Hansard Blues
Select Standing Committee on
Finance and Government Services
Draft Report of Proceedings
The committee met at 8:32 a.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Janet Routledge, and I am the MLA for Burnaby North and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, a committee of the Legislative Assembly that includes MLAs from the government and opposition parties.
I would like to acknowledge that I am joining today's meeting from the legislative precinct here in Victoria, which is located on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations.
I would also like to welcome everyone who is listening to and participating in today's meeting on the Budget 2022 consultation. Our committee is currently seeking input on priorities for the next provincial budget and began public hearings yesterday.
British Columbians can also share their views by making written comments or by filling out the online survey. Details are available on our website at bcleg.ca/fgsbudget. The deadline for all input is 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 30, 2021. We will carefully consider all input and make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be included in Budget 2022. The committee intends to release its report in November.
The public hearings this week are being held virtually, with most presenters organized into small panels based on theme and others making individual presentations. Today we'll be hearing about advanced education and K-to-12 education, with presentations from post-secondary institutions, faculty associations, student associations, school districts and other organizations.
Each presenter has five minutes for their presentation. To assist presenters, there is a timer available when in gallery view.
Following presentations from the panel or following an individual presentation, there will be time for questions from committee members. At that time, I ask that members raise their hands to indicate they have a question, and we will keep a speaking list. I also ask that everyone please put themselves on mute and wait until they are recognized before speaking. All audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website, and a complete transcript will also be posted.
I'll now ask members of the committee to introduce themselves. I'll start with the vice-Chair.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): My name is Ben Stewart. I represent Kelowna West, and I'm the Deputy Chair of this committee.
L. Doerkson: My name is Lorne Doerkson. I'm the MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin. I'm pleased to be here.
G. Kyllo: Good morning. My name is Greg Kyllo. I'm the MLA for Shuswap.
I'm coming to you from the ancestral territories of the Secwepemctsin-speaking peoples.
M. Dykeman: Hello. My name is Megan Dykeman. I'm the MLA for Langley East.
H. Sandhu: Good morning. I'm Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.
It is located on the unceded and traditional territory of the Okanagan Indian Nations.
I look forward to your presentations.
P. Alexis: Good morning. My name is Pam Alexis. I'm the MLA for Abbotsford-Mission.
I am from the unceded and traditional territories of the Stó:lō people.
M. Starchuk: Good morning. I'm Mike Starchuk, MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale.
It is located on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, which include the Kwantlen, Katzie and Semiahmoo.
J. Routledge (Chair): Assisting the committee today are Jennifer Arril and Mai Nguyen from the Parliamentary Committees Office and Billy Young from Hansard Services.
Thank you, everyone. I think we're ready to proceed with our first panel, which is advanced education institutions. We are first of all going to be hearing from Kevin Hall, University of Victoria.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 1 – Advanced Education (Institutions)
UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA
K. Hall: Good morning, Chair, Vice-Chair and committee members.
I wanted to also start by recognizing land and language. It's really critical that we do that. I am also on the land of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ peoples, on whose traditional territory the university stands. I'd like to pay my respects to Elders past and present.
I want to first recognize the hard work of all members serving their constituents across British Columbia and to really thank the government for their contributions in ensuring that British Columbia's post-secondary education sector remains strong and ready to provide critical programs of education, advanced training and research — in fact, the strongest in the country, I believe. I'm really pleased today to be joined by my colleagues representing Kwantlen Polytechnic, Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.
I became the president of UVic in November 2020. I came from Newcastle, Australia, where COVID has had a significant impact on the university sector in that country. In B.C., the provincial government has been much more supportive, so we remain intact and healthy.
In my first six months at UVic, I embarked on a listening tour to really help inform some of UVic's priorities. Something that stood out to me was really how closely British Columbia's post-secondary education sector works together in supporting student success, innovation and teaching and research and in connecting with communities. I believe this is an incredible advantage which delivers significant opportunities for British Columbians.
There's much more work to do as we tackle pressing issues, such as economic recovery, access and housing affordability, pressing social challenges and ensuring that we put people first. I would say additionally, as a Canadian who's been over seas for eight years, I'm really shocked by our lack of progress towards truth, respect and reconciliation. This is a priority for UVic, as I'm sure it is for the province. This summer's events are really a stark reminder of our complacence.
As a new and proud British Columbian, I wanted to talk about the opportunities and actions that can inform the province's and UVic's priorities. For the province, I think it's critical that we continue to remove barriers to learning, to look globally to find best practice. We need to develop and mobilize talent that helps move our core industries into the next generation through upskilling, re-skilling and micro-credentialling.
We need to think out 30 years to where we want to be positioned globally, a knowledge-based economy in medical technology, clean technology, renewable energy work, etc. We need to focus to continue connecting locally and globally.
If there's a silver lining from the past year and a half, it's that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a mission-based, innovation-driven economy that leaves no one behind. We need a strong and inclusive economic and social prosperity.
I'd like to highlight a few areas where UVic can work together with the government and other key partners across the province. This summer, I was pleased to join Ministers Kang and Rankin to announce the expansion of our engineering and computer science facilities.
We want to work with the province to advance leadership in next-generation green building practice, smart cities, building world-leading technology in green hydrogen, wave and tidal energy systems — energy storage, for example — and really help chart a feasible pathway for the transition of British Columbia to a low-carbon economy. We're currently working with industry on the development of a pilot facility for new companies to test their products in a real-world environment.
We also want to use our deep commitment to partner with the province in advancing truth, respect and reconciliation. We've committed to action to build on our strong history of Indigenous academic programming, research and partnering with communities. In 2018, we launched the first Indigenous law program in the world, and I'm pleased to say that in June 2022, we'll see the world's first graduates in the Juris Indigenarum Doctor.
We know we've got a lot more to do to advance strong policy solutions, implement the Truth and Reconciliation recommendations and meet our obligations in UNDRIP, and this work is essential for the futures of Indigenous people in post-secondary education.
I'd also reflect on the year since my arrival. It's clear to me how COVID has really underscored the importance of health and social determinants. Issues such as aging, homelessness, mental health and addictions, and poverty are at the top of mind for me and for many people, not only here at home but globally.
I'm pleased to share that UVic is currently working with partners such as Providence Health Care and other post-secondary institutions to advance interdisciplinary research in social health and medicine to unlock solutions to these challenges. We all know that a strong and sustainable economy doesn't exist without a healthy population. I encourage you to see universities as a critical partner in the work ahead.
In summary, I really want to share my support for the sectorwide priorities that the Research Universities Council of British Columbia will present to the committee later today. As we move forward with recovery, I really encourage us to maintain the collaboration, the creativity, the compassion and the work ethic that has guided our work through this pandemic.
Thanks. I look forward to your questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Kevin.
Next we'll hear from Santa Ono from the University of British Columbia.
UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
S. Ono: Good morning. Thank you for inviting me today.
I'm speaking to you from UBC's Vancouver campus, located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. I also respectfully acknowledge that UBC's Okanagan campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.
This last year has been challenging for many because of the pandemic, to a record wildfire season, the stark evidence of the horrors of Canada's residential school system. Thank you for your public service through these difficult times.
I'll start my comments by recognizing the great resiliency and adaptability demonstrated by UBC students, faculty and staff throughout the pandemic. The UBC community has been at the forefront of the pandemic response here in B.C. but also globally, like midwifery student Emily Baxter, who led a network of volunteers to provide PPE for midwives across the province, or kinesiology student Ava Katz, who helped isolated seniors by doing errands and grocery runs around her neighbourhoods.
UBC researchers and spinoff companies have been leading the way, as you know. For instance, UBC spinoff company Acuitas Therapeutics providing critical components for the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, based on four decades of UBC research.
Another UBC spinoff, AbCellera, developed antibody treatments for COVID-19 used around the world and completed the largest biotech IPO in Canadian history.
The pandemic has underscored the importance of working together, and we must continue to do so as we look to the future. We're committed to doing our part and building new partnerships that will shape a more sustainable, resilient and inclusive future for British Columbia.
This fall, we are looking forward to welcoming students from across the province back to our campuses in Vancouver, Kelowna and more than 90 community learning sites across the entire province. We continue to expand our presence across B.C. to better serve British Columbians and our communities. For instance, UBC is working on expanding its presence in Surrey, in the rapidly developing Fraser Valley region, to provide additional opportunities for students in their local communities. In the Okanagan, UBC recently opened one of Canada's most energy-efficient student residences, and work is underway to establish the new downtown presence and innovation precinct that will support further growth in that region.
We are grateful for the provincial government's recent commitment to fund the next stage of planning for the extension of the SkyTrain to UBC, a critical public transit infrastructure project that will deliver significant benefits to the entire region.
The pandemic recovery provides a unique opportunity to invest in long-term strategic initiatives that will improve the economic and social well-being of all British Columbians. As part of this, we must leverage and build on B.C.'s strengths in post-secondary research innovation and advanced skills development.
One area where we can work together is in ensuring that post-secondary opportunities are accessible to all, including those from marginalized communities and mid-career learners. We continue to prioritize accessible post-secondary education, increasing UBC-funded student aid by $107.4 million last year alone. We've further encouraged the expansion of government student aid programs like the B.C. access grant and the B.C. graduate scholarship program, as well as supporting targeted programs like the UBCO Aboriginal access program.
The pandemic also highlighted the importance of B.C.'s research and innovation ecosystem. Bolstering this strength will be essential to achieving a prosperous economy for B.C. To build on all of these strengths, B.C. must work to support the full innovation pipeline, from basic and applied research to continued support of BCKDF through to supports for commercialization, entrepreneurship and small businesses.
Recent B.C. government investments in tech seats, B.C. graduate scholarships, work-integrated learning and promoting international education are all helping develop a much-needed talent in B.C., and we will do our part in making sure that occurs.
Lastly, we encourage government's continued building on B.C.'s sectoral strengths, particularly with an eye to leverage federal investment in areas such as life sciences and bio-innovation, AI, quantum science and climate research, areas in which UBC and other universities in the sector are national and international leaders.
Thank you again. I hope UBC is a partner with you in all of your efforts, and I look forward to your questions later today.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Santo.
Next we'll hear from Joy Johnson.
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
J. Johnson: Good morning, everyone. My name is Joy Johnson, and I'm the president of Simon Fraser University.
I want to begin by recognizing that I am privileged to be speaking to you from the unceded, traditional territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, the Squamish, the Kwikwetlem and the Musqueam peoples.
I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to you for helping steer us through COVID-19. I know it hasn't been easy, particularly for our students who are your constituents. They've endured a great deal. But with the support of government, the post-secondary community, loved ones and friends, students kept on going, kept on learning, kept on pursuing their degrees and their dreams. Their determination should give us all hope.
Young people in B.C. place an enormous value on their education, and I know that you do as well. For decades, B.C.'s post-secondary system, where colleges, universities and institutes work as partners, has been an enormous asset for the province. And now, as B.C. emerges from COVID-19, we can serve as a powerful engine for recovery.
In that effort, let me say that SFU fully supports the recommendations of the Research Universities Council of British Columbia. These priorities complement those of B.C.'s colleges and universities, including SFU's, to which I will now turn.
Three priorities SFU is bringing forward today are grounded in our mission and purpose. For decades, SFU has been defined by its commitment to engagement, with our three campuses in Burnaby, Vancouver and Surrey, and a reach across the province and beyond. And for decades, we've marshalled our resources to help make life better for all British Columbians. Today, in the wake of COVID-19, this work, this mission, is more important than ever.
We must start by giving young British Columbians the tools that they need to succeed in a fast-changing economy. B.C.'s labour market forecast calls us to action. The vast majority of new jobs over the next decade will require a post-secondary credential. I applaud the government for creating 2,000 new tech-related seats and supporting pathways for success for Indigenous students and traditionally under-represented communities.
But even with these measures, demand continues to climb. Our newest campus in Surrey is perfectly positioned to fill this gap. It's already transformed the educational landscape of an entire community, and it can do even more.
In 2006, the province and SFU agreed that it was necessary to double the size of the campus. We've made progress with the launch of the School of Sustainable Energy and Engineering, but we can do more. Therefore, SFU asks this committee to recommend that Budget 2022 include a commitment to increase the size of SFU's Surrey campus from its current size of 2,900 to 5,000 full-time-equivalent students.
More students and provision of cutting-edge education require more infrastructure, and again, we thank the government for its support, particularly for its new student housing loan program.
Let me point to two capital projects that are priorities for SFU. As you know, British Columbia has a thriving life sciences sector, and this sector has indicated that access to talent is limiting their growth. A new interdisciplinary life sciences building on SFU's Burnaby campus will help us meet this demand. The life sciences building will be a centre for discovery, invention and innovation, and it remains SFU's top capital priority.
I want to turn to a second capital priority. In one week, tens of thousands of students will be returning to in-person learning. At SFU's Burnaby campus, those who use transit will face some of the longest commute times in Canada, travelling on outdated diesel buses. The Burnaby Mountain gondola is a cost-effective, environmentally friendly and reliable solution to this growing problem. SFU asks this committee to recommend that Budget 2022 include the necessary capital funding required to see these two innovative projects through to completion.
Finally, I want to say a few words about our public health care system. The pandemic emphasized the tight link between strong public health and an effective pandemic response. I'm excited about the prospect of a second medical school located on our Surrey campus with learning centres across Fraser Health. This will be in partnership with Fraser Health and the First Nations Health Authority. The new school will be a big step forward for strengthening our primary care systems and meeting the needs of Indigenous communities.
SFU's final ask is that this committee recommend that Budget 2022 maintain the government's ongoing commitment to improving our public health care system by funding this program.
Let me conclude by sincerely thanking all of you for this opportunity. Our collective response to COVID-19 has showed us the way, and now the hard work continues. Thank you very much.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Joy.
And finally, on this panel, we will hear from Alan Davis on behalf of Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
KWANTLEN POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY
A. Davis: Hello. Thank you for your time and attention today.
I gratefully acknowledge that KPU serves the region that overlaps with the traditional and ancestral lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓- and SENĆOŦEN-speaking peoples, who include the Kwantlen, who graciously bestowed their name on this university.
I'm honoured to be on this panel with the leaders of three of Canada's great universities and great partners of ours.
Like others, I recognize the tremendous support we've received from all sectors of government through their leadership and careful attention to both the health safety and business continuity of the post-secondary sector.
KPU plans to come out of this pandemic as a better institution, more open, more flexible and more relevant. As a polytechnic university, KPU is well positioned to support the short- and long-term economic recovery and prosperity of B.C. through both its applied research and by providing a talent pipeline that equips students with the knowledge and skills to transition effectively into the workforce of the future.
Our written submission speaks to three areas of need at KPU, and I recognize that these are also top of mind with our Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training. That work is already underway to address them so long as the necessary funding is also available.
Firstly, the annual operating grant. None of the undergraduate universities have the stable and predictable multi-year operating funding they need to fulfil their important mandates.
As we emerge from the pandemic, there are several areas which require specific attention through an increased grant. More support for student mental health and well-being. And while digital transformation of programs and services increased accessibility and opportunity for many students, this needs to be leveraged and sustained.
Likewise, key green infrastructure projects need investment, such as early childhood education centres on our campuses and reconceived and refurbished spaces that reflect KPU's digital transformation to more flexible teaching and learning opportunities.
Full funding for new seats is needed in programs that are important to our communities, including the health sector, early childhood education, other human service areas and high-demand technical programs.
The expectations for authentic and lasting justice, equity, diversity and inclusion are higher now than ever and will be hard to meet without new funding.
My second point, and really a subset of the above, is the lack of funding for research and scholarship at the undergraduate universities, where the research profile is exemplary, but we do not currently receive any annual operating funds to support it.
Compared to institutions that have similar mandates across Canada, teaching loads at B.C. undergraduate universities are too high and faculty are underpaid, making the university research endeavor unsustainable and limited. A long-term investment in research in the undergraduate universities will provide many benefits for our students and for our communities.
And lastly, we need more support for Indigenous students and their communities. While KPU has developed and self-funded many supports for Indigenous students, much more needs to be done to implement and achieve the relevant TRC and UNDRIP recommendations. There is currently no targeted funding to support Indigenous activities at KPU, and we are thankful that AEST is undertaking a review of this. We believe every institution should be tasked and funded to deliver Indigenous language and cultural education and other programs and services in partnership with Indigenous communities.
I'd like to thank you for your time and attention today.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Alan.
We've now heard from all of the panellists, and we'll open it up to questions from the committee. I see that Pam has indicated she'd like to ask a question.
P. Alexis: Good morning, and thank you all for your presentations. I am an alumni of UVic, and so it always feels good to hear about how things are going at UVic. Thank you for that.
I just have a question, because we have had many meetings with students since we were elected last year. Many have indicated certainly a surge in mental health issues. I'd like to know how you're dealing with this at the campus level and what new services or how…. Just sort of a general open question.
I'd love to hear from all of you, and I know you have to be as succinct as possible because I'm sure there are other people that have questions.
S. Ono: I'd like to say at UBC, we've done a number of things. We have created a new facility for counselling to meet the need. You are absolutely right with your question. Thanks for it. We've also embedded in each of our residence halls, a 24-7 counsellor, so it's easy for students to actually access counselling support where they actually live. We wanted to make things seamless and integrated with the health authority, so we've recruited a chief mental health officer to actually serve on the population in our residences here at the university.
And finally, because of the diversity of individuals and students in our population, we provided, in collaboration and integrated with what's been provided by AEST and the province, 24-7 virtual counselling support in multiple languages.
J. Johnson: If I might just add, I think all of our institutions are adding additional supports, but we are funding these through our operating budgets. Costs are escalating, and it would really be helpful to receive additional funds so that we can continue to increase support for mental health, because you're absolutely correct. Our students are stressed, and they require support.
K. Hall: I'm just also echoing what Santa and Joy said. We are very similar to UBC in what we've done. We've tripled our budget in support of mental health and wellness. The other two pieces for me that are critical is that our international students are also undergoing significant issues. What is our duty of care with the international students who are committed to come to B.C. to study, who may not be here yet? It's really as significant.
The other piece for me that is really coming to light is actually career counselling as part of mental health, because our students are worried about the courses they're taking. Will there be those jobs there in the future? Having them understand that their university education is preparing them for all kinds of different things in life is important. A lot are asking for this career counselling.
A. Davis: Maybe I could just add: along with my colleagues, we introduced our own 24-7 service, which was heavily used. Students actually found the flexibility of reaching a counsellor online to be, to some degree, better than having to trudge into campus and do it. There were actually some benefits of doing this remotely. It's not quite as good, but certainly, students were able to access the services quite readily and we were able to reply.
Now there's a lot of talk about this echo pandemic. What are the long-term mental health issues that perhaps the entire society will have to endure, and how can we adapt and make sure that we're prepared in the future to deal with the long-term issues that may occur?
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you so much. Lorne has a question, followed by Megan.
L. Doerkson: Madam Chair, my question is to Joy. I'd like to ask all of you, but I know that time doesn't permit.
Joy, you touched on taking your capacity from 2,900 to 5,000, provided that the funding came through for that. I'm wondering about the timeline for that. I'm also wondering if you could give me a sense of what the situation is today. How many students are being turned away?
I do know that in my riding of Cariboo-Chilcotin, we've heard from a number of people who have applied to multiple universities throughout the province and have been unable to gain access. If you can paint a bit of a picture for me, that'd be great.
J. Johnson: Thank you ever so much for the question. Yes, indeed, application pressure continues, and it seems like every year the grade point average required to get into university continues to increase.
I would say, depending on the program, we are seeing as many as 50 to 20 percent of students who are being turned away, and these are provincial students. I think we really do want to make sure that students who really meet the bar can get into university.
In terms of our Surrey campus, right now we are in-market, looking at a number of programs that we could actually stand up, really thinking about ways in which we can actually meet the need of government, as well, thinking about where the growing opportunities are for employment — Kevin touched on that — so looking at some of the technology areas. Agritech, for example, and health technology are areas that we're particularly interested in growing in Surrey, and certainly, that the city of Surrey is interested in trying to support as well.
I'll make sure that in our submission we provide more details on the pressures, but definitely, we are seeing those pressures. We're also hearing from industry that they do not have the qualified personnel that they need. So I think there's a real opportunity for British Columbia right now to really move forward and make sure that we do have the HQP that industry is going to require by providing more seats for students.
A. Davis: If I could say…. At KPU, we share the task of post-secondary education south of the Fraser with SFU Surrey. We fully support their plans, and we would go along with that. I think there are lots of pathways and partnerships between us, and we fully support their endeavour to continue to go for the 5,000 FTEs.
L. Doerkson: Just a follow-up, Madam Chair.
What are your staffing levels like? Are you feeling the same pinch that many different industries throughout the province are feeling? Are you having problems filling your faculty positions?
J. Johnson: Maybe I'll quickly respond to that. Right now I would say no. For the most part, we are able to recruit highly qualified faculty. Particularly, some….
The housing market in British Columbia, though, remains a bit of an impediment to land people. It is extremely competitive. I think in some fields — I would say, in particular, in computing science — we're only landing about 50 percent of the offers we're making.
It really does depend on the area, but thus far, I think the system is robust, and we are able to hire and make sure that we do have excellent faculty and excellent staff.
M. Dykeman: My question is related to the return to school, on-campus learning. I'm just wondering. I know we're short on time. Roughly, are the classes going to be on campus but online, or will they be in class? What is it looking like for students, this coming year, a few weeks from now?
J. Johnson: I'm going to jump in quickly. The Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training has really given us direction to be fully back on campus this fall. All of us are making plans to do so. We will have some online courses to really try to accommodate, particularly, international students.
I'll let my other colleagues chime in on this, but we at SFU are expecting to be fully back on campus for the most part.
A. Davis: At KPU, we developed a return-to-campus plan last March that tried to leverage, actually, some of the benefits that we heard from students themselves on wanting more flexibility and more blended and online approaches. So we built that in. Then we had to adjust, because the demand this summer was much higher than we expected.
With the mask mandate, we adjusted again and created a bit more flexibility temporarily just to get through the mask mandate and, hopefully, see this thing turn. Then we can come back more fully on campus.
It is a different mixture of face to face and blended and some fully online. We expect that to, essentially, be…. We've become a multi-campus, multimodal institution, and that seems to work best for our students.
K. Hall: I think one thing that's really helped us is the solidarity, the British Columbia government, in ensuring that our students are back to campus, and we're all fully committed to that.
You can see what's going on in Calgary right now. The University of Calgary gave permission to individual professors to decide whether it's online or not, and they've now got an uproar with students who have paid to come back to Calgary, who have housing for the year and who are now finding that half their courses are online.
I think the government is to be commended for creating that solidarity amongst our institutions. We're all doing the same thing. For us, it's about 90 percent of our courses that will be face to face in September.
S. Ono: At UBC, it's sort of a mixture of what Alan said and what Joy and Kevin said. There's a different situation in the Interior because of the large number of cases there. They're different environments, and we do have to be mindful of the anxieties and concerns of the faculty, staff and students.
Largely, it's face to face, to answer your question. But we have some flexibility to really address the concerns of our communities.
J. Routledge (Chair): Another question. Mike.
M. Starchuk: Thank you, Madam Chair.
One really quick one for Joy with regard to the 2,900 to 5,000. That is not including the new medical facility that's coming.
J. Johnson: Well, it's certainly…. Our plan right now is to have a new medical program, and it would be based in Surrey. It could include and it would include the seats for the medical program.
M. Starchuk: Alan, with regard to your presentation that you submitted to us…. You talked about, in the area of research, key areas. One of the areas that was mentioned by Joy but not mentioned by you was agritech. Could you expand on that?
A. Davis: Yes, just trying for the economy of time there. We have a lot of research that takes place in sustainable horticulture and sustainable agriculture and sustainable food systems generally. Our applied genomics lab, which has just opened, has all kinds of connections with the agricultural industry.
We're trying to use sustainable, high-tech approaches to support the industries in our region. I'm sure there are going to be all kinds of conversations and partnerships with SFU as they develop their programming and research capabilities. Once I get started to mention these things, it's hard…. You're worried about leaving somebody out.
Thank you for that. It's a key area for us.
J. Routledge (Chair): I'm not seeing any other questions. I'll thank the panel for taking the time to make your presentations and to meet with us and to answer questions. Thank you for your vision. With that, we'll let you go.
Now we'll take a short recess until 9:20.
The committee recessed from 9:09 a.m. to 9:19 a.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): Good morning to our next panel on advanced education.
Without further ado, we'll start with Paul Vogt from the College of the Rockies. You have five minutes, Paul.
According to our agenda, it's Paul first, then Todd and then Lane, each for five minutes, and then we'll ask questions.
So starting with Paul.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 2 – Advanced Education (Institutions)
COLLEGE OF THE ROCKIES
P. Vogt: Thank you, and thanks for this opportunity to present. I'd also like to thank the ministry and other government officials who may be listening for their support of all education institutions through an extraordinarily challenging time.
With the time I have, what I want to do is describe College of the Rockies operations and set them in the context of challenges that are facing post-secondary education generally and that we're seeing in our region of the East Kootenays specifically.
I hope that the main takeaway you'll receive is our readiness to step up to the challenge of responsiveness through innovation, which is in front of us and will be ongoing. I'm not, in the first instance, seeking more resources but asking for consideration of changes in the ways that we're resourced that I think will help us more effectively respond to the strategic innovations that are expected.
Before beginning, I want to acknowledge that all of the College of the Rockies campuses are located in the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa people, which is also home to the Kinbasket people. We also partner very directly, besides with the five First Nations within our region, with the Kootenay regional office, so the Métis Nation of B.C.
For close to 50 years now, College of the Rockies has been meeting the advanced education needs of our region, the East Kootenays. We have seven campuses. Northernmost is Golden, but down to Creston, close to the U.S. border, and we have two main campuses within Cranbrook.
Within those communities we serve, effectively, College of the Rockies is the only local option for almost all career pathways. We see ourselves as and feel the responsibility of essentially being the only game in town. Roughly a third of the people in the East Kootenays region who have post-secondary credentials are graduates of College of the Rockies.
We are compelled and actually appreciate the responsibility and challenge of delivering a full range of programs from university studies through skilled trades, nursing, education, a number of programs that meet the needs of specific industries within our region, adult education and community interest courses.
Each year, we deliver instruction to approximately 10,000 learners with, last year, just under 1,000 graduates from our credential programs, noting, too, that we have significant cohorts of both Indigenous and international students.
Now, the challenges that I wanted to talk about briefly I think are familiar to you, so I won't add numbers. They are the challenges of the increasing requirement for most careers of post-secondary education. Combined with that, of course, is the challenge that more people who lack those credentials are being sidelined from the current economy. Also, there's a growing demand for re-skilling or upskilling for workers who are already in career, and with that comes the challenge of more flexible delivery to provide convenient education options.
We're also receiving feedback from employers that, in addition to technical skills, they're looking for basic employment skills — teamwork, problem-solving, communications — which are often best delivered through a combination of classroom and work experience placements. In the East Kootenays, we're seeing all of that. We're noting that those trends have been exacerbated by COVID, and we're seeing the beginning of labour shortages or skill shortages that we think are going to constrain the growth potential of the region if they're not addressed in the coming years.
We are responding to those challenges. In the past year, we introduced new micro-credentials. We made expansions to areas of high demand, and we also added upgrades to our adult education components and worked directly with First Nations on education options to meet their needs.
I feel we're up to the challenge, but there are two aspects of meeting those challenges, which I leave for your consideration, that are currently constraints on our ability to be responsive and strategic. One of them is the fact that in order to expend accumulated surpluses or reserves, we need special permission from ministry and Treasury Board. We've made continual requests to be like other institutions and have more leeway to be strategic in our investments.
Then finally — and I'll end on this, as I see my time expiring — we do appreciate all of the support that we've received in the past year for the special changes that we've made in response to COVID, but much of that support was in the form of one- and two-year grants from the provincial or federal government. We're faced with the challenge of making innovations that we believe are meeting, actually, long-standing needs but on the basis of short-term funding.
I'll leave for you those two considerations, I think, that would help us address the challenges of responding appropriately and strategically to the education needs of our region.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Paul.
Next we'll hear from Todd.
NORTHERN LIGHTS COLLEGE
T. Bondaroff: Thank you for the time from this committee to include Northern Lights College on your agenda for a short presentation. My name is Todd Bondaroff. I'm the vice-president of student services and community relations for Northern Lights College in northeast B.C.
I'm actually joining you all this morning from Fort Nelson.
I'm located here today on the traditional territories of the Fort Nelson First Nation. Northern Lights College serves a broad area and the communities of the Cree, the Dene, the Dunne-Za, the Kaska, Saulteau, the Taku River Tlingit, the Tse'khene and the Tahltan First Nations people.
I'm here this morning to discuss with the committee a major initiative that is taking shape here in northeast B.C. It is the establishment of the centre for innovation in Indigenous education, which is being led by Northern Lights College. We feel that it's certainly the first of its kind here in British Columbia, and developing it is unique and will be unique throughout Canada, especially in post-secondary education.
Hopefully, you may have seen my presentation material. You will notice that Northern Lights College has partnered now with the Indigenous Sport, Physical Activity and Recreation Council, or ISPARC, and Engage Sport North, ESN, through a formalized memorandum-of-understanding process. The committee will be hearing from ISPARC and Engage Sport North later today or tomorrow, and they're going to talk to you about a variety of topics, including the centre for innovation in Indigenous education. But I am here today just to talk to you about the centre. I'll just refer to it as the centre from here forward.
The foundation, or the underlying principles, for the centre, as we build it, was developed upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to actions Nos. 7, 16, 57, 62 and 65, which speak to education, language revitalization, gaps in employment and education and then, finally, research into residential schools, treaties, language and things of that nature.
The current status, where we're at with the centre today, is that we are working through a governance structure between the college and all of our Indigenous partners throughout the north, which includes chiefs and council, spokespersons, clan directors and band education leads also.
Once we have that finalized — and we're working through that right now — the next steps will be to work on programming within our institution and in a couple of areas: looking at opportunities to Indigenize existing programming where possible, but more importantly, to develop new programs of significance to our Indigenous communities in the north that work within our structure of an education council and develop courses, programs and credentialing for the students throughout our region.
Our key principles that are included in these opportunities and where we really work with our partners, ISPARC and Engage Sport North, is in maintaining mental health and wellness, physical literacy development and then, importantly, post-secondary education. We've already heard from our region and our Indigenous communities here in the northeast. We know health care is important, on the heels of COVID. We know connection to the land for guardianship — land and water stewardship — is important, and we know that language revitalization in many communities is also important.
Our ask. We already know that the college is not fully funded to develop, implement and build all aspects needed to deliver on the centre for innovation in Indigenous education. We are anticipating program costs annually in excess of $1.1 million to deliver upon the objectives of the centre. We are putting base funding towards that, but we are asking this committee to consider providing $730,000 annually just to help us and Indigenous communities in the northeast to build and deliver on the objectives of the centre of innovation for Indigenous education.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Todd.
Finally, on this panel, we'll hear from Lane Trotter of Langara College. Then after that, we'll open it up for questions.
Over to you, Lane.
LANGARA COLLEGE
L. Trotter: I'm Dr. Lane Trotter, and I'm the president of snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓, Langara College. I'm pleased to be here, and I want to thank the committee for this opportunity to speak to you this morning.
I'd like to respectfully acknowledge that snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ Langara College is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people, who gave Langara the name snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ in 2016.
Today I'm joined by my colleagues Mr. Viktor Sokha, our vice-president of administration and finance, and Mr. Yusuf Varachia, our vice-president external, who will provide me with any additional information you may require. We are here today to share our vision of Langara College and to highlight the areas of support we are seeking from the committee.
First, I'd like to share a few facts about Langara and how we're advancing the objectives set forth in the government's mandate letter. Langara plays a valuable role in British Columbia's landscape by providing learners with academic pathways for personal growth, further education and, most notably, through university transfer and career success in fields that are key to B.C.'s economy.
Because of the quality of our programs and the foundation they provide our learners, our numbers are growing. We serve over 23,000 students annually. Nearly half, 46 percent, of our students are enrolled in university transfer programs, and the others are in career-based programs. We generate economic impact for the province. In fact, a study done by the Emsi indicates that Langara contributes $966 million to the regional economy. For every dollar invested, society gains $8.70 added to provincial revenues and in social savings.
We make post-secondary education accessible and affordable. We generate these benefits, all the while charging one of the lowest per-credit tuition fees in the region.
In 2021, we launched our new strategic plan, Weaving a Shared Future, which will make Langara College Canada's premiere pathways college. Our plan focuses on five areas that are critical for our success: indigenization; our culture, including justice, equity, diversity and inclusion; community engagement; relevant, innovative and high-quality programming; and environmental and financial sustainability.
Here's what we want to achieve.
We will put students at the centre of all of our decisions and practices. We will be the college of choice for Lower Mainland Indigenous students and the employer of choice for Indigenous faculty and staff. We will strengthen mutually beneficial partnerships with the myriad of local BIPOC and underserved communities and work with municipal, provincial and federal governments to provide outstanding learning opportunities for our students.
We will advance learning innovation so that our students have the knowledge and skills needed to contribute to our economy and communities, especially in areas of focus for British Columbia. We will be leaders in environmental and economic sustainability, developing high-quality learning spaces our students need and deserve, and set the standard for environmental impact and performance.
But we need your help. The renewal of our campus is critical to our ability to deliver on our mandate.
We must replace a 50-year-old deteriorating building that's seismically unsafe and not environmentally sustainable with environmentally sustainable infrastructure. We must make significant strides towards erasing a critical deficit of space that restricts our growth and prevents our students from accessing the learning supports they require. We must create a campus designed and built for today's learners, one that embraces indigenization, celebrates diversity, facilitates engagement with the community, businesses and government in our students' interests and, above all, provides relevant, accessible learning, connection and impact.
As the first priority of our master plan, the creative community and technology complex will replace 50-year-old building A, our main classroom facility, which is nearing end of life. The creative community and technology complex will serve as a home in our in-demand humanities programs, aligned with ministry priorities that include early childhood education, criminal justice, education assistance, social service worker, as well as programs in digital applications in development and data science.
As well, we will expand our child care centre, doubling the current daycare capacity to better serve a critical need in our community. We will create Langara's first Indigenous meeting house, strengthening our ongoing partnership with the Musqueam First Nation and other B.C. Indigenous communities.
In closing, Langara's campus will become home to spaces that inspire, connect and open the world around us to study, reflect and improvement. We'll be putting people first, weaving lasting and meaningful reconciliation, advancing equity and anti-racism, mitigating the effects of climate change and building a strong, sustainable economy.
Thank you so much for your time. I apologize for going over.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Dr. Trotter.
We'll now open it up for questions from the committee.
M. Dykeman: Thank you for your presentations. I will ask the same question I asked the last panel. Could you give me a little bit of an insight into what return to school is looking like coming into September for students?
L. Trotter: Thank you very much for the question. About 48 percent of our programming will be on campus. The other will be online or hybrid. This was what we planned months and months ago. We will then continue further in January for additional face-to-face delivery. But it's a transitioned approach back.
P. Vogt: I'll go quickly. Similar to Lane, there will be a mix, although our guiding principle planning has been that all of the instruction that was delivered in person prior to COVID would be brought back and delivered in person in September. We're on track for that.
We've had, as you're probably aware, new direction from the provincial health officer, but we've incorporated that into our planning. We feel confident that we'll be able to safely deliver in-person learning to most of our students.
T. Bondaroff: I can add that in the northeast, our Indigenous communities and our remote communities are still dealing with the impacts of COVID-19. An area of concern for us is just connection to those communities and to those learners and providing them access to education at the same time as everyone else.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much for all of your presentations. Just to get a kind of shape and size, having visited the campuses….
That's with the exception of Langara, Lane. Sorry. I say that meaning that we met in Asia.
What's the student body size, and is it growing? Stable? I know that you're talking about programs, etc., but I just wondered, from Northern Lights and the College of the Rockies, are the campuses growing? Or what's the opportunity for growth, to expand post-secondary education in your areas?
T. Bondaroff: I heard Northern Lights College, so I'll jump in ahead of Paul.
Great question. Definitely in our bigger centres, around Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, our own projections for the fall look stable. Even, actually, in some cases, especially in the trades, we're seeing growth, because there needs to be growth in that area, especially to service the needs of the major projects that are happening in our region.
However, though, in our smaller campuses, especially where there's more remote access, we are paying a close eye to what our enrolment will be this fall.
P. Vogt: A quick summary. We're seeing, this year, for September, steady or increased enrolment across all of our program areas from domestic students, which is very encouraging.
In particular, I'll note early childhood education and nursing and then health aid. Those are areas of high need and demand in our region, and we're also seeing an increase in applications in those areas.
Just to note, we will see a significant decrease in international students as well as impacts on…. Our desire to be an internationally oriented institution also has budget implications. We expect those will probably continue. If we have a lower intake this year, that will affect people who would be in two- or three-year programs. So we'll probably see that dip, which will affect us for a few years to come.
L. Trotter: For Langara, we're seeing an increase in our domestic students. We're also working to increase our Indigenous student numbers to make sure, again, that they align with our strategic plan.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Okay. Thanks very much.
I guess, to turn that around…. In rural British Columbia, what are the opportunities to increase the uptake in your institutions? Maybe start up in Northern Lights and just hear from…. What are the opportunities? I'm glad that you're working on the opportunities for Indigenous…. We've seen that in mining and some of the other areas where there's been an uptake from Indigenous People. I just kind of wonder: what are the opportunities that you see to grow the student body in your area?
T. Bondaroff: Yeah. Thanks. That's a great question and a good observation.
I think the opportunity exists for us in being more connected and going into communities, especially our remote or Indigenous communities, and having a presence with their administration and in their education system.
We've also had some really unique partnership opportunities to improve connectivity in some of our rural communities, especially in our Indigenous communities. We've worked really hard to provide them with laptops and access to WiFi and Internet so that even if they aren't able to come in and be here in person, we can still connect with them remotely.
I think that the opportunity exists for us to get out there and get into communities and provide a service. That's where I think growth exists for us right now.
P. Vogt: Maybe just quickly…. Actually, a very similar situation at College of the Rockies. There are opportunities to increase our Indigenous enrolment. They're about 7 percent of our student body right now. A lot of those lie in the area of closer-to-home delivery. We've started to expand some of our adult ed programs, and we're also acquiring the ability to have a mobile classroom to deliver education.
I'd go back to two areas where we have both wait-lists and also huge demand. Those would be in the skilled trades and then the health and ECE areas. The only limit, of course, is capacity, which is sometimes a matter of our own capacity as a college but also relates to the ability to place students into work experience placements, which is one requirement of all of those programs.
M. Starchuk: To Dr. Trotter: I see in the presentation that you have a need for funding for new spaces, and it talks about 144,000 square feet. What is the expected change in the enrolment of students?
L. Trotter: Thank you very much for the question.
The 145,000 shortage that we have is based on our domestic enrolment numbers. As I mentioned earlier, we're seeing our domestic numbers go up.
The issue with the new building, for us, is a couple-fold. First is providing the type of learning space that will meet and deliver what the government has said in the mandate letter. Second, it's providing the space that the students need to be successful in their learning — again, in the programming areas of both the humanities and doubly in our child care space and also working to support the technology field.
There's a broad spectrum of programming in there. This will give us the ability that the current building, which is at end of life, does not have the capability to be remediated to deal with.
J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?
L. Doerkson: The question is for Paul. You talked a little bit about the loss of foreign students. I'm wondering. Is that capacity being completely filled by local students?
P. Vogt: Yes. In terms of numbers, I think, in our case, there's a rough offset. We only had…. I think it was about 14 or 15 percent of our enrolment in credential programs was international. So lower components of international students than, perhaps, many other institutions.
In terms of the numbers, I think we will expect that that will be offset by the increase we're seeing in domestic from last year. Nonetheless, of course, the budget impact is more significant because of the higher tuition that's charged to international students.
I also believe, in our region, the long-term labour forecasts will require more people to come from out of the region. We will not be able to provide for the needs of the region with our own demographics. It's a very important role that the college plays, I think, in drawing people who, of course, intend to, most of them, stay and work in Canada and often stay and work in the region where they were educated.
L. Doerkson: Thank you for that, Paul.
Just a follow-up question, Madam Chair.
You mentioned the cost being more for international students. Can you give me a sense of what that is by percentage, compared to…?
P. Vogt: Typically, international students will pay between twice and three times the tuition of domestic students. I will note that there are quite a few dedicated services, including language training and counselling, that are dedicated for the international students. But yes, it's a higher…. The tuition level is roughly in that magnitude.
J. Routledge (Chair): Ben.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Chair, for allowing me to go again.
In terms of the international students that you just discussed and the drop in that income…. Have you been kept whole with the mandate change, in terms of focusing on that stream of revenue to help maybe fund certain programs? If you haven't, can you just share with us how you've been able to adapt to…?
I think one of you mentioned the fact that domestic students are paying an increasing amount. Is that what this shift has been, that some of that offset has had to go over to domestic students?
L. Trotter: In terms of the differential rate…. I'll just speak for Langara. What it costs to deliver a credit hour of education is $527. Of that $527, $100 is paid for, per credit hour, by students as part of their tuition for us, and $300 is paid for by the province. That means that we have to generate $127 per credit hour, times 30 credit hours per FTE, times our 7,096 FTE delivery mandate. That's how we make that up, through our international education.
Our numbers have been impacted as well, but through our online activities, we've stabilized that. Once we're past COVID, we expect that there will continue to be demand for the type of education delivered in British Columbia at all of our colleges and institutes.
The challenge is one of balancing off where we're at. We charge one of the lowest, if not the lowest, per credit hour of delivery fees, which is $100 a credit hour, but what we charge international students is over $600 a credit hour. It is a six-to-one factor, but there are differences in the costs and in the investments that the province has already made into the system. That allows us to pay for the other services that we provide for both domestic and international students.
P. Vogt: Could I just comment…? Or go ahead, if there are other questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): If you want to elaborate on the answer to that question, go ahead.
P. Vogt: Just to add to what Lane said. There is an overall picture that has to be taken into account. I think the key thing is that our ability to be the affordable, local career learning option is really…. That is the college role — access to career education. We are, all of us, very close to the edge on that.
College of the Rockies has never run a deficit, but by the same token, our surpluses have never been over $1 million either. That actually speaks to a consideration I asked the committee to look at, which is that in a year like this, the ability to use accumulated surpluses or reserves would be very helpful to maintain all of our services for all of our students as we recover from what will be a short-term dip in one part of our revenues.
J. Routledge (Chair): Okay, well, I don't see any additional questions.
According to the agenda, our time with you is up. I want to thank you all, on behalf of the committee, for taking the time to meet with us, giving us some really important insight into the role that your colleges play in your various communities. Thank you for answering our questions.
P. Vogt: Thank you very much.
J. Routledge (Chair): The suggestion is we could just go ahead with the next panel.
No? We'll take a break then. Okay. We'll recess for five minutes.
The committee recessed from 9:52 a.m. to 10:03 a.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): For our next panel, we are continuing with Advanced Education, and now we're going to hear from faculty associations. According to my agenda, we'll start with Daniel Laitsch of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 3 – Advanced Education (Faculty Associations)
CONFEDERATION OF UNIVERSITY FACULTY
ASSOCIATIONS OF B.C.
D. Laitsch: Good morning, everyone. I'm Dr. Dan Laitsch, president of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C., CUFABC. I'm also a faculty member at Simon Fraser University. CUFABC represents more than 5,500 faculty members, including professors, academic librarians, instructors, sessional instructors and lecturers at B.C.'s research universities — SFU, UNBC, UBC, UVic and Royal Roads.
Budget 2021 did well to support our province, and I want to thank you for listening to us and incorporating many of our recommendations in your report last year. Of course, much also remains to be done. Living through the last year and a half has shown us that we will need to — and more importantly, that we actually can — do things differently as we move forward.
We agree that the 2022 provincial budget needs to rebalance our economic and social systems to truly focus on people. Our submission offers a pathway to an economic and a policy environment that will build a strong, educated future for British Columbians. We urge you to consider our recommendations in the context of this transforming world. This is the moment to affirm and strategically invest in higher education.
Over the course of the last year and a half, faculty have worked above and beyond to support institutions and students in completing their studies, offering both academic and personal support to those struggling as a result of the pandemic. That said, it's important to acknowledge that the pandemic has interrupted our work, and we need support to recover well.
Informed by what we have learned from this experience and what is needed to support the recovery of post-secondary education and research, we recommend that government strategically reinvest in public education in B.C. We agree that we need to put people first. So strategically reinvest in the human infrastructure at B.C.'s universities at a time when they will best be able to contribute to an economic and just recovery for all.
Restructure the funding model to focus on people, and assert the primacy of public funding to universities by reducing the overreliance on precarious employment and international student tuition.
Create a stabilization fund to support institutional recovery from pandemic disruption. This includes the recovery and expansion of faculty personnel and the strengthening of health plans and comprehensive mental health initiatives for faculty and all campus community members. Such a fund should also focus on the reduction of institutional budgetary risk caused by an overreliance on international student tuition.
The stabilization fund should also help offset fluctuating currency exchange rates, which can substantially increase university costs for resources priced in U.S. dollars. This includes textbooks, journals, software and other licences, lab supplies and reagents for research as well as curriculum resources for teaching needs.
Support research. Create a broad-based provincial research grant open to all disciplines to support researchers in the fields negatively impacted by COVID. Jump-starting research programs is critical. It requires a targeted infusion of resources to support research until grant moneys return to normal. Personnel are rehired and trained, labs are reopened and restored, and research collaborations are rejuvenated.
This summer's record heat waves and fires, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic response and the huge impact of income inequality highlight just how important university research, in STEM fields and in the social sciences, is as a tool to address the core problems society faces.
We urge you to support truth and reconciliation, equity and inclusiveness. More than ever, Internet access is an essential service, especially for those living in rural and remote communities. Through the lens of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as equity and inclusion, invest in provincewide Internet access, connectivity and infrastructure. We must ensure Indigenous communities, as well as rural and remote communities, have access to affordable and reliable high-speed Internet.
Implement the calls to action for the post-secondary education sector made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, specifically calls 11, 16, 62.ii, 63 and 65. It is an ethical imperative that government provide ongoing funding to support B.C. universities in creating degree and diploma programs in Aboriginal languages and the hiring of Indigenous faculty into permanent positions and finance research programs aimed at dismantling systems of racism, discrimination, the criminalization of poverty and state-sanctioned brutality.
We have seen our universities and colleges stepping up and supporting their communities over the course of the pandemic. With the right investment, universities can continue to play a critical role and help B.C. recover from recent hardships.
Our priorities address government's core goals of the 2022 budget by catalyzing innovation, sustainability and inclusiveness. Now is the time to make investments to help universities continue to fulfil their public mission as generators of the high-quality research and education that the private sectors of the province rely on.
B.C.'s students depend on a vibrant university education to become productive and creative citizens in a diversified and complex knowledge economy. Thank you for your time this morning. I look forward to your questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Dan.
Next we'll hear from Brent.
FEDERATION OF
POST-SECONDARY EDUCATORS OF B.C.
B. Calvert: Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to be here today to provide input for the 2022 B.C. budget.
My name is Brent Calvert. I'm president of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of British Columbia. We proudly represent over 10,000 post-secondary workers at 19 public colleges and universities and seven private institutions right across British Columbia.
I wanted to recognize that I'm joining the session today from the ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations.
In response to the pandemic, the government has undertaken many actions not just to respond to the crisis but also to proactively generate growth in the future. The current initiative being led by Ravi Kahlon, the Minister of Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation, is one government undertaking that is deserving of commendation. Lead consultant Mariana Mazzucato has challenged all of us across the province in every sector to ask: "What are the problems around climate change, sustainability, inequality and gender parity that we want to solve? How can each sector collaborate to solve the problems of our time?"
I believe there is widespread consensus regarding four major problems that our society currently faces: first, the widespread health, social and financial hardships of the global COVID-19 pandemic; second, the climate emergency that is affecting every corner of our globe; third, the long overdue recognition of the origins and continued presence of white supremacy and racism towards Indigenous, Black and other racialized peoples; and fourth, the opioid crisis that has, in this year alone, claimed over 1,000 lives as of today, which is Overdose Awareness Day.
These problems almost all overlap. Just one example of this is that the hardships of the pandemic are not borne equally but instead have disproportionately hurt women and racialized people. Elevating these societal problems to be the primary focus points will have immediate and long-lasting impacts for British Columbia.
Later this morning you're going to hear from other faculty leaders at our institutions on their specific ideas about the role post-secondary education can play to help B.C. grow and prosper. I'll be using my remaining time to highlight just a few ways that education — post-secondary education, specifically — can play a part.
Our first recommendation is funding for access. We'd like to see ongoing addressing of the barriers to access being addressed right across all demographics. We support the expansion of the B.C. access grant program by increasing eligibility to reduce barriers and make sure more people are able to access the skills they need for the jobs of the future.
Around post-secondary funding, we specifically would like to see a reinstatement of targeted funding to provide assurance that core programming will continue to be available to all, no matter where they live.
As part of our vision for a fully-funded post-secondary education system, we'd like to see improvements for workers. Specifically inside of that, we'd like to see that workers will have living wages and full-time work. Secondly, that overall funding increases for the Labour Relations Board and the B.C. employment standards branch are in place such that these important bodies have the resources and staffing required to quickly respond to cases and conduct enforcement of violations.
It is our request that there be regular reviews of the public employers to ensure compliance with collective agreements and addressing any contracting out of services.
We're looking for the following improvements for students. We'd like to see reduced or eliminated financial costs to post-secondary such that everyone is able to pursue their education or career pursuits without the burden of student debt that currently outpaces future earnings and costs of living.
Finally, we'd like to see funding support continue for overall system improvements. Within that, we think that the B.C. skilled trades certification program should be fully implemented across the province and also for all skilled trades. This process serves as a model that we should strive to create across all post-secondary education credentials.
Thank you to the committee for the opportunity to present our recommendations for the 2022 B.C. provincial budget.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Brent.
Next we'll hear from Max Blouw, Research Universities Council of British Columbia.
RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES
COUNCIL OF B.C.
M. Blouw: Good morning. My name is Max Blouw. Blouwse is the long word. Drop the "se," and that's my name. I'm president of the Research Universities Council of B.C., representing UBC, SFU, UVic, UNBC, RRU and TRU.
I'm speaking to you, gratefully, from the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking peoples.
I wish to echo my colleagues this morning in acknowledging government for your leadership over the last 18 months. Thanks to our close collaboration among government and with our system partners, B.C.'s post-secondary system has fared well during this challenging time.
As you have heard, research universities support putting people first, promoting lasting and meaningful reconciliation and a strong, sustainable economy that works for everyone. We recommend that you consider four priorities for a strong future.
Our first priority is collaboration. Guided by the new provincial economic framework that Minister Kahlon is developing, we feel that government should convene our post-secondary institutions with the business community to identify promising business opportunities which build on provincial strengths. Secondly, incenting and encouraging both investment and collaborative, cross-sectoral cooperation to drive such opportunities to sustainable business success, and thereby accelerating inclusive prosperity for all British Columbians.
Our members clearly support provincial priority setting, making choices about where to invest in B.C.'s future economic strengths, and we're ready to assist in identifying priorities. Massive collective efforts amongst governments, business and the entire post-secondary sector is required to address major challenges like climate change.
The extent of collaboration amongst our post-secondary institutions is the envy of the rest of Canada. We must now extend this collaboration to increasingly include the business community and government. Our universities are committed to meeting the needs of industry by partnering with employers to create new educational pathways — for example, expanding work-integrated learning — furthering a collective ecosystem that accelerates the flow from ideas and talent to products and prosperity.
Our second priority emphasizes student access, which my colleagues have also mentioned. We recommend investment in improved access and opportunity for post-secondary students, especially for non-traditional learners, with emphasis on wraparound supports to facilitate student success. Advanced talent is in critically short supply in B.C., and we can lead. We need to increasingly build a diverse, highly skilled and adaptable workforce with the capabilities to excel in the knowledge economy.
The groups at risk of being left behind in the new economy — Indigenous People, immigrants, low-income Canadians of all ethnic backgrounds and those who live in remote locations — are also those who have the most to gain by being able to acquire high-level skills and education. We need wraparound supports for such students.
Our third priority is digital infrastructure. We recommend investment in resilient, digital infrastructure, digital access and cybersecurity to support B.C. competitiveness in a rapidly changing and threatening global digital environment. COVID has revealed many inequities, including unequal access to stable, high-speed Internet, which is a resource that is increasingly essential for work and learning. Increased access to broadband and learning spaces is required to reduce gaps in income and to enhance access to knowledge and health services.
As the global innovation race speeds up, only jurisdictions with world-class digital infrastructure will remain competitive. Digital infrastructure is the foundational toolbox of the knowledge economy. In short, to achieve an inclusive, sustainable economic recovery will require that we work towards equitable, high-performance and secure broadband Internet access, right across the province.
Our fourth and perhaps most important priority is research and innovation. We recommend that investment in research and innovation, especially in graduate student spaces and scholarships, will spur economic recovery and growth in the modern economy. Priority should be given to areas of strength, including bioproduction; life and natural sciences; green, clean solutions; and advanced digital technologies.
Many people think of universities primarily in terms of our role in education. I hope that my comments have underscored that we are equally relevant and high performing as agents of economic strength and recovery. We hope that you see us as a central contributor to the economic strength of British Columbia.
Thank you for the opportunity to present, and I look forward to your questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Max.
Each member of the panel has now had an opportunity to make a presentation, and we will now open it up for questions from the committee.
P. Alexis: This one is for Max, but feel free to chime in, the other two organizations.
You talk about collaboration; it is your first priority. What I do hear from business, industry is that there's a little bit of a disconnect between post-secondary and employment readiness — that by the time they get to the job, there's almost a retraining that needs to happen. Can you address that at all?
I absolutely agree that collaboration is essential with the business sector, but we have seen perhaps a lack of readiness on the graduates' part to make them ready for the job. I actually ask Max: could you address that one first? If the others feel the need to chime in, please do so.
M. Blouw: Thank you for that question. Great question. There's no doubt that our universities and colleges are working very hard to prepare students for the modern economy. Sometimes there is a bit of a gap between where jobs are going and the educational preparedness.
Therefore, I think it's increasingly important that we work with the business community to understand evolving demands, that we work amongst one another as educational institutions and that we increasingly develop work-integrated learning — co-op education, workplace placements, etc. — to enable students to learn and work at the same time or concurrently or in a sequential fashion and to bring that work experience into the classroom to ensure they ask questions and get the kind of learning they need to be relevant in the workplace.
We very much applaud the emphasis our provincial government has been placing on work-integrated learning and all the associated developments there. We think that's the right direction, and we encourage more dialogue between government, universities and the business sector to ensure that we remain highly relevant.
J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you. I wanted to ask you. The conflict in my mind…. Max, you mentioned about different groups of people getting access to education. I think about a group that exists across Canada called Mitacs. I'm sure you're familiar with that term.
When I first was presented with what Mitacs was doing, it was bringing in a certain group of bright, potentially inspirational students from around the world that would help us elevate our learning outcomes, to help bring the best of the best to British Columbia — or Canada, for that matter.
I'm wondering. With the suggestion about foreign students…. I don't know if they fit into the Mitacs formula, but I guess the question is…. I see, as an employer, a big gap in terms of the skills that don't exist. The people don't exist. The fact is that we have to attract people here, and one of the things we have is immigrants coming into the country where maybe their family members get an opportunity. Now, they're not foreigners once they've arrived here.
I guess the thing about it is that I did like the idea about the people that have lower income — immigrants, and those types of people — getting access to this. I'm just trying to square this.
It seems to me that we've kind of pushed away foreign students because they're taking space from domestic, maybe. Will our system deteriorate because we're not willing to kind of be open-minded? Education is a competitive business, and we need to make certain we are global in terms of our thinking and make certain we continue to invest in being what I think are….
I know that UBC and SFU and UVic are some of the best research-based universities in the world. I just kind of think: what's wrong with the existing formula?
M. Blouw: Well, there's a lot packed into that question and comment, so let me see if I can take a few pieces and try to give a response.
Mitacs is one of the best agencies for encouraging students, really talented students, to work with industry on industry-relevant projects. They draw in faculty members and so on. They do have an international component, so you're absolutely correct about that.
To attract new international learners into B.C. is critically important. Our demographics absolutely require immigration to support our economic prosperity, to the extent that we can attract very, very highly talented people for the jobs of the new economy.
Joy Johnson, I think, mentioned this morning that over 80 percent of the new jobs will require post-secondary education of some form. If we can recruit immigrants to British Columbia and educate them exceptionally well for the skills of the new economy, I think that will serve us in good stead for generations to come.
Mitacs does a great job of connecting students with the business community, business community with the university. Immigrants, I believe, are hugely important to our future prosperity.
I think the final part of your question was the balance of international students and domestic students and how we best support the international students in the face of also having domestic demands on education. I'd like to point out that the international students are not displacing domestic students, in my view. We recruit international students. They pay the full cost of their education, whereas domestic students are subsidized by our provincial government.
The international students pay a higher rate than the domestic students in order to fully pay for the cost of their education, which is higher than even our domestic students because we do have some additional supports for the international students. They pay twice or more, sometimes quite a bit more, than our domestic students. I don't believe they're displacing domestic students.
In fact, I was looking at numbers this morning that there's a net outflow of domestic students out of British Columbia each year that go to other provinces for their education. It amounts to about 4,000 students a year. I believe that adding spaces, increasing access in British Columbia would serve us well to ensure that we maximize the human potential of our British Columbian population.
I feel like I'm talking a lot, and I'd like to offer Brent and Dan an opportunity to comment as well.
D. Laitsch: I'm happy to jump in. I agree with Max. I think doing things like increasing the seats available to universities to bring in students is a great way to expand access and make sure we're meeting the needs of B.C.'s student population.
I also agree with Max that international students on-campus are a critical part of our community, and we need to make sure we have systems to recruit talented international students and bring them onto our campus and support them while they're here. I also would agree that the tuition that international students pay does offset the full cost of their participation.
One concern I have about that, however, is I think we have reached a point where we have an overreliance on international student tuition to make up for funding shortfalls. I think right now is a really key time to support public education by reinvesting in that and rebalancing the extent to which the British Columbia government actually invests in and supports the public part of university education.
We've seen a great exposure to risk brought about by the pandemic as international student travel is restricted, and institutions risk losing millions of dollars in tuition revenue that they've come to rely on for core services. I think we need to think very carefully about how we rebalance this to ensure that our public institutions remain fully publicly funded. I think this is a great opportunity to do that.
B. Calvert: I'll pick up on maybe a blend of the two questions I've heard so far.
On the first question, I actually would encourage government to even go further than what we've done with integrated work learning — that sort of thing. We can go a lot farther. What we need to be thinking about is not just the big companies in the urban centres, but we need to be thinking about the needs of small businesses in rural communities. If we do a good job of connecting students with work in their local communities, we'll do a better job of keeping our rural communities vibrant and active. That's going to take a lot of organization work and a lot of effort, but I think it would be worth it in the long run.
The second point I wanted to make there is: we always have a choice. When you look at a problem between educating a citizen, part of what a university does, and preparing people for a job, it's a delicate balancing act. There's always going to be a bit of back-and-forth. I would challenge most everyone on this call to think about a job that you walked into perfectly prepared for. There's always a little bit of the last mile of training that takes place.
What I'm encouraged by what the government is doing is…. By putting our societal problems at the centre of what we're focused on, we can do away with some of the polarization that's taking place in society today. We don't need any more of that. We need to find commonality. I think that being open to business and education coming together is going to be a step in the direction that way as well.
Max and Dan are both right. International students are a welcome and vibrant part of every education community that they're added to. Again, I don't see it as an either-or solution. I think we have to do both. When we get that balance right, we'll be even more successful at attracting international students to come work both in our urban and rural centres. I think we'd be amazed at what we've got to offer in Canada and how attractive that is nationally for people that are looking for help in their post-secondary education.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much. That was a really great discussion. I liked that last part you mentioned, Brent, about the rural communities, etc., and connecting them. They're so fragile, I guess, in terms of the population growth and things like that, and education could be that bridge for them to grow.
J. Routledge (Chair): Harwinder, did I see your hand? I think that will have to be the last question, as stimulating and important as this discussion is.
H. Sandhu: Yes, Chair. It's more so a comment.
Thank you, Brent, for highlighting the polarization. It's a big problem, and we don't need to go there.
Max, I really appreciate your clarifying that international students are not displacing our British Columbian or Canadian students, because often we do hear that. Again, that comes from whatever biases as well, and sometimes people like myself would probably tend to believe that maybe that's true. But I really appreciate your highlighting that.
I know from talking to many international students that, yes, they pay quite a bit of fee, even more than double. They also help us in the workforce. I've seen, and we can all see, them around for the jobs that most Canadian kids probably would think are not ideal. They do take those jobs, because they want to make ends meet, whether it's housing…. Some do three jobs. So they are very resilient, and most of these students do come from very decent backgrounds, and they can afford the education.
I come from India. The amount of money in their states…. There are concerns that's going to Canada, in fees and all. They are concerned. They're trying to retain them, but everybody, like many of us, came here wanting to have that dream, have a better life as well. I was thinking that there are some who are not even able to afford knowing more in depth to this, that we shouldn't feel that it's concerning. Some even sell their resources, whatever they have back home, and they're very resilient. The amount of testing, English exams, they have to go through is pretty amazing.
Thank you for highlighting the importance of immigration. As an immigrant, I could…. You know I'm grateful. I know that if you look around…. I always say that more 40 percent of our doctors, professors, scientists, teachers — you name it — are immigrants. If we didn't have that, many of us wouldn't even have a family doctor or even educators. It's more so a comment.
I wonder: how much initiative are we taking to support these international students, to provide them online learning? They can still learn while they are waiting for these COVID guidelines or the flight bans and all. What steps are we taking to address that?
J. Routledge (Chair): Just before you respond. Sorry to take up that time. I'm just pointing out that we're running up against the next panel.
M. Blouw: Okay.
J. Routledge (Chair): If you'd like to respond to the last question, please keep it brief. Sorry about that.
M. Blouw: Very quickly. I, too, am an immigrant — a proud immigrant — to Canada. I was educated here. I learned the language, etc., so I understand very clearly of what you speak.
In terms of how we've supported international students. During the pandemic, students couldn't come. Yet we delivered online education around the world to students to ensure that they could continue with their programs of studies. We did a great deal to try to ensure that they had a learning environment that enabled them to continue their studies even though the pandemic was restricting their opportunity to attend classes.
I think that was quite successful, and we anticipate our international student numbers will be fairly robust this year.
J. Routledge (Chair): I'll conclude this panel presentation by thanking you so much for taking the time to reflect on advanced education and to give us some really important things to consider — really important feedback. Thank you for addressing international students. It's really important — a lot more to talk about on that front.
Thanks again, and we'll let you go.
We'll go right to the next panel. Our next panel is also representing faculty associations in advanced education.
Our first speaker is Victor Villa from Selkirk College Faculty Association.
Take it away, Victor.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 4 – Advanced Education (Faculty Associations)
SELKIRK COLLEGE FACULTY ASSOCIATION
V. Villa: It's a pleasure to be here to provide input to the 2022 budget. I recognize that I'm in the traditional territories of the Sinixt. My name is Victor Villa, and I'm here as president of the Selkirk College Faculty Association and the 205 post-secondary faculty and staff we represent.
As FPSE president Brent Calvert stated in a previous panel, our faculty and staff are excited about the opportunities that exist for post-secondary workers to be part of solving the major problems of our time. The pandemic, climate change and societal inequalities will benefit from a budget that considers how these are interrelated and how post-secondary education can make significant contributions.
The COVID-19 pandemic and fire season have been devastating for our region. Workers have lost their jobs. The need for climate action has never been greater. In Castlegar, we had the dubious honour of having the worst air quality in the world this summer, and the most recent IPCC report shows that we need to take urgent action now to prevent even worse climate events in the coming years.
In the spirit of presenting recommendations that can be part of solving these problems, our union recommends the following. Reinstate targeted funding to provide assurance that the core programming will continue to be available to all, no matter where you live. The sustained funding for programming ensures that rural institutions such as Selkirk can continue to offer programs and class sizes that are realistic for our region.
Other improvements for workers. In the 2021 budget, the Hon. Selina Robinson, Minister of Finance, reminded us that in British Columbia, the government has our backs, and we all have each other's backs. We all pitch in to make better for the future and recover from existential crises such as climate change and the pandemic. We will continue to help British Columbia in recovering from these difficult times.
We're asking that post-secondary workers be given a living wage, full-time work, and that we be given resources to recruit and retain workers, given cost-of-living increases. We need a budget that eliminates the need for employers to offer precarious work that creates pay and social inequalities. Let's rehire post-secondary educators that lost their jobs because of the pandemic and provide them with more secure work and equal pay. We need a budget that encourages decolonizing and indigenizing the curriculum in post-secondary education. Suzanne Stewart has hope that although education "was once the tool of oppression," now education is a tool of empowerment.
To help us adapt to the western world and for the western world to adapt to our traditional ways of teaching and learning, we urge the committee to recommend that the government implement all of the recommendations from our federation, outlined by myself and my colleagues. Thank you to the committee for the opportunity to present our recommendations. I am happy to take any questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Victor.
We'll hear from the rest of the panel, and then we'll come back with questions.
Our next presenter is Joan Kaun, College of the Rockies Faculty Association.
COLLEGE OF THE ROCKIES
FACULTY ASSOCIATION
J. Kaun: Good morning, everybody. I'm Joan Kaun, president of the College of the Rockies Faculty Association, and I'm an office administration instructor at the College of the Rockies. Today I'm calling you from Cranbrook, on the traditional territory of the Ktunaxa people.
COTR faculty are members of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators. Locally our association represents about 200 full- and part-time instructors at our seven campuses in the East Kootenay. Programs at our college include trades, health, business, arts and science, English language learning and adult basic education.
In preparation for this presentation, I reviewed my previous notes from 2019, when I and others encouraged a review of post-secondary funding. I know many of us are pleased this is taking place, and we hope to provide input during that process. I missed last year's presentation. It was a little hectic.
The next few years will present all of us with new challenges, in addition to the ones we were recently facing. Today I'm going to address two topics within the mandate letter received by the College of the Rockies as well as most other post-secondary institutions to address lasting and meaningful reconciliation in equity and racism.
The mandate letter states that the institution is expected to "remain focused on creating opportunities that implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission." Our college does not have ongoing funding for truth and reconciliation and Indigenous priorities. We've been applying band-aids –– temporary and part-time positions –– for several years, and making small steps, but we need additional and ongoing funding to support the actions that commit to transformative changes. Working towards reconciliation is long-term and ongoing work that will always require dedication and resources.
The mandate letter also states that "the public sector has a moral and ethical responsibility to tackle systemic discrimination in all its forms." The College of the Rockies Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, JEDI, and CORFA have begun promoting educational events such as Black History Month and Indigenous History Month, as well as other information-sharing to raise awareness and encourage reflection and growth. The committee would like to do a college-wide equity assessment and plan to thoughtfully implement and monitor anti-racism and reconciliation interventions and initiatives. We cannot implement solutions for change if we don't clearly understand the barriers. Once again, the major challenge is funding.
Our faculty and staff are excited by opportunities that exist for post-secondary workers to be part of solving the major problems of our time. We have members who are passionate about Indigenous and anti-racism issues and are ready to do the work. These topics are huge and require funding in order to address them even minimally. Increasing funding to post-secondary education is a sound investment in people now and our shared future together. Currently it should also be a priority to allow our institutions to access reserve funds to move through the COVID-19 recovery.
Thank you very much for your time. I will try to submit a supplementary document within the next few weeks for your review and consideration.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Joan.
Next we'll hear from Ian Rocksborough-Smith, University of the Fraser Valley Faculty and Staff Association.
UNIVERSITY OF THE FRASER VALLEY
FACULTY AND STAFF ASSOCIATION
I. Rocksborough-Smith: Hello, and thanks for this opportunity to voice the concerns of the faculty and staff association at the University of the Fraser Valley to the B.C. standing budget committee. My name is Ian Rocksborough-Smith, and I teach history at that institution, primarily in Abbotsford. I am the current human rights officer with our local. The faculty and staff association represents more than 500 faculty and 400 staff employees at UFV.
The university is situated on the unceded traditional territory of the Stó:lō peoples, notably the Matsqui, Sema:th and Ts'elxwéyeqw Nations. The Stó:lō have an intrinsic relationship with what they refer to as S’ólh Téméxw, "our sacred land." Therefore, I express gratitude and respect for the honour of living and working in this sacred territory.
The UFV FSA is committed to the process of truth and reconciliation that the university is and our communities in the valley are committed to. As the events of the past summer have demonstrated, with the revelations in Kamloops and elsewhere, this is still very much a definite work in process, and we have the local Stó:lō community to look to for leadership as we continue to move forward, as histories of genocide in Canada continue to be uncovered.
As the previous speaker noted, post-secondary education needs to be in step with these efforts at reconciliation. The need for resources to tackle systemic discrimination and equity issues will be, and is, great.
As with other medium-sized universities in B.C. and across the province, UFV is locked into an unsustainable funding model, given the demographic growth of the Fraser Valley in particular, which is due to grow, often doubling in size in many communities in the next five years, particularly in a city like Abbotsford, set to more than double its population in the next five years. This sort of population growth has been occurring in nearly all the major communities south of the Fraser River in recent years.
Expenditures outweigh revenues in the preliminary budget, and the province needs to support small and medium-sized institutions like UFV in this time of pandemic-induced austerity. Education in post-secondary and in the public sector should not be based on a for-profit model. It should rather be focused on the needs of local and regional communities that educational institutions serve.
Small and medium-sized institutions like the University of the Fraser Valley have a duty to service underrepresented and underprivileged communities, often students with first-generation college or university education. This is very much an important part of UFV's service to the community.
The UFV FSA supports overall funding increases for the Labour Relations Board and the B.C. employment standards branch, such that these important bodies have the resources and staffing required to quickly respond to cases and conduct enforcement of violations, something our local has been very busy with in recent years.
UFV projects a preliminary budget cost of around $67 million in the next couple of years, to come from provincial operating grants, and $70.4 million to come from student fees. This ratio should really be the other way around, at the very least, for the following reasons.
The pandemic economy has adversely impacted the domestic and international student populations that might otherwise be enrolling at UFV, given the downturn in certain reliable sectors of the economy, notably tourism, public-facing service sector occupations and the like.
Tuition has also crept steadily upward since the early 2000s, and the burden of tuition payments on individual students, both domestic and international — the latter of whom often pay up to three times the domestic rate — does not match the rising cost of living in the Metro Vancouver area. UFV is an institution that, like many others in this province, has profited in recent years from the recruitment and enrolment of a growing contingency of international students from abroad.
We at the FSA call for an implementation of regulations to govern international education recruiters to prevent fraud and theft from international students in what can be a highly predatory system, as recently reported in recent news articles and items, with Canada leading the way behind only the United States and Australia in terms of being a destination for international students from abroad. The federal government currently boasts that international students bring in upwards of $21 billion into the economy each year, which is more than the auto sector and lumber.
We ask that the B.C. government work with the federal government to increase integration across the financial spectrum in order to foster a system of economic and social opportunity for all, regardless of background or financial means.
Improve recognition and processing times for international credentials and support immigrants in achieving equivalent Canadian credentials if they so choose. This is in step with the vision of a more equitable post-secondary education system for all.
Thanks very much for your time.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Ian.
Next we'll hear from Lynelle Yutani, Camosun College Faculty Association.
CAMOSUN COLLEGE FACULTY ASSOCIATION
L. Yutani: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here to provide input for the 2022 budget. My name is Lynelle Yutani. I'm a descendant of the Ainu Indigenous people of Japan and European colonizers.
I'm joining this session today from the unceded traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ, Songhees and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, where I have been privileged to reside, uninvited, for 11 years.
I'm speaking here as president of the Camosun College Faculty Association and the nearly 600 post-secondary faculty we represent. I teach vitally needed health care programs, and my pronouns are she and her.
One of the most brilliant students I have ever taught could have easily earned a Governor General's Award. Instead, their time at school was spent on academic probation because they worked full-time to support their siblings in order to keep them out of foster care. Another student completed their program despite being homeless, and slept in their car for a year. A single parent missed countless classes when they couldn't afford or obtain daycare. All were already receiving the maximum available financial aid, but this does not come close to making it possible for any student to focus solely on their studies.
These committed, bright, capable students faced even greater barriers than most because they were Indigenous, a visible person of colour and gender-non-conforming. As Ian, from the University of the Fraser Valley Faculty and Staff Association, has said before me, increasing the direct post-secondary funding will help. However, this time of unprecedented change and turmoil has starkly highlighted the grave inequities that still persist in today's post-secondary environment. We have not yet succeeded in dismantling the colonialism, racism and white supremacy of our past that still resides within our educational institutions.
When we look at how these historic injustices are reflected and perpetuated, they are still causing socioeconomic disparity along racial lines. It's clear that we need to reduce or eliminate the financial costs of post-secondary education to students. Every child and adult should have the ability to pursue their education or career without the burden of student debt that outpaces all future earnings. This is an important part of turning the page on our colonial past. Adequately addressing the disproportionate barriers that outrageous costs of living, plus tuition, represent to Black, Indigenous and people of colour and LGBTQIA2S+ students is even more important to their present.
Justice Murray Sinclair famously said, "Education got us into this mess, and education will get us out" — but not when it is behind a paywall. Implementing the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission should not be only at the discretion of individuals with privilege, because when it is, we have learned, sadly, that very little changes.
Despite any pandemic or financial austerity, education must not be viewed only as a vehicle for labour skills but also as a vital tool for individual fulfilment, human well-being and a way to fully engage us all as citizens and lead us together into a more socially just future. We urge the committee to recommend implementation of all of our recommendations from the federation as outlined by myself and my colleagues. Thank you.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Lynelle.
Lastly, we'll hear from Jen Wrye, North Island College Faculty Association.
NORTH ISLAND COLLEGE
FACULTY ASSOCIATION
J. Wrye: Thank you very much. I'm honoured to provide input today for the 2022 budget. I'm Jen Wrye, and I serve as the president of the North Island College Faculty Association, Local 16 of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators.
I'm honoured to be speaking to you today from the traditional and unceded territory of the K'ómoks First Nation, who have been stewards of these lands since time immemorial.
North Island College provides learning to students in 80,000 square kilometres in the traditional territories of 35 First Nations of the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw, Coast Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth traditions. From the mid– to north Vancouver Island region, from our centre in Ucluelet to our campuses in Port Alberni, our largest campus in Comox Valley, in Campbell River and Port Hardy, as well as onto the mid-Mainland in the Bella Bella and Bella Coola region, these are small communities with one or two major economic, often resource-based, sectors.
Like my colleagues, I'm passionate about the potential of post-secondary education in tackling some of the most entrenched problems we face in this province, including justice for Indigenous peoples and communities, anthropogenic climate change, the opioid crisis, an increased cost of living and rising inequality.
I see post-secondary education as a vehicle for community resilience and pandemic recovery, especially in rural and remote communities. Accordingly, I'm asking the committee to support measures for increasing core, ongoing funding for programming to ensure all learners have access to the educational opportunities they need to fully thrive at home.
North Island College has faced much unpredictability in the face of constrained higher education budgets. This year has been especially difficult. Our VP finance projects COVID will create budget deficits for nearly three years, leaving NIC to deplete its scant savings to cover these shortfalls. This is not money that is just sitting in the bank collecting interest. It's earmarked to help students, to develop programs, to train our faculty members, to upgrade old technology and so on.
Since COVID, North Island College has lost roughly a quarter of its faculty and further cut programs and sections across most areas, on top of the already thinned out programming in many areas that we had. These cuts have consequences.
Cuts mean learners cannot take courses they need to transfer or graduate on time. It means students cannot stay at home as long or that they must move their families elsewhere to finish their studies. It means relying on fickle international enrolment. It means losing community members, most working age, to opportunities elsewhere in larger cities. It means employers may struggle to find or attract skilled workers in our areas.
Reliable and sustainable funding that is specifically directed toward programming within smaller communities may not be what generates the most revenue or may not be what falls in line with the expectation of large city centres with large student populations, but it makes a really big impact here. Ensuring these institutions, our institutions, have resources to offer varied areas of studies for all would have two key benefits.
First, it promotes local access to learning. Students can plan and complete their studies on time, at home, where they live, without disruption, if programs are not cancelled due to the unrealistic enrolment metrics that institutions must rely on in a system that is uniform.
Secondly, it can contribute to a broader jobs plan for the region, for learners as well as for workers in the institution. North Island College is a significant employer in the mid- to north Island region. It can attract and retain faculty and staff in positions with good wages and benefits, providing small communities with some good jobs. Combined, these offer broad community benefit, including opportunities for families, as well as rural and economic recovery potential.
I urge the committee to encourage government to implement all recommendations from our federation, as outlined by myself and my colleagues who are here today. Thank you.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Jen.
We'll now open it up to questions from the committee.
L. Doerkson: Good morning, everybody. Thank you for the presentation.
I think, Jen, you touched on this, and certainly, Victor, you did. I just wanted to get a better sense of pre-pandemic levels of staffing compared to now. I think, Jen, if I heard you correctly, you said that you've lost a quarter of your staff.
We've heard from institutions this morning that said most of the learning will be face to face in the coming year. I'm wondering. Is that going to return? Are the staffing levels going to return? I'll direct it to both Victor and Jen.
V. Villa: Right now, actually, for us, it does mean…. I think we've regained a good number of people, so it's a good thing right now. That's what it looks like. But I'm not sure about Jen's situation.
For us at Selkirk, lots of people have been rehired, if you will.
J. Wrye: Thank you for the question. It's a tricky one to answer, because our staffing really fluctuates in relation to enrolments. We did experience even more layoffs, some of which were rescinded. We have retained some of those layoffs, and some have been taken back.
I would say that our staffing is rebounding a little bit, but I do wonder whether the assumption about most learning being face-to-face applies in our institution. I would say that that really is program-dependent. We do certainly have some face-to-face learning, and that is helping our staffing. At the same time, we're also seeing consolidation through digital delivery, which is useful for our institution more broadly, but it does provide some uncertainty in how we'll educate people in their actual community.
By way of an example, we used to offer three sections of a specific discipline — let's say, political science, for our politicians in the House — and one on each campus, face to face. We've cut some of those face-to-face, and now we offer one face-to-face, potentially two, and one digital. Where there was a smaller enrolment in some our more remote communities, that's being leveraged for higher numbers. That, of course, results in staffing limitations and cuts.
I think that the question is complex or has a complex answer. We are better than we were, but we have still decreased. I'm estimating a quarter, but it may be more than that.
L. Doerkson: I just wanted to make a quick comment and echo your comments, Jen, with respect to employment in smaller communities. I'm from a smaller community where we, obviously, have a small division of Thompson Rivers University. I can certainly appreciate your comment with respect to the employment in our community. We're grateful for that, and I know that rural B.C. is as well. Thank you.
J. Routledge (Chair): Perhaps before we move on, Lynelle, you wanted to address this question.
L. Yutani: Yes. Camosun College is in Victoria, and that might normally be regarded as a privileged place to be as a post-secondary educator. If you have the luxury of a permanent position, it can be. However, our experience during the pandemic is that we lost a lot of our term or sessional faculty and that we have been facing great challenges in rehiring anyone, because they're priced out of our rental market.
Then, for myself, in health programming, I could make substantially more money were I to be working in the health care field itself. What we're experiencing is that post-secondary education wages can't compete. Not only with the….
I believe it's a moral obligation that many of our prior faculty members feel, now that they're contributing to improving the health and ending the pandemic of our communities. We simply can't recruit to fill that which we have lost in terms of our faculty numbers. We can't hire them at a wage that allows them to move to Victoria, and with precarious sessional assignments, they can't commit for long terms.
That doesn't permit us to be able to grow our enrolment back to pre-pandemic sizes as rapidly as we would like to, which means that sections that are needed for students to complete their programs aren't available. That means that we can't deliver those really vitally needed workers to employment, because they just can't access their courses. That's the challenge that we're experiencing. Thank you for letting me speak.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you for your response. Do we have other questions? Well, I do.
Victor, you talked particularly about full-time work — the access to full-time work for faculty members. That is not the first time we've heard about that concern. It's not the first time since we've been doing these hearings that we've heard about that. I've heard about it in my own community.
There is a concern that we have faculty members who are teaching important courses, and they have been working for years and years, pre-pandemic, as part-time members of faculty. If you and others on the panel could just tell us some more about that, and the significance of it, the impact it has on your work and the impact it has on your students — or whatever else you want to say about that.
V. Villa: Thank you very much for that. Mostly, at Selkirk, we are having a lot more face-to-face courses. Not all of them are, but more so than last year. Because of that, some people have been rehired, or new people, but it's also part-time and more precarious, if you will. So they're at a bit of a disadvantage. It's unknown how much work they're going to continue to have, or for how long.
Also, when people are employed on a part-time basis, it's difficult, if you have to only…. If you're hired at 25 percent, or at 30 percent, or 50 percent, it's hard to contribute to other kinds of things that you need to do at the college. So there are problems with not giving people full-time work if they want that. Often, people do not get enough work and not enough secure work. I think it's a combination of both of those things: security of the work, and whether or not they're getting enough. That's what I'll say for now.
J. Routledge (Chair): Does anyone else want to jump in on that?
L. Yutani: Sure, I will. Again, Lynelle Yutani from Camosun College.
One of the unfortunate tragedies of the pandemic was the break in some learning, and that extended break in the amount of courses we were able to offer broke the chain of regularization for a substantial number of our term or sessional, precarious workers. In many ways, that has been an advantage for the employer, because they can now put off hiring or regularizing our part-time workers, who've been working for the duration that was required for them to obtain permanent positions. Essentially, their clock has now been reset, because the pandemic period of time was not considered bridged, because it was not a choice.
We've had that problem, and then, those highly qualified, experienced and long-term instructors obtaining employment in other places, moving out of the Greater Victoria area, and not being able to replace them has been a substantial problem. When you have part-time, term and sessional employees, the ability of the employer to invest in those employees, through our development support, and their ability to spend time in becoming better instructors, doing a better job and engaging with students, is very limited, when they are also focused on a second or third job, just to be able to maintain a living residence in the region.
We find, for the part-time workers, that not only is it precarious but their attention is severely divided. Everything suffers because of that.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I think there's a commonality in most of the organizations that you represent. It's not the big-city universities. These are the smaller, more rural areas of the province. Ian, you brought up a comment about the cost of living — housing. In most of the areas that I hear about in British Columbia, as the Housing critic, it's that there is pressure.
I guess the question I really have is…. A lot of the institutions that you're from don't have student housing so that there is some way of having something there. I don't know individually…. I've been to the University of the Fraser Valley. I mean, it's a bigger campus than many others. Camosun, certainly, is larger.
Is student housing one of the things, or a combination of housing, maybe even for faculty — I guess that's kind of a question — to help balance that pressure? Faculty come from other areas, and sometimes they're in sticker shock when they look at a price of a home in the Fraser Valley or Victoria, let alone…. I don't know what it's like in Courtenay or Comox or Campbell River and stuff like that.
Do you have a comment about how that might be part of the solution?
L. Yutani: Jen, did you want to start off on this one?
J. Wrye: North Island College is in the process of making a business case for housing. We've made it several rounds through. I can't tell you exactly where we're at, but we've had architectural renditions drawn up. We've got the location set out, all of the design. We've passed through multiple processes. We've got money secured for a loan, and we've got some funding secured. So we're on the way.
Thank you for this question. I would say…. I'm not an administrator, but from the institution's standpoint, as I understand it…. Housing would have a great deal of community benefit, so much so that there's — this is in Courtenay — interest in looking at student housing and family student housing and, potentially, some turnover housing for faculty. We haven't heard that that is a priority, but we think that there may be potential there, in Campbell River as well.
We certainly don't have the sticker shock of the Lower Mainland in terms of price, but in the community in which I reside — Cumberland, B.C. — we've had an old miner's house sell for $1.1 million recently. This was a house that was originally built for miners in Cumberland at the turn of the century. It's been gutted and reno'd, and it's lovely, but it's definitely out of line with the economic reality of the Comox Valley.
L. Yutani: In Victoria, obviously, we have the lowest occupancy available on the Island and certainly echo some of the problems of Vancouver and the Lower Mainland in that it doesn't matter how much money someone has right now. They can't find some place to rent. There just isn't anywhere to live.
We have students who are…. Right now they're camping in preparation for starting school. Short-term rentals, not the kind that you would Airbnb but the type that are available for a semester period of time so that you don't have to sign a full year's lease…. Then, with the restrictions for subletting or capacity metrics, it's very impossible.
I remember when I went to college. There were five of us sharing a one bedroom. That was the only way that we could afford that, and that's just not possible in Victoria with the occupancy limits. Even when you get away with it, it's still much more expensive than it was 20-plus years ago when I was in college.
We have qualified instructors from all over the country who apply for positions. They want to accept our offers, but when they look at the housing in Victoria and they can't get into it for under $1 million…. Somebody from P.E.I. won't even consider making the move across the country. In fact, we have people leaving us because they can't afford to live here any longer.
I think instructor housing, in addition to student housing, would be an incredible benefit to the smaller colleges and institutes.
At Camosun College, we've been trying for the past decade to, first of all, obtain permission and then be able to obtain the funds to build student housing. But you get caught in a trap where the cost of the building you create requires that you charge students market rates for those spaces, and we just can't. The students just can't afford that, as well, so more funding to build that housing would be necessary.
J. Kaun: I'll jump in quickly. The College of the Rockies was fortunate enough to actually just complete another residential building — well, four buildings, I believe — in the last year. But they're full already. We've got some new apartment complexes, rentals, that have just opened up this past summer, but they're not affordable. They are expensive. The occupancy rate in Cranbrook is low like everywhere else, and our real estate prices are jumping high.
Even though we've got some, we need more, and we need more affordable housing for faculty and staff and students.
J. Routledge (Chair): I don't see any other questions, but just before we wrap it up…. Jen, I think I missed your hand earlier. I think you wanted to address the question about the part-time work for faculty members.
J. Wrye: Yes. There are just a couple of comments that I wanted to add. Our experience in the COVID pandemic has been that we are seeing — and we have seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well — contracts that are coming in just short of four months, which is the threshold needed for benefits and pensionable time, if they are sessional, as a potential.
We are seeing now, during COVID, some of the regular employees that we had have had a full layoff and then been recalled to partial work, but they've been thrust into sessional work.
I don't see much difference in the work that I do as a regular employee and that my sessional colleagues do, other than, of course, the experience of salary, of professional development, time and investment. They do excellent work for students, and my concern really is that they do it off the side of their desks, outside of their contracted hours because their contracts don't allow them to properly prepare and to properly close out courses.
We are increasingly being asked to support students who are facing crisis or challenges and need extra time to complete their studies and their courses. The contracts will end but not all students have completed, and so faculty just end up getting emails asking for help or being given assignments. As much as possible, we time sheet this, but the time-sheet system doesn't work on the same level as contract work that is actually recorded.
So these are some of the challenges that I see us facing, because our institutions have such limited resources that they have to try to pinch pennies everywhere they can in order to stay in the black, when they were forced to before, and now to reduce their deficit as much as possible.
J. Routledge (Chair): Seeing no other questions, we'll wrap this up by thanking you for your time but also for your very powerful presentations and your commitment that was very evident in your presentations and in your answers to our questions — your commitment to your colleagues, to your institutions, to your communities and to your students. Thank you very much.
We'll take a recess now until 11:30.
The committee recessed from 11:19 a.m. to 11:32 a.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. We'll reconvene the meeting, and we'll hear from our next panel, which is also on advanced education. It's a panel of student organizations.
Our first presentation will be from Melissa Chirino, B.C. Federation of Students.
Whenever you're ready, Melissa.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 5 – Advanced Education (Student Organizations)
B.C. FEDERATION OF STUDENTS
M. Chirino: Good afternoon, committee members. My name is Melissa Chirino, and I am the chairperson of the B.C. Federation of Students.
I would like to begin by acknowledging that I am calling in today from the unceded, traditional territory of the Qayqayt First Nation.
The B.C. Federation of Students is the largest provincial student organization in British Columbia, representing 15 institutions in all regions of the province. Over the last several years, the committee has put forward many of our recommendations, which have made it into the provincial budget. So we thank you for continuing to listen to the needs of students and helping us achieve an affordable and accessible post-secondary system for all.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted gaps that have already existed within the post-secondary system. As we move towards an economic recovery, we have the ability to shift our approach to benefit the needs of our students.
I'm an international student. When I was finishing high school, I was unsure where I wanted to go and study. I had a lot of choices. In the end, I ended up choosing Vancouver because of the affordability that was promoted back in my country. When I started studying in Canada, the tuition fees for four classes were $5,000. Now, it's almost $8,000. My student loans used to cover all my classes. Unfortunately, soon they won't anymore, which is quite alarming.
We have been saying for years that it is risky to rely on international students to fund our post-secondary system. In the past years, institutions have increased their surplus due to high international fees. This was only possible due to the absence of the cap on tuition.
Not knowing how much tuition will increase the following year is a barrier for international students. Fees may increase by as much as 20 percent, which results in students struggling to continue studying in Canada. As an added layer, Vancouver is also an expensive place to live in. Housing isn't affordable for students, let alone those who have to pay five times more than domestic students in tuition.
International tuition revenues are now estimated to be 25 percent of B.C. university operation budgets. This is a high risk for our institutions, since international fees are not always guaranteed. Institutions cannot continue to rely on international enrolment to fund them.
We saw how, due to COVID-19, people were unable to afford to pay their rent, let alone attend post-secondary. We need to think ahead and invest in education and ensure institutions are stable for years to come. We need to acknowledge that international students are not the exception to negative financial impacts due to the global pandemic. As we are moving towards an economic recovery, we have to keep these students in mind.
Our recommendation includes amending the tuition fee limit policy to add a new cap on fee increases for international students as well as developing a new B.C. international education strategy that will provide sufficient support for international students to assist in the cultural, social and academic integration.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Melissa.
Next we'll hear from Stewart McGillivray, BCIT Student Association.
BCIT STUDENT ASSOCIATION
S. McGillivray: My name is Stewart McGillivray, as mentioned. I am the government relations strategist with the BCIT Student Association. Additionally, I study non-profit management in our School of Business here.
I'm calling in from the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples — in particular, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
At the BCIT Student Association, we represent close to 50,000 students who study at BCIT in any given year in our School of Business, the health sciences, trades. You name it. We're mainly a service and advocacy organization in addition to providing entrepreneurship and career services advising and operating child care at our Burnaby campus.
The policy area that I'll be discussing today is the B.C. access grant, which many of you know was created just prior to the pandemic, in the February 2020 budget. It was something that, as Melissa mentioned, had been a long-standing concern of student associations, and we're very appreciative of the partnership that was often shown from this committee in advancing that recommendation to government.
It's a very good start, definitely. It was to support up to 40,000 students in a given year, although it was principally funded from reinvested line items from the B.C. budget. At the time it was introduced in 2020, it involved about $24 million in new funding over three years or $8 million a year.
It's been a very valuable program to have as students face the affordability challenges brought on by the pandemic. Briefly — you'll know many of them — in the summer of 2020, considerable job losses and higher-than-usual youth unemployment and a lot of upheaval and uncertainty around what their education would look like, both last school year and even this upcoming school year. All the while, both ancillary and tuition fees did go up for both domestic and international students at most B.C. post-secondaries.
One way that we believe students could be supported in combatting these affordability challenges would be by expanding this relatively new program. It is something that was referred to in the platform last October. About $45 million was committed towards training for a changing economy category. We think that's a good start, although more is always preferred.
As recently as the current budget last April, there's about $62 million per year that is spent on tax credits that correspond to tuition. We're very supportive of the idea of reinvesting those funds into upfront needs-based grants. The challenge with some of these tax credits is that they're for after your studies. So they don't necessarily assist with upfront challenges accessing a post-secondary education.
They're also not necessarily means-tested. They correspond to the tuition you pay, irrespective of how it was paid for. There are some studies from the federal Parliamentary Budget Officer that suggest it does have a sometimes disproportionate benefit for those coming from higher-income families.
We think it would make the most sense to reinvest that funding into the existing B.C. access grant. We have a really good mechanism right now with StudentAid B.C. and the federal Canada student financial assistance program.
In fact, channelling some of those tax credits into more upfront support is a policy measure with precedence as well. It's something the previous Ontario government did in 2017-18, when they massively invested in upfront needs-based grants, as well as the federal government. In spring of 2016, they eliminated some of those tax credits and immediately reinvested it into an increase in the Canada student grants.
We think now is also a very opportune time to look at that policy area, because we're in a period of transition at the federal level. The Canada student grant was temporarily doubled beginning last year, but at the moment that's expected to end in 2023. Still pending the results, of course, of this current federal election and the different policy commitments of the parties.
We really think there's a good opportunity here for the province and the federal government to coordinate on providing as much upfront access as possible so that students from lower- and middle-income families can face next to no barriers in accessing a post-secondary education.
That's our chief request and, of course, happy to take any questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Stewart.
Now we'll hear from Amy Barry, College of New Caledonia Students Union. After hearing from Amy, we'll open it up for questions to all of you.
COLLEGE OF NEW CALEDONIA
STUDENTS UNION
A. Barry: Thank you, Madam Chair, and good afternoon committee members. My name is Amy Barry and I am staff at the College of New Caledonia Students Union in Prince George.
I acknowledge that I am presenting today from the beautiful unceded and traditional territories of the Lheidli T'enneh First Nations.
I'm here today to talk to you about institutional funding. In the last 50 years, the proportion of public funding to B.C. colleges and universities has declined to 43.6 percent of total operating revenue, down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s and more than 90 percent in the 1970s. This results in institutions relying on international fees to fund institutions.
At CNC, where there is a high population of international students, they are paying over four times more than domestic students in tuition alone. For instance, for the accounting and finance program, domestic students are paying $6,600 while international students are paying $27,000.
The college is becoming more and more reliant on international student funding to make up for the decrease in public funding. Not only does this cause massive divides between international students and domestic students, but because of the financial difficulties, international students are looking to move on to full-time work and prioritize their financial recovery instead of completing their BAs.
This symptom of underfunding is not giving Prince George a fighting chance to nudge new graduates with fresh ideas and perspectives to start businesses or to help build a new economy. It is clear that there is a funding crisis in our post-secondary system and with deteriorating infrastructure, program cuts, predatory textbook publishers, this all adds to the extreme price gouging of international students.
Although domestic students have a 2 percent cap on their fee increases, they are still being gouged by ancillary fees in order to help institutions bulk up their budgets and stay afloat. So even with domestic enrolment remaining relatively stable, the decline of international students is causing institutions suffer financially as a direct result of their over-reliance on these fees.
There are solutions to these problems, some of which will cost little to no money but will drastically improve the lives and financial security of the students across this province. Historically, investments into the post-secondary sector have been key in moving provinces and countries out of times of financial hardship. In order for us to move forward with proper economic recovery, we need to invest in those who will be here in the future. We need to invest in education.
We are recommending a full review of funding in the advanced education and skills training sector be conducted to determine gaps in government funding, in particular for regional colleges and universities, including an infusion of $200 million annually, and that the government freeze tuition fees and develop a plan to progressively reduce tuition fees at public institutions to lessen the financial burden on students and their families. We need to invest in education, moving towards an economic recovery.
We also recommend that the government strengthen the tuition fee limit policy to ensure that institutions are not increasing fees beyond the prescribed limits in the form of new ancillary fees and repackaged programs.
We hope that you will take our ask into consideration in the coming months and think about how they might be implemented sooner. Now is the perfect time for us to think big. Our goal should not be returning back to normal. It should be thinking of ways our province can create changes that allow us to be better than ever.
Thank you for your time.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Amy.
Now, we'll open it up to questions from the committee.
P. Alexis: Amy, this is a question for you. Can you tell me, or elaborate a little bit more on the textbook issue that you alluded to? If you could just explain that. I know when I went to university many, many moons ago, textbooks were one of the biggest costs, and I understand that it's even more impactful today. Can you give me a little bit more information about that?
A. Barry: Of course. With the research that we have done on our campus alone, there's a high percentage of students — I don't know the number off the top of my head — who probably wouldn't have engaged in the program that they wanted to if they would've known the high cost of the additional fees, such as textbooks and material costs.
There is an answer for this, and it's open education resources. There have been investments in that in the past, but we're looking to have more investments in that in the future and have it more of an across-the-board thing, have it so all institutions have open education resources and lift that burden off of the students having to pay extra, on top of their tuition fees.
J. Routledge (Chair): Does anyone else want to chime in on that answer to that question? Any of the panellists.
M. Chirino: I can chime in a little bit, and just talk about the cost of online tools that are used to assess knowledge in classes too. Those are also an additional cost.
When it comes to things like LaunchPad, a lot of times students sign up and they know the cost of their textbooks, but they don't know that they would have to pay an extra amount for an access code online. Those are also extra costs that are included that make it more of a barrier to get the materials for tuition.
S. McGillivray: I would just echo what both Amy and Melissa said. I think, as part of the needs assessment that StudentAid B.C. does, it is important that there be adequate funding within the program, so that costs of things like textbooks, things like different lab materials, housing in some of our most expensive cities — that those can all be accounted for.
We found one challenge last year was that within the StudentAid B.C. formula, there's a built-in cap, for example, on how much could be spent on technology costs, and we found a lot of students were running up against that, because many more of them were needing to study from home, but it couldn't just be like your basic, entry-level computer. There were higher requirements for some of the programs, and it wasn't possible to get fully funded through the existing StudentAid B.C. amounts.
L. Doerkson: I've got a couple of questions. The first question, I guess, is to Amy. For the second or third time this morning…. Our theme has been, obviously, post-secondary. You mentioned something that I heard earlier, and that is an over-reliance on international students.
My fear…. We've been told this morning that it's not costing domestic seats for students. Would you agree with that statement — that because of the shortfall of funding, we're not picking international students over domestic students?
A. Barry: I don't think I can really speak to it directly as a whole, but I can speak to it for our campus. I know for a fact that there are students right now who are trying to get seats, and they are domestic students, and they are told there are no seats left in the class.
I do know that that's an issue, but I can definitely get back to you with more information at a later date, if that's okay with you.
L. Doerkson: Thanks, Amy. I think it is a concern, and I'd certainly love to get to the bottom of it.
Madam Chair, would that be appropriate that she responds to the entire committee?
Thanks, Amy, for that.
My second question would go to Melissa. You had mentioned…. I think you were quoted as saying tuition was $5,000. It's now $8,000. I wondered over what time frame it has gone up.
M. Chirino: I believe that was 2017 to this year. It was the first time I looked at the list. So 2017, 2016, to now, in the winter semester.
L. Doerkson: Thank you very much, and thank you for the presentations from all of you this morning.
H. Sandhu: My quick question is for Amy.
Amy, you just mentioned that our domestic students are being told that there are no seats. However, we're also being told that we don't have international students there able to come. So do we know why our domestic students are being turned away? Or are institutions like College of New Caledonia or many others hoping that borders will open up, and then we are saving those seats for international students?
A. Barry: I'm only going off of what I've been hearing from students, so I can definitely dig into this a little bit deeper and get back to you on that, if that's okay.
H. Sandhu: Yes, definitely. And we do hear from many parents as well. The more clarity we have on this matter then we can pass that information. So you know, as a previous presenter mentioned, we don't need any polarization, so anything that we get — any information — would be really helpful.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Stewart, you mentioned about the student access grants and you talked about, within that group, more of a means testing. I don't know how much money the grants are, but I just looked on the website here, and it says that those grants are on a needs basis.
So who are the people that you see that are getting these grants that should not, maybe, receive them? You mentioned taking that money and redistributing it to the ones that do need it. Could you help us understand that, please?
S. McGillivray: Definitely, yeah. That was with specific reference to the tuition tax credit currently in place. That's a statement that you get every spring in relation to the dollar value of the tuition you paid, and you get a tax credit. It can be transferred to parents or spouses, and it can also be carried forward indefinitely, so it certainly is a cost-saving measure for those who attend post-secondary education. But it goes to everyone, so effectively, it doesn't distinguish between those with the greatest need and others, and it is after the fact.
Our argument would be taking that existing tax expenditure that's accounted for in the provincial budget and reinvesting it into the relatively newer B.C. access grant program.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Okay. Well, if you could just help me again, Stewart, I just want to know how much money the student access grant provides up front. Also, the fact that interest has been removed on student loans as of August 1, 2020 — what type of savings does that mean to somebody that is having to borrow money or struggling to come up with the tuition?
S. McGillivray: Yeah. The interest's elimination is definitely a huge help, although it is a very incremental saving stretched over the entirety of the repayment period. In terms of the B.C. access grant, my understanding is that for programs longer than two years, it currently will pay up to $1,000 per student for their school year. For programs shorter than two years, it would pay up to $4,000, and that's premised on the availability of the Canada student grant, which is not always available for those in the shorter programs. I think that's where the provincial one seeks to offset that. But the cost of education is often greater than those funded amounts, so that's where we would argue for increasing that.
J. Routledge (Chair): I'm not seeing other questions. I think you've made a pretty clear case. We will take what you've had to say into consideration. Some of this information is pretty shocking, actually.
So thank you for that. With that, we'll say goodbye to you. We look forward to that follow-up information from Amy.
We will now recess until 1:15.
The committee recessed from 11:55 a.m. to 1:16 p.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): I see our next panel has arrived on Zoom, so we'll just proceed.
Our first speaker is with the Students Union of Vancouver Community College, Hemvir Singh.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 6 – Advanced Education (Student Organizations)
STUDENTS UNION OF
VANCOUVER COMMUNITY COLLEGE
H. Singh: I want to start with acknowledging that I am currently situated on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations and that I have the privilege to live, learn and work on these unceded lands.
We appreciate the community's support for students at V.C. College and the acknowledgment of how difficult it has been for students since COVID-19. We are hopeful that this year's budget consultations will result in further advances to the affordability and accessibility of post-secondary education in British Columbia.
My name is Hemvir Singh, and I am the chairperson of the Students Union of Vancouver Community College, Local 16 of the British Columbia Federation of Students. I'm an international student in the automotive trades program.
The SUVCC, along with the BCFS, recommends that a full review of funding in the advanced education and skills training sectors be conducted to determine the gaps in government funding for regional colleges and universities, including the infusion of $200 million annually, that the government freeze tuition fees and develop a plan to progressively reduce the tuition fees at public institutions to lessen the financial burden on students and their families, and that government strengthen the existing tuition fee limit policy to ensure that institutions are not increasing fees beyond their prescribed limits in the form of new ancillary fees and repacked programs.
The B.C. government had made three commitments to the people of B.C.: to make B.C. more affordable, to deliver services that people count on and to build a strong, innovative economy that works for everyone. All three commitments can be met through investment and improvement in the B.C. public post-secondary system.
A review of per-student funding in B.C. tells a concerning story about the provincial government's commitment to strengthening universities and colleges. The 2021 budget includes an increase in the funding to the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training over what was budgeted last year. While this represents an important step forward, it does not make up for the decades of public disinvestment.
Programs like the ones offered at VCC are constantly changing, adjusting or being recreated to fit the labour market demands and the government mandates. Because of the fast-paced changes the institutions are experiencing, they are forced to use tuition fees to balance their budgets. In addition to the labour market demands, places like VCC need to meet the requirement of the ministry and to avoid deficits.
The block funding model leads institutions to commonly collapse programs or adjust them slightly, all just to reset the program with a different name and at a higher cost to the students. This is not unique to VCC. It's something students across the province experience every year. The pandemic has highlighted these shortfalls, and places like VCC have disproportionately suffered from these losses.
I came to VCC because it was the only program available to international students in British Columbia. I now understand that the limited options I had were because of the years of underfunding, combined with the limited funding model. This disproportionately impacts schools like VCC that are building communities for international students.
The funding model that exists forces institutions to offer what is affordable to their business plans. That usually excludes trades and puts places like VCC in a situation where they must choose to charge high tuition to be able to recover the costs of diverse programming. The per-student funding model makes it unaffordable for institutions to run high-cost programs like upskilling and trades.
With the decrease in funding that is happening simultaneously with the block funding model, institutions will be forced to no longer offer diverse programming. I didn't come to VCC because it was my first choice. I came here because it was my only choice.
As the government grapples with economic recovery and works to reduce the unemployment rate, the education and reskilling of workers is a vital investment. The pandemic has proved an opportunity for us to recognize the gaps in various sectors that are key not only to economic growth and civility but also to public health. To speed economic recovery in the province, we now seek additional targeted funding in key areas such as right-skilled trades, health.
Graduate education and research can aid in the recovery we need. The necessary training offered in various regions of the province will help people get attracted to the places they will live. It starts with equitable government investments into the trades and the health sciences of tomorrow. As it stands, the funding structure impacts careers most vulnerable to recovery. COVID has offered us an opportunity to improve the current reality and offer a new, stronger British Columbia.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Hemvir.
Now we'll hear from Ishika Tripathi.
EMILY CARR STUDENTS UNION
I. Tripathi: Hi. My name is Ishika Tripathi. I am the external representative on the Emily Carr Students Union. I'm also sitting on the university senate starting in the fall. I'm a third-year animation student.
I ended up at Emily Carr as a transition through a trades training program at my high school in Surrey. This was an incredibly effective program, as 17 out of 18 of my peers who did the program are now studying at Emily Carr. I chose my major because I loved watching movies as a kid, and I really wanted to be the one making them one day. I hope to work for Sony one day. I was really excited to come to Emily Carr, but I find that the reality at the university is struggling to meet my expectations.
Emily Carr suffers from a chronic deficit situation that threatens operations into the future. One of the first things I learned when I joined the students union was about my university's $7 million annual operating budget shortfall. The result of this deficit on campus is the sense of "if only." If only the university had adequate funding to meet its core operations, then the possibilities expand.
I also ask: what are some of the other consequences of the ongoing structural deficit? Emily Carr University has the privilege of relying on its reputation — a reputation that means being able to attract the best faculty, solicit funding for student awards and scholarships and assist new graduates to secure great jobs. As the narrative continues to grow that Emily Carr University suffers from a funding shortage, that reputation also starts to erode. Instead, the excellent reputation of Emily Carr as an international art and design university is replaced with a new narrative of underfunding — one where the university has an overreliance on underpaid, precarious sessional faculty.
We believe the success of Emily Carr graduates can be B.C. successes. I know of graduates…. Jason Jaw is one example who is working in B.C.'s booming film and VFX industry and has recently won an Emmy with a scene from his work on the show The Dragon Prince. Being the only specialized art and design university in the province is pretty neat. It's quite unbelievable to be surrounded by such talented colleagues.
In the time of pandemic anxiety and uncertainty, current and future students are at the forefront of cultural productions, decolonization and community-building initiatives. Our school is a hub of innovation and opportunity. Think about all the things that have brought joy to you and your families over the pandemic — movies, TV shows, video games, magazines, podcasts, music, live-streamed theatre and more. This is the work of the creative sector. This is the work that keeps the spirit alive in times of strife.
My recommendation to you is to recognize the critical role of post-secondary education in rebuilding through COVID. Our institution, if adequately funded, can continue to bring incredible value to B.C.'s economic recovery.
We echo the British Columbia Federation of Students and our colleagues on this panel as we identify that the post-secondary sector is in urgent need of a review of the funding system for institutions and an annual increase of $200 million. Additionally, targeted funding to our art and design university invests in new ideas needed to solve the province's wicked problems.
Emily Carr continues to suffer from chronic underfunding due to its designation as a teaching university and not a research university. Changing this designation would enable additional funding that would help alleviate the current crisis. We also ask that this review result in the funding of domestic students in last year's program who are currently not funded on a per-student basis by the government.
I believe in the return on investment through an increase to operating funding to Emily Carr University and an investment in the creativity of B.C. There is great potential for leadership and innovation in sustainability, a clean economy, B.C.'s growing creative economy, entrepreneurship, decolonization, cultural production and preservation, and community leadership in organizing. Disney is coming to the region, and our animation graduates will climb to the artistic leadership ranks.
I'm reiterating the comments of my colleague on this panel that increased investment in post-secondary education is desperately needed to support the growth and potential of our province to get us through this pandemic.
I ask: what other ideas and solutions are still in their early stages, taking shape through the brilliant minds of B.C.'s only specialized art and design school? What else can we provide to the province, if well supported? Without this needed support, we are watching the potential slip away.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Ishika.
Next we'll hear from Carissa Wilson.
NORTH ISLAND STUDENTS UNION
C. Wilson: Awesome. Thank you so much.
My name is Carissa, and I'm the executive director with North Island Students Union, representing all students at North Island College. We're Local 15 of the British Columbia Federation of Students.
Of the 25 public post-secondaries, NIC's catchment area is the largest and serves a broad range of students, including over 35 distinct First Nations, including the K'ómoks Nation, from where I'm speaking to you today. With offices in Port Hardy, Port Alberni and Campbell River, our union aims to provide meaningful services, connections and advocacy for all members and has been doing so since 1991.
The B.C. government made three key commitments to the people of B.C.: to make B.C. more affordable, to deliver services people can count on and to build a strong, innovative economy that works for everyone. All three commitments can be met through investment and improvement to the B.C. public post-secondary system. In order to follow through on these commitments, a full funding review for public post-secondary is necessary, with a special focus on regional colleges.
Colleges like NIC and the other institutions represented by the fine folks on today's panel are acutely affected by the current funding model, which often consists of one-time funding. Funding in these blocks makes planning challenging for small institutions and has deep impacts on enrolment. Programs offered, advertised one year, spark interest and then aren't offered again.
Block funding also leads to a higher rate of sessional instructors. Sessional instructors are often precariously employed, which leads to less engagement with the college community, shorting the important learning that happens outside the classroom.
Many institutions were asking for this funding review well before COVID-19 began to play havoc on our lives. With so much change in the labour force, institutions like the ones speaking to you today are tasked with re-educating these workers displaced by the pandemic. The folks speaking to you today all represent trades training, which, again, are often block or one-time-funded, making planning year in and year out a challenge.
In many communities, colleges are the entry point for education. When potential students face barriers to their entry, they may not complete their registration, and they may not make it to that important first day of their education.
Over the past several decades, funding has dropped for public post-secondary, forcing institutions to rely more and more on tuition. This has placed undue pressure on students. The North Island Students Union recommends that tuition face a freeze in the coming year and that during that time the tuition limit policy be reviewed.
We recommend including international students in the tuition limit to protect this valuable contribution to our economy and our schools. When international student tuition is relied upon heavily to cover shortfalls in overall funding, we see tuitions rise at unpredictable amounts. Our studies show 47 percent of international students are economically vulnerable, and financial insecurity weighs heavy on emotional health.
We recommend review of the international student plan with increases for supporting and integrating into B.C.'s social fabric. When including international students in a tuition limit policy, these valuable members of our economy can begin to feel valued and will continue to contribute to B.C.'s tax base, which recent figures report as $218 million in direct income tax contributions.
International students are B.C.'s third-largest export, only after our precious lumber and minerals. To protect this integral part of our economy, we must plan to support their place in our province.
I want to applaud this government for the return to compulsory trades programs. When trades were removed from compulsory status years ago, apprentice completion rates dropped dramatically, and many workplaces became precarious. With trades training in each community NISU represents, we ask that further supports for trades students are planned, including increased support for apprenticeship completion. These valuable workers are key to rebuilding B.C.'s economy.
Previously, trade students had access to an on-campus apprenticeship counsellor, a vital tool in supporting students throughout their years of education. When learners feel valued, we see completion rates rise. Many trades programs run independent of academic scheduling, and their access to on-campus and community supports are just as staggered as their start dates. By supporting apprentice counselling, we can return to valuing this important sector of B.C.'s economy.
One final ask starts with more applause, with the return of the B.C. grant system. Supporting students early, again, increases the likelihood of completion of education. Many students were underemployed throughout the last year, unable to work towards important savings to carry them throughout the school year. Now, more than ever, increased funding in existing grant programs will support B.C.'s economic rebuild. We ask for $100 million annually for this important program, increasing support for the learners up front, when they need it.
I'm really thankful for the opportunity to speak to the panel today, and I look forward to any questions. I look forward to the work, as this committee continues. Thanks so much.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Carissa.
Now we'll hear from Puneet.
CAMOSUN COLLEGE STUDENT SOCIETY
P. Kaur: Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee today. I am an external executive of the Camosun College Student Society and represent 9,000 health, trade, university, transfer and other students at Camosun College, which incidentally, is only a few kilometres away from the B.C. Legislature.
Last fiscal year Camosun ran a deficit of about $7 million and will likely run another similar deficit this year. For any college, even a medium-sized post-secondary institution, this is a lot of money. COVID-19 has only worsened an existing structured program in the funding of colleges and similar teaching institutions.
We realize that there are multiple competing priorities, but community-based institutions continue to be underfunded. Camosun College ran a deficit, but the deficit is drawing down the very limited fiscal reserves of the institution. With an uncertain situation, there is a real risk that smaller institutions will require significant government assistance in subsequent years. We call upon this committee to recommend a fair funding formula for colleges and smaller institutions, as well as direct COVID-19–related funding to offset the pandemic deficits.
Additionally, I'm sure that the dire housing situation facing students in the Victoria area has not escaped your notice. Those who have managed to find housing are often paying way too much, and others have had to make hard choices in terms of the distance from the campus and the quality of their accommodation. There are desperate students still struggling to get housing for a semester that starts in eight days. Some students are seeking a deferral, but others are arriving in town with no place to stay.
Camosun College needs to have student housing on both its campuses. Similar institutions simply do not have the same fiscal capacity as the big universities and lack the funds to be able to undertake housing projects. Even with the partial government funding, having more students in residence makes it easier for other community members to find homes in the area with very tight housing markets.
We call upon this committee to strongly recommend that the budget includes dedicated funding to fully fund the construction of student housing at the colleges and at least at a few post-secondary institutions.
I happen to be an international student and the first international student to be the senior elected officer of my student union. It was only after I arrived here that I realized how post-secondary institutions rely on the high tuition fees that I and my fellow international students must pay. Many of the large COVID deficits being run by post-secondary institutions in British Columbia are directly related to international student tuition fee revenue.
International students make important contributions and fill the major gaps in the labour market. We also are the only workers in the province who must pay the double premium for health care, and we also live in the fear of the institution suddenly increasing our tuition fees.
We ask that this committee also strongly recommend regulation on the international student visas in British Columbia and to recognize that there needs to be fairness for international students.
Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee today. I'm looking forward to questions and any comments.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Puneet.
I'll now open it up to the floor for questions from the committee.
P. Alexis: It's to Ishika. I have a question for you. You said that there was a $7 million shortfall. I was wondering if you could tell me what kind of impact that has on a student, daily or for the year. What does this mean, so that it actually represents…? Just give us a little bit of a story so that it's not just a number. I need to understand the impact, if you could, please.
I. Tripathi: Yeah, absolutely. As animation students, we have a big problem about how our instructors are. If you miss a class that's in the fall, you have to wait a whole year to take it again. With the sessional thing, there's this big issue of how students don't exactly have the proper time, and not all of the students can take it at that exact time. So if you miss it, you're pretty much put back on your degree. It will take you longer and cost you more.
Another issue is counselling. Our counselling does have wait-lists. So if you do miss the wait-list, you have to wait another month.
Again in animation, we also have another issue where we don't exactly have a lot of money for specialized animators. So if you do want to specialize in that field, we don't have instructors for that.
P. Alexis: If I could, Madam Chair.
So it's really about course offerings and limitations to times, which limits your ability. If there's a conflict or whatever, you've got to pick one course over the other, so you're moved to the next semester in order to actually get that course that you are required to graduate. That's what I'm hearing. Is that correct?
Yes. Okay. Thank you.
Does anybody else want to chime in, with respect to what it means to you when we talk about these deficits. That's one example, with respect to course offerings. Anything else you can share with me?
P. Kaur: Yes, as I mentioned in my speech, we do not have housing on campus as big universities can build. Perhaps if our colleges have enough funding, then they can have a good housing system for students so that they are sure of where they're going to live and they feel more comfortable and safe while arriving to Canada.
P. Alexis: Anybody else?
C. Wilson: I'll just echo what my other two compatriots say here. At North Island College, we also see less course selections offered, which will cause students to slow their education goals by…. It could be a semester, but it could be much longer than that — a whole year.
Also, all of B.C. is in a similar housing situation right now. But we feel a particular crunch here in the Comox Valley. Housing on campus — we currently have a business plan to the sitting government, and we're looking for approval for that as well.
More funds on campus would help to see that those students would face the appropriate supports as well. I'll also echo what my other friend says here about counselling services.
Some of those more ancillary but really important services for emotional health are often what needs to happen off the side of someone's desk, as opposed to being a dedicated service at a smaller institution, like we all are here. We see that some of those, I would argue, more important services actually see less support and are then undervalued.
P. Alexis: This morning we heard from the three large post-secondaries, and we asked the question about mental health. They told us that they've tripled their budgets just to try and address the mental health issues. So in a smaller campus, I expect that it's even more difficult to triple the budget, that kind of thing, because it's just not there.
Is there anything that you want to add about mental health and services and how you're feeling? I know we did hear from student associations earlier this year, and I know that's one of the big topics. Is there anything you want to add to that conversation?
J. Routledge (Chair): Before you begin, I'm having trouble seeing the hands from here when you put your hand up, but I see that both Puneet and Hemvir put your hands up. If you want to address this specific question about mental health, great. If you want to address the previous question, that's good too.
P. Kaur: Yes, it can address both questions. As the Chair already mentioned, it's difficult for any institution to triple or even…. When it comes to smaller colleges or institutions, they have a very limited amount of funds to use in specific areas.
When the pandemic hit, it was very difficult for a transformation, to go online and then arrange multiple options like medical or mental health services, because of the lack of funds. When this situation arises, their only option is to increase the tuition fees of international students, because we have a cap on domestic students, which is 2 percent, but we do not have a cap on international tuition fees. This is the way out where institutes look for increasing their funds. This is what I wanted to say.
J. Routledge (Chair): Hemvir, why don't you go next?
H. Singh: My point resonates with Puneet. If a college is running into a deficit, they can always target increased tuition fees for international students. There is no cap; it's not regulated. That's the cash there. They can increase it any time, without any notice.
Speaking about mental health, our college has started a mental health and well-being steering committee, and I am a part of it. I'll just do a quick comment on that.
I guess it's a good committee, and it is reaching out to all the parties concerned, whether they be students or other departments on the campus, to take their feedback. We are at the stage of developing a framework for this, for the mental health and well-being.
J. Routledge (Chair): Ishika and then Carissa.
I. Tripathi: Yeah, speaking about mental health, obviously if we did have a bit more funding, we could afford more counsellors and psychologists, because we do have a wait-list right now.
Speaking personally from my experience, this semester was pretty hard for me, and I have to get a few assessments done. It turns out my school couldn't exactly afford this, because we can't afford psychologists, so we didn't have them. I have to get it from an outside source, which I can't exactly afford.
It would be helpful, with more funding, if we could get psychologists and help the students with ADHD assessments or any other problems that they have. With the current counsellors, we do have trauma counsellors, with all the recent attacks on Asian kids, but we still do need a lot more to help them.
C. Wilson: Speaking to the mental health piece, the Here2Talk program that came into place has been very helpful. We received feedback from our members that having that tool is beneficial.
In years past, counsellors on campus were only tasked with supporting folks with their academic life, but we've seen over and over and over again that our members need to have support with their emotional health as well. The mandate of on-campus counsellors has expanded quite a bit, and we see that their use has increased dramatically.
At our institution, our counsellors wear more than one hat. Often a counsellor is also tasked with having roles in student life, so they're event planning, and they're counselling. More dedicated funding would allow our institution and institutions like us to be able to have that dedicated support that many students need in that transition.
J. Routledge (Chair): Harwinder has a question, and then Ben has a question.
H. Sandhu: Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all the presenters. Thank you for highlighting…. We learned a lot today — how much colleges, even with the deficits, rely on international student fees. And we've heard about…. Pretty much it's, in honest words, fee-gouging.
Puneet, my question. You mentioned that international students have to pay double the health care premiums. Was there a recent increase in the health care premium, and can you tell us how much, roughly, you pay? I know that for B.C. residents, it's been waived. If you can touch upon that, because to me, hearing from multiple presenters how much — sometimes four times more — the fee is, and then housing and then the premiums — a lot of things that often people, day to day, don't think about. If you can highlight that, that would be great.
P. Kaur: Thank you for your question. At the moment, international students pay $75 per month for health care. In the beginning, when the permanent residents were supposed to pay, the fees for international students were less, but because of the waive of them, they imposed all the fee increases on international students.
H. Sandhu: Good to know. Thank you.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Ishika, you mentioned in your presentation that there was chronic underfunding at Emily Carr of $7 million. First of all, I'd like to know where you got the information to validate that. It's my understanding that education institutions are not allowed to run deficits, so where is that $7 million, that information, coming from?
The second question I want to ask you is that you mentioned $200 million of increased funding. What I would like to clarify: is that number for more than one institution or just Emily Carr?
I. Tripathi: To answer your second question, it's for more institutions, not only Emily Carr. And to answer your first one, for that one we can give a written response in the September end hand-in.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): All right. Well, thank you. I think it's important that we do know the facts on this.
Now, the $200 million. Have you got a breakdown of that, or can you provide a breakdown to which post-secondary education institutions are looking for that and how it would be used?
I. Tripathi: We can provide a written breakdown with the September hand-in. Absolutely, we can do that.
G. Kyllo: Great. Thank you very much for your presentations.
International education is a pretty significant contributor, as you guys have recognized, to the provincial economy. One of our previous presenters had indicated that tuition fees in the last four years have gone up from $6,000 to $8,000, on average That's about a 33 percent increase. I'm sure that these post-secondary institutions must be having a look at the factor that if they start increasing the rates too high, they're going to have a correlation and a reduction in potential kids actually coming to the post-secondary universities.
All the presenters that have come in…. Everybody's looking for more money, and I certainly appreciate that that's part of the presentation process. I'm wondering if anybody can comment on your confidence level of the efficiency of the different organizations that you guys each represent, how confident are you that everything is being done to run the post-secondary institutions as efficiently as possible.
Obviously, it's always easy to ask for more money, but I'm wondering what your confidence level is within the institutions that you attend, if their priorities are accurately putting the funds into where the students actually most need the funds in order to provide that post-secondary education that you're all looking for.
C. Wilson: Thank you so much. I'm just going to touch on the $200 million that was mentioned previously, and it kind of loops into this as well.
That figure comes from work that we're doing with the British Columbia Federation of Students and is the recommendation across all 25 public post-secondaries so that that money would be distributed evenly or proportionately across the institutions. You will be able to see more information in our written submission about some of that breakdown and what our recommendations are. But yes, that is meant to be across all of the province. Fortunately, there are many controls and measures in place to dictate and mandate that public post-secondaries are run as economically efficient as possible and with many reporting mechanisms in place.
From my point of view, North Island College is doing its best work possible with the limited funds that they have to distribute education as equitably as possible, as we can, over such a large geographical area. Could they use support? Yes, for sure. But I think, given the tools that they have, they are doing a very fair and reasonable job. There are definitely shortfalls, and there are definitely things that we can do better.
We think colleges are so often just the starting point to someone's education, and when we see success at a college, it really impacts our communities so deeply. Graduation is my favourite time of the year. I absolutely love cheering them on and seeing the families come together and yell and hoot and holler for every graduating student, because that impacts that family and that community with such deeper goals. I always end up in tears, honestly.
Supporting our students early and often is going to see more completion rates, which is going to see a greater and quicker economic recovery for our province.
J. Routledge (Chair): Ishika, did you have your hand up?
I. Tripathi: Yeah, to answer the question. I believe what my university is doing is pretty good so far, with the funding that they do have, because they just want what's best in mind for the students. With everything that they have — whatever little we have so far — they've still been pretty good at equally dividing it to all of the students, and they have been reaching out for help. If we do have more funding, it would be a lot better.
In the fall, when I do start in the senate, I will see the funding more efficiently.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you. Do we have any additional questions?
L. Doerkson: My question is for Puneet, if she's still there.
You brought up housing, and of course that has been brought up a number of times during the discussion today. It might be too personal to ask, but could you give me a sense of what…? You said that you don't have dorm or on-campus living there. Can you give me a sense of what that cost is for you or other students? I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but I really would like to know.
P. Kaur: Thank you for your question. It will give a sense of how much international students are paying.
Sometimes we have limitations in the number of people per house, but my roommates and I are living in an apartment, so we are three sharing a two-bedroom apartment. It's about $1,695. We have figured out the cheapest apartment in Victoria city. As I told you, it's like sometimes students have to make choices if they want to go with a good apartment near to the college, or if they are looking for a cheaper apartment, it can be two hours away from the college.
My apartment is not that near to my college. If I was looking nearer to my college, then it was around $1,800 or maybe $2,000-plus, and it was very expensive so that it was not affordable. Once international students arrive in Canada, it's not that…. They are not earning in Canadian dollars. They are coming back from different currencies, which is way more.
If I talk about my Indian currency, $1 is around 60 Indian rupees, which cuts down into so much that, in the beginning, international students preferred to go with the cheaper side, and they adjust to the quality and distance from their colleges.
L. Doerkson: Thank you for sharing that information.
J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. Well, I think we're pretty well out of time. Thank you for your presentations, and thank you for your candid answers to the questions. You've really given us quite a bit of insight into the challenges that students have today. So thank you for that.
We'll now take a short recess.
The committee recessed from 1:55 p.m. to 2 p.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): I understand our panelists are all present.
We'll start with Debbie Tablotney.
Debbie, whenever you're ready.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 7 – K-to-12 Education (School Districts)
SCHOOL DISTRICT 38, RICHMOND
D. Tablotney: Good afternoon. My name is Debbie Tablotney. I am the vice-chair of the Richmond school district, and I am presenting on behalf of the board and for the chair, Sandra Nixon. We just wanted to thank you for giving us the opportunity to participate in this budget consultation and share our priorities for the upcoming provincial budget with you.
We have a couple of key messages. One is on our provincial funding to support COVID recovery in schools. Our district made tremendous efforts in the 2021 school year to minimize the spread of COVID while maintaining educational programs for our students.
The pandemic has had a significant impact on our district's financial position. The district is facing a $7.2 million budget shortfall in 2021-22. Primarily, it's due to reduced revenues, as a result of the pandemic. We've had to make significant cuts to staffing across all our employee groups to balance the budget. Several resources of revenue — including international education, rental revenues, investment income — have been negatively impacted.
We acknowledge and appreciate the pandemic-related provincial and federal funds received in 2020 and 2021. The Richmond school district received $1.4 million in provincial funds and over $7.8 million in federal safe return funds in 2021.
These funds were spent in a number of areas, such as a transitional learning program — which was actually the largest, proportionally, in the province — and, of course, enhanced cleaning staff and PPE equipment technology and employee health and wellness support.
With the availability of the vaccine, our society is looking forward to entering the recovery phase. The safety of students and staff remains our No.1 priority. In the fall of '21, we will require everyone in the education system to be nimble in contributing to the success of our students.
Our district requires continued provincial support to allow us to provide a healthy learning environment for our students and staff. The K-to-9 distributed learning program — which is new to our district for 2021-22 — for students that want to continue remote learning will likely require some additional staffing.
Our health and safety guidelines from the Ministry of Health, BCCDC, that were announced before the end of August…. Enhanced cleaning requirements will still be required, including some daytime custodial staff to do the disinfecting of high-touch areas, etc.
It's currently included as a budget adjustment. Last school year, it was funded from the COVID relief funds on a one-time basis. We'll need some additional staffing to support the schools in welcoming the students back, especially for our parents and staff and students to feel confident that our schools are safe and clean.
We'll need funding to support PPE, including masks, hand sanitizers and safety supplies. Mental health support for our students and staff will continue to be required. As well, 44 percent of our elementary classrooms in our district currently do not have mechanical ventilation systems, and capital funding will be required for that.
The No. 2 priority is continued investment in seismically safe schools and major capital projects. In 2004, the Ministry of Education launched the school seismic mitigation program and identified schools that may have structural risks associated with a seismic event.
In Richmond, we had 37 schools that were identified with at least one high-risk building section needing to be addressed under the SMP. And Richmond is identified as a geographic area with unstable soil conditions and risks of liquefaction.
J. Routledge (Chair): Debbie, you're out of time now.
D. Tablotney: Out of time?
J. Routledge (Chair): Yes. You had five minutes. But what I'm going to suggest is that when we have questions at the end, that may be an opportunity for you to make some points.
D. Tablotney: Okay. Great.
J. Routledge (Chair): Now we'll turn to our next presenter, Jen Mezei, with school district 41.
SCHOOL DISTRICT 41, BURNABY
J. Mezei: Good afternoon, committee members. It's with gratitude that I'm joining you today from the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish Nations of Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh and the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓- and Squamish-speaking peoples, who have been stewards of this land since time immemorial.
Today's reality is very different than when the Burnaby school district presented to this committee last year. Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged us to utilize our infrastructure to assist in a systemic pandemic response but has also highlighted the many challenges that have faced districts across the province.
I'm incredibly proud of the work that was done last year to meet the needs of our community while keeping schools open for in-person learning. I'm incredibly grateful for the commitment of our school-based and district-based staff to focus on not only learning but also connection and safety. However, the last 18 months has made us look at our education system through a different lens and highlighted inequities in our system and strain on our infrastructure, including to financial and to human resources.
The Burnaby school district submission focuses on new recommendations and previous submissions pertaining to capital project funding, including facilities; ventilation in portables; equity, including supplemental funding for students with disabilities and diversabilities; additional funding for Indigenous language education; and mental health supports as well as sustainability.
We'll be submitting our whole submission later on in the next couple weeks. Today I'll be presenting on the recommendations pertaining to capital funding and, if I have time, sustainability.
The board recognizes and is grateful to the provincial government for the recent infusion of capital funding into the Ministry of Education. Our school district has benefited greatly from this investment, as we have advanced many schools at high risk for remediation or where school additions are required as well funding for new child care spaces.
The district has an aggressive, long-range facility plan to ensure that students are provided modern, safe and sustainable learning environments. Adequate capital funding must be retained to meet this goal.
Our first recommendation is on minor capital funding. It's recommended that government significantly increase grants provided to maintain existing building infrastructure, such as the annual facility grant and the school enhancement program to decrease the deferred maintenance liability that currently exists and to allow school enhancements that improve the learning environment.
Significant additional funding is required to address deferred life-cycle maintenance of schools. According to a recent BCSTA report, in 2020 the routine capital program, funded by the provincial government for schools, totalled $204 million. By comparison, the estimated cost of repairs and maintenance recommended by building system engineers engaged by the ministry was more than double that amount at $441 million.
Our second recommendation is on school ventilation, and it is recommended that government provide additional funding to prioritize the installation of adequate ventilation systems in all schools to ensure that recommended air exchange occur as required by the B.C. Centre for Disease for Control and the American Society of Heating and Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, ASHRAE.
Ventilation continues to be one of the more protective environmental measures that is referenced in the hierarchy for infection prevention and exposure control measures for communicable disease in the current provincial COVID-19 communicable disease guidelines for K-to-12 settings.
The Burnaby board of education is grateful to the provincial government for the $77½ million that has been made available to school districts through routine capital funding, specifically for HVAC system upgrades or replacements in 2021 and 2022. However, additional funding is urgently needed to address the many older classrooms across the province without ventilation systems able to accommodate MERV 13 filters, including classrooms that are not connected to ventilation systems at all.
Although these classrooms are compliant with CDC guidelines, they do not meet the same standards as newer classrooms, since referenced in part four of the OHS regulation. For a building ventilation system installed prior to 1989, an adequate supply of indoor air must be provided in accordance with the ASHRAE standards and, I must stress, in place at the time the ventilation system was designed.
As just stated by Dr. Henry in the last hour, every school has done an assessment on ventilation. It is with our district assessment in mind that we strongly recommend the government provide significant additional funding to prioritize the installation of adequate ventilation in schools to address this issue.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to present to your committee.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thanks, Jen.
Our last speaker in this panel is Kerri Palmer Isaak of school district 43.
SCHOOL DISTRICT 43, COQUITLAM
K. Palmer Isaak: Hello there. Thank you for having me today. I am Chair Palmer Isaak, from SD 43, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Anmore and Belcarra. I will try and squish a lot into my presentation in a short time as well.
We believe that funding for a K-to-12 education system should be adequate to ensure equity and accountability. Additional, predictable and sustainable funding is required to address the serious funding shortfalls that many school districts face, and I'm going to outline those in four main themes. The first one is supporting vulnerable students, then supporting education curriculum changes, sustainable and equitable funding, and overall education system funding.
For the first one, supporting vulnerable students, I have four different areas to cover as well. The first is to fund to address learning loss, which is one of the great challenges we're facing right now. Since the late 2019-2020 school year when the global pandemic started to disrupt learning in schools, students have experienced increased challenges.
Decreases in in-class instruction time have been detrimental to the social and academic advancements for many students, particularly those of our students who are most vulnerable. Even after a relatively consistent 2021, many students have had difficulty in achieving personal academic success and have fallen below established benchmarks.
The next one I'd like to touch on is mental health support funding. While there have been an increase in the downloading of health services to the education system, there's a cost associated with providing these services, and that has not been adequately funded, resulting in districts having to redirect funds from the classroom.
The Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth in B.C.'s government has identified that supports for students with mental health challenges should be a number one priority. The rise of students struggling with anxiety and depression and other mental health challenges has been well documented.
In SD43 and other school districts, these students are some of the most challenging to support. The existing funding is inadequate to support their needs. We realize that their attendance, safety and academic success, and often the school's culture climate…. The impact is significant when these challenges are not addressed.
We recommend increased funding to support students with mental health–related challenges and providing a model that will work with all three ministries — the Ministry of Children and Family Development, Health and Mental Health and Addictions — to provide wraparound support for these students.
Third is funding for students with special needs. The funding formula for students with special needs is inadequate, and funding for early identification is crucial, in addition to the adequacy of support for these programs. It is clearly understood that students with special needs require additional supports.
CommunityLINK funding is my fourth area under this topic. Our CommunityLINK funding and vulnerable student supplement, which is now called the equity of opportunity funding, are important for supporting our vulnerable students. However, both are significantly underfunded, and there are allocation inequities amongst the school districts. Most recently this funding in our school district was cut by more than 15 percent. This funding goes to support our most vulnerable students.
Support for new education curriculum changes. Funding for support of our implementation of B.C.'s new curriculum has fallen short of expectations. Directives around the framework for enhanced student learning supports cannot be fulfilled until adequate funding has been made available. Our grant for curriculum and student support has been cut over the last two years, and implementing the new curriculum itself requires an increased commitment of staffing at the district level in order to provide classroom teachers with resources and support.
A modern curriculum requires modern technology to be effective as well. Changes to student assessment models require teacher training and support from district-level staff. Providing training and feedback and ongoing structure around classroom teachers is crucial to the successful adoption of these new protocols.
It's imperative that there's equity for all students and financial support and funding in its place to provide equity through the education system. This includes appropriate funding for educational tools to deliver education in the 21st century.
I'm going to jump forward into capital funding now because I think it's very important in our district. We're encouraged by new schools and seismic replacement and upgrade funding capital initiatives by this government and encourage continuance of growth in this area. We want our children to achieve educational success in safe buildings.
Unfortunately, the practice of requiring school districts to contribute funds, destined for student needs and being redirected into capital projects, is cross-purpose to successful education. We wholeheartedly support the funding model recommendation that capital funds should not be directed out of the classroom, rather than fully funded by the government.
I'd like to encourage the government to fully support the quantum required to meet the educational needs the new funding model will likely reflect. In addition….
I'm running out of time. I'm going to close and say thank you very much to the select standing committee for the time that you have given us. The rest of my recommendations are in my letter.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Kerri.
Now we have roughly 15 minutes to take questions from the committee.
I think committee member are still perhaps collecting their thoughts. Why don't we go back to Debbie.
I know you had a few more things you wanted to say. Maybe in a couple of sentences, you can summarize what you didn't get to tell us in the first place.
D. Tablotney: Thank you very much. What we did want to say was that since 2019, we've had no new seismic mitigation projects announced for our district. None of the 24 remaining projects have been supported and announced in the 2021 capital response letters. Delays to support and funding for seismic upgrade of schools will result in increased levels of risk for students. The annual cost inflation rate makes the projects more expensive. The lack of projects could potentially lead to a loss of staff.
Those were the things that we really wanted to get across. I'm sorry I didn't get through all that.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you.
Pam has a question.
P. Alexis: It's not a question. It's for Coquitlam. You got to two of your five, I believe. If you could just give us the other three, but not with the same level of detail you did in the first point, please.
K. Palmer Isaak: Thank you very much. I'm more than happy to just touch on the other ones we had in there.
Our high priority, which I really tried to go in depth with, was support for our vulnerable students. I think that I would be remiss if that wasn't the focus or the largest bulk of my presentation. Our next areas were support for new education curriculum changes, sustainable and equitable funding, overall education funding and capital funding.
Now, I did touch on capital funding very, very briefly, because we have been struggling with that. I know that other districts have mentioned the same scenario, and that is something we are working very hard to bring in line.
One of the other parts that I'd love to touch on, though, is our support for the new educational curriculum changes. In terms of equitable funding, in my notes here, we were underfunded in our budget for 2021 to the degree to cover collective agreement labour settlement costs. Our district actually absorbed a shortfall of $3.5 million that year. This translated into reduced teacher staffing. I don't think that was the goal that was intended in that scenario — the shortfall that we ended up with. I think that's something definitely worth bringing attention to.
I'm happy to touch base on any of the other areas that you'd like to discuss, including capital funding.
P. Alexis: I'm good, thank you. I just wanted to ensure that I had captured the main points. That was what I was after, so thank you so much.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much. It was mentioned at least by two of you about the seismic funding. The model — you mentioned that there had to be a partnership in that, with the school districts coming up with a certain amount of money.
We've been at this for a long time. I mean, we've been at this for 20 years. What's the model, and why is it a barrier? I thought that as government, we chose to make certain that there was seismic safety in our schools, especially in the Lower Mainland.
K. Palmer Isaak: I'm happy to respond. I'm not the best example, because we have received a seismic project in Coquitlam. But we are contributing funds to that project. That is a good indication of what is actually transpiring. We are required to contribute funding to that seismic project. Some of it, of course, is to cover the increase in the number of students that will be in attendance in that building.
I would add that it took many, many years for this to be recognized, and it was our number one seismic replacement project. We had a lot of very, very concerned parents in our community, advocating very, very vocally for the fact that they felt their students were in an unsafe building.
I do appreciate that, but I'm happy to go to my colleagues.
D. Tablotney: Yes, I'd be happy to answer that. I think for our district, it's not about the cost-sharing. Our concern is really that we've had no projects approved.
J. Mezei: Maybe I'll just add one more thing. I think Debra touched on the loss of revenues with international education programs. I think especially for districts in the Metro area, a lot of that cost-sharing for capital projects came from other revenue sources, because we tried to keep educational dollars that are intended for the classroom inside the classroom.
For example, with Stride elementary school — which is going to be new-build, which is actually a net-carbon-zero project — we are going to be contributing $3½ million, I believe, to that project, as well as Burnaby North. There's a significant amount of money that is coming from the district as well.
I think it's one of those pieces where, when you look at…. The other challenge that we're really facing in our district is being able to procure land to be able to build new schools where we need to expand. It's an issue that is actually facing a lot of Metro areas, and it's something that we feel very strongly needs to be looked at.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Sorry, Chair, if I could just ask one more.
Deb, I just want to better understand. You said that there's nothing approved. I don't know what the process is and how many schools you have in your district, but what's the percentage of schools that still need seismic upgrading in your district?
D. Tablotney: There were 37 identified as needing seismic upgrades. We have 24 left that still need seismic upgrading. And we have 48 schools in our district.
J. Routledge (Chair): Mike, you have a question.
M. Starchuk: Thank you, Chair, and thanks to all of you for your presentations. My question is to Kerri with regards to supporting the vulnerable student that you've outlined here.
I can see all of the ones that are cost: "We need funding for this; we need funding for this…." You used a term that was fresh to me, and that was "learning loss." How do you fund learning loss?
K. Palmer Isaak: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to that. I think we're going to have to look at that through staffing. I think my colleagues would probably support that. We're going to really need to aggressively look at that through staffing and through professional development and professional training and with technology.
We're really struggling, and I hate to say this. Even now, going into September, I'm getting email, and I'm sure my colleagues are getting email as well, about students and parents that are uncertain about returning back to school again this September. Trying to reach and work with those students that are not going to be in attendance — that don't want to do a full-time online program, that want an alternative — is something that we're really struggling with.
Asking our staff to be able to reach students online and teach in a classroom at the same time has not resulted in a good end result, and we recognize that. I think that we need some alternatives, definitely, in that direction.
I think it's really going to boil down to staffing. I'm confident that my other two colleagues here have similar situations in their district that they have shared concerns around.
J. Mezei: Maybe just to add to that, as well, I think that one of the areas that does require funding is when you look at learning loss. I am also the chair of the ELL consortium, which is a consortium of trustees and educators when it comes to supporting ELL students and students who need settlement services. What really stuck with me last year was when we looked at…. There were some districts who reported that the students who'd been assessed after a year had actually lost language acquisition. I think that's one of those things we're looking at.
Currently when we look at funding for ELL students, there's the five-year cap. Things have changed where some students, especially students who have never had formal education before, who are coming to us and need language supports — they may need more than five years of language supports. Especially when we look at the challenges that have faced a lot of language acquisition because of COVID-19, we feel very strongly that that cap of five years needs to be removed.
J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. Do we have any other questions?
G. Kyllo: Following up on the seismic upgrades. I think you'd indicated there were 48 schools in your district, 37 required some kind of seismic upgrading, and 24 have yet to actually achieve any upgrading. Have there been any announcements? You indicated there were none announced since last year. Have you had any schools announced for seismic upgrading in, say, the last four years?
D. Tablotney: We did have a few in the previous two years, but in the last two years, we have had none. Our district — we were moving ahead, and there was a promise from the ministry to expedite because we had so many, and we have unique soil conditions in Richmond. However, that seems to have come to a bit of a standstill.
We have submitted several projects, and I've listed them in the brief which you should have in front of you, but none of them have been approved at this point.
G. Kyllo: Just a bit of a follow-up. Thank you very much for that. Is there any commitment as far as the time frame? Like, is there a guarantee that these will all be completed in the next ten years, 15 years? Has there been any kind of commitment, I guess, made by the Ministry of Education for the seismic upgrades that are required on these remaining 24 schools?
D. Tablotney: The commitment was to complete all our seismic upgrade projects by 2030.
G. Kyllo: Thank you very much.
D. Tablotney: So we're going to fall short.
J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. I think that's it for the questions. Thank you so much for your time and your commitment to K-to-12 education. You've given us a lot of food for thought. Thanks so much.
With that, we'll say goodbye.
We have another presentation — Cathy McMillan, representing Dyslexia B.C.
Cathy, there you are.
Budget Consultation Presentations
DYSLEXIA B.C.
C. McMillan: Thank you, committee members, for having me here today and presenting at the Budget 2022 consultation process. I am here today representing Dyslexia B.C., which is a parent-led, grassroots movement concerned with limited access to interventions for dyslexia in B.C.
We are advocating for a universal definition of dyslexia, mandatory teacher training on dyslexia, mandatory early screening, mandatory remediation programs and access to appropriate assistive technologies.
Did you know that one in five people in B.C. has a learning disability? And 80 percent of all learning disabilities are dyslexia? That means there are a lot of people in B.C. with dyslexia.
We've advocated all the way to the ministry level and asked for early screening for struggling readers. Also, did you know that it takes four times longer to remediate dyslexia if you wait until grade 3 or 4 to start remediation? We've previously asked for increased access to accessible material, including audiobooks. We've asked for legislation for dyslexia. In the U.S., 48 states have made dyslexia-specific legislation, and in Canada, they've made no dyslexia legislation to date.
We have also asked to bring back the funded category J, which was reserved for severe learning disabilities when it was taken away in 2002.
Our requests from Dyslexia B.C. today from the budget committee are to: bring back the funded category for LD, include some psychology services as part of MSP for diagnosis, remove learning disability diagnosis from the education system, implement universal dyslexia screening in kindergarten, access to structured literacy within legislation in all classrooms, and add screening centres for adults.
To bring back the J category, it would cost about $4,000 per student. Once the remediation process is done, you could probably lower it to about $2,000. If MSP covered psychological services, which would include diagnosis for dyslexia and other learning disabilities, it would take about 12 hours every five years for a diagnosis, and a diagnosis would probably be needed only for students that continue in education. After that, you could screen for dyslexia, which would only take about an hour.
Early literacy screening should cost between zero dollars and $10 and can be done right in the classroom, which is pretty cost-effective.
We looked on the ministry website, including the B.C. Children's Hospital website, to find information on resources for learning disabilities. We pretty much found nothing. So this is the Children's Hospital website. This is the Ministry of Children and Family Development website. Lots about autism. Lots about intellectual disabilities and other complex needs, but nothing about dyslexia.
We asked families and individuals with dyslexia. A total of 356 people responded. We asked them if they felt included in government initiatives towards disability, and 89 percent of them said no.
What does dyslexia and learning disability do to a person? It affects their self-esteem, gives them depression, unemployment, underemployment, and they are overrepresented in the incarcerated population. And that only gets worse without a diagnosis.
What does the Ministry of Education say? The funding levels are 1, 2 and 3. We are not included. They say: "If you aren't included in a funding category, the answer is no." You often get no service, and the student is told they are not funded and, therefore, receives no support.
Even if you move to a prevalence model, which the Ministry of Education is pushing towards, it won't be any different. We're going to get a no. We're going to get pushed into the system. We won't get a diagnosis, which isn't good for anyone.
Here are the funded categories 1, 2 and 3. Learning disabilities are an afterthought in the paragraph after. This is right out of the Ministry of Education funding model.
What happens to kids and adults that aren't diagnosed? They get pushed up into the mental health. Mental health should actually only be about 5 percent of disabilities represented in B.C.
My key asks for the funding budget committee this year would be to bring back the J category, include some psychology services as part of MSP, remove learning disability diagnosis from the education system, implement universal dyslexia screening in kindergarten and access to structured literacy, with legislation, in all classrooms, and screening centres for adults. What will that do? The positive impact of funding people with learning disabilities like dyslexia will have equitable access, because they will have early prevention, fewer mental health issues, higher literacy rates. And overall access will be improved.
Thanks for listening today.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you so much, Cathy. We have some questions for you.
C. McMillan: Okay, perfect.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much, Cathy.
I just wanted to find out…. You mentioned about having psychologists in doing some of this, if we return to that. Have you given any thought to how many psychologists are in British Columbia, and what would the numbers be to actually implement this? Or is the timeline quite a bit longer? I'm just wondering, what's the gap today in terms of the people that could do a proper assessment?
C. McMillan: I think there are enough psychologists in B.C. currently. Right now what's happened is there's a two-tier system, so the people that can afford to pay for assessments are doing that. The psychologists are there. They're getting paid privately or by extended medical. But if we decide to screen, starting in kindergarten, the need for assessments later on will be reduced.
It's a matter of prioritizing things differently more than actual, more money. But the number one budget ask for you guys today is to bring back that funding category, because without a funding category for LD kids…. Like, the Ministry of Education even admits that school districts tell these kids and families that there's no funding and they don't get services.
G. Kyllo: Cathy, thank you for bringing this to our attention. It sounds like the ounce of prevention versus the pound of cure. Has the Ministry of Education provided any statistics on what the actual gross cost would be, or annual cost, to provide that early intervention or, I guess, detection of those that might have dyslexia in the school system?
C. McMillan: I honestly don't think it would cost that much, and like I mentioned, the screening in kindergarten costs zero to $10 per child. They already purchase materials that are similar, so like I keep saying, its just a matter of reshuffling and reorganizing.
P. Alexis: Why was the J category removed in 2002?
C. McMillan: Apparently Christy Clark said it was so that they could include all kids with learning disabilities. Just like eyesight or autism or any other disability, there are varying degrees of learning disabilities. You know, it could be mild to very severe. One of my family members has severe dyslexia, and she's still reading at the grade 2 level. And we've had no government help at all to fund that.
Christy Clark outright said that she wanted…. There were two categories. There was the mild-to-moderate category, and then the J category. What they did was that they amalgamated the two categories into one and said that all kids would be able to get help now. There was one category, because the kids with the mild to moderate were getting left out. That's the only thing I've heard of, and I've asked several people why it was removed.
Maybe you could help me answer that question.
P. Alexis: I can't, actually. That's why I'm stumped here. Okay, so there were two categories, and they were merged into one to include that range of disability under the dyslexia category. Is that correct?
C. McMillan: Well, yeah, the learning disability category.
P. Alexis: Under learning disability, okay. I'm trying to understand. So it was too much of a definition, then? It was too specific, and that's why they wanted to make it broader? I'm still struggling with understanding.
C. McMillan: No. When they changed the funding category, they had what they called directed funding — back before 2002. Autism, let's say — I don't know the exact numbers — was probably $10,000. So if a child was diagnosed with autism, they'd go to the school. They'd bring their diagnosis, and then what would happen is that the principal would designate that student with the ministry as a child with special needs: that he has autism.
Then the ministry would give that school the funding for that child, that $10,000, to help with SEAs or whatever he needed help with. And kids with severe learning disabilities would get designated. Then I think it was around $3,000 a school would get for that specific child.
Then what they did in 2002 is that the principal would apply for all his funding and designations, and he'd get a lump sum. That money isn't targeted toward any individual student. They raised autism to close to $19,000 — and other medical issues, $19,000. They made a behavioural category, which is $10,000, and a few others. Those boxes I showed in there had funded categories, and they start at $5,000 to $10,000, go to $19,000, and then go up to $40,000.
Then learning disability was pushed all in together and was supposed to be included in base funding. I know that my one child with severe dyslexia has gone to remedial centres three, four months at a time, where she's been sent in a cab and that sort of thing. I don't know where the district gets the money for it, because she doesn't come with funding. She's designated as a child with special needs, but she does not come with supplemental funding.
P. Alexis: Thank you for further explaining that. Thank you so much.
J. Routledge (Chair): Okay, thank you very much, Cathy. I see no other questions. You've actually educated us.
C. McMillan: Oh, thank you. I'm so sorry for being late. It was a bit of a kerfuffle.
J. Routledge (Chair): No, that was just fine. No problem. Thank you for your leadership on this, and thank you for your time.
We'll now take a ten-minute recess.
The committee recessed from 2:44 p.m. to 2:55 p.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): We have a panel of school districts about to present.
The first one on the list is Maria Hampvent, school district 46.
Whenever you're ready, Maria.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 8 – K-to-12 Education (School Districts)
SCHOOL DISTRICT 46, SUNSHINE COAST
M. Hampvent: ?iy te kwiykyiy. Good afternoon. My name is Maria Hampvent, and I am the vice-chair of the Sunshine Coast board of education. SD 46 spans the coastal communities along a 180-kilometre peninsula northwest of Vancouver.
We are so grateful to work on the beautiful traditional, unceded lands of both the shíshálh and the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nations.
We serve over 3,200 students and employ over 600 staff at our 14 schools. Diversity, inclusion and equity are three of our key values for student success.
The pandemic revealed areas of inequity in our district that have only become more pronounced. Since 2020, we've developed anti-racism and anti-poverty policies and are deeply committed to partnering with the ministry for our equity scan. Last year our district provided additional resources through access to food, technology, mental health and well-being supports for students, their families and staff.
Studies confirm the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact for minority students with diverse abilities, lower incomes, racialized populations, LGBTQ2S+ and Indigenous students. Now more than ever our commitment to equity is paramount in ensuring success for our students.
From the ages of five to 17, most students in B.C. spend over 900 hours per year in schools. For many vulnerable students, time at school presents their only access to healthy meals, counselling, mental health supports, supportive adults and a safe environment. We know that there is an interdependence between health and education. Students whose basic needs are met are better learners and better-educated people, and they'll make healthier decisions.
We must support the optimal conditions for the education of our youth, and we must be funded accordingly to deliver. Several years ago our district partnered with MCFD as part of a pilot project to develop a full-time integrated clinician position that worked across the two systems. While the pilot proved successful, a lack of financial commitment was a key challenge to sustaining this position.
We applaud the K-to-12 education recovery plan 2021–2022, which encourages boards to work collaboratively with both the MCFD and the DAA to explore the needs of families during COVID recovery. We urge the province to commit additional funding to support these integrated models of care.
Studies have revealed that an investment in education results in savings to other ministries down the road. For every $1 invested in education, the province sees an economic return of $11.
Investing in our youth is a more efficient use of limited taxpayer resources and allows for early intervention. Coming from a systems-thinking lens, investing in education is the strongest lever for a betterment of our society at large. For this reason, a collaborative interministerial approach with financial resources targeted at educating children continues to be a solid investment in the human capital of our province.
We don't yet know what recovery will entail, but what we do know is that year after year, school districts in B.C. report that targeted funding for students with special needs is insufficient. In an average year, we spend double the amount we receive to support students with diverse abilities. Without an influx in targeted funding, school resources will be stretched more than ever while we serve this population.
Our board was encouraged to see that the Premier cited the importance of food supports in his ministerial mandate letter from November of 2020. According to our recent regional report, more than one in four of our children live in poverty. We have witnessed the increase in food security in our student population firsthand. In 2020, the demand for family grocery vouchers rose by 400 percent.
We urgently need additional funding to support the increased demand for food programs, typically supplemented by external grants and last year funded by COVID support. This fall we used surplus funds that would otherwise have gone towards classroom supports, and this is not a sustainable option, given the demands we face as educators.
Lastly, salary increases for non-union staff, which includes school principals and superintendents, are linked with provincially negotiated union wage increases but are not funded. This has a hollowing-out effect and creates a structural deficit that results in resources being removed from the classroom. All districts will benefit from equitable, consistent and predictable funding that is not only linked to increased student enrolment.
Thank you for listening. I am so grateful for the opportunity to advocate for youth. I passionately agree with the ministry's direction to focus on the whole child as we address the impacts of the pandemic.
Please support us to excel by increasing your investment in public education. It is the key to promoting greater equity, stronger mental health, catalyzing systems change for the common good towards the unified, successful future of this great land.
?ul nu msh chalap.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Maria.
Now we'll hear from Chris Johns of school district 5, Southeast Kootenay.
SCHOOL DISTRICT 5,
SOUTHEAST KOOTENAY
C. Johns: Thank you for the opportunity to once again present to the committee.
Similar to other school districts, we have two focuses for our presentation. One is on funding with respect to special education, and the second focus is on school life-cycle funding.
We know that all students have unique educational needs. Most students are able to be educated within the funding of the basic allocation. Approximately 14 percent of the Southeast Kootenay school district student population is identified as having diverse abilities or disabilities and require additional support to meet their needs and graduate with confidence and purpose.
We also know there's an unparalleled increase in the complexity of students and their needs each year. Some of the reasons include: students survive medical difficulties during birth that were not prevalent a decade ago; increased experience of adverse childhood trauma; a significant annual increase in the students diagnosed with autism; and fourthly, we would add the mental health issues that are resulting as a result of the pandemic. As a result, some students require up to four times the amount of support funding to educate than most students. These students equally deserve a fully funded, unreduced education along with their peers.
We are projecting for the 2021-2022 academic year that the Ministry of Education targeted funding provided 14 percent of our total district budget to attempt to meet these needs. In the same academic year, 7.4 percent of our total district budget amount was pulled from the basic allocation to further meet the needs of students. Using basic allocation funding to supplement student supports has been a district practice since the deregulation of a portion of the special education funding in 2001-2002.
For the 2021-2022 academic year, the Ministry of Education has reported, approximately, a 4 percent increase in provincial targeted funding. These increases have only provided for the correct sizing and the funding required to educate some of our most complex students, which is welcomed and appreciated, but it is long overdue to bring funding in line with support staff salary increases.
As a result, we will continue to use funds from the basic allocation to minimally meet the service needs of students. Targeted funding for all students with needs would work best for our district and, we suspect, for many other districts in the province.
More support service funding is required to properly consider the needed support and to increase the Southeast Kootenay school district's 91 percent six-year graduation completion rates for all students. What about the other 9 percent? Lastly, adequate funding is the moral and ethical thing to do.
The second part of our presentation is on school life-cycle funding. We echo the comments from the report prepared by the B.C. School Trustees Association of March, which refers to the work which must be completed over the life of a building to ensure that it remains in peak operating condition. The report highlights the impacts of time to our facilities, and the resulting increased cost of maintenance, which is evident in the East Kootenay, as is the case in Cranbrook, where Mount Baker Secondary School is in its seventh decade. It just had its 70th birthday.
We appreciate the necessity of seismic upgrades to the facilities in B.C. to ensure that we mitigate injury and damage for future events, but the province needs to address the aging infrastructure in all of the education sector before it is too late. The districts which fall outside of seismic areas have continued to maintain a minimum level, which is barely considered acceptable to operate schools.
The learning environment for the students and the health and safety of our employees are integral too, improving educational outcomes for all students, developing the educated student, and ensuring that there is continuous improvement to the educational outcomes for all students. For too long, the focus has been on fitting kids into spaces. It is about time we started building spaces for students and their learning needs and their stages of development.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to present our school district's concerns.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Chris.
Next, we'll hear from Tim Bennett, school district 57, Prince George.
SCHOOL DISTRICT 57, PRINCE GEORGE
T. Bennett: Good afternoon, everyone.
I am pleased and honoured to be joining you today from the ancestral lands of the Lheidli T'enneh.
I am representing school district 57 and the 13,000 students that we're currently serving.
Recently our district approved our new strategic plan, which focuses on four key areas: truth and reconciliation, equity of access, wellness and learning. Today we just wanted to highlight a few of our concerns that align with those areas.
First off, around the idea of predictable and sustainable funding, we recognize, as an education system, that we have a job to do to provide quality and equitable public education. We're asking that the K-to-12 education system be sufficiently funded to provide and deliver not only the new curriculum equitably to all of our students but to ensure that the districts are able to cover the costs of inflationary, contractually negotiated and PSEC-approved increases.
I echo the concerns expressed by my colleague from SD 46 regarding the salary increases for our principals, vice-principals and exempt staff. It does not make sense that incremental funding is provided only for unionized staff of a school district. All of our employees in each and every district contribute to improving student learning and student achievements.
It is our recommendation to fully fund general wage increases for all staff in the same manner that funding is provided for increases provided to unionized staff. Compensation guidelines and approvals are provided by Treasury Board through the Public Sector Employers Council and should be funded by government.
We're seeing increased inequities across not only our district but across the province. More and more students and families are living in poverty.
We do applaud government's work to develop a poverty reduction strategy and their commitment to provide food programs and mental health supports to students. We are asking government to consider increasing funding for a comprehensive and accountable provincial poverty reduction strategy with facilitated implementation of such a strategy across ministries to ensure that the strategy addresses the needs for all vulnerable students and families. We are confident that this recommendation will help improve student achievement and success for not only our students but the families that we serve at the district.
School district 57 is a large district in the province. As a district, we represent 52,000 square kilometres, stretching just over five hours from point to point. We have high schools of over 1,000 students, elementary schools close to 600 and elementary schools that have just over 20 students. This represents a good microcosm of the province as a whole, where we're trying to balance the needs of our urban and rural students. It is safe to say that providing education in small rural communities is essential, as schools are not only a place for education but can help drive the economic success of small communities.
We are asking that government defer their consultation and ensure that the processes are in place to provide equitable access to quality education in all small rural communities.
Finally, we want to echo the concerns of our colleagues from SD 5 with regard to aging school facilities. In school district 57, most of our buildings rate, by the Ministry of Education's facility condition index, as poor. Despite this poor rating, our facilities services staff and custodial staff do an amazing job each day to ensure that our buildings are clean and safe places for learning and working. Even through COVID-19, we have ensured that our buildings remain a safe and caring place for students.
Due to the emergent work that comes up with our aging infrastructure, our annual facility grant needs to be prioritized. Important preventative maintenance work is often postponed. We were encouraged to see recommendations in last year's report related to sustainable capital funding for school districts. We also appreciate the availability of the school enhancement program and carbon-neutral program, where we receive other significant upgrades.
We are asking government to increase the annual facility grant funding, school enhancement program and carbon-neutral capital program funding annually to address the identified provincial shortfall of capital infrastructure to extend the useful life of schools at our facilities.
Thank you very much for your time and for your consideration.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Tim.
Before we open it up for questions, we'll hear from Helen Gilbert, representing school district 60.
SCHOOL DISTRICT 60,
PEACE RIVER NORTH
H. Gilbert: Good afternoon. I am the chair of our school district 60 board.
I am coming to you today from the territory of the Dane-Zaa and treaty 8.
I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present today. My intention is to expand on aspects of our written presentation, where we highlighted our need in the four areas of COVID recovery: recruitment, retention, staffing challenges; compensation; capital funding for building upgrades and school capacity; and transportation.
We echo many of the things I've already heard today. Our board is proud of our district, the achievement of our students and the efforts of our staff. The ministry's focus, in documents that guide our work, is equity. I think of equity in the following way: educational opportunities should not be defined by a student's postal code. It is very sad for me to say to you today that in our district right now, a postal code matters in terms of what students can access.
Our pandemic challenges continue, and September 30 enrolment is a worry. We trust that the ministry will listen if difficulties emerge. Recruitment and retention result in equity challenges. Getting people with the right skills and abilities to offer a wide range of educational things in our town and rural schools is difficult. The north deserves well-trained staff that can meet the diverse needs of our community. Make a Future has helped with recruitment, but we often need to go further in our efforts. This costs, and that takes away from the money that we can put into student services.
Job satisfaction is a factor in retention. A shortage of teachers teaching on call and trained casual support staff are a factor in staff burnout and diminished job satisfaction. Student learning is also impacted. When teachers do not get their scheduled support staff to assist students in the room or have revolving casuals, it makes things difficult for everyone.
Imagine being the principal who has to make many calls to the casual list and comes up short. They then look at many different staffing arrangements and complete a daily triage of need. In the end, they are forced to make the very difficult call: "I'm sorry, but I can't have your child at school today because there is no one with the skills to insert their feeding tube, do their throat suctioning, lift them safely or assist with your child's self-regulation."
Growing our own staff in the north helps with retention, but when there is an insistence that available programs — such as the Alaska Highway consortium on teacher education — run at full capacity, and the program is cancelled for a year or threatened completely, the impacts are devastating. Further conversation is needed on supports and strategies to grow teachers further north, including online programs. The newly announced UBC program is a start, but it does not address the complete need. The funding formula review has started to address some of our needs, but work remains.
Speaking to the situation of Wonowon school highlights our equity challenges. The building is deemed critical. Two years ago, we met with the community to talk about their needs. A project proposal was sent to the ministry, and we waited. To quote the PAC president: "We don't need a glass palace like the new schools in town." We need more room, though, so we can keep our kids closer to home and give them more educational opportunities
The current enrolment is 60 students, but there are 21 children going out of the community to school because of the state of the school and the lack of what can be done within that school. A community survey indicated these students would stay in Wonowon if things changed. Applied design, skills and technologies are difficult to run because of space. We arrange for bus trips into town for those students to use facilities in town where they can do ADST, but a snowstorm comes and their trip to town gets cancelled.
This is an ELL community, and preschool programs such as Ready, Set, Learn are essential. Right now, these take place in an old community hall that we use as a gym, and the students then don't have access to gym time. Specialists work with kids in the hallways. Public health clinics also happen in the hallways. Imagine being a child getting a dental check while the class files by to the gym, when you are already scared about somebody in your mouth.
J. Routledge (Chair): Helen, can you wrap it up? You're past your five minutes.
H. Gilbert: Okay. In this community, there's a 1½-hour bus ride to town. Yes, we choose to live in the north, but this doesn't mean we deserve less. Our northern community contributes substantially to the economy of this province.
Thank you. I was very nervous.
J. Routledge (Chair): You did great. Thank you.
I'll now open it up to questions from the committee.
L. Doerkson: Just going all the way back to Maria's presentation, I'm hoping that I misheard what you said. But I wanted clarity around the 400 percent increase in food programs that are required. Did I hear that correctly?
M. Hampvent: Yeah, that was the demand in food vouchers that we needed to provide for families. For instance, there's a program that we partner on with our community schools, called Backpack Buddies, where kids that don't have food security at home are able to just grab a backpack and have a couple of meals that they can have later in the day.
It's supposed to be very subtle. In those types of programs, if we're going to offer lunch, we always give it away for free for kids that don't have enough money during school. During the time that kids missed school, or when there was only 50 percent enrolment last year, during COVID, we saw a 400 percent increase in demand for, needs for, those types of vouchers.
L. Doerkson: How is that currently funded? Is it funded through the schools? I know that in my riding, there are a number of backpack programs that are funded through Rotary and things like that. Are you actually funding that yourself, and could you give more clarity around the 400 percent? In other words, is it one child and there are now four, or are there 100 and now 400 children?
M. Hampvent: I would assume that it's in the hundreds. The data came to me from my lovely staff, and I can definitely get more information for you about that. I do know that where we were able to handle it last year was as part of the COVID support money that we were given. Quite a substantial amount of that money, which was supposed to go towards food, went towards food and was completely used up in exactly that type of program.
Basically, we were able to cover it last year with the COVID support money that was targeted for that, but in future years, we're seeing a food shortage. If the economic impacts on those families remains such that those same families are further into poverty, we are jumping to the conclusion that we're going to see an ongoing, increased demand for food, which will not be covered by the COVID support.
J. Routledge (Chair): Any additional questions?
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much, Maria. Just the other day, I was dealing with the local food bank. I know that things have changed dramatically in the area that I'm from.
Are there any programs from the food bank that accessible to the school districts on the Sunshine Coast? I have no idea how many there are, but I know that the uptick in donations and use has gone up significantly across British Columbia.
M. Hampvent: Yeah. Our community is quite tightly knit and sort of a smaller town. We have something called the Sunshine Coast Community Services Society, which is an umbrella organization that looks after a number a programs, the food bank being one of them. The access to the food bank, where people access that, is quite close to the central location where we do live.
I do know that families, in terms of finding out how to access food bank supports…. I know that they're in dire need as well in our community, since COVID started. I used to work there, so I'm still kind of dialled. I don't know if there's necessarily a collaboration between our school district and the food bank. Usually we raise food bank funds and/or food for the food bank for things like Christmas, but I don't think that there is food bank support coming to youth through the school.
We try and handle the families through the youth that we can have access to, to kind of offset that and handle what the youth are telling us that they need. Then, I'm sure, adults are accessing the food banks as well, for those hours that kids are not in school.
M. Starchuk: My question is to Helen. You used a word that I hadn't heard yet today: "retention." How big of a problem is that for your school district?
H. Gilbert: It is a problem. It sort of seems to come in waves, but there were a number of jobs that opened up in the south two years ago, and we lost a whole middle generation — I call them a middle generation — of teachers. Although we've managed to bring new ones in, and we've reduced our number of teachers on letters of permission right now to five — it had been as high as 18 — keeping those people is what is really hard work, especially when we recruit substantially from out of province. Most times we get two, maybe three years out of people, but that's with a large investment to get them to come.
M. Starchuk: Just as a little follow-up, is there any hindrance to the actual students — for their learning, for the curriculum — with this retention issue?
H. Gilbert: Yes, there is, because we often end up recruiting from outside of the province, and then we end up with teachers coming that don't have knowledge of the B.C. curriculum. It takes work to plug those holes for them. Some of the online supports for teachers are helpful. But when you talk about…. We've had instances where we recruited teachers to come to some of our rural schools, which are very complex to teach in — you know, small with multiple grades in a classroom. They come, they take one look at what they've committed to, and they turn around and leave.
In those rural schools, that's where the retention issue is really more difficult. We're very lucky if we get people to stay beyond two years. We need some programs, and we need systems support to grow people that are really familiar with those communities and willing to stay. We've managed to do that. We have a few examples of that, with people that went through the AHCOTE training program and are now teaching in those rural schools. But it's a very different assignment, so it needs to be looked at in multiple ways to support people who want to stay in those places.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much, Helen. Further to my colleague's question about retention, are there any systems or any incentives put in place to attract graduating teachers into your district, through incentives such as student loan forgiveness or anything like that? Is there anything in place like we have for some of the medical community?
H. Gilbert: No, there isn't. In the presentation to the standing committee last year, we asked that you consider a forgivable loan program like they have happening in Alberta. We have local kids that went away to school and trained to be teachers in Alberta that are not coming back to our community because they can have their whole educational program paid for if they go back and work in a school or in certain communities for a length of time. For some reason, Grande Prairie is on that list, and that's a town. How do we compete with offering Wonowon in that kind of situation?
We do have, in some of our rural schools, teacherages, and we provide rent, which is an attraction to some people. But teacherages are not something that the Ministry of Education funds. That's something that we take on as a district, and we work really hard to make those teacherages as attractive as possible so that housing is an incentive for people to stay.
J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?
I have one. I think Chris and Tim kind of came at the same issue — I think you did — from maybe a different perspective.
Chris, I was struck by your comment: "Build spaces for kids, not fit kids into spaces." I'm paraphrasing.
And, Tim, you were talking about the need for a vulnerable student plan.
I wonder if you could elaborate a bit, Chris, on what it would look like to build the space to fit the student? And does that relate to a vulnerable student plan?
C. Johns: I think one of the biggest considerations is that when you look at a building that's 70 years old, it was built for an entirely different kind of educational experience. What we have now with the revised curriculum is that the spaces do not afford that same kind of flexibility that we want to see.
When you're looking at a building that's over 70 years old…. I mean, I was looking at the pictures of it from the time it was built, in talking about Mount Baker, and some of the interesting old cars, etc., that were around at that point in time. Some of the first grads out of that school are now in their late 80s, so that kind of puts it into perspective as to how old this building is.
The annual facilities grant — we keep pouring money into it over and over again, and at some point in time, this whole thing is just going to come down. I mean, we have to have facilities that are safe for students and for our staffs to work in, and they have to be flexible.
The Mount Baker one, for example. Mount Baker Secondary has an Indigenous learning centre in it which is unique. If we look at building a new building, it's not even part of the template that comes out from the ministry.
So when you look at that and then you look at the spaces that other special education demands, we need to do a serious revamp. We are encouraging the ministry and your committee to take a look at that in a hard way because that has to dovetail with what we're saying about the revised B.C. curriculum.
T. Bennett: I think, just to follow up on trustee Johns's point, schools have become much more than just where students go to learn. We heard about the meals programs that are being offered. Schools right now, for a lot of students, are also before- and after-school care centres. We're quickly running out of our space in buildings to be able to provide these wraparound supports that we need for students and for families.
I think there is work that needs to be done on our current facilities. Then, as trustee Johns said, ensure that when new buildings are designed, they take all of that into consideration.
J. Routledge (Chair): Seeing no more questions, we'll….
P. Alexis: I apologize.
Back to school district No. 60. Are you in the queue for building replacement? Have you had an evaluation done?
H. Gilbert: We have, and we put in for 101. We put in a project proposal, but we really haven't heard anything back. Our initial work with this community was two years ago, so they're kind of losing patience with us a little bit. I know the ministry has been really busy. We're very excited, because we do have, in their sort of hour-and-a-half-away sister community school, a new gym going in because that school didn't have a gym. But 101's situation is quite urgent.
J. Routledge (Chair): I'm not seeing any other hands asking to ask questions.
With that, I will thank you so much for your time, and thank you so much for your commitment to your schools and your communities. As an urban MLA, you've given me quite a bit of insight into what your challenges are. You were very eloquent about it.
Now we'll recess until 3:40.
The committee recessed from 3:31 p.m. to 3:40 p.m.
[J. Routledge in the chair.]
J. Routledge (Chair): Welcome to our presenters.
Our next presenter is Tracy Humphreys, BCEdAccess Society.
Budget Consultation Presentations
Panel 9 – K-to-12 Education (Inclusion)
BCEDACCESS SOCIETY
T. Humphreys: Thanks for having me here today. I'm Tracy Humphreys.
I'm speaking from the stolen lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ peoples, specifically the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations.
I am a settler with roots in the U.K. and Germany, and I'm a white, middle-aged woman with reddish, shoulder-length hair and glasses wearing an orange shirt and black over-the-ear headphones. Don't mind my laundry pile behind me; this is pandemic living sometimes.
I am a disabled mom of three amazing kids with disabilities, two of them still in K to 12. I am the executive director of BCEdAccess, which was founded in 2014 to connect parents and guardians of children and youth with disabilities and accessibility needs to share information, support one another and to learn about human rights and the education system.
We're a volunteer-run organization. We serve families all over B.C. with kids in all types of schooling with all types of disabilities. We have a parent Facebook group community that has grown, at this point, to about 4,000 community members.
Because the education system is so complex, we actually hired a researcher and policy analyst through the Canada summer jobs program this year. Using parent concerns that were cited over the years, combined with a quick survey earlier this month, we're creating a written submission for this committee that will outline the top changes parents are looking for to create a more inclusive education system.
I'm here to ask you today to invest, in a significant way, in K-to-12 education, which is still experiencing budget cuts every year. On the table were approximately $100 million in cuts among the 60 school districts for the 2021-22 school year, many of those targeting inclusive education, and there are more cuts on the table for next school year. Limited time means I'll just give you a couple of examples of what parents are looking for.
First, please release the updated inclusive education policy manual. This would be a low-to-no-cost effort because we, among other groups, were able to meaningfully engage with the Ministry of Education in reviewing the current manual, and we understand the majority of the work is now complete. School districts currently use a very outdated policy. We're interested in seeing stronger rates-based language, and we'd like to see this in place, especially, when child care moves to the Ministry of Education to ensure a strong, inclusive framework is already present.
Second, an individual education plan, or an IEP, is a student-centred living document created by the parents, student and school team to identify learning goals, describe the services and adaptations to the environment — teaching methods — and how to achieve those goals. In 2011, the Office of the Auditor General reported on the first phase of an audit of school district accountability for the effectiveness of special education services, and this report said: "Currently, the best information on student needs is in individual education plans."
So the province does a compliance audit, but we need accountability for student outcomes. The only measure of student achievement right now is graduation rates, which have not increased measurably in the last three years for students with disabilities, ranging between 60 to 75 percent, compared to between 81 and 90 percent for non-disabled students. We need to know sooner whether the money and effort being put into inclusive education is helping disabled students be successful. Waiting until graduation is far too late, so we're asking that you audit IEPs annually for student outcomes.
I also want to talk about mental health, because while our focus is education advocacy, it's become increasingly necessary for BCEdAccess to participate in discussions locally, provincially and Canada-wide about child and youth mental health, because it has such a huge impact on learning. We need actual mental health services for all, both in schools and out, and in particular for disabled children and youth.
One thing that we've learned so far from the pandemic is that more kids are struggling, and for those who were already struggling, it has gotten worse. It has really highlighted the gaps in services for children and youth, but most especially for those who also have a disability diagnosis. There are very few counsellors, psychologists or psychiatrists who are actually trained to work with disabled children and youth who need mental health support.
Significant funding has come through from the federal government and also been committed by the province, but it's our understanding that none of it will be specifically targeted to address the mental health needs of children and youth with dual diagnoses in schools. We need accountability for these funds and for them to actually support all students, not just some.
The Ministry of Education says that the purpose of the B.C. school system is to enable students to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy. In practice, though, the system creates barriers that disabled students have to overcome to develop their potential.
If the government is committed to a B.C. that includes all, then you need to commit to a significant increase in education funding and make changes recommended by all who are speaking to this topic.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Tracy.
Now we'll hear from Cindy Dalglish.
CINDY DALGLISH
C. Dalglish: Hi, everyone.
I am presenting this to you from the stolen lands of the Coast Salish, Semiahmoo, Katzie, Tsawwassen, Stó:lō and Kwantlen peoples.
My pronouns are she/her.
This is my fourth time speaking to the Select Standing Committee on Finance. I want to start with my concern on the efficacy of the select standing committee and its ability to inform positive change within government. I have yet to see traction on the calls to action shared with the committee from myself or other advocates for children with disabilities and their families.
My first ask is that each of you personally champion calls to action that are presented to you by myself, Tracy Humphreys, Cynthia Lockrey or any other advocates who work so hard to advocate for children. I will be reaching out to you individually to follow up.
As always, I'm here in support of education and better funding for the entire K-to-12 system. We have a ministry that seems willing to listen, but they do not have the bandwidth to act with any urgency for what are deemed urgent issues. Our K-to-12 education system includes educators, education assistants, administrators, boards, unions and our government staff that enact programs and policies that support the education system.
At this current pace, little is getting done, and it's not from a lack of will or desire, but a lack of bandwidth. There are many unfilled positions in the Ministry of Education, and even when filled, the staffing is not adequate to complete the workplans. My first financial ask is to support the Ministry of Education by increasing the resources to complete their workplans, including the work on getting standards of practice for education assistants — so very important — as well as the inclusive education manual that Tracy spoke of earlier.
As your responsibility indicates, you are on this committee to support the financial well-being of our province. When we do not support our children proactively and adequately, we pay dearly both financially and socially when these children become adults. We see it in the numbers around mental health supports, poverty, addiction and incarceration, many because we didn't support these adults as children with adequate services during their formative years. It easily costs our province ten times the amount in social services, if not more, to support these adults than it would if we'd just supported these students proactively.
What does this support look like? Assessments for every student that requires one. We have long wait-lists for assessments within our education system, which impedes a student's ability to get the support they need in a timely fashion.
When numerous administrators throughout this province state they are told they need to prioritize students needing assessment and max out how many students they have on a wait-list — in other words, they could have 100 students who need an assessment, but they're told: "Your wait-list can only have ten" — we have a problem. Every student that is showing need for an assessment should be getting one in that same calendar year. It's not uncommon to hear that students are identified as struggling by grade 1 and not receiving assessments until grade 7. This is, no doubt, by design and because of budget constraints.
This is where you come in. These budget constraints need to change. We need to remove the growing inconsistencies district to district. The support needs to be targeted and the responsibility lie with government to ensure our children are receiving their legal right to an accessible and equitable education.
What else does this support look like? We need more resources to support the findings of the assessments, either smaller class sizes or well-trained education assistants in every class. We also need more school counsellors to support the mental health of our students, even those without an assessment. We need more speech and language pathologists in the schools. Ten to 15 minutes with a student once a month — not cutting it. We need more specific student resources to meet the students' specific needs.
I understand COVID has put a wrench in many things, but it cannot become the excuse for not supporting our children. We can't do the bare minimum. In fact, we already don't do the bare minimum to ensure each student is receiving their equitable education. If we truly believe that education is supposed to be the great equalizer, regardless of the circumstances in the home, we do a poor job showing it.
I know we have the highest funding ever, but it doesn't matter. It's not adequate, and it's not even close in line with other provinces. But I don't want to look to other provinces for a benchmark. I want our province to lead and do right by our children. It's time to invest in our future.
Thank you for your time.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Cindy.
And finally, we'll hear from Cynthia.
CYNTHIA LOCKREY
C. Lockrey: Hi. I'm Cynthia Lockrey. I'm a mother of two diverse learners in Cowichan Valley on the unceded territory of Cowichan Tribes First Nations. I have one student who is in public education, and I have a second student who I've had to pull, for her own safety and her mental health, out of public education and put her into the private system, not because I won the lottery, but because it was necessary due to lack of supports.
I'm also the co-chair of Parents for Inclusive Education. Parents for Inclusive Education is a committee that was formed by parents in school district 79 because we're struggling. Our kids are experiencing trauma, and families are in crisis. You'll find out that there are Parents for Inclusive Education that sprung up across B.C. this school year in Surrey, Kelowna and other school districts. So that should tell you something about what's happening in our schools — that parents are needing to create yet another group when we're already stretched.
This is my fourth time presenting. Every year we hear about the crisis, and every year when the budget comes out, it's like the crisis isn't existing. We're putting band-aids on it, and the reality is our kids are struggling greatly.
I'll give you an example of one child. I have a child with an autism designation. It took us almost two years on a wait-list before we had to give up and fork out $3,000 for a private assessment, because without that golden nugget of an autism, he wasn't getting the support he needs, although all of his needs were obvious.
Last year we were promised in the B.C. government's restart plan: "Students with disabilities, diverse abilities and those who require additional supports will have access to and receive the same supports and services they had prior to the pandemic." That was a promise by the province of B.C. that I guarantee you did not happen in any school, anywhere in B.C. We all saw cuts, cuts, cuts. Our school of 450 kids went from three EAs to two, for 450 kids, with three kids in grade 3 alone who required one-on-one support. Forget about all the other kids with supports.
Last year my son had meltdowns every day of the week because he had no support. He was left to try to navigate all these new restrictions and was in crisis. It was only through a month of doing nothing but advocating, bringing in provincial organizations — I'm a strong advocate — that we were able to get one more educational assistant back.
But here is what happens. We have to wait till a child is in trauma to get help. They have to be in severe trauma, and even then, they don't always get help. Then we make these announcements about mental health funding, but we allow the trauma to be created. We wait until the trauma results in mental health issues, and then we address it at the end, which, as Cindy mentioned, is much more expensive than if we could just support these diverse learners at the beginning so that the trauma is not inflicted.
That trauma — it has a ripple effect. Teachers, administrators, the other children are being inflicted upon with what's happening, and families across B.C. are in crisis. Through my Parents for Inclusive Education Committee, every week I get phone calls and messages from parents who are in crisis, whose kids are not getting supports. We've had numerous meetings with our school district — very open — and they've said: "Our hands are tied. We only have so much money, and the needs are here, and the funding is here. We want to help your kids, but there's nothing more we can do."
So we talked to the Ministry of Education, and they said: "That's all the money we have. Go back to your school district." So parents are in this loop and loop. Meanwhile, kids are spiralling out of control. We're having trauma, families are going into crisis, and no one is there to help us.
My ask to this committee is simple: please listen to what we're saying. This is our fourth year saying it. I'll be back next year, but I'm hoping that my son doesn't have to have another year of trauma and that I have to pull my kid out of public education to ensure their safety.
Also, I ask you to really look at how funding is earmarked for kids with disabilities. Right now school districts have funding earmarked for Indigenous students and Indigenous learning, and it's safeguarded. That is not the case with our kids' funding. It goes into a big pot of money and can be used if we need to buy more hand sanitizer.
Finally, please keep your commitment to support kids with special needs. Last year's promise was broken, and none of us have the bandwidth to go through another school year like we went through last year because of the trauma that was inflicted upon our children.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Cynthia.
We now have roughly 15 minutes for questions from the committee.
L. Doerkson: I'll give it a go. I think I can certainly sense the frustration. I am currently working with one of my constituents who is having a child assessed for autism. So, Cynthia, I think I can appreciate what you're saying.
It seems to me that the problem is throughout a couple of different ministries. For the situation that I'm working with, it's Interior Health. The number that you quoted is $3,000. They want the child assessed by their doctor, who obviously is not the doctor that the child was originally assessed by in the community. And the $3,000 is exactly what I was told by the constituent.
I can appreciate the cost and the frustration. But I think there are certainly multiministries that we need to convey this message to. It's not really a question; it's more of a statement. But I can appreciate your frustration, and certainly, I'll do my best to be part of that message.
M. Starchuk: Cindy, with your comments about assessment and the lag of time that's there, have you done the kind of legwork, maybe, to find out what other districts have as benchmarks that are there? Like, is it rampant everywhere? Or is it just Surrey-centric or Metro Vancouver–centric, or whatever the case may be?
C. Dalglish: This is a provincial issue, not a Surrey issue. Pretty much everything I've stated today is around the province and not just specific to Surrey.
Surrey, of course, does have its own issues because of the general size of it. But I know, just in doing some of the research in talking to different districts, that this is not uncommon throughout the province.
M. Starchuk: Okay, so just a follow-up. There's not a school district that's out there that does it in 30 days and another one that does it in 45 days?
Okay. Very good.
C. Dalglish: No.
M. Starchuk: I got the head nods. I got that one.
C. Dalglish: The head negative nods.
T. Humphreys: I was wondering if I could jump in on that, because I think I could provide you a little more information there.
The province does kind of keep track of wait times a little bit provincially and how that's going. It looks to be nine months to almost two years right now for most people. In the bigger districts, they actually have potentially more capacity, because they're more funded generally, just because they have so many students. Rurally, it can be really, really challenging to get an assessment, because there just isn't even anyone working in that area who can provide it. So on balance, it's pretty bad everywhere.
C. Lockrey: I will also add that our child…. We've been told in our district that our child will never get an assessment even though we have, every year, letters from developmental pediatricians for needing a psych-ed assessment. Going back to the money, that's now another $3,600 to get a private assessment that every doctor has told us we needed, but the school district said, in Cowichan, "We only do 100 a year," and they have to do anybody in grade 12 first who has already had it done. So it really minimizes how many they can get done.
It means kids can go through their whole school career needing a psych-ed assessment, and unless you can fork out lots of money, your kid is not getting it, which means we wait until graduation, as Tracy said earlier, to find out why they didn't graduate.
T. Humphreys: Just to add to that…. It might be helpful for you, if you're interested in looking at this as a committee further. The select standing committee on — I was trying to remember the name — children and youth with special needs, I think it was called, a couple of years ago did a big inquiry around services for children and youth with disabilities. Lots and lots of people came and testified, and there's a ton of information there about assessment, if you're interested in looking further.
L. Doerkson: Just a follow-up question, I guess to you, Cynthia, only because I'm a little bit familiar with your situation.
What is the holdup with the assessments? Is it too many kids? Is it lack of staff? I mean, I guess it would be easy to say yes to that.
I think one of you mentioned that there are many positions open, but these assessments, obviously, are coming from doctors. It appears to me that perhaps there's a list of doctors that can approve these assessments. I guess I'm wondering what the specific issue there is in getting these assessments. In my case, it's two years minimum to get the assessment done on a child who is roughly 14 years old, I think. Obviously, by the time we get this kid assessed, it's going to be 16. What is the holdup there?
C. Lockrey: It's interesting, because you have the public funded system and, you're right; it's a bottleneck of all of these kids coming through, and the under six require a more lengthy assessment than the over six and different practitioners involved. Then, because the bottleneck has gotten so bad, there is now a charity that is funding private assessments.
Tracy, I can't remember the name of the charity right now.
This charity is now funding private assessment, which is a new thing. So now that has taken some of the people out of the public into the private, and now that's clogged. Now it's over a year for a private. From what I understand, it's just there's not enough funding to hire more practitioners to do this and also to expand who can do these assessments.
T. Humphreys: And we're not training enough people to do them. The people who know how are retiring, and we are not replacing them. That's the key piece of information.
C. Dalglish: And as you stated earlier, this could be across different ministries. Right there, not having enough in the labour workforce would need to fall under the Ministry of Labour, just like education assistants should also have a tie-in with the Ministry of Labour, but they're not at the table, and the left arm is not talking to the right arm about these different things. Of course, the Ministry of Advanced Ed should also be part and parcel of these conversations, and they're not. They're just not at the table at all.
The charity I believe Cynthia was speaking about is Variety.
L. Doerkson: That certainly is consistent with my situation as well. The Variety Club will hopefully help this family. But again — and somebody pointed out just now — it's a matter of who can do these assessments, because this family actually has an assessment, but it's not acceptable to the ministry.
You're back to either waiting for…. I believe it's called IHCAN; I'm not sure. But that would be the Interior agency. Then, of course, they have a list of people that can provide that assessment. It would seem to me that any physician should be able to do that, perhaps, in the province.
Now, I'm a complete layman, but I do appreciate the conversation. It's certainly important. Thank you.
C. Lockrey: And I will add that without that assessment, without that diagnosis, now you get into the issue of schools, where they don't get the support, because a lot of times, the support is based on the assessment but not needs. A child can have clear needs, but without the assessment — which comes with, for autism, $20,000 for a school district — they don't get the support. You can see how that….
We call it the golden nugget for a reason, because we need that for our kids to get support, and when you're 16 years old, before you get that diagnosis, that means you're 16 before you get the support you need in the education system, and the amount of educational assistance and supports that school districts are budgeted for is based on those dollars that those kids bring in, based on their assessments.
So it really does go all the way down the line, impacting these children. They don't have a chance.
H. Sandhu: I really appreciate all of you shedding the light and importance of how important it is to invest early on, which can save us a lot more money, and it shouldn't be about money, when it's about our children.
From my knowledge, I know the government gives money to school districts, and every school district manages their funds differently. I think one of you highlighted how they have the money…. There is a safeguard for Indigenous education. Would it be that a change in mandate, a certain type of mandate, would help? Like, this much money should be saved, in addition to what three of you suggested — that there needs to be more funding?
Have you heard about any school district that has been the champion or are trying to move into that direction, to take the lead to save a designated amount of money to support these children? I know I saw head nods earlier, but I wonder if there's any school district who is talking about it or thinking to take this action. Would a mandate change help, or what can we advocate for?
T. Humphreys: I don't want to jump ahead of other people. I'm sure other people have lots of ideas.
It's a very complicated question you ask, because the direction of the Ministry of Education through the funding model review which happened a couple of years ago and which we were involved in — really happy to be involved in — was more in the direction of needs-based funding, and so less in the direction of individualized funding.
But what we're really talking about is accountability, right? I don't mean to denigrate school districts in any way. I know they work very hard and they do the best that they can with what they have available. I think it's really challenging for them, because there's less and less every year, but no one that I can think of is doing what you're suggesting.
The best thing that I have seen them doing recently is starting to have conversations that are specific to students with disabilities. Some districts have committees now where they talk about inclusive education and they're looking long-term at how to move forward.
The best thing that the province can do is set accountability standards for students with disabilities. There's really nothing right now. Like I said, just graduation rates. That's the only thing that tells us how our students are doing. Anything in addition to that, that looks along the way would be really, really helpful.
H. Sandhu: Thank you. I appreciate the answer. Often, we hear this very common phrase when we're investing. It's taken as spending, and I always see that investing in children or youth or other social programs is the best investment where you see the returns later, and you save a lot more money.
I really appreciate the work the three of you are doing. I appreciate the presentation and giving us this broader knowledge of the issue and the bottlenecks that are being faced.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I think, actually, I got the answer. Tracy, you mentioned you needed greater accountability by audit to improve outcomes. You just said that setting the standards for students with disabilities…. I guess when I see this, and in my own riding over the years, obviously, early diagnosis, before kids are in school, especially autistic children…. I guess I'm really wondering if it's more of a health issue, in the sense of the early assessment, because school is maybe too late, and it's not necessarily equipped to deal with it. I wonder if it's sitting in the right bucket.
T. Humphreys: Yeah. We often talk about that assessment. It's kind of strange that most assessments are health, except a few particular ones. Psychoeducational assessments are not within the Ministry of Health, and those are really important assessments for our teachers to understand how to best educate and support disabled students.
There are even some really simple screens that can be done, actually, regarding grade 1 — for, let's say, dyslexia for example. Really easy and just like eye screening or hearing screening. We can do a screening for a number of things that would help a student pick things up in their early years that maybe don't require that bigger assessment yet.
M. Dykeman: Thank you to all of the presenters today. I know I had the privilege in my role on a school board to meet with many of you and hear many fantastic presentations and submissions that you made over time in our school district. I'd like to thank you for your work.
The question that I have is just moving off the conversation with health. What sort of reception has there been to that type of conversation, looking at more integration within the ministries and moving psychoeducational and other assessments. Have you had the opportunity to really dig into that?
T. Humphreys: I haven't actually ever engaged on that with Health. I know that there's significant siloing between ministries. Education is like a hub. All the child-serving ministries, in one way or another, intersect with Education. There are inter-ministerial protocols that are set up with Education and all of the other ministries so that that kind of service is defined. Actually, it's another area that needs updating, because they're, I think, seven years out of date right now — most of them. That would be another thing to talk about.
Mostly, it's having those engagements inter-ministerially — actual conversations and talking about how to best serve kids and not say: "This is my bucket of money; this is your bucket of money." Let's just figure out the best way to do this that cuts through the timeline.
I'm sorry, Cynthia and Cindy. I don't mean to do all the talking here.
C. Lockrey: Well, I was going to add that there are two other pieces. There's one…. A pediatrician's diagnosis is not always a Ministry of Education diagnosis. Parents are really struggling with this piece. The pediatrician may say that the child has this, this and this and needs these supports, but the ministry — this is the siloing — has a totally different type of designation that needs to be done. So parents are left with this great sense of relief because of what the pediatrician says only to hit a wall with the Ministry of Education.
In my work, I was at the community conversations the Ministry of Health had just days before COVID hit. I had this conversation with Ministry of Health staff, and they laughed and said, "Oh, we do not speak to each other, and do not expect us to speak to each other" — because that's a whole silo that will take years to be broken down.
You can see where parents are frustrated, when your pediatrician tells you something, and it doesn't actually mean anything — just to the health world. But it doesn't cross into the education world. Yet it's the same child.
M. Dykeman: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
J. Routledge (Chair): I think with that, we have some more presentations this afternoon, and we have to wrap it up for now. I think we've certainly heard your frustration and your commitment to your children. There are a number of things that I think we would want to pursue as a committee and beyond as a committee. I think this is the beginning of a much bigger conversation about silos and about the health of our children and making sure that our children get the best education possible.
Thank you. It was hard to hear, but it was important to hear.
We'll move right into the last presentations. The next presenter is Tammy Murphy, CUPE 728 Surrey school district support staff. Tammy, over to you.
Budget Consultation Presentations
CUPE LOCAL 728, SURREY
SCHOOL DISTRICT SUPPORT STAFF
T. Murphy: Good afternoon. My name is Tammy Murphy. I'm an education assistant and the president of CUPE 728, the union representing more than 5,000 support workers in Surrey's public schools. We support students in classrooms, keep school clean and healthy, ensure that grounds and facilities are maintained, provide administrative support and ensure that students are safely transported to and from school.
Our members work on the traditional, unceded territories of the Katzie, Semiahmoo and Kwantlen First Nations.
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a great deal of strain on those working in the public school systems, especially sectors like K-to-12 that have experienced years of underfunding in the past. We want to speak to you today about some of the necessary funding increases needed to ensure that our schools and those who work in them can meet the needs of children and families.
A legacy of past funding shortfalls has negatively affected mental health programs and supports. Over 18 months, the pandemic has both triggered mental health conditions and made existing conditions worse. This pattern has been felt across systems and acutely experienced by those serving as education assistants, youth care workers and Indigenous support workers.
In our district alone, approximately 10,000 students have a defined complex need, and approximately twice that number of students need assistance but don't have designations. This constitutes around 43 percent of Surrey's nearly 70,000 students. There are approximately 2,500 support staff trying to service this community of need. You do the math. It means that we are far from providing one-on-one support to students who need it, and this legacy of underfunding is being felt by those on the front line and the students who we serve.
Our recommendation is that Budget 2022 include increased funding levels for mental health programs and support workers and more training spaces and bursaries for education assistants and Indigenous support workers.
A key lesson from the pandemic is the value of cleaning and custodial work. Not only was last year's increase of daytime custodians vital to the stop of the spread of COVID-19, but the increased sanitation and cleaning contributed to other positive health outcomes by limiting the spread of viruses that are common to school environments. Preventing schools from being vectors of transmissions for illnesses like influenza, colds and strep throats protects our most vulnerable citizens, reduces the amount of time staff and students miss due to illness and protects the overall health of communities.
CUPE has repeatedly raised the concerns about limited daytime hours for custodians, and that has evolved because of systems of underfunding. In Surrey, two elementary schools have daytime custodians. That means that during the day, there is no regular sanitation, high-touch cleaning, no one to deal with maintenance issues and no one to deal with spills, accidents or bodily fluids at 102 of Surrey's 125 schools.
We recommend that Budget 2022 provide sufficient funding for daytime custodial staff at all school sites and that this be a permanent and ongoing element of the K-to-12 funding model.
CUPE members in Surrey schools were among the many CUPE workers who provided critical child care services during the pandemic. Our members know firsthand that public education systems can make a substantial contribution to filling B.C.'s tremendous need for child care spaces.
We commend the B.C. government for the creation of the seamless day model sites, 20 of them, and we believe this represents a strong path forward. While the new sites are an excellent start, much more can be done, especially with new federal funding.
There are a number of benefits to providing child care, especially before- and after-school care, through school systems. Public education has a ready-made infrastructure of facilities. One unique advantage is the human resources available in schools. The K-to-12 system has thousands of EAs and other education workers who are currently underemployed at less than six hours per day and who could easily and enthusiastically be mobilized to provide high-quality before- and after-school care in British Columbia.
To support the government's leadership in the creation of true public systems and affordable child care, Budget 2022 should include the necessary investments to enable mass expansions of child care services in the public schools.
Education is a key part of coming out of this pandemic stronger, and these recommendations, along with CUPE B.C.'s recommendations for increased funding to our post-secondary systems, are a key strategy to securing B.C.'s future and prosperity.
Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to your questions.
J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Tammy.
I'll now open it up for questions from the committee.
M. Starchuk: Tammy, with regards to the EAs that you spoke about, about increasing their hours, what impact would that have?
T. Murphy: It would have a huge impact for social systems, for members. We're looking at, right now, increasing through child care, which of course would be beneficial to society as a whole. We're so underfunded. There are just no spaces available.
It's a natural way of moving forward. As I say, we've done it in the past. We did it at the beginning of the pandemic. EAs, child care workers — they all came in and did it. With six hours, we're still at poverty level when you're looking at wages.
As I say, there are benefits all around the board. There's no losing by increasing the hours and allowing it for child care.
M. Starchuk: I think I'm going to ask the most rhetorical question I can ask for the whole day. Are the EAs ready to take on the extra hours?
T. Murphy: Yes, they are.
J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?
Okay. It looks like you covered all the bases. Thank you for your time, and thank you for giving the CUPE perspective on education. It's really important. Thanks so much.
Now we'll turn to Jennifer Edwards, who is with For Our Kids.
FOR OUR KIDS
J. Edwards: Good afternoon. Our ask is that the next B.C. budget increase the line item for electric school buses so that all of the new school bus purchases are electric. Thank you so much for your time today.
I would like to acknowledge that I live on the traditional, ancestral and unceded Indigenous territories of the Skwxwú7mesh First Nation.
I'm joining you on behalf of For Our Kids. We are a network of parents across Canada volunteering our time to find solutions to the climate crisis.
My oldest child attends elementary school on the Sunshine Coast. School bus services are vital to our community, providing transport for students living beyond walking distance from the school. I'm requesting that B.C.'s budget increase the line item for electric school buses so that 100 percent of the buses are electric.
I was really excited to hear that the province has already agreed to fund electric school buses. However, there is an urgent need for the transition to happen much faster and move completely away from diesel buses. The two main problems with diesel buses are environmental and health related.
The latest IPCC report paints a bleak future unless more is done by every level of the government to decrease emissions. Heat domes, unprecedented forest fires and poor air quality have confirmed that climate change is here. It's deadly, and it will only get worse for our children. Climate impacts will also cost us billions of dollars, yet the average diesel school bus will emit 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. By investing in climate solutions now, it will save us money in the long run.
Traditional diesel school buses also affect the health of kids and drivers. Environment Canada recognizes that there are risks with diesel school buses, which produce pollutants like nitrous oxides and fine particulate matter. These pollutants can build up in the bus cabin and around the school stops and are particularly harmful to the developing lungs of children.
This also puts the health of bus drivers at risk, with pollutants in diesel exhaust that are proven to cause lung cancer as well as lung and heart disease. Workers with the heaviest and most exposure have been found to have lung cancer and the highest death rates.
Electric school buses are a greener and safer alternative. They are now being made by Canadian companies like Lion Electric for delivery around North America to states like Virginia, which has already pledged to go 100 percent electric with its school bus fleet. Provinces in Canada are already invested in electric school buses. Quebec has committed $250 million over the next three years. This target will translate into a reduction of about $800,000 tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions.
B.C.'s school bus acquisition program bought 18 electric school buses last year out of 101 school buses purchased. That means that 83 diesel buses were added to our network. Those new diesel buses will spend over a decade on the road, adding to B.C.'s emissions and to pollution getting into the lungs of B.C. students.
There was recently an announcement by the Canada Infrastructure Bank for the support of 280 electric school buses. This is really encouraging, but we are still seeking more details of the timing of this. How many per year, and how many diesel buses will be purchased in the same time frame? Every new diesel bus will spend ten years in service, extending the transition until the new buses need to be replaced.
Right now, electric buses cost a bit more than twice as much as a new diesel bus. However, the savings are substantial, as lifetime operating costs are about 35 percent lower than diesel buses. The upfront costs, particularly when the charging infrastructure is factored in, are too high for school districts, and so funding from a higher level is required.
Our hope, and our request to you, is that the new B.C. budget ensures that we get to 100 percent electric school bus acquisition. Every new diesel bus is a wasted opportunity, and we need to transition to the existing fleet as fast as possible to reduce emissions and protect our kids' health. Being climate leaders will also communicate to our kids that adults are listening. They want a transition to a low-carbon world.
There is nothing a parent wouldn't do to protect their child. So I'm asking you to invest in the health and well-being of our children. Thank you. Those are my kids in the background.
J. Routledge (Chair): Would they like to add something?
Interjection.
J. Edwards: Sorry.
J. Routledge (Chair): Did he say: "Time to go"?
Okay. Well, we'd better get our questions in, in a hurry.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much, Jennifer.
I guess the question that comes up in my mind…. You know the hydrogen fuel cell, the development here in British Columbia by Ballard.
J. Edwards: Yes.
B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I guess the question about it is…. As an alternative source, from a clean point of view, in terms of the environment, etc., I know that Ballard has been selling significant fuel cells into Asia where the bus manufacturing, etc….
It is a homemade product here in British Columbia. It's current. It's much more…. I've actually seen the actual fuel cells compared to Toyota and some of the other ones. The size of it is very compact. I've ridden in it, and I can tell you that it's as fast as electric vehicles, which is sometimes maybe too good for bus drivers in the sense that it's probably going to scare the kids. Anyway, I just don't think we should leave that out as an opportunity, as part of opportunities.
Then the other problem is…. There are parts of the province where the remoteness doesn't always lend itself to the recharging of the electric buses — something that we have to think about in terms of some of the long bus rides in some of the rural and remote communities.
J. Edwards: Yes.
L. Doerkson: Thanks for the presentation. It was great to see your kids. I think MLA Routledge was thinking that we should be playing dinosaurs. So it was great to see the kids there.
It sounds like you've done quite a bit of research. Can you enlighten me on how effective electric buses are in colder climates, for the North and, certainly, maybe those longer trips that we see in some of rural B.C.?
J. Edwards: That's a great question. I don't have the answer offhand. I myself work for the school district. I work with the early-years team. So I'm not an expert. I'm just here as a parent today. But we could definitely look into that and hand it in with our written submission.
L. Doerkson: I would certainly appreciate that, for sure.
J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?
Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time, Jennifer. Thank you for making a pitch for our children's clean, healthy future.
J. Edwards: Thank you so much.
J. Routledge (Chair): What a great way to end a long day. That was delightful. Thank you so much.
I'll take a motion to adjourn, please.
Motion approved.
The committee adjourned at 4:33 p.m.
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