Legislative Assembly of Ontario

The House met at 10 o’clock, a.m.

Prayers.

Mr. Speaker: Orders of the day.

COUNTY OF OXFORD ACT

Hon. Mr. Irvine, on behalf of Hon. Mr. White, moves second reading of Bill 95, An Act to restructure the County of Oxford.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. R. F. Nixon (Leader of the Opposition): I don’t know whether I can take this enthusiasm at this time of the morning, with all the members so anxious to hear my remarks on this bill, including the Minister of Revenue.

Mr. V. M. Singer (Downsview): All 10 Tories.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: We’ve discussed regional government in this form many times before, Mr. Speaker. This bill is just another step in the Conservative design to regionalize the province and to change the system of local government in a way which we in this party are not prepared to support. We have not supported it in the past and we will not support this bill.

Hon. A. K. Meen (Minister of Revenue): Inflexible to the end.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I intend to oppose it on three bases, all three of which the minister is familiar with, except the first; that is, that the minister is justifying the introduction of this bill because he said it is unanimously accepted by the three councils in which he has confidence in the county of Oxford.

There was a time when the member for Chatham-Kent, (Mr. McKeough), the architect of this policy, was prepared to stand up publicly and say: “I am prepared to take the tough and unpopular decisions.” He was ridiculed by opposition members and some of his own supporters for putting his own judgement ahead of the judgement of those people in the community who were to be served by the new method of local government. But at least he had the strength to say: “It is a decision of the government and it is a decision that I am prepared to impose.” He even used that word on certain occasions many years ago.

Naturally, the people to be affected by the new means of local government did not like their future to be imposed by a cabinet minister who perhaps did not, in the opinion of the people affected, have a corner on all knowledge and all good judgement.

But now that has changed. As a matter of fact, it was about a year ago, when there was a series of by-elections in the province -- and the minister may recall that in Huron where my good friend, Mr. Riddell, was elected on behalf of our party --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: -- and Mrs. Campbell in St. George -- but at least in Huron one of the issues was regional government.

Hon. Mr. Meen: And it was a red herring.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: It may have been a red herring, and yet the hon. minister who interjects must surely be aware that if he has his way Huron will be regionalized just like Haldimand and Norfolk and every other part of the province. He must also realize that the people of Huron do not want regional government; that’s why they voted against his party and for the Liberal Party. It is an issue, whether he realizes it or not.

Following that, the Treasurer of the day, who is the present Treasurer (Mr. White), indicated quite clearly that he was drawing back from the government position on regionalization. He seemed to be quite timorous; so it was a surprise to many people when he went forward with the introduction of five new regional government bills last spring. It seemed to fly in the face of the lesson of that particular by-election. We debated those five bills here, and those areas are now regionalized; I’m going to be referring to them very briefly, Mr. Speaker, when I refer to the cost of regional government, a subject that is of great interest to me and of great interest to the minister, because he talks about it frequently.

The situation in Oxford, though, is quite different from that which prevailed previously. The ministry is not now prepared to say that this is government policy and we are going forward with it, even though there is objection. The minister has said -- and I have heard him say it -- that regionalization will go forward only at the request of the people concerned. This is a strange position to be taking when the ministry has for so long rejected any thought of a referendum or any kind of an approach to the people concerned by way of a vote.

I recall discussing the Hamilton-Wentworth situation with the Minister of Revenue, who formerly had the responsibility for municipal affairs. He was good enough and energetic enough to come down to a number of meetings, where he stated clearly that it would go forward only if he were convinced that the majority of the people wanted it.

I have never been able to find out how he was so convinced; certainly the meetings that I attended and the reports I read in any of the newspapers concerned with the area were anything but convinced that the people wanted it

I think that this is a red herring, a phrase that the minister has already used in his interjections. To say that the people of an area are crying out for regionalization is ridiculous. Certainly they are crying out for some changes in the attitude of the government at Queen’s Park, who continue even through regional government to dictate decisions in planning, education and the provision of medical services by way of budgetary control. They refuse to take the strings off the grants that are available to the local municipalities.

I am sure that if this bill becomes law -- and I suppose we might as well be realistic and expect that it will -- that even those who favour regional government will find that ii they go on into regional council, they will have even more trips to Toronto to consult with the ministers and get not only their opinion but their approval on the day-to-day business decisions which, in our view, should surely lie with the initiative of those elected at the local level, rather than at the beck and call of the ministers in their elaborate office suites who hand down the decisions for those they consider lesser than themselves at the municipal level.

Now, I am most serious when I talk about that criticism, because one of the justifications that the ministry has put forward for regional government has been that finally decision-making powers will flow to the municipalities concerned. Just the opposite has been the experience. The regional chair- men flock to Toronto at regular intervals on every possible decision that they, themselves, should be empowered to make.

It is actually something of an embarrassment to find that people, who are now receiving substantial salaries and who have, through regional government, been empowered supposedly with the responsibility to take decisions within their own hands and in their own council, come supplicating once again, often to the Minister without Portfolio (Mr. Irvine). He will give them a general answer until he checks with the Treasurer -- who, of course, isn’t here this morning -- who is sort of the sub-architect of regional government; a man who makes it clear, embarrassingly clear to those of us in the House, that he considers the Minister without Portfolio and the Minister of Revenue his servants in this regard.

Now I have heard of a policy structure, a senior minister who establishes policy, but if I were the two gentlemen in the brown suits sitting opposite, I would somehow feel a certain tremor of embarrassment as we see and observe these two ministers going to the Treasurer and saying: “What about this, John? What should we do with Toronto? What do you think?”

They know if they don’t go that way, he will reverse them in a minute. He will reverse them without a qualm, because he knows in his particular position, and with a funny kind of an independence which he thinks is the strength of his particular brand of democracy, that he can reverse his colleagues at a moment’s notice and has done so on more than one occasion in this very session. We have been embarrassed by the ministers opposite because of this.

But it’s a funny chain of command, Mr. Speaker. With the establishment of a regional government -- in this case a reformed or a re-established county, which I choose to refer to as a regional government although it is smaller in size -- that the powers that are going to accrue to those areas are not going to give the independence that a reformed municipal system must surely have.

So, the first point of objection has to do with the minister’s contention that he has canvassed the area and, in his opinion, the people want this form of government.

The second objection has to do with the costs of local government. Our experience -- and I will dwell on that briefly in a few moments -- is that regional government, or the changes that the government has brought forward by way of policy at the municipal level, has led to unconscionably increased costs having no relationship with the improvements of services rendered to the local taxpayers.

The information on this -- using the minister’s own figures if he chooses to use those, but all from the same source; the statistics have come out of the old Municipal Affairs ministry.

And, of course, the last point is the most important of all; that we believe this approach to regionalization makes local government insensitive and remote to the residents of the area.

I have those three points to make. I want to just bring to your attention, Mr. Speaker, some specifics as to the minister’s rather dislocating comment that the people in the area want regional government. There is only one way to find that out, and that is by referendum.

The policy of the government is not to govern by referendum, and I can see some sense in that in the day-to-day business of government. But surely if they are going to reject that approach, the ministry should not be saying that the people want it, because there is no way that they would know that particular piece of information. I am a member from the area, and I say it’s wrong. I know there’s another member, representing another part of Oxford -- the larger part -- who may have a different opinion; and I suppose these matters can only be tested I at the polls. But this test is now many months, perhaps years away.

I would say the issue that the government is going forward with regional government for Oxford because the people want it is ridiculous. It is not based on any factual material and in this particular case is substantially misleading. I personally regret that the government is not taking the strong stand the present Minister or Energy (Mr. McKeough) used to take and say, “It has nothing to do with what the people want. We believe it is best and therefore we are going forward” because essentially that is the motivation for this bill.

The minister has gone through the most elaborate convolutions in order to make it appear to a superficial observer that the people in the Oxford area are clamouring for the advantages of higher taxes and) insensitive service from their local government.

The minister indicated in his original announcement that the three councils in the area in which he had some interest and concern had all voted in favour of regional government and therefore he had unanimous support to proceed. He referred to the vote of the city of Woodstock, which voted six to two in favour of regional government. He referred to the vote of the town of Ingersoll, which voted in favour of regional government; it was a tie there and the mayor broke the tie in favour of regional government. He happens to be a very able man indeed, a man whom I agree with in many matters of political philosophy but I happen to think he is wrong in this regard. On the other hand, he had to break the tie for the town of Ingersoll so that the minister could stand up in this House and say “we have unanimous support.”

Then we get to the county of Oxford, the area substantially being affected. The members of the county council, as the minister knows, voted 23 to 16 in favour of regionalization. I won’t take the time of the House, Mr. Speaker, to go over the history of the debates in county council leading to the committees examining this which certainly had a tremendous impact on politics locally. I am sure there are those, particularly the member for Oxford, who can recount the details of this if he so chooses. It has been a dislocating procedure indeed and one which was particularly galling to those in the municipalities which make up Oxford county when they found that a number of their representatives on county council did not express the views of the elected members of the municipalities concerned.

The minister, in replying to that, said it didn’t make any difference to him; that the reeves went to county council and expressed their opinions but they expressed their opinions as individuals, surely, and not as reeves. They expressed their opinions as members of county council, that is true, but not as reeves of their municipalities when it surely was their responsibility to express the views reflected by, if not their local ratepayers and residents, at least the other elected members of their municipalities.

The information has been made available to the minister with the signatures of the elected members of the municipalities appended. It is as follows as far as Oxford is concerned: North Norwich township, five members against; East Oxford, five members against; West Oxford, five members against; Dereham, five members against; West Zorra, five members against; Embro, five members against; Blandford, four members against, one member for.

As a matter of fact the reeve of Blandford, supporting this at county council, brought about such an objection as far as his own township council was concerned that one member resigned in protest.

South Norwich, four members against, one member for -- that was the reeve; Beachville, four members against, one member for -- that was the reeve, I believe; Norwich, three members for, two members against; North Oxford, four members for, one member against; East Zorra, five members in favour; Blenheim, five members in favour.

I draw to your attention, Mr. Speaker, that the warden of the county, who is also the reeve of Blenheim township, is in your gallery this morning. Certainly we welcome him here along with some members of the council and the staff of that area.

Tillsonburg, seven for regional government, one against; Tavistock, five members for regional government; East Nissouri, five members for regional government.

If you add those up, and the minister is very concerned with these totals, 37 elected municipal councillors were for regional government; 46 against. If we include the votes of the council of the city of Woodstock and the votes of the council of the town of Ingersoll, we get 46 elected councillors in the city and the other municipalities of the county in favour of regional government and 51 against.

I don’t want to make a big thing of this, because I am prepared to accept the minister’s statement that this is not to be decided by referendum. But if he is prepared to stand in this House and say he has unanimous support from Oxford favouring regional government, then I simply must go on record as rejecting that as a complete misrepresentation, a distortion of the facts and an attempt to fulfil the policy laid down for the minister by the Treasurer.

He finds himself in the ridiculous and embarrassing position of trying to speak for the author of the policy, who isn’t even in the House and doesn’t even attend the meetings, who simply says, “This is what we are going to do. You do it. You arrange it. You look after the votes. If they suit you, report them; use them any way you choose. Say you have got the support of the county, because I as Treasurer have said that we will not go forward without this support.”

It is ridiculous and it is unworthy of the government. If they are going forward with regional government, as they are, they should at least have the strength of moral character to do what the former Treasurer (Mr. McKeough) did and say: “We believe that it is in the best interests of the area. It’s a matter of government policy, and we are going to do it.” Rather that than pull this threadbare cloak of local acceptability over it. It is ridiculous and, I say again, it is unworthy of the minister and the ministry.

I would like to say further that the costs of local government are my second serious concern. The minister and I have had a substantial difference of opinion as to what these costs are. He has resented the fact that, throughout the province, I have been seriously critical of the level of escalation of costs in those areas of the province that have been treated to the tender mercies of this government through the enactment of regional government.

Now the figures come only from one source, whether I use them or the minister uses them; that is, the summary of financial reports of municipalities, which is published each year. Unfortunately, the last report is for 1972; so we cannot bring them up to date as far as we would hope. We have examined the figures carefully -- and I am prepared to use the minister’s figures in this regard -- and I want to put them before you briefly, Mr. Speaker.

It is true this bill does not deal with the regional government of York or of Ottawa-Carleton, but the people in Oxford surely can expect the same treatment as the other regional municipalities have received over these years. I just want to take five minutes to tell you, sir, what the record is.

In Ottawa-Carleton, according to the minister’s own figures, municipal government expenditures were 14 per cent higher in 1969, the first year of regional government, than they were in 1968, the year previous. The cost increase over the first three years of regional government was 59 per cent. After four years of regional government, costs were 81 per cent higher than the year before regional government was introduced, an average of 20 per cent a year.

In Niagara, again using the minister’s own figures, the cost of operating the counties, cities and other local municipalities in 1969, the year before regional government was imposed, was $43.9 million. In the first year of regional government costs jumped 28.4 per cent to $56.5 million; the escalation continued in the second and third years, so that by the end of two years, costs were up 51 per cent. A year later, expenditures had risen by 62 per cent over the 1969 figure.

Mr. R. Haggerty (Welland South): And with little improvement in services.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Perhaps I should just say something here about Niagara, because this really was the laboratory for regional government. I can well recall that before the election of 1971 -- it was just at this time of year and we knew that an election was coming in the fall -- Niagara was bringing forward, I believe, its second budget; and they were in real trouble. The minister of the day got up and special legislation was passed, giving him the right to award special grants as he saw fit. He went down there, six weeks before the election, with a cool million dollars of our money in his pocket. That is, the money of the taxpayers of this province. He handed it over to the council of the Niagara region in order to make that council get over the election period without the budgetary problems that truly belonged right there. Then he went with another million dollars to York, to Muskoka and to Ottawa-Carleton, to do the same trick.

I’m not prepared to say it was a lousy trick, because the people in the area couldn’t have survived the tax jumps that would have accrued if he hadn’t done just that. But it was certainly the crassest procedure to buy the government’s way through an election situation in those areas, which could not have survived without spending $2 million of extra funds taken from the Treasury -- raided from the Treasury of the Province of Ontario -- to make it work for that period of time.

Let me go on to talk about York region.

Hon. D. R. Irvine (Minister without Portfolio): Mr. Speaker, would the hon. member mind repeating the third year for Niagara? I didn’t hear it. I just want it clarified.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Let’s do it from here:

The escalation continued in the second and third year, so that by the end of two years costs were up 51 per cent and a year later expenditures had risen by 62 per cent over the 1969 figures.

You talk to the taxpayers down there. Every one of them can show you tax bills that have shown the increased costs -- and those tax bills do not take into consideration the tremendous infusion of funds from the provincial Treasury. And, believe me, it’s been difficult to get from the ministry the figures which show the net costs to the taxpayers of the Province of Ontario of this policy, because there have been no adequate presentation of these figures.

Mr. W. Hodgson (York North): What service was taken over?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: It’s been like pulling teeth to get the information out of the government. And I can well remember the mayor of one of the lower-tier municipalities, who was a strong working Tory, coming up into the Brant area to convince us that we should have regional government. The first question put to him was: “What happened to your tax bill?” He replied: “That’s irrelevant, because we’re concerned with improved services.”

How often have we heard I the same argument: The costs are irrelevant.

An hon. member: Where are the improved services?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The arguments are that we’re getting the economies of scale. All we’re getting is a nice tame group within each of these regions’ that is prepared to come to Toronto for advice on each and every decision that this government wants to dictate. And the centralization of powers has been completely unconscionable and’ continues apace, even though we are moving forward with further regionalization. Let’s go on to York.

Municipal government expenditures jumped 51 per cent, from $21 million in 1970 to $31.7 million in 1971 during the first year of regional government [The first year!] and despite massive provincial subsidies, taxes had jumped by more than 19 per cent after two years of regional government, from $29.4 million in 1970 to $35.2 million in 1972.

That is in spite of the additional money that the Treasurer had put in his pocket -- no, it was the former Minister of Municipal Affairs, the member for York Mills (Mr. Bales). He put it in his pocket and went up there to York and I gave it to them to tide them over their election problems.

Mr. W. Hodgson: Tell the whole story.

An hon. member: What does the member mean?

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Mr. W. Hodgson: Tell the whole story.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: We will. We will.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Mr. W. Hodgson: It didn’t do the Liberals much good in the last election not to tell the whole story.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. If I may, we’ll call on the member for St. George.

Mrs. M. Campbell (St. George): Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like at this time to introduce into this House a grade 7 class from Jesse Ketchum Public School in the riding of St. George, and they are accompanied by their teacher, Mrs. Sawchuk. Would you welcome them, please?

Mr. Speaker: Would the member for Brant care to yield to the minister?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Of course.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, I want to clarify whether the hon. member -- as I understood him to begin with -- is quoting figures that I have used, or is he quoting figures that he has got from the ministry?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: In Ottawa-Carleton and Niagara -- those are the only areas where the minister has objected to the figures I have used -- I’m using his figures. He can check these out. They came from the same source as his -- “Summary of Financial Reports of Municipalities.”

Hon. Mr. Irvine: They may come from the same source, Mr. Speaker, but they don’t add up the same, because the hon. member doesn’t --

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The minister can check them out. He can check them out and make his own speech, then.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: And I think the hon. member better reference his remarks and say where he got his figures and not say that I gave them to him.

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I didn’t make any statement regarding York, or any other municipality. And the member is not talking to the bill anyway.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: All right. Let’s go on to Muskoka -- and before I do, let me make it clear that the figures for Ottawa-Carleton and Niagara are the minister’s own figures. All right?

An hon. member: That’s right.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: In Muskoka in 1970, the year before the district municipality of Muskoka was created, municipal government costs were less than $4 million. A year later. municipal expenditures had increased by 76 per cent to almost $7 million --

Mr. Haggerty: That’s not bad.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: -- and after two years costs were up by 116 per cent, to $8.5 million.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Taxes also soared, despite provincial subsidies; and we know that Muskoka is always treated very well indeed by this House, very well indeed. Taxes soared and were up by 45 per cent in the first year of regional government -- $3.7 to $4.4 million was the increase -- and by 76 per cent between 1970 and 1972. That is an increase of $6.4 million.

Now it’s not for us to debate what these various regional governments have done. Very much like county school boards, the first thing they do is decide they have to have a new regional government centre, just like the county school boards have done everywhere. They buy the most expensive land, plan the most expensive building and then build it twice as big as they need it; because after all, regional government is big business, you get to go down to Toronto to talk to the minister all the time; very big and important indeed.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: But what happens to the people who pay the taxes, who are living on the concessions and the side streets? They are the people who suffer. It’s easier for this government to deal with regions, but it’s not easier for the man and woman who pay the taxes to deal with regions.

Now let’s go on to Waterloo. The cost of services assumed by the regional municipality increased by 36 per cent in the first year of regional government. The province paid only one quarter of the $1.8 million start-up cost and the balance was added to property taxes in the region. The police services, for example, were taken over by the region and this allowed the OPP to decrease their detachment by five men. But it required 43 new regional police officers costing more than $300,000 to take their place.

Now this has happened in all the regions. I am delighted to hear that the minister is going to offer an amendment, I believe -- is it in the bill or is it an amendment? He is at least going to leave the OPP there for a while. But from people who report the minister’s comments, I wouldn’t count on them sticking there more than a year or 18 months.

Mr. Haggerty: The minister knows that very well.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: It’s just a little sop thrown to the people who are objecting saying: “Oh you don’t want regional police? That’s fine; you don’t have to have regional police, because the ministry is always reasonable, always prepared to talk; and we will let you off this hook for a year.”

The minister didn’t say a year, but I will bet there will be an amendment changing it in short order, because this is very costly. I have heard the minister say many times it is unfair for the OPP to provide this service. I know his views, he will not allow a region to go without regional police or county police, or whatever one chooses to call them, for very long. This is just one way to pour a little oil on the troubled waters for a very brief time.

The figures on the budgets of the regions created last year are just coming in. We haven’t really heard from Haldimand-Norfolk in any great detail. We have been hearing what’s going on out in Peel.

The member for Halton is here. He has no doubt read the reports of the various problems in that area. I just want to refer to one, and that is Durham, because I know the minister and the Treasurer have been concerned with Durham recently. As you are aware, Mr. Speaker, Durham region was expecting an average 28 per cent tax increase based on the regional government levy after provincial grants. This was reported in the local press, in headlines, that after $1.1 million of special grants, the taxes will still go up by 28 per cent in the whole of the Durham region. These estimates were approved by the regional council on May 22 and were reported.

I raised the matter in the Legislature and I was quite surprised at the Treasurer’s response. He said -- I should have his actual quote here -- however, the impression I got from him, at least, was that he was very concerned too and was going to do something about it. Well a few days later council approved a levy of approximately $8.4 million, substantially reduced, which should result in a tax reduction throughout the region.

The figures were arrived at, as far as I can gather, as follows, Mr. Speaker: The hon. Minister without Portfolio has decided to provide an extra $920,000 out of this special fund that the ministry seems to have somewhere in a back room that they can dip into when pressed far enough. There will be $920,000 in transitional grants; and evidently the Treasurer himself, who has been approached by somebody, had tentatively promised, subject to approvals of people beyond him -- I presume the cabinet -- to provide an additional cool $1 million for the region if the region would cut its costs by that amount which, of course, it agreed to do.

We don’t know what the tax rate in Durham is going to be because obviously the great planners, the Treasurer and the Minister without Portfolio were surprised when Durham came up with a 28 per cent increase in its tax bill even after the government had shovelled in $1.1 million. That’s the kind of planning we’ve been treated to in regional government.

All of a sudden they read in the paper, or there’s a question in the Legislature asking “What about this 28 per cent increase?” They went out to the back room, saw what they had in the pot and came up with approximately $1.9 million extra. Of course, we don’t know whether those grants have been made. There hasn’t been a formal announcement made but we do know that the planning associated with this has been inadequate and it is costing the taxpayers of this province a lot of money.

Certainly the government should assist the taxpayers in Durham but what about the people in Oxford? They’ve been subjected to the same treatment -- “Of course, your grants are going to go up. All you have to do is do what we tell you, come into regional government and you’re going to have this additional money.” I heard the minister say, in Brantford, “If you don’t form a region you will certainly not have the advantages of these additional grants.” I hope the people in that area --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, I did not say that. The hon. member was there and he’s well aware that I did not use the word region. I did not say “If you don’t restructure” or “If you do restructure.”

Mr. E. R. Good (Waterloo North): The minister is playing with words.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: It is entirely up to them whether they restructure or not. I want that on the record.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: That’s good. If the minister doesn’t use the word region, he is going to use restructured county; that is fine.

Mr. Good: It is deceiving the people.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I think as far as we’re concerned, this bill is a regional government bill.

Mr. Good: Absolutely.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The government has abandoned those population requirements which were established irrationally some years ago but the fact remains that the procedures are all regional procedures except for two. Those are that the warden is going to be elected -- I’ll refer to that in a moment -- and the minister is allowing the local police structure to remain largely unchanged for a limited period of time. Although it is clear in the bill that the minister can change that at any time he chooses.

Let’s get back to this point because the minister objected to my using the word “region.”

Hon. Mr. Irvine: No, I just objected to the words that the member used. I didn’t say that.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The point is the minister goes out to these areas and surely I’m not revealing anything confidential because I’ve heard him say this many times -- we’ve already gone over that stuff -- the minister has said, “We won’t regionalize you,” or “We won’t restructure you unless you want.” I have dealt, with that as strongly as I can because I believe that’s poppycock.

The second thing is this; it is sort of a subliminal blackmail on two levels. The most obvious level is, “The grant system remains the same unless you do what we tell you,” and there’s the feeling, “Gosh, we had better get on this bandwagon.” The bandwagon leads to more money from this Treasury, that’s true -- it could lead to a lot more money from this Treasury -- but the costs locally go up by far more than those increases. The taxpayers at the local level are still carrying those increased costs and the minister knows it.

The other kind of blackmail is even more difficult to cope with and that is the feeling: “Boys, you had better get on the bandwagon. You don’t want to be left behind. When we have our meetings of the regional chairmen down here you don’t want to be just some old-fashioned little county council doing a job for the people. How can you possibly compete with these restructured regions when you’re giving your views to the government of the Province of Ontario?” That is another kind of blackmail which is misleading, frightening to those people at the local level and totally wrong.

We have found -- I have even mentioned Muskoka; it’s a rather small constituency, for example, but it is always treated very well indeed by this House.

Mr. M. Cassidy (Ottawa Centre): Rather small? It is minuscule.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: What we really want is the feeling that the people do have some control over their own future. There was an interesting question asked in Brantford by the mayor of Paris, and the minister almost laughed at him. The mayor of Paris said: “We don’t have any problems that we can’t solve under the present system as long as we are given sufficient powers by the province to accomplish that.” His feeling is that things are going well and that our municipalities are functioning well and are sensitive to the needs of the people.

I mentioned Paris. Let me just talk about that. We had a flood up there, and it went through Brantford, Cambridge and Waterloo. The mayor of the municipality of Paris visited every flooded home on the Monday morning after the waters receded enough so that he could get there. He was down in the cellars, in those flooded basements, talking to the citizens concerned and looking at their freezers and food that had been spoilt and all the rest of it. At the same time, the regional chairman of Waterloo wasn’t in the region for a few days, but the first thing he did was to come down here. I think that that is typical. Chairman Young is a very able man. His first thought was to come down here to Queen’s Park and get the money to fix it.

The first thought of the mayor of the town of Paris, a very small municipality of 6,000, was to get out and talk to the people who were affected. I wouldn’t probably be unfair if I said he wanted to talk to those people individually and also wanted to see the damage that had actually been done, because it is true there are going to be a lot of bills coming in to the flood relief fund for payment. The mayor and members of that council will have seen what the damage was themselves and not just be shuffling papers and handing out dollars to certain applicants who probably don’t deserve it, while those who do need the help are going to go unassisted.

I think that small instance is an indication of what’s good with small local government and what’s bad about big local government. I really believe that and I hope that the minister will comment on the view.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I will.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: All right. The last point I want to make has to do with the down-grading of local government by this procedure. It is an attraction to locally elected people who can look around at other regions. I hope I’m not being unfair when I list -- not in order of importance -- one thing. They say look at what happens to the money they get. Look down at Haldimand-Norfolk and those people are not overpaid. Certainly the chairman isn’t compared with chairmen’s salaries elsewhere. I don’t know who we have to thank for the fact that the chairman of Haldimand-Norfolk only gets $18,000 a year, compared with the almost double that amount that other chairmen get. I’m sure I don’t know who we have to thank for that.

Mr. J. R. Smith (Hamilton Mountain): And chairladies.

An hon. member: Chairperson.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: One chairlady or chairperson, all right. The municipal politicians look around and say they really don’t have to be too afraid of regional government, because the only thing that happens is that it becomes largely a full-time job for the regional councillors, with a very large increase in salary. They get to come down to Toronto to talk to the ministers all the time to find out what they should do. They come to these important meetings where they sit down with other regional chairmen, and it’s almost like another parliament.

Mr. J. R. Breithaupt (Kitchener): The members are never involved.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: That probably is in the mind of the Treasurer. He loves to go and sit in the Provincial-Municipal Liaison Committee, an excellent committee indeed. He spends more time there than he does in the Legislature relatively. He is sweetness and light. Anything that is suggested he will certainly look into and try to do.

Mr. Breithaupt: He is in charge there.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: He comes into the Legislature and he is either white-lipped and trembling because there is not enough federal money to pay his bills or he feels that the position taken by the Opposition is stupid and simply can’t be considered. He’s got a complete arrogance that shows in his contempt for this particular Legislature. So he’s going to make his own legislature where there are people who think he’s great and people who will respond to his undoubted attractive personality and charm. It’s a strange thing.

Mr. Cassidy: Not this minister.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I think that liaison committee is an excellent forum, but it is in its own way leading a change in the power structure of this province away from the elected members of the Legislature to something else and I think that we’ve got to be concerned -- at least we’ve got to be aware of that.

Specifically regarding Oxford, when I say we are down-grading local government I simply bring to your attention, Mr. Speaker, that although Bill 95 calls for a two-tier system those people who are elected to the lower tier will find themselves almost unemployed. The bill specifically enables them to build sidewalks.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s all.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I don’t know how many sidewalks are going to be built in Blenheim and Blandford, but no doubt some.

It specifically gives the lower tier responsibility over some drains -- not the major drainage system of the county, and in a rural area, of course, this is of great importance and local sensitivity; that’s at the upper tier. The local people can deal with the individual farmers who want to put some tiles in to drain their fields. That’s the second thing.

And it gives them responsibility over some roads. Of course, the regional system or the restructured county system will have the present county roads under it, and most of the other roads presumably or a lot of the other roads, so that it will simply be some of the side roads and concessions that will be left and the regional council will be dealing with everything else.

We looked at this when the Peel regional bill came in. We said at the time what the government was setting up was a one-tier system. Of course, it had a second tier of three municipalities in Peel, but in fact all of the power was at the top. The same is true in Bill 95. Essentially the government is constructing a one-tier system with what might be called wards, so that the representation on the regional council is going to be distributed according to a formula that is established in this bill. The government is going to have very much the same attitude by the local people as they presently have to the county school boards.

Certainly the county school boards do an excellent job in, let’s say, administering education from a business basis. Their budget is huge. They have to hire very-high-priced talent to tell them what to do. The same thing is going to happen in these restructured counties; it is going to be the directors and the other civil servants who form an entirely new level of bureaucracy who make the decisions.

The elected members of council are going to come in and say, “Gosh, what’s your opinion against that persons? After all, we are paying him $35,000, maybe $40,000; he’s the person who should know. I’m just newly elected. I had better sit back and not impose my view very much.” That’s what happens in the school board, and we have seen the resultant deterioration in the quality of education and the escalation in the costs of the provision of those services.

The government is going to find the same thing in its restructured counties -- that its regional councils have all the power but they are going to find that they have to hand that power over to their bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is designed to fit hand in glove with the bureaucracy down here.

An hon. member: It’s the same people.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Seventy thousand people who tell the ministers what to do. They are, well, largely the same people who are presently moving into the regions in those high-priced jobs. With all of the charm and ability that these well-educated, well-experienced people are going to have, they are going to turn the province into a bureaucracy and a technocracy; which is the last thing that local government should have.

What the government is imposing on the municipalities is a series of little Queen’s Parks, and obviously we don’t want that. We’ve got enough big government now. We’ve got big government here with a budget of over $8 billion in the Province of Ontario and 70,000 employees. Now the government is moving down into the municipal level. The decision has been made that with all of the charming reversal of the old McKeough policy, the Conservatives are going forward with regionalization and they won’t stop, unless the people stop them, until the whole of the province has been treated to this kind of so-called reform.

I believe that it should be rejected by this House, that it is not in the best interests of the people concerned. I am not saying that we in this party are just against the way regional government is coming forward, but we in this party are against the principle of regional government along the policy lines that were first laid down by the present Minister of Energy and now by the Treasurer and his spokesman, the Minister without Portfolio (Mr. Irvine). I am just coming to the conclusion of my remarks, Mr. Speaker, but I do believe that if we move forward with the restructuring of this county, it is going to spell the death of local government as we know it right across this province. I have pointed out to you, sir, that even though you are going for two-tier systems, the power is all at the top and the lower tier is nothing but a sham where the centralization of decision-making is going to be balanced, according to this bill, with all of the blame being taken by the local councillors at the local level who have no power to change things. A big bureaucracy that fits hand and glove with the Queen’s Park model, spending money on salaries and officers, and they in turn accepting decisions from Queen’s Park.

I would leave things alone in Oxford, with one exception. I believe that we must have city and county-wide planning. That is the only area that justifies the changes that have been brought forward in this bill. The minister knows my opinion in this -- that we should be prepared to recognize that in the county of Oxford they already have a substantial history of tradition of co-operation between the major urban centres and the rural areas, in their health unit, in Woodingford Lodge, then- social services, the county library, Children’s Aid, and now they have moved towards city and county-wide planning.

In my opinion, we should have a new planning law here which requires that sort of planning but does much in addition; it would enable the planning goals to be established locally within a broad plan for the Province of Ontario and give the local planning authorities responsible to the councils the power to implement that plan. We should get out of the veto position that the Treasurer, who calls himself the chief planner of the province, has maintained for himself over these years and who has strengthened in that position since Mr. Davis became Premier. The centralization of decision must be reversed -- and this applies to the budgetary controls in education and in health. We must be prepared to recognize that the autonomy of the local municipalities requires the deconditionalization of grants -- and I don’t mean any restricted list but by granting the power to the elected councils to in fact make mistakes, subject to correction through the normal democratic process in their own area. With big brother here watching over every clerk-treasurer, every councillor, every reeve and every warden, then of course there is always the tendency to refer to Queen’s Park. We cannot establish the kind of autonomy at the local level that is going to be meaningful unless we reject this type of reform at the local level and accept the strengthening of autonomy along the lines that I have put before you, Mr. Speaker, in these comments this morning.

So we are opposed to the principle of this bill and to many of the features of its detail. We believe it is a mistake. We believe it is unnecessarily costly. And, more important than anything else, we believe it undermines the basic strength of local government by imposing the decision-making powers of Queen’s Park over the responsibility and good sense of the local elected officials.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. member for Ottawa Centre.

Mr. Cassidy: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I want to make a few comments on this bill and particularly on what the bill implies as far as the future of rural life in the province is concerned. I must say, Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that the reason so many councillors from the rural townships of Oxford county were upset about this particular bill was because they have had no guarantee and no indication of interest on the part of the province that their future, that their lifestyles, that their communities, will in fact be allowed to remain.

We have seen over the past two or three decades in this province, Mr. Speaker, the continued depopulation of rural Ontario under this government. It has gone on year after year, farm after farm, village after village. The old people may stay; the young people move to the towns. They move to the cities. They move to Toronto.

They have got to move. It isn’t just for education they move, they move because that is where the jobs are. There has been no effort at any time by this government to halt rural depopulation, to ensure a viable option to people to remain in their home communities, or if they wish, to return to their home communities after a few years spent in urban centres for education or for the excitement that some young people crave.

It is no wonder, faced with that kind of consistent attitude by the government, that so many people in Oxford county were reluctant and reticent about the proposals put forward by the government and by the study committee for the restructuring of Oxford county.

When you look at the bill that has been created, Mr. Speaker, which we are also going to oppose, you will find that the worst fears of these rural townships have been realized, because there is now no viable local government left as far as the five or six rural areas of Oxford county are concerned.

There is a certain amount of viability left in the councils that are provided for Woodstock, Ingersoll and Tillsonburg. But as far as the others are concerned, gravelling a few concession roads is about the only thing that they will have to do. They will have no power over water, over sewers or over the main roads within their area. They don’t have recreation programmes, and health is already at the county level.

There will be literally nothing for those local township councils to do, except preside over the depopulation of their particular area in favour of London to the west, Cambridge and Waterloo to the east, Toronto farther to the east, and possibly the watching of a certain amount of urban growth in the three urban centres of the county.

Not only that, Mr. Speaker, but people in the rural areas are faced, as is usual in these affairs, with a very unhealthy and unknown financial commitment which is involved with the introduction of restructured county government. In all the documentation I have seen -- the study paper, speeches by the minister, the county restructuring programme and so on -- there is not a word about the financial implications of the restructuring that is going on -- not a word. People are being asked to simply take it on faith and are being told: “Look, we will pay for your first election.” Big deal. The cost of the first election in Oxford county may be $40,000, $50,000 or $80,000. It is a very small pittance in return for what people may be losing.

The grants will go up to a certain extent. That’s fine. But the grants will go up by $2, $3 or $4 per capita, depending on the degree of sparsity grant and other things like that. We don’t even have the figures for that, Mr. Speaker, but we do know that the per capita expenditure of regional governments across the province is somewhat more than $200, and it is rising at a rate of eight per cent, nine per cent or 11 per cent per year.

We also know that the per capita cost of county government and of township government is a heck of a lot lower than it is in restructured municipalities in the regions we have been creating. That is true for people who live in the rural areas of Ottawa-Carleton, say, the new region of Cambridge or the regional municipality of Niagara, just as it is true for people who live in the urban areas.

But there is nothing about that. There is just a promise from this minister, who has got to be one of the less trustworthy ministers in the government, to trust us. “It is going to be all right, boys. It is going to be all right” and then --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I appreciate every compliment the member gives me.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, I knew the minister would. You know, Mr. Speaker, I am sorry that I haven’t been able to go down to Oxford county to talk to people there. I talked briefly with the warden --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: They’re not sorry. They’re happy.

Mr. Cassidy: What’s that?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: They don’t want the member. I can tell him that.

Mr. Cassidy: Is that right? We’ll see about that at the next election.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The member will have trouble finding a seat.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, this has been like a poker game in which one side, the province, has all of the cards and keeps on saying to the other side: “Okay. How far are you willing to go?” It’s been like a bargaining session.

In the course of the proposals for local government reform, which were published by the province in April, it was clear how far the people of Oxford county were prepared to go -- and that wasn’t as far as the province wanted them to go. The gun was then put to their head by the province which said, “Now we want you to go further. We want you to allow water and sewer services to be taken over from the province. We think that probably police ought to go over pretty shortly. We want a county fire co-ordinator who is going to have a lot of powers. We are going to dissolve your police villages but we will give you a few things in return.” Even some of the bargain’s that were proposed in this particular document are not present in the final legislation.

If one wants to be very specific, the people of the county of Oxford have been sold a bill of goods over local management and administration of their water and sewer services, which were specifically put in this study paper which was endorsed by the county council. That was put in but it has not been put in the legislation since the legislation was only introduced eight or 10 days ago. It is pretty tough as it is so often tough for people to come to grips with the details and to find out that they have been short-changed and led down the garden path by the government on the issue which was the crunch issue, as far as a number of those municipalities were concerned.

Mr. Speaker, in labour-management bargaining and all other kinds of bargaining as well, you get to a position where both sides have reached an irreconcilable last position. In this particular case, the province said, “We want water and sewer services to be at the county level,” and the municipality said, “No, we want to keep water and sewer.” Then eventually somebody said, “With so much else agreed upon, can’t we agree on this one?” And so the municipalities were led to agree up to a situation which, if I can quote from the report, says specifically policy control of water and sewer services would be put at the regional level, but the administration and the maintenance would be at the local level.

As you read this document, Mr. Speaker, you will find the government was double-dealing because there are sections in this document which don’t lay out that same agreement in the way that it is put earlier on in the report. Nevertheless, the people were led as far as they wanted to go, went as far as they were finally willing to go and then the province took them even further.

The county restructuring programme which is now being put forward by the government is the regional government programme under another name. It applies to smaller municipalities and to smaller areas. The large urban areas as the Treasurer has told us in the past, have already been structured. We have got regional government there for good or for ill. We have been very unhappy with the way in which the government has administered it in many cases, and that is one of my major complaints about this particular bill as well.

We have a county of 80,000 people lying midway between two rapidly growing urban areas. The province comes along and says, “Okay boys, we want you to restructure.” The Treasurer went before the Association of Counties and Regions of Ontario eight or nine months ago and said, “As far as we are concerned, here are the minimum things that we want to see, we think.” He mentions water and sewer services, arterial roads, planning, health, welfare and capital borrowing. He says on Oct. 29, 1973, and I quote: “In addition to these seven functions there is the question of police protection. As with the regions, an additional grant will be provided to a county operating its own police force.” He weasels on that one. He doesn’t say whether he wants the regions or the counties to take over police or not, but he indicates pretty strongly that he probably does. Then he says, “Let me repeat that the ideas I have put forward here are not government policy and should not be regarded as commitments on anyone’s part.” At that time, there was an appearance of flexibility as far as the government was concerned, but it has become very rapidly clear there was no real flexibility. There was only the form and nothing more. All of those seven powere were required in the province’s hands, to be at the upper level in order to qualify as a restructured county.

The process seems to be open and maybe it was, very temporarily, but now it’s gone past cabinet approval it is no longer open. The results are closed and any thoughts that this is a tentative programme, any thoughts that there may be other patterns in which powers remain decentralized in restructured municipalities within a county system, are obviously out the window. The Treasurer and his sidekick are not prepared to accept that.

One has to look at the results. The county of Oxford is the first model off the line of the government’s assembly process for these newly- restructured counties. There are about 25 still to go, I understand, on eight or nine of which there are studies under way. Lesson 1 is that the results of the study committees are going to be overloaded or are going to be severely changed by the government when it applies its priorities to what local people had thought were to be their priorities.

The final study report on Oxford county says specifically, and I quote from the government report:

There were problems in the areas of garbage disposal; industrial waste disposal; the demand for more urban land which resulted both in amalgamation negotiations and annexation disputes; the conflict between good land use planning and planning for assessment and the planning and the construction of roads.

These were the problem areas in Oxford county. If one looks at the powers which are being given to the regional level, one sees that the powers go far beyond those which are necessary to satisfy the conflicts being experienced in the county and which people were able to anticipate in the course of the final study on Oxford county.

There is no mention about problems with water. There is no mention about problems with sewage. There is no mention of problems with police; no mention of problems with fire. There is no specific response to the questions about assessment. Other techniques could have been used in order to stop people from planning for assessment and in order to permit the joint planning board for the county to be strengthened and to carry out the planning function in a way which would, perhaps, take it over for some of the townships which didn’t want it and would supplement the work being done by the larger municipalities.

If one step alone had been taken in addition to the reduction of the number of municipalities in the area -- that would have been to have the county collect industrial and commercial taxes so that the industrial and commercial assessment would have been shared right through the area rather than being concentrated in two or three areas -- that step alone would have effectively stopped the planning for assessment, would have permitted good planning to have come forward and would have solved that particular problem.

What we’ve got, Mr. Speaker, is a restructured government; let’s call it a regional government because that’s what it is. It is a regional government which has more powers than any off the regional government assembly line until now. Let me read that distribution of powers into the record:

The county will have sole responsibility for water; for sewage; for arterial roads. It will have all responsibilities for planning, including zoning. It will have health. It will have welfare. It will have daycare. It will have capital borrowing. It will, temporarily, not have the powers to take over the police but will ultimately have the powers to take over the police. It will run the libraries. It will be responsible for fire co-ordination which, according to the government’s document, includes the creation of a single county communication system which effectively co-ops the fire equipment of all municipalities in the county, and therefore means the takeover of fire protection. It will have emergency measures. It will have partial responsibility for parks, it will have waste disposal and it will have transit.

The local people just won’t have much left. Temporarily they will have police, or they may have the police; they will have licensing; they will have local roads and concession roads; they will have sidewalks, for those areas that have them; they will have recreation programmes, for those areas that have them; and they will have a certain degree of control of fire protection, for those areas that have it. They will have shared responsibility for parks, for those areas that have them; and there is some kind of phoney decentralization of the water and sewage responsibility, which I must confess I simply cannot understand from the legislation.

As the government itself said in its report in the final study paper: “It may be felt desirable,” said they, “to minimize the number of people sitting on the local councils, given the added functions that have been recommended to be performed by the new county council.”

In other words, Mr. Speaker, the local municipalities are being stripped of so many powers that you may as well not even pay people or have many people on them because they won’t have anything to do. The only people who will really have anything to do on the local councils will be the mayor and the one councillor, in the case of every one of these municipalities, except Woodstock, who sits on the restructured county council.

Now Mr. Speaker -- I am trying to find the words about water and sewage here; let’s see now. The province says in its paper -- and I hope Gardner Church is here:

The area municipalities or public utilities commissions could be contracted to exercise responsibility in the area of meter reading and billing for water services. The administration of the county water system could be decentralized to ensure that the actual maintenance is at a local level; the actual repair and construction of watermains and laterals, including contracting, could be performed through local offices. If the county or city or separated town requested that such a decentralization be made mandatory rather than permissive, the legislation would specify that area offices would have to be used wherever a water or sewer system exists.

Now that’s a phoney decentralization, Mr. Speaker. That isn’t simply policy decisions at the regional level and then administration locally. No; the whole schmear, the whole running of the water and sewer systems would be at the area level.

And that it is confirmed, when you look at the sections in the bill that relate to water and sewer services where they say specifically -- if I can find it -- that while the county may enter into agreements with any person or municipality with respect to any matters provided for in this part, they say specifically that on and after Jan. 1, 1975: “No area municipalities shall have or exercise any powers under the Act for the supply and distribution of water, including the financing thereof.” And the same phrase is used in relation to sewage.

Well that means, Mr. Speaker, that there is effectively no control at the local level as far as sewage is concerned.

During the course of the study report, Mr. Speaker, the province also referred to the question of the disbanding of the police villages; and it said then that it recognized what police villages have done, it was sorry it was having to disband them, but something else was needed in their stead; and therefore it says that it recommends that the eight police villages be dissolved.

That’s not the region that is suggesting that, this is the county -- I beg your pardon, this is the province. But the Oxford study committee recommended that community advisory committees be established in the existing police villages to advise the council of the area municipality. There is no mention of those community advisory committees in this legislation, Mr. Speaker.

Last night we had the minister saying he was trying to anticipate problems by putting paragraphs in legislation even if people weren’t prepared to take them up at this time, by putting permissive powers into legislation. I suggest that permissive power should exist and should be put into the legislation. I would feel that it ought to be mandatory, but even if it were only to be permissive, it ought to be in this legislation rather than awaiting an amendment at some future date.

We are still awaiting such an amendment, in the case of Haldimand-Norfolk I think it is, and possibly in the case of the regional municipality of Niagara, and it hasn’t come forward yet.

The report says that the legislation about community advisory committees would not compel the area municipality to establish such a committee, nor would the area municipality be permitted to transfer or delegate any of its statutory responsibilities to such committees.

Well this is nonsense; this is nonsense. It is about time, Mr. Speaker, that we began to develop a philosophy of the way in which restructured government will work which ensures that as much power as possible is decentralized rather than being centralized. We don’t disagree with the idea that there should be a planning responsibility at the senior level or at the upper tier of government within the restructured counties of the Province of Ontario. We don’t disagree with that.

We do disagree though with this obsessive desire by the province to bring so much power into the hands of the upper tier, and to leave the lower tier virtually powerless to do anything. The minister would reject, and we would have severe qualms about, any theory of government which said that the township or lower-tier municipal councils could delegate their representatives to the county council and tell them what to do. I find that one very difficult to accept.

But right now they don’t even have any advisory functions to the upper tier; and the upper tier will exert almost all the powers that are to be exercised by government in the county of Oxford under these particular proposals. It’s as powerful as any other regional bill. The distribution of power says that the 83,000 of Oxford county will be governed by their upper tier and that the local tier, or the lower tier, will be purely decorative and will do only a few things and will effectively have no say in influencing the kind of life that people lead.

There’s one other matter I wanted to raise on this, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the government is making a serious mistake in the proposals related to the warden of the county of Oxford. I hope that they reject it now; and I hope that they withdraw it when we get to future restructuring bills.

The proposal that is made here is that the warden must be elected at the local level every two years, but that he will have to vacate his municipal seat in order to take the warden’s job. Now, that means that for a period of two years after his appointment as warden, he’s divorced from the people who elected him -- he’s divorced from them. Maybe the minister has an amendment on that. Is he about to -- well, we’ll have to see what the amendment is.

As it stands, it’s just completely asinine and it misunderstands the basis on which politicians have their support. It’s reminiscent of the old rule that they used to have in the Canadian parliament, that once a man was sworn into the cabinet he had to resign his seat and stand for re-election.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: They had that rule in the Legislature.

Mr. Cassidy: They once had that rule in the Legislature, as well. I, frankly, don’t think it’s a good rule at all. I don’t see that the problems of governing the county of Oxford on a full-time basis are so onerous for the warden that he can’t also exercise his functions as a representative at the local level.

It seems to me that if the minister wanted to introduce an amendment which said that any person who became warden of the county would be permitted to resign his position as mayor of one of the townships, or one of the area municipalities, and that the area municipality would then be able to appoint somebody else to fill that position, while the warden continued to sit on the council of that particular municipality, that that would be an acceptable kind of saw-off -- recognizing the responsibilities and recognizing the confusion that might be entailed if, say, the warden of Oxford were also the mayor of Woodstock; I could see a problem there.

To force the guy off council would mean an increase in parochialism, rather than a decrease. Because in order to ensure re-election at that municipal level in two years’ time, the warden would have to put more favours in the way of the people he used to represent than if he was also sitting on their local council and they could see that he was still working on their behalf as their local representative. To have their representative as the warden of the county would be an honour; to lose him as their representative would be a disservice. I hope that the amendment will satisfy that particular problem.

Mr. Speaker, we think that the government ignores the financial realities that will be entailed with this particular form of regional government. We think there are far too many powers that are unnecessarily going to the upper-tier level of government. We think the warden’s election is wrong and we think the government is simply sneaking in a new form of regional government while telling people in the counties who have reacted so badly and so negatively, for good reason, to regional government in the past, that this is all a new face, that they are putting on a new face.

The government is not putting on a new face at all. They are doing the same old thing. They are making the same old mistakes. The government has failed in any effort it was trying to make to bring forward a new philosophy of government restructuring for the counties in less urban areas in the province of Ontario.

Mr. Speaker: Any further speakers in the Liberal Party? The member for Essex South.

Mr. D. A. Paterson (Essex South): Yes, Mr. Speaker, in rising to take part in this debate on the restructuring of the county of Oxford --

Mr. Haggerty: Is the member for Oxford (Mr. Parrott) supporting the bill?

Mr. Paterson: -- I wish to echo the words of my leader and concur in all his remarks. In the past three weeks, Mr. Speaker, I’ve had occasion to speak in the county of Essex and the county of Kent, which are just going into studies for the restructuring of their particular counties, and have made remarks to various organizations including police groups.

When I do speak in relation to this I always preface my remarks by indicating that I and my party are opposed to regional government, especially as it has been imposed in the past by the ministry. I have spoken in the vein that I would hope that the local and municipal officials for their own future will take the initiative and attempt to do some restructuring on their own, possibly in advance of even these restructuring studies.

I reject this particular Bill 95 on two basic principles. The first is the acceptance by the elected officials in the county of Oxford. This was not near-unanimous, as has been indicated by the minister. These facts have been detailed by my leader and I think nothing further needs to be said in that regard.

I think the thing that concerns me most and is the greatest disappointment to me in this bill, is that it is called a restructuring, but really in fact this supposed two-tier system really leaves no power whatsoever for the lower tier -- the area municipalities that are really closest to the people. It has really stripped them and the existing municipalities of all their current powers, which are limited even under today’s structure of government.

Being a Liberal I do see some good points in the bill and I’ll speak to these, as well as the points that I think are wrong. I view this with the thought toward my own county of Essex that I had hoped that it would be restructured into six or eight area groups. I note in the Oxford bill that the existing 18 local municipalities will be reduced to approximately eight. I think this is a move that is in the right direction, provided the agreement of the local residents and the local councils can be garnered ahead of time. Unfortunately this has not really been done to my satisfaction in this particular instance.

This is why I have been speaking in my own county to try to get public opinion starting to work to get the people to realize that things are happening in the province and this is going to be confronting them within the next several months.

There is one point I would like the minister to clarify in his remarks and this comes from a speech I made in the municipality of Wheatley, which is on the border of the two counties of Kent and Essex. Wheatley is part of the county of Kent, but it would appear from the many people with whom I have spoken that their ties are really with the major municipality of Leamington in the county of Essex and there is some move that they should be included in the Essex county study on the restructuring of government as well as in the study of Kent county to which they belong. I just wonder if it is possible to shift a municipality right on the border line into another county under the restructuring procedures. I think it would be helpful at this time for the edification of the residents of the area and the councils so concerned for them to know this.

One of the disappointments I have in the bill is in relation to the restructuring of the county council. I note they are going to be given all the expanded powers and so forth of a regional government itself. In my speeches I have tried to avoid the use of the words “regional government” and tried to deal strictly with the word “restructuring.” But certainly I would hope that, with the restructuring, those areas that are restructured would have the benefit of the financial car- rots that have been dangled by the budget and ministerial statements in the past.

One of the good points is in section 8 of the bill, whereby the mayor or mayor-elect of a municipality now will sit on county council. I think this is a long overdue reform. I have never been elected a local official myself, but in the 11 years I have been a member, I have viewed with a great deal of interest the fact that the heads of the major municipalities in the county system have never been able to go to county councils to say their piece and have had to rely on their reeve to carry the ball on behalf of their municipalities. Therefore, I think this is a welcome change.

But, again, I don’t believe this bill has gone far enough on the restructuring in terms of the numbers elected to the county council. I personally believe in representation by population, and I know I have some support in the county of Essex in this regard, I feel that this can be arranged, as we do here in the Legislature, where we alter the boundaries and so forth based on population. I think that this should be given further consideration. In this regard I am disappointed that this bill doesn’t take the final step.

I do like the thought that the warden is going to be elected, and I understand there are going to be amendments to the bill so the warden will not have to resign his seat from the municipality in which he was elected.

I am a little disappointed in relation to the powers that are being left with the lower-tier areas. It appears to me, as has been enunciated, that they are possibly going to issue dog licences and fix up curbs and sidewalks. I notice one section in here regarding bylaws concerning the regulation of parking. Parking certainly is a prime matter for the small urban areas in a county -- certainly it is in Essex and, I am sure, in the county of Oxford as well. This is always a thorny problem for the downtown merchants, especially in relation to the development of shopping plazas and so forth that has occurred in the past, although I believe this now has been stopped in the rural areas of most townships in the counties.

I agree wholeheartedly with my leader when he states that the purpose of this new county administration basically should be of a planning nature. In the county of Essex I think we are fortunate that most of the jurisdictions being handed to a restructured or regional government are already in force and have been in operation for many years, including the health unit and all the various ancillary bodies, at the county level.

Basically we have these things in Essex, and I follow this particular bill fairly closely to compare what structures are being offered in the Oxford bill that may be advantageous to the county of Essex should it proceed with this upon the desire of the ratepayers and the local councils.

I note in many of the minister’s speeches, and I have used portions of them in my remarks in the past, that there hasn’t been too much mentioned about police forces. I have related these matters to the report of the task force on policing when I have spoken before. I note there has been some change in the position of restructuring from the regular regional bills in this regard, but I don’t think I am in total agreement with what is contained in the bill. There should be some urging of these police forces to come in on an area basis. Not a total county basis, but hopefully the commissions and the councils concerned, along with the individual police forces, could be encouraged possibly to amalgamate in that regard.

I think there is one good section in this, Mr. Speaker, section 72, that does indicate it. This is a major step forward that in those areas within a municipality that presently do not have police coverage the area council may establish a police area and omit these areas. I think this is one of the reasons the costs for regional government or restructured government have been so high in the past, in that the police have had to cover the total area thus requiring more men and more services and so forth. Under this particular clause, it would allow the local area to exempt certain areas and thus negate some of this major cost.

I am quite concerned with the principle of having the county given the sole responsibility for sewage and the supply and distribution of water and the financing thereof, and with the various sections in that regard. I feel this should possibly be left on the area basis within the newly formed structure. In my own area, I think we have moves afoot toward amalgamation and restructuring upon their own forethought. I can’t support the total county concept in this regard.

In relation to the finances, this is something that has bothered me. It did occur in the question period following one of my speeches. What happens to the debts or the surpluses of the various municipalities that are brought together under this proposed arrangement in the county of Oxford, or elsewhere should it occur? Are those municipalities which have a good government and good financial structure going to have to assume the major liabilities of other municipalities that may not have had such good judgement in the past and may be in a bad debt position?

I think this was forcefully drawn to my attention, Mr. Speaker, when I was speaking in Wheatley in Kent county, suggesting that possibly their ties lie within Essex county itself. The former warden of Kent county and the reeve of that municipality said: “We want no part of Essex county because of their debt position and so forth. We don’t want in there.”

This is something that must be taken into consideration when individual existing municipalities are confronted with a restructuring such as is proposed in this particular bill. I assume this holds true with any reserve funds that are being held by utilities, commissions, councils or other bodies, that these will be part of the total financing. I believe section 89 deals with this, that they are all lumped together for the benefit of all and possibly to the chagrin of those who have built up these surpluses in the past.

One other section which I disagree with here is in relation to the transportation system. I believe it is indicated that there is a principle that no area municipality shall operate such a system, that it is going to be the restructured county that will operate it and that all the assets and liabilities of an existing transportation system will go to the county. I can’t agree with this particular principle, because in the area with which I am familiar, I believe an area transportation system could serve the municipalities better than a total county package.

Before concluding my remarks, I would like some clarification on section 134, dealing with utilities commissions. I don’t have that clearly in my mind. It indicates that members of a public utilities commission shall continue to hold office until a date to be determined by the minister under subclause (b); but under subclause (4) all public utilities commissions and waterworks commissions within the county will be dissolved as of Jan. 1, 1975. I would appreciate it if the minister would give me his advice in this regard so it might be clarified in my own mind.

With these thoughts in mind I have supported a few sections of the bill, as I know that they may be beneficial to my own area, but I do reject the principle of this bill because of the manner in which it was brought in; because there wasn’t unanimous acceptance by the various elected officials, let alone the residents of the area; and because, Mr. Speaker, this bill strips the powers from the existing local councils. It leaves very few powers for the lower tier of government, which is closer to the people, and puts most of them in the hands of the upper tier, whose ties in future really will be with Queen’s Park and not with their own citizens.

Mr. Speaker: Do any other hon. members wish to speak to this bill? The member for Scarborough West.

Mr. S. Lewis (Scarborough West): Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to say something about this bill. I was in Oxford yesterday watching the sweep of the federal New Democratic Party to fame and fortune --

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Lewis: -- and the déshabillé and the clear and irresistible demolition of the Conservatives, which is of course just a prelude to the retirement of the member for Oxford in 1975. I noted those things with inner satisfaction.

But I also noted some other things, because I had a press conference in the afternoon with a number of members of the media there and with a number of representatives from various groups, which press conference necessarily spent some time discussing the restructuring of Oxford. That is quite natural; it preoccupies local interest at the moment. It came through pretty clearly that there was enormous apprehension amongst a large number of people in Oxford about the consequences of the restructuring and that the media, such as they were able to read it, were concerned with the implications of the restructuring. Many of us have received a telegram from a group of councillors and elected municipal officials in Oxford, asking that the restructuring not be proceeded with. The National Farmers Union in Oxford met and, with a vote of 100 per cent, opposed the restructuring of Oxford as it is set out in this bill.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: How many was that?

Mr. Lewis: All of them voted against it; all of those who were at the meeting. I didn’t inquire as to their numbers, but I think they were representative of the union membership in Oxford, which is presentable.

It is quite clear from everything one is able to pick up that there is a great deal of opposition in Oxford county, both as yet unexpressed and some of it explicit, to the restructuring bill as it is presently designed. I think the reason for that is because the bill raises all of the questions about restructured local government and about regional government which have begun to harass this province in a persistent fashion over the last two or three years of sculptured remodelling of local municipalities.

I do not have to repeat the effective and useful, I thought, observations that I heard the Leader of the Opposition make as I listened in my own office -- that’s right; I want to tell you that. And I don’t have to repeat the position that my colleague from Ottawa Centre took, which was equally direct and compelling except that nobody over on the government benches would listen to it.

I can very quickly summarize: There is absolutely nothing in this bill which gives the kind of financial guarantees in the process of restructuring a transition which will make anyone in the county of Oxford feel secure about the financial implications of the bill. And it’s as wrong as it can be to continue to press regional or restructured municipal governments through the House in this fashion without making the kind of financial undertaking which the government should make. That is catching up with the government around the province.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The member hasn’t read the bill, then.

Mr. Lewis: I certainly have. It is catching up with the government around the province. And don’t tell me I haven’t read the bill, because the last three years of restructured government in Ontario is a series of squalid episodes, where one month after another or one session after another, a minister gets up to announce increased transitional grants or increased reimbursements by way of amendments to the regional government bills, because none of the provisions in the original bill were financially adequate.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: No way.

Mr. Lewis: Don’t talk to me about the contents of this bill.

Mr. P. D. Lawlor (Lakeshore): Time after time.

Mr. Lewis: Whether it is what happened --

Mr. Lawlor: We spend half our time correcting them.

Mr. Lewis: -- recently in Durham, or negotiations with Cambridge, or what the government did with York or with Niagara or with any of the other regions, it is forever piling in after the event to rescue the chaos it has created financially.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The member admitted himself he didn’t understand local government.

Mr. Lewis: All of us know that, because we participated in those debates in this Legislature. And as sure as I am standing here, after this bill goes through, the minister will be back to us in the fall, or in early 1975 with an amendment to this bill to give him the right to give more grants to the county of Oxford because he will find that the financial provisions of this bill are not durable, that they won’t work.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We don’t need an amendment to give grants.

Mr. Lewis: Yes, I understand.

Mr. Good: He does not need an amendment.

Mr. Lewis: He can do it in a variety of ways, but this is his first restructuring effort of this kind, and where this’ is involved, it wouldn’t surprise me if he came back with a specific amendment.

If the minister wants to do it by way of additional grants, he will do it by way of additional grants. But everyone knows that the provisions of this bill in terms of the financial guarantees are not sufficient to reassure the residents of Oxford that the implementation of this reordered government won’t result for them in abnormally, not to say extraordinarily, high tax increases.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Nonsense!

Mr. Lewis: That is wrong. That’s not the way.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Nonsense!

Mr. I. Deans (Wentworth): It isn’t nonsense.

Mr. Lewis: Well, you know, “nonsense” is an easy epithet to hurl across the floor, were it not for the fact all of the regional government apparatuses up to now have shown the government to be wrong, and we on this side of the House to be right. I am going to come back to that.

The second point is that the kind of guarantees of accessibility which are required when the government restructures local government are nowhere guaranteed in this bill. I want to tell the minister something: that when he sets up regional government or restructured county government of this kind, it should be necessary by law to build in special avenues of accessibility for the residents of the county. One of the things which worries the farmers to whom I spoke, and one of the things which has worried people all over the province subject to regional government, is the sense of distance that is immediately imposed when the legislation is implemented. And that distance isn’t overcome, Mr. Speaker, simply because an individual or a group can appear before a local council or a restructured council or a regional council in order to make submissions. There has to be in these bills, I suspect, a guarantee by law that the various tiers of the council meet on a regular basis for no reason other than to hear public representation from those they are governing. That’s one of the things which is a profound weakness in the whole restructured and regional government apparatus.

The third point, Mr. Speaker, is that in this bill the distribution of power, is in fact perverse; and I don’t have to re-emphasize what has already been said, unduly, but the concentration of power in one tier at the expense of the second tier, in fact creates the kind of centralization which the minister pretends he doesn’t want to create. Now the minister can be blind to what he is doing in restructured government forever, ultimately it will hurt the government electorally; and maybe there is a death wish component in this as there is in so much else which the government is currently doing.

I may say, Mr. Speaker, that one of the things one experiences, forcibly around Ontario, is the extreme sense of alienation, frustration, and in places anger, which the citizens feel after regional government has been imposed. Not solely because of the financial implications, but also because of the experience of distance, the lack of accessibility, the feeling that somehow government has moved yet further away. And unless the government explicitly sets out for its second tier some functions, power or authority of a planning kind which will give people at the local level a feeling that the government is not some kind of efficient centralizing machine, but that it appreciates the value of local contributions, unless the minister does that in his legislation his legislation is a mockery.

The minister is failing in this bill on those three grounds. He is failing on the financial guarantees; he is failing on accessibility; he is failing on the distribution of power. So what has he got left? All he’s got left are a number of mechanical changes which he presumes will work better for the benefit of Oxford.

Mr. Speaker, it’s been said by others that Oxford, as it is here restructured, is really another regional government bill in disguise, and in large measure that’s true.

Mr. Speaker, not very long ago, I think it was just a very few months ago, I visited the regional government of Niagara and I asked the regional councillors of Niagara whether they would meet with me in their council chambers and talk to me about the regional government as that regional municipality which is most often abused by politicians. I may say, with some pleasure, that they agreed to do that. Most of the regional councillors were there and we sat down over a period of an hour and a half to two hours and discussed regional government in Niagara.

I said to them at the outset, Mr. Speaker, very directly, that the New Democratic Party had originally supported the principle of regional government; that we had originally supported the initial regional government bills. We had voted against the most recent five regional government bills -- I think they were Durham, Peel, Halton, Hamilton-Wentworth, Haldimand-Norfolk -- we have voted against those five regional government bills because the experience of Ontario in the interim showed not the implementation of regional government, but its systematic mutilation on the part of this provincial government.

And that therefore -- reluctantly at first, willingly later on -- we began systematically to oppose the bills because they refuse to provide the kind of safeguards, guarantees, reviews, supports -- both financial, administrative, and indeed electoral -- which we felt should be in regional government bills.

And for those reasons we’re opposing this today.

I said to the regional government of Niagara: “I still have this kind of fundamental faith, my party still has, that the conceptual view of regional government makes sense. But I want to ask you as regional councillors to talk to us, to talk to me, about the positive features of regional government.”

And for half an hour or 40 minutes, Mr. Speaker, there was nothing but defensiveness from the regional councillors who were there. And then, suddenly, the whole tone of the discussion shifted. For an entire hour the regional councillors of Niagara, in a fashion which in some ways was quite compelling and in other ways very interesting, began to mount a defence of regional government which made some sense.

Now having said that, let me add this: One never hears any defence of regional government which is plausible in Ontario today, either from the regional councillors or governments themselves, because most of them are frightened, most of them are worried that there is enough opposition out there that were they to defend it uncritically, they would go down. And one doesn’t hear any defence which is plausible from the provincial government because --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Oh, the member just doesn’t listen.

Mr. Lewis: No, I listen very carefully, and in fact I have carefully read the minister’s --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: If the member would stay in his seat he --

Mr. Lewis: -- speeches on restructuring, because I have sought such evidence; but I don’t hear it and I don’t read it. All I read is a plethora of generalities from the minister.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: That is right; the member doesn’t read it.

Mr. Lewis: All I read is a plethora of generalities from the minister -- no substance, no thoughts, no figures. The only figures he has adduced is in response to some figures which were used by the Liberal Party to debunk their percentages -- that’s all the minister has used. And in the process of using his own percentages, he has indicted regional government, because they are so far out of line.

But the minister never talks in explicit terms about the specific kinds of programmes, supports, innovations, positive things which regional government might bring. So I say to myself, and we say to ourselves in this party: If the government mutilates it in the process of implementation, if the minister has nothing beneficial to say after it’s been implemented, if it arouses nothing but public animus in the course of its implementation, what merits are left? It’s not up to the New Democratic Party to make the minister’s bed. He lies in it quite splendidly himself; and we want no part of it.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We wouldn’t want the NDP or the Liberal Party. We don’t want a socialist in our bed.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Does the member for Oxford hear that?

Mr. Lewis: But let me tell the minister, that he is bent on a destructive course.

An hon. member: Is the minister trying to ruin the member for Oxford?

Mr. Lewis: It may be, theoretically, that the government sees restructured government in Oxford as being a useful mechanical apparatus, etc. But let me tell the minister the voters of Woodstock don’t experience it that way; the voters of Ingersoll don t experience it that way; the voters of Tillsonburg don’t experience it that way; the voters in the rural areas don’t experience it that way -- they experience only apprehension, because they know what has happened around the rest of Ontario. And they don’t hear from this government the kinds of arguments which are plausible. I may hear it --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Why doesn’t the member say something sensible for a change?

Mr. Lewis: -- from the member for Oxford at some stage, I suspect; because he has --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The member is more ridiculous than usual. What happened yesterday? Didn’t you have a good day?

Mr. Lewis: Well, I was in Oxford yesterday and I was irritated by the --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Did people not believe him? Something must have happened. The member is ridiculous this morning. And he doesn’t have any more hope there than he has here this morning.

Mr. Lewis: No, as a matter of fact I was at a --

Mr. E. M. Havrot (Timiskaming): The messiah rides.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Cassidy: The minister is getting pretty belligerent.

Mr. Lewis: I was in Oxford yesterday afternoon where, I admit, in 1972 the New Democratic Party didn’t precisely win the acclaim of the electorate.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Lewis: And I was at a rally in London last night which spells the end of the Tories in southwestern Ontario. So I was in extremely good spirits.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: There is going to be a Liberal Party there.

Mr. Lewis: Look, you beggars over there -- don’t heckle me. I have never heckled them. How can they possibly do that?

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Lewis: They know they are not mannerly.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I take it back.

Mr. Lewis: Government members have no sense of the decorum of this chamber.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Lewis: They have no respect for the dignity of this institution -- now listen to what we have to say.

Mr. Havrot: The member for Scarborough West is the biggest ham in the House.

Mr. Lewis: And let the member for Timiskaming not interject so willingly with his absurdities. I want to say to the minister that willy-nilly, whether he means it or not, he is destroying local government in Ontario because of his insensitivity. It’s not so much because of the conceptual design, because one can rescue some positive aspects of that design. It’s not because the government wants to do it deliberately, because it is not made that way. The government is not deliberately crippling local government. But in the process of the implementation it is so insensitive to the anxieties of the province at large, of the voters and the residents at large, is so arbitrary about the things it institutes and is so unwilling to provide the protective supports for local government that it is destroying it.

The government is undermining public confidence in local government. It has done it with regional government, and now it is doing it with restructuring in Oxford. All the responses in the world won’t change that, because those are matters of feeling, of tone, of interaction and of the way in which government relates to people. And they can’t all be measured in dollar terms and in the effortless workings of some bureaucratic machine. They’re registered in human terms. They’re registered in the ways in which people experience the functioning of government.

When farmers see that a councillor will represent an area three times what he once represented; that his accessibility will be even less than it was before; and that the second tier means not a damn in substantial terms; them the farmers say to themselves, as city dwellers say to themselves: what is this creature called local government, this restructured local government?

Now I guess from some bitter regret; I admit that. If one asks me what’s wrong with me, I guess that’s what it is. I suspect it will emerge occasionally this week. It’s partly end of session and it’s partly the aggravation of seeing a legitimate principle of reorganization of government shot to hell by people who don’t understand the way it should work.

This government is going to be on the run about local government right through until 1975. It is going to be subject to criticism right through until the election. It has invited it upon itself. It has destroyed the very mechanism that might have made sense. I don’t subscribe to some nirvana that never was nor to a bunch of little principalities running themselves forever in tiny local units without a more intelligent distribution of services to people. I don’t subscribe to that, that kind of view of the 17th century; but I don’t subscribe to the government’s view either, which seems to be so frontal and which sees restructuring as an assault rather than a process.

Therefore, we oppose this bill as we have opposed the other regional government bills of which this is simply an extension. Without any great discomfort, but with a great deal of irritation, I add that we are again frustrated by it all and unhappy that all of this is happening. It is impossible for the government to recognize that there was some worth inherent in regional government which it has managed, systematically, to dismantle through insensitivity on the one hand and arbitrariness on the other.

We’ll be darned if we’ll support that kind of position. It makes no sense at all. The observations which were made by my colleague, the member for Ottawa Centre, about the actual workings of this bill I think demonstrate that, and the anxieties of the people of Oxford demonstrate that.

The government will have a great machine. It will meet regularly and it will do all of the ritual and symbolic things it’s supposed to do. But for the people of the province, for the people who pay the taxes, who foot the bill, who want accessibility, who want some power, who want government decentralized; for all those people the government thumbs its nose because it is a captive of the fetish of centralization.

It is destroying the organization of government, just as it is destroying economic and social priorities around Ontario, as the government concentrates everything in the Metro-centred region to the expense of everyone else. The mentality that is at the root of that is the same mentality that is at the root of this bill. That’s why it is so profoundly wanting.

Mr. Havrot: The member is just a big ham.

Mr. Speaker: Do any other members wish to speak to this bill? The hon. member for Oxford.

Mr. H. C. Parrott (Oxford): Mr. Speaker --

Mr. Cassidy: We almost had to drag him to his feet.

Mr. Parrott: Not at all. Let me assure you, Mr. Speaker, if there is any reluctance on my part to speak at this time, it’s for one reason only, and that’s because the man over there in the brown suit has a full knowledge of what the local people want. My friend, the Leader of the Opposition, suggested that that brown-suited gentleman did not have those kinds of feelings. Let me assure the members that the people of Oxford respect that man because of what he has been able to do in a very short period of time to come to grips with their concerns. Let me put that very clearly on the record.

Mr. Cassidy: He overrode their concern.

Mr. Parrott: For that reason I am hesitant to speak because I’m sure the minister can do it far more effectively than I.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Why should the member say that? Surely he knows more about what goes in in Oxford than the minister does?

Mr. Parrott: Simply because if the Leader of the Opposition had been in Oxford as he claims to have been, except to be an obstructionist on many occasions --

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Parrott: He takes the stance that he ought to be there to encourage the opposition but how often did he try to come with constructive things and work with the people of Oxford? He is not available to those persons.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The member can’t mean that.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Parrott: I mean it implicitly because I’ve seen the hon. member there many times. He and I have shared the same platform on those very pleasant social occasions, and that’s a privilege, but when it gets to the hard core work of representing the people I know that’s my responsibility. Also, as the member suggested, there is a small portion of Oxford which he represents and I think that’s perhaps symbolic of what indeed is happening right now. That small portion which is divided from the county of Oxford represents, perhaps, the small portion of those who do not understand what is going on.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Quite the contrary. The people in that portion are in favour of it; the reeve is in the gallery.

Mr. Parrott: Indeed he is.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: What is the member talking about, then?

Mr. Parrott: I’m saying the Leader of the Opposition does not represent, in my opinion, the vast majority of the people in Oxford with his views.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: He never will.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I am running in Brant. The redistribution committee is trying to give me a few of the member’s Tory townships.

Mr. Parrott: I think there is a very valid reason for his not wanting to accept that position. I think it is very simply that he would like to flog the horse of regional government rather than deal with this bill, which truly is a restructuring of a county, and therein lies a very significant difference. This particular bill outlines and starts with the county boundaries.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The member has never read a regional government bill before and I don’t believe he has read this one. He is pulling too many teeth.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Parrott: If he is saying it puts more power in the hands of local people, indeed I will have to agree with him. If that’s what he is saying I do agree with him and that’s where it should be.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: It doesn’t leave anything in the hands of the reeve of Blenheim other than that he can build sidewalks if he is a good boy.

Mr. Parrott: I would like the Leader of the Opposition to ask that question directly of him. If he had had the opportunity, which he had, to talk to my friend, the warden of Oxford county, this morning he would indeed deny that very charge; he did to me privately. They have as much power and will have more in their local council than they had prior to this bill.

Mr. Good: The member hasn’t read the bill.

Mr. Parrott: Yes, indeed I have.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Nothing is left but a few drains and some sidewalks and some roads.

Mr. Parrott: The opposition members talk about wanting to support the local decision and that we should have gone to a referendum.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: No.

Mr. Parrott: That was certainly the inference I drew from his remarks. I would suspect that even in his party there are occasions when he has to accept the majority decision; I suspect there are times when he might have had a minority and a very dissident minority. But he has had to come with a majority decision and indeed that has happened in Oxford.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: It is all a matter of judgement and the government is making a bad judgement.

Mr. Parrott: We’ve talked about those times when it’s been rushed; another very sensitive subject. I have read a report by the local area government study committee. Apparently the member for Ottawa Centre did not have that great advantage of reading that one. It was the one done by local people and paid for by local people. The resolutions are from all three of the councils.

Mr. B. Newman (Windsor-Walkerville): And who appointed the fellow who did the studies?

Mr. Parrott: They not only appointed them, but they paid for them.

Mr. B. Newman: And who suggested that he be appointed?

Mr. Parrott: It was a local decision 100 per cent.

Mr. B. Newman: It wasn’t a local decision at all. It was pressure from Queen’s Park.

Mr. Parrott: It was not pressure from Queen’s Park and there is absolutely no evidence to support that.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Parrott: Absolutely none. The member has no concept of what happened.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Parrott: Let me read it into the record.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. You’ve all had an opportunity to make your remarks.

Mr. Parrott: If you would like, I could read into the record this local area government study report, the background and the purpose of it. It very clearly indicates the steps that the local people took during 1970, four years ago. I will read one small section.

During 1970, discussions were held which culminated in the decision in December, 1970, by the councils of Oxford, the city of Woodstock and the town of Ingersoll to proceed with an Oxford area local government study.

That was their decision and there was no influence in that decision at all from Queen’s Park. Let that be very clearly on the record.

Talking about representation, the Leader of the Opposition read into the record the numbers of those who were opposed and those who were for. What he forgot to mention, for instance, in his illustration was the village of Embro with its 600 residents with five votes represents one vote for 125 people. He forgot to mention the town of Thamesford divided by the township boundaries with no votes at all. I think if he would ask those people they might have been a little more favourable because they have some real problems.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Parrott: The member made the suggestion, not I.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: He can’t have it both ways.

Mr. Parrott: I believe that he and I were elected to make decisions and I believe that these county people were elected to make decisions. They are clearly on record as having said, “This is our report. This is what we want.” As their member, I will support that recommendation of the local people.

Mr. Cassidy: There is a clear split in the county between the rural areas and the urban areas.

Mr. Parrott: There is not a clear split in the county.

Mr. Havrot: The member for Ottawa Centre would like a split.

Mr. Cassidy: There is a rural problem because this government has been pillaging the rural areas for decades.

Mr. Parrott: I would certainly not like to suggest that there is no one in this county opposed to this. That would be ridiculous beyond words. There are large numbers.

Mr. Cassidy: It is that which causes serious concern on this side of the House.

Mr. Parrott: Indeed I am concerned myself on that very issue.

Mr. Cassidy: No.

Mr. Parrott: When the day of decision comes we must accept the final decision that their elected representatives decide upon, and that is made very clear in this instance by three resolutions on two --

Hon. S. B. Handleman (Minister of Housing): That’s what local autonomy is about.

Mr. Parrott: -- separate occasions. In other words, there were six opportunities for one municipality to have said to the minister it wished to stop at this stage. On no occasion in six different opportunities did any one of those municipalities say stop. They have said to proceed and to proceed with the plans that we have suggested.

Mr. Cassidy: Aren’t there six or seven municipalities that have said precisely that they don’t want to go into it?

Mr. Parrott: No, the member doesn’t understand.

An hon. member: He doesn’t want to understand.

Mr. Cassidy: The county says no.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The member tor Oxford will please proceed with his remarks.

Mr. Parrott: The member just wishes to distort the figures. I can suggest to him that when he lists the number of people that are represented does he think in Woodstock, for instance, where one councillor represents 3,000 that should be equal to other municipalities where one councillor represents 200? That is hardly a fair way to analyse the situation.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The member is taking the figures to suit his wishes.

Mr. Parrott: Sure the numbers are in his favour.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: He takes them to suit his wishes.

Mr. Parrott: Indeed I have not, to the contrary.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: The minister says he has unanimous support.

Mr. Parrott: Well, indeed there has been.

Mr. Deans: This is a terrible thing to do.

Mr. Parrott: I am sure there will be a lot of controversy on this, almost all of it inspired by the opposition.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Cassidy: Why don’t the back-benchers spark a bit from time to time?

Mr. Parrott: As we talked about the public utilities aspect of this particular bill, one thing seemed to come to mind. Originally, and I think it still is, the concept of power in this province by Hydro was power at cost. It seems to me that the Liberal Party, particularly in Oxford, has changed the slogan by adding one word: “Power at any cost.”

I don’t think they will get to power in Oxford county by going against the wishes of those people who are elected, and I refer specifically to the three larger municipalities. They have done their job. They have done their homework, and I think they have done it well. I stand with the majority of those people. I feel sorry that there are as many as there are who do not support this bill in Oxford. I recognize that. But in the scheme of things, if this does not work, I will be very amazed, because frankly I have a lot more faith in the local elected officers of Oxford county than I see in the other members who have spoken so far.

I believe implicitly that those people will form a strong restructured county government that will work. I think they know that the eyes of Ontario are on them. Indeed, the future of local government is going to centre on Oxford county and on this particular bill. I see this as the opportunity for local government to be strengthened, and it will only happen if we take the direction that we must from those local people.

I would like to mention one last thing in closing, if I could, because I am sure the minister will make many of these points far better than I. But when he was there, he made his points and then we had a meeting of some four or five hours in duration. It was a very difficult meeting, a very frustrating meeting, because all of us realized there were things in this bill that we didn’t like. There are things in this bill that I don’t like. But I thought the most significant thing that morning was this:

We got to the point made by the member for Essex or someone else -- I have forgotten who it was -- and we were discussing surpluses and debts. That’s where the crunch comes in local government. That’s where it s really at. They know what debenture debt is better, I am afraid, than anyone in this House. They understand that. It’s a pretty direct relationship.

There was a motion put to that meeting that we start nibbling away at the principle of sharing that responsibility of debt and surplus. One councillor decided that indeed we should hack off a bit; we had paid for that and we don’t really want to give it.

To the everlasting glory of the warden of our county, who sits in this gallery this morning, he said: “Gentlemen, we have come a long way in understanding that this has to be a shared responsibility. For heaven’s sake, let’s not back off now.” The chairman, who sits with the warden, agreed with him. And that meeting, when they were not in a good frame of mind, as they have been on other days, said: “Yes, that’s a very sound principle. We have got to think a little bigger than our own little bailiwick.” Indeed, they have.

It’s that kind of spirit of co-operation, which I see among the elected people of Oxford county, that will make this bill work, because I know they are interested in a larger concept than their own small municipality. I stand in full support of this bill because I know it was bred, sponsored and raised in Oxford and it will work in Oxford. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Essex-Kent.

Mr. R. F. Ruston (Essex-Kent): Yes, Mr. Speaker, I will be brief with regard to this bill. I think the leader of our party put most of the points across very well earlier in the debate, but among the things that I consider unacceptable in this bill is that we are eroding the power of local municipalities to such a great degree. We are taking away the power of local municipalities to the point where, as one councillor told me the other day: “I guess, by the look of it, all you will have us doing is perhaps chasing dogs up and down the streets.”

In the local municipalities, I see by the number of people who will be on each council, there are going to be a total of 55. Sixteen of them will be sitting on county council, and the other 39 I don’t know what they are going to be doing; by the looks of this bill they are not going to be doing very much.

To me this is eroding responsibility that should be at the municipal level where it gives the people the opportunity of dealing with things locally in their own municipality where they can get in touch with people. Many of these things that are operated by the municipality need the personal touch.

I think my leader mentioned a while ago about the flood in Paris and the mayor making surveys himself. Having been a municipal councillor and a reeve of what I considered a rather large municipality -- about 8,000 population and 45,000 acres and an assessment of $12 million to $15 million -- that was a responsibility I felt was plenty large enough, yet I think it was still possible for people to come in to see their local councillors and clerks and so forth and have a little personal contact with them.

With the power that is going to the county here, again it is up to only the head of the municipality who will be a representative on county council, the mayor -- except, of course, in the one township of Blandford and Blenheim where they will have five; and Woodstock will have five; but the others will each have only one besides the head of the municipality.

It certainly restricts the public from getting in close contact with the people running their affairs.

Another thing that concerns me is section 74 where the minister may: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 70, 71, 72 and 73, establish a police force for the whole or part of the county in such a manner as he determines.” This gives the minister pretty wide powers, and I just can’t see that this power should be given to the minister. I think the people in the area should be able to tell whether they need police in their area; whether they need the services of extra police and police on a 24-hour basis; or whether they just need what we have in some areas, which is patrol by the Ontario Provincial Police, patrol to enforce the speed limit of the provincial highway, which pretty well serves the needs of people in many of the areas.

What concerns me is the cost of putting a police force in a regional area such as this. I think in the area I live in we have a police force that is costing about $30 per capita. I could see in the township where I live, which is predominantly rural, the provincial police serving adequately by just doing regular patrols on the provincial highways. It could cost our population of around 4,000 about $120,000 additional on our taxes to have a police force.

Sure, the minister will say that the government gives a grant, and on a regional basis the grant is $8 per capita; which would be $32,000, about a third of the cost. Or if it is not a regional municipality it is $5, which is $20,000. It still means a great increase in cost to the people in the area if the minister should decide to put a regional police force in the area.

Another thing that concerns me is section 76 dealing with the county waterworks system. I am thinking of the involvement I have had with waterworks in the county of Essex. We are just this very summer joining onto a waterworks system at Leamington, from the Ruthven pumping station that takes care of Leamington, Mersey, H. J. Heinz Co. and all the way to Essex. We are joining onto a line that goes into the town of Belle River, which gives us a hookup, in cases of emergency, almost throughout the county. This is being done through the local municipalities. The municipalities still keep their identity and they still look after the people locally.

Waterworks systems can be established, of course, for more than one municipality. There was an opening just last Thursday of an addition to a large waterworks system in an area in our county and it serves the two adjoining townships. In fact they sell four times as much water to the two adjoining townships than they sell to their own municipality. Yet, through agreement, they service the area. They are not restructured; they have been doing this for a number of years -- since 1924, I think. So they were co-operating and operating waterworks throughout areas where people needed it, and doing this before they ever thought of regional government.

You don’t need regional government or restructured county governments to really serve the people in the area, if the people are interested -- and I am sure they are -- in looking after one another in their adjoining municipalities.

We don’t need the minister taking people from the municipalities into Toronto, wining and dining them, and saying: “What a great thing this will be. We will give you more money if you join into a new, restructured municipality.”

We don’t really need that. And at the same time the government is taking the power away from the local municipalities and putting it here in Toronto. I think this has a tendency to have people shy away from joining in municipal government. They say: “What is the use of being elected? For every approval we have got to go to Toronto anyway.”

So, it erodes local power considerably, Mr. Speaker. I think that is all I have to say.

Mr. Speaker: Does any other member wish to speak? The hon. member for Waterloo.

Mr. Good: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to make some remarks supporting my leader in opposition to this bill. An Act to restructure the County of Oxford.

One can take many things from the title. When you think of restructuring a county, naturally you think of restructuring its municipal government. This, in fact, is what is being done. The model used for it is, of course, Mr. Speaker, the model that has preceeded this on the restructuring of other counties; both singularly and when they are put together in the form of regional governments. And by no stretch of the imagination is there anything to indicate that we are going to have anything new, other than a regional government set up -- with one exception, of course; and that is the head of government will be called the warden. His method of obtaining office, of course, is entirely different from the method of the regional chairman being appointed by Queen’s Park, as in the case of the other regional governments.

You can call this what you will, Mr. Speaker, but we have in essence all of the sections that were included in other regional bills. I debated many of the other regional government bills, but I don’t remember having seen or heard the member for Oxford debate any prior regional government bill. So it is not factual, in my estimation, for him to say that this is not similar to a regional government piece of legislation.

Mr. Cassidy: If anything, it is tougher.

Mr. Good: The fact that the warden is elected from the other members of council does cause me some concern, Mr. Speaker. First of all, I think we must realize that the head of government under this restructured government is not going to be the same type of warden as previously. In many counties it was more or less an honorary post that was taken on rotation as your turn came up to serve as warden. And rightly so; this person had the confidence of a lot of people.

I understand in Oxford they did fight for the position of being warden. But remember, Mr. Speaker, we now have the two separated municipalities of Woodstock and Ingersoll back in the county system. Now, had they restructured county government and put those municipalities back into the county system and left the powers similar to what they had been, we would probably have a different type of bill altogether. It perhaps would have been a restructured county, reducing the number of local governments from the present number down to the eight that were included in the bill, and retained the warden system.

I am not so sure, Mr. Speaker, that this would not have been the best situation. In fact, I really feel it would have been. When we have a municipality of, perhaps, under 100,000 people, to bring in a truly democratic head of government- which we have been advocating in every regional government bill -- the warden, if they wish to call him a warden rather than a chairman of council, should have been elected at large across the county. That would, of course, have been no hardship whatsoever. Then we would have a true head of council who would represent all the people, and who would not have arrived there through some parochial election in some small part of the region.

Let me mention, Mr. Speaker, for the benefit of the gentlemen sitting in the gallery, that if the warden does not take on full-time responsibility as head of that regional government or county government he’s going to find that the chief administrative officer of the county is going to become the main authority and, perhaps, the head of government.

An hon. member: He will.

Mr. Good: This is what will happen. Whoever he will be I don’t know at this time but it’s not inconceivable that the chief administrative officer will soon become the liaison person between Queen’s Park and this regional government, as the appointed chairman is in many other areas across the province.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: We tell them what they can do and what they can’t do.

Mr. Good: I speak on this, Mr. Speaker, having debated all the other regional government bills and having seem what has happened in all the other regional governments across the province.

It’s interesting, Mr. Speaker, that prior to the 1971 election the government said, “We’re now going to have a pause in the creation of regional governments. There will be no more until we assess the value of those which have been established.” At that time we had established Ottawa-Carleton, Muskoka, Niagara and York, I believe.

As related by my leader, to get those regional governments through the election period -- that was the time, Mr. Speaker, let me remind you, when St. Catharines wanted to withdraw from regional government. There was no legal way it could, of course, but it made a strong case and it was on that basis that we passed’ legislation here. The then Minister of Municipal Affairs (Mr. Bales) went down with a pocketful of money and bailed out Niagara with $1 million and York with $750,000. Then the election was over and we started on the regional government binge again. It’s not too many months ago since the Treasurer of the Province of Ontario said it was no longer going to impose any regional governments in the Province of Ontario.

Now we have come up with a new name. It’s a restructuring of the county form of government. Let me tell you, Mr. Speaker, a rose by any other name smells the same and regional government by any other name is still regional government. What I want to do, Mr. Speaker, is bring before the Legislature, in the hope they will get back to the people, some of the things which I don’t think the people in the area really understand.

The first part deals with the roads. Let me say this, Mr. Speaker, of the section dealing with the county roads system. Problems have usually arisen in other regional governments under this road setup because one level of government has to take over certain roads from the level of government above it. What happens here in section 29, subsection 3 is, “The Lieutenant Governor in Council may transfer highways over to the county jurisdiction as he sees fit.” Under the Highway Improvement Act they can do that and it won’t be too many years before the province will be saying, “You’re big boys now; you’re a restructured county government [or in our view, you’re a regional government, getting the same grants] and we think you should take over this many miles of provincial highways.” The county then will say, “We can’t handle all those financially and we will hand over some of our roads to the area government.”

The poor area government, or the municipality, has no place to go from there but look after them. This is what happened in the Niagara region; it took over miles and miles of road. There was nothing it could do about it except when it got to the point when the provincial government wanted to start dealing and wheeling with their roads and the advice of the present Minister of Energy to Waterloo region was simply, “Make as hard and as sharp a deal as you possibly can, and that is the only thing you can do. You will find the provincial government will be coming to you and will want to dump a lot of provincial highways in your lap, saying, “They’re your responsibility.”

We know the same situation will exist here as in the regional governments where the upper-tier government has complete authority over what used to be suburban roads. At any intersection where these roads cross an area government road, the top tier has authority of 150 ft in all directions, including the planning and what can be done in those areas. Any area government road intersecting a regional road is also subject to the powers of the upper tier.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. Does the hon. member have further remarks?

Mr. Good: Yes.

Mr. Speaker: Well, perhaps he might move the adjournment of the debate.

Mr. Good moves the adjournment of the debate.

It being 12:30 o’clock, p.m., the House took recess.