HANSARD

Department of Environment and Labour

Printed and Published by Nova Scotia Hansard Reporting Services

STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES

Mr. Ronald Chisholm (Chairman)

Mr. Brooke Taylor

Mr. Cecil O'Donnell

Mr. Frank Corbett

Mr. Howard Epstein

Ms. Joan Massey

Mr. Keith Colwell

Mr. Leo Glavine

Ms. Diana Whalen

In Attendance:

Mrs. Darlene Henry

Legislative Committee Clerk

WITNESSES

Workers' Compensation Board of Nova Scotia

Mr. Louis Comeau

Chairman, Board of Directors

Ms. Nancy MacCready-Williams

CEO

Department of Environment and Labour

Mr. William Lahey

Deputy Minister

Ms. Barbara Jones-Gordon

Senior Policy Advisor

Mr. Bill Turpin

Communications Director

HALIFAX, TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2005

STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES

9:00 A.M.

CHAIRMAN

Mr. Ronald Chisholm

MR. CHAIRMAN: Good morning. I will call the Standing Committee on Human Resources to order. For the record, maybe we will ask each of our members to identify themselves. I know we are short a few but they will probably wander in as time goes on. So we will start with Mr. O'Donnell.

[The committee members introduced themselves.]

MR. CHAIRMAN: Today, at our committee meeting, we have people from the Workers' Compensation Board of Nova Scotia, also the Department of Environment and Labour. Maybe we will get our guests to identify themselves. How the committee works, we allow five or six minutes for opening statements. We will allow Mr. Comeau as well as Mr. Lahey, today, to give us a brief opening statement and then we open up the floor to questions from committee members to our guests. Mr. Comeau, if you want to start.

MR. LOUIS COMEAU: I'm Louis Comeau. I'm Chairman of the Workers' Compensation Board of Directors, and with me is Nancy MacCready-Williams who is the President and CEO of the WCB.

MR. WILLIAM LAHEY: I'm Bill Lahey, Deputy Minister of Environment and Labour. With me this morning is Barb Jones-Gordon, a senior policy advisor in the department.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, so we can allow for opening statements. If you would, Mr. Comeau.

MR. COMEAU: Good morning and thank you for inviting us. What are we doing at WCB? I was here a year or so ago but I want to refresh some of the things. When I became chairman, almost three years ago next month, I was struck by several things. Struck by the perception of WCB, that employers view the system as a tax, that employees view that the benefits are not to the level that they would like. I was struck by the rate structure. The rates are the second highest in the country and I was also struck by the benefit levels. While we have all the benefits, they are not all at the level that we would like them to be. I was also struck by the unfunded liability that still has about $400 million and, of course, I was struck by the WCB's role in safety and prevention.

Since that time, if we did all that was recommended to be done at the WCB, we would add approximately $500 million of new benefits to the system. So we have a challenge. We have a real challenge. How do we do those, how do we maintain rates and how do we deal with the unfunded liability? So Bill and I, last year, were appointed by the Minister of Environment and Labour to work with stakeholders and to see if we could improve the governance structure of the board, the issue being, certainly I feel very strongly about this, that it has to be more stakeholder-driven so that the stakeholders together, not independently, can decide this is where we want the system to go.

It's difficult because the WCB is arm's-length from government yet we work closely with ministers, MLAs, department staff and other arms of the government regularly through legislation. Government also controls the benefits package that we provide to injured workers. Of course, government and the Legislature obviously play a major role by establishing the legislative and regulatory framework under which the WCB operates so at the end of the day, the government and the Legislature - because the Legislature passes these benefits, et cetera - are ultimately accountable to the people of Nova Scotia for the performance of the workers' compensation system.

The WCB is accountable for its performance to government and we have a significant level of autonomy in our operation and decision making. So we are neither fish nor fowl. We are not a private insurance provider nor are we a government department and we operate at arm's-length, a public insurance agency. While agency independence is critically important, we recognize - and this is what we have been trying to do with this document - that the system belongs to the stakeholders.

As a result of the historic compromise, workers gave up their rights to sue their employer over workplace injuries and in return employers pay for the system. So balancing all of this is tough but I believe we have managed to develop a system to achieve this thanks to a consultative and collaborative process that Bill will tell you about in a minute because the employers, the labour reps and injured workers who work with us - and we had many meetings in the last nine months - spend many hours discussing and debating the right approach.

Before Bill takes the floor, let me emphasize one more thing, that governance is not the only area in the system needing attention. In April, WCB, with Nancy's direction, issued a discussion paper which proposes a new direction for the workers' compensation in Nova Scotia. Why do we need new direction? Basically we need new direction to address the issues that I talked about earlier, the rates, the benefits, the unfunded liability, et cetera.

I think that the workers' compensation in Nova Scotia is a little bit off track. Last year, 27 people died on the job in Nova Scotia and last year was not exceptional in that regard. Over 34,000 injured workers filed claims with the WCB in Nova Scotia last year. That's more than 90 every day. Of those, more than 9,000 were injured seriously enough that the worker could not report for the next shift. Trying to do something about all of these issues is not an employer problem, it's not a worker problem or a WCB problem. It's our problem. It's a cultural problem and that needs to get attention. Workplace injuries are destroying lives, destroying families and it needs to change and I think we can change it.

So we are a little bit in a vicious circle. Not only do workers get injured in the province but when these injured come through the doors at the WCB, they tend to stay on short-term benefits longer than in most provinces. As well, more of them receive permanent benefits compared to other provinces. This puts increased pressure on the system. I already said, Nova Scotia employers pay the second highest rates in the country. So we have to address those issues. We have to address the rates issue, the benefits issue and, of course, the safety issue. So that is why we need a new direction. We need to really tackle all these issues as one but we can't do it alone and we need to create a safety culture and we need employers, the worker and trade associations, labour groups, injured workers and government, everybody working to try to get the system, over the next few years, back on track.

So, basically, that's what we are trying to do. I think we can improve the system substantially by some of the things we are trying to do, at least I believe so. Is it the end-all of everything? No. Is it the only way to do things? No. Is it the most efficient system we have in governance? No. But it might work, so therefore that's really what I wanted to briefly tell you about, some of the things we are doing. I will turn it over to Bill to explain the paper in general.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Comeau. Mr. Lahey.

MR. LAHEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good morning, members of the committee. I think I will start just by going back to where the chairman outlined the challenges facing the Workers' Compensation Board and indeed the broader workplace safety insurance system. My understanding, the rationale behind asking the chairman and myself to undertake a review of governance and accountability was a sense, and I think I would describe it as a pervasive sense, that stakeholders needed more confidence in the system, and I would emphasize the system of governance and accountability, to ensure that they would have an opportunity for input and that they could live with the decisions that were

made in meeting those challenges, as the system moves forward, both with respect to rates and the implications the rates have for employers and also with respect to the benefit levels and the importance that they have to injured workers and their families.

As the Deputy Minister of Environment and Labour, I have been working with the chairman of the board and with a broad cross-section of stakeholders throughout the past year to develop improvements in the system of governance and accountability, both at the board and within the broader workplace safety insurance system. I think the chairman and I both approached the task on the premise that significant input from stakeholders is key to system planning and to making improvements.

[9:15 a.m.]

Over the past year, all of the participating stakeholders - and it's a long list of participating stakeholders - including employers and employer associations, employees and employee representative organizations, and designated injured workers' associations, they have demonstrated, in my view, a tremendous level of co-operation, and a very encouraging ability to achieve significant consensus when it comes to defining shared goals and moving forward in a collaborative way.

Now, on May 19^th, as everyone on the committee will be aware, the Legislature passed an amendment to the Workers' Compensation Act on the structure of the board. That amendment serves the purpose of giving effect to the consensus that the stakeholders reached in the governance and accountability process because it allows implementation of the document that the stakeholders created, which we have called the Statement of Principles and Objectives on Governance and Accountability. I believe we have distributed a copy of that document this morning.

The legislative amendment, as you are all aware, is pretty simple. There no longer will be non-voting, public-at-large, members of the board. Instead, everyone on the board will have the responsibility to be a voting member.

The other aspect of the change is to increase the number of voting members from six to eight, while maintaining the parity between employer and employee representation. At the end of the day, that change should produce a stronger board, by virtue of it being larger and more representative and more accountable to stakeholders who are the foundation of the system.

That strength and accountability comes through, I think, in two key aspects of the Statement of Principles and Objectives. First, the nomination process that the minister has committed to using in making recommendations for appointment to the board. He will make those recommendations based on nominations from stakeholders.

Secondly, the way in which the Statement of Principles and Objectives outlines expectations on the part of the board, but also on the part of the other agencies in the system, including the department and Workers' Advisers Program, Workers' Compensation Appeals Tribunal, to remain connected and in consultation with stakeholders as major decisions are made in the future, and to be open and transparent in decision-making processes.

Now, one of the reasons for strengthening the accountability of the board to stakeholders, I think, is to, at the same time, strengthen the independence of the board from government, in particular. That has been clearly articulated through all the discussions. That was one of our objectives, to reinforce the independence of the board, not to compromise it.

At the same time, we appreciated that there was a need for a structure or a system to build upon the collaboration that is already going on across the four agencies that make up the system - again, the department, the WAP, the WCAT and the WCB - because independence doesn't preclude a relationship.

I think there was, from the beginning, a general consensus among stakeholders that, although tremendous progress has been made in the recent months in terms of the organizations working together, that there needed to be even more collaboration and more consistency in pursuing a common set of strategic goals, which gets at some of those issues that the chairman just mentioned in terms of the number of fatalities, the number of accidents and the duration of workers' compensation cases in this province.

The mechanism that the Statement of Principles and Objectives has created in that regard is a coordinating committee which will be made up of the deputy minister and the chairman. The role of that committee is not to displace either the decision-making process within government or the decision-making process within the board, but it's to try to ensure that everyone working on behalf of those agencies is doing their very best to advance the same, or at least consistent, set of strategic objectives, that those strategic objectives will be developed through the ongoing process of consultation with stakeholders.

I think the last thing that I will mention, in terms of the Statement of Principles and Objectives is, although I think the key driving mechanism is making the board more stakeholder-driven by virtue of an appointment process that starts with nominations from stakeholders, and by virtue of greater openness and ongoing dialogue with stakeholders as decision-making is made, there is also a very strong emphasis in the paper that although board members have a responsibility to represent their particular constituency as board members, they have a broader responsibility to make decisions in the best interests of the system as a whole, and once those decisions are made, to represent those decisions in a positive way back out to the stakeholder community.

I think I will end there and simply say that, from my perspective, the most positive thing about the process was the willingness of stakeholders to dedicate an awful lot of time and effort, and to engage in what I can only describe as highly respectful dialogue with each other about what the issues and the challenges are, and what are the options in terms of moving forward and meeting those challenges. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Lahey. We will start with the NDP caucus. Mr. Epstein, you have 10 minutes.

MR. HOWARD EPSTEIN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Well, Mr. Comeau and Mr. Lahey, I would like to start off by asking, if I may, about the $500 million figure that I heard mentioned - it was by you, Mr. Comeau, in your opening statements. I want to ask about this for a couple of reasons. The first is that of course, this is a very striking figure and it's of some importance. I would like to obtain a greater understanding of what it is that you're talking about.

But there's a second reason and the second reason I want to ask about this is that it seems to me, in what I heard in the two opening statements, that it is the only solid item a person could put their finger on in what we were offered. I heard a lot about collaboration, and being open and transparent, and being accountable and independent, and so on. These are important values but they are at a sufficiently high and abstract level that I don't know that I found myself any further ahead. I would like to start with something solid.

Mr. Comeau, the $500 million figure, I heard you say . . .

MR. COMEAU: Well . . .

MR. EPSTEIN: Well, just a second, I'd like to complete my question. What I heard you say was that that would be the cost if changes as recommended to you were made. So the first thing I wonder is whether you are saying that the $500 million is the cost of Dorsey or it's the cost of the Dorsey report plus something else. I have to say, it doesn't seem to me $500 million is the figure I've heard before with respect to the Dorsey report. Could you help us understand where this figure comes from?

MR. COMEAU: I think what I said is that since the last three years, we have potentially, or it has been recommended, about $0.5 billion and it would be distributed. If we did all the Dorsey, as recommended, you're talking $200 million, $250 million, okay? Chronic pain is another. We have $168 million in there for chronic pain. That has the potential to be closer to $200 million, in that range.

We did the firefighters, another $25 million and we did supplementary benefits, another $25 million or $30 million. You know what I mean? It's in the ballpark. I'm not saying that these things are not proper. I'm saying that we've got to do all of these things. I

don't disagree with the Dorsey in any way, shape or form. I made this very clear in the past. But we've got to schedule these things along with rates and the unfunded liability.

MR. EPSTEIN: Thank you. That's helpful and clarifying. Mr. Comeau, the figures that you've just given us, do they appear somewhere else in writing? I have to say, I don't know if I've seen them collected together in one place before.

MR. COMEAU: I think we certainly have talked about Dorsey before and that's in writing somewhere.

MR. EPSTEIN: That's why I asked about the $500 million because it wasn't the same number that I had heard.

MR. COMEAU: The chronic pain is already booked in our books. The firefighters is already done and it might not be $25 million, but I mean, that's what we had looked at, potentially, and then the rest of it. The only one is the Dorsey but we have estimated the Dorsey, we said that many times before, was in the vicinity of $250 million, if we did all we should do.

MR. EPSTEIN: In the document we've been given - it's a document dated April 7^th of this year, it's the A New Direction document from the board - in the Executive Summary you talk about a hesitation on the part of employers to become involved in expanding benefits until the unfunded liability has been dealt with. I'm just wondering where the board is with respect to this particular point. Of course, the statutory changes, for example the firefighters, you have no choice on but I'm wondering, where is the board with respect to handling other changes?

MR. COMEAU: I have indicated many times - and I've indicated it to the board, I've indicated in publicly and probably said it last year when I came to the committee - that we don't disagree with the benefits at all, it's a question of scheduling them so the rates are maintained at a competitive level and also we can deal with the unfunded liability. That's one of the big reasons for this government's change, that together labour and management can agree on how we're going to deal with this.

In the past it has been, in my view, anyway, employers never got together in the same room to agree on how we deal with these issues. There have always been all kinds of negotiations taking place and I want them to agree together that this is how we're going to tackle these issues.

MR. EPSTEIN: Do I understand, Mr. Comeau, that this is the next major decision you expect the restructured board to tackle, the question of how to deal with the overall finance?

MR. COMEAU: There is no question that if the stakeholder government system that we are proposing works the way I hope it will work - and it might not as I indicated before - that the stakeholders will clearly understand one another's position and will, together, hopefully arrive at how we deal with the issue. There are about 22 or 23 associations, the Construction Association, CM&E, retailers, gas, all those things, that make up the assessment of the board. So those 22 or 23 associations - and there might be a few others but essentially they make up the bulk of the assessed income - along with the Federation of Labour, what we're saying, together, if we want to increase benefits, which we have to move in that direction, the employer has to understand. They are the ones who are paying so they have to agree with labour that this is what we're going to do and they have to work harder, in my mind and in the mind of the board, as well, to tackle the issues of safety and duration.

What's costing the system? What's costing the system is the claims costs are high and not that they're wrong, except that we have to make sure that we're doing the best we can and return to work - not return to work for the sake of returning to work, but safe return to work.

MR. EPSTEIN: You identified rates, benefits and safety as being the factors that you're looking at. Have you a timetable in mind for the collaborative process that you've just described?

MR. COMEAU: What we intend to do once this new board is finished, we will start the process, and we have already started actually. We had an annual meeting of the system in the Spring and we had our second one this year; we had over 100 people attend which really pleased me to no end that a lot of people showed up. We do intend to have another major consultative process with the major stakeholders, labour and these 22 or 23 associations in the Fall, we haven't set the date yet. In the meantime, the board, made up of stakeholders, nominated by stakeholders, I hope will play a greater role with the stakeholders they represent so that when things come to the board we kind of understand the position of the stakeholders.

[9:30 a.m.]

MR. EPSTEIN: When you finish your consultation with the stakeholders, will the board be turning its mind to making a decision?

MR. COMEAU: This is the intent.

MR. EPSTEIN: Do you have a target date in mind for the board sitting down to grapple with that decision? You're going to consult in the Fall, will you be sitting down in January, for example?

MR. COMEAU: The process in mind is to develop a new strategic plan which we hope we could do for the next cycle, which certainly by next Spring we would have some ideas, and these things will change. This can move as strategic discussions evolve but certainly I hope that we can have some kind of strategic plan developed for, let's say, next Spring, that incorporates all of these new ideas. It's an ongoing process, we're not going to wait until next Spring to continue the work that we started to do on prevention and safety, that goes on. We have a lot of work going on right now in incentive rates to try to encourage and discourage, that's going to go on because we need to tackle those issues.

We have a tremendous amount of work with Nancy working with stakeholders; 50 per cent of her time is off the office desk now, to try to discuss and participate with stakeholders, meeting with them, discussing with them and trying to get some of these new thoughts moving ahead.

MR. EPSTEIN: So you have hopes that by next Spring the board may have new financial direction and a new overall strategic direction, is that the idea?

MR. COMEAU: I hope that we will, yes, either this is approved or a new structure is developed.

MR. EPSTEIN: I see from the Chair that my time is up. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Whalen.

MS. DIANA WHALEN: Welcome, again, this morning. I know we have met before. I had a number of questions and I think it's important to start with the fact that we invited you today because we had heard from three board members who had chosen to leave the board and that there was a great feeling of discouragement, a sense that the board wasn't functioning as it should, a sense that they weren't being used as they should be, in terms of decision making for the board, and there was a fair amount of testimony given at that meeting a couple of months ago. We wanted to really explore some of the cases of not so much your go-forward, but also, what has gone wrong at the board right now that would make three people, from three different political persuasions, representing labour, management and employers feel the same way, that their role had been diminished, that their work was not meaningful and that there was no point in continuing on the board. I wonder if you could just perhaps quickly respond to that?

MR. COMEAU: That's their view, it's not my view at all. They say that I don't understand the Workers' Compensation Board, maybe I don't, but I have a little bit of understanding about governance. I have sat on a lot of boards, from university, volunteer stuff; I'm a mentor for two small businesses, young people; I have sat on boards of a billion and a half, so I've had the spectrum. I have made some changes, no question about it and some of the changes that I first made when I first got there was the board used to meet two

days every month. To me, the board was way too involved in management; it might be right, it might be wrong. I was the chairman and I decided that was not proper - that boards govern and management manages. I did change that but not because we eliminated the discussion, because we shifted the work to the committees, because the committees became very important, and are very important. So I suppose I have directed it more towards a corporate structure than what they were used to.

Also, I think - and they have their right - they were concerned that some people would have representation on the board and that's not . . .

MS. WHALEN: Perhaps I would like to pursue that point a little bit. You've spoken today about the new system where people will be nominated by various stakeholder groups and come on the board. I would like to probe that a little bit, discuss it with you.

I think that if you've nominated somebody from a special interest group, whether it be labour, injured workers, employers and perhaps others who are major stakeholders, then they are responsible to the group that nominated them. If they vote in a way that displeases the group that nominates them, chances are they won't be sitting on the board very long, that they will be replaced. So it changes the objectivity and perhaps the professionalism of the people who sit around that table.

I think that should be looked at because right now you've had a system that over the last 10 years, I believe, has worked, that you've had a balance between the two major stakeholders, labour and employers, and that seems to have been effective. Now if you introduce more complexity, where you have different masters to report back to, then does that not emasculate the board rather than empower it?

MR. COMEAU: That's not my view. I believe that if the employers are paying the bill that they, as a group, just like a shareholder in a company - again, maybe I'm too corporate - should be the ones, so therefore if you're nominated by, let's say the Construction Association, when we talked to the 22 or 23 associations, they don't represent the Construction Association. The employers' group will have four nominations on the board and they represent all the employers and the same with labour. The Federation of Labour will make that decision, so I don't see any . . .

MS. WHALEN: Well, tell me, where do the injured workers fit into this picture then? They've never had dedicated members but there have been injured workers on your board. I know from speaking to others in the past, they've been effective members.

MR. COMEAU: Yes, and the injured workers will be part of the Federation of Labour's nominees.

MS. WHALEN: But who nominates them, our injured workers' organizations?

MR. COMEAU: Injured workers will have a say in making recommendations for nominations, yes.

MS. WHALEN: So they have a stake there . . .

MR. LAHEY: Could I just add, I think it's important to put this in a little bit of historical perspective in that the board from its inception has always been a stakeholder board, it has always been understood that the voting members would be equally consisting of employee and employer representatives. By and large, going back through the years, those seats have been filled by a kind of informal nomination process, in that, by and large, the appointments that have been made on the employer side have come from employer associations and the appointments made on the employee side of the equation have come through the Federation of Labour.

I think the issue that a lot of the stakeholders were raising is that that sort of informal nomination process left a lot of people not having the opportunity to make nominations. You put your finger on one group, for example, designated injured workers' associations. The Federation of Labour feels very strongly that they also have a responsibility to think about injured workers, in terms of putting their names forward. So it's not to say that it's now solely the responsibility of designated injured workers to think about that representation, but it's bringing that category of organization that historically hasn't existed, into the nomination process.

There were organizations on the employers' side of the equation that felt exactly the same way, that their associations hadn't had an equal opportunity to put nominations forward. I think one of the really encouraging things is, by and large, people are emphasizing that they want the opportunity to nominate. They are not expecting, necessarily, that it's their nominee who will get appointed.

More importantly, I think there was an awareness among the stakeholders of the risk that you are alluding to, about board members becoming too attached to particular stakeholder organizations. That is why in the conversation with stakeholders, it was stakeholder representatives themselves who kept going back and emphasizing that once you're appointed on the board, you have a responsibility to represent all of the stakeholders on your side of the table, but even more so, you have a responsibility at the end of the day to make decisions for the good of both stakeholder communities.

MS. WHALEN: So you're referring to your expectations document, are you?

MR. LAHEY: Yes, and so that's why the stakeholders spent some considerable time, in addition to talking about the nomination process, paying attention to outlining duties and accountabilities of board members, and emphasizing within those the responsibility of each

board member to be a board member for the whole organization, not just for their particular constituency.

MS. WHALEN: So can I ask would the overriding expectation be that you would be there for the long-term viability of the Workers' Compensation Board? Would that be a basic premise of what they would be there for?

MR. LAHEY: Yes.

MS. WHALEN: Have you articulated that for them?

MR. LAHEY: I think it is articulated in the document. I guess I would emphasize as well that the document captures some of the conversation among stakeholders, but the conversation, I think, also emphasized this point over and over again, without disagreement from anyone.

MS. WHALEN: In terms of the former board structure, are you saying it really wasn't effective, it wasn't working? Would you honestly say that, Mr. Lahey or Mr. Comeau?

MR. COMEAU: Oh no, the board was working. It was my feeling that it needed to be more, what I would consider, stakeholder-driven. They were nominated by stakeholders but there was hardly any accountability for them.

MS. WHALEN: Under the new system, will this be adding a new level of complexity to the whole thing? Is this going to make it more difficult?

MR. COMEAU: To me it simplifies it.

MS. WHALEN: Can I ask about the financial situation at the board, under the previous board and as it was operating, tremendous successes had been registered. You had gone from a payback period for the unfunded liability, I think it was something like 50 years hence, I don't know. We were down to 2014, a timeline that was foreseeable. Now, with chronic pain and some other really big threats to the viability of the board, how are you going to manage all of this, becomes the question. Now you're pushing it back again, way out into the future, several decades from now.

It seems to me that with all of the financial stresses and the concern about how you deal with chronic pain, this return to governance, and concern and time and effort spent on governance is the wrong thing to be spending your time and effort on right now. You had a board that worked and, in fact, with the non-voting members in February 2004, I believe it was you, Mr. Comeau, here at the Human Resources Committee, who said, "The at-large ones don't vote. But like I explained before, they play a very useful role in bringing consensus." So you weren't complaining or saying that there was a problem with the

structure of the board at that time. You were defending even the non-voting members as being a reasonable thing.

MR. COMEAU: My frustration was with the board - not the board, with the process. We made recommendations on Dorsey two years ago, nothing happened to them. Quite frankly, nothing happens to them because the stakeholders haven't bought into that. I say it is time that stakeholders together agree that these things are either going to get done or they're not going to get done. It's a little bit frustrating when you work, as a board, and then you have one group or the employers' group who disagrees. There has to be that buy-in so that's what we're trying to do here, it is all we are trying to do, to get the stakeholders to agree that these things are okay - and not everybody agrees but the bulk of the stakeholders, workers, and employers agree that this is the direction that we want to go.

Yes, we have made tremendous inroads into the financial, absolutely, there is still more to be done . . .

MS. WHALEN: We're now reversing those inroads.

MR. COMEAU: Not necessarily, we're reversing them if we keep adding all of these benefits. Unless we raise the rates or we do something about the claims costs, what can you do other than the unfunded liability go the other way? A New Direction talks about all of this, if we can change some things, we're still looking at the same time frame of about 2017, in that area, to have the unfunded liability paid off. Again, it depends on what we have.

If we don't want to increase the rates and we keep adding benefits, and we don't do anything about the claims costs, what in the world can we do?

MS. WHALEN: I think if your unfunded liability remains huge you don't really have the capacity to increase your claims and benefits. You can't do that . . .

MR. COMEAU: Unless we deal with it, that's what I'm saying, that together we have to agree on how do we tackle these issues, and it's doable.

MS. WHALEN: Just a different question . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: Your time is up for the Liberal caucus right now. We have 10 minutes each and you've had pretty close to 15 minutes to be honest about it.

Mr. O'Donnell.

MR. CECIL O'DONNELL: Mr. Chairman, I have a question I would like to ask Mr. Comeau. I had a lady in my office yesterday actually and she's been in the process for the last three years trying to get her workers' compensation through. She went through the appeals

case and she was turned down and then she went to the tribunal. I just want to read this to you. "The Worker's appeal is allowed. Based on the whole of the evidence before me, including the information contained in the statutory declaration of the Employer's agent, the evidence is sufficient to find that the Worker suffered a personal injury . . ." Then it goes on to say, "The injury was in the nature of an acute, allergic reaction . . . The Worker's claim is referred back to the Board for the calculation of appropriate benefits." Now, this was dated December 13, 2004. Is this the normal time frame that it takes, six months, for her to get an answer back?

[9:45 a.m.]

MR. COMEAU: That's a question for Nancy.

MS. NANCY MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: No, that would not be a typical time frame at all.

MR. O'DONNELL: So what is the normal time frame for . . .

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: The normal time frame is that there is an expectation that a decision will be rendered and implemented within 30 days. So there is an issue there, let's talk afterwards and I'll take a look at it.

MR. O'DONNELL: Okay, thank you. I will turn it over to Brooke.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Taylor.

MR. BROOKE TAYLOR: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our guests for coming in today. I'm sure you all have very challenging jobs.

I would, I guess, ask, if it's reasonable, Mr. Chairman, that somebody from the opposite side read into the record the membership of the board of directors, and who is actually representing the employers and who is representing the employees.

MR. COMEAU: Well, right now, there is only one, but there is a chairman, of course, me, and there's a deputy chairman. Then there's one voting employer representative right now.

MR. TAYLOR: Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, I was hoping you could - if you could, Mr. Comeau - give us the names of . . .

MR. COMEAU: Yes, okay. Jim Melvin, he's the employer representative. The employee representative, the voting labour representative, is Betty Jean Sutherland. Then, because I have asked two other members to stick around for a few months because of their

experience, because we have these resignations, one is Jim Neville, the labour, and the other one is Gary Dean, for the employer. So, basically, there are six of us at this point in time.

MR. TAYLOR: Now, what constitutes full membership, like, in terms of numerical?

MR. COMEAU: Well, I think the Act says it can be up to 11.

MR. TAYLOR: Yes. So a quorum would be, I think, six?

MR. COMEAU: No, a quorum is half the members present, I believe, isn't that it?

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Yes.

MR. TAYLOR: Half the members present, so it's not like half of the 11?

MR. COMEAU: Not half of the 11, no.

MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Comeau, you indicated you had served on numerous committees, and so on and so forth, and I think we all appreciate that, but what efforts, I guess, is the board taking - you, Mr. Comeau - to bring this membership up to a full complement? When do you expect that to happen?

MR. COMEAU: Well, according to what I understand, on May 19^th the Legislature passed a new bill indicating that the board would be 10 members, including the chairman, the vice-chairman, four employers and four labour. We already have two voting. Therefore, there are some ads going out now - in fact, they've been in the papers the last week or so - to call for members to fill the membership. I expect that within the next couple of months this will be full complement.

MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, just going from recall, as was indicated earlier, we did have three disgruntled, or certainly disenchanted, former board members in at a previous hearing here. One of the allegations, if you will, that they made was that there are too few people - like, if you only have six members, actually you could, theoretically, have three people making some of the decisions relative to WCB matters, and I think that problem, probably by way of efforts that you were taking, should rectify that. But, nonetheless, I think it was a legitimate complaint, based on what you're telling us this morning in terms of sheer number of representatives on the board of directors.

MR. COMEAU: Well, you might be right, that maybe three voting members or two voting members, along with the chairman, deputy chairman, is not the normal board, but we are making efforts to change. Saskatchewan has three members, period, the chairman and two others. That's how they function. They've functioned like that for years. But I don't think that's sufficient.

MR. TAYLOR: No, nor do I.

MR. LAHEY: I guess, maybe if I could add, that this is something that we talked about with stakeholders, once the resignations had happened, about whether or not we should be moving ahead with new appointments according to - I'll call it the old system - or whether or not we should be waiting, so that the vacancies could be filled with the new process that stakeholders were developing.

At that point in time, stakeholders felt very strong that we were far enough along in the creation of a new process, that we should keep focused on that and complete that process before those seats were filled. We are certainly relieved to have completed the process and to be in a position now - is there a July meeting of this committee? - in terms of having names through Cabinet so they can be discussed at this committee for an appointment in July.

MR. TAYLOR: Yes, I think there had been concern and, Mr. Comeau, until you have a full complement in your membership, you may have potentially one stakeholder group overrepresented, if you will, and there may not be the necessary balance that's needed. But I'm confident that we will achieve, or at least the board will achieve, new members and more balance will be added.

Frequently, we hear from injured workers that the process is too timely, too cumbersome, I guess, is a concern that we hear quite often in terms of having an individual case assessed and, also, concerns that it isn't comprehensive enough, it's not transparent enough. Could you perhaps tell us whether or not you feel that that system that's now employed is, certainly, better than some of the past processes that had been put in place?

MR. COMEAU: Well, you know, to those who don't get the benefits that they are seeking, the system is wrong. I have, as chairman - and Nancy can comment on this further - taken it upon myself to really try to understand whether both employers and injured workers, and employees of the worker's compensation, were generally doing the right things. Quite frankly, we've done some polling - we do some on a regular basis - and I'm tremendously amazed at the kind of response that we're getting from the people that we serve. They like what we're doing.

Now, there are still 15 per cent or 10 per cent of people in some difficult cases, and one was pointed out this morning - probably there is an issue there - but, you know, you can't say no to every case. The Workers' Compensation Board management has focused tremendously on making sure that things were done efficiently and I think that they have, quite frankly, succeeded in that particular area.

What the board hasn't paid enough attention to, in my estimation, rightly or wrongly, is the business side of it, which included what we talked about earlier, the rate structure, the

benefit levels and the unfunded liabilities, that the business side of it was not necessarily dealt with sufficiently. But in terms of process, getting claims done, and so on and so forth, I think that we have made tremendous improvements in that particular area. Nancy, do you want to add something?

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Sure. We survey injured workers monthly and we have for a number of years, every year, year over year, customer satisfaction surveys and they're not done by us they're done by Corporate Research Associates on our behalf. Every year the results improve and this year, for 2004, we've had the highest ever satisfaction surveys from both injured workers and employers, these are the ones we touch on a regular basis. In fact, at a February board meeting, CRA said that our customer satisfaction survey results are leading edge in Nova Scotia for any public sector organization, leading edge in Atlantic Canada, and they are atypical private sector organizations, and they benchmark against all of that. As well, we've asked injured workers particularly, what is the most important thing from a service perspective and one of those was getting the first cheque within two weeks so they don't miss a pay cycle.

In 2000, we were only getting 50 per cent of our cheques out the door within two weeks. In 2004, we're getting 80 per cent out within two weeks and that's the highest in Canada, so we're very proud of that. We're not saying we're perfect, but we're working very hard in terms of improving the service we deliver to injured workers and, in fact, they're saying we're doing a good job on the whole.

MR. TAYLOR: Is that it, Mr. Chairman?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes, that's it. We'll get back to you. Ms. Massey.

MS. JOAN MASSEY: I'd like to talk a bit about chronic pain. In a media release on April 14^th, there were some points made that you were trying to streamline the process and part of that was hiring 70 new employees, and that hopefully by the end of 2007, all the claims would be completed, and that under that process you currently had 22 employees who were part of a specialty transition team and that had been set up in 2004. This team would focus on just chronic pain.

Within that process you were talking about separating chronic pain claims into two distinct groups. One group would be the group already in the appeal system when the policies were approved and that they would be reviewed first. So my question is, how many of those in that distinct group have been reviewed as of today?

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: If I could just step back for a second to give a little bit of context on where we are with our plan. We have over 5,000 claims now in our queue to be reviewed, 5,000 injured workers, they account for over 28,000 claims in our system,

so there's an enormous amount of work to be done because we need to go back as far as 1985, and re-adjudicate almost 20 years of history under the new chronic pain rules.

That being said, the board of directors did approve a revised plan based on an increased understanding of the complexity of these claims and increased volumes, as well. The plan is twofold. Number one is to refocus a return-to-work management program or a disability case management program, internally, now that chronic pain is compensable in Nova Scotia, to be best practice leaders at identifying chronic pain in the healing process of an original work-related injury and direct the right services to ensure a safe and timely return to work; so make sure we are best practice leaders in identifying chronic pain and hopefully, preventing the onset of that. The second stream of effort is processing this volume of claims. Again, it's at 5,000 and we expect - if the queue grows at the rate it has been growing - that to be almost 7,000 by the end of 2007.

We have resources, we're in the recruitment process, we've been interviewing and we will have our full team on board and ready to roll in September. We have revamped the work process, the appeal claims are going first, but all populations are being dealt with concurrently. There are a number of different populations, given the fact that we're going back to almost 1985, in time. There are injured workers who fell under the old Act and there are injured workers who were injured under the new legislation. That work is all being done concurrently.

The focus, to date, has been managing over 400 open claims where return to work is the goal. Some of those have come to closure but there are a tremendous number of services to be provided to ensure that the barriers to return to work are removed.

[10:00 a.m.]

The plan we have in place right now is that by the end of 2006, all of the injured workers injured under the old Act and many injured under the new Act will be fully complete and by the end of 2007, the remaining claims with workers injured under the new Act will be complete. So the work is all being done concurrently, as we speak.

MS. MASSEY: I'm not sure if I understood your answer, to be truthful. Really, seriously. You're saying then that you have two sort of processes underway and one is your revised plan and you're refocusing to bring in return-to-work processes there and services are provided. Then you have the second part which is your recruiting process to recruit these 70 workers. So I'm hearing that you actually haven't even hired all these 70 people.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: We just got approval from our board in April to go ahead with that plan. We've been recruiting through the month of May and into June. We hope to have offers out, people on board, trained and ready to roll by August, September.

MS. MASSEY: So you said you're working on 400 open claims?

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Yes, as of . . .

MS. MASSEY: How many have been closed? You actually said some of those have been closed.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: I don't have those figures with me right now.

MS. MASSEY: Do you have a rounded out number? Twenty, 300 . . .

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Definitely over 100, but these are complex claims requiring a number of multi-disciplinary services. It's not a simple matter of cutting a cheque. What we're trying to do for open claims is ensure that we remove the barriers to return to work, and it's providing a multi-disciplinary service approach, so that we tailor the services to the individual needs of the injured worker, and ensure that they have the right services to ensure a safe and timely return to work. If that's not possible, then we determine entitlement under the new chronic pain rules.

MS. MASSEY: It's still a very slow process then, I guess, is what I'm deeming from that answer and from what I have read. On November 29, 2004, I think WCB stated that you would be in a better position to predict how long it would take to get through this process by next Spring, and it's Spring now. What I'm hearing today is that maybe 100 claims have gone through to get people back to work and these are people who you are returning to work, so people who are not going to be returning to work, it sounds like their claims have not really been settled.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: They're being adjudicated now, streamed. All the work is being done concurrently, all the different populations, including those in the appeal system, including those whose claims haven't been closed and are actively receiving temporary benefits.

MS. MASSEY: You're talking about a lot of claims, you're talking about 28,000 separate claims and 5,000 people making those claims which could go up to 7,000, so I'm just concerned.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: We always said that it was going to take a couple of years to get through, this is an enormous amount of work and it needs to be done efficiently and effectively. Getting it done quickly and getting it done right, sometimes butt up against one another. What we're trying to do with our plan is we always said it was going to take a couple of years once the final policies and law was in place, that was last Fall when we said that. We're saying now, even though the numbers have almost doubled what we anticipated having to review, we're still going to get this work done within the couple of

years' time frame that we initially said. That's why we said we needed additional resources and streamlined processes to meet that initial expectation that we had announced last Fall, in terms of a timeline. So the timelines really aren't shifting, but we've really revamped our internal process and added additional resources to deal with the complexity of the work and to deal with the sheer volume of the work.

MS. MASSEY: I guess we'll have to wait and see how things progress.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: We have a really rigorous communications strategy in place, we're meeting monthly in Halifax and Sydney with stakeholders, to talk about our progress to date. They are quarterly reports to the community going out from me saying here's our progress to date and we've been briefing the caucuses, there's all kind of communication around our progress to date, and we will continue to do that until we are through this work.

MS. MASSEY: Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have left?

MR. CHAIRMAN: One minute.

MS. MASSEY: One minute. Maybe I will just save my minute and add it on to the end.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Epstein.

MR. EPSTEIN: I'm happy to try to use the minute. I have a question about the structure of the board and the process of recruiting. I think I heard it said earlier that, for example, when it came to labour side representatives, and you were asked about injured workers, it was suggested that they would have to shelter under the Federation of Labour and, really, it's the Federation of Labour that was being looked to, in terms of the originator of applications or, perhaps, some form of talk.

At the same time, there are a whole variety of labour organizations, there are a whole variety of employer organizations and you just told us that you're running an ad. It's not clear to me how it is that you're going to be looking to try to structure either your labour side or your management side representatives. Could we have something clearer from you, please?

MR. COMEAU: I think we start from the premise that no association has a seat on the board. We start from that. The Construction Association doesn't, that kind of stuff. What the stakeholders have decided - again, not Louis or Bill - the stakeholders have decided that it would be four and four, and they were really adamant about these public interest people, that they not be there, that everybody would be voting.

For example, we've always had injured workers represented on the board and I assume that we always will. The Federation of Labour will be making recommendations to the minister, I guess, and it has to eventually come through the HR Committee of the Legislature. Hopefully, those would include injured workers. It could be somebody from the injured workers' associations or it could be another, but the Federation of Labour will be making those recommendations.

MR. EPSTEIN: I see Mr. Lahey is trying to help us here.

MR. LAHEY: Could I just add that everyone who has participated in this process - and this is the understanding - they can put in their own nominations if they want. So if a designated injured workers' association wants to put its own nomination in, it can. Alternatively, if it wants to put nominations in with the Federation of Labour, it can do that.

Equally, on the employer side of the equation, each association can put in their own nomination or associations can get together and co-nominate. Then it's up to the minister to make decisions from that pool of nominees. It could be the same number of nominees as there are places on the board, if stakeholders want to organize themselves in that way, or it could be a greater number than that.

What the document did, in terms of the Federation of Labour, is it simply documented that, historically, the Federation of Labour was the source of nominations for the employees' side of the table. It also makes it very clear that designated injured workers' associations now have the opportunity, through this process, to put in their own nominees directly or through that process.

I guess, in terms of other unions - and I don't know if your question gets at who is in and who is not in the Federation of Labour, but it's a long list of unions that participated directly in this process and were comfortable with the language that the document contained with respect to the Federation of Labour.

MR. EPSTEIN: Okay. I see the chairman getting agitated.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We can get back to you. Mr. Glavine.

MR. LEO GLAVINE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Comeau, deputy minister and staff for coming in today. This is really, I guess, Part 2, as a result of the witnesses we had earlier.

Charlene Long, when she was here, had summed up her statement by saying, "I left the board of directors because I felt that the Workers' Compensation Board is at risk of reverting to political management, which will have a tremendously negative impact on both the employers and the workers of this province over the long term. What seems politically

expedient for all concerned at this time will, in my opinion, lead back to the disastrous board of the early 1980s."

I was just wondering, Mr. Comeau, if you could comment on how you . . .

MR. COMEAU: Well, obviously, I disagree. The purpose was to do exactly the opposite. The purpose of restructuring the governance is to do exactly the opposite, to get buy-in from stakeholders that, look, together, this is the kind of system that we want, and together we are going to be recommending to government and to the Legislature Dorsey recommendations, or whatever else we recommend, and together we are going to do this. Our intent is to do exactly the opposite to what she's talking about. That's her view, but what can I say?

MR. GLAVINE: And to quote Mr. Jim White, who said, "For nearly a decade, the government had been hands off the WCB. Two years ago, with the arrival of our new chairman, it appeared the WCB was back in what one academic expert on governance would call the political bargaining arena." I was wondering what the deputy minister's reaction was to that statement.

MR. LAHEY: Well, I guess, to reiterate what the chairman just said, the premise of the governance and accountability dialogue that we've been engaged in, in the past 12 months, is to reinforce, not to compromise, the independence of the board. At some level, for me at least, it's as simple as the board has to be accountable to someone and there's consensus that it shouldn't be directly accountable to the government in a very ultimate sense, because it is arm's-length from government. If it's not going to be accountable to government, it has to be accountable, in my view, to the stakeholders who make up the system. So from a good governance point of view, that is necessary both to reinforce the independence, but also to make sure it's a board that is appropriately accountable to someone.

I guess the other thing that I would like to say on this is that, you know, behind those quotes - and, again, I'm not in a position to question the perspective of board members in terms of what's happening at the board. I'm not on the board and have never been on the board. But some of the examples given in terms of interference, I just have difficulty understanding.

For example, the fact that the Department of Environment and Labour is supporting the Workers' Compensation Board's education program in occupational health and safety to try to reduce workplace injuries and accidents, that's a relationship between the department and the Workers' Compensation Board, in my view. They are two agencies that have responsibility for different parts of what, at the end of the day, must be one system, a system that has as few accidents and injuries in the province as possible, and has benefits for

employees who experience injury in the workplace. It's not interference, it's an example of collaboration and co-operation.

In that instance, in particular, I think I would like to emphasize that the plan around prevention and education is very much a Workers' Compensation Board plan. As a department, we are very pleased to be able to support it. Even in terms of the content of the plan, it's not something that is in any way being dictated by the Department of Environment and Labour.

MR. GLAVINE: Thank you. In fact, that was one of the examples that I really wanted to take a look at. I do applaud the Workers' Compensation Board for moving in that direction. We have heard from Ms. MacCready-Williams in that area. In fact, prevention is the direction that must be taken, absolutely.

However, on this particular issue, the board, at the time, said they didn't feel that the Department of Environment and Labour should have their stamp on WCB, you know, literature, information and posters going out. In fact, the board directed and advised, but obviously the chairman overruled, as Mr. White stated in his testimony here before the committee. There was no money put up by the Department of Environment and Labour, yet the minister's name is associated. How much more political can you get than that?

MR. COMEAU: I'm not sure, Mr. Glavine, that the board directed that this not be the case. I think there was some discussion around the board table and some suggestions by a couple of board members that we not - some people were frustrated that the department is not contributing anything. Management felt strongly about that basically, because one of the things we have to deal with and one of the things that the stakeholders, particularly the injured workers, are frustrated with is that the system is too complicated and too legalistic, and we have to do something about it.

[10:15 a.m.]

Some people, and certainly those board members who resigned, wanted the whole OH&S piece to come to the Workers' Compensation Board. There is some merit in that. There are boards that operate the way it's structured now. There are others that operate the way they are suggesting. The government made a decision, rightly or wrongly, that we would get prevention, and that the enforcement would remain and there were arguments to do that too. So all we are trying to do is to get some co-operation and some relationship between these various groups so that we all look like we are in the same boat but it doesn't mean - workers' compensation has devised those programs, there are no ifs, ands or buts about that. They are our programs but it is our intention to work more closely with the OH&S enforcement so that we can deal with these issues.

You read the statistics the other day. I read one the other day about young workers. A lot of the workers' compensation boards across the provinces have reduced their incidence of - we've increased them in the last five years. We have to tackle those issues. So we need co-operation. It's not political interference, it's co-operation.

Anyway, I say fire the chairman, by the way.

MR. GLAVINE: I appreciate your comments, thank you. I was going to pass the remainder of my time to Ms. Whalen.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Whalen.

MS. WHALEN: On that question of the ads that are run for occupational health and safety, the cost of that is 100 per cent borne by the Workers' Compensation Board, is that right; the creative cost, every cost associated with that? I think that was the point, that all of the costs and all of the effort is the Workers' Compensation Board and despite your collaborative nature with government, government doesn't really - you know you've changed it, the government no longer runs those ads, you run them.

MR. COMEAU: But we also pay 100 per cent of the WAP and WCAT.

MR. LAHEY: The board pays 100 per cent of our inspection services. (Interruptions)

MS. WHALEN: And that's three-quarters of the employers of the province, too. It should be mentioned. It's not all the employers of the province, so the government has really downloaded that to three-quarters of the employers of the province. It's an important job, I'm not diminishing the importance of it, I'm just saying, is it right?

MR. LAHEY: That's another conversation which you can have with someone else, I guess, because I have to administer the system that I have to administer. The one point I wanted to make, though, is it means a lot to our inspectors in the field, when they go into workplaces, when they see the posters on the wall and it says Department of Environment and Labour as well as Workers' Compensation Board, because those officers are some of the best communicators we have in terms of the message that's coming from the Workers' Compensation Board through the media and through newspapers and other sources. Their credibility, in working with employers, yes, putting orders in place for infractions and pressing charges but also helping employers do the right thing, their credibility in that respect is greatly improved when it's visually on the wall that it's the Department of Environment and Labour as the OSH inspectorate and the Workers' Compensation Board that's getting this message out to Nova Scotians.

MS. WHALEN: That makes sense and if there is that overriding concern, I think that could have been communicated to the board and the board wouldn't have had objections. I

would have imagined they might have changed their objections but I understood that they felt they had been overridden by some other higher force than the board itself which is really who I believe the CEO reports to and so on. The governance says the board is the one in charge.

I wanted to ask the chairman, if I could, how much you spend, in a month, on workers' compensation business.

MR. COMEAU: It varies. I used to spend an awful lot of time. First of all, for about the first two years there, almost two years - well, the first six months we had a CEO but then we were in the process of changing CEOs. There was about a year or so that there was only an acting CEO so I spent a lot of time at the board. Now I don't spend an awful lot of time. The CEO is doing her work and I don't deal with management issues, I deal with governance issues. I spend an awful lot of time because of this governance paper. We had a tremendous amount of meetings in the last nine months. Do I go to the board once a week? Yes, and probably sometimes I go twice a week, maybe for an hour or two in the morning or something of that nature.

MS. WHALEN: Do you have regular, set meetings with the Deputy Minister of Environment and Labour?

MR. COMEAU: We have to get that back on schedule. I would like to meet, quite frankly, once a month with the deputy minister and the minister to brief them on what we are doing. That's what I would like to do. We haven't been doing it.

MS. WHALEN: Could I ask, the coordinating committee that you referred to, that would be yourself and the deputy minister. That creates a whole new structure in your governance model, doesn't it, to create this two-man tag team that's been already operating but now you will have an official name?

MR. COMEAU: It's not ideal, there is no question about it. The system is complicated. It's a way of coordinating for understanding what the left hand does and the right hand does. That's really what it is. It has no authority other than to review the agencies. As I said before, the system is viewed to be way too complicated and legalistic and we have to streamline that a little bit. There are an awful lot of things that go on from the Workers' Compensation Board that when it gets transferred to the appeal system and all of that stuff, it gets complicated.

MS. WHALEN: And how will your coordinating with the deputy minister change that? I mean a system should be arm's-length. That's really where I'm going. I don't think it is if you have a coordinating . . .

MR. COMEAU: Well, this is a suggestion of the stakeholders that this is the way it be done. It's a very strong suggestion. We had a lot of discussion on this, that it only be the

chairman of the board and deputy minister and it's a coordinating group that really brings all the agencies, ourselves, WAP, WCAT, OH&S to understand what each of these agencies is doing.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Ms. Whalen. Your time has expired. Mr. Taylor.

MR. TAYLOR: Mr. Chairman, I'm wondering if our guests can tell us this morning how many employees actually work within the WCB framework.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: We will probably, when we finish the recruitment for these 70-odd additional positions, be up around 450 or 460 employees of the WCB itself.

MR. TAYLOR: How many would be the maximum number of employees within the last year at WCB?

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: About 350, something like that, I'd want to say, maximum.

MR. TAYLOR: So potentially the WCB will go to 460 employees.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Yes, but these are only term positions. We are hiring for 18-month terms and 24-month terms. This is to get the work done that needs to be done in relation to chronic pain and then go back to our regular complement. These are term positions that we've hired.

MR. TAYLOR: Just so I understand, Mr. Chairman, the board is potentially going to 460 employees and then once the work is done, the board will revert to 350 employees or there about.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Something like that, that's right.

MR. TAYLOR: I just wanted to put that in perspective.

Mr. Comeau, you mentioned, I believe, unless I misheard, that you have established a number of committees now and have delegated a lot of the management responsibilities, if not governance. I'm wondering how many committees actually reside within the WCB itself? How many different committees?

MR. COMEAU: The board has an Audit and Finance Committee, it has an Investment Committee because we have close to $800 million of investments to manage, and then we have a Governance and HR Committee. So we have three committees.

MR. TAYLOR: Could you tell me a little bit about the investments and the Investment Committee.

MR. COMEAU: Well, it really looks at, for example, right now, this very month, we are looking at the investment managers and basically on a quarterly basis it meets and reviews the performance of the fund to see how we are doing. It works essentially like a pension fund of a company, for example. You get reports from the various managers of the fund, the performance, and you follow the performance. For example, during the past year we are changing one manager and that's, again, taking a lot of time in the last few months because we are changing managers and we have to interview other new managers to come in and we are going to be making a decision, probably at the end of June regarding new managers to manage the portfolio a little bit differently. We are not necessarily happy with the performance that has been taking place.

MR. TAYLOR: I'm sure it's a difficult job. Don't get me wrong but I think to use your words, it does perceive or misperceive to be very complicated and legalistic and bureaucratic, quite frankly. I think when you are trying to work with that number of employees and in fact are going to increase the numbers, that people will demand more accountability. They will be demanding accountability. I'm wondering, with the numbers of employees that you have now, how many people are actually in management positions? Out of your 350 employees, how many are working in management?

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: Less than 50. I should add that there is an umbrella organization of Workers' Compensation Boards in Canada called the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC) and they provide a whole host of statistics that compare WCBs to apples to apples across Canada. One thing that we have always kept a close eye on is administrative costs as a percentage of payroll covered. Our administrative costs have been at or below the national average for the past number of years, so in terms of being criticized for being too heavy, administratively burdensome, we're not, we are lean and our administrative costs have been at or below the national average of other WCBs in Canada.

MR. TAYLOR: I appreciate that information because, as I said, there may be a misperception. I know I have had it from time to time when trying to deal with WCB on behalf of constituents. Of course, I think all Parties have an excellent representative to refer complaints to, a certain individual, and he has been very good, I want to say. He gets back to us promptly but, however, we don't always receive the information we would like and that's true in all aspects of life. I do want to say, on behalf of our caucus, that we appreciate the work that Mr. McInnis does to try to communicate concerns, issues, answers, responses and queries, back to MLAs

Regarding the three previous disenchanted former board members, and I say that with respect, one of the examples they used - and I think it was in Mr. White's presentation. Do

you have a copy of Mr. White's presentation that he actually made to the board? I don't either at this time but I did have a copy of it, it's no doubt in my folder, but I'm just going from recall, Mr. Comeau. He articulated verbally and in writing, because he actually read through his written presentation, that the board of directors or at least the three former board members felt that the firefighter legislation was an example of where the board wasn't consulted enough. I'm very proud of that piece of legislation and indicated at that hearing, I feel that certainly stakeholders on the ground were consulted with, and I feel to a certain degree that those three former board members lost - as far as this member of the committee is concerned - a degree of credibility when they used that as an example because, again, I feel that that is excellent legislation.

I'm wondering, based on their observations regarding it, was that treated any differently than any other policy decision, legislation, amendments, whatever you have, regarding WCB in terms of policy, or was it handled the same?

MR. COMEAU: I think what happened there is that it wasn't initiated by the Workers' Compensation Board. There's nothing wrong with that, if somebody else wants to initiate something, that's fine. One of the things that we don't control is product, the product is controlled in this room with legislation, but in that particular case, this came from here. The firefighter legislation came from here in a sense that it was indicated to us that this was done and therefore we, at the end of the process, administer it, and we're doing it. We evaluated how much it would cost and all that kind of stuff, so I think that was the example of what they were using about what they called "political interference". Well, maybe it was, but is it the wrong thing? Not necessarily. Is it the right thing? It probably is. I saw Manitoba just last week make some changes with respect to that. Maybe it should have been dealt with by us first and recommended here, but it wasn't.

My frustration with the system is that the stakeholders, the legislators, you people who control the product, should have some confidence that the board of directors, as a group, not one group and another group, but together we agree these are the kind of benefits we want to give to a particular group, this is what we have to say about universal coverage, this is what we have to say about this, about that, and so on and that has not been happening. That has been the frustration of the board of directors. In my view, it has not gained the confidence of the legislators to do those things and that's why it needs something that is driven by stakeholders, that the people in the Legislature can have the confidence that this is what the stakeholders are asking and if it doesn't make sense, sure, change it, but at least you get a united view. So it has been frustrating. That's an example of one case where they view it as political interference. Was it still not the right thing to do? It probably still was.

[10:30 a.m.]

MR. TAYLOR: You might say, just at first blush or conversely to politicizing, you may say that when you have three members representing these three provincial Parties in

Nova Scotia, so to speak, I'm not sure about one but two of them fessed up and indicated what Parties they were representing, that you may be depoliticizing the WCB. Again, I'm just throwing that out in jest at this particular time.

I do want to say that I welcome the opportunity this morning to engage in this dialogue, I find it extremely interesting. Do I have time for one short snapper, Mr. Chairman?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Your time has expired but a short snapper.

MR. TAYLOR: In terms of a new business establishing and setting up in Nova Scotia, I have received a complaint that because other businesses doing a similar type of work have a certain rate per $100 of assessment, that they are being charged the same rate, when that same type of business did have some problems at the workplace with injuries and things of that nature. The business people feel that it's unfair, they should be standing on their own merit. I can understand both sides to that claim, I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

MR. COMEAU: This is what the incentive rate program will try to decipher. One of the issues that I indicated at the very beginning frustrated me was the employers - and I meet an awful lot of them - view their assessment as a tax, they don't view this as an insurance scheme for their employees, and it is. So we have to get the culture going, that both employers and employees feel that this is an insurance scheme for them and not just a tax that you pay, an assessment rate. I went to a group a while back who were paying up to 13 per cent of their payroll to the Workers' Compensation Board in assessment and they were complaining. I said, don't complain to me, stop having the accidents, stop having the claims, do something about it. They started doing something about it, they have done a lot of stuff about it and it's that kind of thing we have to do.

You can't just slough it off as a bureaucratic organization, you have to deal with it and that's what we're trying to do.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Epstein.

MR. EPSTEIN: Mr. Comeau, earlier when you were discussing the finances of the WCB and you were looking at various options, you indicated that in balancing the different factors, the options included improving safety in the workplace, I certainly agree with that. You talked about dealing with the rates issue, which is always a possibility, and, of course, there's the issue of what benefits are offered. You seemed to think this was the limit of the mix but there's another possibility.

You are in the insurance business and one of the things that insurance companies would often seek to do, or any insurance entity would seek to do, is to spread the risk. One way to spread the risk, of course, is through universal coverage. I didn't hear you mention that earlier, although I think just a moment ago, when you were raising various issues that

needed to be grappled with, I did hear you mention universal coverage. My question really is, this question of universal coverage, or greatly expanded coverage as an alternative, is this something that the board itself is going to be grappling with, or is this something you see as purely within the political realm and the board wants to stay out of it entirely?

MR. COMEAU: We had made recommendations to that effect already when we recommended things on Dorsey. We did not recommend universal but we recommended expanded coverage because I think there are an awful lot of - and this is my own personal view and maybe I shouldn't express it but I'll say it anyway because I'm chairman of the board - small companies that are not covered and they should be covered, that's my view. You get somebody working on your roof and all of a sudden they fall off the roof, there's no coverage to an employee, to a one- or two-person operation. These things, do they need coverage? I think they do. My view is that this is the kind of thing that everybody had confidence that you have a board there that is doing its work properly and that has the buy-in of the stakeholders, that these are the kind of recommendations that we should be able to make with some confidence that legislators could look at and say, look, let's do something about it or suggest something else.

MR. EPSTEIN: Good advice. Thank you. I think my colleague, Ms. Massey, has some questions.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Massey.

MS. MASSEY: I've got a minute, or what?

MR. CHAIRMAN: No, you've got more than that. You've got probably six minutes.

MS. MASSEY: Oh, good, okay. I would like to talk about injured workers. In the binder and in the documents that we've seen in the last couple of meetings, there are some very disturbing numbers. I am just going to go over some of them for the record. Thousands of workers were injured in 2004; 27 died in 2004. I think you said that this morning. "On any given day, 94 people will get hurt at work . . . Twenty-five of them will be unable to return to work the next day. In the next 14 days, someone will die as a result of their work. 20 people under 25 were injured on the job every week in 2004. One person lost their finger on the job every month in 2004. 8 people injured their back on the job every day in 2004. 2 people injured their eye on the job every week in 2004."

Minister Morash, in some of his documentation, actually is quoted as saying that ". . . these deaths and illnesses are mostly predictable and preventable." That's a scary comment to be reading.

Mr. Comeau, you mentioned this morning - and forgive me if I haven't quoted you correctly, but you're saying the problem is cultural, when you were talking about safety, and you said safety culture. You said that it's not WCB, it's not the workers' or the employers' problem. I'm really at a loss as to how to form a question but I know there's a question there. I'm just wondering how, I guess, with your new format, what route are you taking to have these not occur? I'm not sure - because I haven't seen any stats in here - I could have missed

it, that's for sure. Nova Scotia versus other places of similar size - like, how are we on a scale for these injuries?

We're talking about some very serious injuries here. Especially alarming to me is the 20 people under 25 injured on the job every week. How are we really protecting - are we proactively enforcing what safety . . .

MR. COMEAU: Nancy can probably expand a bit further but one of the things that we have been working very hard on in the last two years, but more particularly, let's say, the last year, is this whole issue of prevention. We have worked - and it takes a while. I know that you're going to say, well, it's too long. It probably is. But it takes a while to restructure the rates, to get a rate structure in place, to get the policies in place, to get buy-in to those things. We will continue to be aggressive on prevention. That is the one thing that we're going to try to do, in terms of changing the culture of safety in the workplace. There has got to be more attention paid to that in Nova Scotia, if we're going to deal with those statistics that you're talking about.

I don't want to be critical of the Department of Environment and Labour, of course, but there was no effort in - I shouldn't say no effort - there was limited effort in that particular area. There was hardly any money spent on the issue.

We have a budget of close to $3 million on trying to get this culture moving, to get people to pay attention, focus on the key 20 industries or so that are really causing 80 per cent of the problems, et cetera. We are really working hard to get at this safety-culture mandate. We have to do that and we also have to tackle, as I said before, the duration of the claims. We have to deal with that and we have to encourage employers to safely get people to return back to work, and to do it in a timely manner. They have an accountability to do that. It's not only the Workers' Compensation Board that has to tell them what to do. They should see that these things are economical to their business.

MS. MASSEY: I will just stop you there for a second because I just want to get a quickie in. When workers are injured on the job, can you give me some idea of how many charges are laid in the province every year against employers, as far as . . .

MR. LAHEY: For example, there are 50 cases, roughly, in a year that are under some kind of active prosecution, under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. I know it was just a quickie but I can't sit here and not contribute to the answer to this question because I think, in the end, reducing the number of injuries has to be the function of all the various instruments we have at our disposal, working in collaboration and in reinforcing ways.

The work that the board is doing in terms of prevention and culture has to be supported by the work that we do at the departmental level in enforcement. That has to include, on an ongoing basis, reviewing and updating regulations. The minister and I are

scheduled to meet with the Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Council in August on that.

Many of the stats that you indicate, are covered by existing regulations. It's not simply a matter of adding on additional regulations. We have to also be constantly improving our enforcement, and more importantly, our culture of compliance with the regulations that we have, so we are doing some other things.

One of the initiatives that you would be aware of is that the Public Prosecution Service has, for the first time, after years of discussion about this, designated a specialist in regulatory offences who will be focused on occupational health and safety offences, at least in the early stages of his new responsibilities. I think the Public Prosecution Service recognizes that occupational health and safety prosecutions are complex and they need - especially in the more difficult cases - a kind of specialized expertise. It's not all about prosecutions but prosecutions are part of the mix. They send an important message and we want to make sure that we are doing them well.

Another initiative, as a department, that we are going to be spending a lot more time on in the near future is, how do we help employers who want to do the right thing actually do the right thing? I think if you think, in particular, about small- and medium-sized enterprises, some of the regulatory requirements are really quite daunting, just in terms of, how do we get started? These are organizations that don't always have experts in occupational health and safety on staff.

It's important to be enforcing the regulations against all entities, but it's also important to be thinking about how we can increase the capacity of organizations - not just small- and medium-sized ones, but perhaps, especially, small- and medium-sized enterprises so they can . . .

MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has expired. Ms. Whalen. You've got about six minutes, I guess. We'll give six minutes to each Party.

MS. WHALEN: Yes, I would like to just pick up where I left off about the time commitment that's required for the board and for the chairman. Can you tell me how often the board meets now?

MR. COMEAU: It meets every month, except July and August, so far. The Governance Committee will be looking at the meeting schedule - well, we're looking at that next month. We're looking at the next year's schedule but it generally meets nine times, 10 times. Sometimes we have teleconferences, depending on the issue.

MS. WHALEN: Okay. But is it fair to say you spend about a day a week on the work of the board?

MR. COMEAU: Oh, probably, yes.

MS. WHALEN: I wonder if I could ask the deputy minister how much of your time, in a very big and complex department, is spent on the issues of the Workers' Compensation Board?

MR. LAHEY: I really wouldn't want to put it in percentage terms because I haven't thought about it in those terms and I might get it wrong. But as the chairman said earlier, in the past six, seven, eight months, it has been a substantial amount of time in this governance and accountability process, in particular, as well as meeting on a regular basis with the chairman and the CEO, just on updating and mutual sharing of information.

[10:45 a.m.]

MS. WHALEN: In the effort to create committees that were going to take more of the work that you said two days a month might be too much for the board, itself, to meet, how could those committees possibly have operated when there were only two and three members that were actually on the board?

MR. COMEAU: We operated the full board. The full board acts as a committee so the six participated as a committee. So that's what is happening now.

MS. WHALEN: Recently you had as few as two members, right, that were active on the board?

MR. COMEAU: Well, there are only two voting members but there are six members sitting around the table. For example, next week we are having some meetings and they are committee meetings but the whole six will sit as committees because we don't have enough.

MS. WHALEN: Of the voting members, is one of those members the individual who lives in the States?

MR. COMEAU: No.

MS. WHALEN: He's a non-voting . . .

MR. COMEAU: There are none who live in the States. Gary Dean is in the States sometimes.

MS. WHALEN: Okay, commutes for large parts of the time?

MR. COMEAU: Gary Dean is a non-voting member and he spends some time in Florida, yes.

MS. WHALEN: I wonder if I could ask Ms. MacCready-Williams if at any time the costs of travel have been covered for Mr. Dean, the person who lives in the United States, if his costs have been covered. The question was asked earlier about what kind of expenses the board has absorbed because he's not here and available to attend meetings.

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: His travel expenses to Florida, while Mr. Comeau and I have been in our respective offices, have not been paid by the Workers' Compensation Board.

MS. WHALEN: He's never come back for meetings that were essential that he be present for that were covered?

MR. COMEAU: First of all, it's not Nancy's jurisdiction, it's mine, as chairman.

MS. WHALEN: Who pays the bills?

MR. COMEAU: Well, the Workers' Compensation Board but she doesn't decide on board members' activities.

MS. WHALEN: No, she wouldn't make the decision.

MR. COMEAU: Pardon?

MS. WHALEN: She wouldn't make the decision but I'm asking whether she knows whether or not it was paid.

MR. COMEAU: No, so that is under the chairman.

MS. WHALEN: Well, perhaps you want to answer the question.

MR. COMEAU: Nancy answered it, we do not have a policy of paying people out of the province, like Gary Dean, to attend board meetings or committee meetings.

MS. WHALEN: So then because there is no policy, you are telling me it was never done?

MR. COMEAU: It has not been done in my term. I don't know whether it has been done in the past but it has not been done in the past three years.

MS. WHALEN: Under the new guidelines for your members, will you make a provision that members should be here in Nova Scotia? I mean we have many good people who live in Nova Scotia.

MR. COMEAU: No, not at all. The members are from Nova Scotia, absolutely, they have to be but I will not at all exclude teleconferences in any way shape or form.

MS. WHALEN: I think the occasional one anybody would understand but if there is a routine need for teleconferences, I think that that should be questioned.

MR. COMEAU: First of all, his term has ended and there are new members coming in, sure.

MS. WHALEN: Mr. Comeau, in the beginning you said the Workers' Compensation Board is arm's-length from the government and that is how it should be and that you are accountable to the public, I think was what you said. How does creating the coordinating committee allow you to continue at arm's-length? Does that not tie you closely, having yourself and the deputy minister sitting on a regular, coordinating committee?

MR. COMEAU: Well, first of all, it's not myself, it's the chairman. The chairman might change, you never know but basically that is a way of coordinating the agencies. The big frustration is how do we work as a system. So the only other way to do it is to put all those agencies under one roof and that's possible if the government or the Legislature decided that WAP and WCAT and OH&S, if they were all under another board of directors, that's quite possible. That's not the structure we have and that was not what was recommended by stakeholders. We discussed this with the stakeholders in labour and management and we had important people, we had quite the discussions on these issues and they said, no, the agencies are okay but let's find a way so that we understand what one does versus the other. Up until three years ago, these agencies were not even getting together in the same room, so we finally got them together in the same room and under Nancy's leadership, now they're starting to co-operate but we want to make sure that people understand.

Sometimes things are brought up. For example, there are things that - maybe I'm wrong in what I'm going to say here - I don't think that these agencies should be making policy for the Workers' Compensation Board. I think they should understand policy and they should help us with policy. If the appeals groups, for example, feel that our policies are wrong, they should be able to indicate to us that they are wrong. Without us having to spend millions of dollars into a legal system, we should just talk about it, discuss it, those kinds of things. So it's a coordinating committee to make sure we understand what everyone is doing.

MS. WHALEN: If our agencies are not properly constituted, or if we have given them power beyond what the government would like, then perhaps things like WCAT and so on should be reviewed and their powers changed because I do understand we have one of the few that's quasi-judicial that makes rulings that then have to go to courts of appeal and so on. Would that not be government's role to step in because government doesn't belong at the

table, I don't believe. It's arm's-length. Government should step in and change legislation or the structure of something if it's not working.

MR. COMEAU: In New Brunswick, for example, all the appeals system is within the board. It's not structured like we have here.

MS. WHALEN: That's something that's a possibility.

MR. LAHEY: Across the country, there is tremendous variety in terms of how these three programs are structured. I will call them the enforcement program, the insurance program and the prevention program and I guess the fourth, the adjudicative program. I guess you would say our system is a hybrid system but we are not the only province that is there. There are other Workers' Compensation Boards that have prevention, don't have enforcement. There are some WCBs that have everything. In terms of where the stakeholders were on this discussion, some felt very strongly about the Department of Environment and Labour continuing to be the enforcement mechanism. Also, some of those people think the prevention program should be moved back. Other people feel strongly about that.

I guess from the point of view of the chairman and I, in the absence of having some kind of really serious consensus around that organizational structure, let's put in place something that will at least ensure that the structure that we have now operates more like a system. I think we can do that without compromising the independence of the board but also very importantly the WCAT, which is a quasi-independent adjudicative body, and the Workers' Advisers Program that has a responsibility to represent injured workers and not to take direction from anybody else.

MS. WHALEN: If I could, just two quick things. Number one, you said two days a month, Mr. Comeau, were, you felt excessive. I think the organization that you are representing here is a huge organization taking in millions of dollars, huge liabilities and responsibilities and I have to say, I don't think two days a month spent at meetings is excessive for that. Secondly, your other statement was that the Legislature didn't have confidence in the board. I would have to take exception with that as well that as a member of the Legislature, I felt that the board had made tremendous gains, a lot of positive feedback from the surveys, a lot of good progress really being made on a lot of fronts, particularly financial, particularly getting a handle on the unfunded liabilities which were huge and came from years ago when there was a lot of political interference. A lot had to be done to correct, I don't think that there was a lack of confidence. I would like to ask you, is that meaning that the government didn't have confidence in the board?

MR. COMEAU: Well, first of all, I don't care whether the board meets five days a month, if there is work for it for five days but while I'm chairman, it will not deal with management issues; it should deal with governance issues and policy issues. I just felt that we would spend the amount of time that it takes to sit as a board. If it takes three days, four

days, I don't care, as long as it is board matters but if it starts to manage, a board cannot manage. They don't spend enough time at it. So it is impossible.

All I know on the other question, is that we haven't been able - our recommendations with respect to Dorsey, for example, or other things that we recommended in the past two years have not been accepted by the Legislature, I guess. The government and the Legislature approve those things, so therefore somebody is saying we don't understand your recommendations or we don't believe them or something like that. All I know is that there has to be a way for the people who control the product to be able to say, look, this has been looked at by stakeholders and agreed to and not have some groups, once the decision is made, come back and see the minister or see members of the Legislature and oppose that to hell and high water. They have to understand that 90 per cent of the people agree with these things. Otherwise, we are not going anywhere and that is what has been happening. We haven't been able to improve the benefits on the Dorsey in the last couple of years because . . .

MS. WHALEN: But at the same time, chronic pain is a major issue which is actually very destabilizing for your organization. I would say it's millions of dollars of liability.

MR. COMEAU: Sure it is and we have to deal with it and that's what we are trying to do. The additional people that we are proposing is another $10 million. What do you do? You have to spend it.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. We have, I think, one more question from the PC caucus. Mr. O'Donnell.

MR. O'DONNELL: Mr. Comeau, you briefly mentioned that you felt more small businesses should be covered by the WCB. Can you tell us if you think any currently exempt vocation or jobs should be required to pay into the WCB now?

MR. COMEAU: I'm not understanding the question.

MR. O'DONNELL: What I'm asking is, can you tell us of any small businesses that are exempt from paying into the WCB that should be required to pay into the WCB now?

MR. COMEAU: Nancy, will you go into this? The three-worker rule is one of them that is on the books . . .

MS. MACCREADY-WILLIAMS: One of the recommendations that was recommended in Dorsey and the board supported in the Fall of 2003 requires legislative change, a regulatory change and its elimination of the three-worker rule so that small businesses with three or fewer employees who would otherwise find themselves in mandatory industries - so typically risky lines of business - should have workers'

compensation protection for their employees. Right now, if you have three or fewer workers, you don't have to register for workers' compensation coverage, despite the fact that you're in a mandatory industry, so that was a recommended change. But the WCB can't do that on its own, it requires a regulatory change.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. That concludes the time we have allotted for our guests today. If you want to do a quick wrap-up, a few comments?

MR. COMEAU: Just thank you, let's all work at this together and we'll get this thing straightened out.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Again, on behalf of the committee we thank you for coming in today to make your presentation and answering, I think, some very difficult questions and thank you, again, to the committee as well.

Our next meeting date is June 28^th. We have the ABC appointments and, as well, we have university tuition on that day. They have gotten back to us and said they will be here so university tuition is on for June 28^th at 9:00 a.m. We have the ABCs as well. Right after our regular meeting the last time they had e-mailed us and said they were available to be here, so they will be here.

Any further business? The meeting is adjourned.

[The committee adjourned at 10:57 a.m.]