Crown Corporations -- Issue No. 23 -- Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Present: Ken Stewart, MLA (Chair); Harry Bloy, MLA (Deputy Chair); Pat Bell, MLA; Susan Brice, MLA; John Les, MLA; Harold Long, MLA; Dr. John Wilson, MLA; Patrick Wong, MLA; Rod Visser, MLA; Barry Penner, MLA

Unavoidably Absent: Joy MacPhail, MLA; Daniel Jarvis, MLA

1. The Chair called the Committee to order at 9:36 a.m.

2. The Committee considered a further schedule of meetings and its procedure.

3. The Committee adjourned to the call of the Chair at 10:11 a.m.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON CROWN CORPORATIONS



CONTENTS

		Page

Committee Meeting Schedule		329

Review of Crown Corporations: Review Process		332

Other Business		334

Chair:

* Ken Stewart (Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows L)

Deputy Chair:

* Harry Bloy (Burquitlam L)

Members:

* Pat Bell (Prince George North L)
* Susan Brice (Saanich South L)
Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L)
* John Les (Chilliwack-Sumas L)
* Harold Long (Powell River–Sunshine Coast L)
* Barry Penner (Chilliwack-Kent L)
* Rod Visser (North Island L)
* John Wilson (Cariboo North L)
* Patrick Wong (Vancouver-Kensington L)
Joy MacPhail (Vancouver-Hastings NDP)

* denotes member present

K. Stewart (Chair): Good morning, everyone. This morning you have an agenda before you for the Select Standing Committee on Crown Corporations. One of the issues we're going to have to tackle today is our schedule between now and when we sit again as a House. We may want to take some time and talk about our process to date.

On other business, one of the things I would like to add is…. Jonathan did a very nice job of putting together, with the help of the Clerk, the review of the governance. I found out quite a bit of new information and other agencies that seem to be doing some activities in there, and I think we should spend a little time on how we want to go about doing that.

Is there any other business that people would like to add to today's meeting to make it go longer? If that's okay, then we'll start.

K. Stewart (Chair): I'll open it up to some discussion on the scheduling of meetings. I trust everyone has a copy of the review schedule. That's who we've seen and when we've seen them. As you'll note, there are a number of organizations we've yet to see, so now is the opportunity to have a discussion as to what the priorities are. We may want to decide how often we want to meet between now and the end. That will help us to sort of limit them down. I'm opening it up for discussion.

K. Stewart (Chair): Twofold. How often do we want to meet between now and February 12, and who do we want to see?

P. Bell: I'm down the next two weeks still. I don't know what other people's schedules are like, but I'm down the next two weeks, and Wednesdays are free for me. After that, I don't know that we would want to meet until perhaps the latter part of January — one more time, maybe. That would be my thought — perhaps two more between now and….

K. Stewart (Chair): With regard to scheduling, I think we want to be somewhat careful of what else is going on. What we've always tried to do in the past is schedule a meeting congruent with something else that's going on so that we're not bringing people all the way down to Victoria or, possibly in January, all the way down to Vancouver for just one meeting. I notice there is a date in Vancouver where almost all of us will be there. I wonder if a Vancouver meeting might be appropriate to see a Crown of choice.

B. Penner: I know we have reviewed B.C. Hydro in this past year. I wonder if it might be appropriate for us to zero in a bit and have a specific meeting dealing with Powerex. If we were to meet in Vancouver, we could actually have a tour of the Powerex trading floor, see their facilities and operations, and then delve into more detail about their particular line of business.

K. Stewart (Chair): Any further thoughts on that? I'm looking for suggestions here today. I would find that interesting, but I don't know about the rest of the members.

K. Stewart (Chair): My anticipation would be that it would be somewhere around the meeting we're all in Vancouver for.

J. Wilson: We've got a road trip. There are some meetings with the Information and Privacy Act Committee.

K. Stewart (Chair): This scheduling stuff is always difficult when we end up with 12 people in the room trying to….

H. Long: That particular committee is the 19th to the 22nd. We're talking about the 15th.

K. Stewart (Chair): Okay. Let's look around — a general consensus that we're going to try and schedule a meeting around January 14 or 15. That's one date, so let's nail that date down. Do we want to meet between now and Christmas? That'll be our second question.

I believe most of us will be over next week, but the difficulty is getting a Crown over within a week. I think it may be a little difficult for notice. Correct, Jon?

K. Stewart (Chair): I think that would be out. If we wanted to meet with a Crown before Christmas, we'd have to give them, I anticipate, at least two weeks' notice. If we were to do that — and I'm not trying to suggest one way or the other — we would probably be looking at the 17th if we're keeping with our Wednesday dates. Again, that would entail bringing everyone down just for that meeting.

H. Bloy (Deputy Chair): I would say no. I would say not until after Christmas.

K. Stewart (Chair): Is that a consensus? Okay. If anyone has anything else to add to that, now is the time.

J. Wilson: I probably won't be here on the 15th, but that's okay. You guys can meet.

B. Penner: Just a suggestion back to the meeting in January in Vancouver that we were talking about. I would just suggest or request January 14. That would be a Wednesday.

K. Stewart (Chair): Okay. Let's finish this one and decide whether we're going to meet before Christmas. The general consensus I get here, unless someone's going to jump up and say something different, is that we won't be meeting before Christmas after today. All right. That's done.

The next thing, then. We were talking about a potential date. The 14th appears to be a date that would work in January for most of us, so let's try and solidify that date.

S. Brice: Not having a calendar here, it's hard to make a confirmed attendance. I would just put to the Chair that yesterday two more select standing committees were struck, and it starts getting very dicey. As Chair of one of those myself, I've already sort of cast about in January to start looking for some meetings. I've said the block of time between the 12th and the 15th looks like when we would like to have a meeting as well — for the Select Standing Committee on Health.

I think we've been somewhat fortunate over this last period of time because a number of the Select Standing Committees haven't been active. I think we're just going to have to recognize that sometimes people are going to have to come down for single meetings. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to hook everything onto a caucus meeting and have all of us meet all of our obligations.

K. Stewart (Chair): I know the difficulty of trying to schedule meetings by consensus in a group. It's somewhat difficult. What we're just trying to do is nail down…. We've already decided on nothing before Christmas. I've got a bit of a consensus out there that we'd like to try and schedule something in January. There is a meeting that we'll all be in for on January 15, so either the 14th or the 15th would be days that I would suggest around that.

P. Bell: If I can suggest…. Why don't you contact the other select standing committee Chairs and arrange for a…? You could liaise a bit and try and establish some scheduling practices.

K. Stewart (Chair): If I could make a suggestion, then. We're going to tentatively, with the approval of this group, try and schedule something on the 14th or 16th. We'll try and work around other people's schedules on that and leave it to the Chair and the Deputy Chair to try and coordinate that. As far as the date, are we okay with that?

K. Stewart (Chair): The second part of this, then, would be a topic. Powerex was suggested. Are there any others that are a priority?

P. Bell: It's the group, Barry, that does all the marketing initiatives — Dream Home China and all that kind of stuff.

K. Stewart (Chair): The one difficulty with that organization is that they're relatively new. They haven't published an annual report or a service plan. I don't know if they've got one defined, so there may be a time issue as far as the relevancy if they don't have….

P. Bell: If they don't have a service plan, they're in big trouble. They've been active for two years.

K. Stewart (Chair): We can get into that a bit when we get into governance. Let's try and nail this down, because it's gotta be tough for Hansard and anyone reading the minutes of this particular meeting.

J. Les: If we're going to meet on Wednesday the 14th — I would suggest it's probably a pretty good day — let's make a full day of it, so we can get as much out of it as possible. Maybe you could do both Powerex and FII.

K. Stewart (Chair): All right. What we've got so far — again, trying to help Hansard out with this, because this goes all over the place — is the date of the 14th…

K. Stewart (Chair): …of January. We're looking at two potential ones: the forest investment…

K. Stewart (Chair): …initiative and a possible tour of Powerex and working that in with B.C. Hydro as either a short review or just a tour for information.

B. Penner: I'm advised that it's quite a sight to see the trading floor, and that may well lead to some good questions on our part about what they're really doing.

K. Stewart (Chair): It's interesting because we did do that grouping of the Oil and Gas Commission, B.C. Utilities, B.C. Hydro, etc. We've done those, so it would kind of put a nice cap on our knowledge base for that.

J. Wilson: There are a couple in here that I wouldn't mind taking a look at. One is the second one. That's the Assessment Authority, and the other is Land and Water B.C. I see that the deputy is the chair of that. I'd be interested.

K. Stewart (Chair): Okay. We've got a meeting in January. My next question is going to be: do we want to try and fit anything else in before we sit on February 12?

K. Stewart (Chair): So we should have one meeting after that, and we could probably do it while we're sitting so we could report out to the House.

C. James: The work of this committee ends on February 12 or the day the House resumes sitting. When we prorogue at 10 a.m., that's the end of the work. But if the report has been completed by the committee and approved by the committee, you can present the report anytime after the 12th.

K. Stewart (Chair): It would be my suggestion that we try and clean up the three we have on the boards for the House — to make it easier for the next committee. My suggestion is that we look — and it's far enough out that we don't have to really set a date now — somewhere in that week prior to February 12. Would that be a consensus? Okay, so we've got our dates set.

P. Bell: Just a suggestion. We're coming up now where we're a little over a year past when we first started reviewing some of these Crowns, and I think it would be useful for them to know we're going to revisit them. For the next committee — I mean, we probably aren't going to get to that for this committee — when it is started at the beginning of the session, we might want to include in our report that we recommend revisiting the Crowns that we visited in '02.

K. Stewart (Chair): It would be my suggestion at this point that we try to wrap up what we've done with this group. My suggestion to whoever makes the decisions as to the appointment of the timing of the Crown, which I've suggested to the House Leader before, is that we get…. Whoever the committee is going to be, it gets struck much earlier. It seems to work out quite well when we're in session — meeting every Wednesday.

One of the things I would like to do, as we're in this discussion of scheduling, is get a consensus from this particular group that they would like to continue our every-second-Wednesday dates moving through the House. There is a scheduling issue with other committees, and the quicker we get it in…. I'm not sure who will still be on this committee and who will be the Chair after it's reconvened, but whoever it is, I'm hoping there will be enough continuity from this group to

carry through with some of the initiatives we've taken and also to carry through with that scheduling date. Any comments on that?

S. Brice: Once again, I would caution that because the select standing committees are all-party, Wednesday morning is prime time for being able to, in any realistic way, involve all members of the committee. I know other committees are also looking at that time.

I think there needs to be some coordination between the Chairs, because Wednesday mornings are the one little moment that all members, regardless of party, can legitimately expect to be there.

K. Stewart (Chair): My comment would be that I agree it's premium time. We are established as being a committee that has a block of that premium time, and we wouldn't necessarily want to relinquish that if we didn't have to.

The other thing I think is important is that when they're looking at the makeup of the committees, they take into consideration the overlap of some members on committees and try to balance that. That's something that we'll suggest to the Clerk's office. As the current Chair of this committee, I will be trying to coordinate with the other Chairs so that we can get some consistency so that we can have an efficient schedule for all members.

P. Wong: I would like, when we're in Vancouver, to bring in a couple of Crown corporations in case one of them cannot show up. I would like to bring the Science Council of B.C. as a replacement on that date.

K. Stewart (Chair): That's one that we can put down. Any problem for…? The one I think we may have trouble with would be the forest group, if they're not ready, but we'll try. Certainly, I'll relay the wishes of this committee, the anxiety, that we'd like to see them. Any further comments on scheduling before we move on? Okay.

K. Stewart (Chair): The process of inquiry. It was interesting. We had the long discussion about better ways of doing our questioning at the end. Then we decided just to do it the way we were doing prior, when we threw it to a vote on the day. So now is an opportunity, with a little less pressure, for some discussion again on how best to visit the way of eliciting the kinds of information we want to get out of the witnesses.

H. Bloy (Deputy Chair): I still believe that if one person carries the load at the start of the questioning, we might go deeper into the inquiry. But I think that person would have to identify himself a couple weeks before the meeting to say that he…

H. Bloy (Deputy Chair): …or she wants to take the lead on that particular item, and then we could discuss that. Otherwise, as we sit here and listen and read the reports, we all have something that we want to ask, and our questions are quite varied in our interest.

K. Stewart (Chair): My only concern is having one person basically monopolize the time, and other people may have some other questions. If we're going to do that, I would suggest — and again, it's only a suggestion — that there be a time put on that so they have, say, the first ten minutes or 15 minutes of questioning — whatever the group thinks appropriate. Or else I could see sort of one person running it and a lot of people with anxious looks on their faces wanting to get their question in and not getting it in. Again, I'll throw that out.

H. Long: If that was the case, that person would have to have the proposal well in advance so they knew what was going on and so they could get into all the questions and answers. But they're going to have no advantage over anyone else in the committee if it's only been done at the committee stage.

K. Stewart (Chair): Harold, the fact is that I today could go to the Internet and get almost every committee here — or go through Jonathan and get their service plan, their financials. They're all there. They come up on an annual basis. The information is there, other than some that have yet to publish an annual report and service plan, which are noted here. But if we wanted to go to about 90 percent of this list, you could have more information than you could read in a couple of nights. That would be for sure.

J. Les: You know, what we're trying to do here is something that I think really does need to be done. One of the frustrations is that each one of these Crown corporations, in most cases, is a major-size corporation. For any of us to imagine that we're going to do an in-depth review of what goes on inside that outfit would, I think, be presumptuous.

The way we're resourced around here is pretty skimpy. If you really want to do a job on one of these things, you basically have to set the rest of your life aside for a while and assume the role of a ferret and go in there, do your own research, dig in and what have you. We don't have the luxury of a large research staff that's specifically working for this committee.

I think we need to think about that a little bit. We all have the very best intentions. We want these Crowns to be challenged and what have you, yet I feel

K. Stewart (Chair): Hopefully, to alleviate some of your frustration, John…. I don't know if I'll be able to, but a couple of things that have happened and some of the feedback I've gotten with regard to this is that we have to remember that for 23 years there was no ability for the public to look at these Crowns. There was no accountability back to the House directly. Crowns are now starting to realize that we are there. I think some very hard questions have been asked by this committee, and it might take just a few good questions to make it well worth the effort to do it.

The other thing is that — just going back to the last one, the questions about the service plans — there are a lot of good questions that come out here, and if they take those to heart, they're going to do a better job. In some ways it may seem a bit cursory, or it might seem a bit shallow. I think every session I've been fortunate to be Chair at, I hear one or two deep, probing questions where it really hits home with the organization. Just for the organizations to realize there's some transparency between the public and what they're doing is, I think, worthy in itself. Hopefully, that'll help give you some motivation for coming — knowing that we are starting to have an impact and we are starting to be noticed.

It's also a good tool for the ministers that are responsible for these Crowns to start looking at that and saying…. I'll use a recent example of ICBC with the governance issues. That's something that points out maybe some support for some of the deficiencies they were seeing with an organization in governance. It gives them some support to act, because an independent body has maybe looked at what they've been seeing and verified it for them.

I'd like to believe that even the methodology we've used in the past has been somewhat successful.

S. Brice: Can I make a suggestion that we try something different? Not to say this is always going to be the way it is, but take something like Forest Innovation Investment. Say that's going to be the one. We take two of our members. I would suggest Rod and Pat. They take the lead on it. We notify these people that it's going to possibly be a two-hour meeting and that their presentation is not to exceed half an hour. We know that these two would do an in-depth for half an hour or 45 minutes, and then it could go to general discussion for everybody to add what they didn't feel was covered. We could see how it works. If we felt it had some merit, we could say that could be our model. If it didn't seem to have any merit, we could say: "Let's go back to the old way."

K. Stewart (Chair): I'm a Liberal. I'm always out for experimenting with new things. I think that's a good suggestion. I would certainly throw it out that the time lines they need might vary from Crown to Crown to do the in-depth questions.

Again, the only thing I would want to ensure is that there was an opportunity for other members to ask questions, because quite often…. You know, we have a fairly high level of talent here, and people have various skills. We have accountants; we have lawyers; we have successful business people. We have people that we're not really too sure what they do here for a living, but….

K. Stewart (Chair): Yeah, we have quite a variety here. So I think we'd like to utilize those skills and talents too. I am quite favourable to the thought of having one or two specialists on a Crown because of our varied backgrounds. There are some people that have a good background in it.

P. Bell: If I can suggest that rather than actually designating one or two, we would ask for volunteers. If there were three or four that had a particular interest in a given issue, then that's great. If there were only one, then maybe that's not as good but okay. If there's none, then we might need to try and round up some volunteers. Perhaps it's not worth reviewing a Crown if we don't have any that are interested.

K. Stewart (Chair): One of the things — and I know I'm referring back to the scheduling a little bit — if we have a long…. If we can get started early in a session, we can easily map out a dozen meetings — even more. That would, I believe, give us a great advantage that we haven't had in the past — that is, the ability to schedule into a nice regular routine. At that time, I believe, there's more ability to have the type of time that Harold is talking about being necessary to get it.

If you know that in six weeks a Crown is coming up that you have an interest in, we can open it up, and a couple of people who have an interest in that can say: "Okay, I notice we have the British Columbia Arts Council in six weeks. You know, that's an area I have an interest in. Could I be on that?" Then we'd solicit to see if there was another person or two that would like to take the lead. I think that would be quite helpful.

J. Les: How about in terms of after the fact, after we've had a committee here, there's often a large number of questions that remain unanswered? I think you kind of encourage us to do some follow-up work afterwards. How do we do that? Do we get the committee, perhaps, to authorize several members specifically to do that kind of follow-up work? I'm thinking of legitimizing the role of the members as they do that. Right now it's kind of left a little bit informal, I think.

K. Stewart (Chair): Well, I think one of the things that, a resource that…. You talked about resources earlier. We have the resource of the Clerk's office and Jonathan, of course. Jonathan, maybe you can take a

minute and tell us what areas you think you can add a little more help or expertise in regard to follow-up and John's question. You are our resource, and I really am not that sure of your workload.

J. Fershau: Okay. In terms of preparing for a meeting, one of the things I do is a media scan for the last year or so on the Crown corporation, just to be sure of the major issues that have faced that Crown for the last year. That's something I'm more than willing to distribute to the committee if they're interested. Sometimes they're quite long. I just transfer the stuff from TNO into a Word document. Sometimes they're 100 pages long with all the news stories, like B.C. Hydro, for example. So I could do that kind of prep work for you.

In terms of follow-up information, I read the transcripts through the day that they come out. I send the letter off usually to the executive assistant or the person who presented at the meeting, and I expect a response for the information for follow-up. For instance, from the last group that was here, I'd expect a follow-up from them within two weeks. That information then would get distributed to you and through the Clerk go out to the members if there were any specific questions that come.

In terms of prep work, I read through all the service plans and annual reports, but it's not my real role to prepare questions for members to ask them. I'd feel very comfortable to do that. I do read them pretty thoroughly and have a good understanding of what's going on in most Crown corporations.

K. Stewart (Chair): I think that's a role that, if we had some people taking the lead, they could do. If they could get your media collection of information, get that over to you, get the…. Of course, the service plans, etc., should be there. Then they could come with a set of questions.

What I usually do before a meeting is go through the service plans and whatever other information I have, and I'll pick out some question areas and then see what gets picked up during the committee. If not, then I'll try to get to that at the end.

The other avenue, of course, that we have open to us is the written questions. My only caution, again, on this is to make sure that everything goes through the Clerk's office. If you have some questions or queries, the process would be to make sure it goes through the Clerk's office so that we have an audit trail of the information. One of the things that we don't want is people freelancing outside of the committee, with Crowns, etc. I think that's really an important caveat to the way we do our work. It's not to say you can't ask anything you wish, but it's just….

Also, it would be better if that information were done ahead of time or it came out of the responses of the witnesses at our discussion at the end. Obviously, being the diligent members we are, quite often we'll think about something later and do a little research on it. My only caution is to make sure that questioning goes through the Clerks and out that way.

I'm certainly open to moving on with that process and having some work done on what's been suggested.

J. Les: Have we been getting much feedback from the various Crowns in terms of the questions we've raised and their responses?

J. Fershau: B.C. Housing was the first that we met where there was a considerable number of questions. The deadline for them to respond was December 10. I'll follow up if they haven't responded by then. The Oil and Gas Commission was a week later, so they have the same kind of framework for a response. I do hope to hear back from them by the deadline, but if not, I will definitely follow up with that information.

K. Stewart (Chair): Okay. So we'll move on if we have consensus on that process. Again, if we get an early start to this committee in the next session, it'll make it a lot easier for us. I mean, we've been just getting started much later than I would've liked to.

Jonathan did a draft of the survey, and it was quite good. There is other information that when I started looking into it…. Interestingly enough, the same week, unsolicited from myself, I had the auditor general's department come over. They're doing some work on this. Actually, someone is working on a master's on this type of work, so they've got a lot of work on it.

Talking to the group that does the board appointments, they just had a workshop on it two weeks ago. They're invited to share some information there with us. There are other agencies out there. Jonathan put together — again, with the help of the Clerk…. We probably should just e-mail this to everyone. It needs some work, though.

Our suggestion of sort of a pop quiz on the Crowns…. When looking at it, there's a diversity in how they were appointed. It becomes obvious when you pick up your review schedules and see who some of these chairs are. They're people in the ministry. Some of these have been legislated to be as such. Before we do a pop quiz, I think we need to do a little more work at breaking out the different types of enactments

which cause the boards to be structured the way they are. For some of the Crowns….

We've used B.C. Hydro as an example. They probably have a fairly well-functioning understanding of the governance of a board and the right number of people, and they're doing a lot of work on it. Whereas some of the other ones, as we saw — the last two that we've seen — are basically chaired by people right in the agencies — the CEOs or else deputy ministers. There is quite a difference. I think we need to do a little more work.

What I'm looking for today is some latitude from the committee to pursue that more in depth before coming back and going out with a survey. I believe that

in this bit of research we've done so far, we may be a little premature in doing that. I'm just looking for some support to continue in that investigative role first. Are we all okay with that?

That's good. If you guys are okay with that, we'll pursue that line of investigation then. I'll try and report back each meeting as to how we're doing with that.

That's it for our agenda. Does anyone have anything else they'd like to add to the agenda for today?

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet. Chamber debates are broadcast on television and webcast on the Internet.

Committee Staff:	Jonathan Fershau (Committee Researcher)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON CROWN CORPORATIONS

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON CROWN CORPORATIONS