2015 Legislative Session: Fourth Session, 40th Parliament

HANSARD

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.

The printed version remains the official version.

official report of

Debates of the Legislative Assembly

(hansard)

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Afternoon Sitting

Volume 25, Number

ISSN 0709-1281 (Print)

ISSN 1499-2175 (Online)

CONTENTS

Page

Orders of the Day

Second Reading of Bills

Bill 25 — Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Statutes Amendment Act, 2015 (continued)

D. Barnett

H. Bains

M. Morris

B. Routley

D. Routley

Hon. S. Thomson

Bill 20 — Election Amendment Act, 2015

Hon. S. Anton

G. Holman

J. Martin

L. Krog

D. Bing

M. Farnworth

Proceedings in the Douglas Fir Room

Committee of Supply

Estimates: Ministry of Justice (continued)

A. Dix

Hon. S. Anton

L. Krog

M. Farnworth

S. Fraser

V. Huntington

M. Karagianis

[ Page 8173 ]

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2015

The House met at 1:32 p.m.

[Madame Speaker in the chair.]

Orders of the Day

Hon. S. Thomson: In the chamber I call continued second reading on Bill 25; and in Committee A, the continued estimates of the Ministry of Justice.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 25 — FORESTS, LANDS AND

NATURAL RESOURCE OPERATIONS

STATUTES AMENDMENT ACT, 2015

(continued)

D. Barnett: B.C. Timber Sales currently contracts about 95 percent of its business activities to the private sector and will continue to do so for the purpose of these service agreements.

[D. Horne in the chair.]

Strengthening our economy comes not only through investing in our communities but expanding and opening new markets such as forestry, increasing competitiveness in the industry and supporting the accurate pricing of Crown timber by allowing non-BCTS licences to provide timber to BCTS for auction and improving the marketability of lower quality beetle-killed timber by equalizing the financial risk associated with cruise-based and scale-based sale licences.

These changes to the Forest Act and the Forest and Range Practices Act will help the effectiveness of B.C. Timber Sales and act on the recommendations of the BCTS effectiveness review. Acting on recommendations from the B.C. Timber Sales effectiveness review, the amendments will encourage more accurate timber pricing, help B.C. Timber Sales generate more revenue and improve overall business practices.

These changes will not only encourage more accurate timber pricing and increase BCTS’s annual net revenue by as much as $4 million but will also help BCTS generate more revenue and improve the agency’s overall business practices, essentially helping support suitable forest management and market access by empowering B.C. Timber Sales to enforce its environmental management system.

[1335]

The economic engine of the Cariboo-Chilcotin is driven by forestry. Closer to home, forestry has always been a backbone of the economy of the Cariboo, and it remains so through some tough times, when markets changed and the pine beetle epidemic hit.

Hon. Speaker, 100 Mile House is home to timber harvesting, lumber production and oriented strand board production as the home to Ainsworth Lumber’s oriented strand board plant, two West Fraser mills, a community forest and numerous log home companies, as well as privately held woodlot operations.

Williams Lake is the place in B.C. where Pioneer Log Homes spawned the HGTV show Timber Kings , which launched in 2014 and is now in its second season.

Increasing competitiveness in this industry is important not only to my constituency but all of British Columbia. In Williams Lake there is the West Fraser Timber Co., a leading North American integrated wood products company. There is also Tolko Industries, West Chilcotin Forest Products as well as pellet lumber and Pinnacle Pellet plants. Additionally, West Chilcotin Forest Products is a jointly owned lumber company that brings the Ulkatcho First Nations and industry together as partners.

Our government’s approval of the Williams Lake community forest is providing new opportunity for forest management in the Cariboo by enhancing economic opportunities with community forests and ensuring that local values and interests are integrated into forest management.

Of course, the Alex Fraser research centre, which is situated on close to 10,000 hectares of Crown forest land near Williams Lake, in the Cariboo region, is one of two UBC research forests, managed to create opportunities for research, education and demonstration of suitable, sustainable forest management.

The 100 Mile timber supply area covers well over one million hectares of land. Bill 25, the Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Statutes Amendment Act, will make it easier to regulate and manage low-impact community, recreational, industrial and commercial activity on Crown lands.

The Land Act has not been substantially reviewed in 40 years and currently has a very limited scope of regulatory powers. New regulation-making powers will establish time limits and other criteria related to how an activity can occur on Crown land; require clear notification of proposed land use or activity; allow government to restrict areas for a season, activity or use; and allow government to create clear remedies to address non-compliance.

The proposed changes to the Land Act will also streamline application processes and give government authority to identify low-impact activities like camping, organized events and aggregate testing, which are exempt from the application process.

The Land Surveyors Act. The proposed changes to the Land Surveyors Act will allow the Association of British Columbia Land Surveyors to register land surveyors who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

Land surveyors are also identified as one of the 63 professional occupations that are enabled to engage in and

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practise their business activity within the NAFTA zone. These changes mean that the Association of B.C. Land Surveyors will be in line with other self-regulating professions in the province.

I support Bill 25 and believe in seizing these opportunities and changes, keeping our forest sector growing and continuing to create jobs to support families and communities across B.C.

[1340]

H. Bains: It is a pleasure to speak on the issue before us, Bill 25. Every time we talk about anything to deal with the forest industry, it just brings you up to the next level. It’s such an important industry for our province, an industry that for 150 years, ever since B.C. came into existence, built this province. This is the industry that helped many families secure good family-supporting jobs all across B.C., including the Lower Mainland.

I am a direct beneficiary of the forest industry, having spent most of my working life before this job in the forest industry, first as a worker in the sawmill and then as a union official representing those workers who were employed in the forest industry. So my family benefitted tremendously, along with thousands of other families over 150 years. I’m sure there isn’t one person in British Columbia that isn’t touched by the benefits of the forest industry in our province.

That’s why it becomes so important that every time we talk about the forest industry or any changes we are talking about, that we review it, that we monitor it with a fine-tooth comb so that we don’t make any mistakes. I will talk about Bill 25, a number of different areas. There are some concerns in the bill, and I shared that with the minister.

As my colleague from Columbia River–Revelstoke mentioned earlier, the minister on that side, who garnered a lot of respect from all sides of this House and the industry and people outside of the industry, I think is genuinely trying to make the forest industry a little better place for all of us to work and benefit from.

Again, the dynamics all around these changes you need to really examine — whether these are going to be benefits to our British Columbians and our industry. Now there are different components. I’ll talk about that separately in each one of them and expand that later on.

Basically what Bill 25 does…. The minister explained a number of different areas that this touched, but there are about three or four that I will touch briefly and then will expand into it. The amendment to the Forest Act implements the recommendation that came out of the B.C. Timber Sales role and effectiveness review. That’s what we are talking about.

It came out of the B.C. Timber Sales role and effectiveness review report written by…. I think it was chaired by John Allan, who has a good name in the industry, with the industry and on the workers’ side and with the government. But that report will not be made public. I think there are different reasons, and I understand the minister has said that they will not be made public.

Of the changes allowed with major licensees, I think this is a big one. It allows major licensees to sell their unused AAC to the government. Then the government will then put that in BCTS, and the BCTS will place that timber in their system, which means that it’ll be opened up, as all of the other BCTS-operated and -managed forests, put up for bids and the successful bidder will go and harvest. That way that timber is made available to the industry, which otherwise it wouldn’t have been.

I mean, that’s the argument that the minister made. I think that generally that’s what he’s trying to do. The timber that normally would not have been made available to the industry because a licensee decided not to cut their total AAC that year…. They would let that unused AAC portion go to BCTS, and someone would come and harvest and make it available through auctions to anyone who needs it.

In theory, I think it looks good, but if you really examine it, it has really serious implications to the working people who are dependent on the forest industry — the workers, the unionized workers and others.

I will go into these individual issues one by one, but let me go back to put things in perspective — you know, where we started and where we are ending up with this bill. Or at least that’s the risk — where we will end up.

[1345]

If you go back to the history of the forest industry, about 100 years ago our government of the day decided that 95 percent of those forests were owned by the government, by people of the province, and that we need to utilize them for the benefit of British Columbians. How did they do that? They invited the industry and said: “Look, these trees are available to you. You have a vast supply of raw material. But in return, we expect you to harvest them and manufacture them in your own mills.”

Originally, through an appurtenancy clause in the Forest Act, a certain part of the forest was directly tied to a mill. The idea was: “Yes, we will give you a tree farm licence and clearcutting and harvesting rights for that area, but you must harvest and manufacture in your own mill, that particular mill.”

It went on for a number of years until the 1980s. I think the minister of the day really watered it down, that appurtenancy clause. Basically, he changed it to…. Rather than an area of timber directly tied to a mill, the new language was instituted, by way of legislation, that now the company holding a tree farm licence must utilize the equivalent volume in their own mills or mills owned by their affiliates. And there was a definition of who the affiliates are.

Again, they gave them the total AAC and said: “All of that AAC must be utilized in your own mills or the mills that are owned by your affiliates.” You could move timber from one area and then feed another sawmill, so no one

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particular mill was tied to that particular timber. I think that was the area. I thought they were trying to make it more practical to move timber around to feed the mills that may not have the timber tied to them.

Then in 2003, when this government got elected, under the so-called Forestry Revitalization Act it completely cancelled that social contract that existed between the companies, the government and the people of this province through their government. That social contract now is gone.

The timber holders now do not need to process any stick of wood in their own mills. So they would own a tree farm licence, but they are not required now to process them in their mills. The result is a high volume of log exports. I think that was the sliding slope that the government started. And cut control was gone as well.

Let’s face it. We are a province with many, many forest-dependent communities. They are smaller communities. People of the day, in their wisdom, said that there has to be some activity in the forest industry to keep those communities working. Having some economic activities continues to keep those people working at the gas stations, the grocery stores and so forth.

They were required under that social contract to harvest a minimum of 50 percent of their AAC — or 50 percent plus or minus 50 percent, but over a five-year cycle they must be within 5 or 10 percent. Now that

part is also gone.

All of those changes were made — so that the people who are listening know — with a promise from the industry, on the coast especially. This industry, the coastal industry, required heavy investment to upgrade their mills to be competitive with the rest of the world. They pledged $2 billion to invest in those sawmills, to upgrade them. That was the promise made by the industry in return for what the government gave them under the Forestry Revitalization Act.

[1350]

Well, the industry got what they wanted, but the people of this province did not get their part of the bargain. Investment that was promised in return for those changes…. Guess what happened to those investments. I’ll give you some numbers. These are astonishing numbers that blow your mind.

That $2 billion that was supposed to be invested here in British Columbia — guess what happened. Three major British Columbian companies…. West Fraser now owns 15 sawmills in the United States, compared with seven in B.C. and five in Alberta, and 36 percent of shipments of lumber can now come from United States mills. In 2001 they had one mill in the United States.

Interfor now owns five sawmills in B.C. and nine in the United States. Now they will add — I think they have added them — another four mills this year. So about 43 percent of Interfor’s current production capacity is in B.C. and 57 percent in the U.S.

I might add, while I’m on Interfor, that when that Forestry Revitalization Act was passed, McDonald Cedar, which existed in the Fraser Valley…. What happened to that mill? They picked up that mill and moved about 20 kilometres across the line. They set up their shop there. They did it because they were allowed to do that, because no one would question them holding a tree farm licence and not processing those trees in their own mill. That’s what happened.

Canfor owns 12 sawmills in B.C., one in Alberta and ten in the U.S. It also owns four pulp mills in B.C., one wood bioenergy plant in Alberta and one in B.C.

That’s the result of that Forestry Revitalization Act. I might add it was ill-thought-out, did not help the industry. Since that time — and the government is on record — we had over 150 mills closed in B.C. Over 30,000 workers lost good-paying, family-supporting jobs that once existed before the Forestry Revitalization Act was brought in.

While they’re shutting down mills here…. It’s not that they’re expanding. It would be fine if they were expanding — maintaining their mills in B.C. and expanding to the United States and making some business decisions. Fair enough. But no, they’re shutting mills down here in B.C. and setting up those shops in the United States. No wonder 30,000 jobs were lost in B.C.

The government will stand up and argue: “Well, we had some bad times.” Yes, there were some not-very-good times in the forest industry in the last few years, but that was not the only reason we lost those jobs. I would say a big reason was government policy, lack of vision and basically giving away British Columbians’ resources to the industry without getting anything in return through a social contract.

That is shameful. The government is the custodian on behalf of the public — custodian of those forests, as I said, that fed our families, that built this province for 150 years. They simply let it go — simply let it go. That’s not a very good record for this government.

When you look at so many other different things and look at this, it just shows the complete failure of this government to continue to have a thriving forest industry and continue to have an industry that once was the engine that drove the economy of this province. They simply mismanaged it year after year after year.

Not only that. We’re losing jobs, and we are not getting the benefits or the value from the logs that we have, that we harvest. Here’s an example. The other jurisdictions are doing a much better job.

[1355]

Let’s take a look. Quebec — this is how many jobs they create with 476 cubic metres per job. In Quebec they create one job with 476 cubic metres of logs. So 29.2 million cubic metres — the logs that they have — and they create 61,300 jobs.

In Ontario they create one job with 328 cubic metres.

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In B.C. it takes 1,470 cubic metres for each job. That’s four times Quebec and Ontario. I mean, something’s wrong with this picture. Ontario’s economy is dependent not only on its forest industry, but on many other manufacturing and other sectors of the economy. But we were the forest industry province. We depended on the forest industry. We just let it slide, gave it away, rather than being a good custodian and looking after our forests not only for today but for our future, for our children.

It’s such a shame, and it’s embarrassing, actually, the opportunities that my generation, our generation and the generation before had. When I started at Eburne sawmills in 1973, we had three generations working in that mill. The grandfather started, his son started, and his son started. They all ended up working their lifetimes at Eburne sawmills. Today no worker in the forest industry is encouraging their sons or daughters to come and work in the forest industry because they don’t see a future. This government isn’t giving them hope that there is a future in the forest industry.

Again, how bad we are…. Since 1990, B.C. has now got about 50 percent worse at creating jobs with the amount of timber. From 1991 to 2001 — an average of 787 cubic metres per job for those ten years. Now it is 1,470, and from 2002 to 2012, 1,400. Ontario and Quebec got better, 14 percent and 13 percent better over the same period, because somebody is paying attention to their forest industry — the very, very important and precious forest industry.

So that’s the problem. The problem is that government has turned a blind eye to the forest industry. I could go on about how bad we are when it comes to managing our forest industry. I could look at different areas of how bad we are. Since the Forestry Revitalization Act became

an act, the social contract is gone. There’s no justification for mill closures and no requirement for the companies to process their equivalent volume of the tree farm licence in their own mills.

Guess what’s happening? I’ve just said 30,000 jobs lost and 150 plants shut down. But here’s a little history on log exports. Log exports ballooned in that same period — ballooned. So 2013 was the highest number: 6.7 million cubic metres of logs were shipped abroad — 6.7 million exported. Last year wasn’t any better; it was just under 6.7 million.

In the meantime, we have mills, manufacturers, here in B.C. looking for that timber. They’re not running at full capacity because they have no logs available to them, or they’re shut down, or they’re running on only a one-shift basis. From 1987 to 2012 I’ll give you a little….

[1400]

The minister sometimes, and other members of the House, will stand up and say: “Well, you know, log exports — it’s always been the case.” In 1987 it was three million cubic metres exported; in 1995, 692,000. In 1997 only 270,000 cubic metres were shipped out. That’s like running one mill on half a shift — one shift, not on two shifts. But 6.7 million? It’s like running ten sawmills on a two-shift basis, every size of sawmill, for a full year. Then from 1997, 1999, 2000, 2005, it went up to about 5 million cubic metres. It just continued on from 2000 until 6.7 million — record-breaking — in 2013.

Like I said, in the meantime we have mills that are looking for that timber. They’re not running at full capacity. Therefore, job opportunities for our workers coming out of high schools and coming out of universities are not there. Jobs are created somewhere else with our resources. That’s not right.

Bill 25 does not address that issue. It does not. So I gave that little history. That’s what this bill could do. First, we had a strong appurtenancy timber tied to a sawmill, and then the company timber tied to their mills. And in 2003 that social contract was gone with no requirement of the industry or the company to process those logs in their own mills. That is gone.

But now under this bill they can sell their AAC back to the government, the AAC that belonged to us, the public. And they were given that AAC because they made the argument and convinced the government and the minister of the day that they needed those logs to process them in their own mills to create jobs for British Columbians. That was the requirement of them obtaining their licence.

Also, at that time, when they tore up that social contract, they allowed these companies who got their AAC by adding and including their private timber holdings to have the AAC overall. So there was Crown timber given to them because they were bringing their private timber holdings into it. And then the government allowed them to subdivide that and sell the private portion that they brought into it as a condition of getting that AAC.

You see the pattern? Now we are talking about, under this bill, that now they don’t even have to harvest them. They can sell the unused AAC back to the government, who owns that timber in the first place. They’re selling it back to the government, and the government, through BCTS, puts it in their system so that somebody else comes in and harvests it and then makes it available to whoever.

Now they don’t have any responsibility. They hold timber licenses, but there’s no requirement for the public of this province to get their return on it. Just because they’ve got a timber licence, what right do they have to sell it back to the government? If they don’t use that AAC, then they don’t use that AAC.

First of all, there should be a requirement that if they have that AAC, they must use it. So with Bill 25, it would allow them to sell. They’re selling something that we already own. We gave it to them because they made an argument that they needed that timber to run their mills. Now they’re not even required to harvest it, they sell it and make money off of it. Now we are turning it into a private property for these companies. That’s where we started, and now this is where we’re going.

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This is not a good deal for British Columbians, and I will have all kinds of questions at the committee stage on that. That one area is a serious concern. It is serious, serious stuff, what’s happening in the forest industry. Like my colleagues have said before, I have faith in this minister, as a custodian on behalf of the government and on behalf of the public. The minister better take a serious look at the direction that we are going because it is not the right thing to do, what we’re doing.

Again, when we are talking about log exports, it was supposedly the excess timber to our domestic market. That’s what the rules are. For that reason, to determine whether it is excess or not, the government, the minister has created what’s called the timber export advisory committee, made up of members from the industry. They know the industry. Over 100 times, when applications for export came to them in 2013, the minister overruled them. What a sham.

That’s not how you run a forest industry that built this province. We have an issue. There’s no doubt. On the coast we have close to 20.8 million, almost 21, cubic metres of AAC, but the mill consumption is about 12 million. So there are about eight, nine million cubic metres of excess timber available on the coast. And we have mills that are not running at full capacity because they can’t get those logs.

What’s wrong with that picture? Don’t you think the government has to show some leadership to make this industry the envy of the world? I just gave you some numbers. Ontario is doing better. Quebec is doing better. But we’re not. We’re in the last place when it comes to creating jobs with our resources. Western Forest Products on the coast have over two million cubic metres of excess wood, and they export. In the meantime they are shutting down another sawmill. They shut down another sawmill in Nanaimo. Not good.

Then we have wildland-urban interface. This is an area that was identified by Filmon after the Kelowna fire. There are 685,000 hectares around those communities identified as high risk. Only 68,000 in 11 years have been cleared, so we still continue to put those communities at risk.

I just want to get back…. My time is running out. That is a big concern: allowing unused AAC by these licence holders to sell it back to the government. The other one is the bonus bids. Now they can bid, but if they don’t proceed to harvest what they bid for, there’s no penalty, because that deposit is not going to be forfeited.

Mr. Speaker, I think those are the things…. There is so much else — stuff to talk about. Maybe I will use my…. Being a designated speaker, I could go over maybe a minute or two on this one.

Then also, on the community forest, government is proposing under Bill 25 that they will reserve the right to have the reservation in new community forests, so that BCTS can go and harvest. That is a concern to the community forest operators.

Then we have what we call NSR, not sufficiently restocked, areas. Two million hectares that the Auditor General has identified in their report and which the Forest Practices Board identified. Two million hectares that should be restocked, replanted is not. Every area you look at, you see mismanagement after mismanagement after mismanagement.

[1410]

I know we want to finish today earlier, so I will not take a lot of time. But I have so many questions about that one particular part of the section. I think it’s

section 8 of the bill. If the minister cannot convince us that it is not going to harm the forestry workers who will be affected by it, then I can’t support it.

The worry the unionized workers have is that now these companies, the tree farm licence holders who have a unionized workforce, could easily decide not to cut their AAC and give that or sell that to the government, to BCTS, and some other non-union contractor will come and take the timber. In the meantime the unionized workers will be sitting at home.

It’s a worry why the unions and those workers…. This will lead to deunionization of the logging industry on the coast — a serious concern. If that’s the case, and I hope that it’s an unintended consequence, it’s a significant consequence to those workers and those communities.

Many of those contractors, as I mentioned, are unionized. They are local contractors, they have roots in those communities, and they reinvest in their communities,

whereas when you go through BCTS, those contractors have no connection to those communities.

The companies will use it every which way. That’s the fear of the workers, and I sympathize with them. This way the company will easily say: “I’m not using and cutting all of my AAC — giving it to BCTS.” Somebody else comes in.

They make money. They still make money without doing anything, but at the same time, the workers are losing because their work will now be work by somebody else.

I think that is a serious concern. We will have so many questions on this, Mr. Speaker. I will have more questions at that time, and I’m sure that my colleagues will have more questions on this.

With that, because of time constraints today, I will take my place and thank you very much for the time and allowing me to make those comments.

M. Morris: It’s my pleasure to stand up and speak in support of Bill 25. I’ll speak from personal experience with respect to the Land Act. I went through a Land Act application a number of years ago — longer than a decade ago, anyways — and the process was very onerous. A lengthy process, a lot of unnecessary steps, in my view as the applicant. It tied up a lot of administrative resources at the land office, a lot of inspections and a whole lot of activity related to probably some archaic terms that were

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in the Land Act. The Land Act hasn’t been looked at in any great detail for the past 40 or 50 years.

I can understand these relatively simple changes to the Land Act. I think it’s going to make things a heck of a lot easier for any of the applicants out there that want to get into adventure tourism, that want to get into some of these activities that shouldn’t trigger a whole list of administrative activities and burden on government and on the applicants. I think those amendments are going to be very much appreciated by the folks that are out there.

I’m going to concentrate a little bit more…. And the other amendments in there I don’t think are very elaborate changes to the Land Surveyors Act — pretty straightforward and whatnot.

I’m going to focus a little bit more on the forestry aspect of things. The world has changed. The member opposite went into a lot of detail about how things used to be in the past, and I can understand that. That’s when he was most familiar with the industry. The industry has changed significantly since the forest practices code. The Forest and Range Practices Act and the planning regulations were results-based, where the legislation was put in place to make things work.

I think it was working pretty good, but then a phenomenon came along. That phenomenon was the mountain pine beetle epidemic that has hit my area hard and the Quesnel area, the Williams Lake area, the whole Interior of the province, where we saw the AAC almost double in some respects.

[1415]

Forestry has been the mainstay of my community, in Prince George and Mackenzie and the central Interior, right from the time that the then Forests Minister back in the 1960s, Ray Williston, had a vision for an expanded forest industry throughout British Columbia, established the pulp sector and created some more opportunities in the forest industry. We saw the AAC go from 20 million cubic metres a year in the Interior forest area up to 70 million cubic metres a year. It held that volume pretty steady over the number of decades since the ’60s — 60 million, 70 million cubic metres.

Then along came that tiny little beetle that just decimated the Interior forests, and government had to take some fairly quick action and increase the AAC. In some years, just recent years, we reached 90 million cubic metres per year in the Interior. A lot of the forest was cut down and processed as a result of that.

Industry rose to the challenge. They produced sawmills that were capable of not only handling the extra volume but the depreciated condition of the wood itself, the fine dust particles. We’ve seen the results of that, the tragic results of that, and the technology that has developed since.

Not only in that way but in the processing of that wood — they became very efficient at it. The member opposite was talking about so many cubic metres of wood for so many jobs in Quebec and Ontario. British Columbia is leading the world in forest technology, and the sawmills that we’ve produced in British Columbia today are reflective of that.

There are less people working in those sawmills because of the automation involved. There are less injuries involved in those sawmills because of the automation involved.

Not only that but on the logging side as well. When we have feller-bunchers nowadays that can cut between 750 and 1,000 metres per day, that is also replacing a lot of the workers out there, but it’s a lot safer for the workers in the forest industry. We’ve seen a significant decline in the number of injuries related to that.

All saying that because of the increased capacity to the sawmills, the increased capacity of the harvesting techniques that we have, we’ve been able to meet that 90-million-cubic-metre threshold the last few years. It’s had an impact on the land base. It’s had an impact on B.C. Timber Sales and the availability of fibre for those people in order to maintain a market pricing system that we have in British Columbia, which is connected to the softwood lumber agreement.

B.C. Timber Sales requires 20 percent of the volume throughout the province that is reflective of the type and kind of wood that the forest industry is harvesting itself. That wood is available in community forest lots. It’s available through First Nations timber allocations. It’s available in several types of areas throughout the province.

The amendments that Bill 25 speaks about are providing the province that ability to expand the community forest licences. The ministry has a tremendous amount of pressure on from all community forests in the province, and other communities that don’t have them, to expand or create community forest licences for those particular areas. This legislative change will allow that to take place. It’s also going to allow B.C. Timber Sales, in order to reflect the types and size of wood, to have that opportunity to use wood from the community forest licences.

The benefits that accrue to First Nations as a result of community forests or as a result of some of the licences that they have in the program…. McLeod Lake is a good example — McLeod Lake Indian Band, which is in my riding. They’ve got a significant annual cut, and they supply not only their own mill, which they’ve just built in Mackenzie, but they supply fibre to Canfor. They supply fibre to Conifex. They supply fibre to anybody else that wants it in that particular area there.

It has provided good-paying jobs for the members of the McLeod Lake Indian Band, and it’s provided a revenue stream for them that has paid some pretty good dividends for the community. We’ve seen a significant increase in the social development of that community as a result of the impact of these types of licences they have there.

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[ Page 8179 ]

This is allowing a little bit more flexibility for government in not only meeting our requirements in making a determination for a market pricing system, but it also makes some allowances to provide that extra capacity and those jobs for the communities through the community forest program, the First Nations licensing program.

Some of the costs that the member opposite was talking about and some of the pressures that we now have on industry and on government today as a result of the mountain pine beetle epidemic are that the mills have logged significant areas from the mill outward. So the distance to haul the wood into the milling facilities is fairly significant, and it’s increased their costs.

The member opposite was talking about how back in the old days the community supported the mill, and the wood was taken into the local sawmill. That was probably an accurate description 30 or 40 years ago, when the wood was handy to those local mills. But because of the cost of technology, because of the cost of infrastructure and the money that these companies have put into the mills, we can’t have these types of sawmills in every kind of community. Of course, the capacity in the province would be far exceeded.

The industry now is faced with the problem of: how do we minimize our costs? How can we remain competitive in the world, still maintain that competitive edge, get the fibre into the sawmills, into the processing plants, and still make a dollar out of it?

The other pressure that we have on the fibre supply in British Columbia — and Bill 25 addressed that — is that we no longer have just sawmills. We’ve got pellet plants. We’ve got bioenergy plants. We have an increasing number of bioeconomic sources to use fibre in British Columbia.

We have to be a little bit more nimble. We have to be a little bit more efficient on ensuring that we get that fibre into those processing plants in the most economical fashion that we can. The old tradition of cutting a log and throwing it on a truck and hauling it into the sawmill — that works in some cases, but now we have to figure out how we’re going to bring in the branches and all the other pieces of that tree so that these bioeconomic plants can utilize that fibre and provide jobs for British Columbians and contribute to the economy.

I notice that the member opposite made a comment about the fact that the forest industry used to be a driver in the provincial economy. Well, it still is. It is one of the major engines of the British Columbian economy, and it will maintain that place in our economy. It employs over 100,000 people in direct and indirect employment and contributes billions of dollars to the provincial economy through all the good jobs that it provides, in addition to all the taxes we have here.

I think Bill 25 is going to enhance that ability. It’s going to provide government with the ability to help industry be more competitive; help our communities in the community forests expansion, trying to find that fibre that they need; and keep B.C. Timber Sales as a viable tool in the market pricing system determination here in the province. I think we’re taking the right steps forward here, and I look forward to the continuing debate on this.

B. Routley: I, too, want to join with the minister and others who commented about Darrel Wong’s passing. He became a friend of mine. Darrel and I worked together in bargaining over the years, starting back in the 1980s. Darrel became the president of Local 71 of the IWA, which was known as the loggers local.

[1425]

He was a guy with real class and dignity. He was a problem-solver. I can honestly say he talked me away from the ledge several times in terms of the frustration and anger that I was feeling. He was the kind of guy that would try to find the solution and work with everyone on that solution. I’m going to really miss brother Darrel Wong.

I attended his funeral, and there were people from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as folks from industry and from the labour movement and the workers who worked with him and his family friends, who would all join together in saying that he was a guy that all of us will remember fondly for his class, his dignity, his work ethic and his friendship and loyalty to all of his friends.

Having said that, I want to move on. I know that brother Darrel and I talked many times about the changes in the forest industry. While members have talked about some of the technological advances…. That’s true. There was no question that we saw logging go through technological change and manufacturing plants. However, the companies and the government of British Columbia didn’t do what was possible.

When I look at countries like Sweden…. I want to go back. I almost got to finish this story, so I’m going to go back and remind those that may have forgotten that when I was in Sweden, I went to a small town that had an old mill.

You know, they could have just shut it down and walked away, but that company said: “We’ve got 100 people in this mill, and the new Linck mill is only going to require less than half of that.” So that third-generation sawmill owner had the good grace and the class to say: “Well, wait a minute. I’ve been part of this community all this time, and so I have an obligation to the community to do something, to be innovative and try and find a way to employ 100 people.”

I was, I must say, thunderstruck with his vision when we talked to him, and he told me that that was the plan from the stage of drafting a new mill — how are we going to invest in new opportunities?

So you know what they ended up building was a laminated beam section. They built a finger-joining sec-

[ Page 8180 ]

tion. They built a dry kiln and a new planer mill. They built all of this stuff, and guess what. Not only did that company survive, they thrived.

Why did they thrive? Because you had a small community business that knew the value of the community, of the workers, of pulling together to come up with a huge opportunity. They were actually competing with the steel industry with laminated beams. I was, again, very, very impressed.

That was back in about 1989. Certainly, they had gone through changes in Scandinavia as well, but they already had improved forestry practices. In fact, the group that I was with was called B.C. future forest study group, and the provincial and federal governments, I think, put money into that program for us to go.

I know that there were contractors with us. There were industry people with us. There were labour folks along as well. We were very impressed by what we saw and what we learned in terms of the forest practices in that country. That brings me back to British Columbia and how we have unfolded our tenure reform and practices here in British Columbia.

You know, I still remember — in fact, I still have a copy of the document here, the old newspaper from April 2003 — when the B.C. Liberal government at the time said: “Oh, we have got a new plan.” They took out a full-page ad. Now, let’s just review it, and see how they’re doing.

Let’s do a bit of a report card on what really happened, because here’s what they said in their ad. Their B.C. heartland strategy and this new forest revitalization was going to diversify the economy for global competitiveness. Fail. No, that didn’t happen. We’ve got corporate concentration, and I’ll go through that in a minute.

[1430]

Now let’s talk about how we’re going open up new opportunities for smaller companies and value-added. Again, fail. Why? Because the value-added industry, the remanufacturing industry, reports themselves that they’ve been gutted. Less than half the value-added and remanufacturing jobs remain in British Columbia. That is a real, real, serious failure. It has nothing to do with the technological change. It has everything to do with the policy of this government and what they did in impacting value-added and remanufacturing. But that’s what they promised.

That was their promise then. Value-added industry, community forests, woodlots. Oh, they were going to sustain good high-paying jobs. Wrong. We lost 25,000 forest jobs. That’s after you account for the 10,000 that they have added back in some places with new opportunities. But we’re still short 25,000 because it was over 35,000 that lost their jobs. More than 204 manufacturing plants were closed to forest communities all over British Columbia.

The other thing in that ad. It says…. This is directly related to this Bill 25 and the proposal to deal with B.C. Timber Sales. Here in this ad, this dusty ad that I dusted off and looked at…. Again, it’s quite amazing to read through. It says the revitalization plan “will achieve this by reallocating 20 percent of timber now held by the major forest companies. The amount of timber that will eventually be available through the open market will grow to 45 percent.” Nope, that didn’t happen either, and there was going to be no changes in the current restrictions on the export of logs from Crown lands. Well, no.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

I guess they can claim “wrap their arms around the old legislation,” but there was a little matter of the minister acknowledging and agreeing that he did sit down and basically tell the timber export advisory committee: “That’s all very interesting what you guys think, but I’ve got a better plan. We’re going to cancel, if not dozens….” I know it was over 85 timber export licences that other people wanted to claim back. No, it wasn’t permitted.

You look at those promised changes for the better. Again, it’s really sad, actually. I’m not happy to report that it’s all bad news and all wrong, but it is the reality. It’s all about holding people accountable for what they say and what we find in reality.

They also said: “Marketing our forest practices to the world. B.C. is leading the way in scientific, sustainable forest management.” Well, wait a minute. We laid off all the scientific and research people in the Ministry of Forests. Cut the research staff completely. Laid off more than 1,006 workers who worked for the Ministry of Forests.

In fact, we did away with the Ministry of Forests. We have Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations — the minister of licencing. But we don’t have a Minister of Forests in the province of British Columbia. That’s how much they really think about the forests. There’s not even a real focus on the forests of British Columbia with this plan.

You also think we need to look more at the forest revitalization package. You know, it was a confusing time. The Liberals introduced Bill 27, the market-based pricing piece. Oh, market-based pricing. Well, wasn’t there something about us selling 60 percent of the timber for 25 cents a cubic metre? That’s a real…. Well, I don’t know. There’s got to be something to it. We’ve got to look further into that one.

Then there’s Bill 28, tenure reallocation and industry compensation. All part of the transition: Bill 28; forestry revitalization changes to tenure obligations, Bill 29; and defined forest areas management, Bill 24. Confusion reigned the day.

[1435]

The tabling of all of these bills — the Liberals were in such a rush that they were forced to do multiple amendments to fix their own mistakes. In some cases, they had to introduce amendments to further weaken their own bills.

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I want to talk about corporate consolidation in the province of British Columbia. Talk about a tragic story. We’ve now got five major forest companies and two smaller ones. We’ve got, in the Interior mostly, Canfor and West Fraser. And Interfor, Tolko forest industries. We’ve got Western Forest Products. Those are the big five, and then you’ve got the private land owners, TimberWest and Island Timberlands on the coast. So you’ve this corporate concentration that has taken place.

I don’t think it would be missed on anyone that these biggest forest companies in B.C…. It has been mentioned already, but it’s worth repeating again so that we really understand the picture of what’s happened to British Columbia. Did we give the farm away intentionally? I don’t know. Maybe not. I hope not.

When you hear that B.C.’s largest forest company, West Fraser, now owns 15 American mills compared to just seven in B.C. and five in Alberta…. Interfor owns five sawmills in B.C., nine in the United States and will add four more mills this year. Canfor owns 12 mills in British Columbia, one in Alberta and ten in the U.S.A. You look at what’s been happening with that corporate consolidation. Anybody hear something about what happened to the towns of Houston and Quesnel — when corporate concentration leads to serious impacts on forest communities in British Columbia?

More and more forest communities are feeling the impact of this corporate concentration. Forest workers and their families are losing jobs by the hundreds and have continued to be in a very difficult situation in forest communities, while we watch the logs roll down the road.

The little town of Youbou. The former forest workers there get to cover the dust. If you try to hang out some clothes in your backyard in Youbou right now, the dust just coats them. Why? Because they’re exporting logs. That’s what we get. We get left in the dust. That’s what happens to the people in Honeymoon Bay. It used to be a mill town, Honeymoon Bay. Little Mesachie. There was a mill there too. All the mills on Lake Cowichan are gone. Every single one.

I used to walk on the logs on Cowichan Lake. That used to be my job, partly, when I was on the boom. I enjoyed the fresh outdoors and working on the booming grounds, seeing logs for miles and miles and manufacturing in the community. You could feel the value that it gave to our communities. All gone. Now we just get to watch the logs drive through town and wave as they go by.

The forest revitalization plan relocated 20 percent of the timber to the large companies for B.C. Timber Sales. The interesting part of that is that the tenure takeback was intended to help solve the softwood lumber dispute by making more timber available. On the coast the takeback resulted in lower stumpage instead, by 7 percent. I don’t think they achieved their goal, because a lot of what was allowed to take place was that companies got to pick and choose what went into the pot in terms of that 20 percent.

You know, the major forest companies’ impact on small forest companies throughout British Columbia has been profound. Not just on value-added have they lost half their value-added industries; the truck loggers.

[1440]

Not only the current Truck Loggers president but the former Truck Loggers president Mr. Yochim talked about how their members are being sent letters by the industry saying,

“Here’s your rate, and if you don’t like it, we’ll see you in arbitration,” which costs those small contractors $80,000.

All you have to do is drive by any of the Ritchie Bros.outlets, and you can see logging equipment from all over British Columbia lined up. Why? The rates have actually gone backwards. This is the result of the Liberal plan. This was planned: stuff the pockets of the biggest corporations in British Columbia with cash, and let the community stakeholders and small contractors and the workers go and get in the unemployment line or go and take their equipment and sell it off.

I watched as companies like Ted LeRoy, Madill…. I used to represent the workers that worked in Madill all those years. They had a wonderful company, treated their workers with dignity and respect. But what happened was the total collapse of so many of those companies. Munn’s Lumber….

Only five years earlier Donald Hayes had been told he was one of the top companies. He was in B.C. Business Magazine , if you can imagine. But that was before this government’s legislation. Now he, too, fell by the axe of all of these changes and was put into bankruptcy as a result of this corporate consolidation.

That forest revitalization plan has made tenures more like private property. A debate on this can’t go by without pointing out the obvious in Bill 25. First of all, these companies had appurtenancy that applied to tree farm licences, meaning they had to have a manufacturing plant or a pulp mill. That was tied to: “We’ll give you the timber licence, but you, in return, are going to give us something to ensure that we have community jobs.” Jobs and sustainability for communities — that was the promise.

Make no mistake. I heard executive after executive stand in front of crews and say: “Oh, this is all about sustainability.” All those mills closed now, and they stood there in front of them and said: “Oh, we’ve got sustainability. We’ve got wood forever. We’ll take you up in a helicopter and show you we’ve a lot of timber.”

The reality is the cut came down dramatically as a result of all of all of these changes, unprecedented consolidation. We’ve had Western Forest Products. Russ Cameron says that Western is an oligopoly. That’s a hard word for me. It’s not quite as good as jiggery-pokery, but it’s pretty close. Oligopoly — I’m sure that’s bad. It doesn’t sound good. But it is true that all of these jiggery-pokery changes….

You look at what was told the good people of British

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Columbia. They actually put it in ink and said: “Oh, look what we’re going to do for you.” But you know, you turn the page. Most of the time it’s yesterday’s news, and it’s thrown in the garbage. Nobody notices. But I happened to keep that because I thought it might be important one day. Isn’t that funny that I managed to store away the Liberals’ promises from 2003 and all the wonderful things. Sadly, in each and every case they’ve failed — not a good thing for forest families in British Columbia.

The 20 percent clawback. That resulted…. I remember my conversation with brother Darrel Wong on this one. I asked Darrel what the impact was to the loggers in terms of jobs. He said that as a result of the takeback of 20 percent, we lost 1,000 unionized forest workers in communities throughout British Columbia — 1,000. That’s just loggers. Never mind the…. Who knows where the timber ended up, although I will be talking about that later.

[1445]

While they clawed it back and got paid some money, there seems to be some of it coming back at the end of the day.

But the point is that working people living in communities all over B.C. lost family-supporting jobs because they worked in camps like Port Renfrew or Caycuse. Any of the major logging camps that had crews lost timber supply, so you had to downsize the crew. And then what happened? B.C. Timber Sales would mark out and tape out a block, and somebody from up the coast would come down to a camp on Vancouver Island. I witnessed this myself. They’d bring in a bunch of trucks and a few power saws and a few pieces of equipment on a machine and go and do a few cutblocks. But that was not creating community-supporting jobs. It was a race to the bottom — a race to the bottom for the lowest cost.

Who benefited from that? It sure wasn’t the people of British Columbia. All it did was replace good-paying, unionized jobs with contractors who bid the lowest rate they could. Now a lot of them are going out of business. You just drive by and see their logging equipment stacked up by the side of the highway for sale, and you know that this has been a dismal failure.

Now this government has a plan. Get this. We’ve already gone from, “We’re going to grant you a licence….” Then they could run down to the bank in the old days. They’d grant you a huge forest land licence. They could go to any bank and say: “We need the money to build a mill.” They could borrow the money at, I’m sure, a very premium interest rate, given all the land holdings in this licence to cut that was guaranteed. Sure, it was tied to a mill, but everybody thought it was a good thing. Now all of that’s gone.

Then this government decides, back in the early 2000s, to do away with the private land portion of a tree farm licence. They tear that out and say: “Well, you can take your private land back.” I want you to think about this, hon. Speaker, and everyone that’s in the room. If you were looking at harvesting a pie, if you were going to take 1/80…. My first tree farm licence, TFL 46, said: “We’re going to take 1/80 of the trees” — an 80-year rotation. Now they’re down to 35- or 40-year rotations.

But if you were going to take 1/80 of it, you were going to work your way around that pie. And guess what. Part of that pie was the private land portion, in TFL 46. The private land portion. They did leave the private land alone a lot more, and they cut the rest of the pie based on the inclusion of that land. That land made up the forest pie that allowed the Ministry of Forests at the time to calculate the annual allowable cut. But when you allowed them to take it out, what you effectively did was make every year, for the last 50 years prior to that, wrong. Every AAC reduction or cut was wrong because you were including land that has now been taken out.

Well, okay, you can readjust it. Math is math. You can just figure out what’s left — if you’ve got an inventory. If you’ve got an inventory, you can do that. But that’s a whole other subject we could go into. We still have a problem with inventory in the province of British Columbia. In spite of all these promises, we still hear from the Auditor General, we hear from the professional foresters, and we hear from the Forest Practices Board concerns about things like inventory, things like safety on our bridges and our roads. It has really been a tragic race to the bottom.

This government bragged about cutting regulations. I went into the library and looked it up. You know, anybody should go and take a look at what this government did to WCB regulations. And they’re proud of it. They cut 5,445 regulations out. I could go through all the dates. July 1, 2003, to September 30, they cut 1,834. And on it goes. All of those regulations cut — basically written in blood, in my opinion. I’m not going to go there. I’d get myself too upset again.

[1450]

But I do have to say that it is unacceptable to me that we have cut all these regulations — cut regulations in the Forest Act. We’ve consolidated the forest industry so there’s nothing left but a bunch of oligopolies, and here we are. Now the government says that if you’ve got a licence to cut timber, you can give a little of it back as standing timber. Think about it. The public first says, “Okay here’s a nice piece of timber,” and then says, through Bill 25, “Oh, we’ll pay a little for taking it back.”

What? All these years under cut control the way it worked is that you had to cut within a specified period. I think it was, five years. There was plus or minus 50 percent. At some point, though, you could potentially lose your cut. Of course, often they would write a nice letter to the minister and explain the difficult circumstances, and they wouldn’t be penalized. If they were penalized, the government had the unilateral right to take it back for violating these cut controls — take the timber away.

Now we’re talking about giving them…. First we give

[ Page 8183 ]

them the timber. Now we’re going to pay them not to cut, if you can imagine such a thing. If you don’t feel like cutting your timber this year, not all of it, you can give a little bit back. B.C. Timber Sales will buy it back is the way I read it. We’ve got a lot of questions. Obviously, there are a lot of questions that we’ve got to go through with this legislation.

While I’m there, I’ve got to comment how weird it is that in this place we get to talk for half an hour about a bill and then when we get into the third reading, we finally get into asking questions about what it all means. It is a bit humorous. I do have to say that from the point of view of a working-class guy, the idea that we come in and talk for half an hour about the thing and then get to ask questions in detail and go through clause by clause later somehow is backwards, in my view. I don’t know whether the minister will join me in correcting that, but it seems like a strange thing.

I would ask the minister, and I know he is…. You know, people have talked about him as being a gentleman, as a concerned citizen, as a minister that’s, out of the whole bunch, not bad to talk to. Why? Because he’s at least got the patience to…. He sees through our stuff. He understands we’ve got a job to do; we understand he’s got a job to do.

I really do wonder how this could possibly be in the public interest. Like, how…? What? It’s in the public interest to, first of all, give them a gift of timber rights? Now we don’t even expect anything in return. “You don’t have to build us a sawmill or a pulp mill anymore.” No, that’s all gone. Appurtenancy is gone. Now, in fact, you can shut down a mill in your local community and buy or trade with somebody else — just do, basically, whatever you want. You’ve got unilateral rights.

Now you can also take the timber that we have, through our government…. The public interest is supposed to be met, but our government has interpreted public interest that we’re going to give them the licence and then we’re going to pay them, too, if they give us a little bit back. It’s just strange.

D. Routley: I rise to speak to Bill 25, the FLNRO Statutes Amendment Act, 2015. I rise in second reading, where we’ll discuss the basic intent of the bill.

[1455]

I think of the people who’ve spoken before me and their expertise and their experience in the forest industry — very in-depth experience of the member for Cowichan Valley, who spoke before me; the critic, the member from Surrey who spoke earlier; and the member from Revelstoke, who was the former critic.

I know that my own grasp of the industry by detail is less than these people, but I’ll tell you that the forest industry and wood, the product, has been such an essential part of my life. The first job I ever had was a high school job using a pump and fire hose to clean off barges outside the Chemainus sawmill. I went on to be a tree planter. I worked as a logger. I worked in Youbou sawmill. I’ve worked in a lumberyard. I’ve built houses with my dear stepfather. I’ve handled wood all my life. I’ve worked on the green chain. I know the smell and the feel of the wood, and I know the culture of the industry.

I know most of all that it is an essential piece of the soul of the communities I represent. It is absolutely tragic that we have seen such a litany of failure in managing the industry, the core industry of our province. It’s much more than simply an industry. It is, in fact, a culture. In fact, if managed properly, our forests represent the heart of a thriving economy and the lungs of the planet.

By far the greatest contribution B.C. can make to the fight to counter climate change is to be the world’s great carbon sink and to have healthy, thriving forests that provide that environmental function, at the same time providing enormous benefits to the communities that we all represent. It is the most sustainable of resource industries.

Our economy and culture are built on the exploitation of the resources of this province. It was built that way, not simply by mistake. Careful consideration, planning and vision were applied to the way that our country and our province manage our natural resources in the public interest. That’s the key element.

There was always an essential trust between the people and their government that we were in the same boat rowing to the same goal, that the resources of our province would support our communities, would support our families, would support the development of the future of our province.

It really saddens me to stand here in this House and put on display the absolute failure of the government to meet its basic test: to act in the public interest. All of us, as British Columbians, would like to stand with pride and relate to each other and to the world a sense of accomplishment around what we’ve done. I always grew up thinking that Beautiful B.C. meant that we had this appreciation of the environment, of the beauty that is our birthright and of our overwhelming obligation to play our part, in our short time here, to build on and defend that foundation and that legacy.

In fact, what we’ve seen is an absolute abandonment of the core, essential role of government. Let me talk to you for a moment about that. I understand that the role of government is to make it all work for people — make it all work for our children, make it all work for our grandchildren, make it all work for people who we haven’t yet imagined who will one day look back, hopefully, and say that we made the right choices. That is the most amazing piece of all of this.

[1500]

I think of my dear friend Rick Doman, who was the CEO of Western Forest Products. He now has left the province and is disgusted with the state of our forest industry and the management of it by our current gov-

[ Page 8184 ]

ernment. His father, an immigrant from India, created a billion-dollar enterprise, starting with one truck running wood waste out of the forest.

My dad and I used to go down to the Cowichan River to fish, and we’d walk past what is now a shopping mall but was then the yard where all the Doman trucks were. He would tell me: “This is an example of the best of what Canada is, the best of what B.C. is.” It is the opportunity for people to come from far away and to start with little or nothing and create something of benefit to all of us, and to themselves.

This is the thriving free enterprise economy supported by thriving public institutions like public education and public health care — us all doing it for each other. That seemed like the basic premise to me, growing up in this province. But in recent years, in the recent decade, we’ve seen an abandonment of that vision and that grand, almost utopian, idea now that we look back at it and look at the outcomes.

We have public control over our forests. We have a government that still has the power and the mechanisms to be able to leverage that great benefit for each and every one of us. We had a social contract between those who were granted access to those resources…. Those entrepreneurs like Rick’s dad, Herb Doman, had access to this vast public wealth — our trees, our minerals — and in exchange for allowing them access to exploit that resource, they were expected, they were demanded, to create jobs to make benefit for communities.

There was a concept, a policy, called appurtenancy. Appurtenancy meant that if you got control of these trees, you had to use them in that mill to create jobs for those communities — a simple equation that for decades and generations provided benefit to all of us.

It was this government that completely broke and tore that contract, the most essential contract with the people of B.C. They sold it to us telling us that if we would endorse their plan of deregulation, then everything would be good. The capitalist interests in the province would be free to invest and profit, and we would all benefit. I think the people of B.C. trusted the government. They trusted them, and they gave them a mandate to do that. Instead, the government did something quite different.

When I met my dear partner, Leanne Finlayson, it was the strangest place to meet the person that you would fall in love with. It was at an inquest into the death of a faller. The tragedy of that faller’s life became, to me, an essential symbol of why it was wrong for the government to simply come and rip the guts out of regulations that had been put in place over many, many decades and many generations to protect people and to, essentially, link our communities with the benefit from their resources.

[1505]

The government had ripped out more than 5,500 regulations from WorkSafe B.C. I’m sure some of those regulations were on the ridiculous side and were an impediment to business and efficiency and probably deserved to be removed. But they made a minister of deregulation. They made such pride that the regulations they took out of the annals of British Columbia’s statutes were some six or eight inches high if you stacked them all together. Well, in that mix were people and communities.

In the case of Ted Gramlich, he was a faller who…. Well, let me tell you that fallers used to work as a company crew. The tree farm licence holders would employ them along with the yarding, who pulled the wood down, the truckers, the mill workers. It was all connected. There was a complicated chain that developed in protecting people in one of the most dangerous industries in the world, a chain of checks and balances that kept people alive.

It was through privatization and deregulation that this government created a situation where the companies then fired all those crews and then contracted them back. So men like Ted Gramlich became companies unto themselves — still working for the same employer, but now the employer was not burdened by such obstacles or burdens as compensation details, benefits and such.

Ted Gramlich was working by himself with a partner many miles away, connected by radio. Before deregulation, no faller would go into the woods until it was clear that helicopter evacuation was available to them. There was a chain to notify that the helicopters were able to fly, and then the fallers would go into the woods and perform their jobs.

On this fateful day, Ted Gramlich and his partner went into the woods, and the links that connected them to the helicopter medevac had been broken and severed. Nobody had thought of the consequence. Ted Gramlich, admittedly, took a risk, and he was crushed by a tree. His partner found himself miles from the first-aid truck and on his knees with Ted in his lap, dying. They thought that a helicopter would come and evacuate them. That never happened. The fact that it didn’t happen…. They were unaware of that fact because of deregulation.

So when the member for Cowichan Valley says that these policies were written in blood, he is absolutely correct. The coroner, Honey Forbes, said exactly that. She said that a contributory cause to the death of Ted Gramlich was the deregulation by the B.C. Liberal government of the forest industry. A coroner said that a cause of his death was deregulation.

That’s just one person in an industry of many thousands. In 2001, when the B.C. Liberals took power, there were some 50,000-plus people working in the forest industry. When Ted died, there were about 30,000 working — so about 60 percent. They had lost 40 percent of their workforce, but the fatalities in the industry had quintupled. They had 60 percent fewer people working in the woods, and they had five times more fatalities. And Ted was one of them.

[1510]

My partner, Leanne, was advocating for logger safety through a group that she formed called the Vancouver

[ Page 8185 ]

Island Loggers Safety Support Group, just a grassroots group of people fighting to defend the rights of workers in B.C. These are the people who have paid the price for this government’s failure to manage this industry in our interest.

Since the B.C. Liberal government took power — and all the promises that were made, that if we deregulated, there would be massive investment in the industry and more employment — we have lost 50 percent of the value-added companies in the province. So 50 percent of the companies that took our resource and made products out of it are gone, along with 60 percent of the jobs. That’s the outcome.

I consider that the job of government is to manage this resource for the benefit of all of us, to manage this resource for sustainability. What could be more essential to the future of our forests than tree planting? Tree planting was a huge part of my life. During the Bill Bennett years, Socred government — and restraint, another right-wing approach to governance in this province that drove young people out of this province — I was a tree planter at that time. I planted trees all over the province.

Tree planting had an enormous impact on my life beyond simply a job. It really led to an incredible experience for me. It was an incredible job for young people. You could go out and make enough money planting for a season to pay for your education, or to pay to start up a business, in my case.

When this government came to power, they stripped out the legislation that required that public lands be restocked, that the public be responsible for restocking public lands. Since then, two million hectares of forest land has become NSR — not sufficiently restocked. In other words, not planted — sitting barren.

The most essential and sustainable industry that we have is being abandoned by this government. They made a 90 percent cut to the budget for planting trees — 90 percent. How’s that for a disinvestment in the future of our province — a 90 percent cut in the planting of trees? Now we have two million hectares of B.C. public lands without being planted. It’s ridiculous.

This is the level of neglect to the public interest that this government has established. When they came to power, they had an ideology that whatever was good for industry would, through trickle-down effect, be good for all of us. They gave to the major licensees, the biggest corporations in this province, who happen to be the biggest donors to the B.C. Liberal Party — millions upon millions of dollars that have supported this party. They gave to them every measure that these companies said they required.

There were promises made. There were promises that there would be billions of dollars of reinvestment in the industry and in our forests. None of it happened.

If you think that money isn’t important in politics in B.C…. People always say that the American political system is overrun by moneyed interests. Barack Obama spent three-quarters of a billion dollars the first time he became president, through primaries and presidential election. Per capita, the B.C. Liberals outspent him — millions upon millions of dollars.

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Many millions of those were donated by the very companies who have requested the reforms that the B.C. Liberal government…. I think the cabinet ministers on the other side think that this is not according to the bill. I’ll assure the Transportation Minister that, in fact, the donation of tens of millions of dollars by the forest companies who benefited from the reforms that are carried on in Bill 25 is essential and irrevocably linked to the outcomes that we’re discussing here through Bill 25.

The forest companies asked for reform. The B.C. Liberals delivered the reform that they asked for, and British Columbians like Ted Gramlich, like all of us, have paid for it. Raw log exports, because of the closure of mills that used to be held open by policy, have wound up costing this province billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs. That’s the truth.

We have seen a race to the bottom in working standards. We’ve seen a consolidation of the industry under fewer and fewer hands. The manufacturing sector of the forest industry has been decimated by the loss of 50 percent of the companies and 60 percent of the jobs. I see in my own constituency pulp mills that are starved of fibre.

The minister said that this bill will encourage and support the transfer of pulpwood agreements and thereby create jobs or protect jobs — in effect, acknowledging that the loss of pulpwood agreements, which were torn out of the Forest Act by the B.C. Liberal government, was a mistake. These pulp mills, which are multi-billion-dollar investments and once lost are never returned, are starving of fibre because of a disintegration of the industry. Bill 25 continues that pace towards disintegration. We’ve lost control of our forests because the B.C. Liberal government has given away control of our forests.

One of the pulp mills in my constituency happens to be the payer of 40 percent of the tax base of the municipality of North Cowichan — Catalyst pulp mill. Catalyst pulp mill and Harmac in Nanaimo — two pulp mills that provide hundreds and hundreds of family-supporting jobs that extend out and have a ripple effect, a multiplier effect to many hundreds more jobs and small businesses in the community — are starving of fibre every month. They’re profitable, they’re viable, they’re excellent employers, and they are being abandoned by B.C. Liberal forest policy like Bill 25.

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Bill 25, in fact, takes the loss of appurtenancy a step further. In order to establish market-based pricing to defend against softwood lumber challenges from the U.S. softwood lumber coalition, it allows tenure holders to sell fibre to B.C. Timber Sales so that B.C. Timber Sales can achieve a 20 percent auction rate, which will be, they say, a legitimate market price base in order to establish the cost of timber to the major licence holders.

That all sounds all right. That all sounds good when you say that a First Nation or a community forest can sell their timber to B.C. Timber Sales to help them plump up their percentage and make a more accurate definition of what the market price of timber is. But it also allows the major licence holders, potentially, to not log the land that they’ve been given, the forest that they’ve been granted rights to, and sell it back to the government. Something we already own we would purchase back in order to establish a price for them.

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That seems wrong to me when the original formula in B.C. was that companies would be granted rights to timber provided that they created jobs, that they had manufacturing facilities. All of that has been lost. We are paying the price on and on for this. As the member for Cowichan Valley said, we see this every day in the auctioning of equipment.

Earlier today I celebrated the 108th birthday of Mr. Keith Turner in Ladysmith. I think the guy sounds like a hero to me, right? He was fired from a Vancouver shipyard because he refused to fire all the women welders. This was back in the ’70s. I think that’s pretty amazing, that that man stood up and wouldn’t do that.

He went on to work for a company called Madill on Vancouver Island. I’ll tell you that when I was a kid growing up in the Cowichan Valley, I had a friend from Chemainus who was an artist. What did he do? His vision was designing forest equipment and drawing forest equipment. He had books full of drawings. He was a fan of Madill.

We were proud of Madill’s in Nanaimo. They were one of the world’s leading manufacturers of logging equipment. Because we lost so much of our industry, we lost so much else. We lost Madill. It’s gone. I see their equipment, what’s left of it, being auctioned off. We lost our manufacturers. But this Mr. Turner, he worked for Madill. He went around the world and demonstrated their equipment. That was his job.

We were proud. We were proud of that. We were proud of Herb Doman. I am proud of that heritage. I am proud of the logging industry. I am proud of the people who built our province on our resources, who offered to the world products…. We were world leaders. If other countries wanted to learn about the forest industry and about manufacturing products out of wood, they came to B.C.

Not anymore. Now they come to buy our wood cheap, to buy logs cheap. I see at the docks of Nanaimo freighters being loaded with raw logs — being loaded from the site of closed sawmills.

Interjection.

D. Routley: A sigh from the Education Minister. It’s so boring to hear this litany of failure to the other side who don’t seem to give a crud about what the outcomes have been for our communities.

I see every couple of weeks a freighter come into Nanaimo Harbour and get loaded with raw logs, and down the hull of that ship, written in 20-foot-tall letters, is “Wisdom Line.” How ironic is that? Wisdom Line. It comes to Nanaimo to load the raw logs from a closed mill site.

Across the chain-linked fence is a pulp mill starved of fibre, and separating them and those jobs and the benefit of British Columbians from our resource is more than a chain-linked fence. Separating us from the benefit of our resources are things like Bill 25 and a government that has systematically severed the tendons of the body of the economy of British Columbia and has left it without the power or the ability to respond, and it’s wrong.

Deputy Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, the minister will close the debate.

Hon. S. Thomson: I appreciate the comments of the members opposite. They’ve made a lot of assertions about this industry. A lot of what has been raised here we have addressed through estimates. A lot of what was raised here is not specific to the bill that we have in front of us.

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One thing we will agree on and we all agree on is the importance of this industry to the economy of British Columbia. As they pointed out, this is an industry that has a long history, one that has contributed to the economic history of British Columbia and continues to contribute to the economic history and prosperity of British Columbia.

There were a lot of comments about diversity in the industry and lack of diversity in the industry. I should point out: in 2001, one community forest in British Columbia. We now have 51 community forests in British Columbia and are working on more community forest opportunities for communities across British Columbia.

Since 2007, 55 new woodlots in British Columbia have been established — small- and medium-sized opportunities throughout communities in British Columbia.

We’ve built opportunities for First Nations in the industry now through forest tenure opportunity agreements, through First Nation woodland licences — 13 percent of the annual allowable cut in British Columbia. That is building opportunities for First Nations communities throughout the province.

What the forest sector wants in British Columbia,

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what the forest sector needs in British Columbia, is a stable investment climate and a competitive operating environment, one that allows them to compete globally, in a global industry, one that’s a very, very competitive industry. That is what we have built in British Columbia — an industry that can compete globally.

We have helped diversify markets for British Columbia producers. That’s why we’ve had a 20 percent employment growth in the industry since 2007. That’s why we’ve seen this industry contribute to 35 percent of exports in British Columbia. For British Columbia, significant opportunities. This is an industry that will continue to contribute to a positive future for both rural and urban communities in British Columbia.

The members opposite raised a number of comments around specific sections of the bill. We’ll certainly address those during committee stage. With the references made to the rationale of the disposition agreements — that

section of the bill — we will deal with that in committee stage. I thank the members opposite for their comments. I look forward to committee stage of the debate.

I move second reading of the bill.

Second reading of Bill 25 approved on division.

Hon. S. Thomson: I move that the act be referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 25, Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Statutes Amendment Act, 2015, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Hon. Michelle Stilwell: I call second reading of Bill 20, the Election Amendment Act, 2015.

Deputy Speaker: The House will have a short recess.

The House recessed from 3:29 p.m. to 3:31 p.m.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

BILL 20 — ELECTION AMENDMENT ACT, 2015

Hon. S. Anton: I move that Bill 20 now be read a second time.

The amendments in this bill address specific issues identified by government as well as recommendations made by the province’s independent Chief Electoral Officer.

Let me begin with government’s proposed amendments. First, we propose adding two additional days of advanced voting on the Saturday and Sunday prior to the week when advanced voting currently begins. The last few elections have shown that advanced voting is increasingly popular with voters. In the 2001 general election just under 7 percent of all voters voted during the advanced period. By the 2013 election more than 20 percent did.

These two additional advanced voting days will assist voters who may be away from home for the week leading up to general voting day. By choosing weekend days, we’re making voting more accessible for those who work during the week, because only one of the current advanced voting days falls on a weekend.

There are a few related amendments that flow from creating these earlier voting opportunities. The reason for these related amendments is to ensure that Elections B.C. has sufficient time to print ballots and finalize the voters list before the start of advanced voting.

The deadline for campaign registration would be moved to the seventh day of the campaign period rather than the tenth day, as is currently the case. Also, regular voter registration would be closed, and the voters list would be finalized after the first day of the campaign period rather than on the eighth day. Voters who are not on the voters list by that date can still register in conjunction with voting, just as they can now.

The bill also contains a number of amendments that remove all references to the 60-day pre-campaign period. These provisions have not applied to third-party election advertising sponsors since the ruling by the British Columbia Supreme Court. The amendments propose to remove those provisions, which are not enforceable as the result of the court’s ruling.

However, at the present time the pre-campaign period spending limits continue to apply to political parties and candidates. This creates what we believe is an unequal playing field. Political parties and candidates have limits on what they can spend during the 60 days prior to the start of a fixed date election campaign, but others face no such restriction.

Mr. Justice Cole of the British Columbia Supreme Court said in his ruling on the matter that it would be unfair to continue to apply limits to political parties and candidates during this period. He also said: “I have no jurisdiction to deal with those particular sections of the act. I therefore leave it up to the Legislature to take the necessary corrective action in respect to this unfairness

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to the political parties and the candidates during the pre-campaign period.” That’s what we are doing with these amendments. If they’re passed, then spending limits would apply to everyone during the 28-day campaign period only.

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The bill would also expand the scope of fundraising activities by parties and candidates that would not be counted towards their expense limits. Currently the act sets out a list of expenses that must be reported but which are not counted towards expense limits. The list includes such things as legal and accounting services, day-to-day administration and communications to members of the constituency association or party.

There’s also an exemption for expenses incurred in holding a fundraising function. That exemption has been there since 1995. The bill would update that provision by exempting all fundraising communication expenses. The reason for this is that fundraising activities have changed considerably over the years. These days it’s less about hosting functions like a barbecue or a dinner and more about sending direct mail and staffing telephone banks. There can be significant initial costs in setting up these fundraising mechanisms, and we believe the act should evolve to reflect that.

The bill would also amend the act so that Elections B.C. would provide voter turnout information directly to candidates and political parties. Currently the act authorizes candidate representatives to be present during voting proceedings to observe and scrutinize the process — except, of course, for when voters actually mark their ballots. Part of that observation process involves checking to see whether a candidate’s identified supporters have come out to the polls and voted.

The bill implements a recommendation made by the Chief Electoral Officer that the act allow election officials to provide information to candidates respecting who has voted in an election. This information would be provided after each advance voting day, as well as during general voting day. The bill also includes an amendment, on which the Chief Electoral Officer takes no position, so that a complete and final list of voter turnout may be sent to registered political parties after an election is over.

The reason for both amendments is to assist candidates and political parties in their voter turnout and engagement efforts, which in turn helps to increase overall voter participation. I emphasize that the information to be provided only identifies whether a voter has voted. It does not provide any information respecting who a voter has voted for or in any way interfere with the secrecy of the ballot.

As the Chief Electoral Officer notes in his report: “This information is no different in substance from what candidate representatives have the authority to observe and obtain now.” He also notes that most other jurisdictions in Canada authorize the production by election officials of these kinds of voter turnout records during voting proceedings.

I’m aware that the amendment to provide post-election voter turnout information to political parties has received some public comment, including from the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner. I want to assure the House that government takes British Columbians’ privacy seriously. The Election Act currently provides that any personal information may be used and disclosed only for specific purposes — in this case, for an electoral purpose. In addition, the Chief Electoral Officer has the authority to place further restrictions or requirements on the use of this information.

I am supportive of the Chief Electoral Officer doing so, should this amendment be enacted by the Legislature. His office is independent of both government and political parties, and I think it is appropriate for him to be the one to fine-tune any further requirements respecting voter turnout information. The Information and Privacy Commissioner has expressed her intention to assist the Chief Electoral Officer with such regulations, if the Legislature enacts this change. This collaboration by two of the independent officers is welcome and helpful.

Turning to other recommendations made by the Chief Electoral Officer, the bill contains measures to correct an apparent discrepancy regarding the identity documents that must be produced by voters who vouch for a family member who is registering in conjunction with voting. Currently the person who is vouching for a family member must sign a declaration respecting the family connection but is not required to produce his or her own identity documents. The bill would require those documents to be produced.

The bill also implements a Chief Electoral Officer recommendation to permit constituency associations to incur expenses on behalf of their candidates throughout the campaign period. Currently the act limits that time period to the first ten days of the campaign period. Expenses incurred by a constituency association are currently applied to a candidate’s expense limits and that will not change.

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Finally, we are proceeding with the recommendation to waive the requirement for a party leadership contestant to file a financing report if several conditions apply. The candidate must win by acclamation. He or she must not have raised or spent any funds relating to the leadership contest. This amendment will remove what is an unnecessary burden, particularly on smaller political parties, to comply with the fairly onerous reporting requirements when there is, in fact, nothing to report.

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G. Holman: Thanks to the minister for that

summary.

I’m very pleased to rise and speak to second reading of Bill 20. The general view from this side of the House is that while there are some modest improvements being made to the Election Act, there have been some significant opportunities lost to move democracy forward in British Columbia. In fact, there are some amendments, some changes, being suggested to the Election Act here which are, as currently drafted, completely unacceptable to this side of the House. If changes aren’t made to address those concerns, we will be opposing the legislation.

There isn’t anything more important to our democracy in British Columbia than government’s role, government’s responsibility to make elections as fair and transparent as possible. That’s why this legislation is so disappointing. There are a number of opportunities missed here that could have taken further steps in improving democracy.

While government has brought forward some of the recommendations made by the Chief Electoral Officer as well as changes government itself is making, two out of three of the CEO recommendations for amendments to the legislation have been ignored by government.

We all know the data, I think, and understand the data, if not the specific numbers. We certainly all understand the trends in voter turnout, which over the last number of years has been declining precipitously in British Columbia — and, in fact, elsewhere in Canada. That problem is particularly serious among young voters.

Another very serious problem with elections in British Columbia is the fact that we’ve got big money still involved in political campaigns, from large organizations like unions and corporations. These proposed amendments do nothing to change those issues, to change those problems.

I’m very proud to stand on this side of the House and speak on behalf of the NDP opposition. We have a long history of democratic reform in British Columbia, extending back to…. We haven’t had many governments in British Columbia, but we’ve left some very important legacies. And democratic reform is certainly part of that very important legacy.

I refer specifically to the Barrett government of 1972 to 1975. It made a number of changes that are still in place today that both sides of the House benefit from in terms of their ability to speak to the issues, represent their constituents and hold government’s feet to the fire. They have improved the accountability and the effectiveness of this place considerably.

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The Barrett government made a number of vital changes still in place today. They established the first daily question period in the Legislature. They established the full Hansard in British Columbia, the first full record of everything that’s said in this place. The Barrett government increased funding for opposition parties, which enabled opposition parties to hire researchers and do the important background work that’s necessary for opposition parties to hold government to account — another very important change.

Chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee was given to a member of the opposition, and that’s still in effect today — another very important change.

As spokesperson for democratic reform, I tend to look at these reforms more broadly than just around elections, just around elections financing.

The Barrett government created the B.C. Energy Commission which is the precursor to the Utilities Commission, which has actually been precluded by this government from vetting most large hydroelectric power projects in British Columbia. But the Barrett government in the ’70s brought in the B.C. Energy Commission, which regulated private utilities, monitored oil and gas prices.

The notion of independent watchdogs, paradoxically enough, perhaps, is very important to democracy. The minister herself just referred to two very important independent offices — the Chief Electoral Officer and the Privacy Commissioner — and how important those bodies are to, again, provide an independent view, an independent check, on elected governments.

The Barrett government established the right to sue the Crown — or restored the right to sue the Crown. It created the Islands Trust Act to protect the Gulf Islands against uncontrolled development. It established the first native school board in the province, the Nisga’a Tribal Council. Independent boards of review to decide Workers Compensation Board appeals — established by the Barrett government.

Mr. Barrett also established the Public Officials and Employees Disclosure Act, which required elected and appointed officials to disclose their financial holdings — a very, very important piece of legislation to ensure that MLAs would be transparent in their financial dealings and to reveal potential for conflict. The first full-time human rights officers. And the B.C. Human Rights Commission was also created by the Barrett government. This government also established the B.C. Police Act to handle public complaints against the police.

The list goes on. I’ve just mentioned a few to make the point that NDP governments, even though there have only been three in British Columbia, have a very proud history in terms of democratic reform. They’ve established some of the fundamental institutions, still in place today, that are so important to both sides of the House and, in particular, opposition parties.

This is the remarkable thing about the Barrett government: the institutions that he created, in fact, benefited the opposition of the day. I’d like to read a quote from a book by Meggs and Mickleburgh. Most members of this House will be aware of the book entitled The Art of the Impossible : Dave Barrett and the NDP in Power,

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1972-1975 . A quote where they were referring to W.A.C. Bennett:

“Bennett’s opposition” — in other words, the NDP of the day — “had struggled to find gaps in his legislative juggernaut. Knowing their efforts would ultimately be ended by all-night sessions, Barrett’s opponents were reaping the benefits of question period, expanded committee mandates and Hansard Blues , the first drafts of each day’s proceedings. Barrett and the New Democrats were delivering on their promise to open up the Legislature and handing their opponents the democratic toolkit Bennett had always denied them.

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This is what is remarkable. I think a good sign of whether democratic reforms stand the test of integrity is whether the reforms benefit the government in power or whether they actually benefit the opposition or other parties. This is the remarkable thing about Mr. Barrett’s reforms in the Legislature — that they benefited the opposition, which itself, when it was in power, refused the same kinds of rights, the same ability for the opposition to hold its feet to the fire.

Mr. Barrett is quoted in the book, in his February 9 budget speech, some of it clearly improvised on the floor of the House, which members will notice does not apply to me. Mr. Barrett was quoted as saying that the New Democrats’ mandate resulted in “a new era for the people of our province, an era where the rights of the individuals are supreme…a just and open era.”

I think he lived up to that rhetoric. I think most people in this House understand that Mr. Barrett has fallen on hard times and is convalescing today. I’m going to be sending him a copy of this speech. I hope he’ll be able to enjoy it.

As you know, our leader has made a very substantial commitment for democratic reform and electoral reform in British Columbia. I would argue that it does meet the test of integrity because many of these reforms are not going to just benefit the NDP. Many of them will support, will benefit, smaller parties. They will benefit opposition parties, regardless of who forms government. And I’m very proud to be the spokesman for democratic reform for our side of the House. That’s why this Bill 20 is so important to us. I just want to remind the House of the commitment that we’ve made to electoral reform in British Columbia.

It is an auspicious time because of the recent election results in Alberta, with the first-ever NDP government in Alberta. That NDP government is also proposing some very significant election reforms, and I’ll mention those later.

The commitment that we’ve made to electoral reform is to put it back to the people of British Columbia. To the credit of previous governments, Premier Gordon Campbell of the day actually had initiated two referenda on electoral reform in British Columbia — in 2005 and 2009. We have committed to do the same thing if elected in 2017. We will put electoral reform back to the people of British Columbia early enough in the term so that if British Columbians agree that we should be moving to some kind of proportional representation system, the following election would be held under those rules. I’m very, very proud of that commitment.

While I understand that Bill 20 is not directly related to electoral reform, everything is related. Everything is interconnected.

There are a number of other things that need to be addressed in our democracy in British Columbia. We need to ensure that this place meets at least two times a year. We need to ensure that the election is held on a date after the spring budget has been tabled so that electors and all candidates understand and know what the actual state of the finances of the province are.

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We need to empower legislative committees in British Columbia. Even the Parliament of Canada…. The federal Conservative government is rightly criticized for its very autocratic approach to parliament, to governance in Canada. Even there you have legislation that’s actually vetted by legislative committees. We need to make these kinds of changes to make this place more effective, more accountable and more transparent.

We need to ensure that whistle-blowers are protected. The members from Cowichan and Duncan, both members, have spoken about changes to workmen’s compensation and the kinds of issues that that has created for workers and others. It’s very important that when wrongdoing is revealed or come across by government employees, they don’t face the risk of being fired because they’re blowing the whistle on inappropriate government policy and regulation. It’s very important to bring that kind of change in.

Conflicts of interest. We need to strengthen that legislation to ensure that not just MLAs but senior officials of government are bound by very stringent rules around conflict of interest. If you don’t do that, then the very fabric of government itself rots at the core. So those kinds of changes are very important.

Open government. We’ve seen examples where this government appears to be not fully disclosing information that should be available to the public, should be available to the opposition. So we need to bring in rules that ensure that all government records are made available to the public, fully disclosed. This is an essential aspect of democracy, and these changes have to be made.

In terms of financing of local elections and provincial elections — and this is an area that bears much more closely to Bill 20 — we need to make changes in this province that ensure that we keep big money out of political campaigns. This bears directly on a provision in Bill 20 which removes spending caps in the pre-election period. It’s a very, very serious amendment to the Election Act, bringing us closer to the free-for-all that we witness in the United States, where it’s big money that talks, not necessarily individual voters, and where you have to be

[ Page 8191 ]

a millionaire at the very least to run for state and even local governments.

We need to make these changes. Some of them could have been addressed with this legislation and are not being addressed at all.

As you know, Mr. Speaker — and I understand I’m not supposed to be talking about private members’ legislation — we’ve attempted to address all of these issues. I won’t belabour that point. You have taken me to task on that before. But these kinds of changes are very important, and again, they stand the test of integrity. It’s not just about the partisan interests of the NDP opposition. In fact, these changes will benefit all parties, and that’s why I think that they’re so important.

When you’re talking about democracy, partisanship and partisan interests should not be playing a role. The public interest should be the dominant factor.

One of the other issues that’s very important that could have been taken up by Bill 20, and hasn’t been, and was one of the three priorities identified by the Chief Electoral Officer was early voter registration. That’s another issue that needs to be addressed that we are proposing to address. Again, it suggests that government, in pushing forward this legislation, doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to the report of the Chief Electoral Officer.

I wanted to go through some of the recommendations in that report, some of which have been taken up in the legislation — as I said before, there are some modest improvements here — but many of which have been ignored.

[1600]

In October 2014 the Chief Electoral Officer provided a report to the Legislature entitled Report of the Chief Electoral Officer on Recommendations for Legislative Change . In the report the CEO, Chief Electoral Officer, explains that “after each general election Elections B.C. conducts a thorough review of the processes used to administer the election in order to identify what went well and what could be improved.”

Again, this points to the value of independent offices in British Columbia. This is why we need these folks. This is why we need these offices to provide this independent, objective advice to government which is not tainted by partisan interest.

“This review includes consultation with stakeholders, including senior election officials, voters, non-voters and political parties. Many of the improvements that are identified through the review can be implemented through changes to administrative procedures and training, but some improvements cannot be made within the bounds of the existing legislation.

“As the ability to make changes to the Election Act lies solely within the authority and mandate of the Legislative Assembly, the Chief Electoral Officer’s role is to follow the process outlined in the Election Act for making recommendations respecting amendments to the legislation.

“In addition to these three priorities, Elections B.C. would also like to refer legislators to a small number of issues in the Election Act that are largely technical in nature but cause recurring business problems for Elections B.C. and/or our stakeholders. Brief explanations of these challenges and recommendations…are contained in the appendix to this report.

“Elections B.C. also endorses the technical recommendations included in parts 7 and 8….

The reason I’m emphasizing this report, going through it in so much detail, is because several of the key recommendations made by the CEO were not taken up in this legislation. Some of them were, but a couple of very important ones, the most important ones, were not taken up.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the Election Advisory Committee that the CEO consulted with before writing the report, before making his recommendations. In fact, the advisory committee included members of all political parties. That’s important for all of us to understand, that when the CEO sought advice, he made sure that he was getting that advice from all of the major political parties in British Columbia, including the B.C. Liberal Party, the B.C. NDP, the Green Party of B.C. and the B.C. Conservative Party.

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In fact, the CEO is required to consult with the Election Advisory Committee before making recommendations to the Legislative Assembly. It is a matter of due diligence, but in fact, the CEO is required to strike such a committee and ensure that he or she is getting advice, input from a broad range of stakeholders, including all of the major political parties in British Columbia.

The priority issues identified by the CEO include facilitating youth participation; trialing new voting technology; and more flexibility for advance voting opportunities. Now, only that last one is addressed by Bill 20. Just to go through some of the analysis by the CEO about the issue, he indicated:

“The lowest voter registration rates are for young voters 18 to 24 years of age. There is a positive correlation between voting and being registered as a voter before general voting day. The most effective means of registering youth may be to approach them before they graduate from high school. Currently, voter registration is restricted to those at least 18 years of age, an age when many youth have left high school.”

Just on the voter turnout, I wanted to recount some of the data, some of the information, on this very serious problem for western democracies. In fact, this is from an Elections B.C. 2014 report on Internet voting, when they discussed this issue.

“Academic publications suggest that since the 1970s, citizens in western democracies have been taking up the act of voting at later points in their life and in smaller numbers, and accordingly, overall voter turnout has dropped from approximately three-

[ Page 8192 ]

quarters of eligible voters in the 1970s to approximately half of eligible voters today.

“In the 2013 provincial general election” — in British Columbia — “overall turnout was 55.3 percent of eligible voters, but only 29.9 percent of eligible voters aged 18 to 24 chose to vote. At the local government…turnout is also trending down but to an even lower level. In 2011 local government elections voter turnout averaged 29.6 percent.”

That’s about the same percentages for younger voters provincially.

[D. Horne in the chair.]

These are very disturbing numbers. Certainly, while there are modest attempts to address this in Bill 20, it doesn’t go nearly far enough, and it completely omits any reference, any change at all, any suggestion or proposal to register young voters at an earlier age, ideally in high school.

Deputy Speaker: Is the member the designated speaker?

G. Holman: Yes.

Deputy Speaker: Yes? All right. Thank you, Member. Continue.

G. Holman: Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for that vote of confidence. It’s not widely reflected in the House. I understand that, but I do appreciate that.

This has been a problem in British Columbia, in Canada. In 1983, 71 percent of registered voters turned out at the polls, but since then the turnout rate has fallen to about 55 percent of 2.9 million registered voters.

There are a number of factors that bear on this, that influence this, but one of the factors that we believe, on this side of the House, bears on this is the electoral system itself, the voting system itself.

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We also believe that big money bears on this, that voters become cynical over time. They become cynical that their vote actually counts versus the financial contributions by large organizations. Particularly, younger voters are becoming more and more cynical, more and more doubtful that the democratic process actually works for them. Does it work for them, or does it work for large organizations?

Who do political parties listen to? Who do governments and opposition parties, for that matter, listen to? Do they listen to individual voters? Do they listen to young voters? Or do they listen to large organizations, like unions and corporations? That’s why we need to fix these rules, and Bill 20 does virtually nothing to do that and nothing to really encourage younger voters in British Columbia.

There is evidence to suggest strongly that proportional representation does increase voter turnout — for example, a work done in 2012 by Arend Lijphart, who’s a world-renowned political scientist and has spent his career studying the differences between majoritarian and consensual, i.e., PR, democracy. In his landmark study Patterns of Democracy he compared 36 democracies over 29 years and found that in countries using PR systems voter turnout was 7 percent higher on average. That’s a well-known study.

Again, it’s something that we really need to be considering in British Columbia, and if we form government in 2017, we will be considering that.

Back to the priority issues of the CEO. In his 2014 report he indicates that other jurisdictions have already taken steps — we’re talking about facilitating youth participation here — to address this issue by allowing the provincial registration of otherwise eligible individuals under the age of 18.

For example, Nova Scotia legislation permits the Chief Electoral Officer to collect the registration information of 16- and 17-year-olds who may become eligible to vote. Quebec also has a provisional register of potential voters who, unless they explicitly decline, are automatically added to the voters list when they turn 18.

In Alberta — where there’s been a rather sudden turnaround in political representation and philosophy — although the amendment has not yet come into force, the Legislature has passed laws enabling the Chief Electoral Officer to request directly from school boards the registration information of 16- and 17-year-olds for the purposes of provisionally registering them to vote.

Nine American states currently have provisional registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. Australia has addressed the issue by allowing provisional voter registration of 17-year-olds. The U.K. Electoral Commission registered 16- and 17-year-olds in Scotland in order to facilitate their participation in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

There are various ways to approach the issue of youth voter registration, but there does seem to be a common theme where, certainly, the preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds before they become eligible is an important part of the strategy to engage them in the democratic process.

The data does seem to suggest that if you do engage young people in this way, it does increase, substantially increase, their turnout in elections. Bill 20 doesn’t deal with this, mention this, address this at all.

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Current provisions in the Election Act envision a voting and counting process that is paper-based and limit

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the ability of Elections B.C. to adopt, even on a pilot project basis, some new voting technologies.

Elections B.C. endorses the recommendations of the Independent Panel on Internet Voting, as described in the panel’s recommendations report submitted to the Legislative Assembly earlier, in 2014. This panel recommended the province go slowly on the topic of Internet voting; take a provincewide, coordinated approach to the issue; and establish an independent technical committee chaired by the Chief Electoral Officer to evaluate Internet voting systems and support jurisdictions that wish to implement it.

The general area of testing new voting technology, as recommended by the CEO — one of the three priorities that he identified for changes to elections legislation — is not covered at all, is not mentioned at all, in Bill 20.

The final priority of the three identified by the CEO is to provide more flexibility for advance voting opportunities. This is one area that, in fact, government’s amendments to Bill 20 do address, although to a more modest degree than recommended by the CEO. “Since 2001” — I’m reading from the report — “a steadily increasing number of British Columbians have been taking advantage of advance voting opportunities. In the 2013 election over 20 percent of all votes were cast at advance voting,” which, I believe, is an all-time high percentage.

The current Election Act requires that advance voting opportunities be held from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the week before general voting day for an election. The CEO states: “While this is appropriate for most areas of the province, some parts of the province, particularly rural areas, do not have sufficient population to justify the cost and effort of establishing and staffing a full four-day advance voting opportunity in their communities. Hence, advance voting is not available in some smaller communities.”

To make this advance voting opportunity available to a larger number of voters, the CEO recommends that:

“…legislators consider providing greater flexibility to district electoral officers to establish advance voting opportunities on any of the days of the advance voting period or for a limited number of hours during the day. Elections B.C. does not intend to reduce the length of advance voting in communities that traditionally warrant an advance voting opportunity.

“To ensure this provision is applied carefully and consistently, the limited opportunities would require the prior approval of the CEO. Advance voting opportunities available for other than the full four-day period would clearly be identified as such in communications to voters, candidates and political parties.”

This is an area where government has responded, at least in part, to these recommendations. As I said earlier, it is an example of some changes, fairly modest changes, that do move the ball forward in terms of reforming our democracy in British Columbia.

There were a number of other recommendations made by the CEO. I do want to talk about those in a little more detail later when I go through the bill itself in a little bit more detail.

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Just to summarize and reaffirm that of the three priority recommendations made by the CEO to make amendments to the Election Act, only one of those was addressed by Bill 20.

While the minister spoke of the importance of listening to the independent officers of the Legislature, in this particular case, for these three priorities, one out of three is not a great batting average. The CEO doesn’t seem to have been…. There wasn’t a lot of attention paid, it appears, to those three priority recommendations.

I do want to speak a little bit more about the specific legislation and some of the issues that we’ve identified with that legislation. I’ve spoken about the three priority issues. There are some other changes in the bill, both positive and negative, that I wanted to speak to as briefly as I can.

Interjection.

G. Holman: Thank you to the member opposite for the vote of confidence.

Some of the changes that were identified and recommended by the CEO are picked up in the legislation, which in general is a good thing. The minister did refer to it in her

summary of the legislation. While they omitted any reference to or changes around youth voter registration, as recommended by the CEO, this bill does address some other issues.

There is an exemption from filing expense reports for leadership candidates that are acclaimed and that neither raised nor spent any funds. Even to a new MLA such as myself, it seems to make intuitive sense to do something like that.

The legislation permits constituency associations to incur elections expenses on behalf of a candidate for the full period of the campaign instead of just the first day. Again, this makes intuitive sense, and I think it meets the test of fairness and reasonableness.

The legislation proposes to tighten up identity requirements for vouching, requiring family members and personal care vouchers to provide identification the way that friends are required to now. There is a bit of a concern here, and when we get into the committee stage we’ll be asking more details about exactly how that works. There is a bit of a concern there around voter suppression, around some classes of voters — the marginalized, the poor, First Nations — where identification documentation can be a bit of an issue.

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There is a concern that while it’s not unfair to have rules that ensure that the person who is voting is actually who they say they are — that’s not an unreasonable objective — the devil is definitely in the details here. For example, there were changes made in federal elections rules that really did raise some serious concerns around dissuading or suppressing votes by marginalized groups because of the stringency of some of these requirements. We’ll be asking more detailed questions about this particular

section of the bill when we get to committee stage.

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The legislation provides election officials with the authority to provide voter turnout information to candidates during advance voting and general voting. Again, that was a recommendation made by the Chief Electoral Officer.

Now, the provision of voter turnout information in Bill 20 has been ex