Raj Chouhan

BC NDP

12/3/2025

Bill 22, Statutes Act, has been read a third time and has passed. Before we call the committee, I have a ruling that I would like to give to the House.

31 words

Raj Chouhan

BC NDP

12/3/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

Members, the question is third reading of Bill 22, Statutes Act.

11 words

Mable Elmore

BC NDP

12/3/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

The committee on Bill 22 reports the bill complete without amendment.

11 words

Lorne Doerkson

Conservative Party of British Columbia

12/3/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

Thank you, Members. We will call the chamber back to order, where we will be contemplating Bill 22, the Statutes Act, and we will recognize our Attorney General to open our committee stage debate.

34 words

Hon. Ravi Kahlon

BC NDP

12/3/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

I call Committee of the Whole on Bill 22.

9 words

Bill 32 — Mental Health Amendment Act (No. 2), 2025

I will ask, then: why has the government not attempted to bring back Bill 22, which was pulled for further consideration?

21 words

We are debating a very short bill today. It’s not just a few lines on paper. The consequences of those lines could not be bigger. Bill 32, the Mental Health Amendment Act (No. 2), 2025, asks us to repeal the deemed consent provision that has governed involuntary psychiatric treatment in this province for decades. The government says this is modernization, that it’s about strengthening rights, that it’s just a cleanup, but everyone who works in this field — clinicians, families, legal experts, people with lived experience — knows the truth. This bill is incomplete, premature and dangerously out of sequence. The reality is simple. Repealing deemed consent without providing a replacement framework does not modernize mental health law. It destabilizes it. It takes an already fragile system and removes the only tool clinicians currently have to treat people who are too unwell to recognize they are sick. The bill solves a legal problem for the government, not a clinical or public safety problem for British Columbians. Today I want to offer a balanced speech to acknowledge the government’s intent, to acknowledge the real rights issues at stake, and to also show clearly why this bill, as drafted, will harm the people it claims to protect. I want to begin in good faith. There are real concerns with B.C.’s existing deemed-consent model. We are the only province in Canada where involuntary admission automatically gives psychiatrists the legal right to treat a patient without assessing capacity or seeking actual consent. There is no mandatory capacity evaluation. There is no substitute decision-making structure. There is no statutory appeal process for treatment over objection. That is why the Ombudsperson, legal scholars, disability advocates and people with lived experience have raised concerns for years, and that is why section 31 is now under active Charter challenge. So yes, there is a real rights conversation to be had. And yes, the government is right to be thinking about modernization. But modernization is not a slogan. Modernization is not repealing one clause in isolation. Modernization is not doing the bare minimum because a court case is underway. If we are going to change the foundation of mental health law, then we must build a new foundation at the same time. Bill 32 does not do that. We cannot discuss this bill without grounding it in the reality of British Columbians, the reality British Columbians are living every day. Since the toxic drug emergency was declared in 2016, more than 16,000 people have died. A quarter-million overdose events, 100,000 individuals affected, fentanyl found in three-quarters of the deaths, a growing wave of toxic-drug-related brain injuries that experts now describe as the largest emerging epidemic in this province’s history. Among nearly 13,000 youth overdose events, a single overdose gives a young person a 15 percent chance of another overdose in a year, a 7 percent chance of a diagnosed brain injury and a 2 percent chance of death. I feel like I am repeating a lot of what my colleagues have expressed in this chamber for the last, probably, 2½ hours. As I have looked at this, what I wanted to say and express…. I can’t help but try to understand why a bill would be put forward and not properly address every single layer in this crisis, when so many of our young people are dying and suffering. We can see the consequences in our communities, especially in our Vancouver downtown core between 2016 to 2024. Robberies rose. Assaults rose. Arson, weapons offences rose, often linked to untreated mental illness, toxic-drug-related brain injuries. Families are scared. Health workers are exhausted. Police and paramedics respond to the same people twice a day, sometimes three times, sometimes more. The public sees it, families live it, and clinicians endure it. And it is our responsibility in this House, if we are presenting a bill, that it is thought through and detailed in a way that actually answers the problems that we are facing, not trying to just cover up. We are in the middle of a crisis. There is mental health illness and toxic drugs, homelessness and public disorder colliding. And the government brings forward a bill that removes the only existing legal mechanism for treating someone who is involuntarily detained because their illness prevents them from recognizing they are sick. This is not modernization. This is backward, and I cannot help but get passionate about this. Sometimes it’s really sick that in the position that we hold, we do not do the work that is necessary and needed to actually come up with solutions that are detailed and take into consideration every member of society so the people that work in the system, the people that are affected by the system, the families…. This bill does two things. It repeals deemed consent, and it expands liability protection. That’s the entire bill. It repeals deemed consent, the section that currently allows clinicians to treat involuntary patients when they object, and it expands liability protection for clinicians when treatment is authorized by the director. That’s it. By removing deemed consent without providing a replacement framework, it leaves clinicians, families and patients in a dangerous grey zone. The law today says a person can be detained involuntarily under sections 22 or 28 of the Mental Health Act. But the authority to treat them comes from section 31, the deemed-consent provision. If we repeal section 31, as this bill does, the entire system defaults to general health care consent law, the Health Care (Consent) and Care Facility (Admission) Act. The act says that all adults are presumed capable. A capable patient has the right to refuse care. An incapable patient requires a substitute decision-maker, and forced treatment is only allowed in very limited emergencies. On paper, that sounds rights-protecting, but in practice, it creates a crisis, because many people certified under the Mental Health Act, particularly those with psychosis, bipolar disorder, toxic-drug-related brain injuries, are not capable, in the narrow legal sense, even though they are profoundly unwell. They can repeat back risks and benefits, articulate information and appear coherent, yet have zero insight in their condition, as many of my colleagues have gone into detail about. Under the general capacity test, these patients will often be found capable and, therefore, entitled to refuse all treatment, even when they are at high risk for serious harm or death, meaning that we could detain them but we could not treat them. This is the most dangerous implication of Bill 31. Repealing deemed consent without replacing it leads directly to detention without treatment. Detention without treatment is medically irresponsible, ethically indefensible and legally questionable. It is the opposite of compassionate care, the opposite of trauma-informed care and the opposite of what involuntary care is supposed to achieve. Imagine a person with acute psychosis, terrified, disoriented, unable to understand what is happening. They are detained because they present a serious risk. Because they can repeat back the information you tell them, they are found legally capable. If they refuse medication, under this bill, clinicians have two options: detain them without providing treatment or try to initiate a capacity assessment and substitute decision-making process that is not designed for psychiatric care, unclear in the law and inconsistent across the province. It is without oversight standards; without appeal mechanisms; and, in many communities, not possible, due to the limited psychiatric coverage. This is not patient-centred care, this is not rights-based care, and it is certainly not safe. Families know this.They’ve already lived this nightmare. Clinicians know it. They are terrified of being left out without authority. Communities know it. They see the people revolving through emergency rooms again and again. Repealing deemed consent without a replacement framework worsens the very outcomes the government claims this bill will fix. This bill is particularly dangerous for our young people. There is no capacity-based youth model. There’s no clear ability for parents to override a youth’s referral of psychiatric treatment. There is no legal structure for stabilizing youth after an overdose. You heard from my colleague, firsthand, her lived experience, today in this place, of how if that did exist, how much of an impact and a life-changer that would have been. In 2020, the government introduced Bill 22 to address this, but then they abandoned it. Now in the midst of the worst youth overdose crisis in Canadian history, the government brings forward a bill that makes it harder, not easier, to treat youth with impaired insight — the very people that should be at the top of the list when we think about solutions in this place. This is unacceptable. Yes, we will hold you accountable, and yes, we will keep speaking up. They matter, their lives matter, and their future matters. In rural and northern regions, the consequences are even sharper. Many hospitals do not have on-site psychiatrists. Our emergency departments are overwhelmed and oftentimes closed. In-patient psychiatric beds are scarce. Community supports are thin and non-existent, and now the government wants to remove the only mechanism that clinicians currently rely on to stabilize people quickly in a crisis. This is not modernization; it is abandonment. These contradictions are glaring. The Premier has repeatedly said that involuntary care is needed for repeated overdoses. To revive in the morning and die in the evening is unacceptable. Toxic drug-related brain injuries impair insight. Involuntary stabilization is sometimes necessary. These are all things that he’s said. His chief scientific adviser said the Mental Health Act already allows involuntary care for these cases, yet this bill removes the only mechanism that makes that possible, with no replacement, no framework. British Columbians have a right to ask: was the Premier even serious about expanding involuntary care, or is this bill simply about shielding the government from a Charter challenge? The timing tells its own story. An eight-month delay after the mass casualty event, no evidence of progress on the Mental Health Act review, no consultation paper, no public engagement, no terms of reference released, and this bill was introduced days after closing arguments in the Charter case. The conclusion is hard to avoid. This is a bill about legal risk and not patient safety. If the government were serious about modernization, the bill would include a statutory definition of capacity, tailored to psychiatric decision-making, including pattern of illness, history of relapse, fluctuating insight. It would include mandatory regular capacity assessments, conducted by trained professional, with clear standards. It would include a structured substitute decision-making framework with oversight and appeal mechanisms, rights advisers and safeguards for family involvement. It would include a clear process for treatment over objection, which balances autonomy, wherever possible. There’s a list of solutions that it would include. I’m not sitting on that side, but come on. We just got this bill last night. It would include solutions. It would include transparent oversight and reporting. It would include a trauma-informed and culturally safe framework. It would include real investment into mental health capacity. Let’s be clear about this bill. Let’s be clear about what it does accomplish. It protects the government in court. It protects health authorities from liability. It does not protect patients, families or clinicians. It does not increase access to care. It does not help people living with psychosis, toxic drug-related brain injury or severe bipolar disorder. It does not make communities safer. This is a wording fix; it is not a system fix. It’s legislation that moves risk off the government and onto families and clinicians and the most vulnerable people in the province. I want to be clear. I support strengthening rights. I support modernizing mental health law. I support ensuring that people have meaningful autonomy wherever possible. Genuine rights mean more than the right to refuse care. It also includes the right to be well, the right to regain insight, the right to survive long enough to recover. A modern, balanced, compassionate system can and must do both: protect autonomy whenever possible and intervene when severe illness destroys insight. Rights and safety are not opposites; they are partners. British Columbians deserve a government that does the hard work, the real modernization, the real consultation, the real system rebuild. They deserve a mental health law that recognizes and protects life, autonomy, clinicians and families with a clear, compassionate framework. Instead, they are being handed a bill that is rushed, incomplete, legally driven, clinically unsafe and fundamentally misaligned with the Premier’s own promises. This is not modernization. It is not leadership, and it is not how we protect the most vulnerable people in our province. I cannot support a bill that removes a major legal mechanism and replaces it with…. I cannot support a bill that risks detaining people without treating them. I cannot support a bill that puts clinicians in legal jeopardy and families in impossible positions. I cannot support a bill that was drafted to solve a government problem rather than a system problem. British Columbians deserve better, and we can do better.

2168 words

Peter Milobar

BC Liberals

11/25/2025

I rise to speak to Bill 32, Mental Health Amendment Act, 2025. It’s interesting, “2025,” because the government keeps characterizing this as their first attempt at the mental health amendments in their eight, nine years of government. But it’s not their first attempt. That’s why it leaves me with a lot of skepticism and worry about this bill. Their first failed attempt was on June 23, 2020, in this House, when the Mental Health Amendment Act, Bill 22, was introduced. It failed because then-Premier Horgan decided to pull the bill and trigger a general election a year early, simply because he wasn’t sure if he could actually pass the bill that was deemed to be flawed, to have not had proper consultation, to have not talked with Indigenous communities about how this would impact them and the care for their kids. It was around involuntary care for youth, but involuntary care nonetheless. Now, at that time, the seats in this House were 42 for the opposition. The official opposition had 42 seats. The government actually only had 41 seats. They were propped up by three seats of the Greens, which had morphed into two and one with an independent at that time, and a Speaker that was independent. Not dissimilar to the vote makeup…. Although on the technicality side of how a vote would advance in this place or not, the Speaker wouldn’t have broken a tie at that point. He would have just tied the vote, and he wouldn’t have even voted. My point being, that was the government’s first crack at trying to do something meaningful to the Mental Health Act, and in their almost nine years in government now, this is their second attempt. Two clauses that do nothing more than try to shield the government from outstanding legal cases that are out there right now, as I see it. Nothing meaningful in the five-plus years from when Premier Horgan pulled Bill 22, with the promise that after the election there would be more consultation and a new version would be brought forward to this House for proper access to involuntary care. So 5½ years ago now that was said. That commitment was made two general elections ago. This is the best the government has. And the government has the audacity, government members, to heckle and try to take victory laps for things that they have or haven’t done in the 8½ years that they’ve been government today. They’re facing criticism for a bill, a bill I would point out…. Now, there’s plenty of time to deal with the bill, so I don’t want to give the impression that this is overly rushed by the government, but let’s be clear. We have what’s essentially six sitting days left in this session. No mention of this brought forward in the pre-session interviews that ministers and House Leaders have about what they expect for a legislative framework of bills to be brought forward in this chamber. In fact, when we heard Bill 32 was coming, we had assumed that the government was going to actually do something they should have done at the beginning of this session and bring forward the EV repeal mandate that they’ve now said they’re going to repeal. But we’re not going to see that until well into next year when car dealers are already paying penalties for something that’s going to be repealed anyways. Instead, Bill 32 is this ham-fisted attempt to look like they are significantly advancing involuntary care provisions. Now, I want to be clear. I fully support involuntary care in this province. I think it needs to be dramatically expanded. I think it needs to be done aggressively. I think health care professionals providing that involuntary care, those that work with the population that is headed towards that or is already at that state, need protections. But we do question whether this bill actually will properly protect those health care workers and professionals or just simply protect the government. It doesn’t seem…. You would think, given the years it took to bring forward Bill 22 in 2020, the commitment to have further discussion and community outreach around provisions around involuntary care, two general elections, a Premier that was heavily involved in the civil liberties side of the world as a lawyer before he became an elected official in this place…. The best the government can come up with today for us to debate, with a few days left to go in session…. Again, more than enough time to properly debate this and properly scrutinize it in committee stage, but it certainly wasn’t on the radar. The best they can come up with is Bill 32. The bill doesn’t create a replacement framework for treating people who refuse care. But they are likely profoundly unwell, given that people are thinking that they need involuntary care. They could have psychosis, toxic brain injury from drugs, severe bipolar disorder. This bill doesn’t deal with that. It doesn’t implement the involuntary care that the Premier, not Premier Horgan but this Premier, repeatedly promised, not just in an election but in his own leadership campaign, which was a questionable leadership campaign at best, I think we can all agree on. That’s the underlying worry, I think, that the government is hearing and refusing to acknowledge, in fact, wanting to push back to speakers in this place that have had the audacity to point out their failed track record when it comes to things around mental health and access to mental health services. It’s one thing if the government is just using the spin they use…. At one point, one of the heckles was: “There was nothing in place when we took government. Nothing at all.” Then they have to grudgingly acknowledge that Red Fish that they are proud of was started under the former government, that Foundry was started under the former government. When they talk about treatment beds and facilities and access to detox, they never want to talk about the ones they’ve closed at the same time as ones they’ve opened, so net new is nowhere near what we need for a system. They don’t want to talk about any of that. They want to throw the quick and easy heckles out of the NDP campaign book, but that doesn’t make it so in the real world outside of these walls. People in communities are begging for proper involuntary care. When they heard that a late bill was being presented called Bill 32, they were expecting something substantive. People that are trying to provide these services, health care professionals, were expecting something substantive. Families with a loved one in crisis were expecting something substantive. Why would they have been expecting that? Because the government has repeatedly promised that time and time again. The government called an actual general election a year early over this exact topic five years ago, and this is their response to that. Now, it’s the government’s right to call early elections, even though it’s legislated as fixed election dates. They didn’t break any laws when they did that. But they, one would assume, were trying to send a signal to the public that they take involuntary care provisions and access to involuntary care provisions extremely seriously — seriously enough that they were willing to gamble government on a House that had 42 seats for opposition and 41 seats for government, being propped up by the Green Party. Five years ago that’s what they said in this House and out of this House and on the election trail — that they took this issue so seriously. We have waited five years for the government to bring forward amendments to the Mental Health Act, and this is the best they have to show for it. They should be ashamed of themselves, with the pure chaos we’ve been facing in our communities. The fact that the Premier committed to a review of the Mental Health Act after the deadly Lapu-Lapu tragedy…. This is the best the government has. I don’t know how many more special advisers the Premier needs to hire to advise him on these types of things. I’ve lost count of how many they keep hiring, how many special commissions they have, how many extra reports they want to do. Bill 32 doesn’t cut it. It will be interesting when we get to committee stage, because this is critically important. For once, this bill actually comes into full force and effect at royal assent. That means either this Thursday or next Thursday, when the Lieutenant Governor comes here and does “doth assent” to the bill being passed, if it passes. I’m waiting for the government, based on the speeches today, to have to come in and try to make this a confidence vote again. I’m sure they would love to have a 2.0 election over mental health issues. They had no problems pulling the trigger on that last time, five years ago. This bill comes into effect on royal assent. Normally when we go to committee stage, the answer we get back from ministers on a wide range of very consequential, meaningful questions we ask is: “Well, that’s left for regulation later on. We haven’t figured that out yet. We still need to consult. We’ll wait for the regulations. You’ll have to wait for the regulations to answer that question. You just need to pass the legislation and trust us. The regulations will be okay. We haven’t worked that out. We need further consultation. We’ll have more consultation, and then we’ll tell you.” They couldn’t even tell us what the fee for an FOI was going to be because that required more consultation. Magically, the document with the fee was signed 15 minutes after the bill became law. Apparently, it was a pretty fast consultation in this government’s mind. They couldn’t tell us, on Bill 44, what the housing regulations were going to be because they had to work that through. They required more and more consultation on that. A week later, a 57-page policy booklet of regulations was dropped on every municipality to explain the new housing legislation regulations. But they wouldn’t answer it to us in committee stage because it was subject to regulations that hadn’t been worked out yet. The good news is that this is all, in Bill 32, subject to royal assent. This means we expect, as an opposition…. The public expects full disclosure from this government on every question asked. Not deflection. Not: “You’ll have to wait till after the bill is passed for us to be able to talk about that.” Not: “Well, that’s subject to cabinet confidentiality.” Not: “Well, we can’t talk about that because it’s in front of the courts right now.” That’s the irony of this. Bill 32 is going to affect an outstanding court case that’s been in front of the courts since 2016. You watch. The government’s going to start saying: “Well, we can’t talk about that. It’s before the courts. We can’t talk about that. It’s before the courts.” Tried and true lying from this government, because they’re in court a lot. They don’t win very often. My nickname for the Premier back when he was the Attorney General was “O-fer” because they never seemed to win anything. Questions of a very serious nature on Bill 32. How will involuntary treatment work once deemed consent is removed? The public, health care professionals, families deserve an answer from that. They’re already in court, which this bill is trying to address. This means Bill 32 is going to get dragged into court too, if not on the existing court case, on a future court case. For the viewers at home, why that’s important is that lawyers on both sides of any court action will pull the transcripts from our committee stage. They will pull the minister’s speeches — not opposition speeches, but the minister’s speeches — to find out what the government’s intent of a bill is and what the government’s intent around certain clauses was when laws are passed in this place. That’s why it’s important that the government actually provides answers, and not vague, “You’ll have to wait for a regulation,” which, as I’ve covered off, in Bill 32 is not an excuse for them anymore. How will involuntary treatment work once deemed consent is removed? How will capacity assessments now be required for every single involuntary patient? What we’ve seen a lot of times is either the government has really well thought through a piece of legislation and the regulations that go with it but they don’t want to talk about the regulations until after the fact, or they actually haven’t thought it through. We’re sitting here two years later, and they still haven’t taken any action on a piece of legislation that they deemed was critically important at the time. Again, all those excuses are gone with Bill 32. What happens when a capable patient refuses antipsychotic medication? What framework replaces deemed consent for treating psychosis or concurrent disorders, brain injuries from overdoses or youth in crisis? Remember Bill 22, back five years ago, triggered an election because it had to do with youth involuntary care provisions. How does Bill 32 deal with that? What framework is replacing that deemed consent for youth? Government has had five years to come up with an answer for that. Let’s hope they actually have it. Why now? The government has stated…. Well, not only did they state five years ago that they were going to review the Mental Health Act and did nothing and had done nothing up to Lapu-Lapu of any significance. And then after Lapu-Lapu, it was politically convenient to re-engage a mental health review that we’ve heard scarce little out of, but it’s still apparently underway with yet again more outside advisers for the Premier. Apparently, 400,000-plus public service workers can’t be trusted to provide the advice and expertise the government needs. They have to keep hiring outside advisers that have close ties to the Premier to advise them. But why now? Why are these two clauses in Bill 32 here now, when that Mental Health Act review, which has been long coming, long-suffering waiting for it, literally, in people’s households all across this province…? Why now? Does this even do anything on the Premier’s commitment around expanded involuntary care, or does it simply maintain the status quo and try to get the government out of a legal quagmire they’re stuck in, in court, because of years of inaction? The hope with Bill 32 was that it was going to be meaningful. The hope for Bill 32 was it was going to actually show a path forward. That’s why there was the urgency. That’s why it came in late. That’s why it came in several weeks after all the other legislation we were led to believe was brought forward in this place. Again, plenty of time to properly debate it. We’ve had a long back-and-forth here today already. There’ll be plenty of time for committee stage. This isn’t about the typical manoeuvre that this government has done with three days left in the legislative calendar and dropping a major piece of legislation. So there’s hope yet for EV mandates to get repealed, I guess. But this government always makes more out of what they say a bill is than it actually is. And on Bill 32…. I can see it right now. I can see the NDP spin machine kicking into gear. “B.C. Conservatives say they’re for involuntary care, but they’re voting against it.” This is not involuntary care. I want to be really clear about that. I’m not sure how the Green Party is going to vote, but if they vote against it, it’ll be spun the same way for them because they got blamed for the last election. It wasn’t even a confidence vote. That’s the interesting thing. Bill 22, five years ago, was not a confidence bill. The government could have brought it in. They could have maybe agreed to some amendments back and forth between the House. Again, 42-41, and three was the seat count. You know, they talk about working across the aisle, working together. They could have used that as the framework, could have actually accepted that maybe they have some flaws in it and needed some improvements, or it might have just failed altogether. Government didn’t have to fall over it. It wasn’t a confidence vote. The only thing the Greens were tied to for that whole three years leading up to it was to support budgetary and throne speech confidence votes. It was the NDP that decided to say this is such a critically important issue, we’re going to go to an election over it, and five years later, the sum total of that work is two clauses that shield them from a lawsuit. It doesn’t meaningfully show a pathway to expanded involuntary care in this province. In fact, it’s been pointed out that it flies in the face of the advice given by Dr. Vigo already, who says there actually don’t need to be changes to expand involuntary care to the act. It’s interesting when they do or don’t want to listen to their own handpicked experts. He is an expert. I don’t challenge his expertise whatsoever in this field. He has way more expertise than I do. I may or may not agree with some of his recommendations, but it’s not because I don’t think he’s got expertise or knowledge in this field. Do we see any type of recommendations to improve the involuntary care act? Especially the back bench of the NDP government, I would ask them to just take a step back — all of them have been here at least a year now, some many more than that — and ask themselves about the time that they have had a meeting in their constituency office. If you haven’t, (a) I find it really hard to believe, but (b) count yourself sadly, in a weird way, fortunate if you haven’t actually been asked to have that meeting. If you’ve just avoided having the meetings, well, that’s on you. Recall back to the parents desperate for their teenager, looking for help and can’t get treatment, and them trying to get the teenager in, but every time the teenager gets asked, “Do you feel safe?” and they answer, “Yes,” the police, the social workers or the health care workers involved say: “There’s nothing more we can do. They’re 15 years old.” Bill 32 doesn’t help that gut-wrenching situation of that family desperate to find that teenager help, that teenager that has their whole life ahead of them. If they get help then, they might stumble a little bit, but their odds are way, way better than for waiting till they’re my age and have 40 extra years of things built up in their life and their mental health and whatever other substances or anything else they might be using. They’re in full-blown crisis, for that family, for 40 extra years because this government failed to create any capacity. Just ask yourself if you’ve actually had those meetings, and then ask yourself, if you’re a government member, if Bill 32 actually addresses that, if you will you be able to look that parent in the eye after this bill passes and say: “Don’t worry about it. We passed Bill 32. We should have access to involuntary treatment for you in the next week.” You know the answer is that you can’t say that to them. You know the answer to the parent or the spouse coming in because a loved one got addicted after a workplace injury and either has a bit of a brain injury to go with it or an oxy addiction for pain treatment that they are now self-medicating on, and to have those moments where the family thinks that they might be able to try to force them into a facility. They are adamant that they don’t have a problem and don’t want to go, but everyone knows that they actually need it, because they are spiralling and spiralling. Their next stop is to live as a middle-aged person on the Downtown Eastside streets. This government seems to think that’s okay, that’s a humane way for people to live, because they’ve done nothing about expanding the capacity for those people over the last 8½ years. When that family comes in your office and starts asking about involuntary care options, look them in the eye and tell them that Bill 32 is actually going to solve that problem, that Bill 32 has addressed it, that it took you 8½ or nine years but that you finally got it fixed with Bill 32. You can’t. It is a complete moral failure. This is a government — frankly, I’m amazed — that must be cauterized, because they don’t ever seem to get nosebleeds, standing on the moral high ground that they all like to preach down on us from, on a wide range of topics in this place. They’re going to stand up in this place and try to spin this that this side of the House doesn’t care, that this side of the House doesn’t want people to get treatment and that this side of the House is against involuntary care. Nothing can be farther from the truth. That won’t matter to the speeches they provide, because it’s all about making sure their narrative gets out there, to try to deflect away from the fact that after nine years, the best thing they can do to offer for mental health amendments is a two-clause bill, in Bill 32, that shields themselves from an existing court action. Now, it may actually need to get done, but it could get done with a whole lot more meat as well. There are frameworks out there. There was literally legislation in front of this House that could have been brought back, with Bill 32 added into it, that would have addressed and talked about involuntary care. Now to be clear, that bill back then, as memory serves, the opposition and the Greens were…. We had different reasons we were going to oppose it. So I’m not going to speak for the Greens. Those members aren’t even in this place anymore, so I’m certainly not going to speak on behalf of members that have switched out. Fundamentally, I’d ask every member of the government, and I’ll end on this, that if you can honestly look those constituents that are desperate in the eyes…. Let’s face it. There are quite a few NDP ministers and backbenchers that represent some of the poorer neighbourhoods in this province, the Downtown Eastside in particular, where issues like this are prevalent, where the need for proper involuntary care access is incredibly high. To those members, I say: “Look in the mirror, and ask yourself if Bill 32 is why you ran to help people in your constituency.” If you can look at those families in your constituency and say: “Well, Bill 32 — that’s great. We’ve got involuntary care taken care of….” You can’t, and you won’t. And if you do, shame on you for saying that. Be honest with them. This government ideologically, actually, doesn’t agree with involuntary care. They’ve had nine years to actually make significant changes. They haven’t. They haven’t done anything of any significant consequence whatsoever, especially as it relates to legal frameworks. Be honest with them about that, instead of trying to deflect away and trying to blame people in this chamber that actually have been standing up and speaking for involuntary care for years. There’s a time to do what’s right for your constituents, not what’s right for your political leader. In this case, you’ve actually campaigned, this leader has actually campaigned around involuntary care before, sometimes not in favour and sometimes in favour, whichever way the political wind flows. It doesn’t matter about the human misery side of that equation, apparently. Bill 32 is not good enough. Bill 32 is not supportable. Bill 32 has a ton of questions that I will almost guarantee will not be answered by this government in committee stage. And despite our best efforts, when we bring forward meaningful and thoughtful amendments, those will be rejected by this government. It’s shameful. It shouldn’t be happening. And if it’s important enough to truly try to help people, let’s get this bill to a place that can at least provide a modicum of relief for people, moving forward, instead of this political theatre for a court case instead. Thank you for this time.

4128 words

Bill 32 — Mental Health Amendment Act (No. 2), 2025 (continued)

I hope that you will indulge me. I had to get cut off earlier for lunch, so I’m just going to go back one paragraph so that I don’t confuse myself here. If the deemed consent provision is removed, the Mental Health Act contains no framework for how treatment decisions are to be made for involuntary patients who refuse care. In that situation, the system defaults back to the general law of consent in British Columbia, the Health Care (Consent) and Care Facility (Admission) Act. That act says that every adult is presumed capable unless proven otherwise, that a capable patient has the right to refuse treatment and that the only time treatment can proceed without consent is in a narrowly defined emergency or through a substitute decision-maker if the patient is incapable. That sounds reasonable in theory, but it does not reflect the clinical reality of the people who are most often certified under the Mental Health Act. Many involuntary patients are not incapable in the narrow legal sense. They can understand information. They can repeat back risks and benefits. They can explain side effects. But they cannot appreciate the consequences of refusing treatment because of a condition called anosognosia, the lack of awareness of one’s own illness. When we talk about consent and capacity in the context of severe psychiatric illness, we must recognize that British Columbia’s existing legal framework was never designed to address the realities of conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder with psychosis, psychotic depression or the increasingly common toxic-drug-related brain injuries we are seeing today. Capacity law in the Health Care (Consent) and Care Facility (Admission) Act sets out a narrow test: whether someone can understand information and appreciate the reasonably foreseeable consequences of a decision. That test may work when someone is deciding whether to have a surgery or a medical procedure, but it does not capture the fragmented, inconsistent and often fluctuating insight that characterizes many severe psychiatric disorders. People can often articulate information clearly while being completely unable to appreciate its personal relevance, because their illness prevents them from recognizing the illness itself. That is the clinical reality of anosognosia, and it is a reality our laws have not even attempted to describe, let alone regulate. It is not denial; it is a symptom of severe mental illness. It affects a significant percentage of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder with psychosis and psychotic depression. It also affects people with traumatic and toxic-drug-related brain injuries as well as people with Alzheimer’s and dementia and things of that nature — a population that is now growing rapidly in British Columbia. When someone has this they genuinely believe that there is nothing wrong with them. They may insist that their hallucinations are real, that their paranoid beliefs are justified or that their family is conspiring against them. They may also, once stabilized, appear articulate, logical and coherent, which leads clinicians to find them capable under the general legal test, but because they lack insight, they will often refuse further treatment. This produces the tragic cycle that we all recognize. The person deteriorates, becomes a danger to themselves or to others, is detained, receives treatment over objection, begins to recover, becomes capable in the legal sense, refuses continued treatment, is discharged, stops medication and relapses, overdoses or returns to the hospital in a worse state. Families are left grieving. Communities are left unsafe. And the individual’s brain injury deepens each time. Without clear statutory guidance on how capacity should be assessed specifically for psychiatric decisions, clinicians are forced to make extremely high-stakes judgments in a legal vacuum. Some may interpret capacity broadly and conclude a patient is capable simply because they can repeat information back to them. Others may take a more nuanced approach, incorporating insight, history, pattern of illness and risk. In rural and northern communities, including mine, where psychiatric coverage is limited, these assessments may be made by clinicians meeting the patient for the very first time, under pressure in a chaotic emergency department or, worse yet and commonly the case, virtually rather than in person. None of this inconsistency is the fault of the clinicians. It is the direct result of a legislative framework that has failed to define what capacity should mean in the context of severe psychiatric illness. The outcome is a system where two patients with the same conditions may have completely different rights, outcomes and protections, depending on who assesses them that day. What’s particularly troubling is that not only is the situation that I just described very common in northern rural B.C., where we’re looking at the lack of access to psychiatrists, but…. Very recently, the Health Minister and I were touring a facility in my riding where we were told that it’s better for the patients that they can’t see a psychiatrist in person and just virtually. That bothers me greatly. I don’t think that you can replace face-to-face interaction with a health care provider with virtual. I understand that we have to fill gaps, but it’s quite alarming that we’re now making excuses for why we can’t actually allow patients to be seen in person. And I think, specifically when it comes to psychiatric assessments, being able to diagnose somebody in person is incredibly important. If the government removes deemed consent without establishing a modernized capacity framework, these inconsistencies will only deepen. Many severely unwell patients, especially those with anosognosia, will be deemed capable in a legal sense and therefore allowed to refuse all treatment, even when their lives are at risk, or others’ lives. Others may be labelled incapable based on subjective judgment. Families may suddenly become responsible for treatment decisions that they are unprepared to make, in situations that are emotionally fraught and medically complex. And clinicians will be put in the impossible position of guessing whether treating someone without clear statutory authority could expose them to complaints or litigation. This does not create safety or clarity. It creates uncertainty and potential harm. The government may argue that substitute decision-makers can simply fill the gap when a patient is found incapable, but that assumption overlooks the very real complications. Substitute decision-making only works when there are clear statutory rules guiding it. At present, British Columbia has no legislative process detailing when a family member can authorize or refuse psychiatric medication on behalf of a loved one. There is no oversight mechanism to ensure that the substitute decision-maker is acting according to the patient’s values, best interests or stated wishes. There is no tribunal process to resolve disputes between clinicians and families when opinions differ, and there are no safeguards to protect patients from family conflict, coercion, estrangement or even well-meaning but harmful decisions made in moments of crisis. It’s because this piece of legislation doesn’t actually replace anything. It’s looking to remove a section without providing any kinds of guidelines or framework. If we’re going to go to a situation where, essentially, we’re going to be relying, for the most part, on these substitute decision-makers that are primarily going to be family or close loved ones, why is there no framework here about how that person is determined, which person it’s going to be in the family, safeguards to ensure that they’re not going to abuse that family member? It’s impossible for a clinician to know every single time what the family history is or how this patient has interacted with that person in the past. So we’re going into very dangerous territory by doing this without any kinds of clear frameworks. These risks are not theoretical. Families across the province are already stretched to their breaking point, caring for loved ones with severe and persistent mental illness, substance use disorders or brain injuries. Many are exhausted, traumatized and desperate. Asking them to shoulder legal responsibility for forced psychiatric interventions without clear guidance, support or safeguards is unfair to them and unsafe for patients. There are also situations where estranged or abusive relatives attempt to insert themselves into care decisions. Without a legislated framework, the system risks enabling further harm rather than preventing it. And again, that’s not to say that I don’t want to see more family involvement in care decisions, because I think that’s important. But what we do need are guidelines, because not everybody is going to act in the best interest of people in their family. A modern mental health law must recognize these complexities. It must define capacity in a way that reflects psychiatric reality, including impaired insight. It must set out a clear and consistent process for involving substitute decision-makers, backed by safeguards, oversight and the ability to challenge decisions. It must ensure that clinicians, patients and families all understand their roles, rights and responsibilities. Removing deemed consent without addressing any of these issues does not modernize the system. It destabilizes it. It leaves clinicians without guidance, families without support and patients without the protections that they deserve. This issue is even more concerning when we consider youth. Young people experience mental illness and substance use disorders differently from adults. Their insight fluctuates more rapidly. Their decision-making capacity is more vulnerable to peer influence, trauma and developmental factors. Yet British Columbia has no youth-specific involuntary treatment framework, no capacity-based youth model and no clear legal standard for when parents can override a youth’s refusal of psychiatric treatment. This is a really big issue that has been consistently seen. I get tons of casework to my office about this because there is no ability for a parent to intervene in those decisions, even when the child may have other disorders, not just psychiatric disorders, that impact their ability to make these decisions. But the parents aren’t allowed to intervene. The government once recognized this gap when they introduced Bill 22 in 2020, which would have allowed involuntary stabilization for youth after an overdose. They paused that bill due to a lack of consultation, promised to come back with something better, then abandoned the issue entirely. This is alarming, because it’s similar to what we are seeing right now with no consultation and a bill being brought forward. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Now, in the middle of the most severe youth overdose crisis in Canadian history, they bring forward a bill that could make it even harder to treat high-risk youth who lack insight into their condition. One of the most serious consequences of removing deemed consent without replacing it is that we risk creating a system that detains people without actually treating them. This is not only medically irresponsible but also ethically indefensible. Detention under the Mental Health Act is supposed to have a therapeutic purpose. It is justified because treatment is necessary to prevent serious deterioration or harm. If clinicians are legally unable to provide that treatment, then the detention itself becomes punitive rather than therapeutic, something this government has said multiple times that they don’t want to do. It becomes confinement for the sake of confinement. That is the opposite of what involuntary care is supposed to achieve. Imagine a person in acute psychosis — paranoid, terrified, disorganized, unable to recognize their own needs. Imagine telling that person: “We can hold you here against your will, but we cannot give you the treatment that would actually help you become well.” That is not compassionate care, that is not trauma-informed care, and it is certainly not recovery-oriented care. It is a failure of the system and a violation of the principles that this government claims to uphold. If this bill proceeds without a replacement framework, that is exactly the situation British Columbia will be placing clinicians and patients into. If Bill 32 passes without a replacement framework, that cycle will become more entrenched, not less. Clinicians will still be able to detain a person, but without the deemed consent provision, they will likely be unable to treat them, unless they go through the formal process of declaring them incapable and locating a substitute decision-maker. Because the legal test for incapacity is narrow, many people with anosognosia will be labelled capable. That will mean that the very group of people who most desperately need stabilizing treatment, the people with the least insight into their conditions and the highest risk of fatal outcomes, will be the ones who are now allowed to refuse care. This is not a hypothetical concern. The government itself has acknowledged that drug-related brain injuries are now a widespread and growing problem. The Premier has spoken publicly on multiple occasions about people overdosing twice in a day, being revived in emergency and being sent back out onto the street to overdose a third time. He called it bizarre. He spoke about the need for involuntary care in those situations. The government then appointed a chief scientific adviser, Dr. Daniel Vigo, who confirmed that involuntary care for this population could be delivered under the Mental Health Act, and that’s under the existing Mental Health Act. This was eight months ago that he said that. So again, I can’t help but wonder why this is being couched as a necessary part of being able to move forward on involuntary care. Why are we not listening to the expert here? What really concerns me about this is that when I had a briefing on this bill with the government staff about it, I asked about how much consultation had been done about bringing this piece of legislation forward. I was told that Dr. Vigo — now, bear in mind Dr. Vigo is the one that said that these changes were not necessary — has done consultation with psychiatrists. But the staff admitted to me that no consultation beyond that has been done on bringing forward this piece of legislation. Again, I am concerned that this is just about shielding the government because of this Charter challenge. I understand the desire to do that, but don’t couch it as being something that’s necessary to bring forward involuntary care when the wording itself makes it seem as though it’s actively working against that goal. Despite recognizing this, the government has made almost no progress in actually implementing involuntary care. So I must ask: how does it make sense to talk about using the Mental Health Act as a tool for involuntary care in the toxic drug crisis while, at the same time, removing the very legal mechanism that allows you to treat people whose illness stops them from recognizing that they are ill? For years, experts, advocates, families and clinicians have been calling for expanded psychiatric beds, expanded long-term treatment capacity and vastly more community supports. The government has ignored those calls. We still have emergency departments functioning as psychiatric wards. We still have people admitted to medical surgical floors because there is nowhere else to place them. We still have hundreds of people discharged prematurely due to bed shortages. We still have Indigenous communities with no psychiatric services at all. We still have youth waiting months or years for a psychiatric consultation. A modern mental health law cannot function if there are no psychiatrists to assess people, no beds to stabilize them and no community teams to support them after discharge. That infrastructure does not exist, and this bill does absolutely nothing to fix that. Even the scarce detox and treatment beds that do exist outside of the Red Fish Healing Centre are not designed for stabilizing long-term psychiatric or cognitive impairment caused by toxic drug exposure. They are not designed for the people cycling repeatedly through acute psychosis with no insight. They are not designed for people who need weeks or months of structured in-patient care to regain stability. Another glaring problem with this bill is that it assumes the province has the capacity to operationalize a modern consent system when it simply does not. Capacity-based legislation only works when the entire system is built around accurate, timely and consistent capacity assessments. That means having trained psychiatric staff available around the clock. It means having clinicians who are capable of assessing acute psychosis, disorganized thinking, brain injury or impaired insight in a reliable and standardized way. It means having specialized in-patient units ready to receive patients when capacity is lost and treatment is necessary. None of those conditions exist today in British Columbia. Another serious issue is that lack of capacity exposes clinicians to enormous legal and professional risk. Under this bill, a nurse or doctor who decides a severely unwell patient is incapable could be accused of violating their rights. Meanwhile, a clinician who decides they are capable could be blamed when that patient deteriorates, harms themselves or harms someone else. These decisions cannot be left to guesswork, but that is exactly what will happen without the resources needed to make proper assessments. We are setting clinicians up for failure, and the government knows it. Giving them liability protection does not solve the problem. It merely shifts the risk. A modern system would give clinicians the tools that they need, not leave them to improvise in a crisis. The government also refuses to acknowledge that modernizing mental health law requires capacity not just to assess and treat but to follow up. People with severe psychiatric illness need continuity of care. They need intensive case management, assertive outreach, structured housing supports and long-term stabilization. British Columbia does not have those systems in place. People are discharged with no follow-up, no plan, no appointment and no support. We know what happens next: relapse, psychosis, overdose, hospitalization, sometimes death. A rights-based framework without a care-based infrastructure is an illusion. One of the most overlooked problems with this bill is that it deepens the inequality between rural and urban care. In Vancouver or Victoria, a patient refusing medication under a capacity-based system might at least be seen quickly by a psychiatrist. In the North, that same patient could wait days or longer for an assessment. In some cases, the assessment might not happen at all. The law will be the same across the province, but the outcomes will not be. The regions with the least capacity will see the worst results. People in rural and northern communities, my communities, will be left without timely assessments, without timely treatment and without the protections a modernized framework is supposed to provide. This is not equity. It is regionally entrenched injustice. In northern communities, including Skeena, we often have limited or no access to psychiatrists on site. We have emergency departments that are overwhelmed, rotations that are inconsistent and designated psychiatric beds that are insufficient. This government has known for years that psychiatric capacity is dangerously low, yet they have not meaningfully increased staffing, expanded in-patient facilities or developed community-based psychiatric services for communities. Instead, they now introduce a bill that will remove the only legal tool that clinicians currently have to provide timely treatment in high-risk situations, and they’re not providing anything to replace it with. The government is legislating as though we have a fully staffed, modern psychiatric infrastructure. We do not. We are nowhere close, and the consequences of pretending otherwise will be borne by the most vulnerable people in the system. The irony is almost unbelievable. The government is trying to legislate a capacity-based model while refusing to invest in capacity. It is like trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of sand. The structure looks neat on paper, but it collapses as soon as it is used. If the government truly believed in a capacity-based approach, the first step would be investment in psychiatric beds, in detox beds, in long-term treatment, in community outreach, in northern services, in forensic stabilization and in specialized brain injury units. Instead, they are moving backward. They are making it harder to treat people, not easier. They are making it harder to intervene in a crisis, not easier. It must be said plainly. This government has known for years that British Columbia’s mental health system does not have the capacity to meet even basic needs.

3338 words

Bill 23 — Regulations Act (continued)

When I was speaking about this bill earlier — I think it was about a week ago or two weeks ago — I introduced my thoughts about this bill. I spoke about what the strengths of this bill are. To sum up what I was saying about the strengths, I was talking about the importance of ease of access to law. Prior to Bill 23, we had just debated Bill 22. Bill 22 dealt with statutes and statutes being recognized as official versions of the statutes if they were online, so they could actually be used in court or evidence. Then Bill 23 has the topic of regulations. Bill 23 does essentially what Bill 22 does for statutes. It states that if there are regulations that are posted online on the government site, essentially that can be used as evidence in a hearing or a court hearing. When I was talking about that particular point, I said that it was a good thing because it creates efficiency in terms of having hearings and litigation proceedings. That was the point there. But I did say that I had some questions and some issues about the legislation. I believe that’s where I left off. I started talking about regulations, how you have to be careful about the regulations because the difference between statutes and regulations is that with statutes, we pass them here on the legislative floor. Regulations are passed through the cabinet. When they’re passed through the cabinet, that does not have legislative oversight, so that does not have legislative debate. When we look at regulations and we look at enabling statutes of regulations and we look at a legislative code, essentially this is what Bill 23 does: introduces a legislative code of how regulations work. What’s the framework around regulations? How should they be drafted? How should they come into force? It talks about that type of procedure. When we’re looking at regulations, some of the concerns I have…. I will take the Legislature through what my concerns are as I go through the bill. I’m just going to go through the bill. The first part of the bill, part 1, talks about interpretation and classification. Under this part, we see definitions under clause 1. Clause 2 talks about the meaning of regulation in this act, so we’re still talking about interpretation. Clause 3 gets into the meaning of consolidation, so that still talks about interpretation. Then we move into clause 4. It also talks about how if a regulation is amended or repealed, the following portions of the act do not apply to the amendment, so it also kind of goes to interpretation and application. Then we move into part 2 of this bill, which deals with drafting and examining regulations. Some of the sections that are in here, the sections that are in part 2, go from clause 5 all the way to clause 8. Clause 5 talks about drafting regulations and how they work under the direction of the chief legislative counsel. Clause 6 talks about examining regulations. Before a regulation is enacted, the regulation must be examined by legislative counsel. It seems to be pretty straightforward procedural stuff. Then we go further, into clause 7, and it talks about when an examination is not required, so when it’s not required for the legislative counsel to examine certain aspects of this regulation process. Then we go further, into clause 8. It talks about solicitor-client privilege in regard to the process that’s involved under this bill. That stuff all seems to be very procedural. Then we jump into part 3. Part 3 talks about depositing regulations. I did have an issue here, so I would like to spend some time here. I’d like some clarifications, and I will be canvassing those clarifications at committee. Part 3 talks about depositing regulation. When we look at the word “depositing,” it means when, essentially, it’s being said that the regulation is going to take force. It’s being deposited; it’s going to take force. That’s kind of the interpretation around it. This part, clause 9 all the way to clause 13, kind of refers to that process. I’ll just get to the one where maybe I have a bit of an issue. I need clarification, and I need to explore it a little bit more at committee stage. Clause 12 talks about the power to specify a date of deposit. This is relevant. You’re saying a regulation that’s going to take force when you deposit it. This particular clause talks about the power to specify a date of deposit. So when is that deposit? It’s going to happen when the regulation gets deposited, or will it happen before or after? This is a highly relevant clause. I’ll read the clause. It states, “If the Attorney General considers it to be in the public interest, the Attorney General may, by regulation, do any of the following: provide that a regulation is deemed to have been deposited on a specified date that is on or after the date of enactment of the regulation, and before the actual date of the deposit of that regulation.” I guess when I read the whole clause 12 — it goes on further — I read it as that there could be retroactivity to when a regulation takes place. That kind of alerted some reaction from me, because when we’re already having regulations that are being passed through the cabinet rather than legislative oversight and debate through this Legislature, there’s less probing of what’s going to be in that regulation. We need to have a transparent process, and there needs to be accountability to that process in regard to these regulations. Normally you will have the regulations. They get passed and they go through. But if you can backdate some of these situations, that takes away from the transparency. It makes the process a little bit…. The regulations could be a little bit unaccountable, because they lacked proper oversight. You’re saying that there was a specified date back in history, that the regulation actually applies from that. Say if that had some sort of monetary value to it and had some monetary consequences. If you backdated something to say, like, a year before and nobody knew about that before, that would kind of be unfair. Like I said earlier, this bill acts as a code for regulations and how regulations will be formulated. It’s important to kind of probe if there’s going to be a retroactivity to this, when regulations are going to take force. That will be something that will be canvassed by myself at committee stage because I have some questions around that. That’s an interesting point to mention about this bill under part 3. Part 4 just talks about the adopted materials website. It talks about when you have regulations referring to adopted materials, how that is going to work. There’s an adopted materials website, and those adopted materials would be on that website so that people can review them. This kind of just sets out that process here under part 4, and it seems to be pretty straightforward. Part 5 of this bill talks about the Gazette. Gazette refers to the printed, when we’re talking about printed Gazette or published in the online Gazette. Essentially, where do people get notice of their regulations? They refer to the Gazette. Now, going through this part…. I won’t go through all the clauses, but I will go through some of the pertinent ones that I find there need to be more questions asked about in more of a detailed setting in, say, the committee stage. Those are clauses 21 and 22. Clause 21 under this part refers to exemptions from publication in the printed Gazette. Now, the whole reason, the bigger part, the purpose of this legislation is to make sure that if there are regulations that are in online format, they’re also official versions so you can use those regulations for evidence. If you’re coming in here and looking at clauses 21 and 22 and you’re saying some of the publication can actually be exempted either from print or online, then that would kind of water down the effect of and purpose behind this legislation. So we actually need to probe this a little bit more at committee stage and get further answers. How will all this work? The rest of it…. There are a couple more clauses under this particular part, the Gazette part, clauses 23 and 24. After clause 24, this gets into clause 25, which talks about consolidations of regulations, about bringing regulations together. My interpretation of reading the consolidations part was: how will they all be put together? I thought that it’s a good thing when you consolidate. It’s an easy way to kind of access regulations and for you to be able to reference different regulations over a sphere of time. I didn’t really have too many questions on this part, because I feel consolidation of regulations is a good thing. Under part 6, there are a few clauses, essentially clause 25 all the way to clause 32. Then we get into part 7 of this bill, which talks about revisions. How do you make revisions? What’s the process in regards to revisions, if there’s something posted in a regulation and you need to kind of fix that, and there was an error in it? The revisions go all the way from clauses 33 to 39. Then we get into part 8, which deals with official versions of regulations and consolidations. That goes from clauses 40 to 41. Then we get into part 9, which deals with orders in council and letters patent. I didn’t have too many questions on this part. This part goes from clause 42 all the way to clause 49. Then we get into part 10, which is the general part. I did have some queries on this. I did have some questions after reading part 10 here. This is the general application part of this bill. Actually, the questions were more on part 11. Part 10 seems to be fairly straightforward, but under part 11, which deals with regulations under this act, you go down to clause 58, which deals with Attorney General regulations, general powers. Now, this particular clause states what authority the Attorney General has to make these regulations. It also goes further to talk about other people, what other people can do under the authority of the Attorney General, like, “In making a regulation under this act, the Attorney General may do any of the following: confer a discretion on an employee of the government; delegate a matter to an employee of the government; make different regulations for different persons or things or different classes of persons or things.” Now when you’re dealing with employees, you’re not even dealing with the Attorney General, who is a member of this Legislative Assembly, and there’s some accountability. Now you’re dealing with an employee that may make some changes in regards to these regulations. Going back to the accountability process, making regulations available online, making them official versions, that’s a good thing — transparency. But when you’re going back and saying that some unelected individuals may have some control over making some changes, there may be some issues there. That is an issue that I will be probing at the committee stage. Part 11 goes up to clause 60, and then part 12 talks about just the transitional provision, talks about transition, meaning how it relates to other amendments. So that seems to be pretty straightforward. It gets into talking about other acts, the Constitution Act, the Balanced Budget and Ministerial Accountability Act. It talks about a few other acts. Then there was another one. There is, again, retroactivity referred to under clause 71. There are some issues here, and although I think it’s a good thing to have transparency, have official versions of online regulations to be considered, there are some questions to be answered when you look at this. I’m looking forward to asking those questions at the committee stage of this particular bill.

2029 words

Bill 23 — Regulations Act

It’s an honour to stand up here as the Attorney General critic from the official opposition from the Conservative caucus of B.C. to speak to Bill 23, the Regulations Act, in this second reading. As a starting point of introduction of the official opposition’s position, we will be voting for this bill at second reading. But we have some serious questions, even more serious questions than the last bill, on this particular one. There might even be some introductions of amendments coming at the committee stage of this particular bill. The level of concern is much higher than Bill 22, which we just looked at. That’s the original introduction to my speech here, but let’s get into the speech. First of all, I’d like to thank the Attorney General for actually bringing this bill forward and bringing the last one. I’m going to elaborate on what my thoughts are here on this particular bill. Like the last one, this bill may look highly technical at first. But its implications reach deeper into how government functions, how laws are made and how ordinary British Columbians access the rules that govern their lives. Regulations. Usually people view regulations…. They view the laws as what are actually made here in this chamber. Then the regulations are usually not made in the chamber. They’re usually made by a cabinet decision or some sort of delegation from the cabinet. So it’s important to look at this one with more of a microscope, this particular bill, because a lot of what this bill will authorize or change will change the framework that applies to regulations. You can call it types of law as well, because they have legal force, although they’re called regulations. Those regulations are…. That type of law is actually made without any proper scrutiny from this House because those regulations are made through the cabinet or some sort of delegation from the cabinet. This statute essentially becomes a new code. It looks at the whole framework of how regulations are made. If this is what sets a framework of how future regulations are made, that may not get the level of accountability that legislation gets. It is absolutely very crucial to actually look at this particular bill with even more scrutiny. For that reason, I think it’s important to take our time on this legislation. We can’t really rush it through. We have to really look at each clause. We have to look at what it means. We have to look at the implications. Regulations, as I just mentioned earlier, don’t have the oversight from this Legislature, from all sides of this House. We need to unpack this particular legislation to understand why it matters and to reflect on how it can be strengthened before it actually becomes law. First, to just touch upon why this legislation matters and why the official opposition is going to vote for this at second reading…. It’s important to touch upon those points first, and then we’ll touch upon why we need to do some scrutiny of this particular bill at the committee stage. Regulations are the practical machinery of government. When we pass an act in this House, it sets out broad principles, but it is through regulations that those principles become operational. A lot of times we see a lot of legislation come through this House, but it seems like it’s pretty brief. It seems like there’s a skeletal legislative framework. That is the case because there are a lot of regulations that come after the fact that are applicable to British Columbians. They have significant bearing on British Columbians because they’ve got to follow those regulations. Regulations tell us how a law is applied, when it takes effect, who it applies to, what procedures must be followed. They determine how businesses comply with safety rules, how professionals are licensed, how citizens interact with government. Yet regulations are made not in this chamber, as I mentioned earlier, but by cabinet or delegated authorities, like I mentioned earlier, behind the scenes, after the enabling law has already been passed. So when we discuss a regulations act, we are really discussing how executive power is exercised, how legislative oversight is preserved and how transparency and access to justice are protected. Bill 23 updates the framework that governs how regulations are drafted, as we heard earlier, deposited, published, revised and consolidated in British Columbia. It replaces an outdated structure with one that embraces modern technology, particularly by recognizing official online versions of regulations as legally valid under the Evidence Act. They now become official versions. I spent a lot of time talking about how statutes, when they become official versions, make access to justice easier and how it affects our justice forums in terms of adjudicating cases moving forward. Similarly, with this, regulations sometimes…. People more easily find the statutes. It’s sometimes easier to find statutes because people know about those statutes. But sometimes people are like: “What are regulations?” Then they try to find those regulations, and sometimes it’s cumbersome to actually find those regulations. Sometimes you find them and they may be in the wrong version when you present them to the adjudication forum, and that may prevent you from making sure that you have fairness in your case when you want to be heard. I think having an online version that’s an official version is even more important for regulations than it is for statutes. Statutes — a lot of people know about them. A lot more people talk about them. But regulations? Sometimes people forget about them, that they exist too. Sometimes you forget about their nature, or sometimes you have a hard time actually finding them. We hear a lot about laws, and a lot of people refer to statutes as law, but there’s not a lot of discussion that happens about how there are regulations too. For that reason — regulations are, in a way, hidden because less people are talking about them and there’s less knowledge about them — it makes even more sense to make sure that the regulations have an official version and that the online version is the official version for them. In short, to the extent this bill talks about digitizing the regulations and recognizing the official version being an online version as well for regulations, that’s about trust, transparency and access. It’s about ensuring that British Columbians can confidently rely on the online laws and regulations that they read and that what they see on the government website is indeed the law of the land. Bill 23 complements Bill 22. A lot of times…. If you’ve read Bill 22 already, that helps you understand Bill 23. As we saw from Bill 22 — we just recently debated that — Bill 22 deals with online versions of statutes. Bill 23 deals with online versions of regulations, the next layer of law, if you can call it that. Bill 23 allows regulations and their consolidations, when published on the government’s official website, to be treated as official versions for evidentiary purposes, with similar legal recognition for materials adopted by reference, such as technical codes, standards and maps, as was earlier referenced. So there’s similar legal recognition for items that are connected to the regulations when published on a new government platform, such as this official website where you will be able to see these regulations. Updates to procedures for drafting, depositing, publishing and revising regulations — this bill brings that in line with digital reality. This bill also outlines terminology — for example, changing Queen’s Printer Act to King’s Printer Act — and incorporates a number of housekeeping and procedural reforms. Beyond the technical details, Bill 23 raises broader questions. Who ensures that these regulations are properly drafted and publicly accessible? It’s one thing putting it in this act that this is going to happen, but what’s the mechanism behind it to make sure it will indeed happen? What happens when a mistake occurs? I know there are some clauses that talk about when there are typographical errors and how they will be amended, but there needs to be a little bit more discussion and explanation. Noting the hour, I reserve my right to continue with my second reading speech.

1382 words

Lorne Doerkson

Conservative Party of British Columbia

10/9/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

Members, the question is second reading of Bill 22, the Statutes Act.

12 words

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

I rise today on behalf of the official opposition as the Attorney General critic, and I will be making the second reading speech as part of the official opposition. We are speaking about Bill 22, the Statutes Act, 2025, today. In principle, this is a good statute in terms of…. We’re looking at modernizing how we look at legislation, how we’re able to access legislation. That’s an important tool to have. Prior to this bill being introduced, we have had the experience of dealing with original version paper copies from the King’s Printer — prior to that, the Queen’s Printer — and there may be many challenges related to that. I’ve been a lawyer for approximately 19 years now. I practise civil litigation law. You have to navigate the Evidence Act. You’ve got to follow all the rules if you want to submit some evidence. And if you want to refer to law and you want to have judicial notice of that particular law to be taken, you’ve got to properly introduce it. The proper version was the paper copy before, the original paper copy from the King’s Printer. Prior to that it was the Queen’s Printer. But with this new legislation, what we’re seeing is that modernization. One could look at online versions of statutes and may be able to print off that online version, say on a house printer or an office printer, or even use a digital device to take evidence of that specific statute or legislation to a hearing or a court forum. So this actually makes things a lot easier to present cases, and I’m sure legal professionals will welcome this. At first glance, this bill seems to be highly technical, but it represents an important modernization of how our province publishes, consolidates and verifies its laws. In short, it brings our legal publishing system into the digital era. A lot has happened over the last 30 years. We see a lot of work being done over Zoom meetings. We see MS Teams being used. We see a lot of virtual meetings happening. Even in the court system, we see a lot of technology being used. If we were relying on paper copies, what we’ve probably used for the last 100 years, and not going with the times…. That creates a lot of inefficiency. This is a welcomed piece of legislation. It’s something that’s long overdue in our province, and it’s something that prides on innovation, accessibility and transparency. For more than a century, the laws of British Columbia, the official statutes of this Legislature, have existed primarily as printed volumes published by the King’s Printer and, like I said earlier, the Queen’s Printer before that. Anyone seeking to present law in court or to cite a statute and evidence needed to rely on official printed copies. Today with Bill 22, the government proposes to bring official online versions of statutes and consolidations admissible as evidence under the Evidence Act. In other words, for the first time, British Columbians will be able to rely on official digital versions of our laws, accessible from the government’s website, with the same authority as printed copies. That may sound simple, but it carries major implications for access to justice, legal certainty and transparency in our legislative process. Let’s get more into the substance of this legislation. I’ve touched a little bit on the main purpose of this legislation, but Bill 22 does some crucial things here. It recognizes online versions of acts and consolidations as official, meaning they can be used as evidence in legal or administrative proceedings. It’s important to mention that we do have many forums to adjudicate legal cases here. When one looks at how the cases get decided, where this evidence goes and where you can use these now online versions, we have the formal courts, which is the Provincial Court. It involves small claims court, as well as criminal court. It involves family court. Then above that, we have the Supreme Court, and then we have the Court of Appeal in this province. In addition to the courts, there are also a lot of administrative tribunals that look at cases and look at evidence. They closely follow what the courts use as procedure, but they also use their own rules. This will allow greater flexibility. Some of those tribunals that we see…. We heard earlier this week about the Civil Resolution Tribunal, and the Civil Resolution Tribunal has been given a lot of authority as well. A lot of those proceedings are actually online proceedings, so it makes sense. If you are now having online proceedings, you should also, maybe, have online-based evidence that you can introduce to those online proceedings. In addition to that, in this province we also have other tribunals that look at cases daily, such as the residential tenancy branch, which hears a lot of issues related to tenant and landlord issues. We also have WorkSafe. We have the tribunal there. We have federal tribunals as well. In terms of applicability, this applies to the provincial statutes. It’s great to know that this tool will be available after this law comes into force. This bill also updates and clarifies the long-standing roles and responsibilities of the King’s Printer and the chief legislative counsel when it comes to preparing and publishing laws. It’s absolutely crucial to know. It sounds good to say, “Look, we’re going to have these online versions available,” but we also have to look at the framework that actually allows for all of that to happen. Having a look at the King’s Printer and having a look at how the legislative counsel works is also something crucial to look at — something that this particular bill does. Thirdly, this particular bill modernizes and aligns other related statutes. I believe the references were made in regard to the King’s Printer Act and the Interpretation Act and the Evidence Act to reflect today’s digital reality. As I mentioned earlier, up till now only printed copies produced by the King’s Printer — prior to that, the Queen’s Printer — were considered official. That was fine in 1975, but in 2025, the whole process of deciding cases has totally changed with the times. It makes less and less sense to actually rely on archaic ways of presenting evidence. The law that governs us should be accessible to the people as easily as possible. It also shouldn’t be locked behind subscription fees or limited to printer editions. In today’s day…. Back ten or 20 years ago you would have certain segments of our population that were less likely to use online versions or use computers. These days everybody seems to be using internet tools, so this was a very important thing to do. Bill 29 allows British Columbians, whether they’re here in Victoria or Richmond or New Westminster or Prince George, to have the same access and to present official legislation directly from their digital device and, as I said earlier, even printing it at home. This will probably bring a lot of peace of mind, knowing that what’s on your digital device carries the same weight as what would be an original version from the King’s Printer and paper copy. It’s not only an improvement in terms of how you look at statutes and how you look at digital statutes; it changes the game in terms of how you present your case and how you present evidence in regards to proving what the law is. So this is actually…. It seems very simple. The idea seems quite simple, but it has some significant, prominent positives flowing from this. It will really affect and help the practice of law, moving forward. Especially in a time when we want to make our courts and tribunals and administrative tribunals more easy to use…. Some people don’t understand how to follow the proper procedures to get the proper evidence and how to present it. That’s a common theme. Even when you go to tribunals, a common theme is that the evidence wasn’t presented properly, or the evidence wasn’t given in time properly, or the evidence wasn’t served in the proper method properly. This goes to the heart of how to present a case involving legal authority. This is a big step forward in democratizing access to the law. In a nutshell, access to justice begins with access to the law itself. How can a person follow the law if they cannot easily find or trust what the law says? One should be able to find the law at their fingertips rather than ordering a piece of legislation. By giving online legislation official status, we make the law more transparent, more accessible and more responsive to the needs of citizens, lawyers, businesses and the courts. This change will particularly benefit people in rural communities. It will benefit students and self-represented litigants. That’s actually a very common theme that you hear within the court system. Sometimes you hear that there’s a backlog in the courts because there are self-represented litigants and they don’t necessarily understand all the procedures. They don’t necessarily understand how to present their evidence. A lot of legal professionals say that one of the reasons why the court system may bog down is because the self-represented litigants are actually taking some time to understand how to operate within our justice system and move their cases forward. When you have a tool like this, legislation like this, it actually makes it easier to access the evidence and say: “Here’s my evidence. It’s on my digital device. Please take notice of this.” It makes things very simple for self-represented litigants. In addition to who else it will probably benefit…. I mentioned rural communities, students, self-represented litigants. It can help journalists and also small business owners, amongst many, all of whom rely on online resources to understand their rights and obligations. This bill also ensures that digital accessibility features such as hyperlinks, as the Attorney General mentioned earlier, alternative text for images and historical references can be integrated in the official law without affecting its legal meaning. That’s an important point. Bill 22 makes clear that these accessibility tools are not editorial only. There’s actually a force behind them, as well, when you look at their online nature. They don’t change the substance of the law, but they make it easier to navigate and understand. Some of the clauses in regard to this particular bill I’d like to just go through, just to give a sense of what’s in this bill. I’ll walk through some of the clauses. Clauses 1 and 2 lay the foundation of defining terms such as “consolidation” and “official website.” The official website is obviously important to understand because you’ve got to know where this online version is going to be to read the law. Consolidation is also important to understand because sometimes there’s consolidation of legislation, and you should be able to understand that as well. A consolidation is the version of an act that includes all amendments currently in force as of a given date. In other words, it’s the up-to-date version of the law. This bill recognizes there are three types of consolidations — initial, updated and point-in-time consolidations. This is critical. It means users can look at the law as it exists today or as it existed on a particular date in the past. This capability, sometimes called a point-in-time law, is essential for courts, lawyers and even historians who may need to know what the law said at a specific point in time. Clauses 3 and 4 deal with the processes or process of publishing acts. After a bill receives royal assent, the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly must send the act to the chief legislative counsel who then provides a copy to the King’s Printer for online publication. This process ensures a clear and traceable chain of custody from the Legislature to the public record. A lot of times, people have questions. How are these laws made? How do they get to the place where finally you’re going to be looking at them? So when this bill sheds some light on these procedures or these processes, it shows the transparency in this, transparency in terms of how these statutes may go online. Clauses 5 and 6 are about correcting minor and technical errors. They allow for small editorial corrections to be made. For example, fixing typographical errors, formatting or cross-reference errors. However, these corrections must be confirmed by the Legislature. They’re not totally clear, so some of the questions at committee stage that I will be asking will be around these particular sets of clauses here as well. Going further, in clauses 7 to 13, they cover the preparation, publication and correction of consolidations. These provisions codify long-standing practices that have evolved in the legislative counsel office and put those clarifications forward. Like I said, it’s important to understand not only that these will be official versions of the law when they go online, but it’s also important to understand how the process works. Once things get passed here in the House, how does it all work? And how does the law get to that online version? I guess the most important clause in this particular bill, to me anyways, is clause 14. It establishes what makes a version of an act official. If it’s official, then you can use it as your evidence. An act or consolidation is official if it is in a prescribed format and includes a statement approved by the chief legislative counsel indicating its official status. This gives courts, lawyers and citizens confidence that what they’re reading online is the law, in fact, not an unofficial summary or a third-party version. We talked about hyperlinks earlier, and clause 15 actually touches on that. Clause 15 allows for accessibility features and information features such as hyperlinks, alternative text. That’s an important feature to have because it allows you to navigate the law in an easier way. Clause 16 talks about if there’s a conflict between the new Statutes Act and the King’s Printer Act, the Statutes Act will prevail. Clause 17 exempts the act from section 5 of the Offence Act, meaning no one can be prosecuted under this act unless the act itself specifies penalties. Normally with these types of bills that are very administrative, very clerical in nature, bills that are setting up administrative procedure, a lot of times we see that the Offence Act does not apply. It doesn’t provide quasi-criminal penalties to it. That seems to be in line with other types of legislation that are kind of similar to the procedural quality of this particular bill. Clause 18 gives the Attorney General authority to make regulations under this act, so it talks a little bit about that. Remaining parts, 5 onward, are mostly housekeeping and consequential amendments. For example, a housekeeping-in-nature example would be they update outdated references like, say, from “the Queen’s Printer” to “the King’s Printer.” Going further, this bill is more than just a technical update. It reflects a larger shift in how government views access to information. We hear on a regular basis that — I don’t know what the exact term is — we’re on an information technology highway. There’s some specific term to that. But it shows that we’ve had a major shift in how we approach access to information. That’s a positive sign, and that’s a positive precedent led from this particular bill. For decades, governments have published laws in print form, but as a society, we moved online. Citizens began relying on digital versions, and sometimes from unofficial or outdated sources. That really complicated things because people thought: “Okay. Well, this is a government site, and there’s legislation here. Let’s go use it.” Then they’d find out you can’t use that version. You should have ordered the proper version. That could have delayed the case or affected the case, or maybe you wouldn’t have been able to present certain evidence in your case. That could have led to a procedural injustice there. Although it seems very minor in nature, what this bill does actually has very significant positive outcomes for what will be achieved. It’s important to make sure that we keep flowing in this direction of modernization. There are some potential questions and considerations that I will be exploring at the committee stage of this particular bill. Although I agree in principle with this bill and I support this bill in principle, there are certain questions that I will have at the committee stage of this particular bill. In regards to those, how will the government ensure that the older point-in-time consolidations remain available and accessible in the long term, even as technology changes? How are we going to make sure that, no matter what, we’re going to have access to all the old statutes? Say if we want to go back 60 years, if we completely change to digital…? I know that you’re still going to have access to the King’s Printer, but what this particular bill signals is that we’re moving in the modernization direction, that we’re moving in a digital direction. It’s going to be important to understand that if we are moving forward, we will still, on a permanent basis, be keeping some paper format, some access to hard copies somewhere. If somebody wanted to research it, if they still can’t find it online, they should be able to find it somewhere. What safeguards exist to prevent cybersecurity risk or tampering with online versions of the law? We see…. In the era of AI, which is fast evolving, we hear about cyber risks, we hear about cyber fraud. We hear about…. What do they call those? The emails when somebody just masks the name of somebody else and they send an email and somebody thinks that’s an email from the actual source. Lawyers have actually dealt with this. The Law Society sends out notices to lawyers: “Hey, watch your emails because somebody may copy your email and send it to someone.” And they also tell receiving lawyers: “Look, make sure you actually pick up the phone and call the other side before you send over funds to the other party, because this could be a fake email.” So now when we’re dealing with law, we’re moving to an official version of being online. We want to make sure that someone can’t just fabricate that or change it around and then be able to take it to a court or a tribunal and say, “Hey, here’s the official version. This is what the law says. This is what the words say. And my case hinges on these particular words,” and then getting some sort of outcome. I know that would be fraud. You shouldn’t be able to do that, but that is still a concern. How do you prevent that from happening in the future? Are there some safeguards in regards to that? So that will be an important item to explore at committee stage, what protections there are in terms of, say, cybersecurity. Then another important factor just popped up while I was reviewing the legislation, and I thought about it because we’re talking about the King’s Printer. We’re talking about a chief legislative counsel. We’re talking about what is happening here in the Legislature, and we’re talking about getting these versions in different spots. How will the chief legislative counsel and the King’s Printer coordinate to guarantee both accuracy and timeliness in publishing? We want to make sure this stuff gets published on time, in a timely manner. We don’t just want to say that we’re bringing this legislation. We want it to have some teeth. We want this to actually happen. We want the digital official versions to be all there for people to look at. Finally, what outreach or education will be provided to ensure that lawyers, judges and the public understand that online acts now carry legal authority? Now somebody presents a digital…. Here’s a digital version of the law. Everybody needs to understand that. All the legal professionals need to understand that. Will there be some sort of educational training, or will there be some press releases from the government saying that, okay, this has happened? Sometimes not everybody looks at those press releases. We want to make sure that everybody who’s going to work with this online version of this law or statute understands that’s available and what that actually means now. These are not just criticisms, but they’re important due diligence questions to ensure that in modernizing access, we do not compromise certainty or integrity. In conclusion, Bill 22, the Statutes Act, 2025, is a thoughtful and overdue modernization of how British Columbia publishes and authenticates its laws. It respects our legislative history, strengthens access to justice and brings our legal infrastructure into the 21st century. By giving digital access equal footing with print, it puts the law quite literally in the hands of the people — accessible, verifiable and transparent. We will be supporting this legislation at second reading today, but we have some questions at committee, and we will be looking through this legislation in detail at committee stage.

3553 words

Lorne Doerkson

Conservative Party of British Columbia

10/9/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

Thank you, Members. We’ll call this House back to order and ask you to take your conversations outside, as we’ve got business to attend to. This morning we will be opening debate on Bill 22, the Statutes Act, and I will recognize our Attorney General to begin that debate and introduce the bill.

53 words

Hon. Mike Farnworth

BC NDP

10/9/2025

Bill 22 — Statutes Act

In this chamber, I call second reading of Bill 22, Statutes Act.

12 words