Public Accountability and Reporting (PARP)

Introduction to PARP

The Public Accountability and Reporting Program monitors the governance of B.C.’s eight regulated agricultural sectors.

Each board or commission must evaluate and publicly report on its performance every year. These annual reports must show how they meet BCFIRB’s governance and strategy expectations. The PARP program:

Promotes public trust and informed decision-making
Tracks whether board and commission decisions align with marketing policy and the public interest
Provides consistent, comparable data over time
Helps farmers, producers, policymakers, and the public understand how each regulated sector is performing

There are two types of reports:

Summary reports (compiled overview)
Individual board/commission reports

Summary reports

These reports combine data from all sectors’ individual reports to give a province-wide view of governance and quota management.

What’s in the summary reports

Each PARP summary report is organized into five main sections:

Sector summary: gives an overview of how many producers there are and how much they produce in B.C.’s supply-managed and regulated sectors.
Performance targets: shows the goals set by each board to guide the future of B.C.’s regulated agriculture. These targets help support better decision-making by the boards, BCFIRB, and government.
Governance: explains how boards operate and make decisions. Governance is measured in four areas: Decision-making, Governance tools and practices, Financial accountability, and Stakeholder consultation.
Quota management and movement: explains how quotas in supply-managed sectors are assigned, used, tracked and changed. It includes information on the sectors’ quota holdings, production, growth, and movement.
Appendices: includes detailed data for each commodity sector, such as maps, tables, and charts. Contains detailed producer and production information for supply-managed and provincially regulated commodities.

Individual board and commission reports

Each board and commission provides its own yearly PARP report. Use the links below to view each sector’s reports.

How PARP started

PARP was created following BCFIRB’s 2018 Quota Assessment Tools Supervisory Review. That review looked at BCFIRB’s 2005 quota policies and directions to see if they still supported sound marketing policy.

The review revealed that there wasn’t enough data or objective evidence to assess board-recommended changes. To fix this, BCFIRB directed boards and commissions to start publicly reporting each year on how they manage quotas and whether their practices continue to serve the public interest.

BCFIRB also directed that quota reporting should be part of a broader set of reporting expectations and performance measures around board governance, developed in consultation with all boards.

Developing PARP criteria

In 2018, BCFIRB began working with all boards to develop clear criteria for reporting on:

Sector performance targets
Governance practices
Quota management and movement

Feedback on drafted measures and targets

In May 2018, boards and commissions provided feedback on the draft measures and targets:

Continuous improvement

Each board was asked to provide a public report to BCFIRB on these targets and measures by June 2019.

After reviewing the first round of reports in winter 2019, BCFIRB met with the boards to gather feedback. Based on that input, BCFIRB updated its performance measures and created new reporting guides and templates for the 2020 reporting period.