November 1, 2006

NOTICE TO THE GVRD SUSTAINABLE REGION INITIATIVE TASK FORCE

You are requested to attend a Regular Meeting of the GVRD Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force to be held at 9:00 am on Tuesday, November 7, 2006, in the 2nd Floor Boardroom at 4330 Kingsway, Burnaby, British Columbia.

A G E N D A

1. ADOPTION OF THE AGENDA

1.1 November 7, 2006 Regular Meeting Agenda Staff Recommendation: That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force adopt the agenda for the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force regular meeting scheduled for November 7, 2006 as circulated.

2. ADOPTION OF THE MINUTES

2.1 October 11, 2006 Regular Meeting Minutes Staff Recommendation: That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force adopt the minutes of the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force regular meeting held October 11, 2006 as circulated.

3. DELEGATIONS No delegations presented.

4. REPORTS FROM COMMITTEE OR STAFF

4.1 GVRD and Regional Economic Initiatives (deferred from Oct 11) Designated Speaker: Delia Laglagaron, Deputy CAO, GVRD Recommendation: That the GVRD Board: a) Request the Chair to appoint a Standing Committee on the Economy as a forum to discuss issues on the region’s economy and define the role of GVRD and partners. b) Provide the Greater Vancouver Economic Council (GVEC) formal support including GVRD’s support in their request for Federal and Provincial financial assistance. c) Direct staff to identify projects that may be done in collaboration with GVEC; and d) Develop Terms of Reference for the development of a Regional Economic Strategy using the paper entitled “PROSPERITY, LIVABILITY, SUSTAINABILITY: Seeking a Strategy for the Future of Greater Vancouver’s Economy”, as a starting point.

4.2 International Association of Business Communicators Award presented to GVRD television program The Sustainable Region (deferred from Oct 11) Designated Speaker: Bill Morrell, Media Relations Division Manager, GVRD Recommendation: That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force forward this report, International Association of Business Communicators Award presented to GVRD television program The Sustainable Region, dated October 4, 2006, to the Board for information

4.3 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues: Dealing with your Drug Problem, Labour Pains, and The World Is Watching Designated Speaker: Johnny Carline, Chief Administrative Officer, GVRD Recommendation: That the GVRD Board: a) Forward the reports dated October 24, 2006, titled: 1) Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - Labour Pains 2) Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - Dealing with your Drug Problem 3) Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - The World Is Watching to member municipalities for their information and comment; and b) Direct staff to consider the output of the dialogues in the development of a “sustainability based vision” for the future of the region.

4.4 Manager’s Report – GVRD Board Workshops: Vision, Priorities and Procedures Designated Speaker: Johnny Carline, Chief Administrative Officer, GVRD

5. INFORMATION ITEMS

5.1 National Child Care System - Correspondence from Mayor Jon Lefebure, Municipality of North Cowichan, dated September 8, 2006.

6. OTHER BUSINESS No items presented.

7. RESOLUTION TO CLOSE MEETING No items presented.

8. ADJOURNMENT GREATER VANCOUVER REGIONAL DISTRICT SUSTAINABLE REGION INITIATIVE TASK FORCE

Minutes of the Regular Meeting of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force held at 4:15 p.m. on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 in the 2nd Floor Boardroom, 4330 Kingsway, Burnaby, British Columbia.

PRESENT: Chair, Director Lois Jackson, Delta Vice Chair, Director Peter Ladner, Vancouver (arrived at 4:18 p.m.) Director Derek Corrigan, Burnaby (departed at 6:14 p.m.) Director Ralph Drew, Belcarra (departed at 5:40 p.m.) Director Marvin Hunt, Surrey Director Wayne Wright, New Westminster

ABSENT: Mayor Dianne Watts, Surrey Director Maxine Wilson, Coquitlam Director Max Wyman, Lions Bay

STAFF: Johnny Carline, Chief Administrative Officer Delia Laglagaron, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Marjorie Whalen, Assistant to Regional Committees, Corporate Secretary’s Department

1. ADOPTION OF THE AGENDA

1.1 October 11, 2006 Regular Meeting Agenda

It was MOVED and SECONDED That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force: i.) amend the agenda for the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force regular meeting scheduled for October 11, 2006 by varying the order to hear the delegations later in the meeting; and ii.) adopt the agenda as amended CARRIED

2. ADOPTION OF THE MINUTES

2.1 September 20, 2006 Regular Meeting Minutes

It was MOVED and SECONDED That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force adopt the minutes of the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force regular meeting held September 20, 2006 as circulated. CARRIED

Minutes of the Regular Meeting of the GVRD Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force held on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Page 1 of 3 3. DELEGATIONS

3.1 Invited Presentation: Green Infrastructure Partnership (GIP “Changing the Way We Develop Land: Design and Nature” Pursuant to Item 1.1, this item was considered later in the meeting.

4:18 p.m. Director Ladner arrived at the meeting.

4. REPORTS FROM COMMITTEE OR STAFF

4.1 2007 Program Plan and Strategic Priorities of the Sustainable Region Initiative Committee Report dated October 5, 2006 from Johnny Carline, Chief Administrative Officer, outlining the proposed 2007 programs and priorities under the committee’s purview, as the basis for the budget to be considered at the budget workshop on October 20, 2006.

Discussion ensued relative to the GVRD taking on new responsibilities in unrelated areas beyond its core area of services.

Members were advised that regional emergency planning is undertaken by other regional districts, but in the GVRD, the municipalities are not coordinated, but do have mutual-aid agreements. A legal mandate with respect to emergency planning is being sought by staff.

Concern was expressed with endorsement of all the programs in the proposed budget and the need for further discussion and information to ensure due diligence.

It was MOVED and SECONDED That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force endorse the proposed programs and priorities, as outlined in the report dated October 5, 2006 titled “2007 Programs and Strategic Priorities of the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force”, as the basis for the budget to be considered at the GVRD Board budget workshop on October 20, 2006; and refer the two programs Regional Emergency Management and Regional Cultural Strategy to the GVRD Board workshop on October 13, 2006. CARRIED

Agenda Varied Pursuant to Item 1.1, Item 3.1 was considered at this time.

5:40 p.m. Director Drew departed the meeting.

Minutes of the Regular Meeting of the GVRD Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force held on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Page 2 of 3 3.1 Invited Presentation: Green Infrastructure Partnership (GIP) - “Changing the Way We Develop Land: Design and Nature“ Director Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, GVRD Liaison to GIP; Paul Ham, Chair, GIP; and General Manager of Engineering, City of Surrey; Dale Wall, Assistant Deputy Minister, Ministry of Community Services; and member GIP Steering Committee; Kim Stephens, Program Coordinator, GIP; and BC Water Sustainability Action Plan; Ray Fung, Chair, Water Sustainability, BC Wastewater Association (BCWWA); Manager of Utilities, West Vancouver, discussed how to support local leaders to implement 'design with nature' practices and regulation province-wide.

The Green Infrastructure Partnership is one of six inter-connected initiatives that comprise the Water Sustainability Action Plan for British Columbia. The action plan provides a partnership umbrella for an array of on-the-ground initiatives that promote a “water-centric” approach to community planning. It is also enabling the province to collaborate with local government to advance water stewardship and sustainable communities. Effective implementation of the design with nature approach will rely in part upon changes in policies, programs, and transportation and infrastructure servicing.

Members were requested to: • initiate conversations with an expanded Mayors Focus Group; • become partners in a Communication Guide for elected officials; and • continue funding support through the Liquid Waste Management Plan program.

6:14 p.m. Director Corrigan departed the meeting.

Loss of Quorum Quorum was lost and the meeting concluded.

______Marjorie Whalen, Lois E. Jackson, Chair Assistant to Regional Committees

Minutes of the Regular Meeting of the GVRD Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force held on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 Page 3 of 3 Item No. 4.1

Committee Meeting Date: November 7, 2006

To: Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force

From: Delia Laglagaron, Deputy CAO

Date: October 5, 2006 (deferred from October 11, 2006 SRI Task Force meeting)

Subject: GVRD and Regional Economic Initiatives

Recommendation:

That the GVRD Board a) Request the Chair to appoint a Standing Committee on the Economy as a forum to discuss issues on the region’s economy and to define the role of GVRD and partners; b) Provide the Greater Vancouver Economic Council (GVEC) formal support including GVRD’s support in their request for Federal and Provincial financial assistance; c) Direct staff to identify projects that may be done in collaboration with GVEC; and d) Develop Terms of Reference for the development of a Regional Economic Strategy using the paper entitled “PROSPERITY, LIVABILITY, SUSTAINABILITY: Seeking a Strategy for the Future of Greater Vancouver’s Economy”, as a starting point.

1. PURPOSE

To present a summary of GVRD’s participation on initiatives related to the region’s economy and seek direction on next steps

2. CONTEXT

The region’s economy as well as the social and environmental dimensions of the region has been identified as a key factor in achieving the livability and sustainability of the region. The need for an economic development strategy has been widely touted as one of the shortcomings of the region. In the delivery of the region’s key infrastructure and the growth management functions, the future of the economy of the region has been treated only implicitly. One of the criticisms of the Livable Region Strategic Plan (LRSP) was its silence on the region’s economy; the design of some of the regulatory functions requires an assumption about industries and their activities; and the delivery of key regional functions requires an understanding of the regional economy to effectively and efficiently deliver these services.

Economic development has been an area where the Board has been reluctant to assume responsibility. The business community, however, saw the need for a regional approach and so in the past, the GVRD facilitated the creation of the Greater Vancouver Economic Partnership (GVEP) – a business-driven organization with some GVRD and Provincial support and participation. This approach did not work. The business community emphasized promotion and avoided contentious policy issues. It developed little profile and did not deliver services to local municipalities, so political support quickly waned. At that time, perhaps because of the GVEP approach, the private sector did not engage to any significant degree.

Page 2 of 3 Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Report: GVRD and Regional Economic Initiatives

The Sustainable Region Initiative identified the development of the economy of the region as a role intended to be undertaken and lead by other agency/agencies but one which the GVRD, with its various roles in land use strategy, provision of utilities and transportation policy would necessarily be involved. The two initiatives that GVRD has participated were presented to the SRI Task Force at its March 2006 Committee meeting:

• Identified as one of the projects of the SRI Partnership, GVRD staff participated in the development of PROSPERITY, LIVABILITY, SUSTAINABILITY: Seeking a Strategy for the Future of Greater Vancouver’s Economy, a paper that begins to develop what sustainability means to the economy of the region. The author(s) describes the paper as “a call to action to government, business and civil society opinion leaders to voice their support for a “sustainability-inspired” regional economic strategy for Greater Vancouver and commit to participate in its development and implementation.” A series of regional dialogues with key interests is proposed as a means to inform and garner support for the regional initiative.

• GVRD Director and staff are members of the GVEC. GVEC represents the culmination of a major collaborative effort across a broad spectrum of business, academic, labour and civic leadership. GVEC’s presentation outlined their business case: to stimulate investment and new employment in the region, all within a sustainable context; and expand industrial clusters, attracting international investment, and benchmarking against competitors.

• GVEC is seeking: • formal support of initiatives, including funding • active support of GVEC’s request to the Federal government for support • assistance on efforts to attract regional business leaders • collaboration on joint projects, such as: Arts and Culture, Industrial land base studies, regional data analysis, and external economic initiatives. See Attachment 1

In addition to these two initiatives, other GVRD initiatives that are related to the economy are:

• The GVRD’s Agriculture Advisory Committee has developed an Economic Strategy for Agriculture in the Lower Mainland. “The strategy fulfills or advances the original project objectives to: o identify trends and emerging economic issues and opportunities, and to analyze how these will shape Lower Mainland agriculture in the future; o develop an economic action plan for agriculture in the Lower Mainland that identifies short term action items and articulates a long term strategy; o build new and/or strengthened partnerships between agricultural stakeholders in the Lower Mainland; and o draw commitments from agricultural stakeholders, including commodity groups, local processors and distributors, farmers and local and provincial governments, to implement the action plans.” • The GVRD through a subcommittee of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), Regional Economic Subcommittee, provides a forum for municipal economic development officers to exchange information. • GVRD staff are participating, by invitation, on the Vancouver Board of Trade visioning exercise.

004432554 GVRD and Regional Economic Initiatives Page 3 of 3 Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Report: GVRD and Regional Economic Initiatives

• GVRD staff are participating in the Gateway Council’s visioning. • The most recent dialogue on September 25, 2006, on the Future of the Region discussed the Regional Economy specifically on how to succeed in this global economy while ensuring long-term regional prosperity, social well-being and environmental health. More then 150 participants intensely discussed the region’s economy and its future.

3. ALTERNATIVES

The PROSPERITY, LIVABILITY, SUSTAINABILITY: Seeking a Strategy for the Future of Greater Vancouver’s Economy paper is an interesting discussion paper but lacks clarity as to the vehicle to carry ideas into action and therefore may not get the support of key players. The establishment of the Greater Vancouver Economic Council on the other hand, is the mirror image of that, in that it is a collective effort to build a vehicle to do something to advance regional economic strategy, without being clear at this stage on what actions the institution will undertake. There is merit to both approaches and therefore our different external partners have strong preferences for each approach - build the strategy first and then the vehicle to deliver it; and develop the institutional framework first and then allow that to develop the strategy.

In view of past lack of success, staff recommends that we support both initiatives and encourage integration of the approaches.

The Board may a) Appoint a Standing Committee on the Economy as a forum to discuss issues on the region’s economy and to define the role of GVRD and partners; b) Provide GVEC a formal support including GVRD’s support in their request for Federal and Provincial financial assistance; c) Direct staff to identify projects that may be done in collaboration with GVEC; and d) Develop Terms of Reference for the development of a Regional Economic Strategy using the paper on PROSPERITY, LIVABILITY, SUSTAINABILITY: Seeking a Strategy for the Future of Greater Vancouver’s Economy, as a starting point.

These are possible recommendation options for the Committee to consider.

4. CONCLUSION

As a key component of the Sustainable Region Initiative, the GVRD, in partnership with other organizations, has been a participant, facilitator, and convener of activities that provided understanding and assistance in addressing regional economic issues. This report outlines GVRD’s initiatives to provide background for Committee discussion and recommendations.

Attachments: 1. Greater Vancouver Economic Council presentation

004432554 GVRD and Regional Economic Initiatives Item No. 4.2

Committee Meeting Date: November 7, 2006

To: Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force

From: Bill Morrell, Corporate Communications and Media Relations Division Manager, Corporate Relations Department

Date: October 4, 2006 (deferred from October 11, 2006 SRI Task Force Meeting)

Subject: International Association of Business Communicators Award presented to GVRD television program The Sustainable Region

Recommendation: That the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force forward this report, International Association of Business Communicators Award presented to GVRD television program The Sustainable Region, dated October 4, 2006, to the Board for information.

1. PURPOSE

To inform the Task Force of an award for excellence in communications recently presented to the Greater Vancouver Regional District’s television program The Sustainable Region.

2. CONTEXT

Corporate Communications and Outreach activities give voice to the GVRD’s strategic and operational programs. Activities engage stakeholders, both internal and external, as a means of advancing corporate objectives.

Communications and Outreach brings to bear a wide range of communication, consultation and relationship-building tools that provide the GVRD’s diverse audiences with a better understanding of, and opportunities for participation in, the achievement of regional priorities; in particular, building a livable and sustainable region.

One arrow in the quiver of the GVRD’s communications and outreach activities is the production and airing of television programming, typified by The Sustainable Region.

The Sustainable Region is a unique, half-hour TV show that illustrates the challenges and choices of sustainability; demonstrates actions individuals can take, and; provides context for the importance of sustainability to the residents of the Lower Mainland. Each show examines a theme that is viewed through the lens of environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Conceived in 2003 and launched in April of 2004, the show is produced monthly. Each half- hour episode consists of a set of five-minute stories reflecting the program theme and is presented in a newsmagazine format. Themes explore issues of importance to the region, such as agriculture, energy, building green, homelessness, water, wastewater and air quality management, transportation, and regional planning.

International Association of Business Communicators Award presented to GVRD television program The Sustainable Region Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 2 of 2

The Sustainable Region is broadcast on Shaw Cable, and is licensed for rebroadcast to The Knowledge Network, Science World Theatre, Delta Cable and Novus Entertainment Inc. Compilations of the shows are distributed to teachers for use in the classroom as well as to GVRD Parks and LSCR education and interpretation programs, and are available on-line at www.gvrd.bc.ca/TVgvtv.ca

In addition, programming developed for The Sustainable Region is often repurposed for other communications uses – an example is production of a regional overview DVD that was distributed at this year’s World Urban Forum.

On September 20, 2006, The Sustainable Region received a Blue Wave Award of Excellence from the International Association of Business Communicators, BC Chapter, in the category of multimedia communications tactics. An award of excellence is judged to be 5.25 out of a total score of 7. The Sustainable Region received a scoring of 6.42 from the judging panel.

IABC comprises a global network of more than 13,000 business communicators in some 60 countries. Its awards program recognizes the achievements of communications professionals, and celebrates best practices that advance the profession.

It is noteworthy that this award is the second received for The Sustainable Region in 2006. Last February, the show was also honoured with an award for excellence in broadcast journalism in agriculture from the Agriculture Council of BC.

4. CONCLUSION

The Blue Wave Award reinforces the value of GVRD television programming and recognizes the region’s leadership in advancing sustainability.

004432195 International Association of Business Communicator Item No. 4.3

Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force Meeting Date: November 7, 2006

To: Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force

From: Heather Schoemaker, Manager, Corporate Relations

Date: October 24, 2006

Subject: Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues: Dealing with your drug problem, Labour Pains, and The World Is Watching

Recommendation: That the GVRD Board: a) Forward the reports dated October 24, 2006, titled: 1) Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - Labour Pains 2) Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - Dealing with your drug problem 3) Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - The World Is Watching to member municipalities for their information and comment; and b) Direct staff to consider the output of the dialogues in the development of a “sustainability based vision” for the future of the region.

1. PURPOSE

To provide information to the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force on the following Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues: 1) Labour and Immigration - Labour Pains – May 23, 2006 2) Drugs and Crime - Dealing with your drug problem – June 26, 2006 3) Regional Economy - The World Is Watching – September 26, 2006

2. CONTEXT

The Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues is the latest outreach component of the Sustainable Region Initiative (SRI). As the title implies, this series of high-profile debates and discussions is intended to help decision makers shape the future of the region by presenting a range of views which hopefully challenge and stimulate fresh thought on a range of regional issues. The dialogue series runs from March to December 2006 and is facilitated by well-known broadcaster Rafe Mair.

The attached reports (Attachments 1, 2 and 3) provide an overview of the discussions of the three recent dialogues. Included with each report are detailed Issues Summary Notes. Attachment 4 provides details on upcoming Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues.

Attachments: 1 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues - Labour Pains 2 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Dealing with your drug problem 3 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World is Watching 4 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues Flyer Attachment 1

Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force Meeting Date: November 7, 2006

To: Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force

From: Heather Schoemaker, Manager, Corporate Relations

Date: October 24, 2006

Subject: Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains

Recommendation:

That the GVRD Board: c) Forward the report dated October 24, 2006, titled “Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains” to member municipalities for their information and comment; d) Direct staff to consider the output of the Labour and Immigration dialogue in the development of a “sustainability based vision” for the future of the region.

1. PURPOSE

To provide information to the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force on the May 23, 2006 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogue – Labour Pains.

2. CONTEXT

The Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues is the latest outreach component of the Sustainable Region Initiative (SRI). As the title implies, this series of high-profile debates and discussions is intended to help decision makers shape the future of the region by presenting a range of views which hopefully challenge and stimulate fresh thought on a range of regional issues. The dialogue series runs from March to December 2006 and is facilitated by well-known broadcaster Rafe Mair.

The third dialogue, Labour Pains, took place May 23, 2006 at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. Vice-Chair Ladner introduced the event and the panel members: • Jim Sinclair, President, BC Federation of Labour • Keith Sashaw, President, Vancouver Regional Construction Association (VRCA) • Ken Peacock, Senior Policy Analyst, Business Council of BC (BCBC) • Roslyn Kunin, President, Roslyn Kunin and Associates Inc.

The audience of approximately 101 participants included local government, the business community, government and non-government organizations, financial organizations, and other interested organizations.

The dialogue focused on the new economy, the requirement for skilled workers (trade, technical and management) and how we train, retain and recruit the workforce necessary to maintain and ensure a vibrant and thriving economy. Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 3 of 70

Some of the salient points made were: a) The labour market is driven by the region’s underlying demographics, which suggest that growth in B.C.’s labour force will slow significantly in the future. If international and inter- provincial migration levels fall, which is quite possible, labour force growth could slow to zero within a decade. b) Within the labour market, there will be little growth in numbers of workers under 40 in the next twenty years, and there are already shortages, especially: • People with trades, technical education, quantitative skills • Entrepreneurs, first-line managers, rainmakers, people who can grow companies • NGOs c) We need a high-wage, highly skilled workforce to compete internationally. This requires more emphasis on: • Training, with lower costs and more convenience to trainees, higher completion rates. • More spending by companies on training, possibly even a training tax, rather than companies relying on “poaching” trained employees from other companies. • Reaching out to schools, underemployed, those in poorly paid service sector jobs, aboriginal and immigrant groups regarding training and opportunities available. • Education, with lower costs to students. • Treating employees well, including providing meaning and purpose in work, providing career planning, and being flexible to meet employee needs. • Increased emphasis on recognizing credentials from abroad and from other provinces. • Technology to reduce labour requirements (e.g. forming systems in construction). • Retaining skilled employees through downtowns, in order to have the necessary skills available for the next upturn. • Making sure everyone is taken care of, no-one is left behind. • Retaining and recruiting retirees for part time jobs, service sector jobs (retirement ages: stable at 67 for self employed; 63 and slightly rising for private sector; fallen from 65 to 59 in public sector). d) Increased immigration offers opportunities as well as challenges: • Canada has not been particularly successful in getting highly talented employees from elsewhere; when we do, they often move on or return home. • The construction industry has had success with the Provincial Nominee program, but this program is limited to a few sectors. • Businesses have to change their practices: they acknowledge tending to overlook immigrant applicants, and to hire them at levels below those they are trained for. • There are a few small guest worker programs (e.g. in agriculture), and limited interest in expanding these programs, though there is some interest in considering possibilities for foreign students just finishing their studies in Canada. • The community benefits enormously, culturally and from many other perspectives, from immigration, but it also puts pressure on housing affordability and on community services

4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 4 of 70

e) To have a successful, sustainable labour strategy, other issues need to be addressed, including: • Housing affordability – a challenge at all income levels except the highest. • Affordable daycare options, with reasonable wages for daycare workers. • Maintaining quality of life.

The event was co-promoted by the Vancouver Board of Trade and their Chief Economist Dave Park joined the GVRD Commissioner/CAO, Johnny Carline in offering brief closing remarks and then Vice-Chair Ladner thanked the panelists and closed the event.

The attachment provides a detailed summary of the labour and immigration dialogue.

3. ALTERNATIVES No alternatives presented.

4. CONCLUSION

The third of the Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues: “Labour Pains”, generated ideas and vigorous discussion. Many in the audience believed that this dialogue cut to the heart of what we want our future to look like, raising questions of the long-term economic sustainability of the region.

An opening question about growth, and the stats of the seniors population increasing by 600,000 but the working population maybe only increasing by about 200,000, seemed to suggest that we may be bound to increase our population in the future to maintain the standard of living for all the seniors. This will pose some interesting challenges and opportunities for the GVRD as well as others. The region has benefited enormously culturally and in every other way from multicultural immigration, but there’s going to be continued pressure on housing affordability (an issue that continues to be of prime importance in these dialogues), on community services, particularly for seniors, for immigrants and for working women.

There was a recognition that increasing productivity will have to be a key part of any economic strategy, but that will also maintain pressure to make sure that that kind of activity will be sustainable productivity. We’re already seeing some pressure on the GVRD to reduce some environmental standards to allow companies to be more productive.

Most felt that the economy is likely to continue to specialize in a high-skill, high wage economy, and have a high cost of living - no one can make a go of it without a well-paying job. If this is true, can training take care of everybody in this respect? Or is this going to be an increasingly difficult place to live for those who simply can’t make it in that kind of economy? If that’s the case, welfare is surely a last resort.

There was general agreement that the region needs a sustainable labour strategy – one that goes beyond apprenticeships and includes some consideration of how to avoid creating an ongoing deadweight loss with the marginal people in our society. Also raised, but not fully discussed, was the role of the regional government, which typically is not really involved in training and education, but is appreciative of the issues and impacts.

4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 5 of 70

The session was very well received and the GVRD once again received accolades for organizing this particular session as well as the whole series.

As with the results of the housing and industry dialogues, it would be appropriate for both municipal and regional staff and elected officials to consider the ideas generated in relation to the role of the region in determining broader development strategies for the region. As the GVRD Board’s SRI Task Force is beginning to consider and develop a ‘sustainability based vision’ for the future of the region, it would also be appropriate to refer this report to staff to consider in the preparation of that vision.

Attachments: 1a. Labour and Immigration Dialogue Issues Summary Notes

4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Item 4.3 Attachment 1a

GVRD FUTURE OF THE REGION SUSTAINABILITY DIALOGUES

LABOUR & IMMIGRATION: LABOUR PAINS MAY 23RD, 2006

ISSUES SUMMARY NOTES

STATED GOALS • This dialogue will explore ways to meet the significant shortfall in our labour pool. • It seeks answers to the following questions: – How will we train, retain and recruit the work force needed by our existing industries? – Will we take advantage of new opportunities in a new and creative economy? – Is this a temporary boom-driven issue, or are there longer term implications? – What is the role of government? – Is there a role for the regional government, which typically is not involved in training and education?

THE DIALOGUE

1.0 Context • To continue to enjoy our privileged status in this region, we have to deal with the topic of labour. • The number one concern of employers and investors is, do we have the people to do the work? • Human resources—people—will be the reason why businesses leave or businesses don’t start, and therefore we don’t have taxes, tax bases or jobs here. • Surveys show that the biggest problem on the minds of businesses, whether big, medium or small, is how to: – gain, train and retain enough qualified workers; or – attract, attach and advance the qualified work force that they need. • Overall, we have a relatively small supply and a huge demand for workers, and we all have to become aware of that problem to find the ways to fix it. • We need to create a society where we have a huge emphasis on trained, skilled workers, retaining them in our society, and making them work. • We want to live in a high-wage, skilled province, because that is the way to compete in the global market. • We can’t compete by having cheap labour, low wages, and exploitative labour practices, because we’re not going to win that battle anyway—we’re not starting from the same place as many other countries are. • Nothing happens unless there’s construction. If we’re building the province, we have to look at this sector. To some extent, construction is now going through what other sectors of the economy will be going through in the future. • To sustain a livable region, do we have to slow down and curtail growth at some point? – Over a few generations, Vancouver has grown from a sleepy village, to city of about 300,000, to an international city of over 2 million. – There were once summer homes at Spanish Banks and farms in Burnaby. Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 7 of 70

• What kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of a province are we going to have? All the rest of it falls by the wayside when you ask that question. • We need a real emergency national view of the world, about where this country is going. That means not just raising it with 50 people; we need to have thousands of people here.

2.0 Why are we facing a labour crunch? • I keep hearing about these jobs that are going to be needed. Why are we here? Is it just the Olympics? Is it just because we sometimes have nice weather? • It’s everything at once. – Five years ago, I was excited when I did a study on the demand for labour for the Olympics and related projects, because they were going to create lots of jobs. They were the only game in town, pun intended, because there was very little else happening in the economy. – Now, we not only have the Olympics and all the related projects such as the convention centre and the highway to prepare for, but we also have the biggest construction boom, both residential and non-residential, in living memory. – We have a growing population that will continue to grow, because this part of the world is Canada’s Florida and retirement capital, and that [creates] demand [for labour]. – We also have the biggest demand for our resources—the energy resources, the woods resources, the mineral resources. This is another cyclical industry that has been down and is now exploding. Demand for resources is going up and will stay up because of growth in China and everywhere else in the world—unless there is a major collapse and disaster, with everyone in the Third World going back down to Third World level, which I don’t foresee. – We have the demographic factor of not many young people being born or coming into the labour force in Canada. So I see this as a major, widespread, long-term trend.

3.0 Not every sector is facing a labour shortage • Other trends include the loss of manufacturing jobs. – In January and February, we lost the most manufacturing jobs in the last 25 years. – The whole manufacturing sector is struggling to compete in the world, and that’s a challenge for all of us. • Also, 35% of every buck in this province—and a lot of the money in Vancouver—comes out of the resource sector in this province, but we have a timber industry on the coast that’s in a crisis. Unemployment is growing in those communities • There are two worlds here: a rural B.C. world and a Lower Mainland world. The construction boom in Prince George looks a little different than it does here. • The forest sector has five-year time frame on the pine beetle dispute. – Many, many mills will shut down in this province, and rural B.C. will look very different. – They’re cutting at a rate of five times sustainability. Our forest industry is not cutting at sustainable levels. – At the same time, our log exports are at record levels, as we close down more mills.

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4.0 Focus on construction

4.1 Recent history • Talking about the skills shortage in construction, it’s important to look at what’s happened in the past because it explains why we’re here today. – In 1992 the province of B.C. built 45,000 housing units. – Two years later, that dropped to 16,000. When you factor in that each housing unit is about 2.5 person-years of employment, you can see what happened to the industry. – We lost an awful lot of skilled workers to other sectors of the economy, and to other parts of Canada and around the world, because Canadian construction workers are seen as among the best trained and most productive in the world. – Some of that is coming back to haunt us today as we’ve seen unprecedented activity in construction. – This shedding of skilled workers in the 1990s as a result of a dismal economy in B.C. means that, per 2001 census information, the average age of a skilled worker with a certificate in the construction industry in B.C. was 41. In some trades it was as high as 48 and 49. – We’re left with a “doughnut” scenario: contractors had to shed a lot of skilled workers to maintain business. They were chasing jobs to keep a small cadre of trained and skilled workers, and then there was nothing. And now we have an influx of young people coming into the industry, and that presents some challenges as well. • The resurgence in construction started in about 2000 with residential projects. Significant increases in residential construction began in about 2004. • The Province of B.C. maintains a major projects inventory that tracks projects over $20 million in the Lower Mainland and $15 million elsewhere in the province. – A year ago, that inventory, tracked $65 billion worth of major projects on the go. – Two weeks ago, they issued their latest report, and the figure is up to $92 billion. • We’ve seen an increase of almost 50% in major project capital intentions in just a year. That clearly is putting stresses on the province. • Remember that construction is a cyclical industry. In past cycles, either – we had very strong activity in the Lower Mainland but not elsewhere in the province, or – more commonly, we were countercyclical to the rest of Canada, and that aided in terms of the mobility of skilled workers. • Now, however, construction across North America is strong, and construction in all sectors of the construction industry and throughout the province is very strong.

4.2 Recruitment efforts • We’ve recruited, going from 60,000 to 80,000 people employed in the province in just one year, but there’s a lot more to be done. • We see a need of about 20,000 additional workers in construction in the province over the next few years. This is based on labour requirement tracking through projects funded by the federal government. Studies indicate severe shortages in the construction industry in B.C. • The construction industry is going into the high schools and actively recruiting, which we haven’t done in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. This has been helped by television shows. – You can’t turn on the TV without seeing some hunk in a tool belt telling you how to fix your home, and that’s encouraged people to come into the industry.

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• We went to Europe to look at encouraging skilled workers in England and Germany to come and work in B.C., and the interest is high. There are tremendous opportunities here. • It’s not a one-response scenario. We have to look at all of the tools available and take action on many different fronts at the same time.

4.3 Resource constraint may slow construction • Are we anticipating a resource (construction materials and energy) constraint following on the heels of the labour constraint? If so, what kinds of new skills or training would be required to address that? • Construction costs are increasing significantly, and only a part of that is due to the labour. – Increases in construction material pricing are breathtaking at times. That is driven through some of the resource base. Copper is up. A lot of the construction materials are oil-based, and we all know what’s happening with that. – We are moving into a scenario of increasing construction costs that may be constraint on construction activity in the future.

5.0 Demand for workers • Everything is in demand, from the entry level worker in a restaurant or hotel to the manager of a large company, and everything in between. Trades workers, technical workers, service workers, technicians, and so on. • We need about 20,000 additional workers in construction in the province over the next few years.

6.0 Supply of workers

6.1 What we have • We have lots of older people—not older workers, because most of them plan to retire at a reasonable age or have already retired. • We have a lot of people with general university and college degrees. • We have a good number of MBAs who are looking for nice, big, well paid, well benefited jobs in large corporations—“tell me what to do and I’ll do it, I’ve got an MBA.” • We do have immigrants but they tend not to stay if they’re qualified. • [Also: unemployed manufacturing sector workers and underemployed, low-paid service sector workers—see notes in other sections.] 6.2 What we don’t have • We don’t have younger workers. – The number of kids we’re having and putting through the school system is small and shows no sign of increase. – The time horizon is about 20 years, because everyone who will enter the work force in the next 20 years or so has already been born. • We don’t have enough people with trades, technical education, quantitative skills, and the quantitative university degrees like engineering—their numbers are not anywhere near the number of people with general college or university degrees. • We don’t have enough entrepreneurs to start a business, create a business and generate jobs. • We don’t have first-line managers and supervisors—we’re really short there.

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– Running a coffee shop or a construction site—that’s the first line of supervision and management – These people not only have to be good managers and supervisors, but they also have to know what they’re doing. They have to have done the job. • We’re short of people who can run small organizations and turn them into big organizations. – Small organizations are like kids: the most wonderful thing about them is their future potential. – If small organizations don’t grow, they don’t exercise their potential. • We’re short of rainmakers—the people who can bring in the business; bring in the money to generate the jobs, to generate the profits, to pay the taxes, to keep the businesses going. – When we bring in rainmakers from the States (which has a lot more) for the new, brilliant, high tech businesses that our scientists are starting, they often take the whole company and move down to California.

7.0 Demographics • The aging population is a real issue, with extreme implications for the labour force. – 600,000 British Columbians are now aged 65 and over. In 2025, that number jumps to 1.2 million. – For the 55 to 64 age group, there will be a rise of about 200,000. – For the core working age of 35 to 44, there will be a small increase of 100,000 to 200,000. – In the younger categories, there is very little increase. – At the extreme, the number of people aged 15 to 24 is projected to decline. – You will see a big tipping toward older workers. • We can consider likely scenarios based on the anticipated number of immigrants and inter-provincial migrants coming into the province, and the population’s anticipated participation rate in the labour market. • Based on rudimentary, optimistic projections, labour force growth will slow dramatically from an annual average of 1.7% over the past five years to 0.8% by 2015 and to 0.3% by 2025. – B.C. Stats projects international net immigration to rise from around 25,000 per year to around 30,000 or perhaps 33,000. – It projects inter-provincial migration to rise from about 5,000 or 7,000 to about 15,000. • If those projections don’t come true—and that’s a strong possibility—labour force growth could easily slow to zero by 2015 or 2016. – Historically, in most years, the federal government has fallen short of its target for attracting skilled international immigrants into Canada. It will be a challenge to attract dramatically more immigrants in the categories we need. – Inter-provincial migration will also be an issue. The most recent figures show that B.C. lost workers to Alberta, causing net inter-provincial migration numbers to go from positive to negative.

8.0 Productivity • B.C. has a poor productivity record over the past decade and a half and is now below the Canadian average.

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• Because there will be slower growth in the labour force, there has to be higher productivity and stronger productivity growth to maintain living standards in this province.

8.1 Working less and achieving higher productivity • Reducing work time relates to productivity. I haven’t heard any of the speakers raise the issue of reducing working time, and I’d like to know why. – That has been a way that a lot of the productivity gains in past have been taken, up until maybe 30 or 40 years ago. – In the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve been taking all of the productivity gains as income. • As long as all productivity gains are taken as income, we’re not recognizing the real essential overhead cost [to workers]. What about taking more of the productivity gains as time off rather than as income? • It should be an individual choice, and the work-leisure trade-off is one that most people make. A lot of people decide that they will work more than one job if they want more income. Similarly, people scale back how much they want to work. • Flexibility is important, but the premise of getting people to work less is counter to what we’re heading for in the next 15 to 20 years: an extreme shortage of labour and workers. That’s the reality. However, people can still decide to work less. • Fewer hours worked does lead to higher productivity, possibly, or can be a contributing factor to higher productivity, and that’s because productivity is measured as output per hour worked. You work fewer hours, you get a higher productivity number. There are a lot of other factors that [complicate] that, of course.

8.2 Competitiveness and productivity • In B.C.’s context, I like to think of productivity within an overall competitiveness framework. – Competitiveness means that productivity is important, but so is output per person— GDP per capita, in economist’s jargon. – Competitiveness is a broad proxy for measuring overall wealth levels. To create a competitive economy in today’s world, it’s important to also have a wealthy economy. – You can imagine a jurisdiction that’s very competitive in a low value industry. Will that be an attractive jurisdiction for other kinds of businesses—all kinds of businesses—if they don’t have good schools, good healthcare, and a safe climate to live in? – People can work less if they decide to, but I don’t see it as a solution for being competitive in the future.

9.0 Progress index • What is the view on a genuine progress index, which maps out, beyond the GDP, what real success is in terms of our humanity and quality of life for everyone on the planet? • The social progress question is fundamental. The government has set up a Progress Board, but it’s one-sided, as usual, with only businesspeople looking at mostly the GNP, and a business view of the rest. • The grossest thing about the GDP is that if you have a natural disaster and thousands of people die, it looks good because lots of money is spent, increasing your GDP. • Oregon has done benchmarking with community groups, anti-poverty groups, and the labour movement. They look at a whole series of things to judge whether we’re making progress.

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– Until the world starts to talk like that, and we start to act like that, we’re not going to create the best place we can live. We have to do more of that.

10.0 Pulling up the economic drawbridge • We could also ask, “At what point do we draw up the economic drawbridge?” – The question was asked, “Is there appoint at which we consider pulling up the population drawbridge?” and we’ve heard about demographic challenges. – We have to step back and look at why we need to fill the labour force and sustain our economy, not just the challenge of filling the labour force. • Considering our pay-as-you go pension plan and healthcare system, we need to grow economically as our aging population migrates not only out of the working stage but into high acquisition of healthcare services and the Canada Pension Plan. • Our healthcare costs are not up exponentially. We are not spending more per GDP than most other countries are in healthcare. – We do need to spend a little more as we get older, but that’s the way it works, and we can afford that. – We’re a very rich country and we’re spending less than many other countries today, which are competing fine in the world. • I don’t buy that we have a huge crisis. We have one of the best systems in the world, the most efficient, and among the cheapest. As some of my business colleagues would say, it’s the best deal they’re going to get, and look at their American counterparts—it’s a disaster. • Where are the real jobs going to be? Growth is great, but what does growth mean if it’s so fast and creates cheap labour jobs? That’s not what I call good growth. • Growth versus sustainability: – That’s the question for the planet, not just for us. We’re not dealing with it very well. We’re not having that conversation in real ways. – It’s growth, growth, growth, growth, growth—you know fossil fuels, fossil fuels, fossil fuels, and energy plan and all those things that use up more and more of our resources. – At the same time we have a billion and a half people on the planet that make a buck a day. – There are some fundamentals that we don’t have right. We’ve got to have those conversations. How and when do we have them? The labour movement wants to be part of them but we’re not the only one to have the conversation.

11.0 Role of labour • The Alberta Federation of Labour recently said there was no shortage of labour. Assuming you don’t support the AFL’s position, what’s your recommendation a short- term solution? • The labour movement wants to be back at the table again, sharing information and coming to joint decisions about how to deal with the crisis. As long as we are blocked from participating in real ways, we’re not going to find solutions.

12.0 Retaining workers • We have to treat people well—they are a scarce resource. • We have to pay people well—that’s necessary but not sufficient; then it depends on how much of that pay you can pass on to the ultimate consumer. • We have to train people and we have to be nice to them. 4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 13 of 70

– In the construction industry, one of the things that helped retain workers was to stop swearing at them. • What about attachment and advancement? – I’m interested in the aspirational aspects of work that are beyond a paycheque, and how these might lead to better success in keeping people in jobs longer. – I’ve been running the management systems for a non-profit in Vancouver that made the list of the top 100 employers in Canada four times in a row. – We did not pay peanuts even though we were a non-profit, because our staff could have gone to work at any business at any time they wanted to. They’re excellent people. – Increasingly, people are looking for meaning and purpose in their work. Engagement comes from knowing that you’re doing good work for a good company that has good outcomes for all of society, and that you’re not just a unit of production. – Have you observed practices changing so people are not just units that we can slot in, but are asked what they want to do with their lives and what kind of society they want to build? – It is citizenship. It is nation building. That’s what people want to do with their labour. • It’s a really good point. Money doesn’t make it for everybody. People need a decent paycheque but, beyond that, there are other values such as loyalty. – After a free trade agreement, dealing with the fishing industry that was looking to move its production to other parts of the world, one of the challenges was the loyalty of workers. – Loyalty is a word we don’t use very much any more, and nobody feels much loyalty when the company’s looking for the cheapest bottom line wherever they can go. – There are lots of challenges as you face the global economy today, and one of the most radical things a company can do is say, “We’re here.” – A worker said to me, “You’ve got great ideas for working with the company, but if we work better and harder, it means they pack their bags faster and move the capital somewhere else.” – We come back to commitment. People are questioning whether companies have any commitment to us anymore, or whether they’d rather ship a log out because they can make a bigger buck on shipping a log than keeping the community going. • Good companies are very aware of this and know that their human resources are their scarcest product, so they are dealing with people’s career aspirations. – They provide people with training, talk to them, and plan out career paths and possibilities. – They don’t say, “If we train you, you’ll just go somewhere else or someone will poach you.” – Instead of saying, “What happens if we train someone and they leave?” they’re saying, “What happens if we don’t train people and they stay?” – If you’re a good company and a good employer, you train your people and keep them cutting edge, and you treat them well, odds are that even if they go somewhere else, if that other place doesn’t treat them just as well, they will come back. • For the non-career aspect, large organizations are doing things like: – giving their staff half a day off per week to do community work—not-for-profit work; – offering charity matching—if an employee donates to a recognized charity, they will match it; – making sure that the worker’s and the company’s interest are aligned through things like profit sharing—we all do well when the company does well.

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• The construction industry, working with training providers like BCIT, has developed training programs for project management and site superintendent, so you can get a masters of construction. There are opportunities for advancement in the construction industry. • There is a turnaround in “not swearing at the employees.” One member said that one of the biggest challenges is trying to convince the site superintendent that he has to be nice to the people on the site. These are cultural shifts but people in the industry are beginning to pay attention.

13.0 Skills training and apprenticeship • Having a globally competitive, high-wage, skilled province means having a massive education system that’s open and accessible to everybody. The doors have to remain wide open offering training to maintain the skilled work force. • Are we doing the job in British Columbia to train people? The answer is, absolutely not, and we’re paying the price for that now. • Will we have the same shortages [of skilled workers] 20 years from now? I don’t know. Construction [is cyclical], and so are other areas. Regardless, skills training is needed because: – If young people don’t have the opportunity to get skills, can’t afford to get them, or the doors aren’t open, then we’re robbing a whole group of people of a future and creating a huge other social problem. – No one can make it in this society without a good-paying job, and many of the jobs offered young people today aren’t good-paying. I run into too many of them working two or three jobs just to make ends meet. • We should definitely get to the kids in the high schools, telling them there are opportunities other than McDonald’s and apprenticeship and trades training is one of them. • At the Business Council, we’re actively out talking to the high schools with a program that we call the “Third Option,” which is essentially letting high school students know early on that there are alternative career pathways—non-university career pathways that are very rewarding and very lucrative, potentially. • Are there any trends in Canada, B.C. and Alberta, in particular, where record low unemployment levels are causing younger students to drop out of school, or not pursue apprentice programs, which will have longer term implications in the labour market? • This would not deter someone from starting an apprentice program, because unskilled workers still get lower pay and are much less in demand. – If you have absolutely no skills and no work experience, you aren’t going to be able to get more than minimum wage jobs. – The big problem is, because demand is so high for anyone with any level of skills that once you’ve had a little bit of skill training and a little bit of experience, the temptation to keep you working as opposed to going on to further training is great.

13.1 Tuition and other costs to students • How are you going to open up the education system and make sure people get to the first stage? The answer is lowering tuitions; doing all those things that viable economies in Europe and other places do. • You have a huge barrier with tuition increases the way they are, the cost of living the way it is, for young people to go to school, especially ones that don’t have parents with a lot of money to put them through school. Student loans are an option, but they get more and more expensive. 4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 15 of 70

• We don’t have enough people going into schools to get trained with the skills that we need, yet we have a lot of people working in jobs that pay really low wages. – You have to correct that by opening up your doors again. Globally successful modern economies, such as northern European ones, recognized that university was expensive and made it free because society needed people to have skills—just like we needed people to have a high school education, so we made that free. – We’ve gone in the opposite direction. We have to turn that around and give young people the encouragement to get skills because, not only do they need them, we need them. • How can we get the many underemployed people in the service sector trained and into the skilled labour force? – Our training plans can’t get them into the system because they can’t afford to quit work even for seven weeks to get a start into the program. • If you’re asking us to open the doors to immigration, you have to open the doors for our own people, too, at the same time. You have to stop charging them to go to school.

13.2 The training system • We used to have 125 people going around to make sure that employers had apprentices and that apprentices got through the system. We fired most of them and are now down to 12. – That’s why we have a drop of 40% over the last four years in the number of people getting tickets as trained people in the different trades. • In the construction industry, labour was a major part of training but, in the last four years, we’ve been fired from all the committees. – We’ve been taken off all the training committees and all the apprenticeship committees, so we not only fired the people who delivered the services, but also all the advisors. – The labour movement has been clear with the construction industry. We want to be back at the table again. We want share information and come to joint decisions about how to deal with the crisis. – As long as we are blocked from participating in real ways, we won’t find solutions. We won’t be having the conversation we need to have. – We don’t want to be second-class citizens in our own house where we provide a lot of the work and a lot of the training. • Working with training providers like BCIT, the construction industry has developed training programs for project management and site superintendent, so you can now get a masters of construction from BCIT. Parents, counsellors, and also kids understand that there are opportunities for advancement in the construction industry. Being in construction isn’t being on the end of a shovel for 40 years.

13.3 Completion rates • We have a drop of 40% over the last four years in the number of people getting tickets as trained people in the different trades. • One of the main reasons for the trouble with completion rates in apprenticeship programs is that the apprentices are so desperately needed at work: – Employers are bribing them, saying, “Forget the studying now. You can always learn later. Right now I need you on the job. I’m going to pay you well. I’m going to give you overtime. Just keep right on working. • One solution is to not dumb down, but modularize the apprenticeship into pieces:

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– You do a little bit, and then work is very tempting and available. You need it, so you do it. – Then, because you’ve done your little bit, when things slow down, you can take the next little bit. – It will take you longer but you’ll make more money and you’ll complete your apprenticeship. – With apprenticeship packaged in one big lump, if you drop out because the work is too tempting now, you’ve lost everything and you’re gone to the apprenticeship system, unless you start over later or it becomes very complicated. • We share the concern about the declining completion rate, but there has been an increase in the number of trainees through the systems. – It’s up from about 15,000 to about 25,000. More people are involved in formal training now than just a couple of years ago. – We lost traction when we transitioned from [ITAC] to the current ITA. There was a lot of confusion in the system. Some of that traction is getting back into the system. • With the creation of the Residential Construction Industry Training Organization and the Construction Industry Training Organization, we will be able to focus the industry better on what we can do to improve completion rates. • It’s not only the employers, but to some extent the apprentices themselves who may be reluctant to leave the jobsite, from a well-paid, high-paid position to get into a training mode. • Anecdotally, based on talking to apprentices themselves, there are a lot of other reasons. – You used to be able to get trained around the province, so that when you had to take six or eight weeks off your job, you could do it in the local community college, and they ran most of the programs there. Now, if you’re an electrician, you have to get trained in Vancouver. – If you’re working in Prince George, it’s not just a matter of taking six weeks off work. You’ve got to move. You can’t get time off – One person with three years on the job is still getting paid at the first year apprenticeship rate. Why? Because he can’t get his second year and third year in at the college. – The employer’s winning, because of paying at the first year rate. • It’s a crime against this situation for us to have declining rates. There’s no excuse for this. We have a booming economy. We can make excuses but, frankly, young people deserve better. • I’m with the Industry Training Authority, and I want to correct a few stats. – I want to distinguish between completion rates and certificates issued. Completion rate is the number of people who start a program and finish it. In university programs, the completion rate is about 40%, and with apprenticeship in B.C., the completion rate is 42%—very comparable to other provinces. – Certificates issued, which is what I think some people are getting at, is the number of people that actually get a certificate. This is a volume issue—how many people started; therefore, how many people ended up with a certificate. – If you had 10,000 at the start, versus 20,000 starting, you’re going to have more certificates with 20,000. So, certificates issued in B.C. dropped. That was an issue to do with the transition from ITAC to ITA. That number is going up. – Someone said there were 1,500 Red Seal certificates issued last year. The number was 2,200.

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– The number of trainees in the system today is 27,000. The number is going up. It’s driven by the economy. I expect the number of certificates to go up accordingly. It went up last year by 20%. – Yes, it dropped, but it’s going back up again. It dropped because the number of people in the apprenticeship system was down when we took over. – The number of high school kids in apprenticeship today is 3,000. It was 800 when we started two years ago. – This is not about the ITA; it’s about the economy. The good news is that kids in high school are getting it. Apprenticeships are good-paying jobs.

13.4 Role of employers • Have employers done their job to deal with the [skilled] labour shortage? No, categorically, failure. – The five biggest employers in Kamloops employ more than 200 trades people but have only 32 apprentices—not nearly enough to take care of the grey hair in the machine room lunch room, or the trades lunch room. Of the 32 apprentices, 29 are at the mine and one is at the pulp mill. – Governments can pull up their socks on hiring apprentices, too. The local [Kamloops] school board has one apprentice; the college, which has a trades training program, has none; and the city of Kamloops has none. • There is an exodus because all of the pulp mills in that area, all those heavy industries, are not hiring apprentices and have been poaching for years. – When students at an apprenticeship class were asked where they would get a job when they got their first year as a millwright, the answer was that two would stay in town (one’s dad owns the machine shop, and the other has an uncle who does). The rest were going to Alberta. • According to the last survey, 55% of employers that use skilled trades have no apprentices at all—zero. They’re taking no responsibility for the society’s needs for trained, skilled workers.

13.5 A culture of poaching • Employers that use skilled trades rely on other people to train those workers, and then they poach them either by offering them more money or hoping for a drop in the employment rates so they can get them somewhere else. • Poaching is part of the culture of those businesses [pulp mills and heavy industries]. When the poaching can’t be done within this pool, we just draw the circle larger and poach bigger. • Small businesses—the Chamber of Commerce put it well—don’t want to train people because big businesses poach them. But they want more immigration so they can poach outside the country. 13.6 The 1% training tax • If you accept that training takes place on the job, how do you design a system that punishes the ones that don’t carry their weight and rewards those that do? • One solution is the 1% training tax used in Quebec and many parts of Europe, which says that part of doing business, besides paying taxes, is that you pay for training. – If you don’t train, you pay the 1%, and you get nothing back. – If you train above the norm, then you get subsidies from the government. • B rewarding the people who are doing it well, and punishing those that aren’t, or at least making them pay their fair share, we start to have that culture of training.

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– That way, we don’t get employers saying, I’m not training any more people because everybody steals them anyway. 13.7 Innovative approaches • The construction industry is working on developing and delivering a $12 million program with the federal government, to take 1,000 aboriginal youth and put them through a six- week training program, getting them job-ready so they can be employed and encouraged to get into the Red Seal trades. • The construction industry is about to launch an immigrants program, to take skilled immigrants who are already here, work with them to get them through the training program and, with job coaches, get them into work. • The Construction Industry Training Organization has just been launched. This is looking at training and what can be done to develop innovative training. We’re also working with some of the training providers.

14.0 Inter-provincial skill transfer • We need a national alignment between provinces to have a national scope on programs such as apprenticeship and bringing in skilled workers. – The discussion here, today, in Vancouver, about poaching and the war on talent (skilled workers), could equally happen in Calgary or Toronto. – We have not only urban versus rural differences within B.C., but also differences between B.C., Alberta and some of the other prairie provinces, and also the Maritimes. – We have federal programs that keep people in areas where there aren’t the same opportunities. – How will we align provincial and national programs? • About inter-provincial movement, we already have a labour market that works very well. – Someone from Newfoundland was saying that the new census is going to be invalid because everybody from Newfoundland is now working in Alberta. When they do the population count, they’re going to discover that in Newfoundland there is nobody home. • We need to look at credential recognition across provincial borders. – B.C. and Alberta have recently signed an agreement to allow labour mobility between the two provinces, and we’re hoping at least some of that is going to move west. • The construction industry, through the Red Seal program, has been proponent of inter- provincial mobility in the construction trades. – That has served the construction industry well in past cycles. It’s often countercyclical to the rest of Canada. • Having a nationally recognized Gold Seal program has been very beneficial in allowing people to go where the job opportunities are. • We have a particular challenge right now in B.C.: we’re next to Alberta, and it’s getting very difficult to get people across the Rockies, regardless of the inter-provincial seals.

15.0 International recruitment (a.k.a. “international poaching”) • Are we counting on poaching internationally to bring in those skilled workers? • We need to attract workers who have the skills and can do the jobs. • About poaching internationally, we’re trying to and not being very successful. – We aren’t attracting the number of immigrants we want with the skills that we need.

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– When they come here, they don’t stay. They go on to the States, they go back home, and they go on to other places. • Our problem is keeping workers in Canada. The people who come to Canada often don’t stay, because we aren’t competitive. They find better opportunities in growing economies back home or in the States where they have a higher standard of living and a better climate. • We haven’t recognized that it is no longer the 1947, just after the second World War, when Canada was a great booming country, and most of the rest of the world was in ruins, and people longed to come here and stay here and bring their skills. – Canada now has to compete for workers with a lot of more attractive countries, with higher standards of living—with countries that are more attractive to individuals because they’re home, and they’re their culture, and that’s where they grew up. – We think: magic answer, we’ll open the doors, we’ll get immigrants, and we’ll solve our problems. It doesn’t work that way in the 21st century. – There are a lot of warm bodies that can come here, but these people would have to be trained to become skilled workers – To poach from the rest of the world for skilled workers, we have to compete with the entire rest of the world to get and keep those workers. • The construction industry has gone to Europe to look at encouraging skilled workers in England and Germany to come and work in B.C., and the interest is high. There are tremendous opportunities here. • Working with the provincial nominee program, I had the opportunity of going to Germany, and there is a lot of widespread interest in what is going on in B.C. – It’s not just about the jobs; it’s about the lifestyle and the opportunities that are here in B.C. – While it may be seen as poaching, the fact is that in Germany right now, there is a 12% unemployment rate, and it’s not looking very good. – I was talking with a lot of skilled workers who are very frustrated because they’re not able to pursue their occupation. They look forward to having that opportunity to work in their trade. • We’ve received inquiries from around the world about opportunities in B.C. The challenges are: – How do we bring them in? – How do we recognize their credentials? – How do we connect them with the employers to make sure they’re operating at their peak levels of training? • The construction unions have said all along that they are not against foreign workers as long as: – Canadian workers have been offered the jobs first, – training opportunities have been offered to Canadians first, and – foreign workers are not used as a source of cheap labour. • When you go to foreign workers, you’re recognizing that there’s a failure in the system. – [Apprenticeship] completion rates are down 40% in the last three years, and this in a construction boom, when employment has jumped 80,000. Why is this? – At the apprenticeship training branch, they’ve laid off 100 people. We have to address our failures first. – Let’s not dumb down the system by watering down the trade credentials. We’re down to 1,500 Red Seal trades who’ve graduated last year, versus 2,800 just three years ago. 4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 20 of 70

– There are so many people involved in the service sector right now—underemployed people, working hard, 12 hours a day, and getting peanuts. How can we get these underemployed people and train them first, before we have to resort to going overseas? • If you’re asking us to open the doors to immigration, you have to open the doors for our own people, too, at the same time. You have to stop charging them to go to school.

15.1 Guest workers • Europe’s guest worker programs have not worked well. Recently, in the United States, thousands—millions—of people hit the streets because the guest worker thing doesn’t work. – We think we have a problem here, with immigrants not being able to work or participate in the society, but multiply that by several thousands and you’ve got what’s happening in the United States. I hope we’re smart enough to plan so we don’t fall into those pitfalls. • The labour movement has never been friendly toward the guest worker program. – When we built this country, people who came here as guest workers, starting with something called the “National Dream.” I think it was a railway or something. We brought in Chinese people. They weren’t allowed to bring their families. They came here and worked. They were super exploited, and then they were sent home and we were done with them. – Frankly, it’s an insult to the people that we bring in and an insult to the country. Immigrants came here, including most of our parents or grandparents, to be nation builders. To be nation builders, you have to be citizens. – We should look critically at any guest worker program, because it can be a program that brings people in to do work that is not supportable as a Canadian—you can’t make enough money at that job as a Canadian, so we bring somebody from another country or another culture, where this money is worth more. • The magic solution to the worker shortage has usually been described not as guest workers, but as immigration. • We have only very small guest worker programs, occasionally in agriculture where we can’t get the crops off, but this is not a major feature of the Canadian economy, and I don’t see anyone proposing that it’s growing. • I wouldn’t write it off entirely. You can find situations where it could be effective. – When [foreign] students graduate from university, rather than sending them home, why not grant them a two-year temporary work permit, which we already do, but extend that and expand that program. – It lets people get their feet in the labour market, get some credentials and experience, and then possibly look to their permanent resident status. • The construction industry has to look at innovative programs, including temporary foreign workers. We are very concerned about whether we can get the skilled labour we need to complete the $92 billion worth of capital expansions. – There are skilled workers who are interested in coming to B.C. They may not be interested in becoming Canadian citizens, but they want to see other parts of the world and check out if B.C. is the place where they ultimately do want to relocate. – It’s not a question of bringing over workers for the Canadian railway. There are checks and balances that we put into place to look at the skill sets to make sure there is a match.

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16.0 Foreign credential recognition • Credential recognition will be increasingly important simply because immigrants will account for essentially all the growth in the labour market in the coming years. • Foreign credential recognition has been in the news. • People have come into the province, into the country, and are working well below the level they are trained for. • The business community itself has to do better. – Businesses admit that they often overlook immigrants in their HR planning. – They tend to hire immigrants at a level below what they are trained for. • The business community will be a key part of the solution. • Let’s not dumb down the system by watering down the trade credentials.

17.0 Cost of Housing • We have to consider limiting factors like the cost of housing. • We haven’t touched on how wages compare to the cost of living. – Not just in the Lower Mainland, but all over B.C., I visit communities where people say there are no good-paying jobs. – We have a service industry economy but housing is through the roof, and part of that is driven by the fact that people like to retire in B.C. People come from other places and people like to have second homes here. – Workers are disappearing to places like Alberta because the wages are higher. – Do we have a wage problem? Or do we have a housing crisis? Do you have any perspective how we can try to solve it? • Absolutely, we do have a housing price issue. It’s a broad issue. It crosses all spectrums from low income even up to higher income people. It’s only going to get worse. – Increasingly, even when companies try to attract top executives from other regions, we hear that very well paid candidates come here, and take a look at the housing costs, and say, “Thanks, but no thanks.” • There’s not a lot that can be done about it. You can talk at the margin about what you can try to do to keep housing cost down but, at the end of the day, it’s a market driven issue and it’s tough to change the sentiment of the marketplace.

18.0 “Overhead” costs borne by workers • Because economic activity takes place in cycles—cycles of booms and busts, labour [workers] bear an overhead cost. Businesses and conventional wisdom in North America have been unwilling to recognize this. • The overhead cost to workers is the cost of getting training, the cost of getting educated, and the cost of maintaining themselves when they’re not employed. • In the past 30 or 40 years, governments and businesses have been more and more interested in putting those costs off onto the individual worker rather than sustaining that overhead so that the workers are available when the economy goes back into boom out of a bust.

19.0 Not every job is a good job • It’s not a totally pretty picture out there for work—let’s talk about good-paying jobs with pensions so [local] people can retire and enjoy the good life, not just people who come here.

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– Where are we getting the good jobs? – People want good jobs, that let them raise families, go home at night, safe, and go back to work the next day and get paid enough that they can have a life and own a home. • You have to pay daycare workers a fair wage. – These are skilled workers who take care of our children from the age of six months to six years, and they’re paid at rates far lower than the custodial staff that work in our schools. • Other countries have decided that if you’re going to have a [retail] service sector economy, which is where the growth is, then you’ve got to pay real wages, to make them real jobs.

20.0 Daycare to support women in the work force • What about women in the work force? What needs to be done to encourage and support young women—educated, talented young women with university degrees and lots of training—who have children—while they participate in the labour market? • The federal government has backed off on a commitment to provide significant daycare funding for all the provinces in Canada. If the municipal and provincial governments don’t step in to bridge the gap, daycare costs will increase by about $250 per month. That’s in addition to sometimes about $1,300 per month for an infant. • If you want people to work in the labour force, and we estimate that about 70% of women want to work, you have to be able to provide quality childcare. • I talk to a lot of women who don’t want to put their kids down the street at a place where they sit in front of the TV all day. It’s just not what they want to do. It doesn’t feel good to them, and it’s not what they want to be a parent for. • In countries with labour shortages, the solution is to have major daycare programs. It’s a society decision that they’re going to let those people go to work because they need them to work. That’s an investment that you make. • The childcare program being cut will just further encourage people not to go to work. • You have to pay daycare workers a fair wage. – Talk about skilled workers—they take care of our children from the age of six months to six years, and they’re paid at rates far lower than the custodial staff that work in our schools. – This is a crime against those people, and a real signal to them that we don’t want them. – People are leaving those jobs to get the jobs that are paying more money, including construction. I talked to a daycare worker the other day who was going into construction. • You have to have a viable system that pays well, and you have to have it accessible to everybody. We’re going in the wrong direction.

21.0 Older people in the work force • Every month, I talk to hundreds of seniors over the age of 60 about their low income problems. – They don’t want to retire, but are scared of going back to physical, heavy labour jobs. – Have you done any research on bringing our own talented pool of Canadian seniors back into the economy—the labour and the business economy? • Several organizations have done that. Some of them start even earlier, looking at people in the organization that are getting close to retirement years. 4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 23 of 70

– This doesn’t work for heavy labour in construction, but it works for most office occupations and professions. – The pitch is, “You might want to retire, but we need your skills. Can we be flexible? Can we bring you back on a seasonal basis? You’ll still get your pension, but we’ll bring you in for three months a year when we’re busy. Then you’ll have enough money for nice holidays.” – A colleague of mine was going to retire, but his boss told him, “You don’t want to retire; you just want to work three days a week.” – Increasingly, companies, because they’re recognize they’re going to need these older workers are working to keep their own work force. – Increasingly (more in the States than in Canada), food service and other organizations that used to rely on the kids that are no longer there are hiring older workers for service jobs, retail jobs and so on. They are being flexible about part- time, part-year work to meet those needs. Otherwise they have to reduce their hours or close down for lack of help. • [Hiring older workers] is an important part of the solution, to the extent that skill shortages do emerge in the future, even more so than now. – A company in Prince George that put out a newspaper ad looking for millwrights, specifically targeted to retired people. – It said, “Come, work with us. We’ll make it work. Doesn’t matter what you want or what you need. We’ll make it work.” – This was because they couldn’t get any other millwrights. • Hiring older workers involves becoming more flexible, bending to the worker’s needs and desires. • Even at Home Depot, for example, I see a lot of older workers providing the assistance that the customer needs. – They were probably a carpenter or something prior to that, and now they can pass on their knowledge to customers. I think you’re going to see more of it in the future. • Construction is ahead of the curve. We’re already seeing [retention of older workers] in construction. – Everybody talks about skill shortages and thinks of the carpenter with the tool or the hammer, or the electrician, or whatever. – We have an equally acute shortage of management—estimators, site superintendents, and project managers. – A number of our members have not bid projects, not because they didn’t have the workers, but because they didn’t have the project managers. – It’s getting difficult for someone to leave or retire from that type of position. The construction companies saying, “Listen, we’ll cut the hours to accommodate your needs.” – People with the skill sets that are in high demand, especially on the management side where they still have a lot to contribute, are being asked to come back, and they’re coming back on their terms. There is a significant shifting going on. • A completely different view is that seniors should come back to work because they want to, not because they have to. – A lot of employers are now saying, get rid of mandatory retirement. My answer is, no: mandatory pensions. Then talk about retirement. – Old people and young people are working in the retail sector because they can be exploited more than other people, and because they can be subsidizing.

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– We’re subsidizing Home Depot with pension plans from other places, but seniors don’t have enough to live on, so they’re going and working there. • I work with a lot of seniors groups, and for 10 years, we’ve heard the cry that the grey tsunami will devastate the pension funds, and other sorts of calamities. – There is pressure on old folks like me and older to stay at work. Not only that, there is guilt tripping that if you retire at a decent age, you’re gong to hurt the economy and your country. – It’s going to become unpatriotic to be retired. – I hope we plan so that we don’t fall into the pitfalls of our poor United Kingdom relatives, who now have to deal with private pensions that are decimated. – We shouldn’t blame the people that have grown this country and this economy for the problems that have been created by the greed of industry. • Looking at retirement ages: – The average retirement age for self-employed people in Canada is 67 years, and it has not declined over the past 25 years. – Most of the decline—people are aware that the average retirement age has fallen over time—is in public sector. It has fallen from about 65 to as low as 59. – In the general private sector, it hovers around 63 and in fact is edging up more recently.

22.0 Underemployed people from the service sector • There are so many people involved in the service sector right now—underemployed people, working hard, 12 hours a day, and getting peanuts. – Our [apprenticeship/skills] training plans can’t get them into the system because they can’t afford to quit work even for seven weeks, because they haven’t got the money to see them over just so they can get a start into the program. – How can we get these underemployed people and train them first, before we have to resort to going overseas? 23.0 Challenges and opportunities in the non-profit sector • You can imagine the difficulties the non-profit sector is facing, not being able to attract people to work because we cannot compete with the salaries being offered by other sectors. – This sector is also suffering from various levels of government cuts, so I am recommending the creation of social enterprises, which again will require more people to work. – How is this sector’s shortage of skilled workers going to be addressed? • This sector offers benefits beyond the monetary. – It’s doing good work that needs to be done and, hopefully, that will appeal to and help offset at least some of the monetary disadvantages. – A lot of the people who are older, close to retirement age, and who maybe only need to supplement their income might be more willing to do that kind of work. • Regarding social enterprises, where nonprofits can’t decide whether they’re fish or fowl, where they have been tried, all the evidence that I have seen so far indicates that they don’t work. – You’re either a for-profit business maximizing profits and working accordingly, or you’re a not-for-profit doing good work. – Trying to have a foot in both camps, in all the examples that I have seen, has not worked. • From the construction industry’s perspective, we have to look at all options. 4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Labour Pains Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 25 of 70

– We’ve forged a relationship with ten aboriginal communities, including the urban native and the local aboriginal communities in terms of working with them to get their clients through a training program and into employment in the construction industry. – We’re working with other groups such as SUCCESS, taking some of their clients as well and putting them through the training. – Clearly, as associations representing industries, and as employers themselves, we have to look at non-traditional sources of income [workers], and working with the nonprofits to see how we can use the resources that they have on hand.

24.0 Worker co-ops • What about worker co-ops, and how that’s working or not? – People take pride in their business, so if they have their own business and a real stake in it [they may work harder]. – Worker co-ops might be an answer. I know they exist. I don’t think they exist as well as some people would like. • Very few worker co-ops are successful. – I worked in one for a bunch of years. – There are some good examples. In some parts of Europe they’re massive. – It just hasn’t been a part of our culture. We haven’t had it be successful here. It’s obviously an option, but not one we’ve looked at.

25.0 Technology to solve labour shortages? • What happened to the theory that was proffered in the ’70s and ’80s that technology would solve a lot of our labour shortages? • We are beginning to see that in construction. – The best example I have is forming systems in Vancouver. Most of the forming is being done by hand. It’s site-built, so it’s labour intensive but low cost. – With increasing labour costs and the demand for schedules, forming systems that were previously prohibitive are being considered. They increase productivity as you’re able to do the same unit of forming with a smaller crew and in faster times. – We’ve seen the power-actuated tools. We have seen a lot of development of technology in some of the industries. – It’s not particularly glamourous, and it’s not particularly well known, but there are moves afoot in terms of better utilizing technology in something as simple as forming.

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4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Attachment 2

Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force Meeting Date: November 7, 2006

To: Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force

From: Heather Schoemaker, Manager, Corporate Relations

Date: October 24, 2006

Subject: Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Dealing with your drug problem

Recommendation:

That the GVRD Board: e) Forward the report dated October 24, 2006, titled “Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Dealing with your drug problem” to member municipalities for their information and comment; and f) Direct staff to consider the output of the Drugs and Crime dialogue in the development of a “sustainability based vision” for the future of the region.

1. PURPOSE

To provide information to the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force on the June 26, 2006 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogue – Dealing with your drug problem.

2. CONTEXT

The Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues is the latest outreach component of the Sustainable Region Initiative (SRI). As the title implies, this series of high-profile debates and discussions is intended to help decision makers shape the future of the region by presenting a range of views which hopefully challenge and stimulate fresh thought on a range of regional issues. The dialogue series runs from March to December 2006 and is facilitated by well-known broadcaster Rafe Mair.

The fourth dialogue, Dealing with your drug problem, took place June 26, 2006 at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. Chair Jackson introduced the event and the panel members: • Dave Park, Assistant Managing Director and Chief Economist, Vancouver Board of Trade • Tom Hetherington, Manager, Addiction Services, Pacific Community Resources Society • Dr. David Marsh, Physician Leader, Addiction Medicine, Vancouver Coastal Health • Darryl Plecas, RCMP Research Chair in Crime Reduction, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University College of the Fraser Valley

The audience of approximately 69 participants included local government, the business community, government and non-government organizations, financial organizations, and other interested organizations. Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Dealing with your drug problem Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 27 of 70

The dialogue focused on ways to reduce drug usage and crime in our region and to mitigate the negative affects of these activities on the quality of life in our community.

The Dialogue featured areas of broad agreement, as well as areas of sharp disagreement. Some of the salient points made were: a) There is a close link between drug use and crime: • About 90% of criminal activity is associated with drugs, alcohol or mental illness b) Crime rates are deplorably high: • Burnaby, Surrey and Vancouver have the highest crime rates in the GVRD • Only one third of all crimes, and only 12% of sexual assaults, are reported to police • Between 1999 and 2004, crime rates in Canada rose 24% for theft of personal property, 42% for theft of household property and 17% for vandalism • The cost of property crime in the City of Vancouver alone is estimated at $130M in 2004 • The federal prison system has effective programs and a very low recidivism rates (less than 10%); in provincial jails people get little help and 50% of those on release programs get involved in crime c) Illegal drugs, alcoholism and crime are a regional problem, not a Downtown Eastside problem, or a neighborhood problem • Some areas around Skytrain stations, and low rent areas, have problems similar to the Downtown Eastside • Drugs and crime are associated with homelessness, which can be hidden in the suburbs in bush lean-tos and in “couch-surfing” d) A distinction must be drawn between drug (including alcohol) use and drug abuse • 80% of Canadian adults have used alcohol; 50% of BC adults have used cannabis, and 17% have used other illegal drugs • Among provinces, BC ranks highest in use of illegal drugs, 7th in self reported problems related to drug use • About 10% of users of drugs and alcohol develop a problem; this rate is higher for more addictive drugs (up to 30% for heroin) • Age of first use - an important indicator of dependence – is falling to 13-16 years for most drugs • Addiction is associated with genetic, psychological, mental health and social factors, including poverty e) It was agreed a four pillars approach – integrating prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction services – was appropriate, and that existing activities in each of the pillars were short of what was required. There were disagreements regarding the enforcement pillar: • some advocated decriminalization of illegal drugs and a new system of regulation of controlled substances, as proposed, among others, by the Health Officers of British Columbia • others stressed better policing, alternative forms of sentencing and stiffer penalties for serial criminal offences and for those organizing the illegal drug trade

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f) Advocates of decriminalization of illegal drug use argued: • The current system hasn’t worked, is arbitrary, and destructive of communities and of people’s lives • Longer sentences have been proven to have little impact on drug use • A regulatory regime would support citizens and communities, deny access to youth, use tax and price leverage g) Advocates of improved enforcement within the current approach argued: • Longer sentences for chronic property crime offenders have proved effective • More police and longer sentences for drug trade principles have proved effective in the U.S. and Sweden; in the U.S. there is declining drug use in schools, and a halving of violent and property crime rates • We need more prosecutors, and more alternatives to traditional sentencing such as those recommended by the Street Crime Working Group • If existing drugs are decriminalized, entrepreneurs will create even more toxic drugs h) Regarding treatment: • Effective treatment saves $7-10 for every dollar spent • Social service cutbacks have disproportionately impacted those most at risk • There are major service gaps at present, including in housing, rehabilitation services, early childhood development, wrap-around services, education, training, drug & alcohol counseling • The therapeutic community of San Patrignano, Italy, has been an effective model, but there is no local equivalent (although a facility for youth is under consideration) i) Regarding prevention: • Schools are beginning to work with users, rather than send them away, but they need to do more • For young children and users generally, we need a humane approach that balances compassion with consequences, and is consistent • A behavioural approach, rather than a medical model is needed

The event was co-promoted by the Vancouver Board of Trade and their Chief Economist Dave Park joined the GVRD Commissioner/CAO, Johnny Carline in offering brief closing remarks and then Vice-Chair Ladner thanked the panelists and closed the event.

The attachment provides a detailed summary of the drugs and crime dialogue.

3. ALTERNATIVES No alternatives presented.

4. CONCLUSION

The fourth of the Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues: “Dealing with your drug problem” at least matched the previous three dialogues in generating challenging ideas and spawning vigorous dialogue. It was also one of the most stimulating dialogues to-date presenting a variety of opinions and challenges to each other, with a very clear message that we need to move from ideas into real, concrete actions.

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While there was consensus that the four pillars is a good approach there was also consensus that we’re not doing enough about any of the pillars.

The majority of the dialogue seemed to focus on enforcement; whether we should be enforcing against drug users or whether we should be decriminalizing and through that process getting rid of the link between drugs and crime.

However, there was also a great deal of discussion concerning the need for rehabilitation work. Specifically, there was reference to the facility in Emilia Romagna, known as San Patrignano. With up to 2,000 people in San Patrignano at any one time, every year they graduate 500 rehabilitated addicts who are not simply free of their addiction, they are incredibly positive, functional citizens.

What this dialogue clearly demonstrated was a call to action - that someone’s got to step forward and take responsibility for advancing the program that Philip Owen put in place, that we will not solve this problem by collective hand-wringing, that the public is actually supportive of people taking a leadership position on this and taking some risks, and if this dialogue has advanced us down that road just a little bit, then it will have served its purpose.

Participants voiced their appreciation for the role of the GVRD in hosting this session and the need for continued opportunities for dialogue and community engagement on issues such as these that very clearly impact the future sustainability of the region.

As with the results of the housing, industry and labour and immigration dialogues, it would be important to share these ideas with both municipal and regional staff and elected officials to consider in relation to the role of the region in determining broader regional development strategies. It would also be appropriate to refer this report to staff in consideration of the work of the GVRD’s SRI Task Force to develop a “sustainability based vision” for the future of the region.

Attachments: 2a. Drugs and Crime Dialogue Issues Summary Notes

4.3 combined 004442787 SRI Dialogues Report Cover sheet Item No. 4.3 Attachment 2a

GVRD FUTURE OF THE REGION SUSTAINABILITY DIALOGUES

DRUGS & CRIME: DEALING WITH YOUR DRUG PROBLEM JUNE 26TH, 2006

ISSUES SUMMARY NOTES

STATED GOALS • This dialogue will look at the impact of drugs and crime on our communities from a long- term sustainability perspective. It is motivated by the unacceptable: – direct social costs of addiction, and – devastating effects on our families and communities. • The dialogue should take into consideration: – the loss of economic opportunities, and – how investors perceive us. • As there is no comprehensive, coordinated strategy for responding to drugs and crime in our city, this dialogue seeks to: – confirm the nature of the challenge, – establish the steps needed to find solutions, and – identify the actions required.

1.0 Context • This is a wonderful city with fantastic restaurants and fantastic people. What a glorious place to live. It isn’t the same for all of us, is it? • On Hastings, there are people everywhere, lying on the sidewalk, holding out cups. People with no teeth. It’s a devastating picture of our great city. • About six blocks away is one of the most impoverished areas in Vancouver and indeed Canada, plagued by addiction to drugs and alcohol, very often suffering mental illness, and desperately poor. • The folks in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside give a human face to our topic. These people are our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our sisters, our children, if we are to be a community. • The Eastside really needs some help, and it’s not just in Vancouver, it’s in the outlying areas as well: in Surrey and to some degree in Burnaby and Coquitlam. • This not a neighbourhood problem. It’s a Greater Vancouver Regional District problem and extends way beyond that. – The disease that comes out so readily from this situation spreads throughout our community. – No one who lives anywhere in the Greater Vancouver area can cop out and say, “It’s not my problem.” • What about the kids? All communities have children: babies, pre-teens, teens, and so on. How do they fit into this conundrum? – We might, as a society, simply condemn the adults, and deal with them. That’s not my way of looking at it, but a lot of people would say that. – I haven’t heard much on this issue, and I don’t know that I will today, but I did want to plant that thought. Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – Dealing with your drug problem Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 31 of 70

• If we are to achieve the truly sustainable community that we profess we want, then we must confront drug addiction and the crime that happens to accompany it. • I’ve looked at a lot of research done all over the globe and often still wonder what’s going on. – Most research ends with the academic statement that more research is necessary and we really don’t know too much about anything. – It’s also clouded because we have so many people in this effort who have strong opinions about how we should move forward. – Evidence and science don’t always have a place among the different ideologies. • As I listen, it occurs to me that everybody is probably 50% right. • Taking a step back from the head butting that’s going on, not in this room, of course, we’re trying to solve the problem inside the paradigm where it was created.

2.0 The link between drugs and crime • Drugs underlie almost every form of crime in this city. – Three and a half years ago, in a major report on crime in Vancouver, Greater Vancouver, and Canada, an exhibit provided by a senior officer in the RCMP lists by name almost every form of crime you can think of and relates them all to drugs. • From the work of Serge Brochu, we know that: – alcohol significantly increases the risk of violent crime, whereas illegal drugs significantly increase the risk of property crime, and – the relationship between illegal drug use and property crime is as much a factor of the drugs being illegal as it is of the effects of the drugs. • Our [criminal law] clients are drug addicted, commit serious crimes, and spend time in jail. Almost 90% of the time, drugs and alcohol are involved in the case, or mental illness. If the drug and alcohol situation were dealt with, it would put criminal lawyers out of business. • A significant number of criminals, particularly prolific ones, are committing their crimes independently of a need for drugs. They’re using drugs, but they don’t have a compelling need for drugs.

3.0 Levels of crime • All over the world, where very poor people live in close contact with very rich people, you see high rates of property crime. • We have made an estimate of the cost of property crime alone in the City of Vancouver, not the rest of the region. The latest estimate we have is $130 million for 2004. – This was the total cost of property crime for that year, estimated by piecing it together, crime by crime, volume by volume. – About $108 million was on the shoulders of the residents. The rest was picked up by business, government organizations and others that also suffered. – That’s close to the total budget for the Vancouver Police Department. – Most of us in the city have been victims. You seldom find somebody who has not been one. • The three major municipalities in terms of high crime rates are Surrey, Burnaby and Vancouver. – The City of Vancouver has been nearly the highest, but Surrey and Burnaby are now up there as well.

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– In 2004, the Surrey crime rate went down a bit and the Burnaby crime rate went up by about the same amount. Whether they’re related or not, we don’t know. – This is crimes reported to police, but only one third of crimes get reported. • As for the major metropolitan areas of Canada, Winnipeg in 2004 had a crime rate that was just slightly higher than Greater Vancouver, and we led the nation in previous years. • What if we look at more than what’s reported to police? According to Statistics Canada’s criminal victimization survey, there were more than 8 million criminal offences in Canada in 2004, directly affecting one person in four. – There were more than 2.7 million violent crimes, inflicting over 650,000 physical injuries. – This survey is done every five years and, compared to 1999, in 2004, there was no significant change in self-reported rates of violent victimization such as sexual assault, robbery and physical assault. – But rates rose by 24% for theft of personal property, 42% for theft of household property and 17% for vandalism across Canada. – The only type of offence to decline significantly was breaking and entering. • Violent crime, in terms of the number of cases, is considerably less in total numbers of incidents than property crime. • In comparison with other developed countries, crime rates in Canada are high. – The United Nations’ international crime victim survey of 17 industrialized countries in the year 2000 placed Canada in the high risk group for violent contact crimes, worse than the United States, where the violent crime rate has dropped significantly since then. Canada’s rate has stayed virtually the same. – Canada isn’t necessarily the kinder and gentler place we’d like to believe it is. • In the last seven to eight years, it would appear that there is a levelling off in terms of violent crime and property crime, but it’s a bit skewed because we have a higher rate of nonreporting than ever before. We should really have local victimization surveys that can tell us more about what’s going on. • Only one third of crimes are reported to police, and unreported crimes include serious offences such as sexual assault, where victim surveys show that 88% of those crimes are not reported.

4.0 Reducing crime • Canada needs to deal more strongly with chronic property crime offenders who routinely receive light sentences that do not escalate with the number of convictions. – Increasing and escalating prison sentences will provide a greater deterrent and will at least protect the public by preventing these criminals from victimizing more [citizens]. – Only a few hundred people in the City of Vancouver and in the region are probably responsible for the bulk of property crime. • Research in the United States has clearly shown that increased incarceration and more police will reduce property crime, but we have to do more than that. • We need the following measures, which are more important today than ever, but by themselves are not enough: – more and better treatment for drug addicts, – rehabilitation initiatives, – better crime prevention measures, – education and literacy programs that will help to prevent crime,

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– effective early childhood and development programs, and – improved accountability to the courts. • Policymakers must also address new sentencing guidelines to better protect the public. • Policymakers must address the need for more police, which we’ve been successful in doing here in Vancouver, and in fact I think we’ll see this year, about a 10% reduction in the City of Vancouver in crime, a lot of that due to a reduction in property crime in the downtown area which is due to increased police initiatives together with private security. • We need better measures to deal with gangs and organized crime. • We need less tolerance for drug traffickers and dangerous criminals, and policies that hold people responsible and accountable for their behaviour. • The simple fact is that if repeat and dangerous offenders are not on the street, they can’t break into our houses and businesses, steal our cars and threaten our safety. • The justice system needs to focus on the rights and freedoms of victims as well as the rights and freedoms of criminals. • There have been encouraging developments: the street crime working group, which many of you are familiar with here in Vancouver, involved representation from the judiciary, the legal fraternity, the health authority, prosecution, police, and they came up with a good report and some suggestions: – in particular, implementation of community court in the City of Vancouver, a measure that would copy ones that exist in New York City. That seems to be going ahead. Hopefully that will have some impact, but we have a long way to go.

5.0 Features of the drug problem • I agree with the paper that the health officers of B.C. published. • Alcohol and drug problems and homelessness exist outside of the City of Vancouver. • More than half of the overdose deaths in Vancouver happen outside of the Downtown Eastside, and by “Vancouver,” I mean in the City of Vancouver. – There are of course many other overdose deaths in the other parts of the GVRD. • There are pockets of special concern, particularly around some ALRT stations and low-rent areas, which have problems similar to those in the Downtown Eastside. • In the Valley, homelessness may be less visible than in Vancouver, as many people live in inadequate housing: in lean-tos in the bush, or couch-surfing with friends. – Couch-surfing, in the extreme, has been labelled as crack houses and similar kinds of residences. • Cutbacks to the social service safety net have resulted in those at most risk receiving the least services. • Most drug use is experimental, and most people mature out of problematic use. – For example, drinking peaks around age 24 and then decreases as life’s responsibilities such as parenthood and work get in the way of partying. • Most youth do not use hard drugs. About 20% have some kind of lifetime experience with hard drugs. • About 10% of people who use alcohol have a problem with alcohol use sometimes in their life. – This is a fairly constant statistic across all drugs. It may be somewhat higher, as high as 20%, with some of the more addictive drugs.

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• The age of first use is an indicator of the possibility of having a lifelong problem. Unfortunately, this age is descending. It’s now 13 to 16 years old for most drugs. • Youth under 18 are more likely to smoke marijuana than cigarettes. There’s not much difference between girls and boys in drug use rates. • Crystal meth use is a controversy in the field. – Unfortunately, we do not have reliable, comprehensive data to discuss this topic rationally. – There’s agreement from all sources that methamphetamine, crystal meth, is a problem, a very dirty and dangerous drug. – One camp believes that meth use is spinning out of control. The other believes that its usage rate has peaked. – Most workers I talk to tell me that fewer young people are starting to experiment with crystal meth as they see the consequences of longer term use. – Several workers reported clients saying things like, “Why are you bugging me about my cocaine use? At least I’m not using crystal meth.” – That partly shows the impact of a good education program, but a sort of false logic. You push the balloon here and it expands there.

6.0 Costs of addiction and drug use • Earlier this year, a study came out showing the cost of substance use in Canada to be about $40 billion a year. – Most of the cost relates to alcohol and tobacco, but certainly illicit drugs contribute a significant part. – With alcohol and tobacco, healthcare costs take up a large portion of the costs. – With illegal drugs, criminal justice costs constitute a majority of the costs.

7.0 Use versus abuse • It’s important to note the distinction between use and problematic use or abuse and dependence. • The Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine defines “dependence” very well. The whole definition is on the website. • Most people in B.C. have used drugs or alcohol at some point in their lifetime. – About 20% of Canadian adults have been abstinent from alcohol in the past year. The other 80% have used it at some point. – More than 50% of B.C. adults have used cannabis. Some 17% have used illegal drugs other than cannabis in their lifetime. It’s very common and in no way is restricted to the Downtown Eastside. • The rate of use is related to but doesn’t go hand-in-hand with the rate of problems of use. – In the last Canadian addiction survey done in 2004, B.C. had the highest rates per capita of cannabis and other illegal drug use, but we ranked seventh among the ten provinces in the rates of self-reported problems related to drug use. – Even though we have higher rates of use, we aren’t the province with the most problems related to drug use, as identified by the drug users. • At most, 30% of people who’ve ever used heroin in their lifetime will become dependent, and for other drugs like cocaine, it’s closer to 20%. • About 10% of people who use alcohol have a problem with alcohol use sometime in their life.

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• Most drug use is experimental, and most people mature out of problematic use. • People who use drugs but are not dependent can develop other types of problems, including legal problems.

8.0 Factors that lead to drug addiction • Dependence or addiction has biological, psychological, social, and spiritual elements. • Why do most people who use drugs not become addicted? – Genetics is an important factor. – For alcohol, at least 40% of the risk of developing dependence is related to genes. • Psychological factors that increase the risk of developing dependence include: – a history of inadequate parenting, – trauma, and – certain mental health disorders, especially personality disorders. • Social factors are extremely important: – In Vancouver and the GVRD, the publicly visible face of drug use is the Downtown Eastside. – It’s so visible there not because of the impact of the drugs but because of the social factors impinging on the people who live there: poverty. – In the first term of the provincial Liberals, the number of people on welfare on the Downtown Eastside declined by 30%. It’s probably not because 30% of those people got back to work. – Along with poverty is the vast differential between rich and poor. • A lot of mentally ill people are homeless and fall into the drug culture. • People who are aboriginal in Vancouver have higher rates of drug dependence. • Aboriginals in B.C. are less likely than non-aboriginals to use alcohol or drugs, but when they do use, they are more likely to run into problems because of systematic social factors like: – lower levels of education, – more difficulty getting work, and – barriers to being fully engaged as productive members of society. • Do we have any solid evidence as to which young people get involved with drugs and which young people don’t? – Poverty is one of the things, but are there any other indications that we can attack on a prevention basis? • Youth of all classes and backgrounds are tempted to experiment with life, with drugs. – My own son, when he was five, would spin around to feel dizzy. People want to change their consciousness. • To predict who will move on to have problems, it’s better to look at their resiliency, what positive things they have in their life and what strengths they have going for them. – The quality and number of relationships with positive adults being one thing, – Their sense of connectedness to community, their family composition. – Rather than the negative, we should look at and celebrate the positive, strengthening what we would call resiliency factors.

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9.0 Reducing drug abuse • We don’t do enough to celebrate kids who make good choices every day, and I think that’s a real need. • We need a coordinated, adequately funded integrated system of care that covers prevention, harm reduction, and treatment. • We need more low barrier treatment programs, because, just like learning to ride a bicycle, learning to quit is incremental. The more attempts, the sooner you will be successful. • Treatment is important but is directed at the minority that becomes dependent. • We need an integrated community strategy, like the four pillars. – The Lower Mainland Municipal Association 2000 study, Mainland Drug Use Strategy, died a slow death, and nothing much has happened in the last three or four years on that topic, although it was a very good paper with very good recommendations.

10.0 The four pillars approach • People say (and I agree) that we should subscribe to a four pillars approach. But to what extent do we have any one of those pillars here? We have a crippled pillar approach. • We should not expect anything to be different ten years from now unless we quit tinkering with each of those four pillars. We have to get dead serious on each one of them. • Let’s go to the four pillars approach. Most people would say they are an admirable architecture, but we just heard that we haven’t done the job on them. If we don’t do it, and begin to do it, nothing is going to change. • There are four pillars because it’s such a complex issue with no single solution. We need a lot of tools in the toolkit. • When you look at prevention and treatment, I agree, they’re not pillars, they’re kind of a stack of old newspapers holding the whole thing in place. • There’s variability across the GVRD in terms of the strength of the four pillars. • As long as the four pillars are located within a prohibitionist framework, they’re always going to be undermined.

11.0 Treatment • All of the big studies on treatment, whether by the [Rand?] Corporation or Rutgers University, talk about $7 to $10 saved for every dollar you spend on treatment. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can’t overspend on treatment. • We talk about treatment, but we don’t really have treatment to any significant degree, and we don’t have it in sophisticated ways. – We don’t have wrap-around services. – We don’t have proper housing. – We don’t have proper education, access to training—all of the things that are needed to get people who are caught up in this turned around. • There are good examples around the planet that show how you can make it work. We simply don’t do it. • Having worked on the treatment side here for over 30 years, it seems to me that we need to stem the flow of people who are failing in their communities and moving to the Downtown Eastside where they have greater access to drugs and cheaper housing, if you want to call it that.

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– Their issues are not being addressed in their communities. • There needs to be a basic level of service. – On the North Shore, we have fewer alcohol and drug counsellors now than we did five years ago, and fewer than we had ten years ago. – We also have a four-month waiting list for people who are trying to get help. – We need to establish a certain ratio of counsellors per population. – With hip and knee replacements, they’re saying you have to have it within so many months, or you’re going to get it in the private system. – We’re taking those things seriously, but people who have knees and hips replaced, aren’t breaking into our houses and our homes. – We need to get easier, quicker access to treatment; really make it something that people can get to easily. • Regarding treatment, there’s often comments about not enough beds. – In Vancouver, Vancouver Community has increased the budget for addiction treatment every year over the last few years, since they got responsibility for it, and we now spend about $28 million per year on addiction treatment for a catchment area of 500,000 people. – In St. John’s, I met with my colleagues at the Eastern Health Region of Newfoundland and, for a catchment area of 200,000 people, they had about $2 million per year. – So, in Vancouver, although we’re certainly far from the level of treatment that we need, it’s one of the better situations compared to other parts of Canada.

11.1 The therapeutic community • In northern Italy there’s a co-op called Emilio Romagna, and it’s a five-year rehabilitation program. – They have an 85% success record, as I understand it, with hard core drug addicts. • That’s a therapeutic community, which is a long-term treatment option. – It’s appropriate for a portion of people with significant dependence. – It’s not the answer for everybody, but within the treatment continuum, we need multiple options. – We don’t currently have therapeutic community for adults in B.C. but we are looking very seriously at starting a therapeutic community that would be a 60- to 90-bed facility for youth. It would be a resource for all of B.C. but would run mainly as a joint project of Vancouver Coastal Health and Fraser Health. • I’ve been at the facility in Emilia Romagna. It’s called San Patrignano. – There are up to 2000 people in that facility at any one time, and every year they graduate 500 rehabilitated addicts who are not simply free of their addiction, they are incredibly positive, wonderful citizens, some of the most beautiful people you’ll ever meet. – It is horrifying to me that we haven’t got a therapeutic community in British Columbia.

11.2 Location of services • The Downtown Eastside is the most common face of addiction, but it touches every neighbourhood and every community. – The face of addiction is everybody and it touches every family.

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– That’s an important message, because cities grapple with how to provide services in every community, rather than crowding them all into the already challenged Downtown Eastside.. • Regarding zoning: all the panelists appear to agree that treatment and housing and rehabilitation are absolutely necessary, but what happens is that when we try to provide them, in any area except the Downtown Eastside, we get the NIMBY groups, and one group that’s just emerged called NIABY, which is “not in anybody’s back yard.” – This group is protesting against a possible rehabilitation centre at 16th and Dunbar. – This is one of the biggest obstacles to providing the necessary treatment, rehabilitation and housing. – I live in Kerrisdale and I have two sons: one’s recovering and the other is back in detox. I’m with an organization for families of drug users. • We need addiction services across all of the City of Vancouver and all the GVRD, particularly, supported housing for people who’ve made decisions to become alcohol and drug free. – Housing and poverty are significant contributors to problems related to drug use. – Living outside the Downtown Eastside gives people a much stronger chance of being able to maintain those changes [choices to be drug free]. – The facility at 39th and Fraser is an example of that, but when we estimate the need for such facilities just in Vancouver, we need between 1500 and 2000 beds. – If we have to fight for three years to add a facility with 30 beds, then it’s going to be many years before we have sufficient services. • Fraser Health is doing a reasonable job responding to this through their strategic planning. – It’s complicated in the Fraser Valley because every municipal council has a different view about this. • It occurs to me that, particularly in areas of development, cities could do more to put in zoning bonuses in new developments that would include social services such as housing for marginalized folk.

12.0 Prevention • We’re also not doing enough for prevention. • Our program is the only program in the country, to our knowledge, that works with children as young as two and three years of age who are growing up in families where alcohol and drugs are being abused. – It strikes me that every major city in the country ought to have a program to protect this highest risk group. • I’ve worked in alcohol and drug prevention education for all of my working career. I have to underline that human behaviour underlies all of this, and it happens in a context. – When people feel connected, when they feel a sense of meaning and purpose in life, when they feel a sense of some option and choice over their life, the chances of them seriously abusing any substance goes way down. – I’ve recently interviewed every high school principal in the city of Vancouver and, interestingly, 15 years ago, if you were caught coming to school stoned or drunk, you were immediately transferred to another school, no questions asked. A punitive approach. – The schools have moved away from that. It varies and there’s still a long way to go, but at least there’s a renewed interest, a new interest, in how to help these kids.

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– So they’re bringing the kids closer rather than sending them away. They’re shedding light on it rather than putting it out of sight out of mind. – They’re doing remedial constructive things that help the kids to develop some of the ingredients that I was just referring to. – It’s really important to have consequences, certainly, but they need to be compassionate. • I want to plug prevention We need treatment and we need enforcement in a balanced and measured way, but there’s so much more we can do with young kids coming up through the system, before the problem develops, and turns into a more serious problem. – We need consistent messaging across all four pillars. We’re not even agreed on our language, and we really have to try to frame this problem more as a human problem. – For a few extreme cases, where hard core, chronic criminals are engaged in recruiting and trafficking, in very serious crimes, yes, you need a somewhat different approach. – But for the users and young kids getting sucked in, we need a humane approach. We need to help those kids and give them supports, and every adult can help. – Every relationship that an adult has with a kid is important and makes a difference. • I’m very pleased about education at schools, about drug users and their experiences. I would like to see that more, even at festivals—drug users talking about their life experience to our youth. • There need to be consequences, but consequences aren’t always applied evenly so that children know what consequences mean. – Enforcement is really important in all areas of life, but also being consistent and applying those things you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do them. • We need to address human behaviour as the main source of change, rather than some kind of medical model. – The medical model diagnoses where the problem lies so we can figure out the solution and then apply the resources to it. – When you are a family member of someone who’s suffering from drug addiction, it’s way too late. – You don’t expect it’s going to happen to you and, when the supports need to be in place, they’re often not there. You don’t know where to turn.

12.1 Allowing youth to grow up and prosper • I like to take things in the back door. We’re maintaining our youth as children for far too long, my son being a perfect example of someone who went through the school system here. • I’d like to see us tackle the economic basis for getting involved in the drug trade. – My experience with youth in high school has been that people will advance drugs to teens so that they can sell them to their friends, to support their own little marijuana package. – Through that means, they discover that there’s a way to make money that is not mainstream and doesn’t require them to get a job—a low-level, entry level, undignified kind of job that other people would think is the right way to go. – This seduction is supported by celebrities—the idea that you should be able to get whatever you want and have a very high level of income. – We need to support families as they learn how to communicate and integrate their young people that are learning grow and develop in the society.

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– Regarding employment, entrepreneurial skills need to be enhanced to help drive people towards creating work that’s meaningful and also generates an income and builds our sustainable economy. – Such skills and meaningful work steer away from ongoing child-like reliance on other people—experts—telling us what’s wrong, what we need to do, and what choices to make. – Too much reliance on others means that when the time comes to make choices, we’re making really poor ones.

13.0 Enforcement

13.1 Making enforcement work • Compared to other industrialized nations, we have on average 25% less police. • Our police also have more to do, and we keep adding on things for them to do, so everything takes longer. • This latest add-on of 50 officers or whatever in Vancouver quite simply is going to do dick to solve that problem. We need hundreds more police in Vancouver. • It’s thought that enforcement doesn’t work, but nothing could be further form the truth. – That’s been demonstrated over and over again in specific instances. – The problem is sustaining enforcement and having the rest of the system do their part. – We’re not only underpoliced, we’re underprosecuted. – We don’t have anywhere near the number of prosecutors we should have. – On the court side, we have a judiciary that, for a multiplicity of reasons, just doesn’t get the notion that you need to have consequences. – I’m not talking about users, here, but about people who produce and traffic in drugs. • It’s no wonder that B.C. is regarded as the ideal place to produce and traffic. – We’re a source country, and B.C.’s the biggest part of that. – We have more organized criminals here today than we’ve ever had by some distance, and of course we do, because there simply is no consequence to being in the drug business. – At the very least, we should be saying that those people who produce and those people who traffic in drugs are merchants of death and misery. – What is holding us back from dealing with those people in the harshest manner possible? – We all know that we could leave here right now and we would find people openly dealing drugs on the streets of Vancouver in short order.

13.2 Ineffective enforcement • During Janet Reno’s term as attorney general in the United States, in a major enforcement campaign on at the U.S.-Mexico border, over a three-year period, they seized about 50 kilograms of heroin. • Here in Vancouver, in one seizure, the RCMP seized 100 kilograms of heroin, but it had no impact on the availability or price of heroin. – The Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study, which was in place before the seizure, asked people on the street about how available heroin was and what price they paid. – The seizure had no impact, and the price that people reported paying for heroin actually declined after the seizure.

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– This is significant evidence suggesting that focusing on the supply side with prohibition policies is unlikely to be dramatically effective. • Increasing the severity of sentences is unlikely to have a significant impact on overall rates of drug use in our society. – This is based on the research of, among others, Pat Erickson, a well-known Toronto criminologist, who has published papers going back to the early ’80s, showing that for people convicted of crimes related to cannabis possession, the severity of sentence had absolutely no impact on the likelihood that they would use cannabis again in the future. • Imagine that you had to walk to work, and you had two choices to get there, and they were both bad news districts. – Down one street the people had been through the American prison system. They had been criminals and they’d been released. – On the other street, they’d been on a softer, gentler system, where they weren’t persecuted or sent to prison. – It’s two o’clock in the morning. Which street will you walk down? • I work as a paralegal for a lawyer practising in criminal law. For 25 years our office was on the 100 block, Main Street, and I have experience on both sides. – I was assaulted four times, my apartment was B&E’d three times, and our office was broken into twice. – Our clients are drug addicted, commit serious crimes, and spend time in jail. Almost 90% of the time, drugs and alcohol are involved in the case, or mental illness. If the drug and alcohol situation were dealt with, it would put criminal lawyers out of business. – I can tell you that jail is not the solution. I deal with the families of our clients and try to figure out a solution for them. There’s a lot of isolation, extreme loneliness, no connection to a community. Their community becomes to community of the Downtown Eastside. – I don’t respond to statistics very well. I lived across the border from Buffalo. Today, I would still not walk down certain streets in Buffalo, nor in Detroit, nor in Seattle, but I have no problem walking down Hastings or the Downtown Eastside streets at any time of the day or night. I don’t know whether that’s familiarity breeds contempt, but I can tell you that there is a difference. So the statistics posed here don’t mean too much to me. – I believe that the only solution is decriminalization, some kind of regulated approach— jail is not the solution; it has become big business in the United States—and we need more treatment centres. I have nowhere to provide solutions for our clients. There are just so few alternatives out there, and jail is just not one of them. • I was born in Vancouver, and all I can ever remember in nearly 75 years is enforcement. Yet we’re still where we are today, and I wonder why. There must be something better.

13.3 Provincial jails need better programs • Having worked in prisons and studied them, I know it’s true that sending people to a provincial jail is a colossal waste of time. – Nothing goes on there. With the kinds of programs they have, and considering what people need and what gets them there, we’re idiots to think we’re going to solve that, and turn their lives around in three or four months. – We can take lessons, though, from the correctional service of Canada, the federal prison system, which has sophisticated programs, sophisticated treatment programs, sophisticated programs for people on release, and one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world.

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– The crime problem in B.C. is not caused by people released from federal prison. Less than 10% of crime is committed by that group. – Crime is committed by people on some kind of provincial release and, 50% of the time, they’re on one of those sentences and they’re committing another crime. – Unfortunately, most people that we sentence get some kind of provincial disposition, almost all of those are colossally stupid ones, and they do nothing to help people turn their lives around. • If that’s the case, let’s get on with getting more good programs into the provincial jails. And why do we need more jails and more police if the jails aren’t working?

13.4 Enforcement against those who create conditions that lead to drug abuse • There was a comment that there should be harsher sentences and more punishment for people who are responsible for criminal behaviour, but who’s responsible for increasing homelessness, for example? What punishment should we bring against that? – Or the fact that people are increasingly refused or denied social assistance? – Or that people are being socially excluded and the despair in people’s lives is increasing? – Who takes responsibility for that? • These are the kinds of things where we need to strengthen communities. – We need to put this into a regulatory framework that considers the health of the individual and the health of the communities. – We need to work together on a creative solution, something new, something that bodes well in terms of improving our streets, improving our communities, and improving the lives of citizens of our area.

14.0 The war on drugs

14.1 Opposition to the war on drugs • The U.S. Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States are totally opposed to war on drugs. • The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prison population. • California spends more on its penal system than on education. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican governor of California, is saying we’ve got to change this. • In 1980 there were about 200,000 Americans in prison and there are now 2.2 million. • The United States puts more people in prison for drug offences than all of Europe—more than Europe does for all criminal offences—and there’s 100 million more people in Europe. • People who are now speaking openly against the war on drugs include Milton Friedman. – He spoke to Vancouver’s Fraser Institute and 800 people stood up and applauded when he said he condemned the U.S. war on drugs as a terrible waste of money that corrupts law enforcement agencies and does more harm than good. – Walter Cronkite recently came out against the war on drugs. – George Shultz, the former secretary of state, and Ed Meese, the former secretary general—I’ve been at three conferences with them, and they’re totally opposed to it. – William F. Buckley Jr. is fairly right wing like Milton Friedman. – These people are publicly and openly opposed to it.

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– Norm Stamper, the former Seattle police chief and the King County Bar Association in Seattle are against it. • Thirteen states now allow marijuana for medicinal purposes, totally opposed to the central government of the United States and George Bush. • Eight states have decriminalized marijuana, again in opposition. • There’s a huge internal wrestling match going on, in the United States, with these prominent Americans that are saying we’ve got to stop this. • In Canada, Senator Pierre Claude Nolan, a Quebec senator appointed by Mulroney and very much a conservative, did a senate report and came out with a book that not only wanted to decriminalize marijuana but wanted to legalize it. • Patty Torsney, an MP from Burlington, produced a report that said that they’ve got to back off and change their approach and that they’ve got to decriminalize marijuana. • We’ve heard facts about Sweden for a long time, but there’s hundreds of other countries [with different kinds of success]. • I don’t think there’s any statistical justification or support for the war on drugs. None.

14.2 Successes in the war on drugs • You’ve all heard that we’re losing the war on drugs—that they’ve lost the war on drugs in the United States. – This is inconsistent with what we know about the United States and other countries. – Sweden has some of the most restrictive drug policies on the planet and also the lowest drug use on the planet. It’s been that way for a long time. You can verify this on the Internet by looking at what’s being said by people who are responsible for drug policies in different countries. • We hear that there’s increased drug use in the United States, but that doesn’t fit with the “Monitoring the Future Survey” out of the University of Michigan, which shows that since 1996, there have been year over year declines among high school students in every grade level tested, for every type of drug, and for every level of use. • Crime in the United States has dropped for 24 of the last 25 years, compared with the reality that Canada has one of the highest crime rates in the world: – it seems to have levelled off lately, but overall, we have some seven times the volume of crime we had 30 years ago. • Between 1993 and 2004, there was a 57% decline in violent crime in the United States, as reported to police, and there was a 50% decline in property crime. – Of that decline, 30% is attributed to increased incarceration, and 5% to 10% to increased numbers of police. – What they have done has had a beneficial impact. – We are now worse off than they are in terms of crime, and crime is directly related to drugs.

14.3 Success tempered by mistakes • There’s no doubt that the war on drugs in the United States has actually been a war on drug users. • We don’t want to confuse U.S. over-reliance on sending people to prison for many years as being a sign that it is not being effective. – Most would say you don’t need to put people in jail for ever.

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– But the United States has successfully put the right people in jail—the most recidivistic group responsible for the largest volume of crime—and perhaps a lot of the wrong people, too. – Specific examples in the United States include Oklahoma and in Oregon, where meth lab production has plummeted. In Oregon the drop is close to 50%. There are other examples in the world. • If the object is to have less drugs in our society, and less drug users, then they’ve accomplished it in the United States and in Sweden. Have they done a lot wrong along the way? Yes.

14.4 The war on drugs has a longer history • Drug use in the United States has declined since 1996, but of course the war on drugs didn’t start in 1996. – It started under President Regan, from 1980 to 1996, during which time the Americans brought in minimum sentencing and had exponential increases in the number of people who were incarcerated. – Drug use continued to increase, the real price of drugs declined and purity of drugs on the streets declined. – It’s difficult to see that their enforcement efforts had a significant effect on the street. • To make a correction, the war on drugs actually started when President Nixon responded to Governor Rockefeller of New York’s hard stance on crime. – Mr. Nixon put it to his top advisors: John Erlichman, John Mitchell, [E?] Crow [?], and the godfather of the DEA, G. Gordon Liddy. So these were the founders of the U.S. drug wars.

14.5 Legalizing and regulating drugs • The regulated market approach is intriguing and substantial evidence supports that effort. • For illegal drugs, if a lot of the costs and the negative consequences are related to the fact that these drugs are illegal, that leads you to consider the medical health officers’ paper, which suggests a regulatory approach to all drugs. – That would give you the levers on controlling the access to drugs that we currently have for alcohol and tobacco—like being able to use taxation and pricing to control the level of use. – You could control access so that it won’t be the case, as it has been for the last 15 years in Ontario, that students from Grade 7 to Grade 12 are more likely to have used cannabis in the last month or the last year than they are to have used tobacco. – Our control over access with the current illegal framework certainly seems to be limited • A regulatory approach would remove the criminal element from production and sale entirely. – We don’t see people producing a lot of moonshine in their basements and running it across borders they way we did during alcohol prohibition. – There’s every reason to think that supplying legal, pure drugs under a regulatory framework would remove the criminal element from the supply and decrease a lot of the negative consequences of drug use. • We need a macro level regulated market approach. – Imagine what would happen if, tomorrow, we made cigarette smoking illegal. Heavily addicted cigarette smokers would start to look like the addicts we see in other places.

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• The traditional thinking of criminalizing the use and production and distribution of certain drugs has not been very successful. – Alcohol prohibition proved to be a disaster because it increased crime and chaos on the streets. – Drug prohibition does the same thing, and it creates all kinds of health issues as well.

14.6 Prescription as part of the regulation picture • Heroin prescription experiments in Europe provide an example of how people can continue to use heroin, but because it’s available in a legal, sterile form of known dose, their level of crime dramatically declines, their use of other drugs declines, and health and mental health improve. Of course, we’re studying that currently here in Vancouver.

14.7 Will legalization and regulation reduce property crime? • There was a comment that violent crime was associated with alcohol abuse, and property crime with drug abuse, and that one [alcohol abuse] was dealt with through the healthcare system and the other [drug abuse] through the criminal justice system. – These two tranches reflect the difference between junkies and alcoholics, between pushers and the liquor store, and between grow-ops and Seagrams. – Getting at the core of what the real problem is, prohibition creates the criminality and if that was changed and shifted to being a healthcare system problem rather than a criminal justice problem, how would the ratio between violent and property crime be affected? • If we moved away from prohibition, we may have some lessening in the amount of property crime. – If we look at Vancouver’s experience, there seems to be justification for that. – But it’s also true that there’s a significant number of criminals, and particularly prolific ones, who are committing their crimes independently of a need for drugs. They’re using drugs, but they don’t have a compelling need for drugs.

14.8 The lesson of meth development • Also, under any system, we have to take a lesson from the history of meth development and the adulterants placed in ecstasy, and look at look at that whole history. – Whatever you plan to do on the anti-prohibitionist side, we are kidding ourselves if we think these people are going to go away, because they will do what they’ve been doing for the last few decades. – They will simply tweak it, change it, and come up with something else. A better mousetrap. A more addictive drug. A more pleasing drug. – If we can find a way to get rid of that, then maybe the idea of moving to decriminalization completely would be more appealing. I’m just not confident it would happen.

14.9 Wider social impacts of prohibition • Some of the costs of prohibition are not on the people who go to jail but on the family members who are left behind. – In Harlem, 80% of the Grade 1 and 2 students have a parent or aunt or uncle who’s under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Think about what that means when kids are growing up and it’s normal for their parents to be in jail. • We need a new approach.

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– We don’t need more police. We don’t need to live in a city where we feel like we’re in a police state of some sort. – We need to have communities that are strong, and we need to have people cared for and not excluded because they choose to use a certain substance. – Use is not always abuse, so why would someone be a criminal simply because they use a certain drug, whereas someone who uses a very similar drug but with a prescription, is not a criminal. – These things are arbitrary and also very destructive of people’s lives and of communities.

14.10 Put the four pillars on a foundation of regulation • As long as the four pillars are located within a prohibitionist framework, they’re always going to be undermined. – We need to put the four pillars onto a foundation of regulation. That will make a huge difference.

14.11 Dialogue about ending prohibition • I’m with Keeping the Door Open: Dialogues on Drug Use, and my coalition’s next intention for the short term and the long term is to have discussions on ending prohibition and looking at what regulatory models will work. – And it isn’t decriminalizing, it’s legalizing all currently illicit drugs. – I’d love to partner with you at the GVRD to have more dialogues.

15.0 Prostitution and drug use • A lot of prostitutes are drug uses, and my question is, I know this is a federal government issue, but why aren’t there prostitution houses in Vancouver, where things could be more organized? The health department would actually look after those prostitutes, and why is that not happening? • The reason is that it is a criminal matter. The criminal court of Canada would have to be changed to do that. We have enough on our plate, unless someone wants to field that particular question.

16.0 Solutions through dialogue and sense of community • We need to be responsible as a community. – Looking at the Greater Vancouver Regional District, part of the problem is that we no longer feel that we are in a community where people care about each other. – Mostly what all these NIMBY things are about is hiding the problem rather than helping people. It breaks my heart. – How do we, as a region, how do you guys who work in the GVRD, help us get there? – I think it’s through having dialogues such as this and I would like to suggest we need more of those. • I’d love to partner with you to have more dialogues. – I’m with Keeping the Door Open: Dialogues on Drug Use and I’d like to say to the GVRD that this is a fantastic start.

004441184

46 Attachment 3

Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force Meeting Date: November 7, 2006

To: Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force

From: Heather Schoemaker, Manager, Corporate Relations

Date: October 24, 2006

Subject: Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching

Recommendation:

That the GVRD Board: g) Forward the report dated October 24, 2006, titled “Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching” to member municipalities for their information and comment; and h) Direct staff to consider the output of the Regional Economy dialogue in the development of a ‘sustainability based vision’ for the future of the region.

1. PURPOSE

To provide information to the Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force on the September 25, 2006 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogue – The World Is Watching.

2. CONTEXT

The Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues is the latest outreach component of the Sustainable Region Initiative (SRI). As the title implies, this series of high-profile debates and discussions is intended to help decision makers shape the future of the region by presenting a range of views which hopefully challenge and stimulate fresh thought on a range of regional issues. The dialogue series runs from March to December 2006 and is facilitated by well-known broadcaster Rafe Mair.

The fifth dialogue, The World Is Watching, took place September 25, 2006, at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. Chair Jackson introduced the event and the panel members: • David Baxter, Executive Director, Urban Futures Institute • Jim Cox, Vice-President, Infrastructure Development, Vancouver Port Authority • Ruth Sol, President Western Transportation Advisory Council (WESTAC) • Peter Holt, Executive Director, Surrey Board of Trade

The audience of approximately 180 participants included local government, the business community, government and non-government organizations, financial organizations, and other interested organizations. Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 48 of 70

The dialogue examined how we succeed in the new global economy, while ensuring long term regional prosperity, social well-being and environmental health. Some of the salient points made were:

• Our regional economy is a partial expression of world-wide forces. We quickly feel the effects on actions and initiatives elsewhere in the world. When thinking of a regional economy we must recognize that we operate mainly in a global economy. • We are the 30th largest metropolitan region in North America, ranking with St. Louis, Missouri, and they are more proximate to consumer markets than we are. We have neither the scale nor the location to be a market-dependent economy. It means we are a niche economy. We have to look at the little things we do very well. We can use our non-mobile factors such as resources. We can look at the environment we create for business, but there isn’t a single set of policies or a single set of industries that give us any particular advantage. • The beautiful surroundings of the region draw attention away from the fact that the region is basically resource-driven – that half of our economy at least in this region is resource dependent. Things are really good right now because we’re at the top of a resource cycle and we’d better get ready for when it slides down, and that’s going to be not in 10 or 20 or 30 years. • Transportation issues, as they impact the regional economy, were raised by a number of the participants. • The ‘funky’ ideas about a green economy may not meet the challenges of providing specialized health care or providing the educational services. How we pay the bills and continue to strive for a sustainable economy may prove a challenge in the future. • A strong link between a healthy environment and a healthy regional economy was drawn by a number of participants. • Some speakers feared that growth, expansion, increasing population necessarily implied a degradation of the environment. • The affordability for people living in the region may begin to affect labour supply, negatively impact the ability of the economy to grow and thrive. • A number of speakers were concerned that the elements of sustainability were being considered separately in an economic context – that they were not being all considered as part of one equation. • The lack of a regional economic strategy was raised as a possible impediment to increasing growth and prosperity. The concept of the region (from an economic viewpoint) might need to be re-framed over a larger geographical area running from Hope to Squamish if such a strategy was to be effective. • There are so many small players in the region that it is difficult to propose simple strategies that would benefit whole sectors of the economy. There are so many little economic engines going in different directions, and in different places, that having a focused policy is really difficult to achieve. • Some speakers felt that small business may be carrying a larger burden of property taxation than is appropriate. Local governments could be more aware of how they could support small business simply by creating a more equitable taxation system. • Climate change, and the role of business in helping to manage it, was proposed as a ‘driver’ for a regional economic strategy. How to involve the business community and for them to demonstrate leadership in adopting new technologies and practices would be a positive way forward.

48 Attachment 4

• There was some polarization in the discussion between those who sought less regulation by governments and those who felt that more regulatory leadership in setting standards that protected the social and environmental aspects of the economy were needed. • In the dialogue that needs to continue on the regional economy we need continue to examine the economic consequences of the social, cultural and environmental aspects of sustainability. • There are corridors for transportation potential that need to be protected, along with lands reserved for industry (particularly waterfront lands) much in the same way that key agricultural lands are currently reserved. • There is a massive global market and an enormously fast growing market for advanced technologies in energy and environment. Here in B.C. for some reason, we seem to have developed an enormous pool of expertise in this area. One of the under- recognized resources we have here in B.C. is in fact our brain power. • Who should have responsibility for economic development and sustainability? It is very difficult to get a consensus.

The event was co-promoted by the Vancouver Board of Trade and their Chief Economist Dave Park joined the GVRD Commissioner/CAO, Johnny Carline in offering brief closing remarks and then Chair Jackson thanked the panelists and closed the event.

The attachment provides a detailed summary of the regional economy dialogue.

3. ALTERNATIVES No alternatives presented.

4. CONCLUSION

One of the most intense sessions we’ve had, the Economy Dialogue contributed significantly to discussions on this important issue. We may be approaching “a raging agreement”, that in fact you can’t talk about the economy without talking about sustainability and you can’t talk about sustainability without talking about the economy.

Discussion identified several key factors in our economic sustainability: a need for better understanding of the relationships between the regional and global economies; our dependency on the resource sector and the challenges that arise from its cyclical nature; the importance of robust transportation networks to support economic activity; the impact of affordability as it relates to economic growth in the GVRD; and the importance of ensuring that all elements of sustainability – economic, environmental and social – are considered in planning for the future.

The session, as with the entire series to-date, was well received by those present and the GVRD once again received plaudits for its role in providing a forum for dialogue and discussion on important regional issues. However, there was also a strong consensus that we likely need two or three more of these economy dialogues in order to more fully explore the issues and take advantage of the contributions the community can make.

004441215 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 50 of 70

It would be appropriate and valuable to share with both municipal and regional staff and elected officials the ideas generated in this session; in particular, as they may relate to the role of the region in determining broader development strategies for the region. The report should also be referred to staff for consideration in the development of a “sustainability based vision” for the future of the region as is being considered by the GVRD Board’s SRI Task Force.

Attachments: 3a. Regional Economy Dialogue Issues Summary Notes

50 Item No. 4.3 Attachment 3a

GVRD FUTURE OF THE REGION SUSTAINABILITY DIALOGUES

REGIONAL ECONOMY: THE WORLD IS WATCHING SEPTEMBER 25TH, 2006

ISSUES SUMMARY NOTES

STATED GOALS • Our goal is to look for insights into the future of the regional economy. • We need a more thorough understanding of the economic challenges and opportunities, and a vision of how to begin to address them. • We need to think about long-term regional economic issues such as: – lagging productivity and what that means to our quality of life; – what will happen to our economy when strong commodity prices decline; – how to identify the environmental and social impacts of our economic development; and – how to weave consideration of environmental and social impacts into our decision- making. • This dialogue needs to thoroughly explore how globalization affects our communities now and into the future. • Questions to prompt discussion include: – Where does that future lead? – Are tourism and minimum wage jobs the way forward? – Is the vaunted high tech sector where we see our significant economic development? It suits our well-educated citizenry but contributes only in a small way to our current economy. – Do we end up taking in each other’s laundry? – Where does it all end? When is the last person well and surely on the lifeboat? – With high commodity prices, we have become more, not less, dependent on our traditional role as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Given the volatility that characterizes resource industries, is this sustainable as a continuing foundation for our regional economy? – What about that elephant in the room: globalization?

THE DIALOGUE

1.0 Context • The B.C. economy and with it the economy of Greater Vancouver is on a roll. This is no surprise to anyone looking for a plumber, buying a house or seeking employees. • The current cycle of high natural resource prices, record non-residential construction, booming trade with the Asia-Pacific, and high demand in our red-hot residential sector presents a positive picture, but we can’t count on this cycle to continue indefinitely. • Economic growth is critical to a sustainable region. I’m worried we haven’t paid enough attention to it. I’m worried that governments, particularly local and regional governments, are not doing enough to understand and support and facilitate economic growth. Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 52 of 70

• It’s fantastic that the GVRD is having this forum, but my biggest concern in this region is that in our communities, we don’t hear the economic planners. We have environmental committees, social planners and cultural planners. I’m surprised and a little disappointed that our local and regional government is not paying more attention to the critical element of our economy. • We have the limited geographic area of the regional district, and we’re dealing with municipal and regional government, which has control over certain taxation. Many of the issues that we’re discussing in terms of economic development are way beyond what either municipal or regional government can control.

2.0 Global factors • Globalization is here to stay. It will continue to drive the Canadian, and particularly the resource-based western Canadian and Vancouver economies. Economic growth will come from that and if we don’t plan for it, we’ll get into bigger problems than we have today. • I’m puzzled that despite the masses of words around the critical subject of globalization, little policy, public or private, local or otherwise, has come forward. – For over a decade, I’ve been talking about globalization, and so have lots of others. – Two of many books on globalization have shaped my thinking. Both are by Thomas Friedman, senior editorialist for the New York Times. The first was The Lexus and the Olive Tree, from five or six years ago. The second, The World Is Flat, came out last year. They’re well worth reading, whether you agree with Mr. Friedman’s conclusions or not. • The elephant in the room is not globalization but privatization.

3.0 Facts and opinions • In these confusing times my rule of engagement is that there are no facts anymore, just opinions. None of us is right or wrong; we just have our opinions and the opportunity to share them. As they’re just opinions, it’s okay if we disagree. • With an engineering background, I can assure you, there are certain facts and we have to make sure we’re not contrary to those facts, or else we can waste a lot of time. • My rule of engagement is that if you don’t have the facts, don’t talk. • One of the problems with this discussion is that we’re all coming from opinion and what we need is a better set of numbers that tells us what our economy is, what it does, and what the trade-offs are, and then we can answer these questions. Opinion is nice. It’s just not evidence.

4.0 Characteristics of the regional economy

4.1 A diverse and poorly understood economy • What strikes me most about Vancouver’s economy is that, in every other major metropolitan city in Canada, if you stopped somebody on the street and asked, “What’s the economic base of this region?” they could answer correctly. If you asked somebody in Vancouver, they’d scratch their head, probably give you some spare change and move on. • At a regional level, at times, we appear unfocused. Even at the local level, sometimes, we look at ourselves and acknowledge that we might be a tiny bit dysfunctional. • Greater Vancouver is distinct among Canada’s metropolitan regions in having a highly distributed, diverse, fragmented economic base. We can’t point to oil and gas, or the tar

52 Attachment 4

sands, or agriculture alone. It’s all of those things. There is no single engine of growth in Vancouver’s economy, but there are many engines, all small, all distinct, often all going in different directions. • Because we do not have a clearly understood economy, we can delude ourselves with a nostalgia for “villages by the sea.” There were never villages by the sea. There were meat packing plants, fish packing plants and sawmills by the sea. But we weren’t quaint Dorset villages sitting on the water. We were resource dependent. • Our lack of knowledge, information and awareness about our economy means everybody gets to claim that they are the engine. We have a lot of special pleading – We have people saying that a sector with high employment is the engine of the economy. This invokes the analogy of fleas and camels, there being many more fleas than there are camels, but the camels are not dependent on the fleas. – We have others who argue that their importance is based on their contribution to GDP, when the majority of GDP is in fact consumption. It’s a feedlot approach to economic analysis. – We hear that high tech is driving our economy, or biotech, or the film industry or arts and culture. – It all seems reasonable because we really don’t know what’s driving our economy.

4.2 The importance of resource industries • I am pleased to see that some people are actually saying “resources.” – Historically, we’ve talked about the metropolitan economy being somehow independent of the provincial economy. In fact, the majority of this economy depends on the resource economy of the province. – For example, in the eight weeks after Katrina, the provincial government picked up $70 million in economic rent from rising natural gas prices, none of which was raised in the Lower Mainland and 57% of which was spent in the Lower Mainland. So we are a resource-dependent region. – We also sell things to the resource regions. So not only do we depend on them redistributionally, but we depend on them as our customers and our clients.

4.3 Strengths and weaknesses • What economic sectors are we particularly favoured in? – Well, we’re not favoured in sectors that depend on scale economies. We are the 30th largest metropolitan region in North America, ranking right up there with St. Louis, Missouri, and it is more proximate to consumer markets than we are. So we neither have the scale nor the location to be a market-dependent economy in the sense of spatial proximity. – This means we are a niche economy. We have to look at the little things we do well. We can use our non-mobile factors like resources. We can look at the environment we create for business. But there is no single set of policies or single set of industries that gives us any particular advantage. • The economic rent and the resource industries of the rest of the province have allowed us to become complacent. We don’t see where we earn our money. My answer to the question, “Have the economic benefits conferred by the physical beauty of our surroundings made us too complacent to compete effectively in the global marketplace?” is an unequivocal no; but the resource industries have made us complacent.

53 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 54 of 70

4.4 Vancouver bias • In Surrey, south of the Fraser, it’s apparent that there is a myopic view that the region is somewhere between Howe Street and Stanley Park. Among the people attending today, there are 83 from Vancouver and three from Surrey. The populations of those two cities are 570-odd, according to B.C. Stats, for Vancouver and 393 for Vancouver [check if speaker intended different figures]. The South Fraser itself is 850,000 people.

4.5 The regional transportation industry • The transportation sector plays a critically important role in our economy and offers great opportunities. About 100,000 people in B.C. work in this sector, and it’s projected to be one of the fastest growing sectors in the province. • Resources are what we ship through the Port of Vancouver and that will continue. Canada and Vancouver in particular have unique assets to compete in the global market for resources. • The Port of Vancouver, ships about 76 million tonnes [tons?] of goods and services. About 3 million tonnes are containers, so it’s a small part of our business. • Containers is a growth area, but we’re going to grow in every sector in the Port of Vancouver: with bulk, solid bulk, petroleum and potash. • If we want to capture growth in the transportation sector, we have a critical need to protect [industrial] waterfront property. [The limited amount of industrial waterfront land] limits our ability to move goods and services. I’m not sure anybody’s taking enough care of the industrial assets that are so critical in the transportation corridors. • There are transportation corridors throughout this region. To benefit our economic development in the future, we must absolutely ensure that they are protected.

5.0 World trade and transportation • World trade has grown tremendously, and it keeps on growing, outpacing economic growth. World trade volume will grow at about 9% this year, overall, while economies, collectively, will grow at about 5%. – Ten years ago, if you took off every article of clothing that you had on that wasn’t made in Canada, you might be taking off an item or two. Today, you’d likely be nearly naked. – What has happened is trade. We no longer worry about Canada being self-sufficient but trade with others for the things that we can’t produce as cheaply. We specialize in what we can do particularly well, and our unemployment rate is the same as it was a decade ago. • The global economy is dynamic and highly competent. That’s why we see these flows of goods coming through our region. If we go to Los Angeles or Portland, we see similar flows. All over the world, flows are increasing. • The rapid growth in trade has been driven partly by the containerization revolution in the transportation industry—the idea of putting products into secure metal boxes that protect them and make handling more efficient. • Container trade has grown, over 25 years, every year, on average, 8.5%. That’s a massive rate of growth, and it’s made the shift of manufacturing to low-cost countries in Asia possible.

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5.1 Greater Vancouver’s share of container shipments • Containers [from Asia] are delivered to the U.S. west coast, and the Canadian west coast. About 70% of them land somewhere in California. Another 20% land somewhere in Washington State, and the last 9% or 10% land here in the Greater Vancouver area. • Vancouver handled a little over 2 million containers last year, and every container generates $1,500 dollars in local benefits. • These containers are either delivered by truck to the nearby customers or they are put on rail and delivered either to the U.S. Midwest or central Canada, other parts of Canada.

5.2 Road and rail connections • Because ports are just one step in the movement of goods, the Port of Vancouver supports the Gateway project. Goods have to come into and go out from the Port, so roads and rail are absolutely critical. – The GVRD, in a close vote, didn’t support the Gateway project as strongly as we would like, but it’s critical to the efficient movement of trucks around the Lower Mainland. – For those of you who are struggling behind trucks, if we don’t fix it, it’s not going to get better; it’s going to get worse. It will begin to impact the economy, jobs and our ability to provide services. • Rail is another issue. Most of the goods that come and go from the Port of Vancouver move by rail, yet we have great pressure to move rail yards to “higher and better use.” – If those rail yards go, those goods and services aren’t going to come. We’re going to have trouble. – Commuter rail on the CP line is a critical issue to us. It takes up 20% of the capacity of that line and there are proposals to do more. We’re supportive of that but we can’t lose sight of the need to move goods and services. • As a transportation planner with the City of Burnaby, I’d like a general sense of the magnitude of the split between road and rail for containers. Also, if you took out the Lower Mainland shipments and only looked at the longer haul, what would be the split between road and rail? • About 70% of the containers that come or go through the Port go by rail, so the rest are trucked. Of the ones that are trucked, I would say, and I’m generalizing, that B.C. is the limit to trucking. If it’s going any farther than that, it’s going by rail.

5.3 Expanding Greater Vancouver’s container capacity • The Western Transportation Advisory Council (WTAC) recently published a study of Canadian retail importers. It showed that container movements will almost triple by 2015 over the 2004 level. – We spoke to retailers about their buying plans. For example, Canadian Tire told us that, in 2004, they would buy 31% of everything they would sell in this country from offshore. In five short years that 31% is going to 48%. – That’s lots of growth, and we have the good fortune to be right across the ocean from the most rapidly growing part of the world. • Regarding the expectation that trade through our ports will almost triple within the next decade, what do we know about the extent to which businesses factored the rising costs of fuel and therefore transportation into their projections? Are these hard numbers that have been through the mill on the subjects of climate change and rising fuel prices? This is particularly important when we are talking about the need to spend public dollars on

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infrastructure to support that growing trade. It would be good to know if we are we spending in the right way to support the right kinds and size of infrastructure. • We went to the top importers of containers into western Canada, and asked them what they were doing in the year 2000 and in the year 2004, and then asked for their projections every year out to 2010 and even as far as 2015, if they could. A good percentage of the companies that are importing into this region gave us their numbers. We didn’t ask them for their rationale. We also asked all of the exporters of products, including forest products, mining, and potash companies, where they saw their opportunities. We had 14 companies tell us what their plans are to move out through not only the West Coast but also other directions. I have to assume that these big, responsible organizations figure in all of the issues surrounding their labour costs and local and the international requirements when they’re giving us the numbers. Our study was fact-based. We collected the data, analyzed it all and added it up, so there’s no opinion. That’s what the plans say, and it does add up to a 10% every year, right out to 2015. • Vancouver has container terminal expansion plans that will cost money and will add rail and road traffic. There are land issues to be resolved, and it won’t be cheap. Do we want this business? • How urgent is it that Vancouver expands its capacity to handle containers? • Take a look at the competition: – Prince Rupert is building a container terminal that will handle 500,000 containers a year. With no local market, a remote location, but a fine deep-water port, it has attracted investment from a New Jersey terminal operator. – Mexico, which has a lousy rail system and that northern border with the United States that shipments must cross, is developing container terminals. – Panama is looking to widen the Panama Canal because it wants to handle the new generation of ships that are too wide to fit today’s system. That would allow container ships to bypass the west coast entirely. – Halifax has a fine deep-water port on Canada’s east coast and is growing its container business. Right now it handles about 500,000 containers. Shipments to Halifax travel a greater distance and have a greater cost because they come from Asia, through the Suez Canal and across the Atlantic, and yet Canadian retailers are investing there. • The container business is lucrative, competitive, surging and sustainable. – Every container generates $1,500 dollars in local benefits. – Unlike other regions, Greater Vancouver has valuable products to put back in the containers returning to Asia: forest products, specialty grains, specialty papers. This helps Canadian exporters as well. – Expanded container business would pay for things like MRI machines and the tax base to cover the pensions as we are all aging. • Expansion of the container business can be done in such a way that every one of us in this region benefits. I don’t want my son to go to Toronto or Alberta to find his opportunity. This is our business to lose.

5.4 Cost of enhancing the transportation infrastructure for commerce • How much will it cost to maximize the Asia-Pacific opportunity? Well it’s going to be billions of dollars. We have about a $2 billion expansion plan underway at the Port of Vancouver. We’re proposing to expand, and it’s not just containers.

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• Roads probably need $2 billion dollars spent to accommodate growth [in the transportation sector]. The province and the federal government have committed that money, and it’s critical. • Rail needs probably another billion dollars. CP spent a few hundred million dollars a couple of years ago. • Does it make sense to put money into this? From our perspective, it does. As a business case, all of those governments more than recover their investment through taxes and [other fees].

5.5 Moving people • There is a lack of balance when we talk about road expansion, which won’t relieve the pressure for automobiles moving around. We talk about massive rail transit for goods, but we don’t talk seriously about moving people—beyond SkyTrain, the Canada Line, and the bus system. Last week, the Economist said that Los Angeles, the emblem of the car culture, is bringing back streetcars in its downtown. And the State of California is now suing the major automobile manufacturers. We have an opportunity to look that squarely in the eye and not repeat the past errors of Los Angeles within this limited geographical area. • I am very heavily involved in bringing the Inter-Urban Line in Surrey through to Cloverdale back to life. The City of Surrey council today will make a decision down those lines. When it comes back to life in 2009, it will be just as clean if not cleaner than it was it was with 600 DC volts in 1910. • We need to be creative about public transit, and that means thinking not only about buses, which actually clog up roads as well as move people. We need to think about, dare I say, streetcars. Streetcars are the solutions around the world, and we ought think higher capacity than the SkyTrain is today.

6.0 The regional knowledge economy • Our economy has been very resource-dependent in the past and it will continue to be so for a while yet, but there is a whole heap of the economy that is driven by knowledge. Economic growth isn’t always dependent on the movement of physical goods and exporting and importing material things. – I work in advanced energy technologies and I would say that energy, environment and economy are three sides of the same coin. They’re all very closely interlinked. – There is a massive, fast-growing global market for advanced technologies in energy and environment. B.C., for some reason, has developed an enormous pool of expertise in this area. – An under-recognized resource in B.C. is our brainpower. This resource has yet to be properly extracted—mined and used and exported. We have to think about that at a provincial level. – There is no better place in the world than B.C. to create a clean energy economy. We have the resources and brainpower to do so. I’m just not sure that we have the will, yet. – We can build this sector through government policy—through regulations, mandates, standards, or whatever—to create markets and industry and ultimately bring head offices here that can be exporting knowledge and services to the rest of the world. • I don’t know how big a heap is. • Regarding brainpower, for every Canadian who graduates from a university this year, there will be 24 people graduating from a Chinese university this year. One of the problems with brainpower is that it’s highly mobile and also fairly well distributed, once we acknowledge

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that the world is flat. I like the idea of using brainpower, and I think China’s a better place, by the way, to develop clean technology, given some of the problems they’re actually having in China right now. The issue is, that’s a really competitive market. Every country in the world that has a good education system is our competition. • We don’t have, as yet, a comparative advantage. We could have, and I’m not dissing it; I just keep looking at how to support 4 million people with that particular segment of brainpower. • The resource industry is, yes, the present and the past, but if it won’t also be the future, we have to do some fairly radical things. • It’s true that we don’t talk enough about the knowledge economy. In that economy, we require decision makers to invest in things for which we don’t know the outcome. You have to really believe that something good is going to come of it. We don’t seem to be skilled in that area, and maybe Vancouver is a good place to grow that.

7.0 Small business • The Board of Trade has a large number of small businesses and our job is to represent them. • Why are small and medium size enterprises and not being supported vigorously by more senior levels of government, when you see more support regionally? • The reality of this region is that it is a highly diverse and small economy. The reason you don’t see as much support for it is that it’s so distributed. You can’t target it. – In Calgary you don’t have a problem targeting growth sectors. Do something good for agriculture; do something for oil and gas. – Here it’s very hard to have a single overarching big policy when it applies to such a tremendous range of very small players. – From a policy perspective, we have to look at contextual stuff. We’ve got to go back to “the world is flat.” We have to recognize that we don’t know what these small players are doing or how they’re doing it, and we certainly don’t want a civil servant for every entrepreneur. – So we need to look at the context: transportation, education, safety, health, cleanliness—those kinds of things, and set that context. – It’s hard to have a focused small business policy when you don’t know whether that small business is exporting ginseng or opening a coffee shop in Korea. – Back when it was a forest-dependent region, you could target an industry and you could have a department. – We have so many little engines going in different directions that having a focused policy is really hard to do. • To many small businesses, the biggest business in the province seems to be the government and the regulations that they’re dealing with. • One of the best ways we can support small business in B.C., specifically in the Lower Mainland, is with a property taxation system that’s more equitable. Right now, the business community, small business in particular, carries way too much of a load for property taxes. That’s a simple thing that the local governments, if they agreed, could do to support small business. That would do more for small business than most of the things that were mentioned. • Small businesses need other people to put the economy itself into a framework, and one of the best things that the levels of government can do is to provide the leadership to have

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economic development marketing. That’s the missing link is that we have to understand ourselves as a region and then to do economic development marketing for our region.

8.0 Land use issues • We have a lack of industrial land, and that may compromise our Agricultural Land Reserve. We have a critical need to protect [industrial] waterfront property. To capture growth, we’ve got to protect those lands. Who’s doing that? We take care of the ALR; in particular, the GVRD takes great care of the ALR, but I’m not sure anybody’s taking enough care of the industrial assets that are so critical in the transportation corridors. • We absolutely need to protect waterfront properties. We also need to protect our industrial land because we haven’t got any [more]. • There are transportation corridors throughout this region. Some of them are the corridors that opened up this region, [away from where,] when the floods came in the spring, the roads got washed away. To benefit our economic development in the future, we must absolutely ensure that they are protected. • Land use is often left out of these discussions because municipalities have all the toys with respect to land use. Discussing the implications of land use decisions, boring as it may be, will become increasingly important not just to transportation but to the functioning of the economy as well. • Unless anybody has a way of stopping immigration, and possibly reversing it, we regrettably will have to be quite creative at knowing how to develop.

9.0 Limits on growth? • As long the underpinning of our whole economy is the word “growth,” we’re living on borrowed time. We are on the wrong footing in our economic thinking. Our planet is finite. I miss two people here today: Professor Wiess [spelling?] and Professor Wassernagel, who have talked about how we have already overstepped our footprint in this region by four to one. • This is a radical challenge to a population that’s already here. If we’re going to reduce our ecological footprint, we have to deport all but 76,000 [760,000?] people from the Lower Mainland. • Regarding our ecological footprint, if you stand naked, you will find that everything that sustains you comes from outside your body. – We all live beyond our own footprint, so it’s a silly concept. – Our agricultural lands by definition are outside our community, so cities are feedlots. We have a relationship with rural areas that’s trade-based and that makes it look like we’re overstepping our ecological footprint. It’s funny nobody ever talks about the ecological footprint of Saskatchewan—because it produces an agricultural surplus. • Let’s put aside the growth argument entirely and talk about maintenance. – To provide healthcare for an aging population, we need economic growth that’s way faster than our population growth. That’s just to the pay health bills as we get older. – Talking about loss of waterfront land for industry purposes, that erodes our economies. • We can talk about how much growth we need, but the fundamental issue we have to ask in this region and in every other region is, how do we pay the bills? It starts from that.

10.0 Are increased medical costs related to growth? • I would suggest that the growing medical health costs are directly proportional to the type of growth that you are talking about.

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• Do health costs go up per person when there are more people? Does it automatically follow that if you have 100,000 people today, if you have 200,000 people, it will cost more, or is it all the same per capita? • It depends on where you are. Our life expectancy, our disability-free life expectancy in Vancouver, in Canada, picks up two years a decade. We’re doing really well. Does our health cost go up with it? Yes, but I can’t see any medical connection [to population figures]. • The air in this region is better than it was in 1968. This is because in 1968 we had beehive burners. In 1968 False Creek was completely polluted. You could walk across it. The quality of the air and the water has nothing to do with the number of people; it’s how those people live.

11.0 Sustainability—economic, environmental and social • I was expecting to hear a lot more about sustainability at this session today. • I, too, came here expecting and hoping to hear more about sustainability and not simply the economic perspective—not that that isn’t obviously a critical piece. • This is a discussion on the economy, so that’s why we’re talking about economic issues. We don’t pay enough attention, when we talk about sustainability, to role of the economy. I worry, in this region, that sustainability means no economic growth. • We’ve been asked to discuss how we will succeed in the new global economy while ensuring long-term regional prosperity, social well being and environmental health. So I really think we are talking about the three-legged stool of sustainability. • The topic was billed as the economy in context of sustainability. This dialogue so far has illustrated the need for more dialogue between people working on the economic side and people like me who are active on the social, cultural or environmental side. We all must begin to make a commitment to look at the other side. • I’m surprised that you’re surprised that the panel didn’t address stuff. We’re just four people. This is a room full of peers. It was never suggested that we had all the answers. These dialogues are to raise issues. Your points are well made and I never argued that there was an exclusivity between the economy and sustainability. I was asked to talk about the economy. • I strongly push the view that we need economic growth. It absolutely has to be done sustainably, and we have that potential, but if we don’t pursue growth, we won’t have the opportunity to do it sustainably.

11.1 Sustainable economic initiatives • In B.C., a fairly comprehensive set of sustainable economic initiatives is emerging. In the Lower Mainland, for example, a lot of people are growing their own organic produce, there are farmer’s markets, and there’s emerging green technology. These seem to be the wave of the future, but I haven’t heard much about them in our economic forecast. • That sounds really funky, but we need to support 2.3 million people. – There’s no objection to growing your own organic food on a railway right of way, but it doesn’t pay for brain surgery, transplants or the standard of living we have. – Maybe we shouldn’t have the standard of living we have, but that’s a fundamental statement that goes a lot farther than growing your own vegetables. – When talk about paying for education and teacher’s salaries, it’s more complex than the sustainable vegetables issue.

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11.2 Social Sustainability • When we bring in more container traffic and Canadian Tire increases its offshore purchases from 31% to 48%, what impact does that have on local jobs? • A top CEO, I read in a paper in the last two weeks, is making $30,000 for every $1 for people at the lowest end of the spectrum. There’s this gap. When is enough enough? How do we increase the capacity of people at moderate incomes and at the bottom, because if we can give them more dollars to spend, we have more markets. • We have to be very careful about moving into protectionist-type cycles on work. The short- term alleviation that all protectionism brings, and it’s pretty well documented because enough people have tried it over the years, is greatly overshadowed by the very regressive consequences of prolonged protectionism. In an extreme case, you could say North Korea. I’d be worried about that. • In the United States, poor people pay 360% more than poor people in Canada pay for sugar because of protectionism from the U.S. sugar industry. • I believe, and I’ve got payroll myself, that when you are an employer, you usually think you’re doing something good for society.

11.3 Making the transportation industry sustainable • The proposal for sustainable economies is to have extra highways and transportation, but maybe we should be trying to reduce the amount of transportation required, rather than just creating more, more, more. We should be looking at how. • In terms of transportation, sustainability involves doing a better job of it. – When you have trucks all lined up between 7:00 and 4:00 on a workday, that’s not sustainable. You have engines idling and no work being done. – The way to make transportation sustainable is to make sure it’s spread out over more of the day and more of the week. You make investments in the most congested bottlenecks and reduce the emissions generated per unit of work being done. – You increase the emission standards. The industry is willing to work with higher standards. – You ask and eventually mandate that the ships that come into this harbour use those giant plugs and use shoreside power so that they’re not burning fuel while they’re in our harbour. – You develop inland terminals so that containers aren’t handled at the very high cost land right at the ocean. You pull them inland where the land is cheaper and there’s more space. – You make grade separations, so that you’re not caught both in terms of safety and also convenience and lifestyle, waiting for trains at crossings. The trains would be going overhead or underneath. – You make road investments in general that improve the flow of business traffic. • The Port of Vancouver recognizes that the transportation business has environmental impacts, and we must reduce those. We’ve set out on a best practices policy and our objective is every year to reduce environmental impacts.

11.4 Technology and sustainability • Technology is often viewed as a negative [but it can also help improve the environment]. – Lately, I’ve heard the acronym “SOV” [single occupancy vehicle] spoken with curled lips, in a manner previously reserved for tobacco smokers, maybe back in the ’70s.

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– But if an SOV were driven by a clean technology, and there are some [clean technologies] on the cars driving around today, you might have a different view of it. – These things are often driven from what some would call “greed” and others might call “ambition to improve ourselves.” – We don’t have to roll back the clock to sustain something. Sustainability is a wonderful and complex thought and we need to look at technology for good as well as dealing with its side effects. – In the 1960s, where I come from in the north of England, you could probably cut the air with a knife. In the developed world, we’re aware of [pollution] and realize it’s something we want to work at. By doing that we’re improving things.

11.5 Evaluating which goods are beneficial • Beyond trade of goods, transportation, trucking and shipping in general, my concern is about the nature and the content of goods that are being traded. – How many of them actually contribute to our life? How much will end up in a landfill? – How do we make sure our trade is sustainable and adds value to our life in all three bottom lines? • This is quite a difficult one. From an economist’s point of view, it’s all about demand and what we as individuals demand within this region and throughout North America. • You are challenging that we trade at all in certain things—because they will be used in a short period of time and discarded. • We have to consider more than just demand because demand is influenced by the media, big business and marketing. There has to be a greater awareness—and people in positions of authority have a responsibility to make us aware—of what we use, what’s helpful to us and what will diminish our long-term health, the air we breathe and the water we need. • It’s more than demand and supply. Lots of people demand things, but who needs more stuff? We need good stuff. • Economists rarely get to say “should.” They are trained not to be normative, so when somebody asks me, does an iPod enhance our well being as a community, I can’t answer that, because it’s not an economic question in the way economists are trained. I don’t know whether iPods are good or not, but a lot of people seem to want to buy them. So I say that seems to be a valid decision. These discussions often move beyond the topic of sustainability into the question of whether our values are better than other people’s values. Luckily, I have no opinions on that.

11.6 Using the triple bottom line • How imperative is it now for businesses to use the triple bottom line of social, economic and environmental interests, in making decisions about their practices in this region? – Previously, decisions have been based largely on a single bottom line. Of course, it’s necessary to generate wealth. – Critical background issues are affordability so that people can continue to live in this region, and footprint—the building and design of compact communities. People are worried about transportation and the environmental side. The GVRD is doing a lot of good work around the Sustainable Region Initiative. • The issue with the triple bottom line is simple: how do you pay the bills? – Social sustainability means income redistribution, health care and education, and that immediately spins out a need for some level of economic activity.

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– There has to be economic growth because the demand for healthcare the other social components is growing. That’s where your linkage to a growing economy is. Even to maintain the social component, you have to maintain an economy. – In these discussions, we pull sustainability out and we don’t pull it back in, at some point, to the recognition that you have to pay for MRIs and teachers. – I appreciate we have to talk about sustainability, but we also have to talk about funding sustainability.

11.7 Integrating the economy and sustainability • You need to talk about the economy but, even if the emphasis of today is on the economy, you have to make the link [to social and environmental sustainability]. Without the link there’s a failure in the analysis. • In the economic community it seems that sustainability means: how do we keep sustaining economic growth? Or it’s used as an add-on frill. In the sustainability community, sustainability means actual survival, whether it’s in the short run or in the long run. If we can bring these ideas together, then we can start making some difference. • I’m intrigued that we are grappling with the separate ideas of being here to talk about sustainability versus being here to talk about the economy. Where do those worlds meet? We’re here to bring those worlds together. • Too often, we put things in silos. We put the economy in a silo, and the environment in a silo and social policy in a silo, and we do a very poor job of bringing them together. • Integration is better at the regional and local level. Provincial [and federal] governments aren’t very good at it, regardless of political stripe. Our challenge is to tear down the silos and figure out how to put these things together. • The worlds of sustainability and economy are meeting at a regional level. The conversation is much more tangible and real and there’s action. It’s the two senior levels of government that seem completely out to lunch on this dialogue and not bringing these worlds together. • Small business is capable of bringing together sustainability, natural resources, very creative people and entrepreneurship and driving growth to a greener economy and a more sustainable future. • During recent speaking engagements with business students and MBA students, at UBC and UVic [for example], I have been polling them about the degree to which sustainability will factor in their careers, where they think the world is going and whether the global economy will crash during their careers. – Most of them don’t think the global economy is going to crash during their careers. They think it’s the next generation, which sounds familiar. – All of them, 100%, this is now hundreds of students, think that sustainability is a major factor in their career, and they’re integrating it into what kind of job they will look for, what kind of work they’re going to do and what their expectations of the economy are. So the worlds [of economy and sustainability] are meeting there.

11.8 The business case for sustainability • Have you looked at how can you grow economically while also advancing sustainability? • I focus on the business case for sustainability because I believe it makes economic sense and a number of my clients who discovered that is true. • Businesses can actually make money and be sustainable. You may be aware of Ecosmart concrete, which was developed here in B.C. They use a high proportion of it is fly ash in the

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concrete. This not only takes fly ash out of landfills but it makes the concrete perform better. It’s a win-win situation. • The chairman of Lloyds of London, the world’s biggest insurance company, made the interesting comment that, first, Lloyds is convinced that climate change is happening and that we’re causing it and, second, they are seriously considering raising the premiums of companies that don’t take measures to reduce their impact on climate change. Their view, as an insurer is that they can’t afford to encourage risky behaviour. So there’s another economic driver. • A recent article in the Vancouver Sun, on the back page, mentioned that obesity is now one of the largest threats to humankind, second only to climate change. The statistic was that a billion people in the world are overweight. More people in the world are overweight than are undernourished. One way to address the legitimate concern that people have about the clogging up of our arteries for commercial vehicles is to get more private vehicles off the road. You would gain space for the trucks that need to move around, people could travel to and fro in a healthier manner, and you would have less obesity. The projected costs of dealing with obesity, are enormous. • My point is that these things are all interrelated and you have to try to solve all of them at once. They’re not acting at cross-purposes and their integration is beneficial.

11.9 Small business and sustainability • Small business is capable of bringing together sustainability, natural resources, very creative people and entrepreneurship and driving growth to a greener economy and a more sustainable future. – Yet we don’t have support for this. We have huge support for bigger business, for larger blocks of the economy. – In the provincial government, small business is a little marketing department, but I see small business as a driver of the green economy. It’s what we’re good at here in B.C. • Small businesses, in the main, would love to be involved in things that would make the enterprise more sustainable. They would love to do things that make the social conscience more sated, and they feel they’re doing something socially. But at the end of the day they are in the same economy as everyone else. • All of the private companies that I have dealt with over the last 2.5 years have desired to do something positive for sustainability. Our problem is that they need guidance on how to do it. Coming out with the whole gamut of what’s good about sustainability doesn’t work. We have to filter it and let them understand where they can contribute. • Small businesses (and I’m sure it’s true in large businesses), in my experience, are not deliberately exploitative (occasionally, we have the bad eggs there), but they actually believe that by running their businesses and creating employment they are doing something for society. I personally agree with that. So I have difficulty when I hear that economic growth is independent of social well being, or that social well being is against economic growth. • The public is taking on the externalized costs of private enterprises. I’m talking about big business, not our small neighbourhood grocer. • Why do you keep exempting small business? A small business that pollutes a lot is okay? It can’t be specific to the scale of the firm. • I’m saying this because I’ve heard a lot about don’t blame small businesses; they’re the ones creating local employment. I want to paint a broader picture

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11.10 Regulation to support sustainability • Expecting individual companies to take dramatic steps is a stretch, so it falls to a higher level of government to increase standards. – As you gradually increase the standards, people step up to the plate. They respond. They invest in the right kinds of technology. To wait for this to happen on a voluntary basis or to appeal to them when they’re out there operating businesses is going to be very tough. – It’s up to provincial and federal politicians to up those standards gradually. • When that happens, don’t people then complain about the bureaucracy and the red tape? • That’s life. • At the Vancouver Port Authority, in the trade and transportation system, we are trying to do a better job. We’re setting targets every day to reduce our environmental impact. We have heard, we have learned, and to a certain extent, in our economic world, we recognize that if we don’t move, someone will make us move. So we’re better leading rather than following.

11.11 Sustainability is a long-term project • The idea that we should get out of our vehicles is excellent, but with the way that this region is set up at the moment, that’s a very long-term project. There are a number of things that must be done. For example there are more than four times as many bus movements from the depots in Vancouver and Richmond compared to Surrey, and there are many more SkyTrain stations and facilities in Vancouver/Burnaby/New Westminster compared to the City of Surrey. • For the biggest issues, we have to set the time frame: it’s 20 years and 30 years. But that’s no reason not to start now. • Long-term planning for the economy requires first having clarity about the facts about the costs that climate change and rising fuel prices will inflict, and what difference that will make to growth projections.

11.12 An economic reality check • We’re facing Vancouver denial again: at least half of our economy in this region is resource dependent. The pine beetle is eating as we speak and copper prices are projected to drop by 55% in the next five years. Where are we going to get the money to pay the bills when those things happen? Let’s be realistic adults. Yes, we’d like to do all sorts of things, but it’s a harsh economic world. • Right now, things are great in Vancouver because commodity prices are great. They’re not great because the film industry’s great or tourism is great, or UBC is great. We’re at the top of a resource cycle and we’d better get ready for when it slides down, and that won’t be in 10 or 20 or 30 years. • Yes, we have to talk about doing things sustainably. We have to care about things and we should care, and firms are doing that. But we also have to be realistic that we are a resource-dependent region in a resource-dependent province. The money for the signing bonuses for provincial civil service labour came from the oil and gas industry, and that’s a message we have to pay attention to.

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12.0 General prescriptions for the regional economy • To strengthen our economy, our policy should not target specific industries but create a context where industries and economic activity can flourish. Because our economy is so diverse, our policy has to deals with Mr. [Friedman’s] comments about a level playing field. • We really need to understand ourselves as a region and all work together for the region’s benefit. Our governments, businesses and private citizens all need to be part it, and I hope today’s dialogue is part of that process. I know that [the GVRD is] looking to take these dialogues to that other place south of the Fraser. • We need an economic development marketing strategy for the region. Economic development depends on how we market ourselves: – We could waste an enormous amount of energy marketing only a part of our region and a part of our strengths. – In understanding ourselves as a region, we need to become focused on what our role is. – If we miss that first step of discovering our region, the rest of the effort will not be efficient. – The next decade will probably be seen as a mess, but the good news is that we are ripe for some successes. The process will be to discover who we are as a region and to communicate that to the entire population. • Lack of head offices: if we do get the regions right, if we can come together as a population and start doing things right, then head offices will find us a very attractive option. • Investment is the key to economic development. In the film business, the new media business, I routinely get calls from San Francisco and Silicon Valley saying, we’d love to invest in what you’re doing if you would relocate to Silicon Valley. The geographic element is interesting. • In the context of globalization, we can do much to make our economy less vulnerable. Rather than relying entirely on export or import driven markets, especially considering the cost of transporting all those goods back and forth, we could focus more on localizing our economy, making it diverse and more robust. We would also have a more complete community. You start with your neighbourhoods and work your way out from there. We do have some answers, and I don’t think that they are funky. Growing vegetables on an abandoned railroad track is a pretty good idea, as a matter of fact. It creates a sense of community and reduces vulnerability in those communities.

12.1 Developing a comprehensive policy for the economy and sustainability • Considering the deep ties that between energy, transportation and economics, and the reliances that we have, whether on the input, output or dumping side of it, where we have externalized costs that aren’t accounted for, we really are socializing those costs. The public is taking on those costs of those private enterprises. I’m talking about big business, not our small neighbourhood grocer. • How do you see us policy-makers developing the kind of comprehensive sustainability policy that we require and that the big businesses will buy into? This is not a simple fix. We’re not going to get it by being focused. We’re going to get it by looking at diversity in all of its aspects in our economy as well as our social and ecological needs. • We’ve already heard that we need taxes to pay for all our health and education. But we also hear we need taxes to be lowered. We hear that we don’t want protectionism, but at the same time, look at what’s happened with the softwood lumber deal. We have to take a very strong look at issues and we can’t be conflicted in our approach.

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• How can we best serve you as policymakers to develop a comprehensive sustainability plan that will answer those questions and meet those needs? • Exactly—that’s what you have to do: you have to look at it as a distributed economy, not a concentrated economy. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis, with a set of goals. • Why do you keep exempting small business? A small business that pollutes a lot is okay? It can’t be specific to the scale of the firm. • I’ve heard a lot about don’t blame small businesses; they’re the ones creating local employment. I’m trying to paint a broader picture. We have very large international companies operating here and expecting us to ratchet down our legislation and regulation. That’s a reality we have to deal with. We are asked to provide stronger regulations, but there’s a lot of pressure on legislators, people who make the laws, to do exactly the opposite. • Yes, people who make the laws take the job and the pressure that goes with it. They have to make decisions. That’s why they run for office and I don’t. • I’m a big fan of internalizing externalities in those transportation costs, but that won’t blow globalization. It’s just going to make the firm that figures out how to internalize those costs best the most profitable firm. Maybe the roads would be flooded with Smart cars rather than Chevys, but they would still be cars on roads. • We have to look at [externalized costs] on a policy-by-policy basis. • You need economic analysis first and then policy, but it doesn’t have to be vested in the GVRD and probably shouldn’t be. It should be in a region-wide organization.

12.2 General economic vision for the region • What does the region mean for you? What’s your vision of the region? • People say that the region has no formal economic strategy. • The region must have a strong economic growth. • How do we view the region? • The region, according to many of the people I associate with, is from Squamish to Hope. Our GVRD in the middle is a subset of that.

12.3 Regional responsibility for economic development and sustainability • Who should have responsibility for economic development and sustainability? When I was on the GVRD, we could not get a consensus. Some leaders south of the Fraser were adamant that they would not give up jurisdiction to the GVRD to do that. • Will you get behind those who say yes, we will cede some of the responsibility to the GVRD because we believe economic development should be done at the regional level, and put pressure on those who oppose it? Is that the way to go, or is there a better alternative? • The south of the Fraser can be wary of ceding authority to GVRD. I mentioned something as simple as buses. From my own experience, in last two years in this particular job, and I have actually lived in Surrey for nearly 10 years now, I would be hard pushed to make a recommendation to my municipalities that they should put all their eggs in GVRD basket as long as it seems to be dominated by the myopic City of Vancouver view. • When people vote in our municipal councillors, it isn’t necessarily in their mind that they are electing people who are going to run TransLink and the GVRD. But that’s the case. • There are models like YVR (and the TransLink governance is obviously up for grabs at the moment) where we have a lot more business interest.

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• For economic development in this region, and it would be a larger region than the GVRD, I would set up something like the Welsh Development Agency years ago in the U.K. It should be something vibrant with new faces, led by people with a mandate. It must be given long- term funds as it will take 10, 15, 20 years. You can’t pull the plug when it’s convenient. • When did “regional” and “GVRD” become synonymous? The governor of Oregon set up the Hundred Friends of Oregon or the Thousand Friends, and pulled it out of that kind of structure. Policy needs to be region-wide and include the SLRD and the FVRD. You need economic analysis first and then policy, but it doesn’t have to be vested in the GVRD and probably shouldn’t be. It should be in a region-wide organization. You could set it up tomorrow at SFU.

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TURNING IDEAS INTO ACTION THE SUSTAINABLE REGION INITIATIVE FUTURE OF THE REGION Are we living on borrowed time? Forums for discussion intended to CHALLENGE traditional thinking and STIMULATE actions.

INDUSTRY April 24 The end of industry? Greater Vancouver land values are the highest in the country. Can we continue to manage the pressures this creates? How do we manage pressure to convert existing industrial lands to residential and commercial uses?

HOUSING March 27 The price we pay: The high cost of housing in our region has impacts on families and the economy. What are the impediments to developing an adequate supply of housing that is livable and sustainable?

TRANSPORTATION October 30 We can’t get there from here: There’s a problem with traffic congestion and goods movement in Greater Vancouver but it’s about more than just building roads.

REGIONAL ECONOMY September 25 The world is watching: Greater Vancouver is uniquely situated as Canada’s gateway to emerging markets. How do we succeed in this new global economy while ensuring long-term regional prosperity, social well-being and environmental health?

LABOUR & IMMIGRATION May 23 Labour pains: Delivering on the new economy requires skilled workers: trades, technical and management. How do we train, retain and recruit the workforce necessary?

AGRICULTURE tba Growing pains: How important is the agriculture sector to our collective well-being, what are the challenges it faces, and how can we meet those challenges?

69 Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues – The World Is Watching Sustainable Region Initiative Task Force – November 7, 2006 Page 70 of 70

FIT CITY December 19 Are we tipping the scales: To weigh in, don’t miss this special edition to our Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues. A DRUGS & CRIME June 26 Dealing with your drug problem: We all have a drug problem. The growing impact of drugs and related crime in the region affects everyone. Is a regionally co-ordinated strategy the place to start in finding a solution?

ENERGY November 27 Batteries not included: New and innovative approaches to energy production are an economic advantage. How can we re-energize our thinking on linkages between energy, land use and transportation?

Venue: Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue Simon Fraser University Facilitator: Rafe Mair Time: noon - 2 p.m. (lunch 11:30 am - 12:00 pm)

The Future of the Region Sustainability Dialogues is the latest outreach component of GVRD’S Sustainable Region Initiative (SRI). As the title implies, this series of high- profile debates and discussions is intended to help decision makers shape the future of the region by presenting a range of views which hopefully challenge and stimulate fresh thought on a range of regional issues. www.gvrd.bc.ca/sustainability

70 SRI Agenda Item No. 5.1

Municipality of NORTH COWICHAN

7030 Trans Canada Highway, Box 278 North Cowichan, BC V9L3X4

Tel 2507463100 Fax 2507463133 www.northcowichan.bc.ca

September8,2006 : r>, ^^fe.4&!#*:-f*-~'-T File: 4750-01

The Honourable Diane Finley Minister of Human Resources and Social Development Parliament Hill - House of Commons OTTAWA, ONTARIO K1A OA6

Dear Minister Finley

Re: National Child Care System

I am writing on behalf of my Municipal Council, which received a presentation from Mary Dolan, of Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, at its September 6, 2006 Regular meeting. In response to Ms. Dolan's request that Council support a national child care system, the North Cowichan Council passed the following resolution:

"that Council write to the federal government urging it to create a universal, affordable and accessible national child care system."

As working families and single parents struggle to find reliable, safe, and affordable child care, children become the victims and pay the highest price of all. High quality national child care is a benefit that must be accessible to all Canadian children, regardless of where they live or how much their families earn. We support a national child care system that is developmental for children and affordable for parents - our children deserve it. Sincerely

Jon Lefebure Mayor

pc: The Honourable Gordon Campbell, BC Premier Jean Crowder, MP, Nanaimo - Cowichan Constituency BC Municipalities & Regional Districts Mary Dolan, Growing Together Child Care Centre