Crown Corporations - Issue No. 4 - Monday, February 11, 2002

2001 Legislative Session: 2nd Session, 37th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CROWN CORPORATIONS
MINUTES AND HANSARD

Present: Ken Stewart, MLA (Chair); Bill Bennett, MLA (Deputy Chair); Dave Hayer, MLA; Ida Chong, MLA; Arnie Hamilton, MLA; Pat Bell, MLA; Daniel Jarvis, MLA; Dr. John Wilson, MLA; Randy Hawes, MLA

Unavoidably Absent: Joy MacPhail, MLA; John Nuraney, MLA

1. The Chair called the Committee to order at 11:07 a.m.

2. The Chair reviewed the work of the Committee to date.

3. The Subcommittee on Agenda and Procedure, consisting of the Chair, Deputy Chair and Dave Hayer, MLA, presented its report to the Committee on the matter of “A Guide to the Operations of the Select Standing Committee on Crown Corporations."

4. The Committee considered its report to the House for the present session.

5. Resolved, that the Committee adopt is report, as amended, to the House.

6. Resolved, that the Chair present the Committee’s report to the House.

7. The Committee agreed that electronic versions of submissions and other documents prepared by Crown Corporations during the course of their appearance be sent to the Office of the Clerk of Committees for distribution to Members of the Committee.

8. The Committee adjourned at 11:35 a.m. to the Call of the Chair.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON CROWN CORPORATIONS



CONTENTS

		Page

Update from the Chair		51

Subcommittee Report		51

Draft Report		52

Chair:	* Ken Stewart (Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows L)
Deputy Chair:	* Bill Bennett (East Kootenay L)
Members:	* Pat Bell (Prince George North L) * Ida Chong (Oak Bay–Gordon Head L) * Arnie Hamilton (Esquimalt-Metchosin L) * Randy Hawes (Maple Ridge–Mission L) * Dave Hayer (Surrey-Tynehead L) * Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L) John Nuraney (Burnaby-Willingdon L) * John Wilson (Cariboo North L) Joy MacPhail (Vancouver-Hastings NDP) * denotes member present

Clerk:	Craig James
Committee Staff:	Josie Schofield (Committee Research Analyst)

K. Stewart (Chair): Welcome, everyone. I'd just like to call the meeting to order. This is our fourth meeting, and it will be our final meeting before the session begins tomorrow. It's my hope that we will be reappointed and be able to continue, but it's certainly not up to me to make that decision.

I'd like to take the opportunity today to do a number of things. One of them would be a report from our subcommittee. Bill Bennett will be presenting that. The other is that we have the consideration of a draft report to the House that we'd like to approve today. We have to complete the report today and sign it off, as the House prorogues tomorrow. That will have to be done today. Hopefully, we can do it within the hour that's allotted. I trust everyone did receive copies of the draft report and had an opportunity to look at that. Then at the end we'll be going into any other business that we may have that we need to do to conclude this section of our work.

K. Stewart (Chair): A bit of an update is that there's a report that's also just been given out to you. If you could, in the next few minutes, take a quick look at that. That's the one by Jack Kempf. We want to consider whether we want to include that in our report or not. That's the other piece of information that you have in front of you that you wouldn't have seen till today.

Continuing on with our update, again, this is our fourth and final meeting. It's anticipated that on reappointment of the committee, there are some of the Crowns that are now finally available and prepared to present. They're through their core reviews and would like our subcommittee to get going on that as soon as the committee's reconvened. It would be anticipated that within three to four weeks the new committee, if it's reappointed, will be able to start that work.

Just going over the work that we've done in the last three meetings — and this is our fourth — we were aware that the Crowns, as they were going through their core review, would not be available for us to meet prior to now. I would like to think that we have used our time wisely in getting some of the updates. We've had an advantage that some of the other committees haven't had, and that is time. We've had the time to look over our mandate, we've had time to look at some of the other agencies that have looked at the Crowns, and we've had an opportunity to get a fairly accurate update from the Crown corporations secretariat. We've had some advantages that should place us well to do more thorough work when we get started.

In saying that, as you'll notice in the report, there still is the freedom to do what's necessary to fulfil our mandate — that is, to have an open and transparent view to the public as to what the work of the Crowns is.

With that, I'd now like to turn the meeting over to the Chair of the subcommittee, Mr. Bill Bennett, if he can just quickly give us a review of the report that he's placed before us. That is included in the draft report, so if you want to refer to it, you certainly can.

B. Bennett (Deputy Chair): I'm going to be brief. We started out on this task thinking that what we were going to do was develop a template — I think that's what we called it at the time — and the template would consist of a list of questions, for the most part, that we would ask of the various Crown corporations that came before us. As the subcommittee met and discussed the template, we began to realize that given that the committee has not sat for so many years and given that our mandate from the Legislative Assembly was somewhat broad, we felt we should consider what the purpose of this committee really is and try and get a handle on the extent to which we wanted to examine these Crown corporations.

We met a couple of times with the Crown agencies secretariat, and I wanted to thank Darlene Harris-Williams, who's sitting over here, for helping me on the first draft of the report. She did the most work on it. She probably did more work on it than I did. What we tried to do was set some direction for this committee and for Crown Corporations Committees in the future so that they would know specifically what their mandate is and what their reporting obligations are. We tried to set a fairly broad mandate.

We're not limited by anything other than the public interest. The Crown agencies secretariat does have its system, I guess, for monitoring Crown agencies, government organizations. We're guided by that, but we're not limited by that, so we can essentially ask whatever questions we want to and go in whatever direction we want to. We have committed to giving Crown corporations some advance notice, I guess, if we're going to get away from the questions that we've indicated on the two schedules that are attached to the report, but we're not limited in any way to the questions that are set out here.

I guess what we've ended up with in this report is a starting point for this committee. We can use this to review the first few Crown corporations that come before us. If we see that what we've prepared in this report is not adequate, that we've missed something or that we maybe didn't allow for enough time in meetings for some component of the review or discussion, we can change it. This is the starting point.

K. Stewart (Chair): Just before I continue, are there any further comments with regards to that, any thoughts of the committee members or areas that they'd like to comment on? Great. I see this is moving along quite quickly.

That takes us to the next section, and that's the consideration of our draft report to the House. Hopefully, after today it will not be a draft report and we can confirm that.

I'd just like to follow up, though, a couple of comments with regards to the subcommittee's report. That is with regard to confidentiality. On occasion there are going to be issues of confidentiality. One of the areas that may come from is some of the core reviews, until they're made public. We have to be well aware of the sensitivity with regards to that. As the information is made available by report to the public, it will certainly be made public. One of the considerations of this committee is to ensure that wherever possible, we can make as much information available to the public as possible so that there's no real reason, other than for strategic business reasons, that something may need to be retained as confidential. We will try our utmost to release as much as possible, though. That was just a quick comment on that.

K. Stewart (Chair): Moving on to the consideration of the draft report to the House, I'd like to first thank Josie and Craig for their support in helping to put together this report. They've been a great asset to us. At the same time, I'd like to again thank Darlene and Sharon for their input into this process to date. They've been a great asset to us in getting this committee going and getting some of the background information that we will have.

J. Wilson: You said there would be some confidentiality here, so are we going to be reviewing material that is of a sensitive nature, and if so, will we be having in-camera sessions? How do you see that?

K. Stewart (Chair): No, it's not my anticipation that we'll be having in-camera sessions. It would be my hope that if there's information of a confidential nature, it may be something that the Crown would indicate to us that due to issues of confidentiality, they weren't prepared to divulge, and it would be up to the Chair to basically make the decision as to whether we accept that or we can pursue it further. In most cases, I would suspect it would be very limited occasions when we would have to do it. I just wanted to note that there may be some situations of confidentiality and that we just acknowledge the fact that that may occur.

J. Wilson: So, basically, we won't be doing any work until the core review is completed on the Crowns. That's how I understand it.

K. Stewart (Chair): That's correct. There are two reasons for that. One is the duplication of the workload. We don't want to be duplicating the work. Secondly, that's a process that's going on, and it will be up to the subcommittee to schedule those Crowns. It's my understanding that some are at a point — or they will be in the near future — where they are prepared to come before us. That scheduling will be left to the subcommittee.

I'm just making a bit of an assumption at this point in time that there will be a continuation of the committee and there will be a continuation of the subcommittee. We'd like to think that's going to happen, so we'll proceed considering it will. Are you okay with that?

D. Jarvis: Is the subcommittee going to submit their list to us for our approval as to who they would like to hear from?

K. Stewart (Chair): It'll be an ongoing process that the subcommittee will be reporting. If you'll notice in the draft, there's a tentative schedule. There'd be a rotation as the Crowns come before us. At each meeting there'll be a Crown presenting. There'll be a review of the Crown past and then a presentation of the Crown forward. The first meeting rotation may be a little out of sync, but once we get going, the subcommittee will be reporting on a meeting-by-meeting basis as to who's available. At that time, there will be opportunity for discussion.

B. Bennett (Deputy Chair): One of the things I discovered personally, as we started to work our way through this discussion at the subcommittee level, was that, essentially, what this committee spends most of its time doing is reviewing service plans. We have the right, I think, to review whatever we want, whatever component of a government organization we're interested in, but we work from a structure that's based on the review of service plans and annual reports.

A lot of these questions that are attached to the report are based on some of the work that's been done by people who work for our government to assist us and the Crown agencies secretariat and other people to, first of all, prepare service plans and annual reports and, secondly, to review them. I think that's mainly what we are going to be doing, but again, we can go wider than that if we want to.

The way I, as a subcommittee Chair, see our role is as part of the process that our government has set up to make Crown corporations accountable. As such, the best place to start is probably with their service plans and their annual reports. I think we should expect to spend a fair bit of time on that.

I. Chong: On that note, I just happened to come across, on page 15 of my report…. I'm not sure about everyone else's number; I've got about three copies of these reports by now. I noticed that it does say that the Select Standing Committee on Crown Corporations may recommend to the Legislature that service plans in general or a service plan for a particular Crown corporation include additional information.

I was curious as to what was going to be referred to as additional information and whether we would, in fact, be assisting Crowns prior to their development of a service plan to state those kinds of additional infor-

mation we requested or whether it would be as a result of the service plans having been tabled. Then we would help modify them in years two and three, as an example. Perhaps some clarification as to our involvement with service plans would be helpful — whether that's in the early stage, at the commencement or on an ongoing basis to see what's applicable.

As you know, with the government caucus committees there's the benefit of the ministries having input from committee members for their service plans before they're developed. I'm not sure whether, with the Crown corporations, this committee is responsible for that. At some point — or today, if we could get clarification — that would be helpful to me, as a committee member.

K. Stewart (Chair): Again, my consideration on that would be where we report out in our report. I don't believe it's our task or role to be telling a Crown what to do or what not to do but to be reporting our observations of any areas that we view that could be improved. I would suspect that would go to the minister responsible with our report, and they can deem to do with it what they choose. Again, it comes out in the full report to the Legislature, so the outcomes of that are there for scrutiny. If your question is, would we be telling the Crowns what to do with regards to their service report, I think our role would be more to comment on what we did and the areas of strength or weakness we may have seen with regards to that. Does that answer your question?

K. Stewart (Chair): If there are no further questions, I trust you've all had an opportunity to see the draft of the report to the House. If there are no further comments, I would ask for a motion to accept it.

K. Stewart (Chair): I call upon a vote for all those prepared to accept the draft report as submitted.

K. Stewart (Chair): Again, it's unanimous. Any other procedural issues that we have to deal with before we move on to other business?

The last item is other business. Just a couple of quick comments. Our report will be going to the House. It's my anticipation that within a week to ten days this report will be submitted to the House. Then it will be up to the House to look at the future of the committee, in anticipation that if the committee is struck again, its workload will be well laid out for it to continue.

I had one other question to pose to the committee. When we get the reports from the various Crown agencies, given that we're living in an electronic age and that most of us have access to computers, in an attempt on my part and, hopefully, on the part of the committee to avoid the overabundant use of paper and duplication, it would be my suggestion…. It's just a suggestion at this point that I'd like to get some feedback on.

A lot of these reports are already electronic. A lot of the reports are actually available on the Web, or at least they're electronically available throughout the Crowns and, in many cases, available to government.

I would like to suggest that as we get the reports in from the various agencies, if they are in electronic format…. Granted, a lot of the organizations print glossy annual reports, etc., but whatever information we can get electronically, it is my suggestion that it be sent in a timely manner to the Clerk's department and that they send it out to us. Then we can print it off as we see fit. As you peruse it…. I'm not sure how you individually look at your areas, but you might look at it electronically and say: "Here's a couple of areas that I want to print out for reference." If you want to print out the whole thing, that's fine too.

Two things happen. There's a process there so that the Clerk knows every one of us received it. They'll be responsible for getting it out, as compared to asking the agency to ensure that it gets to each of us individually. Hopefully, it saves on expense in some way.

Are there any thoughts on that? Does anyone have any difficulty with that? Would you like to stick with the more traditional method, where a big pile of files is compiled for each one, and then they're distributed that way?

R. Hawes: I would like to think we're going to be asking at least to see what the final public report looks like. You've mentioned the glossy reports on some of these Crown corporations. Frankly, I would want to be asking why they're doing probably the most expensive kind of publishing there is, with colour pictures and all the rest of it, to a very limited audience. They're not, for the most part, out there competing. Yet they're putting out the kinds of financial reports that companies competing in the free marketplace are putting out, and that's at great expense. That, for me, is a subject of some interest.

K. Stewart (Chair): That brings up a separate topic. That's accountability for expenditures within their organizations, which would probably be an appropriate question to ask the individual ones. What I'm looking for at this point….

R. Hawes: The other thing I would suggest to you, if I might, Mr. Chairman, is that a lot of these Crowns already have expended the money. They've got the

document printed. Printing off your computer is not free, nor is it sometimes real cheap. I don't know if you're saving money. If there is an abundance of these financial reports gathering dust somewhere, why would we not use them? Otherwise, they'll just go in the trash.

K. Stewart (Chair): If I could comment on that, my intent would be that if there are reports available and they're made available to us — fine. I'm just trying to look at a number of other reports that are electronic that may be of interest to you along the way.

What I'd like to do is get as much information out as we can, and then it's up to the members. They may find something really interesting in some of these other reports, but we wouldn't necessarily want to print them all off for everyone. The intention here was to try and make as much information available to everyone in the most effective and inexpensive way of getting it out, but not limiting the data or information to members.

D. Jarvis: I concur with what you're saying. Also, I would like to know — I can't remember — when they are required to present their financial reports. It seems to me there is some leeway given. If the House is sitting in a certain period of time, they're given so many days. Are you aware of that?

K. Stewart (Chair): I don't have the time lines available to me. It would be my hope that as quickly as we could get them out and they're presented to us, we'll get them to the members, if there are Crowns coming before us.

That may actually be one of the considerations of the subcommittee, too, with regards to when they do their scheduling. If there's a Crown that's just coming up, and if they have information due a few weeks down the road from scheduling, they may want to reschedule it for that.

B. Bennett (Deputy Chair): We have Crown agencies secretariat people here with us today. I don't know what the protocol is, whether we can go have a sidebar with them on this sort of thing, but I know we have discussed the annual timing of service plans and annual reports.

I wanted to say, just since we're talking about service plans, that service plans are not the expensive, glossy sort of reports that you're used to seeing. That's the annual report.

We'll be getting service plans any day now. My understanding is that they start coming in mid-February, on February 19.

Actually, one of the issues that we probably ought to discuss under other business today is the quantity of service plans that we're going to be faced with and what process we're going to use to determine which Crown corporations we want to review and which we feel we don't have time to look at, given that we all have some other responsibilities, as well, besides this committee.

It's a really busy time for this committee starting budget day, February 19, and then another busy time when the annual reports come out in May. What the committee would be doing there is comparing the results in the annual reports to the estimates and so forth that we looked at in the service plans.

K. Stewart (Chair): I believe you're now starting to realize some of the added duties that the subcommittee will have when it starts to put together its scheduling for the reports. It's my anticipation with regards to the scheduling that the availability of the information in the reports will be part of that. That will be an ongoing presentation to the committee. The scheduling is a crucial part of the effectiveness of this committee — that the appropriate Crowns come before the committee at the appropriate time, so we can make the most of the visit of the witnesses.

B. Bennett (Deputy Chair): Can we set up some kind of a feedback process from the committee members as to which government organizations they'd like to look at? Obviously, we're going to need to know that before we start to schedule.

K. Stewart (Chair): I know we have to plan the future in anticipation of continuation, but I didn't really want to go too much beyond the scheduling until we're finished with this round and the House prorogues. I suspect that many of the topics you've brought up are going to be of interest to a new committee, if and when struck.

I would anticipate that the types of issues you talked about are going to be very important in discussing with the committee the availability of Crowns, the desirability of the Crowns to the committee, who they want to see and the types of issues that are important to them. That's not only so the proper information can be put together for the committee but also so the Crowns, prior to presenting that, will have a fairly interesting and informative thought as to what they are to present. I would hope the tentative schedule that we've put with the rotation would allow for that. I just didn't want to look too far beyond the next committee meeting. If that satisfies, we can move on with it.

I did have one point that I missed earlier, if you can just step back to page 12 of your report. I brought this up at the top of the meeting. There was a reference to Jack Kempf's report, 1991. It's referenced in the report. Is there a desire to have the full report in there, or is a referencing enough? Just a point of clarification.

K. Stewart (Chair): Are people comfortable with that? Okay. Thank you very much. That was one point I had to clarify.

If there are no further issues, I appreciate…. I trust that the reason we were able to move through it so quickly is that people had an opportunity to go through it, and they were quite satisfied by the work of the subcommittee and the Clerk's department in putting together our report.

The one other issue that will be added to the report will be the report of the fourth meeting today. That will be included in the report going to the House. That was one issue that was noted about the fourth report, but there was no information, so they'll be very succinct in the approval of the information before us today that will be included in the final report.

Thank you very much for your attendance. I would like to thank everyone for their participation. For me it was sort of like being the president of an automobile club and not having a car to drive. We've certainly got all the information that we need to get ready to go. As soon as we have our first Crown come before us, I'm sure we'll be much more prepared because of the time we've had.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CROWN CORPORATIONS

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON CROWN CORPORATIONS