Legislative Assembly of Ontario

The House met at 2 o’clock p.m.

Clerk of the House: Members of the legislative assembly, it is my duty to call upon you to elect one of your number to preside over your deliberations as Speaker.

Hon. W. G. Davis (Premier): Yes, Mr. Clerk; so that there will be no suspense, it is not the member for London South (Mr. White).

Hon. Mr. Davis moves, seconded by Mr. R. F. Nixon, that Mr. Russell D. Rowe, Esq., member for the electoral district of Northumberland, be the Speaker of this House.

Mr. R. F. Nixon (Leader of the Opposition): Mr. Clerk, in seconding the nomination of the member for Northumberland (Mr. Rowe), I want to wish him well in his new duties. This House has evidently established a reputation as being sometimes somewhat unruly. I think the reputation is ill founded, but being members here, we know from time to time that Mr. Speaker is put severely to the test as far as order is concerned and, in wishing him well, I can make no guarantees other than that we will respect the rules of the House and certainly his difficult duty in supervising them.

While I am on my feet, Mr. Clerk, I also want to express the appreciation of my colleagues, and my own appreciation, for the service of the member for Waterloo South (Mr. Reuter) during the past number of years as Speaker. Probably the best test is his impartiality, which, without doubt, goes without question in our experience in his performance of his duties over these years, but beyond that, as a man and as a friend, his example of courage and common sense is respected by us all.

Motion agreed to.

Clerk of the House: I declare the nominations closed and declare the Hon. Russell D. Rowe to be Speaker of this assembly.

Mr. Speaker: Hon. members, please accept my humble thanks for the high honour and privilege that you have given me today.

This is a moment of mixed emotions for me, I assure you. I am grateful that the hon. Premier and the hon. Leader of the Opposition saw fit to move and second my nomination for this high office.

At the same time, I am sure that all hon. members will join with me in regretting the departure of the member for Waterloo South from this chair. In all his relationships with members, he was mindful of the high responsibilities placed on him and his obligation to be fair to members from all sides of the House. He served us well, and I know that all hon. members join with me in regretting that his health would not permit him to continue to serve for the balance of this parliament.

At the time of his election to the Speakership in December, 1971, the member for Waterloo South stated that the privilege of serving as Speaker carried with it the responsibility to protect the rights and privileges of each one of you. In fulfilling this obligation, I will be ever mindful of the attributes given by Socrates to a judge: “To hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly and to decide impartially.”

I ask also for your co-operation and for your prayers that I may be given wisdom to serve you well and fairly in order that each of you may discharge your responsibilities to this House and to the people of this province. This is a time of transition for this assembly. Hon. members are aware that the two reports from the Ontario Commission on the Legislature have recommended administrative changes within this House. They will place a considerably heavier burden on me than has been placed on any of my predecessors.

In accepting these responsibilities, I am mindful of the duty which all members of the assembly have to represent the people of their constituencies, to raise grievances with the ministers of the Crown and to scrutinize public expenditures. It is my personal desire to serve you in such a way that you will be able to carry out these responsibilities effectively and not be diverted by internal problems which can consume your time needlessly. So, mindful of the responsibilities that you have placed before me, and hopeful of your assistance and co-operation, I accept the high office of the Speaker of this House which you have been pleased to confer upon me. Thank you.

The House will now adjourn during pleasure.

The Honourable the Lieutenant Governor then entered the House and took her seat upon the throne.

Hon. P. M. McGibbon (Lieutenant Governor): Pray be seated.

Mr. Speaker: May it please your Honour, the legislative assembly have elected me as their Speaker, though I am but little able to fulfil the important duties thus assigned to me. If, in the performance of those duties I should at any time fall into error, I pray that the fault may be imputed to me and not to the assembly whose servant I am.

Hon. A. Grossman (Provincial Secretary for Resources Development): Mr. Speaker, I am commanded by the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor to declare to you that she freely confides in the duty and attachment of the assembly to Her Majesty’s person and government, and is confident that the proceedings will be conducted with wisdom, temperance and prudence.

The Honourable the Lieutenant Governor was then pleased to retire from the chamber.

Prayers.

Hon. W. G. Davis (Premier): Mr. Speaker, before statements from the ministry, if I --

Mr. Speaker: Sir, may I make an announcement, first of all.

I beg to inform the House that a vacancy has occurred in the membership of the House by the resignation of A. B. R. Lawrence, Esq., as member for the electoral district of Carleton East.

The hon. Prime Minister.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Are the members opposite optimistic about that one?

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to take this occasion to congratulate you, sir, on your unanimous election by the members of this House to this most important office, and to say to you, Mr. Speaker, that this side of the House, of course, will abide by your rulings with enthusiasm --

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I understand your own sense of commitment and involvement to maintain the traditional dignity and decorum of this Legislature; and so we just wish you well.

I would also like to express, in a very personal way, my appreciation to our former Speaker. For the past number of months he has discharged his responsibilities under really a very substantial handicap. I would like to say to him from all of us, and through you to him, Mr. Speaker, how much we appreciated his commitment to his task and the way in which he handled the very onerous responsibilities as Speaker.

To you, Mr. Speaker, our best wishes and good luck.

Mr. E. Sargent (Grey-Bruce): Mr. Speaker, on a matter of urgent public importance: Mr. Speaker, to the Premier, since a promise of four months ago --

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. There was no notice given for this particular order of business; it’s out of order.

Mr. Sargent: Mr. Speaker, with the greatest respect --

Mr. Speaker: Order. This is out of order.

Mr. Sargent: Regarding the hospital in Owen Sound -- running 107 per cent occupancy, Mr. Speaker -- the Premier promised to do something about it. I am going to demand action from him.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. The member is out of order at this time.

Mr. Sargent: With the greatest respect, I wish the Premier --

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. I would ask the hon. member to please take his chair.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. Would the hon. member take his seat while the Speaker is on his feet. Order, please.

The member may ask questions during the question period, but not at this particular time. He is out of order; would he please take his seat.

Statements by the ministry.

ONTARIO CIVIL SERVICE GROWTH

Hon. E. A. Winkler (Chairman, Management Board of Cabinet): Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the steps the government is taking to control the growth of the civil service. As one of the means to control the rate of growth of provincial expenditures, the government has established as an objective that the authorized complement of the civil service will be held throughout 1975 at a figure no larger than the complement that was approved on April 1, 1974, the start of the present fiscal year.

I should explain that the term complement refers to the number of civil service positions which has been authorized for each ministry. The complement figure differs from the reported strength of the civil service, which of course fluctuates according to the numbers enrolled in and separated from the service. The approved complement on April 1, 1974, was 71,705. This figure does not include the uniformed members of the Ontario Provincial Police force, for whom a separate complement control is exercised.

We are all aware of the impact of inflation on the cost of goods and services. As an employer, we recognize the need to adjust civil service salaries to protect the purchasing power of our employees. These adjustments will add significantly to provincial expenditures. If, at the same time, we were to add new manpower complement, an expenditure growth rate would result which is unacceptable to this government.

Maintaining the existing level of manpower complement is, of course, not a simple matter of enforcing the status quo. Many of the existing programmes have a constantly growing clientele due to the expansion of our Ontario population. Ways and means have to be found to handle this expanding workload, and in some cases additional complement is the only practical answer. Also the government is sensitive to new and emerging needs of society which require legislative action. Frequently these responses require civil service staff for programme implementation.

In order to provide for these additional complement places, while at the same time maintaining the overall complement total, it has been necessary to identify a number of existing complement places which can be phased out. This curtailment in existing complement is being undertaken in all ministries. I should explain that no growth in total complement does not mean that there has been a cessation in civil service recruitment. Although the curtailment has meant that vacancies have been earmarked for reassignment, the majority of the vacancies which have opened up or which will open up will be filled.

The effect of the curtailment in most instances will require programme managers to find more innovative ways of delivering service to the public. This will not be a new assignment for these people. For the last three years, the growth of manpower in the Ontario civil service has averaged less than three per cent, which compares favourably with the four per cent average increase in total provincial employment. Consequently, the civil service has already responded to a constrained increase in manpower levels with more productive and more efficient ways of providing public service.

I would like to commend the civil service staff in achieving this past accomplishment. It reflects the willingness of individuals to adjust to change, to undertake new assignments and to find better ways of doing their present assignments. The decision to maintain complement levels through 1975 will be another challenge for the civil service. I am confident that they will meet this challenge and that they will maintain and expand public services for a growing population in a prosperous Ontario.

Mr. Speaker: Any further statements by the ministry? The hon. Minister of Natural Resources.

ONTARIO PROVINCIAL PARKS

Hon. L. Bernier (Minister of Natural Resources): Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to make two important announcements of new initiatives by the Ontario government concerning provincial parks.

I am today announcing the establishment of an Ontario Provincial Parks Council to advise the government on matters of policy, planning and development of Ontario provincial parks. The council is being established because of the government’s concern that changing recreational needs of the public of this province be reflected in a meaningful way to ensure that both our management systems and our parks planning programmes meet the needs of the people of Ontario.

Mr. S. Lewis (Scarborough West): Stop the logging in Algonquin Park.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: The Ontario Provincial Parks Council will have a broad mandate to monitor the implementation of all provincial park master plans --

Mr. R. F. Nixon (Leader of the Opposition): No new employees.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: -- and to advise the government on a wide range of public needs. It will have the resources it needs to retain specialists and consultants to conduct research on any matter of concern and it will hold public meetings throughout the province as may be required.

Mr. T. P. Reid (Rainy River): It will have more civil servants.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: It will report annually.

Mr. Lewis: Give Earl Berger another job.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: An accelerated parks development programme has been under way within my ministry, Mr. Speaker, for the past several years. We have today in the Province of Ontario the most extensive and elaborate system of provincial parks available in Canada.

Since 1893, the government of Ontario has created 117 provincial parks.

Mr. Lewis: Especially Rondeau.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: And 27 of these have been opened in the past 10 years. Total park space has tripled --

Hon. A. Grossman (Provincial Secretary for Resources Development): Great stuff.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: -- from 3.7 million acres to 10.4 million acres.

Mr. J. E. Stokes (Thunder Bay): Hooray for Polar Bear.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: And during this period the number of visitors to our parks has increased to 12 million annually.

Mr. J. R. Breithaupt (Kitchener): Including the bears.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Special-use parks have been established; such as Fathom Five Park, an underwater park off the Bruce Peninsula; an urban park such as the Bronte Creek Provincial Park; and three very large wilderness parks in Quetico, Killarney and Polar Bear provincial parks.

Through my ministry’s conservation authorities programme, we have a direct involvement in more than 200 conservation and recreational areas that have been developed over the past 20 years, more than 40 of which provide camping facilities.

In addition, there are the facilities provided by the St. Lawrence Parks Commission, the Niagara Parks Commission and the St. Clair Parkway Commission, all of which are provincial agencies responsible to the Minister of Natural Resources.

It is clear that such a broad network of recreational opportunities administered by my ministry has a need for continuing advice and consultation with those in our community who are both knowledgeable and committed to the recreational needs of our citizens.

The council will be under the chairmanship of Prof. George Priddle, a professor of geography at the University of Waterloo and a member of the Ontario chapter of the Sierra Club.

Assisting Dr. Priddle and appointed for terms of from one to three years will be: Mr. Robin Fraser, president of the National and Provincial Parks Association of Canada; --

Mr. A. J. Roy (Ottawa East): One less Tory out of work, eh?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Mr. Richard Howard, a master at Upper Canada College, a former chairman of the Algonquin Park Advisory Committee --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. J. R. Rhodes (Minister of Transportation and Communications): The member for Ottawa East doesn’t even have a riding. What is he talking about?

Mr. Speaker: Order please.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: -- and a member of the Algonquin Wildlands League; --

Mr. E. W. Martel (Sudbury East): Bob Shouldice.

Mr. P. D. Lawlor (Lakeshore): You can have every citizen on some board or commission if you can just enlist them.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Mr. William Fowler, school of physical education, McMaster University; Mr. Thomas Thompson, commissioner, Metropolitan Toronto Parks; Dr. Gerald Killan, a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario; Mr. Clive E. Goodwin, executive director, the Conservation Council of Ontario; Mr. J. F. H. Gray, past president, Ontario Private Campgrounds Association; Mr. John Lewis, professor, department of geography, Sir Wilfrid Laurier University; Dr. Vidar Nordin, dean, faculty of forestry, University of Toronto; Mr. Milton A. Tibbett, chairman, district municipality of Muskoka, and a former member of the Algonquin Park Advisory Committee; Mrs. Barbara Dundas of Komoka; Ms. Joan Sutton, a columnist with the Toronto Sun; Miss Kim Ball, director, Doe Lake Guides Camp, and secretary, Ontario Camping Association; --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Mr. Doug Wilson, a past president of the Northern Ontario Outfitters Association and the Kenora District Camp-owners Association; Mrs. Jeannine Pecaric, Kapuskasing; --

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Are the members unhappy over there?

Mr. Sargent: We haven’t got our fingers crossed anyway.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Mrs. Marianne Wilkinson, councillor and Chairman of the March Township Planning Committee and a teacher of geography at Sir Robert Borden High School at Kanata; Mr. H. A. L. Tibbetts, a former member of the Quetico Park Advisory Committee and manager of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce at Fort Frances; Mr. Norman Rouse, Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge Authority.

Mr. Reid: Are there any non-Tories on there -- just one?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: As one of its responsibilities, Mr. Speaker, the parks council will monitor the implementation of the Algonquin Provincial Park master plan which I am now tabling.

Mr. Roy: Wasn’t that a great way to get around Robarts?

Hon. Mr. Winkler: Very good, very good; great stuff.

Mr. Reid: How much is it going to cost?

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Do the members opposite want it or don’t they?

Mr. Reid: The minister already has an advisory committee on it.

Mr. Speaker: Order please.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Mr. Speaker, within our vast network of parks, conservation areas and recreation areas, it is generally recognized that Algonquin Park is the cornerstone. It is the oldest provincial park and certainly one of the best known, not only to the residents of Canada but everywhere else as well.

The master plan reflects the flow of public inputs from the Algonquin Park hearings and the several years of work of the Algonquin Park Advisory Committee. It details the implementation flowing from the policy decisions of July, 1973. A key element of the plan indicates the zoning of the park into natural, historic, primitive, recreation and utilization zones.

As recommended by the Algonquin Park Advisory Committee Report of 1973, Algonquin Park will be enlarged by additions at several key points and the park system will be complemented by a further addition of perimeter parks at strategic sites to provide additional recreational capacity outside the park.

Built into the master plan is a regular five-year review procedure as a means of providing continuing public involvement in this important provincial park.

Up to 4,000 additional public campsites may be established in the perimeter parks, and private campgrounds may also be established to further serve the public’s camping needs.

As recommended, a fisheries management unit for the park has been established. Staff has been provided and field surveys are now under way.

Policies to prevent the deterioration in volume or quality of park waters are spelled out in the plan and provide a framework within which detailed water management planning may proceed.

A water level study has been carried out, and its recommendations are now being implemented.

Existing interior canoe routes will be improved, and new exterior canoe routes will be established in line with the southern Ontario canoe route study and policies laid down in the master plan.

The interior access system will be restructured to redistribute use through 28 access points and eight departure points. Significant relocation of access points from internal locations to boundary waterways will take place in the eastern portion of the park.

Outfitting information and educational services for interior travellers are described in the interior and corridor plans in the master plan.

The plan for the Algonquin parkway corridor -- Highway 60 -- as contained in the master plan, describes major new interpretive facilities such as the Madawaska motor trail and a new visitors’ centre.

The prohibition of new highways in the park has been extended to include new transmission lines, pipelines and communications towers. Scenic roads will link Algonquin interior access points with the perimeter recreation areas and the existing ring of major highways surrounding the park.

Sound buffer zones have been extended to include all canoe routes, hiking trails and public roads in the park.

Detailed policies respecting the use of chemicals and controls that should apply within the park are presented in the master plan.

Seven areas, comprising 25,000 acres of Crown land, will be added to the park to control access, consolidate entire canoe routes and provide additional capacity for access from adjacent boundary areas. These include the two areas recommended by the advisory committee in Eyre and Cameron townships.

In the near future, the use and possession of non-burnable and disposable food and beverage containers will be prohibited by regulation in areas where there are no waste collection services.

The master plan contains proposals to intensify interior canoe route management, including controls on numbers and distribution of visitors. A comprehensive management plan for canoe camping areas is also included.

As announced in 1973, Camp Algonquin has been established for the use of less advantaged children. With the co-operation of the YMCA, this camp operated last summer at Whitefish Lake, providing a unique wilderness camping experience for more than 200 young people.

The continued use of motor boats and all-terrain vehicles will be prohibited by 1975 except on Lake Opeongo and the lakes on which there are private cottages.

Mr. Speaker, I am sure that as people become familiar with the master plan and understand the reasoning behind the various steps to be taken over the next few years, they will come to recognize that Algonquin Park is in greater danger from its users than from anything or anyone else.

The late Leslie M. Frost, when he was chairman of the Algonquin Park Advisory Committee, remarked frequently that too many people constituted the greatest threat to Algonquin Park.

In point of fact, it is essential that in certain of the interior canoe routes, the number of canoe trippers be reduced either through redistribution to little-used routes or by limiting entry. The excessive use of these interior routes has in effect destroyed campsites and the wilderness experience.

By contrast, however, the enlarged primitive zone has a capacity for 100,000 user days annually of wilderness canoeing, and our studies indicate that current demand for this activity is well below this level.

My earlier reference to the planned banning of cans and bottles through most of the park touches on the litter and garbage problem. The dimensions of this situation on the one hand boggle the mind and on the other hand raise serious questions as to the true concern of park users for the wilderness recreational environment.

Our best estimates, Mr. Speaker, are that garbage collection throughout the park cost approximately $200,000 last year. Needless to say, we will continue to work on the educational aspects of littering in an attempt to improve the situation. I simply mention it at this time to illustrate further my point of dangers to the park from its users.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I would say that within the very near future I will be introducing a bill to establish the Algonquin Forest Authority. At this time, I am very pleased and proud to announce the chairman of the authority, who will be Dr. Vidar Nordin, Dean of the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I wondered when that was going to come down.

Mr. V. M. Singer (Downsview): What happened to John?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: I will announce the balance of those directors during the debate on that bill.

Mr. Singer: Did you fire John? That’s very discourteous to John Robarts. Very discourteous.

Mr. Speaker: Oral questions.

LOGGING IN ALGONQUIN PARK

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the Minister of Natural Resources if he can tell the House what proportion of Algonquin Park will now be closed to logging of any type, due to the designation of the primitive areas?

Second, while he’s on his feet, has the government rejected the position of at least accepting the goal of stopping the logging exploitation?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Mr. Speaker, as was pointed out in the policy statement of 1973, the government felt that in the economic interests of the entire region, which covers 9,000 square miles, it was in the best interests of that area and the province in general to retain, on a very selective basis, the harvesting of the forest products from Algonquin Park to maintain the economic viability of the entire region.

With regard to the area that will remain primitive, it’s clearly spelled out in the master plan itself. I don’t have the exact percentage figure at my fingertips.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Is it half the park; half the park?

An hon. member: More than that.

Hon. Mr. Bernier: More than that.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: More than half?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: No, less than that. I’m sorry.

Mr. Lewis: Three quarters? About 74.9 per cent?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Also, the logging aspect as spelled out in the master plan will only infringe on one per cent of the total area of the Algonquin Park area in any one year.

Mr. J. F. Foulds (Port Arthur): That’s called cosmetic logging.

ANTI-INFLATION MEASURES

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I would like to ask the Premier, Mr. Speaker, if the statement attributed to him, that Ontario has gone as far as it can go to control inflation on a provincial basis, means that as a matter of policy the alternatives that have been put forward in the House and elsewhere have been rejected? That is, specifically, the alternatives for the establishment of a food price and rent review board; the concept of giving more powers to the Energy Board for the control of fuel prices; and the concept of reducing the public debt, or the deficit, so that it would not fuel inflation. Have these alternatives been rejected to the point where the policy secretaries are giving them no further consideration?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, quite obviously the government does not reject any credible programme that could help offset the impact of inflation, both in terms of the consumers or in terms of government policy. As it relates to the two or three specific items mentioned by the Leader of the Opposition, the concept of a form of price review board is really not a question of rejection of concept as much as a question of the practical application as it relates to consumer prices or cost increases.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that we have to be realistic. It’s one thing to say review, but if there isn’t some form of statutory authority whereby, in fact, something can be done --

Mr. Lewis: That’s right. That’s the government’s job.

Hon. Mr. Davis: -- it’s a questionable exercise as it relates to some degree of control.

I think it is also fair to state, Mr. Speaker, that if there is to be some form of control of price on a commodity basis, the feeling of this province has always been -- and I think it’s been supported by others -- that this control, if one is to use that terminology, has to be exercised basically on a national level. I think it is also fair to state, Mr. Speaker, that as it relates to the functioning of the Energy Board, as it relates to the price of hydro or the price of natural gas --

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Has to be gasoline.

Hon. Mr. Davis: -- of course the board is functioning in that area.

As far as any programme that would reduce or try to minimize the provincial deficit, I can only say in this regard, Mr. Speaker, that while we acknowledge that the general level of government expenditure -- although the hon. member for High Park (Mr. Shulman) doesn’t agree with me -- has some impact on inflation, and while this government has endeavoured to constrain its expenditures -- and I would say, by and large, not with the approval of the members opposite --

Mr. Roy: Where are they constrained?

Mr. Reid: This government has a bigger deficit than the federal government.

Hon. Mr. Davis: We constrained expenditures on education, and the Leader of the Opposition is officially quoted as saying: “If elected, I will do away with the ceilings.” Tell me how responsible that is.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Do away with central control. Do away with central control, that is the issue.

Hon. Mr. Davis: We’re going to cut government expenditures and give away the store in the process, that’s the policy that’s being enunciated from across the House.

Mr. Lewis: Not bad, not bad.

Hon. Mr. Davis: I think it’s also important to point out -- well, it’s true, it’s true.

Mr. Reid: Rearrange the priorities, that’s all.

Hon. Mr. Davis: While I am on my feet and in the answer to the question about the deficit -- and the Treasurer (Mr. White) may get into this -- while we do have a deficit; and, Mr. Speaker, that deficit, I think, can be very clearly identified.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Yes, $848 million.

Hon. Mr. Davis: But it is also interesting to note that while we have this deficit, which the Leader of the Opposition talks about at great length, that even so, this happened three weeks ago Monday, the Province of Ontario in the international marketplace, as far as borrowing is concerned, achieved a triple A rating for the first time in its history, and I might say this is the only province of Canada to do so.

Mr. Lewis: Kind of makes the Premier feel like a good restaurant, doesn’t it?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Well I could add something to that.

Mr. Lewis: That is not an answer to a provincial deficit.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, it may be in New York, it may be anywhere else --

Mr. R. F. Nixon: That is where the government is borrowing the money.

Hon. Mr. Davis: -- but it is a very objective analysis as to the financial and economic situation of the government of this province and it is a rating that is not enjoyed by any other sister province in Canada and only two states of the union, Illinois and California. I think it is a very singular achievement on the part of this government.

Mr. Breithaupt: They are the best borrowers in the world.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I could become less than objective if I were to hark back to discussions that took place during last May, June and July as it related to the question of inflation and the official position of the official opposition, but, Mr. Speaker, on your first day I will not become provocative.

Mr. Roy: Looking for wage and price controls.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: That is great, because as a supplementary I would like to ask the Premier why, if he feels that everything has been done, he would not give further consideration to upgrade, for example, the powers of the Ontario Food Council, so that without exerting direct controls, which have been rejected by the electorate within the last few months, that at least there could be information on pricing provided with the authority of this government, in conjunction with initiative elsewhere, which would give the consumers a break?

Hon. Mr. Davis: I have no objection whatsoever to consideration being given by the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations (Mr. Clement), or by the Minister of Agriculture and Food (Mr. Stewart), as it relates to public information as to what consumer goods cost. I have no objection to this whatsoever.

I only say, with respect, that the initial question from the Leader of the Opposition related to some form of review board, and I think there is a very clear distinction between that and the functioning of the food council. I have no objection to the food council taking a closer look, or having information available to the public if this will be helpful.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Finding consumer information.

Mr. Lewis: A supplementary question, Mr. Speaker: Since the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations has within the week published a report indicating that further profits for the food industry at the level of 1973 do not appear to be necessary, what then does the Premier intend to do to protect the consumers of Ontario -- for example, in the area of milk alone -- in preventing these major companies from taking more than they should be taking and maintaining those profit levels?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I would only make this observation as it relates to the particular commodity of milk -- and I guess I must confess a vested interest here because we are fairly large consumers in our own household. This government, and the Minister of Agriculture and Food of this government and the Premier of this province, communicated in no uncertain terms to Ottawa that the federal subsidy should not be lifted. And, of course, the federal government has lifted the subsidy and that was a very major part of the increase in milk prices.

And at home they don’t drink powdered milk either.

Mr. Lewis: Now that the Premier knows that, what does the province do?

Mr. Speaker: I believe the member for High Park has a supplementary. Order please.

Mr. Lewis: He just washed his hands of it.

Hon. Mr. Davis: No.

Mr. Lewis: That’s what the Premier has done.

Mr. M. Shulman (High Park): Did the Premier ever consider ordering his Treasurer to balance the budget, in order to help control this inflation?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I would be delighted to have from the member for High Park his observations as to how he would see this being achieved, at the same time supporting the political philosophy which he does from day to day, perhaps not on a daily basis, which in my view would be totally inconsistent, with the multitude of programmes that they have promised to the public of this province which would increase total expenditure.

Mr. Lewis: They could just reduce the staff of the Premier’s office. That would do it.

Hon. Mr. Davis: If the member for High Park is prepared to be honest enough to suggest as part of his proposal that he would substantially increase the level of taxation as a part of it, then of course there would be some greater degree of logic.

Mr. Shulman: I would love to do it. I don’t have the power; the Premier does.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. member for Wentworth.

Mr. I. Deans (Wentworth): Mr. Speaker, given that accommodation costs contribute significantly to the rising cost of living, and given that the recent announcement of the Minister of Housing (Mr. Irvine) would seem to indicate that the programme just announced will not have any significant effect on the housing market for about two years, will the Premier consider introducing some form of rent review mechanism during the period until such time as the effect, assuming there is one, of the recently announced housing programme is felt?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, once again we get into the very basic discussion or consideration of what is meant by review and what is meant by control. I would say there is a very distinct difference.

Mr. Deans: Of course there is.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Of course there is, and I would suggest once again, with respect, if the member is talking about a form of review which in fact has no authority to do anything about it after the review is finished, the experience in many jurisdictions has been that this doesn’t really solve the problem.

Mr. Deans: I am not talking about that.

Mr. Lewis: The government should give itself the power to roll them back.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I’m saying that if the member is suggesting we should have a form of rent control, I think that is a different issue than a form of rent review. As it relates to the minister’s policy and his observations in the very excellent statement he made, I believe in the last day or so, I would suggest to the hon. member that he might direct questions on that statement to the minister.

Mr. Speaker: Does the hon. Leader of the Opposition have further questions?

HOUSING PROPOSAL IMPACT ON TORONTO-CENTRED REGION PLAN

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I want to direct a question to the Premier on that statement. Since its implementation will provide an additional 170,000 homes -- that is, the services are designed to provide that level of expansion right on the edge of Toronto -- does this mean that once and for all the concepts of the Toronto-centred region plan have been abandoned, as well as the stated policy of the government to make planned housing development across the province their goal rather than simply allowing the sprawl of the Metro area out to the north and east with the utilization of farmland for this purpose?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’m going strictly from memory here, but the TCR, which was adopted by this government as a conceptual approach to the planning of the Toronto-centred region --

Mr. D. M. Deacon (York Centre): Very conceptual.

Hon. Mr. Davis: I know the member for York Centre doesn’t support the TCR as it relates to his own particular problem. I acknowledge that.

Mr. Lewis: Oh, the TCR is not in question. There is nothing left of the plan. It is so conceptual it cannot be seen any more.

Hon. Mr. Davis: I would only say this, Mr. Speaker --

Mr. Lewis: It is a misconception.

Hon. Mr. Davis: I’m only doing a little mental arithmetic here, but if we’re talking about approximately 170,000 units --

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please. Order.

Hon. Mr. Davis: If we are talking about approximately 170,000 units and, say, three persons per unit, that’s 510,000 people.

Mr. Lewis: The Minister of Housing said 700,000.

Hon. Mr. Davis: As it relates to the city of Mississauga, which now has a population of around 400,000, if that -- I’m sure the hon. member for Peel South (Mr. Kennedy) could give me the exact figure -- I believe the projected population in the TCR was around 800,000, so we have 300,000 right there within the TCR concept.

As it relates to the new city of Brampton, I think the initial figure allocation suggested was in the neighbourhood of 285,000 to 300,000; I think we’ve probably reached about 105,000 or 110,000. Therefore, this leaves roughly an additional 200,000 in just those two communities alone within the TCR, which is of course in excess of the figures mentioned by the Minister of Housing and would mean that we could still be within the general levels anticipated by the TCR and meet the objective of 170,000 units.

Mr. Lewis: The government is choking Metropolitan Toronto.

Hon. Mr. Davis: It is totally consistent.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: A supplementary: Surely the concept that would be supported on all sides is that something should be done to at least control the growth in the Toronto-centred region and distribute it elsewhere across the province.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Like how?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Has that concept been abandoned entirely?

Hon. Mr. Davis: No, Mr. Speaker, that concept has not been abandoned at all. What the Toronto-centred region concept envisaged was a degree of control in the Toronto-centred region, and this included rough population densities in those areas immediately around Toronto. I gave the hon. member some figures and I hope I demonstrated, within 1,000 or 2,000 units, how that could still be accommodated within the objectives set by the Minister of Housing.

The other problem we face, Mr. Speaker, and I don’t pretend to have a total answer to this, is that while we would like to see greater decentralization of population growth, and industrial and commercial growth, the fact remains that Metropolitan Toronto and Hamilton-Wentworth -- communities that are established -- still are very attractive as it relates to growth.

Mr. Singer: Oh, what a discovery!

Hon. Mr. Davis: Once again there is a great contradiction. The Leader of the Opposition says he supports in concept what is happening and of course the member for Downsview doesn’t. Once again there is a great contradiction in the thinking of that particular party.

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. Davis: All I’m saying, Mr. Speaker, is that we still want to see growth development take place in other parts of the province -- our programmes are aimed in this direction -- but to say that there will be no growth in the TCR is just totally unrealistic.

Mr. Sargent: The Premier just doesn’t know what is going on, that is all.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Scarborough West.

Mr. Lewis: Supplementary: What announcement has the Premier in hand for the eastern part of the province and the northern part of the province to parallel the succession of announcements -- from the airport to North Pickering, and now the pipeline -- what has he got to parallel those announcements in other parts of the province in terms of what the government is doing in Metropolitan Toronto?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, what we are doing for Metropolitan Toronto, quite frankly, is to accommodate a very real need. If the leader of the New Democratic Party is saying that this need isn’t here and it isn’t a fact of life, then I say, with respect, that he doesn’t know what is happening. But I would say that --

Mr. Lewis: Is there no need elsewhere in Ontario? Toronto gets everything.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Does it?

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Hon. W. Newman (Minister of the Environment): The member is not accurate. There are 400 projects going on across this province right now.

Mr. Speaker: Order, please.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, as it relates to the government programmes for northern Ontario and eastern Ontario, I think it is very clearly demonstrated in the policy laid down for the NODC and EODC -- as it relates to the level of government assistance for industrial growth and in terms of housing in eastern Ontario -- that there will be incentives or we will have programmes in some parts of eastern Ontario and some parts of the north. But, Mr. Speaker, you have got to recognize the facts as they are; and that is that there are still tremendous growth pressures in and around Metropolitan Toronto.

I would only make this observation, just in case there is any further --

An hon. member: This government won’t do anything about it.

Mr. Lewis: The Premier is overdoing it.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: What does the member want to have -- passports?

Mr. M. Cassidy (Ottawa Centre): For the minister and his corporate friends.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, it’s not a question of overdoing it at all.

Mr. Lewis: Sure he is. The Premier has got a --

Hon. Mr. Davis: It’s a question of dealing with the growth pressure in a planned and orderly way. I would say, Mr. Speaker, that we are doing this better in this jurisdiction than any I can think of. I can’t give you another metropolitan area comparable to Metropolitan Toronto where we’ve had the kind of quality growth, the kind of planning, the transportation considerations that exist right here in this jurisdiction. In fact, find me another.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: And the member knows it.

Mr. Speaker: Any further questions.

OHC BRIBE CHARGES

Mr. R. F. Nixon: In the absence of the Attorney General (Mr. Welch), can the Premier assure the House that the policy of the law enforcement officers will be to bring charges against those who offered the bribes to the officials of the Ontario Housing Corp., not just taking action against those who accepted them?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I don’t know if it would be appropriate for me to comment on that particular situation; and I shan’t do so in the absence of the Attorney General. I think the Attorney General could answer that; but I question whether or not I should make any observations about it.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Scarborough West.

ST. LAWRENCE COLLEGE DEVELOPMENT

Mr. Lewis: Mr. Speaker, one of our new colleagues not yet in this chamber but in the gallery -- would wish me to ask the Premier a question. When the Premier graciously wandered through Stormont during the course of the by-election, he lifted the freeze on the Cornwall campus at St. Lawrence College; and from that day to this, nothing has yet been heard by the administration involved. When does he intend specifically to act on the pledge that was made, Fern Guindon notwithstanding?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I’m sure the leader of the New Democratic Party was following very carefully what specifically was said at that time. I will only go by my own memory, but I think I very specifically referred to a letter written to Fr. Villeneuve some two or three days before I even went to Cornwall. The information was conveyed to him that the ministry was prepared to approve in concept the capital development of St. Lawrence College.

There were two issues, if memory serves me correctly. One was the capital addition to the facilities as it related to the kind of programming that would be available to the college itself. I think the second issue, if memory serves me correctly, related to the possibility of involvement in degree granting courses with the University of Ottawa.

The letter said at the top of the second page -- and I think I can quote the section, it is section 6, because I was somewhat involved in the passage of that particular legislation. It said: “A community college may enter into agreements with an existing Ontario university to develop courses for credit.”

This was put in the letter brought to the attention of Fr. Villeneuve. So that as it relates to that aspect of it, I say with respect, the initiation would probably now be in the hands of St. Lawrence College.

There were some questions, I think, as it related to the capital project. The ministry would like to see a reassessment of the design to make sure that the proposed facility itself could relate to a broader community use. I’m sure all members would support this, because with this kind of capital development I think a broader community utilization is a very real priority. I think there was some suggestion in the communication to Fr. Villeneuve that this be considered by the college and communicated or discussed with the ministry.

So once again the initiation may lie in both places, but I think that perhaps part of the initiation is with the college itself and that perhaps -- and I’m only guessing at this -- the ministry may be awaiting some form of response to that communication.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Supplementary, Mr. Speaker: Would the Premier not think this would be an appropriate time to tell the House whether he is only human or not, and allay the fears that were aroused by his former colleague, Fern Guindon, who said that if the Conservatives didn’t win the election all of these goodies announced during those times --

Mr. Speaker: That is not a supplementary.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, once again, this is your first day.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. Mr. Davis: I could answer this in a fairly provocative way, because I have discovered something about the political process in by-elections, and that is that it is quite possible, particularly for the opposition party, to wander into ridings making a lot of statements for which they are not held responsible.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: What about your spokesman and the irresponsible things he said?

Hon. Mr. Davis: But when the government becomes involved in a little politics, of course somebody then raises a question.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I happened to be there the night the former member of this Legislature, a man who did a great deal for his constituents and the people of this province, made his observations. I happened to be there, but I don’t intend -- because there is no way one wins -- to quarrel with the interpretation placed upon it. I can only say that as I sat there and listened to it, while the former member conveyed in no uncertain terms the great merits of having a government member of the Legislature, he did not say -- and I am subject to correction -- but I did not interpret him to say that if they didn’t --

Mr. Roy: He repeated that on radio.

Hon. Mr. Davis: -- there would be no capital project at St. Lawrence College.

If the hon. Leader of the Opposition read my observations after the by-election -- it was interesting to read the three observations of the three leaders -- I went on to congratulate the newly-elected member from Stormont and to assure him that I would, as far as I was concerned, make every effort to see that he was able to discharge his responsibilities to his constituents.

This government, Mr. Speaker, has never made -- unlike the policy adopted by the member’s federal colleague -- a distinction as to where members come from as it relates to government programmes.

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Ask the member for Nipissing (Mr. R. S. Smith).

Mr. Speaker: Order please. I think both the question and the answer strayed somewhat from the original question of the member for Scarborough West. Do you have further questions?

Mr. Lewis: Yes, but not of the Premier, Mr. Speaker.

An hon. member: Tell us about the federal election.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Scarborough West has the floor.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Lewis: Listen, we won. What’s wrong with these members, Mr. Speaker?

I want to ask a question of the Chairman of the Management Board.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Lewis: One enjoys while one can.

COMPOSITION OF CSAO ARBITRATION BOARD

Mr. Lewis: I ask the Chairman of the Management Board, further to his statement on the Civil Service Association: Is the minister prepared to undertake a change in the composition of the arbitration board parallel to the change he announced for the community college teacher negotiations in order to appease the anxieties of the entire Civil Service Association across Ontario?

Hon. Mr. Winkler: Mr. Speaker, from a personal point of view, I am always open to change. The request made by the member involves government policy and when that is available I will announce it to the House.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Rainy River.

Mr. Reid: Supplementary: When the minister makes his statement in regard to the change in policy, will he also consider taking under the wing of the CSAO those people -- some 12,000 of them, perhaps not all 12,000 -- who find themselves designated as managerial or executive people?

Hon. Mr. Winkler: Not under the present situation, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Nickel Belt.

Mr. F. Laughren (Nickel Belt): Supplementary: When the minister reconsiders the legislation affecting the civil servants, will he also consider changing the Public Service Act as well as the Crown Employees’ Collective Bargaining Act to ensure that civil servants in the Province of Ontario have the full democratic right to participate in the political process in this province?

Hon. Mr. Winkler: This also, Mr. Speaker, is a matter of policy. When such matters are considered they will be brought before the House.

Mr. Lewis: The government is asking for confrontation. It is time for conciliation.

Mr. Speaker: Does the member for Scarborough West have further questions?

Mr. Lewis: No.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Grey-Bruce.

NEW HOSPITAL IN OWEN SOUND

Mr. Sargent: Mr. Speaker, this is a question of the Premier. Guess what it is?

Mr. Roy: Surprise!

Mr. Speaker: A question, I presume.

Mr. Sargent: I think, Mr. Speaker, that Balzac was right, that bureaucracy is a giant mechanism run by pygmies; and this is a good example of it.

Members have all seen this “no vacancy” at the Owen Sound Hospital, Mr. Speaker. Since the Premier’s promise about four months ago --

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order please.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: We want a question from the hon. member.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Sargent: The Premier promised four months ago --

Mr. Speaker: Order please. This is not a period for debate. It’s for questions of the ministry.

Mr. Sargent: The question is coming.

Mr. Speaker: If there is a question, please place it now.

Mr. Sargent: In view of the fact that we are operating at 107 per cent occupancy, last week we had to turn down an orthopaedic surgeon because he couldn’t operate in the hall.

Mr. G. Nixon (Dovercourt): What’s the question?

Mr. Sargent: We are going to put a portable operation unit on the lawn.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Can we have the question?

Mr. Sargent: Will you, Mr. Speaker --

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Speaker: Order please. The member for Grey-Bruce is trying to place his question.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Sargent: Is the Premier aware, number one, that the minister has reneged on his promise to give us chronic beds; and, secondly, that we are going to have to put a portable unit on the lawn, and we haven’t got any place for the new surgeon to operate?

I am going to ask the Premier these two things. Because he has such a human interest, as we know from Stormont, will he personally come up and see the medieval setup we have there? Secondly, if he won’t do that, will he allow us to run a $10-million lottery for our hospital in Owen Sound?

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, I think this question would be more properly directed to the Minister of Health (Mr. Miller) who has been having discussions recently.

Mr. Sargent: You can’t believe him, Mr. Speaker. You can’t trust him.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, if the member for Grey-Bruce is saying he can’t believe a minister of the Crown, I take exception to it. I gave the member the answer.

Mr. Sargent: I don’t take exception to it. What is the Premier’s answer?

Mr. Speaker: Order please. The hon. Premier has answered the question.

Mr. Sargent: Is the Premier going to allow us to do one or two things?

Mr. Speaker: Is this a supplementary? The member for High Park.

Mr. J. E. Bullbrook (Sarnia): There is no Minister of Health here.

Mr. Sargent: What is the Premier going to do?

Mr. Speaker: Order please. Will the hon. member take his seat?

Mr. Sargent: Oh come on, Mr. Speaker. It’s a big joke.

Mr. Speaker: It isn’t a big joke. It’s a very serious matter. The hon. member must take his seat. The member for High Park with his question.

WINDSOR RACEWAY

Mr. Shulman: I have a question of the Solicitor General, Mr. Speaker. In view of the drastic efforts made here to force the Emprise Corp. out of the Ontario Jockey Club because of its very close relationship with organized crime, what are he and the Attorney General doing in view of the fact that Emprise have now purchased 25 per cent of the Windsor Raceway?

Hon. G. A. Kerr (Solicitor General): Mr. Speaker, strictly, Emprise has not purchased 25 per cent of the Windsor Raceway. Dominion Sport Service, by buying shares from, I believe, one Mr. Siegel in Windsor, who is a former owner of the raceway, now holds a minority position. We are aware, of course, of that transaction. At the present time, the Ontario Securities Commission is looking into it.

Hon. D. R. Irvine (Minister of Housing): Is he related to the member for High Park?

Mr. Speaker: The member for Ottawa East.

CARLETON EAST BY-ELECTION

Mr. Roy: I have a question, Mr. Speaker, of the Premier which has to do with the Carleton East by-election and the questions that are being asked by the voters. Would he advise the voters there, first of all, why he removed their former member, Bert Lawrence, from the cabinet; and secondly, why he forced him to resign?

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. Davis: Mr. Speaker, once again, I could answer in a somewhat provocative term, but I think that both questions can be answered by the voters in Carleton East; and if the hon. member for Ottawa East wants to get involved, let him be my guest.

Mr. Roy: Are we to assume from the Premier’s answer that the by-election was unnecessary and was only called to satisfy the ambitions of one individual?

Hon. Mr. Davis: The member can assume nothing.

Mr. Speaker: Order please. That’s a hypothetical question.

The hon. member for Wentworth.

An hon. member: He was a Liberal, wasn’t he?

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Deans: I have a question of the Treasurer --

Mr. Lewis: Are they mad at Pierre Benoit! Oh, are they mad -- at the Premier for seducing them. Did he have to seduce them by taking them behind the barn?

Mr. Speaker: Order please. The hon. member for Wentworth has the floor and time is flitting away.

COST OF REGIONAL GOVERNMENT

Mr. Deans: Thank you. I’d like to ask the Treasurer if he’s aware of the expressions of concern coming from various parts of the province over the escalating costs associated with regional government? If he is, has he had an analysis made of what the actual cost of the regional government implementation will be, minus the provincial grants as will be appearing over the course of some short period of time?

And thirdly, would the Treasurer -- if he agrees with me or with many other people, that the reasons for the costs are not very obvious -- have conducted a cost-benefit analysis in one or two regions to try to determine whether in fact the residents are receiving additional benefits for the additional dollars which are being expended at all levels in order to maintain the regional systems?

Hon. J. White (Treasurer, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs): I am very glad to have this question. I would like to respond by making a statement in the House within the next few days which will not be very much longer than the question itself. Because there are many fallacies being spread, most particularly -- and in an intellectually dishonest way -- by the leader of the Liberals, and to some extent by the socialists, I will bring in the facts and figures to disprove those malicious allegations.

Mr. Lewis: Just a second. On a point of privilege, how can one be intellectually dishonest to some extent? Either one is or one isn’t! So, if the Treasurer is going to demean my contribution --

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: He’s imputing motives.

Hon. Mr. White: This fellow knows what he’s saying isn’t true.

Mr. Lewis: I think he’s impugning motives,

Mr. R. F. Nixon: A supplementary question: Since the Treasurer is going to bring in a statement which will only be 25 words long or less, he could comment at the same time on the escalation of the mill rate in the town of Waterford, in the new region of Haldimand-Norfolk, which is going up by 27 mills this year because of regional government and for no other purpose. Would he kindly comment on that and explain what he’s going to do about it?

Mr. Lewis: And by way of supplementary, perhaps he could comment on --

Mr. Singer: A supplementary, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker: Order please. Supplementary question.

Mr. Lewis: Yes. Perhaps the Treasurer can comment as well on why he has indicated -- I gather at breakfast this morning formally -- that there will be no more money for the counties and regions of Ontario because Ontario doesn’t have the money, despite his refusal to tax the resource industries at a level which would be fair.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s right.

Hon. Mr. White: Well sir, we will carry out the Edmonton commitment and we will increase our grants to the local level of government by the same increase as our increase in revenues, which will be about 12 per cent.

Mr. Martel: Yes, with strings attached.

Mr. Lewis: With conditional attachments.

Hon. Mr. White: We can’t go a five-cent piece beyond that because of the heavy pressures on us from a number of ministries -- Health, Education and others.

Mr. Lewis: And the Treasurer puts it on the property tax payers rather than on Inco. That’s what he’s doing.

Hon. Mr. White: In my speech this morning I described how, since 1968, we have increased transfers by $1.1 billion by increasing our taxes here. I’m talking about increased rates now, which amounted to $967 million per year if I remember correctly. So, we have very deliberately increased our more progressive provincial taxes to greatly increase these grants to minimize the use of the regressive property tax. I make no apology for that.

In the process, we have increased our provincial taxes more or less to the average level of provincial taxation in this country. And we are not going to increase our taxes beyond that average point for fear of the counterproductive effect that it will have.

Mr. Roy: Not before the election anyway.

Mr. Lewis: Don’t tax individuals; just tax the resource industry.

Hon. Mr. White: Now insofar as the resource industry is concerned, the new measures which I introduced in my budget and which this House is asked to pass --

Mr. Lewis: Minimal.

Hon. Mr. White: -- will increase the taxes from the mining industry from $75 million to $225 million --

Mr. Martel: He’s just telling us that there’s been a rip-off for years.

Mr. Lewis: That’s a token. It should be twice as high as that.

Mr. Martel: A rip-off for years and he is admitting it now.

Hon. Mr. White: And we have doubled the tax on the lumber industry, so don’t give me that stuff.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. member for Downsview, please. I think there have been sufficient supplementaries.

ROYAL COMMISSION ON ALLEGATIONS OF POLICE BRUTALITY

Mr. Singer: Mr. Speaker, I have a question of the Solicitor General. Could the Solicitor General advise, when he sets out the terms of reference for the royal commission to inquire into allegations of police brutality, if he is going to ask that commission to bring forward a suggested new system of dealing with complaints against police activities?

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Mr. Speaker, as the hon. member knows, at the present time Arthur Maloney has been commissioned by Metro to look into that particular phase of policing. Also, the federal government has a commission set up to look into complaints dealing with the actions of the RCMP. I don’t know if it is necessary to have another commission dealing with that specific facet of complaining, as far as law enforcement is concerned and the conduct of police.

However, it is quite possible that will be in the terms of reference the commissioner would insist on, in view of the fact that some of the allegations include complaints that any allegations they made were not properly dealt with by the Metro force. It may be difficult for the commissioner in this instance to avoid making at least recommendations dealing with the complaint bureau or complaints. But as I say, there may be some overlapping because of the two commissions that exist at the present time.

Mr. Singer: A further supplementary: Wouldn’t the minister agree that since neither of the other investigations is under his control or at his direction, it is important that this province have as good a system of dealing with police complaints as is possible, and that therefore he should so instruct the commissioner to bring in recommendations along these lines? That’s the purpose of the whole thing.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Mr. Speaker, I don’t see anything the matter with the hon. member’s suggestion, but certainly any recommendations, that for example Mr. Maloney would make, could very well be adopted by us. After all, he is dealing with Metro police; he is dealing with police complaints generally. We don’t have too many complaints against the OPP, so I would assume that we would adopt any recommendations we feel would be pertinent and worthwhile and required by us.

Mr. Singer: But the minister didn’t commission Mr. Maloney.

Mr. Roy: May I ask a supplementary on that point, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker: A final supplementary.

Mr. Roy: Why would the minister limit this type of complaint bureau to Metro Toronto? Why would the minister not accept the suggestion we made to him back in the estimates last year that he establish a province-wide bureau for complaints, because for the public’s sake it doesn’t look right when the police are investigating the police?

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Mr. Speaker, you don’t have to have a province-wide bureau to avoid that particular conflict. You can have a citizen complaint bureau in each city.

Mr. Roy: Well, yes.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: One of the submissions made to Mr. Maloney the other day was for a province-wide complaint bureau --

Mr. Singer: Mr. Maloney is working for Metro.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: -- and I think that might very well be the answer.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Thunder Bay.

FUTURE OF ARMSTRONG

Mr. Stokes: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have a question of the Provincial Secretary for Resources Development. What new initiatives has the minister taken since we last visited the hamlet of Armstrong to ensure that it might have some industrial future? When is the minister going to sit down and co-operate with the federal authorities rather than carrying on a back-biting dialogue between those who are responsible?

Hon. Mr. Bernier: Come on. The member should get his facts straight.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Mr. Speaker, the last part of the question puzzles me somewhat --

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I don’t know why it should.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: -- because if any effort has been made by anyone to try to get the federal government to sit down and talk with any of us it has been by myself. I have been phoning them incessantly; we have sent them wires; we have had very few replies.

We have asked them over at least the last four months to appoint a minister who will co-ordinate the efforts of the various ministries involved. Up to about 10 days ago we couldn’t get the Prime Minister of Canada to appoint someone to co-ordinate it although we had promises. I couldn’t get answers from ministers; they just turn their backs on the whole problem.

Mr. Roy: Blame the feds.

Mr. Breithaupt: Answer the question.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: It is just about a week ago that Mr. Andras called and said that he had been appointed, that he in fact was the co-ordinator for the federal government.

As to the general question, we have been dealing with this thing for a matter of months. We have had numerous meetings with various people, including the development corporation up there, with all of the people who could possibly be recruited to help that community.

Indeed, there has been a successful bidder for the radar base. I just talked with him today in the hope that he may have something which would be helpful for the future of that community. We are trying to get together on Monday, which is about three days before the deadline which the federal government has given us for the selling of the radar base.

I have had very little co-operation from the federal government. I think the hon. member for Thunder Bay knows that; I am surprised he asked that question. We have some plans; we have already tried numerous plans for Armstrong and we haven’t given up. We have a number of things in mind, as I have mentioned.

I would hope that perhaps about this time next week I will be able to give the hon. member a complete answer on everything that has been tried for Armstrong, and I hope I will have something to offer by way of a successful endeavour. But if I were to attempt to answer that question in detail, Mr. Speaker, you would stop me because it would take about 20 minutes. I intend to relate to this House in chronological order the events right up until the day I make the statement.

If the hon. member is told, I am sure he will be satisfied that all the ministers of this government have tried everything they possibly could to help in Armstrong. They have had very little co-operation from the federal government, whose only desire is to close up the base, get the hell out of there, get to the next radar base and close it up. Those are the problems we are having.

Mr. Martel: What did this government do at Burwash?

Mr. Breithaupt: Just like Burwash.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: I will read a statement next week in detail, Mr. Speaker, and I am sure it will satisfy the hon. member.

Mr. Stokes: A supplementary, Mr. Speaker: What happened to the two proposals that were submitted to this ministry, the resources development policy field, with regard to three alternatives that would assist Armstrong and area to get back on their feet by a greater utilization of the forestry resources that have been wasting for the last 30 years in that area? The Minister of Natural Resources has had those in his possession for well over a month. The provincial secretary promised a report to the people of Armstrong and the alternatives that would assist Armstrong Development Council two months ago when we were up there. Why has he not at least taken them into his confidence and suggested that they sit down and talk about it in a realistic way?

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Mr. Speaker, I hope the hon. member isn’t suggesting that I haven’t been in constant communication with Mr. Dupuis, the head of the development corporation.

Mr. Stokes: Yes, I am suggesting that.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Well, I have been. We have been in constant contact with him and I am surprised that the hon. member has the impression we haven’t. If Mr. Dupuis has said that, I would be very much surprised.

Mr. Stokes: He did say it.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: Well he is entirely wrong and he is most unfair. We have had numerous propositions and we’ve checked the viability of those propositions out thoroughly. The one the hon. member is referring to, I will deal with in my statement. We think we may have something, but I have always been very careful to make sure we don’t say anything which will raise the hopes of those people in the community unless we are sure that it turns out to be practical.

Mr. Martel: Raise the hopes of the people in Burwash.

Hon. Mr. Grossman: I will deal with all of those questions the hon. member has asked in the detailed statement.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Sarnia.

LAND SPECULATION AND LAND TRANSFER TAX ACTS

Mr. Bullbrook: Yes, I have a question, through you, to the Treasurer. Premising that he is correct in his rationalization that the Land Speculation and Land Transfer Tax Acts are not to collect tax, could he advise us why he felt it incumbent upon him to protect the revenues at $60 million in the first fiscal year? Extrapolating the revenues anticipated by the Minister of Revenue (Mr. Meen), the Treasurer will be out only by about 8,000 per cent. Could the Treasurer advise us why it was necessary to give us a figure of $60 million?

Hon. Mr. White: I will.

Mr. Bullbrook: Let me finish, I am just getting started here. Secondly, could the Treasurer give us the factual foundation for his anticipated revenues of $60 million? Thirdly, could he give us the cost of the administration in collecting thus far something in the neighbourhood of $700,000? Fourthly, why does the Treasurer not adopt the criteria that he has established himself in issuing these discretionary exemptions from the imposition of that tax?

Hon. Mr. White: Well, sir, dealing with the matters in turn, the tax was applied, as the budget clearly said, to discourage land speculation.

Mr. Bullbrook: I accept that premise.

Hon. Mr. White: Yes, but this was question one.

Mr. Bullbrook: No it wasn’t. I said that in accepting that premise, why did the Treasurer tell --

Hon. Mr. White: And at the time of the budget I said the better these tax measures work, the less revenue we will collect.

Question number two; the $60 million --

Mr. Sargent: Where is the $60 million?

Hon. Mr. White: -- as I said in the budget, was a guess.

Mr. Bullbrook: It was a guess? Well, if that isn’t intelligent. Is that misleading the House? He guesses at it?

Hon. Mr. White: Question number three -- well, I was looking for the wording in the budget. It was --

Mr. Speaker: Order please.

Mr. Breithaupt: If he had said $120 million he would have been twice as right.

Hon. Mr. White: No, because I said in the budget -- a copy of which I thought I had here -- that the best we could do is come up with an informed guess; which is exactly what that was.

Mr. Bullbrook: The Treasurer is out 1,000 per cent.

Hon. Mr. White: The measures worked far better than I had believed possible.

Mr. Sargent: Why didn’t the Treasurer ask a page boy?

Hon. Mr. White: Question number three concerning the expense should be put on the order paper; and question number four should be directed to the Minister of Revenue.

Mr. Bullbrook: By way of supplementary, I want the Treasurer to know that it is on the order paper and I’d like an answer to it.

Mr. Speaker: The time for oral questions has now expired.

Mr. Roy: What is the Treasurer’s guess for the deficit next year?

Mr. Bullbrook: How can he be the Treasurer of Ontario when he is out 1,000 percent in his projections.

Mr. Speaker: Order please.

Mr. Bullbrook: Because he is a farce. What about the criteria of the land transfer tax?

Mr. Speaker: Order please. Would the member take his seat.

Mr. Lewis: He has to admit to a little Tory embarrassment. Ridiculous! He didn’t say that about the land transfer tax.

Mr. Speaker: Order please. Next order of business.

Presenting reports.

Hon. J. T. Clement (Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations): I take pleasure in tabling the following reports from my ministry: First the 24th annual report of the Ontario Racing Commission; next, the summary of the 1973 decisions of the Commercial Registration Appeal Tribunal; third, the 10th annual report of the Pension Commission of Ontario for the year ending Dec. 31, 1973; fourth, the annual report of the Registrar General for the year ending Dec. 31, 1973; fifth, the 27th annual report of the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario; and sixth, the statistical review of the operations of the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations for the calendar year of 1973 with comparisons to 1972.

Mr. E. J. Bounsall (Windsor West): How many more tomorrow?

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Minister of Labour.

Hon. J. P. MacBeth (Minister of Labour): Mr. Speaker, I have no’ been as active as my colleague, the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations, but I do have two reports to file.

Mr. Cassidy: They are much smaller, though.

Hon. Mr. MacBeth: I beg leave to table the following reports: The annual report of the Ministry of Labour, 1973-1974; and the annual report of the Workmen’s Compensation Board.

Mr. Deans: The minister is going to be in serious trouble pretty soon with the Compensation Board.

Mr. Speaker: Any further reports?

Motions.

Hon. Mr. Winkler moves, seconded by Mr. R. F. Nixon, that Mr. W. Hodgson, member for the electoral district of York North, be appointed chairman of the committees of the whole House for the present session.

Motion agreed to.

Mr. Speaker: Any further motions?

Introduction of bills.

EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS ACT

Mr. Drea moves first reading of bill intituled, An Act to amend the Employment Standards Act.

Motion agreed to; first reading of the bill.

Mr. F. Drea (Scarborough Centre): Mr. Speaker, the bill is self-explanatory for anyone who has been reading the newspapers. It is intended to bring apartment superintendents under the scope of the Employment Standards Act so that they, like everyone else, may have a day off.

Mr. Speaker: Before the orders of the day there are two matters I would draw to the attention of the House. First, the committee considering the estimates of the Ministry of the Environment will meet in committee room 1; not in room 230, as was found in the order paper.

Second, as indicated by a notice that went around to your desks a little earlier this afternoon, I look forward to meeting all hon. members who can conveniently come to room 230 at 6 o’clock. I believe that some of you may have your husbands or wives in the building today, and I might just mention they are perfectly welcome too. So we look forward to seeing everyone at 6 o’clock.

Orders of the day.

Clerk of the House: The 17th order, House in committee of supply.

Mr. Chairman: Hon. members of the House, I wish to thank you very much for electing me as the chairman of the committee of the whole House. As I have said before, I’ll try to act impartially and conduct the business of the House in the way the people of this province would expect me to. Thank you very much.

ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF TREASURY, ECONOMICS AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS (CONTINUED)

Hon. J. White (Treasurer, Minister of Economics and Intergovernmental Affairs): Mr. Chairman, because these are the first estimates to be called since you were chosen to preside over the committee of supply, I should like to congratulate you and to promise our co-operation as you carry out your demanding responsibilities.

Mr. M. Cassidy (Ottawa Centre): Mr. Chairman, on a point of order, I was actually on the floor. If the minister wishes to make a few comments, that’s fine, but we did begin these estimates -- he may not recall it, but we did begin these estimates on June 10 of this year.

Hon. Mr. White: Well, sir, if I might have the permission of the committee --

Mr. Cassidy: Of course.

Hon. Mr. White: -- I would like to make a brief supplementary statement to bring members up to date on some developments in our ministry since I introduced the estimates on June 10.

Mr. Cassidy: It is rather lost in the cobwebs, I agree.

Hon. Mr. White: The most important such development, as the Premier (Mr. Davis) mentioned earlier, was the decision by Moody’s to give Ontario’s credit a triple-A rating. This is the first time in the history of the world that a foreign government went to market in New York with a triple-A rating. It’s never happened before -- never ever. No other province and no other organization, except for the Dominion of Canada itself, has a triple-A rating in Moody’s; and that is symbolic because Canada doesn’t borrow in New York.

Mr. S. Lewis (Scarborough West): The Premier said Illinois and California had triple-A ratings.

Hon. Mr. White: Two states -- they are, of course, not foreign countries in New York -- two states have triple-A ratings, California and Illinois.

This decision, Moody’s said, was based on Ontario’s “sound financial condition, well-managed debt and enviable sources of relatively inexpensive hydro-electric power.”

We estimate that this new rating will save the province $10.5 million in interest rate savings in the year ahead, and tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in the years ahead.

In this same connection, Mr. Chairman, I should like to remind members that we are continuing with our debt reduction programme. As a result of policies announced in my budget of April 9, we have been able to reduce the outstanding public debt of Ontario by $369 million to date this year.

Mr. Cassidy: That is the kind of accounting Wacky Bennett used to do.

Hon. Mr. White: Last year we were able to make a reduction of $225 million; so the two-year total reduction is $594 million.

Mr. Cassidy: That is not true.

Hon. Mr. White: It is true, and I will teach you something about government accounting before the day is over.

Mr. Cassidy: You can teach it to your students at Western.

Hon. Mr. White: Now then, sir, I would like to use the occasion to publicly acknowledge the great contribution made to our ministry and to the municipalities of Ontario by the member for Grenville-Dundas (Mr. Irvine) in his former capacity as Minister without Portfolio assigned to Treasury. The Premier has recognized his ability and dedication and we all wish him well as he takes on his heavy new housing portfolio. Thank you.

Mr. Lewis: You are sure it was the first time in the history of the world?

Hon. Mr. White: Yes, sir. That is true.

Mr. J. R. Breithaupt (Kitchener): Mr. Chairman, it is always a pleasure to be involved in the making of world history.

Mr. Cassidy: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, I did have the floor when we started on the first round of these estimates some four months ago.

Mr. Breithaupt: Well, if the member would be kind enough to yield, the only point I wished to make was to congratulate the Chairman before he allowed the member for Ottawa Centre to complete his remarks.

I realize, Mr. Chairman, that I had made certain remarks when we had some time on the estimates back in June, but I would like to take this moment on behalf of the opposition to congratulate you, sir, on your election to the chairmanship of committee of the whole. You have certainly had a great amount of experience in this area over the last year or so as you became more involved with this work while the newly elected Speaker was taking on added responsibilities partly as a result of the unfortunate illness from time to time of the member for Waterloo South.

I would congratulate you on your election, sir, and I hope that we will be able to continue with the estimates as we have a lot to cram into the next 60 hours.

Mr. Chairman: Thank you. The hon. member for Ottawa East.

Mr. Cassidy: Ottawa Centre actually.

Mr. Chairman: Ottawa Centre.

Mr. Cassidy: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Perhaps I could join in congratulating you and wishing you that the gift of impartiality will always be with you in your endeavours as chairman of committees for this House.

Mr. Chairman, I would just like to take the finance minister to task on that last statement of his because we’ve heard this canard so many times about the way in which this government has been reducing the debt of the province.

The facts are, as he well knows, that the debt of the province has been steadily increasing over the last three or four years and the only thing that has been reduced has been the public, or marketed debt of the province as a consequence of the enormous payments from Ottawa to Ontario in funds under the Canada Pension Plan. I would point out from his own budget in 1973-1974 the net cash requirements for the province was $721 million and that, in fact, there was $950 million in non-public borrowing in that year and $225 million public debt retired.

The net increase in debt of the Province of Ontario in that year was $733 million and the chart about the government’s requirements in the budget itself indicates that the requirements would be of a comparable nature in this current year, that is, that the government of Ontario will be borrowing around $700 million or $800 million. That will, of course, be met in the main by the money coming from the Canada Pension Plan, which is money which is put into the pension plan by the citizens of Canada on a compulsory basis and which then relieves the Province of Ontario from the necessity of constantly having to go back to the public market.

Hon. Mr. White: The member for Ottawa Centre can’t swallow that triple-A rating, can he?

Mr. Cassidy: No, I can’t swallow that at all.

Mr. M. C. Germa (Sudbury): What is the collateral?

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, I just want to take something else up too which came up today in question period --

Hon. Mr. White: You can’t argue your way around that one.

Mr. P. D. Lawlor (Lakeshore): Oh, come on. The Treasurer swings from budgetary to non-budgetary.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes. Ontario’s debt keeps on going up and the Treasurer is conjuring with a certain kind of debt and says that that is going down. The overall debt of the province keeps on going up.

Mr. Lawlor: Of course.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s a fact. Now, whether that’s wise or not is a different matter and we are not necessarily at odds with the government at all times in the need to use deficits.

Mr. Lawlor: I think that debt reduction stuff is a lot of Conservative malarky. It’s just an economic stunt.

Mr. Lewis: When the Province of Ontario is owned by multinational corporations it’s not difficult to get a three-star rating from Moody’s.

An hon. member: They’d laugh at you if you told them.

Mr. Chairman: Order. I think the member for Ottawa Centre is quite capable of speaking.

Mr. Cassidy: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Breithaupt: Oh, he is that.

Mr. Cassidy: When this debate adjourned on June 10, Mr. Chairman -- it was rather difficult to find out the date, in fact, when we had last been engaged in it -- I was talking about regional development policy and about land. During the course of this afternoon the Premier once again has indicated that he, as leader of the government, is simply not aware of the needs of any other part of the province for development and, therefore he thus explains the government’s obsession with the needs of Metropolitan Toronto and its region.

He said, as I recall the quote, that he wasn’t aware of any needs in eastern and northern Ontario. Very briefly I would like to read into the record some figures of what’s been happening in eastern Ontario and indicate to the Premier and to the Treasurer that, in regional development terms, most parts of eastern Ontario are in desperate need of action by the government and that there are no policies visible that we can see in order to get those, Mr. Chairman.

To begin with, Mr. Chairman, the population of eastern Ontario in the years from 1951 to 1971 has gone up by 45 per cent compared to 67 per cent for the province as a whole. I exempt Ottawa itself from this because Ottawa has had the benefit of federal employment. It’s gone up by only two-thirds of the rate of the province as a whole because of the lack of economic development.

The farm population of eastern Ontario has declined by 30 per cent, which is a greater rate of decline than the decline in the rest of the province. The labour force in eastern Ontario has grown by just under 70 per cent over the last 20 years compared to an increase of 81 per cent in the province as a whole and a much larger increase in the Toronto-centred region. Once you exempt Ottawa itself you find that the labour force growth in the rest of eastern Ontario over 20 years is as low as an increase of one-half of one per cent in the county of Russell. There has simply been no growth in the labour force in that area at all.

You must remember that the area began from a depressed state and it has been steadily falling behind the rest of the province over the last 20 years or over the last 10 years, depending on what you want to count. Because of the depressed state of the economy in most parts of eastern Ontario, a fact which is a chronic feature of our economy, the participation rates of male workers in eastern Ontario are about 77.8 per cent compared to 80.3 per cent for the province as a whole. In other words, there are people who have simply given up in eastern Ontario and don’t try to get involved in the labour force because the jobs aren’t there. For women as well, the participation rate is lower than in the province as a whole and much lower than in the Metro-centred region.

Over the last 20 years, Mr. Chairman, eastern Ontario, which had a fifth of the farm population of the province, has experienced a third of the decline in the farming population for Ontario as a whole, a sign of the decline in the agricultural economy in eastern Ontario.

The average income in eastern Ontario in 1951 was $2,947 per taxpayer, or $216 less than the provincial average, about 10 per cent. That differential has widened to the point where the average taxpayer in eastern Ontario is now $946 behind the provincial average of $7,626 average income. The people of eastern Ontario began behind the rest of the province and they have been falling steadily further behind. If you took out of those figures the people of Ottawa-Carleton, where federal salaries and federal employment growth have been a particular factor unrelated to the rest of the region, you would find that there are enormous disparities between eastern Ontario and the rest of the province.

Let’s see now -- in Glengarry, for example, the average income per taxpayer is $6,044, or a difference of about $1,600 from the provincial average.

The disposable income per household in eastern Ontario is also about $800 or $900 behind the provincial average of $10,540 in 1971, and if you took away Ottawa-Carleton you find out that the difference is as much as $3,000 between the effective buying power per household in eastern Ontario and in the rest of the province. The gap would be much larger if you looked at the Toronto-centred region, to which the government devotes so much attention, so much investment and so much time.

The rate of welfare assistance in eastern Ontario is higher than for the province as a whole. In 1973, 3.3 per cent of the population of eastern Ontario in December were on family benefits, compared with 2.6 per cent of the population of the province as a whole.

Our agriculture again -- the number of farms in eastern Ontario in the 20 years between 1951 and 1971 declined by 42.6 per cent compared to 36.8 per cent for the province as a whole, and the amount of farm land that went out of production was also at a faster rate than for the province as a whole. Here we face a food crisis in eastern Ontario and in Ontario generally, yet over the last 20 years the amount of improved farm land in eastern Ontario has gone down by 20 per cent. It has gone down by approximately 550,000 acres of improved farm land which is no longer in production.

Manufacturing employment in eastern Ontario between 1966 and 1971 in fact fell by five per cent, and between 1961 and 1971 manufacturing employment grew in the region by only 16 per cent compared to the 25 per cent increase for the province as a whole.

Those are a few figures, Mr. Chairman. The reason I put them on the record is because I think that it’s significant that the Premier of this province is unaware of any problems in eastern Ontario demanding action by the government and feels compelled to concentrate his government’s attention on the Metro-centred region when the facts so clearly show that, Ottawa apart, the whole region of eastern Ontario is desperately in need of government initiatives in order to bring it up to the average level of the rest of the province.

The voters of Stormont recognized the problems that have been created for them by the Ontario government, Mr. Chairman, and recent grants and other things that have been done in the recent past did not impress them. They threw out the government candidate because they wanted to tell Bill Davis the message, and the message was that eastern Ontario is being ignored by the Bill Davis government and it’s time that comes to a stop.

We face, in a couple of weeks, another by-election in Carleton East, an area of Ottawa which is of itself relatively prosperous. It’s a suburban area. Many of its people work in the government. In one particular area, Rockcliffe Park, a small village municipality within the boundaries of Ottawa, the average family income in 1971 was a rather penurious $38,000 per year. The rest of it isn’t quite this prosperous, but all the same they’re not badly off.

What the people of Ottawa have been learning though, Mr. Chairman, over the last while, is that they too are a part of eastern Ontario and it isn’t good enough for Carleton East to have a certain measure of prosperity because of the federal government. If there are pockets of poverty within Carleton East among people who depend on the eastern Ontario economy and not on the federal government economy --

Hon. Mr. White: Why did you leave there?

Mr. Cassidy: What’s that?

Hon. Mr. White: Why did you leave Ottawa?

Mr. Cassidy: Why did I leave Ottawa? I still live in Ottawa. I don’t understand what you mean.

Hon. Mr. White: Oh, I see.

An hon. member: I thought you lived on the Islands.

Mr. Cassidy: No. As a matter of fact I’d better put the record straight. I am now the member for Ottawa and the Valley, given the election of the member for Stormont and the St. Lawrence.

Hon. Mr. White: Oh, I see.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, I’m no longer the member for eastern Ontario.

Mr. Breithaupt: It’s nice to have a divided responsibility.

Mr. A. J. Roy (Ottawa East): Tell him, Mike, tell him.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, the riding of Carleton East is a part of eastern Ontario, and as eastern Ontario goes so goes Ottawa, and that mutual responsibility is beginning to be recognized. And I would predict to you, Mr. Chairman, that that too will be shown when the votes are counted in Carleton East on Nov. 7.

Mr. Roy: You’re not suggesting you’re going to take that one, are you?

Mr. Cassidy: Well, we’ll take your candidate and we may take theirs as well, you know.

Mr. Roy: You want to bet money on it?

Mr. Cassidy: The Conservative riding is a rather interesting bird, having been a Liberal in plumage up until very recently, and now having suddenly found an allegiance to a Conservative Party whose former Minister of Labour he dissociates himself from, whose big blue machine he dissociates himself from, and in fact --

Mr. Chairman: Can we get back to the estimates please?

Mr. Cassidy: -- the candidate in that riding, Mr. Chairman, associates himself with the Conservative government only in his pursuit of power, in his wish to take a seat on the government benches and nothing more.

Mr. Roy: Right, right.

Mr. Cassidy: It’s as cynical a move as has been seen since John Rhodes came into the government from being a Liberal in Sault Ste. Marie, and John MacBeth from being a Liberal and former reeve of Etobicoke.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Cassidy: I suppose there’s lots of precedence there --

Mr. Roy: What about the Minister of Transport?

Mr. Cassidy: -- and as the candidate in Carleton East has said publicly, there is really no difference between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. We agree with that statement by the mayor of Ottawa.

Hon. S. B. Handleman (Minister without Portfolio): What about the hon. member for High Park?

Mr. Roy: Oh, John White is going to get mad at you!

Hon. Mr. Handleman: What about the hon. member for High Park?

Mr. Cassidy: Well, he agrees that there’s no difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives either!

Hon. Mr. Handleman: He made quite a switch.

Mr. Roy: You said you were going to talk to Prime Minister Stanfield. Have you talked to him? In June, remember?

Hon. Mr. White: Which June?

Mr. Roy: Yes, which June?

Mr. Cassidy: What adds to the paranoia of the party to my right, Mr. Chairman, is the fact that they think that the mayor of Ottawa intends to become the leader of the Conservative Party and that will somehow do something for the fortunes of the Conservative Party nationally. I assure you that it’s unlikely to happen, but if it does, it’s unlikely to do anything for the fortunes of the national Conservative Party.

Mr. Chairman, when I broke off the other month I was speaking about regional planning. And just moving over into the area of land, I think that one or two points now need to be raised in view of the government’s announcement about yet another vast development plan for land in the north and eastern sectors of the Toronto-centred region, just outside the Metro boundaries. As my leader was saying, the Toronto-centred region plan is in tatters, as has been now written in the press, the planning efforts of the Toronto-centred region staff group are nugatory, are really almost not being done at all. The whole thing has been scrapped by the government and it is now proceeding in a series of ad hoc planning efforts, of ad hoc efforts in development, trying to react to crises rather than to anticipate them.

What is particularly instructive in the announcements about those sewage developments east and north of Metro is the fact that there has been not a whit of mention of any public involvement in the land which will be serviced by those new pipes. The government apparently intends to continue putting the major reliance for housing development on the private sector, despite the disastrous failure of the private sector to provide housing at reasonable cost for people to buy or to rent, whether it’s in Toronto or Ottawa or even the smaller municipalities of the province like Thunder Bay.

I think that during the course of this debate the minister should give us a report on the status of the Toronto-centred region plan. I think he should also give us a report on the status of the other regional plans, particularly the one for eastern Ontario, since that one seems if anything to be even more at a standstill than the planning for the Toronto-centred region.

I think that the minister should give us a very clear statement about what the policy of this government is on public ownership of urban, residential and development land, because we don’t have it right now. We need a policy. We have statements by the government suggesting the formation of an Ontario Land Corp. We don’t know what that’s going to do.

The government policy seems quixotic. On the one hand, there is to be public land development in the Haldimand-Norfolk and North Pickering areas. On the other hand, the government refuses to take any steps to preserve the environment or to provide any public participation in land in the Niagara region, in the Niagara Escarpment or in the parkway.

In the cities generally, there is no policy. There has now been some limited encouragement by municipalities to enter into land banking through the Housing Development Act, but that only came after the cities hammered away through the provincial-municipal liaison committee and in other ways at this government in order that they could have the powers to acquire land, because they could see the need in a way that the government could not do. They could see the need and they saw that the Ontario Housing Corp., the Ontario Land Corp. and this government, were simply unwilling to come to grips with the problem, were simply unwilling to grasp the nettle, to confront developers and to put the thrust of land development into public hands rather than in private hands.

We would recommend, Mr. Chairman, and it is our policy that not only should the bulk of the land coming into development be publicly owned but that for the most part it also be on leasehold or Crownhold terms and that this be done in order to ensure a continued supply of reasonably priced housing in order to prevent continued speculation in land both by developers and also by homeowners, who benefit from public land ownership but who should not be allowed to cash in on that benefit by reselling their property on the market at inflated prices.

We would recommend that industrial and commercial land be purely on a leasehold basis so that the benefits eventually accrue to the public. We would recommend, and it has now been accepted by the government in a small way, that condominiums be allowed on leased land -- but not on leased land held by private individuals, only on publicly owned leased land. We would recommend that where there is publicly owned land the government take a look at what’s happening around our major cities and disengage itself from the dream that it can provide modestly priced housing in single detached form under the HOME plan.

It seems a bit crazy to me that in areas like Glencairn in Ottawa, in other parts of Toronto and elsewhere in the province, HOME houses which are semi-detached or detached on 40- and 50- and 60-foot lots are being built under the government’s land policy, if there is one, while private developers at the same time are providing housing at $10,000 or $20,000 more which is in the form of townhousing and other forms of medium density. It seems to me that the government should use medium densities in order to bring the price of those HOME houses down to the maximum extent feasible and in conjunction with good planning.

The market for land is breaking down. Right now, over the last six or seven months, there has been a temporary halt to the upward spiral of land prices because of the enormous jump in interest rates.

That is what has caused the pause in the real estate market, not the speculation taxes introduced by the minister. Those speculation taxes had no effect on speculation by developers. Developers are still the major people providing housing on the market.

It is noteworthy that despite all the panic and despite the increase in “for sale” signs in the housing market, there still has been no significant decrease in housing prices. In August, for example, the price of housing that was changing hands in Toronto was around $56,000; it had actually gone up by a couple of thousand dollars from the period before the land speculation tax had been introduced by the minister.

So we want to see a very clear statement by the ministry about what is this government’s land policy -- whether it is prepared to undertake a programme of massive public involvement in land in urban centres and the surrounding areas or whether it will continue to put its reliance on that feeble reed, the private development industry, and therefore set the stage for yet another round of inflated land profits at the expense of the Ontario tenant and the Ontario home buyer in a year or two -- if mortgage rates ever come down.

Mr. Chairman, there are a couple of other points I want to make quite briefly, and I think we will expand on them during the relevant points of the debate on various aspects of the estimates. One is that I think the minister should give us a complete statement of what on earth has happened to the review of the Planning Act, which I think was announced more than a year ago but which took so long to get under way.

I was a member, along with the member for York South (Mr. MacDonald) and a number of other colleagues in this Legislature, of the select committee of the Legislature on the OMB, which wanted to go forward to look at the Planning Act and which, given the speed with which we did the first part of our work, might well have had a set of proposals on the desks of MPPs at this time. However, the government chose otherwise. It must have thought the group was far too radical because of the backbenchers who had been installed from the Tory rearguard, and it therefore entrusted this to a separate review.

Nothing has been heard about that. There has been no opportunity yet for public input. The process seems to be in the process of accelerated decay, and that concerns me because of the problems that many municipalities and many citizens’ groups are having with the Planning Act.

In fact, what we have been doing since the review of the Planning Act was announced is making some very substantial changes in planning procedures on an ad hoc basis. The Housing Development Act changes are one. The progress in Ottawa, and I think in other cities as well, towards neighbourhood planning, the implementation of Part II studies with full neighbourhood co-operation, is another.

The getting away from the old fashions of zoning to other kinds of controls and the very warm acceptance of development controls which many municipalities have demonstrated, all indicate that that review of the Planning Act should be under way now at a fast rate and should be completed soon, rather than being put in some pigeonhole to wait from some time after the 1975 election.

Finally, I would like to raise a point or two about regional government. I am sure the minister is aware of the malaise that exists around the province with regional governments and with the kind of expenditures which are being found. We will have some figures to table in the Legislature later during the course of these estimates. They don’t bear out the horror stories that the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. R. F. Nixon) is accustomed to tell around the province; as he tried to do so unsuccessfully in Carleton East the other day. What they do show is that when regional government is brought in, there is a very sharp, once-and-for-all increase in spending and you never get back to where you were before.

And the figures also show, Mr. Chairman, that this government has moved by a series of ad hoc grants of one sort or another to alleviate the impact of additional regional government spending, rather than making any fundamental changes in the fiscal system.

The minister’s reply to questions just today indicates that he is sticking to his intention to load the burden of increased municipal spending on to the taxpayers of the municipalities in the most regressive tax available -- that is, the municipal property tax -- rather than sitting down with the municipalities and deciding what is an acceptable level, if any, of increase, and then deciding to put that on to a progressive tax source, such as those that are available to the province.

As so often happens with this government, Mr. Chairman, the minister is quite prepared to try and beat the federal government over the head for its failure to transfer enough tax points in order to alleviate municipal financial problems. He has now turned around and is beating the municipalities over the head and telling them that they’ve got to suffer as well.

But when it comes to Ontario, to the province and to its power to restructure the tax system in a more equitable way, the minister is neither willing to exact the full due from resources and other tax fields which are open to him, nor is he willing to replace regressive property tax sources with progressive income and corporate tax sources.

The government, it seems to me, should now make a statement to bring us up to date on where it stands about restructuring, because this is still seen as a menace in a number of parts of the province, including areas like Lanark and other counties in eastern Ontario. I know what’s happening; there’s a stick and carrot approach.

The minister and his sidekicks are pushing these areas very hard. In the process of restructuring, the government is putting the boots to many of the traditional values which are strongly held in this province. And these have been eroded far more by the capitalists in the Conservative Party than by the socialists in the New Democratic Party. We, in fact, have been going around the province trying to patch up the damage this government is doing; trying to find ways in which those traditional values can be upheld; trying to find ways in which people can continue to have a sense of identity rather than alienation created by this government; a sense of belonging, a sense of community. These are the things that are being destroyed by this government --

Hon. G. A. Kerr (Solicitor General): That is a lot of nonsense.

Mr. Cassidy: -- and one of the ways in which it is doing it is through its regional government policies.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: The member doesn’t believe in hard work, does he?

Mr. J. A. Taylor (Prince Edward-Lennox): The member’s political philosophy doesn’t permit that.

Mr. Cassidy: What? As a matter of fact my political philosophy definitely does.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: It is an alien philosophy.

Mr. Cassidy: The purpose of the socialistic philosophy is to permit the full development of every human individual.

Mr. Taylor: The member doesn’t believe that.

Mr. Cassidy: You don’t get that under a capitalistic system particularly.

Mr. Taylor: The member doesn’t believe in private ownership of property. He just finished saying that people shouldn’t own their own homes. They should all rent flats.

Mr. Cassidy: So what does the member for Prince Edward-Lennox think?

Mr. Taylor: I think that’s wrong.

Mr. Cassidy: The member for Prince Edward-Lennox believes that the rights of the small group that has substantial amounts of private property should be upheld.

Mr. Taylor: The member should have quoted me correctly. So now I’m everything.

Mr. Cassidy: Under the capitalistic system, Mr. Chairman, the total change in manufacturing employment in Prince Edward county between 1961 and 1971 has been a decline of 25 jobs.

Mr. Taylor: This government has created 964 jobs in my riding at the end of the five-year period through performance loans.

Mr. Cassidy: Oh!

Mr. Taylor: From 1966 to 1974.

Mr. Chairman: Order.

Mr. Taylor: I’ll give the member the facts.

Mr. Chairman: Will the member for Prince Edward-Lennox give the member for Ottawa Centre a chance. He has the floor.

Mr. Cassidy: This is a very interesting dialogue, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman: That’s all right. We’re not on a dialogue between two members. We’re dealing with estimates.

Mr. Cassidy: The member for Prince Edward-Lennox is claiming that the government has created more jobs in manufacturing than actually existed in the manufacturing in 1971 at the time when the government’s own statistics were prepared on the situation of employment in the area.

Mr. Taylor: I have listened to the member’s figures and they are distorted.

Mr. Cassidy: Under the free enterprise system, Mr. Chairman, in 1971 the average income per family in Prince Edward-Lennox --

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Is there any place that the member for Ottawa Centre would rather be?

Mr. Cassidy: This is rather fun, isn’t it? The average income was $7,578, or $3,000 per family less than the provincial average. It was about $4,000 less per family than in Ottawa-Carleton and about $5,000 less per family than in Metropolitan Toronto. These are the fruits of the free enterprise system. The people of Prince Edward are suffering because of this member who comes up here and faithfully votes for free enterprise, which has left his people in penury.

Mr. Taylor: Did you quote how much the province is paying to Prince Edward county and also to Lennox-Addington county in terms of education grants -- what percentage of the total cost?

Mr. Cassidy: Well, thank God for that.

Mr. Taylor: It’s 79.3 per cent for the elementary schools, and 79.64 per cent for the secondary schools and for the Hastings-Prince Edward Separate School Board 87.86 per cent of the total education costs. So we don’t feel neglected.

Mr. Chairman: Order please.

Mr. Cassidy: Thank the Lord, Mr. Chairman, that the government finally took the advice of the member for York South, who for years pleaded for a foundation plan for education and for municipalities.

They have not yet taken the advice as far as the foundation plan for municipalities goes, but there is now equalization in the province to ensure a certain rough justice in education spending between areas which are poor, like Prince Edward county, and areas which are more prosperous, like Ottawa-Carleton.

Mr. Taylor: We are rich in people.

Mr. Cassidy: Richer people?

Mr. Taylor: Rich in people, I said.

Mr. Cassidy: The $7,500 per family income in Prince Edward county, Mr. Chairman, has still got to pay the same amount if they want to buy a Ford car, if they want to buy a television set, if they want to buy construction materials, if they want to buy milk in the store and everything else. The price of all those goods is the same, and the people in Prince Edward-Lennox, under the system that Bill Davis and Jim Taylor and the rest of them have endorsed --

Hon. Mr. Kerr: They know how to save and plan on a private basis.

Mr. Cassidy: -- enjoy a family income which is about a third less than the people in the prosperous metropolitan urban areas of the province.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: It costs more, you know that. How about rent? The cost of housing?

Mr. Cassidy: Maybe they enjoy it, but what we say is that people in Prince Edward county shouldn’t have to suffer those economic disadvantages simply because they choose, or are compelled, to stay in their county rather than coming to Ottawa-Carleton or --

Mr. Taylor: You don’t have all of the economic facts.

Mr. Cassidy: -- coming down to Metropolitan Toronto.

Mr. Taylor: You won’t listen to the economic advantages.

Mr. Cassidy: There may be certain economic advantages, but when you go to buy meat, the price per pound of meat in the Loblaw store in Picton is going to be the same as the price of meat in the Loblaw store in Metro Toronto, or very close to it. The price of television sets is, in fact, lower in Toronto than it is in Picton.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Maybe they are raising their own meat.

Mr. Taylor: How many farmers have you got in Metropolitan Toronto?

Mr. Chairman: Order. This is turning into a debate.

Mr. Cassidy: Well, that is what this Legislature is all about.

Mr. Chairman: You debate with the minister, not with the private members.

Mr. Cassidy: This is one member who faithfully upholds the private enterprise system, despite the ravages it has wreaked on his own particular area.

Mr. Chairman: Make your remarks to the chairman and the minister, please.

Mr. Cassidy: I am making them to the chairman, Mr. Chairman, with a few asides. I’d point out that, next to Glengarry and Russell, Prince Edward county has had the lowest growth in the labour force of any county in eastern Ontario over the last 10 years -- over the last 20 years in fact. The labour force in that area has grown by 25 per cent, compared with a growth of 81 per cent in the province as a whole.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Growth doesn’t mean prosperity.

Mr. Cassidy: It means you are starving Prince Edward county.

Mr. Taylor: It does not.

Mr. Cassidy: You definitely are. You are starving it of any kind of growth. You are starving all of eastern Ontario, with the exception of Ottawa-Carleton.

Mr. Taylor: You must relate job growth with the general growth of population. You take figures and distort the entire picture.

Mr. Cassidy: Well, you ask yourself, why is the population of Prince Edward county coming down to Metro Toronto? They are coming down to Metro Toronto because there has been no effort by the government to create jobs in Prince Edward county.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Cassidy: There is nothing to do in Prince Edward county except raise potatoes. And there has been no industry come into the area.

Mr. I. Deans (Wentworth): That’s a valuable thing.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s a valuable thing, that’s right.

Mr. Taylor: Two million three hundred and forty thousand dollars has been given by way of loans to persons locating industry in my riding through EODC.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, that’s fine but that’s a bail-out, Mr. Chairman. If you drive down the Don Valley Parkway or you drive across the 401 or any other major arterial road here in Metro Toronto, you will see more industry in five minutes than you will see going 100 miles through major routes in eastern Ontario. That is the disparity that exists between the Metro-centred region under Bill Davis and the Conservative government --

Mr. Taylor: We don’t want to be like Toronto.

Mr. Cassidy: I know.

Mr. R. F. Nixon (Leader of the Opposition): The values are far superior to what is going on here.

Mr. Cassidy: That’s fine but I hope the Leader of the Opposition isn’t supporting the idea that Prince Edward county --

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I’m not supporting the idea that they ought to have wall to wall development in Prince Edward county.

Mr. Cassidy: Neither am I, but I think they ought to have enough development that they can choose to stay there, that there can be good jobs for them to stay there, or they can choose to come to Metro Toronto.

Mr. Taylor: We don’t want your steel mills.

Mr. Cassidy: There is no choice right now.

Mr. Taylor: We don’t want your steel mills.

Mr. Cassidy: Oh? The Minister of Housing (Mr. Irvine) wants it now. He has suddenly decided to --

Mr. Deans: What is the matter with steel mills? Have you got something against the people who work in steel mills?

Mr. Breithaupt: They don’t want to put one in Nottawasaga now either.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please. Let’s get back to the estimates.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Chairman: Order. Would the member for Wentworth and the member for Prince Edward-Lennox please stop debating?

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, I guess the member for Prince Edward-Lennox lives in the riding, but I believe he originally came from Toronto. He hasn’t succeeded in transposing --

Mr. Chairman: Would the member for Ottawa Centre get back to the estimates rather than discussing the member for Prince Edward-Lennox?

Mr. Cassidy: We were discussing in very graphic terms, Mr. Chairman, the effects on eastern Ontario of the lack of planning by the government --

Mr. Chairman: Go ahead and discuss that.

Mr. Cassidy: -- and I will continue to discuss it as well. I don’t want to go on for too much longer, but the member is being rather provocative, Mr. Chairman.

The point that I am making is that the member is behaving in the same way as if the inhabitants of Rosedale were to say, “We don’t want any public housing in this particular part of town,” as I am sure they have said.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Oh, no. They need it here.

Mr. Cassidy: From his position, with an income of $30,000 or $40,000 a year, he can well afford to say on behalf of Prince Edward county, “We don’t want any more development here. We want to preserve the growing farmlands and so on.”

Mr. Taylor: I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, you did.

Mr. Deans: He doesn’t want steel workers there.

Mr. Taylor: I don’t want heavy industry.

Mr. Cassidy: You don’t want heavy industry, okay.

Mr. Taylor: Not on our beautiful island nestled in Lake Ontario.

Mr. Cassidy: Right. Maybe there are some other kinds of industry which could go into that particular area.

Mr. Taylor: And we are getting it.

Mr. Cassidy: You are getting it? That is not what the government’s figures show. They show that in fact you are not getting it.

Mr. Taylor: I will give you the figures.

Mr. Cassidy: The figures also show, if you want, that 40 per cent of the income tax payers -- and this doesn’t count those who don’t pay income tax -- 40 per cent of the income taxpayers in Prince Edward county in 1971 --

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Have got good accountants.

Mr. Cassidy: -- had an income of $3,000 or less and 37 per cent had an income of between $3,000 and $7,000. I didn’t choose to have an engagement with this member; he chose it.

Mr. Taylor: You visit us. We will show you how to live.

Mr. Cassidy: That means that 77 per cent of the people within Prince Edward county have an income of less than $7,000 a year. If you want to compare that with the rest of the province, that compares with about 62 per cent of the people of the province as a whole. In other words, there is a very significant sector of poverty in Prince Edward county of which the member isn’t aware because he is obviously very comfortable, as is any member of this Legislature, for good or for ill.

With $30,000, he can say, “We don’t want any more growth. We don’t mind if people have to move out.” But right now the kids of those families making $3,000 and $4,000 are being compelled to move to Hamilton or Toronto, to other parts of the province, to pay the kinds of housing prices that prevail in those parts of the province because there are no opportunities for them. I just hope in the next election that they speak up and tell the member for Prince Edward-Lennox that they have had enough of his $40,000 highfalutin notions about preserving the environment at the expense of any kind of regional economic development.

Mr. Taylor: How did you arrive at that?

Mr. Cassidy: That’s exactly what you said.

Mr. Taylor: You are the greatest fabricator that I know.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, I would just like to close --

Mr. Taylor: I am not talking about no growth.

Mr. Cassidy: Well, what are you talking about?

Mr. Taylor: The introduction of heavy industry.

Mr. Cassidy: You have had no growth there. You have had no growth for the last 10 years.

Mr. Taylor: We have wonderful people. We have a lifestyle that you would aspire to achieve.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, yes.

Mr. Taylor: Don’t tell us all about your socialism.

Mr. Cassidy: So the people of Prince Edward county so aspire to achieve it that they have been moving out of that county in larger numbers, relatively speaking, than almost any other county in eastern Ontario over the last 20 years.

Now I know perfectly well, as the member for Prince Edward-Lennox says, that the county is a great place to live. I suspect that those people who moved out didn’t move out because of choice. They moved out because they were compelled to because there were no economic opportunities for them in that particular area.

Mr. Taylor: Just listen to some of my speeches.

Mr. Cassidy: Well, I will, with great interest. Mr. Chairman, when I was distracted or interrupted --

Mr. R. Gisborn (Hamilton East): By that carpetbagger from Toronto.

Mr. Cassidy: He is a carpetbagger; that’s right.

Mr. Taylor: That is an insult. He should withdraw that.

Mr. Gisborn: He’s a carpetbagger from Toronto protecting his interests.

Mr. Cassidy: Well, maybe it’s a briefcaser from Toronto then.

Mr. Taylor: Just because you settled on the Toronto islands and aspire to represent the islands --

Mr. Cassidy: As I pointed out to the Treasurer, when he came up with that line again --

Mr. Taylor: Don’t shoot disparaging remarks at me.

Mr. Cassidy: As I pointed out to the Treasurer, I am the member now for Ottawa and the valley. There is a member for St. Lawrence and Stormont and we will overwhelm you in the next election. So I wouldn’t worry about that.

Mr. Taylor: You couldn’t overwhelm a feather.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, that’s what they said in Stormont as well.

Mr. Chairman, I want to point out, as far as regional government is concerned, that there are some serious political problems that have been created by the way in which the regional governments are designed. We would ask that in this session the government bring in legislation to permit, or in fact to compel, the election directly of regional chairmen rather than have the system of appointment which we have had up until now. The system of appointment is turning out to be a bad one -- in certain cases disastrous -- because of the fact that the regional chairmen have no political contact with people over whose area they reign. And I use that word carefully.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: You are just discovering that?

Mr. Cassidy: We have known that for some time, but it becomes more and more evident.

The regional governments themselves have always suffered from being distant. The government has resisted efforts, such as were suggested to Haldimand-Norfolk, to bring those governments closer to people -- to the creation of community committees and other devices such as that. We say that it is time the regional chairmen were elected, it’s time that steps were made to bring those governments closer to people, and it’s time that there be a financial deal for regional government which recognizes progressive tax sources and which does away with this plethora of special grants, devices, transitional adjustments, you name it, that the government has brought in, rather than coming up with a comprehensive financial deal.

I would just make one other point, Mr. Chairman, which I would like the minister to answer. This is one that affects the city of Ottawa directly and I raise it now because of the urgency of the matter and because I couldn’t raise it during question period today.

Some five or six months ago, the city of Ottawa passed a by-law which sets spending limits for candidates to the offices of alderman, controller and mayor. Spending limits were $2,500, $10,000 and, I believe, $15,000 respectively. In good time, Controller Tom McDougall wrote to the minister and I think later to the Premier asking for legislation at Queen’s Park in order to give the city the power to enforce those particular limits. Specifically they would either put failure to obey those spending limits under the corrupt practices section of the Municipal Act or else give special powers to the city of Ottawa in its own special Act.

They got a cold shoulder from the minister. I’m sorry I don’t have the letter with me today, but the reasons were rather outlandish. I think the minister said to the municipality: “Try the system on a voluntary basis. Your experience will be very valuable and let us know how it works. If it works, then perhaps we would like to apply it on the basis of the province as a whole. And anyway,” said the minister, “there isn’t time to consult with the provincial liaison committee.”

The first point is that Ottawa wasn’t asking that this be made into a general requirement for every municipality across the province. It was simply seeking a way by which, after careful deliberation and the choice of a system for regulating expenditures on municipal elections, it could have the power to enforce that, and the minister didn’t apparently see that.

In the second place, we have certain candidates -- I have to say it. Asking them to respect a voluntary limit on spending is like asking some crook to respect a voluntary law outlawing bank robbery but with no sanctions attached.

Mr. Taylor: So you equate candidates with crooks?

Mr. Cassidy: I’m just saying that some candidates do not at this point appear ready to abide by the limits on a voluntary basis.

Mr. Taylor: Equating candidates with crooks.

Mr. Cassidy: I am equating candidates with people who, on a voluntary basis, for various reasons, will not abide by the law of necessity. Those who wish to abide by the law and those who wish to play fair are put at a disadvantage by others who right now are spending at rates that indicate they will overdo the limits by a factor of maybe two or three times.

It’s very difficult, Mr. Chairman, for the city of Ottawa to encourage candidates to respect the laws when there are already candidates who have spent up to $2,000 on an aldermanic election which will cost $2,500. Clearly, they intend to spend far more over the next five or six weeks.

I would ask the minister whether he would bring in one or the other of the very simple amendments which was suggested by Controller McDougall in order to permit Ottawa to apply the spending limits now if it wishes. The general question can be dealt with at a later time.

I would agree the experience in Ottawa of a limit which had legislative sanction would be very useful for the rest of the province. Since Ottawa has been in the forefront of this particular move I suggest their wishes be respected rather than having them kicked in the teeth, which is so often the practice of this government when a particular group, municipality -- you name it -- wants to make an innovative kind of step. I look forward to the minister’s replies on those various points.

Mr. Chairman: Mr. Minister, do you have comments at this time?

Hon. Mr. White: I will be very glad to comment now or after the Liberal critic has --

Mr. D. M. Deacon (York Centre): I think actually the Liberal critic has made his comments earlier.

Mr. Chairman: Yes, I think he made his comments.

Hon. Mr. White: You mean congratulating the chairman was the full extent of the Liberal criticism this year?

Mr. Chairman: I think that the member for Kitchener spoke prior --

Mr. J. E. Stokes (Thunder Bay): That was done back in June, if you recall.

Hon. Mr. White: I see, right.

Mr. Cassidy: You may have been here in body, but not in mind.

Hon. Mr. White: Now let me give a lecture on accrual accounting, its advantages and disadvantages, and the way in which our modified -- let me say corrupted -- accrual accounting gives even members of the Legislature the wrong idea about our financial activities.

As one will know, corporations accrue assets on the left hand side of their balance sheet and liabilities on the right hand side of their balance sheet. So if they acquire a $1 million building which has an expected life of five years they record the expenditure as an asset on the left hand side of the balance sheet and they write off depreciations, so-called, each year over the anticipated life of the asset. This may be done in one of several ways, but for the sake of my illustration I’m going to assume a flat rate depreciation, together with the 20-year life of this building and so there $50,000.00 per year would be written off.

By the same token, any moneys owing for any purposes whatsoever, be they pension plans or accounts payable, are accrued on the right hand side of the balance sheet, and a final profit is devolved. Our system is quite different from that. If we buy a $1 million building we write it off completely in the year of acquisition, even though it may yield utility for decades.

Now, to be consistent one would expect us to cash the liability side and indeed if we do so, we see that we have a surplus -- may I call it a profit? -- of hundreds of millions of dollars -- $339 million or thereabouts. If we accrue both sides of our balance sheet and plug in capital invested -- and I don’t mean indirectly through universities and so on -- we would have a profit of more than $500 million.

I read the claims from uninformed persons time after time. Here is an article from yesterday’s London Free Press saying we have an $848 million deficit. I draw to the attention of the hon. members several articles which were in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago concerning the economic consequences of government expenditure, pointing out that the federal government in the States has spent more money than it has taken in nine years out of 10, and then it draws the conclusion that this is the most important single cause of inflation in the United States.

What is the story here in Ontario? We are taking in more money than we are putting out, and that’s the reason we’ve been able to buy back from the market $594 million. The day after my budget a partner in a chartered accounting firm said, “Terrible, terrible, White is running a $708 million budget deficit.”

Complete and absolute nonsense. He is looking at one category in a long list of items in our table C1.

However, I went to the partners in the accounting company, who are friends of mine, and said: “I am going to take one of your very best and most profitable customers” -- “clients,” I think is the terminology in the trade -- “and I am going to put them on exactly the same accounting system which I myself have to use to be consistent with previous years.” Now, I don’t want to embarrass the company but I would be glad to inform the hon. members privately of the name of this particular concern. They recorded earnings for the year 1973 at more than $5 million and, using our accounting conventions, they would have recorded a loss of $17,542,000, and the figures for the year before are comparable.

I am quite prepared to accept this challenge from any company, any corporation, that thinks we profligate, assuming only that that company is expanding and not running downhill -- because if they are expanding and putting capital in place, if they had to write off this capital, as indeed we do, they would be recording very large losses, which is one of the several disadvantages of the system we are labouring under here.

I want to go beyond that. I want to deal with the accrued liabilities. It happens that my deputy Treasurer, the handsome gentleman sitting in the gallery here, pays into a pension plan which for inexplicable reasons is recorded as a form of debt. I myself make payments to a pension plan, as do other members of this Legislature, which are not so recorded. How can that be? The MPPs are paying money into a pension plan that goes straight into a consolidated revenue fund. Beyond that, the deputy Treasurer is paying into a fully funded plan, in contrast to the teacher superannuation plan, which is a partially funded plan, and in contrast, as I mentioned, to the MPPs’ pension plan, which is completely unfunded.

What do other jurisdictions do?

Some jurisdictions don’t have any funding at all, and others have a mishmash such as we have.

I have been trying to educate people to the realization that the obligation toward a retired member of this Legislature, embodied in the statute, is every bit as compelling in the years to come as payments of pension by contract to teachers. As a matter of fact, learned legal experts tell me that the statute is more binding in a sense than a contract.

I think if one were going to do full accrual accounting, one might even have to contemplate putting in some kind of future liability against such provisions as GAINS and mothers’ allowances and so on. There would be no end to it. I think what we should be doing here -- I don’t know if this is the time or not -- is to go to a full cash accounting system which gives, in the simplest form, the results of the financial activities of the province.

My concern in this area, funnily enough, doesn’t have to do with the present inflationary period. My fear is that when we get into a period of heavy unemployment, one year or 10 years from now -- I can’t see into the future and I don’t know when this will be, but in all likelihood at some future date, there will be increasing unemployment -- if we are transfixed by these words “accrued liability” we will be either overtaxing our people or underspending, or both, and in so doing we will not be giving the economy the kind of nutrition and impulse it should have in that phase of the business cycle.

This is an area which has not been studied carefully. It is too complicated for chartered accountants and too simple for economists. The definitive work on the subject, as you may have heard me say, is a book which is to be found in this library entitled “Alternate Methods of Government Capital Accounting,” published in 1966 by John White, MA, and I commend that to the financial critics opposite. That will be very enlightening for them.

Now I would like to turn to the second item.

Mr. Cassidy: Nobody else has written along the same vein as you.

Hon. Mr. White: Well, you had better read it before you criticize it.

Mr. Stokes: If it is that good, why don’t you adopt it?

Hon. Mr. White: I want to express my admiration for the member for Prince Edward-Lennox --

Mr. Cassidy: We all admire him.

Hon. Mr. White: -- who had the fortitude and the good sense to step into the debate while the socialist from Ottawa and -- it is not Ottawa and the Islands, I know that.

Mr. Cassidy: Ottawa and the Valley.

Hon. Mr. White: Have they got a new barber down there on the island? Just so we will know. It is lovely.

Mr. Stokes: Watch it.

Mr. Cassidy: If the Treasurer wants to use my house on the island this year, it has burned down and he will freeze.

Hon. Mr. White: Oh, shoot! Well, I want to thank my hon. colleague for stepping in to describe some of the things that this government has indeed done to help in eastern Ontario. Whether we are talking about the Eastern Ontario Development Corp., the great public works that have been put in place there -- schools, colleges, universities, public institutions of every kind.

Mr. Cassidy: Does the Treasurer mean the Arnprior dam?

Hon. Mr. White: Great new highways like the 401. Great new co-operative works with other levels of government as in the DREE agreement.

Mr. Cassidy: The great long delays on Highway 417.

Hon. Mr. White: I would not pretend for one moment that this is enough. I think we have to bend our backs and come in with even stronger measures to increase employment opportunities for people young and old in eastern and northern Ontario.

Mr. Cassidy: But the government has had 33 years to do it.

Hon. Mr. White: I will be bringing in a bill within the next few weeks to establish the Ontario Land Corp., which will enable the government for the first time to put together a significant assembly for a variety of purposes and which will hopefully, if it gets the approval of the Legislature, enable the corporation to lend moneys to municipalities for provincial-municipal industrial parks, thereby forming a hierarchy of such parks in eastern Ontario, northeastern Ontario and northwestern Ontario.

The legislation is ready. I suppose if the session had gone longer into July, we might have attempted it then. It is complicated enough, I can tell you. It will be coming forward and I certainly look forward to having the support of the members as we debate that bill.

Mr. Cassidy: Why didn’t the government do it five, 10 or 20 years ago?

Hon. Mr. White: Well, I didn’t have the member here to make the suggestions. Oh, he didn’t suggest that, that was my idea, that’s right.

Mr. Cassidy: No. I thank the minister for pointing out that it is the opposition pressure that has got things done for eastern Ontario. That is one of the reasons why the member for Stormont should be sitting in these benches.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please!

Hon. Mr. White: Now, the Toronto-centred region plan, which I think was first announced in 1966, has been progressively implemented. Whether one deals with the new regional governments around Metro, whether one looks at the installation of a variety of services, including highways, sewers, waterpipes, hydro lines or whatever, all these take shape and substance from the Toronto-centred region. Just yesterday we had an illustration when my colleague, the Minister of Housing, and the Minister of the Environment (Mr. W. Newman) announced a multi-million dollar pipe to service York, which will enable tens of thousands of homes to be created. This is all in keeping with the TCR. We have a Central Lakeshore Urban Complex Committee -- the unhappy acronym is COLUC --

Mr. Breithaupt: Colic?

Hon. Mr. White: -- which will soon be reporting to the government and this report will shortly thereafter be made available to members of the Legislature. COLUC, as I described it in rather a lengthy speech in Hamilton some months ago, is an update and refinement of the TCR. It might be wise for that speech to be circulated to the members of the Legislature if that hasn’t been done already. Does the member think it has been sent out already?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: I would think so.

Hon. Mr. White: Then why are all these charges being made? Don’t the members read my speeches?

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, we talked to the planners who say nothing is being done.

Hon. Mr. White: Just can’t understand them, I see.

Mr. W. Ferrier (Cochrane South): The Treasurer didn’t circulate them widely enough.

Hon. Mr. White: Now, the status of the regional plans is something I am going to have to get some advice on when my officials join me here. I’ll comment on that later. The Planning Act really has been a very difficult matter. I suppose I am partly at fault. We attempted a year ago to hire a first class planning consultant. I gave instructions that such a person was to be paid no more than $40,000 a year, which frankly seems ample to me.

Some number of people were contacted. They were asked if they were interested. Discussions continued about the nature of the study, some of the details of the study, the length of time of the study, the reporting relationships and the compensation. And then, x number of days or a week having been spent with candidate A, it was decided he wouldn’t take it because there wasn’t enough money. The same thing with candidate B. And so it went.

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. White: Now, in retrospect I must say I made a mistake, in putting that kind of a cap on it. But in my anxiety to protect the public purse, I put that ceiling on that particular position.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Are you still driving that Chevy?

Hon. Mr. White: When it was impossible to hire a first-class planner at that $40,000 a year salary, it was decided to use a very capable man within our ministry. The name of this man is Mr. Keith Bain. We waited and discussed that approach with the provincial-municipal liaison committee because we didn’t want it thought, and wouldn’t proceed with the appointment, if the municipalities themselves felt that this was going to introduce a bias into the study.

There were no such objections from those on the MLC who knew the good work of Mr. Bain. He was appointed and had no sooner started his work than he took ill. After some weeks of illness, on his doctor’s advice, Mr. Bain informed me that he couldn’t proceed as the study director.

At that time -- do you want to know all of this? I’m not boring you, I see you are yawning -- I’m not keeping you awake, am I?

Mr. Cassidy: Go ahead.

Mr. Breithaupt: You have the undivided attention of all your back-benchers and us too.

Hon. Mr. White: Then we set upon a new search, taking off the $40,000 limit, and went through several names which were attractive to some of my colleagues while not attractive to others. Those who were attractive to some of my colleagues were often not attractive to some of my officials. So we went through a protracted winnowing process at the end of which everyone agreed on a certain person.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Gee, this is interesting --

Hon. Mr. White: We thereupon approached the certain person who took the matter under consideration and who advised us just this week that he wasn’t able to take the job. So now we are --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: You are going to be available next year?

Hon. Mr. White: Now we are going to approach the matter with an inhouse capability to be described to the MLC in Sudbury on Friday. If they concur in this inhouse approach, then we will go ahead with that and the thing will finally get off the ground. And that is the long unhappy story about how I’ve tried to get this review of the Planning Act started.

The member for Ottawa Centre asked that we provide “the financial deal for regional government.” I don’t like the word “deal” particularly but I am not going to quarrel about that. If he is saying that we should have certain financial assistance available on a regular basis to the regional governments, that’s exactly what they’ve got. And I’ll spell out the details of those various programmes later if you so desire.

If it means ploughing a lot more money into regional governments, I couldn’t agree. We’ve played fair with them. We haven’t provided nearly the amounts of money the Leader of the Opposition mistakenly thinks we have provided, but we have provided enough that the increase in mill rates in the regions have been something like four per cent.

Earlier today I promised a full statement on the costs of regional government and at that time I will also undertake to include information about the various grants available from this government.

Finally, I want to deal with the Ottawa bylaw. I don’t know of any jurisdiction anywhere in which limitations to expenditures have been successful, because of the ease with which these limitations can be avoided. For instance, how would you credit the UAW union organizers who were the principal canvassers in the by-election in Middlesex South some years ago when they brought in union organizers from all over this province -- DAW and steelworkers and all the rest of it? How do you cost that in?

Mr. R. F. Nixon: What has that got to do with it? It’s a red herring, if the Treasurer will pardon the expression.

Hon. Mr. White: It isn’t a red herring at all.

The second thing that comes to my mind is the impracticality of imposing a set of criteria and constraints on municipal politicians before we ourselves apply them to candidates for this Legislature. And that in turn becomes impossible because we haven’t got the final report affecting these matters from the Camp commission.

I think my reply to Ottawa is perfectly sensible. If they want to embark upon this, let them do it voluntarily. If they don’t want to embark upon it voluntarily, let them wait for one more election only, until we have the results of the Camp commission, until we ourselves in this Legislature have enacted legislation binding ourselves, until the municipalities have an opportunity to inform themselves about the Camp commission’s recommendations, about our application of those recommendations, about the Ottawa suggestion and about other such recommendations from other quarters, at which time, working once again in our provincial-municipal partnership, we can divine what the municipalities would have us do in this matter.

I think that’s not an unreasonable position. After all, Ottawa just sent this resolution down here a matter of six or eight weeks ago -- 10 weeks ago at the very most.

Mr. Cassidy: They wrote in May and in June.

Hon. Mr. White: It hasn’t been discussed in any of the municipal associations, to my knowledge, and it hasn’t had any airing among the citizens to speak of. To act in that precipitous way, I think, would be a great mistake.

Those are my general replies to the criticism offered by the socialist financial critic.

Mr. Chairman: Shall item 1 of vote 1001 carry?

Some hon. members: No.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, before the Leader of the Opposition goes on to a new subject I just want to take up with the minister the question of the spending limits on municipal campaigns. I take it up partly because of the fact that I originally proposed the idea when I was on Ottawa city council. The minister would probably think that the people in the council expressed a certain sageness of judgment when they turned me down. They said many of the things that he has said. They said it wasn’t workable. “What about the UAW organizers?” I said. “What about the ad-men and so on?” Then they turned it down at that time.

However, it so happens that this approach is being made now with the support of men who call themselves Progressive Conservatives such as Mr. Benoit and Mr. Guzzo and the other members of the council. The matter has been debated at length by a committee of the Ottawa city council. It has been covered in the press. It has been on the agenda of municipal politics in Ottawa now for a period of approximately 3½ years since it was originally discussed, and any citizen who wished to express views upon it in the Ottawa area has clearly had an ample opportunity to do so.

What the minister is saying is that he will second guess the second largest city in the province when they come up with a reasonable and reasoned request to try something out. The minister may tell them that he doesn’t think it will work. They’ve obviously looked at that point because they told me it wouldn’t work, and I know that during their debates the question of its workability was carefully considered.

Controller McDougall, who happens to be a Liberal and who piloted this particular measure through the council, drafted the municipal bylaw as carefully as possible in order to define the kinds of expenditures which could be monitored and which could be the subject of the spending limits.

It doesn’t matter whether or not the minister agrees with it, and it doesn’t matter what Sudbury or Thunder Bay or Windsor or Metro Toronto think about it, and it doesn’t matter what the Camp commission thinks is workable for this Legislature. But will the minister not accept the judgement of the people of Ottawa through their area representatives that they’d like to have it for this election? Will he not let them have it this time? Then if it doesn’t work they may decide to ask that it be withdrawn.

Hon. Mr. White: I’m certainly prepared to commence a dialogue with the municipalities along that line, but I am not prepared to pass legislation until such an exchange has taken place.

I want to get back to this idea of the councillors and candidates for council embarking on this voluntarily and presumably making a declaration to that effect. I bind myself by the intent of this resolution. Some people, it is said, may decide not to enjoin the other candidates in that self-imposed constraint. If the council’s resolution has the full support of the public, my belief in democracy leads me to the conclusion that those candidates not adopting the self-imposed constraint would not be elected.

Secondly, it may have been implied in one of the hon. member’s remarks -- I’m not entirely sure of this -- that the self-imposed constraint was presumably adopted but thereupon cheating took place. I recognize this is a possibility anywhere at any time, but I am not sure that this would be any less effective than the cheating which this kind of limitation has put in train in other jurisdictions -- one of the reasons that observers in this area of government, I think, including the Camp commission, conclude that full disclosure is by far the best way of imposing reasonable restraints on the amount of money being collected and expended.

And I want to mention once again, as I did earlier --

Mr. Cassidy: Does the minister believe in restraints or does he believe that corporate money will continue to buoy up the economy?

Hon. Mr. White: -- a third point. This is that it’s impossible to quantify many of the election services. The NDP on many occasions have availed themselves of union services in a way that hasn’t been possible for the other parties, whether we’re talking about getting a little printing done at a local printing shop as a contribution, or, as I mentioned earlier, UAW professional organizers knocking on doors in a by-election. So, these are the reasons that I’m not prepared to act in a hurry in that matter.

Mr. Chairman: On vote 1001; the hon. Leader of the Opposition.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, there is a matter that I wanted to raise on item 1 of the first vote, and I would certainly accept your direction if you would like it discussed elsewhere. But it is a matter of policy and it emanated from the Treasurer in conjunction with the development of the new towns that are in prospect in the next few years.

The area that I wanted to bring to your attention, sir, and with strong objection, is the view expressed by the Treasurer that the development of these new communities will be directed and carried out independent of the councils, who presently have what is supposedly the local responsibility there. It’s almost as if the Treasurer sees himself as a conqueror taking over some desert island, and, with his gunboats, deciding what is going to happen to that area in the future.

That is not the case certainly in the new town that is projected for Haldimand-Norfolk, or in the others than may be in his mind at the present time in Pickering or elsewhere. Those areas presently have duly elected councils who have access to good planning advice. The minister, through his officials, and the officials of the Ministry of Housing and other emanations of the government, should certainly have an input. But the concept of usurping that local power, in my view, seems to be unacceptable. I’m surprised that the Treasurer would put that forward as the policy of the government.

I have read his statement in defence of the concept and I really must object to it. I hope that there is some way whereby the modification of that concept can return the planning power, with all of the assistance that is available from other jurisdictions, but return it essentially to those locally elected people.

Hon. Mr. White: My hon. friend is depending on a newspaper article which was not incorrect but which may have given him the wrong impression.

Here is a little item from The Canadian Press dated June 21:

“Ontario may have twice the population of Quebec in the year 2001, and Saskatchewan only half its present population. Statistics Canada reported Thursday. Ontario would almost double its population, increasing to 14.7 million in the year 2001, from 7.7 million in 1971.”

Almost doubling the population is going to call for very large residential developments in the next 26 years. Many communities in 1974 are saying: Whoa! We don’t want a lot more housing.

I don’t think that is irrational. If the people in municipality blank -- since the last time I used an illustration I got a scolding letter from an alderman -- if the people in municipality blank don’t want to be any larger than 100,000 or 250,000 or two million people, I don’t think that’s irrational. What’s the alternative?

We have no control over birth rates or immigration, and we can’t shoot surplus citizens. We wouldn’t want to anyway, they are nearly all Tories. The only alternative it seems to me is to create new cities and that is a policy in its formative stage of this government. We have two new city sites at the moment -- North Pickering, which is something like 17,000 acres, and the Jarvis site, which is something like 12,000 acres.

I am in the process of sending a letter to the regional council of Haldimand-Norfolk, and had the opportunity last night at the ACRO convention in Windsor, to discuss a rough draft of this letter with the chairman, Mr. McCombs. In this letter, I set forth the two possibilities. First, proceeding out of the Ontario Planning Development Act, which has several advantages and several disadvantages, or alternatively, proceeding under the more regular course as part of the regional government’s own official plan. That has several advantages and disadvantages. We are not going to be arbitrary, we are going to get the response from the regional council before we try to make that decision.

The one thing we can’t do, however, is say to the regional council, “You may tell us how large this city’s going to be,” because we have got to find room someplace for seven million people in 26 years.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: You are talking about densities.

Hon. Mr. White: It is beyond the horizon, if I may say so, of a single municipality, be it a city, township, county or region. However, we’re not going to force anything down anybody’s throat if that can possibly be avoided while accommodating the large increase in population which is a direct result of having the most glorious jurisdiction, I suppose, anywhere in the world.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Well, in reply to the comments about the glory of the jurisdiction of Ontario. Surely the Treasurer must be aware of the essential reaction of those people who have run for public office under, let’s say, the Haldimand-Norfolk bill. They find themselves councillors in a new jurisdiction grandly called the city of Nanticoke, because it is expected that it will be a city in population terms in the near future, and then read as a press report that the Treasurer is saying, “Those people are not competent to direct this development, but I, and the people who advise me, am competent.”

Frankly I feel that the Treasurer’s comments have essentially watered down the view expressed at least in those news reports. Am I to understand him correctly when he says that he is going to consult with the elected people in the region?

Therefore, I presume that it would go beyond the chairman to some extent, as to whether they wish the provisions of the Planning Act to be involved, or to leave it to the responsibility of the official plan of the region, that they are going to have an alternative here?

Hon. Mr. White: Yes, this is a question we are putting to them. I can’t believe the councillors in the city of Nanticoke were upset. The name of the city wasn’t even mentioned. In fact, I wasn’t even referring to a new city site or an existing municipal council.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Well, the press reports were very clear. They were reporting those too.

Hon. Mr. White: I was simply referring in general to the development of new city sites over the next 20 or 30 years. Secondly, I really can’t be held responsible for the subtle wording or miswording of some of these newspaper articles. Would you believe it? I can’t even discourage the newspapers from printing the taunts of misinformation that pour from the way of the opposition concerning regional government costs and related matters.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Well, on that matter, Mr. Chairman -- since the Treasurer has raised it -- is he aware that not only in his time but in the time of his predecessor we have consistently asked for the comparison of costs from the regions that were then established -- and as they came forward, as they were being established -- with those average costs of the municipalities in the area? We have been told time and again that this information is not available. All we can turn to are the results in that large blue book that he and his predecessors in the former Ministry of Municipal Affairs made available. Those are the figures we work from. You talk about discouraging the press from their reporting, but surely there was no misinformation in the report that the Treasurer said categorically the elected officials in those areas were going to be left out in the cold in establishing the goals for these new and growing communities, just as if they were some sort of inferior natives found in some barren land that the Treasurer had discovered on his own. It sounds like the commissars in Moscow looking at the frozen steppes of Siberia and saying, “We are going to establish a new town there.”

Maybe they have every right and power to do so, but I would submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that the Treasurer -- perhaps he has been misunderstood, but certainly his words would lead the people of this province to indicate that this judgement is better than those locally-elected people, so far as establishing the goals of their own community is concerned.

I believe he does feel he’s smarter and better and must have those powers. For those reasons, some of the glory that he describes as Tory Ontario is going to fade into the past when the people refuse to support it.

Hon. Mr. White: I have never in my life said or implied that I had any more wisdom than the people in the area concerned --

Mr. R. F. Nixon: Why do you assume the responsibility and displace them?

Hon. Mr. White: -- and in fact my dedication for years has been to engage the high talents of people right across this province through decentralization and deconcentration. I never in my life said that the councillors in the city of Nanticoke wouldn’t be fully engaged, and I should have felt that my more recent remark would give substance to my earlier claim. I know that area very well. In fact, I know that area better than the Leader of the Opposition.

Mr. R. F. Nixon: You didn’t even know when you were in my riding. You said Jarvis was in my riding.

Hon. Mr. White: And I know the city of Nanticoke. I spend a lot more time in the city of Nanticoke than the hon. member does. I read the Nanticoke Maple Leaf every week of my life and I have never seen any such reaction as that purportedly described by the Leader of the Opposition. Maybe the Leader of the Opposition would send me the articles upon which this misinformation is based.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for Thunder Bay.

Mr. Stokes: He wants to pick up on this point.

Mr. Chairman: The member for Scarborough West.

Mr. Lewis: I want to pick up on this very point for a moment because it seems to me that it touches on much that is central to Ontario. While I was in my office, I was listening to your discussion of population figures and the increases on where you put people. I want to talk about that for a minute, partly in concert with the announcement that was made yesterday.

What is happening in Ontario is government by whim. It’s planning by impulse. It’s all ad hoc. There is no overall plan for development in the Province of Ontario. There is just nothing left. There was, in the days of John Robarts, a fascinating conceptual idea called “Design for Development,” and the Conservative Party applied it, originally in a thoughtful way, to the Metro-centered region, and then in a way of lesser interest to the rest of the province, eastern Ontario being virtually the last little pamphlet to emerge.

But after Design for Development was introduced in a conceptual way, and threshed out in greater particulars for Metro Toronto than anywhere else -- in the Metro-centred region than anywhere else -- all of the basic planning of this province has gone to pot. There is none left. And your responses are unpredictable and quixotic and they change from day to day.

Your attitude to the North Pickering community project is absolutely perfect. You don’t know from one month to the next what the devil you’re going to do there. You don’t know whether it’s going to be a quarter of a million people concentrated in one place, or 50,000 people in two or three communities, or maybe 200,000 beyond that.

You talk about consulting with your regional governments. The regional councillors of Durham have to read The Globe and Mail in the morning to find out if the Ontario Housing Corp. is purchasing 4,000 acres of land in their regional municipality without so much as a whisper to them that it’s going to be done.

You set up something called Haldimand-Norfolk in response to a corporate decision by the Steel Co. of Canada, and then you’ve got to have a new city in order to accommodate the population.

Now can you tell this Legislature this afternoon where you think the new cities of Ontario should be located? I challenge you to do that. And as I’m standing here you can’t do that because you don’t know. No one knows. Your responses to new growth and development are entirely impulsive.

Mr. Breithaupt: Reflexive.

Mr. Lewis: Or reflexive. Wherever something occurs you then have to respond to it in a way which leaves the Toronto-centred region plan in tatters, as we said at question period, and distorts basic growth in planning priorities for the entire province.

Talk to us about growth centres in Ontario. Tell us where they are. Tell us now what’s left of the redirection of industry. Document for us -- we’ll do it for you in the next two days -- how many loans have been given to the EODC or the NODC in contrast to what is coming to the Metro-centred region.

Explain to us how you got balanced planning in the Province of Ontario. That, in fact, is what is at the root of wrecking regional governments. You don’t know what the regional governments are designed to do because there’s no overall provincial plan dealing with regional development, with growth centres, with land use and with industrial relocation.

All of those things are now empty rhetoric in Ontario. Do you know what the preservation of agricultural land in land-use planning consists of in this province? It consists of a luncheon at La Scala with John White, William Stewart and members of the corporate community. Members of the corporate community discussing how they will preserve agricultural land through various incentives or disincentives of this government.

You call that long-term planning? You suddenly find that you have a city to establish in Haldimand-Norfolk, and something called the North Pickering community project, and you announce an Ontario land corporation or whatever it is, in response to the decisions which have been made so that through the public sector you’ll have some way to effect them.

But the capricious decisions dictate the responses rather than an overall provincial plan. And you’re destroying the kinds of orderly growth that the Province of Ontario deserves.

You yourself as a minister were embarrassed beyond description at the behaviour of Stanley Randall when he handed out over $40 million in forgivable loans and plunked them down indiscriminately all over southern Ontario at his particular fancy -- also which did great violation to orderly growth and development.

And look at what you’re doing to the Toronto-centred region plans. Have you no shame? You put the airport in the northeast part of Metro, which destroyed the plan. You put North Pickering in the northeast part of Metro, which destroys the plan.

Yesterday, as a matter of honour, the Minister of Housing announces enough houses in the next 20 years for 700,000 to 1 million by building the new pipeline. You know where they are going to be? They are going to be in those areas that were called “protected corridors” in the Toronto-centred region plan. You are going to make a bedroom suburb from North York to Barrie, uninterrupted. You call that planning.

Then you plunk the airport on the northeast corner of Metro and it all meshes into one population mass with a concentration of goods, services and people as yet unheard of in the Metro-centred region. That is not responding to immigration or population growth. That is inviting it. That is reinforcing it. That is distorting all the economic priorities of Ontario again. That is because you have no plans.

I sat down 10 days ago with the regional councillors of Kitchener-Waterloo and they told me that they have been waiting for months, years, to find out whether they can have sewerage and water expansion approved by your ministry or by the Ministry of Housing, in order to have some further growth in Kitchener-Waterloo. I don’t know whether or not it is valid but they can’t get an answer from you. Your first answer necessarily benefits Metro Toronto, not Kitchener-Waterloo, because again this is the obsession -- where we are now -- this is where you have struck your priorities at the expense of the province. You have no plans for the rest of the province so you don’t know how to fit the other factors in.

Mr. Cassidy: Right.

Mr. Lewis: It is unbelievable how you have abandoned all the planning. The people who drafted the Toronto-centred region document must be quietly drinking in the halls --

Mr. Stokes: He doesn’t want to make a liar out of Fortune magazine.

Mr. Lewis: -- to overcome the kind of indignity that has been done them by the way in which you have treated the document. The document had some merit when it talked about growth east of Metropolitan Toronto, meaning east of Oshawa. You have interpreted that to mean growth between Scarborough and Durham. Imagine!

And you can’t tell anyone in the House where you intend to put your satellite communities, or where in the province you think they must and should go and enter into a discussion with regional government as to whether or not that is appropriate. You have done none of those basic planning projects.

You had a magnificent chief economist; I don’t know him as well as you do but I probably have as much respect for him. And you have a very talented planning secretariat, but nobody is able to do any long-term economic planning in Ontario. If you want to know why you are harassed on all fronts, electorally as well, it is because of this sense that nothing filters down, that somewhere, for reasons which are largely personal, quixotic, day-to-day, John White or someone else makes a decision which affects the future growth and development of Ontario, without any reference to basic overall planning.

Until you come before this Legislature with a plan about industrial relocation away from Metro and with the precise incentive or disincentive to accompany it; until you come before this Legislature with a policy to preserve agricultural land which consists of something more than lunch at La Scala; until you come before this Legislature with some sense of where new communities should grow and why, and in conjunction with the regional or locally receptive governments, until you come before this Legislature with some kind of overall sense of priorities now that Design For Development is dead, then the whole thing is a farce. It makes no sense. You are lurching from proposal to proposal rather than thinking your way through. I think some of your own members understand that.

It happens the Treasurer is an unusually able politician. I can concede that. He is a knowledgeable man, and he can make some of these decisions on the basis of the information he has, because he has more -- what? more panache, more self-confidence, more personal reassurance than some of his colleagues, but that is not called planning. That is called bravado and it is not serving Ontario. It is serving John White.

That’s all right. That’s --

Mr. Stokes: -- the everlasting monument.

Mr. Lewis: -- the nature of politicians I suppose. But it is of no use to the province.

I really don’t think you can answer the question that all of us are putting to you. I presume my colleague from Thunder Bay is sitting and wondering how it is that yet again from $200 million for a pipeline to $25 to $30 million for Krauss-Maffei, everything is visited on Metropolitan Toronto. We asked the voters of Cornwall, “How do you like your transportation system?” as we went from door to door. And they told us; then they voted NDP. And we have been going door-to-door in Carleton East and asking the voters there: “How about OC transport?”

Do you know it’s easier to get around within the Metropolitan Toronto area than it is to get around the townships of Gloucester and Osgoode? Do you know that in the process of your fixation with Metropolitan Toronto you’ve got whole communities where you can’t even make it from one place to another within the community? Thirty million dollars you can invest here; a few hundred thousand dollars you don’t have time for there. It’s all out of whack because you have no overall plan. New Democrats make no apologies for having the sense of economic planning that’s central to political life. Until you do it you’re in trouble.

I really think that that’s part of the problem with regional government and maybe it’s even part of the problem with regional government costs. They really don’t know where regional government costs. They really don’t know where they fit into the provincial plan because there is no plan. They just don’t know what authority they should take, what they should do, and how they should develop, because they have no sense of the entire problem, and what your priorities are. I think that it is one of the Achilles heels of your ministry.

I would be interested to know whether you can tell us of your precise programmes for relocation, of your precise demographic projections, area by area, of your projected new communities, and of the ways in which you are going to finance these things. It would be useful for us to know what your plan for Ontario is since everything else is predicated on it.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. minister.

Hon. Mr. White: Well, sir, I would say the remarks of the leader of the NDP are somewhat unfortunate and somewhat unfair to those concerned. I am going to beg the indulgence of the House to spend five minutes reading an update on what the regional planners are indeed doing, and then I will attempt to answer the several questions which were at the conclusion of the member’s remarks.

The estimates include $525,000 for further study and refinement of the central Ontario region concept. This amount will be allocated among four areas of primary concern, namely, Simcoe-Georgian, Northumberland, Oshawa-Whitby and the central Ontario lakeshore urban complex which I mentioned earlier.

I would like to describe briefly the area task forces: The Simcoe-Georgian task forces retain a consortium of consultants to develop a series of growth strategies for a study area. A field office has been established at the county building in Midhurst. The work programme is divided into two phases; the first phase is further divided into two parts. The initial part, phase 1(a), includes all data collection, initial contacts with politicians and the public, attendance at political and technical committee meetings, establishment of a field office in preparation of a report. Phase 1(a) was completed at a target date of May 31.

Phase 1(b) will include an evaluation of growth alternatives, continued public meetings, attendance at political and technical committee meetings and the preparation of a second report. This portion is scheduled for completion by Dec. 31, 1974.

Phase 2 will include refinement of the growth alternatives from the results of phase 1(b), as well as detailed discussions and presentations and results of the refinements and a final report.

The Northumberland area task force has selected a consultant from a short list of three to carry out a growth strategy study from Northumberland county similar to that being done here in the Simcoe-Georgian area. A project office has been established in the county building in Cobourg. The phase 1 report has been submitted recently and is now being reviewed by the task force.

Oshawa-Whitby: Work to give effect to the province’s strategic intentions for the area east of Metropolitan Toronto is proceeding. Special studies are needed to provide an adequate information resource base to underpin our programme for the area east of Metro and for the region as a whole. For example, examination of the system of small urban places to provide planning policy guidelines, examination of the effects of government stimulation measures as a guide to future action.

Turning to the central Ontario lakeshore urban complex: The interministerial task force on COLUC, to which the regional planning branch has provided a support staff, completed its work May 31. A presentation was made to the advisory committee on urban and regional planning in mid-June. A number of changes have been made in their report. It is now being prepared for submission to the cabinet.

We have a number of studies in northern Ontario which I think -- Would you like an explanation of them?

Mr. Lewis: We know the studies.

Hon. Mr. White: I don’t mind going further. In fact, I think perhaps I will if you don’t mind.

Mr. Lewis: How long will it take?

Hon. Mr. White: It will take another five or 10 minutes, I imagine.

We have a study on the subject -- a declining gold mining area study. The sum of $50,000 has been placed in the estimates to continue a study jointly undertaken during 1973, 1974, by this ministry and DREE.

Mr. Stokes: You’re going to find out why the gold ran out?

Mr. Lewis: That is a pretty useful study.

Hon. Mr. White: It is now proposed to proceed with some project implementation and the formulation of further coordinated projects. Further detailed study is required and an interministerial committee oversees this project.

Thunder Bay industrial complex: An interministerial task force started a preliminary investigation into the potential feasibility of this project -- the feasibility of accommodating a number of major enterprises in one location. Limited finances are included in the regional priority budget to complete the investigation, including site evaluations. Our first report on site evaluations was received on Oct. 1, 1974. The final report will be available by November 1974.

Northeastern Ontario, phase 2: The phase 2 report is now being completed and its release is anticipated by the end of the year. It will take into consideration the public response to the phase 1 report and will set out proposed recommended planning guidelines.

Mr. Lewis: Four years later.

Hon. Mr. White: In other regions a report on eastern Ontario has been completed by the regional planning branch. It takes into account the public response to the phase 1 reports and sets out recommended planning guidelines for the region.

Mr. Lewis: When is that coming?

Mr. Cassidy: When is that coming?

Mr. Lewis: Have you seen the phase 1 report for eastern Ontario? It could have been written by a 15-year-old -- by a bright 15-year-old.

Hon. Mr. White: It is anticipated that the report will be considered by cabinet in the near future.

A study of the alternative choices for growth in southern Ontario started recently in the branch. It will examine development trends and opportunities in this part of the province, the constraints to development flowing from social and environmental concerns, the use of land and resources, and will identify various development issues. This comprehensive study will result in a series of interim reports --

Mr. Cassidy: I don’t believe it.

Hon. Mr. White: -- the first of which will be available in early 1975.

Mr. Lewis: You keep reading -- this is unbelievable. Do you realize what you are saying?

Hon. Mr. White: The sum of $250,000 has been placed in the estimates to provide for the setting up of 10 advisory committees to act in an advisory capacity to the government on regional planning matters.

Mr. Lewis: This is no joke.

Hon. Mr. White: The first municipal -- it is only a joke to you, because you don’t understand it.

Mr. Lewis: Come on. These ministerial task forces and advisory councils and study groups -- what nonsense.

Hon. Mr. White: The first municipal advisory committee has been established in northwestern Ontario. A similar committee for northeastern Ontario will be established shortly. Both will be made up of municipal representatives from the region. The first meetings of the northwestern Ontario committee have already taken place. Final details of the northeastern committee will be settled in the near future.

Mr. Lewis: You better now explain how it all fits in.

Hon. Mr. White: I came to the subject of planning as a virgin so to speak --

Mr. Lewis: Yes, right, bring you back to the square.

Hon. Mr. White: It was an area of governmental activity in which I hadn’t taken any particular personal interest.

Mr. Cassidy: Many virgins at least know what it is about.

Hon. Mr. White: For some of the early part of my tenure, when I was busy with the first budget and its aftermath, I had to give planning a lower priority.

Mr. Lewis: You certainly did; self-preservation was rather higher. Survival is more important than planning.

Hon. Mr. White: I thought so.

At some point I did interest myself directly in regional planning and I did give instructions that a full provincial plan was to be produced.

Mr. Cassidy: Just like that.

Hon. Mr. White: I was told by the planners that many of the studies done to date could be utilized in an overall plan -- that such an overall plan could not be available, I think it was said, for another couple of years. So I said “Put together the best plan you can for the fall of 1974”, and that plan is coming forward.

No doubt my hon. friend will probably be better informed in this matter than I am. His sources are so up-to-the-minute.

Mr. Lewis: No, the Treasurer must trust his own ministry. We have no contact with them.

Hon. Mr. White: There’s no secret about it anyway as far as that goes.

Insofar as relocating industry is concerned, we now rely very largely on what the market force is, it’s true. By which I mean: a transaction which came to my attention just a couple of days ago was at a land price, I think, of $260,000 an acre while land can be bought in eastern Ontario for less than $1,000 an acre. The very high wages paid in this part of Ontario, with other higher costs which are symptomatic of a large cosmopolis, help to diversify industry to some extent. These market forces are supplemented by a variety of Ontario provincial government programmes of which the EODC is the most obvious.

What we haven’t attempted, and I think will not attempt for a very long time, is to pay companies to move from London, Ont. to Cornwall.

Mr. Lewis: What about the location in the first place?

Hon. Mr. White: What we will be doing, as I said before the hon. member came in, through the aegis of the OLC is to put several important industrial parks in place, each run by a project corporation. The OLC concurrently will lend money to those municipalities for provincial-municipal industrial parks thereby forming a hierarchy of such parks in eastern Ontario, northeastern Ontario and northwestern Ontario.

The work for some of these things is well along. When the legislation is passed, if indeed it meets the approval of the members of the Legislature within the next month or two, the OLC will be in business under its own board reporting to the Treasurer. As presently designed, the OLC will go to market with its own securities. It will lend the borrowed moneys to the project corporations, taking back a mortgage to protect the bondholders of the OLC. Retirement of those project corporation bonds will be made as lands are leased or sold.

I don’t mind answering further questions on this if you so desire. What are the other questions you had?

Mr. Lewis: Now I understand, by what you indicated, what has occurred. I’ll add just a word. I think you thought when I started to speak -- or just to discuss this with you -- that we had somehow heard of your imminent provincial plan. I just want to assure the Treasurer that there is not the slightest possibility.

One of the reasons I was prompted to speak was because of the question and answer exchange which took place at the Association of Counties and Regions this morning, when we spent some time discussing the absence of an overall provincial plan. It was in my mind as I came into the House and that’s really what spawned that. But I am fascinated to learn that sometime this fall we’re going to have something called a provincial plan that would probably be of immense benefit for everyone.

All I point out is that, despite the fact that we don’t yet have a provincial plan, all of these things are in place. Two major new cities; a major new pipeline; a major new airport; an Ontario Land Corp. designating industrial parks.

You said some astonishing things. You said that “recently, by the branch” you are starting a study on southern Ontario to identify development choices in such matters. In 1974 a study for southern Ontario to look at development choices amongst other things? You have been making your choices all the way along. They are now fixed; locked in.

All I am suggesting is that there has been so much ad hoc-ery about it in the last three or four years that it has done real damage to rational economic development in Ontario. What one starts with, unless one is a Tory, is a plan for the province. You should have held out for a few months, lusting though you were, and you might have had a provincial plan within which these other things could fit. But as it stands all the things are in place. Then your provincial plan comes to be superimposed upon them. That is really backwards, to use the kindest expression.

I can’t ask you where you think your large communities might go because you don’t know. You don’t have the plan yet. I can’t even ask you where you think the Ontario Land Corp. is going to put all its industrial sites, because it is making those decisions apparently independent of the regional governments or of a provincial plan.

I am glad for the information that there will be unveiled, presumably in November of 1974, a plan for Ontario, courtesy John White. The next instalment of Design for Development which began when? In 1972? In 1966? I guess it was before the provincial election of 1967. It was 1966. And in 1974 -- eight years later -- we are finally getting something called a provincial plan. And between 1966 and 1974 we had distorted every sane and intelligent economic planning principle in this province.

So don’t ask us to turn cartwheels when you reveal your plan. I don’t know what kind of charade you are dealing with, with all these regional governments that are expected to make decisions when you have no overall conceptual view.

Hon. Mr. White: I want to point out to the hon. member that if he checks Hansard he will see that six or eight months ago, I said, “I want an overall provincial plan.” I was told at that time it would take two years or more, I can’t remember.

Mr. Lewis: So you said, “Give me the best you can.”

Hon. Mr. White: So I said, “Give me the best plan you can for the fall of 1974.” Now this will not be a perfect, all-embracing, provincial plan. It will be the first such attempt at a broadly based plan, however.

Mr. Lewis: That is incredible.

Hon. Mr. White: Even though it may be rudimentary I am sure it will be very helpful.

Mr. Lewis: I have no doubt it will be helpful. But look at what you are saying.

Hon. Mr. White: My hon. friend will think it is the first full and final product.

Mr. Lewis: You have interministerial committees proliferating all over the place incestuously. You have advisory committees everywhere. You have study groups and advisory councils emerging all around you. You have several regional governments in place. You have all kinds of Designs for Development under way and you are saying proudly that you are going to have your first provincial plan in 1974 -- in the fall. Just imagine what damage you have done to economic priorities in Ontario in the process. That, of course, is what really reveals the essential barrenness of the whole policy towards economic growth and development in Ontario.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for Thunder Bay.

Mr. Stokes: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The minister in responding to the lead-off comments from the critics of the two parties asked if members over here ever read the speeches he made as he went throughout the province, in fact, right across the entire continent, holding forth on the great things that were being done, and the leadership that was being shown by the Province of Ontario. I read the speeches that come across my desk made by the --

Hon. Mr. White: Yes, but can you understand them?

Mr. Stokes: That is what I am going to ask. I am going to ask for some clarification of some of the things the minister has said. Unfortunately, I don’t have the speeches with me. I was going to have them and maybe I could get your colleague, the Minister of Industry and Tourism (Mr. Bennett), to explain them to me. But now that I have this opportunity, I am going to ask first hand. There was one that the Treasurer made in Newfoundland not too long ago. He went down and he told Premier Moores, et al, that Ontario wasn’t really a fat cat province keeping everything to itself. He wanted to assure the people in Newfoundland that we had all of the industry that we could handle at the present time down around the “golden horseshoe” and in Metropolitan Toronto, and that the government wouldn’t mind sharing some of it with the have-not Province of Newfoundland, along with its technical knowhow and its planning genius and its ability to come up with an industrial strategy --

Mr. T. P. Reid (Rainy River): That wasn’t this province.

Mr. Stokes: -- and that they would be happy to share that with the poor people down in Newfoundland. Well, it was with a great deal of dismay that people in northwestern Ontario heard an admission from the Treasurer of this province that he had more industrial development in the Metropolitan Toronto area than he could handle, and that he would quite willingly deal some of it off to the have-not Province of Newfoundland.

I want to tell the minister here and now -- in case he hasn’t been told by his advisory committee on northern development; by the interdepartmental committee on northern development; by the interministerial committees that are ongoing and which advise him on economic policy and regional development -- that we do have a section of this province called northern Ontario; that area north of the French River. That is where you have a framework for Design for Development in northeastern Ontario; and you have an actual Design for Development in northwestern Ontario that has been accepted as government policy. And if it wasn’t for the efforts of the Minister of Natural Resources (Mr. Bernier) to deal away excessive timber limits, there would be no meaning at all to an industrial Design for Development in northwestern Ontario.

I am wondering why the minister goes to St. John’s, Nfld., and says: “We are really digging ourselves into a hole in Metropolitan Toronto and the environs of our provincial capital because of our inability to cope with too much economic development and too much industrial expansion in the Toronto-centred region.” In both northwestern and northeastern Ontario, we are crying for this kind of development to provide employment opportunities and economic opportunities to provide an industrial base; to provide an adequate tax mix of industrial, commercial and residential development; to provide the much-needed services that our people have come to expect -- even those living in remote areas of northern Ontario.

I am wondering why the minister says those things if he is really serious in coming to grips with the developmental plans and the developmental problems of an area such as northwestern Ontario, where you already have the design -- albeit you don’t have an overall industrial strategy for the Province of Ontario. It is pretty difficult, I suppose, to deal with one particular spot of Ontario without having some regard for an overall plan. But surely in the interim you can say that until you have a plan -- whether it be a fairly superficial plan -- but in the meantime you do know what you have in northwestern Ontario. You have Design for Development, Phase 3, that has been accepted as policy by this government.

The only thing you have done to date, really, is to set up or indicate that you are willing to set up an advisory committee made up of representatives from all of the municipalities in northwestern Ontario. You don’t even have an interministerial committee to talk to them. In fact, the consultant who is responsible for the implementation of Design for Development, Phase 3, sits over in the Frost Building in Toronto with two economists, or two analysts. They don’t even reside in the region whose plan they are responsible for.

What kind of a commitment is this to the Design for Development that you trot out every time somebody asks you about an industrial strategy? When somebody backs the minister into a comer and when he makes these statements and these speeches as he trots throughout the province and throughout the country, he blames the federal government.

I don’t want to be an apologist for the federal government. Granted, they haven’t accepted their responsibilities for an overall industrial strategy, but surely there are initiatives that can be taken by the province in the absence of some concrete action, some overall planning for the entire country. You do have options open to you where you can say you will provide realistic incentives. We are going to get into that when we talk with the Minister of Industry and Tourism about the failures and the shortcomings of the incentive programmes from ODC, NODC and EODC. What you should be doing is providing disincentives to discourage the kind of growth that you were decrying down here and that you were decrying when you spoke recently in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

It all boils down, Mr. Minister, to the fact that you’ve got too much in southern Ontario of what we haven’t got enough of in northern Ontario. You have it within your power, albeit it would be much easier if you had the assistance and the input and the co-operation of the federal government. There are many, many initiatives that you can take with the expertise that you have, the kind of clout and the kind of incentives and disincentives that you could utilize in order to effect the kind of decentralization of industry and commercial enterprises to the north where it is so badly needed to provide some viability for those communities.

In doing so, you would relieve the pressure for land speculation, the pressure on agricultural land, and the pressure for millions of dollars for new modes of transportation in urban areas. All of these problems are going to continue to be aggravated as long as you sit idly by and watch uncontrolled development in the Toronto-centred region. It’s going to continue to be with us until you take the initiative to decentralize -- I’m not saying to direct -- and to provide the incentives for people really to establish in the north where it would relieve the problem here in the south.

Hon. Mr. White: Mr. Chairman, I like the hon. member very much personally --

Mr. Reid: That is the kiss of death.

Hon. Mr. White: -- and I know that he is not a red-hot red. In fact, I have heard him say that he is more conservative than I am. I am going to tell you it is ever so much harder to get a corporation to locate its plant in a riding held by a socialist. What is that? Because the socialists, with one or two exceptions --

Mr. Stokes: Why is Kimberly-Clark spending $200 million in my riding?

Hon. Mr. White: -- that they send down from northern Ontario spend most of their time criticizing the employers in their cities.

Mr. Stokes: What is Kimberly-Clark spending $200 million in my riding on?

Hon. Mr. White: So, if my hon. friend is really serious about helping --

Mr. Ferrier: What a lot of garbage!

Hon. Mr. White: -- to develop northwestern Ontario, the first thing he better do is to encourage his pals in his caucus --

Mr. Stokes: I have a better rapport with companies in my riding than you have in yours.

Hon. Mr. White: -- to stop destroying the morale of the management class and the corporate shareholders.

Mr. Lawlor: Why don’t you stick to your duties as Treasurer?

Hon. Mr. White: I’d like to give you a report on what we are doing in northwestern Ontario. But before I do so, let me put it in context, I have been to many parts of the world drumming up business for Ontario. That’s what I am. I’m a salesman.

Mr. Ferrier: You are an apologist.

Mr. Lawlor: You are a propagandist.

Hon. Mr. White: I’ve never pretended to be anything more or less than that. I have been as far away as Yugoslavia and Japan saying the same thing: “Listen, you buy more from us and we’ll buy more from you. Let’s do more business together. We’ll have more employment and you’ll have more employment. We’ll have good profits from these transactions,” and so on.

Mr. Lawlor: How did you get along with those socialists over there?

Mr. Stokes: And you told them to come to Metropolitan Toronto.

Hon. Mr. White: I thought to myself wouldn’t it be appropriate to say this to people in other parts of Canada, and indeed is this not part of my function as the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs? I decided it was. So I invited myself to Newfoundland. Mr. John Crosbie, who was then the Minister of Finance, was a little surprised, I think, that I might suggest such a visit, wondered what I might have up my sleeve, decided that very little harm could be done --

Mr. Breithaupt: You mean there was some doubt?

Mr. Reid: He doesn’t know you.

Hon. Mr. White: -- and thereby rendered an invitation to --

Mr. Breithaupt: He has been reading your speeches.

Hon. Mr. White: -- my officials and myself and my colleague, Mr. Irvine. All four of us went down there for a couple of days and I told them --

Mr. Stokes: For some deep-sea fishing.

Hon. Mr. White: -- just about what I have had to say to Yugoslavians and others: “Listen, let’s do more business together.” In the process, I pointed out that if, in whatever way, Newfoundland could attract industry which would otherwise land in some of the hot spots of this province that would be a good thing for Newfoundland and that would be a good thing for the hot spots.

Mr. Stokes: What about the cold spots in Ontario?

Hon. Mr. White: I hope my hon. friend doesn’t put too parochial an interpretation on these events. Quite obviously, my first responsibility is to eastern and northern Ontario. But let us not scream too loudly if Newfoundland does succeed in inducing some industry to locate there, or if Alberta, for that matter, is successful in getting some chemical industries around its petroleum deposits. Isn’t that what Confederation is all about?

So, having said all that --

Mr. J. E. Bullbrook (Sarnia): You pay lip service. Just let me say one thing --

Hon. Mr. White: The member is going to have to wait, because I’ve got a long story to tell about northwestern Ontario.

Mr. Bullbrook: I didn’t realize that at all.

Hon. Mr. White: Yes, I have just got started. Now sir, the sum of $14 million has been placed in the estimates to provide economic and social development programmes in eastern and northern Ontario. The provincial share of DREE programmes in Cornwall and northwestern Ontario is included in this amount, as well as the regional priority budget for northwestern Ontario.

Mr. Cassidy: And nothing for the rest of eastern Ontario, apart from Cornwall.

Hon. Mr. White: This is the second year in which a regional priority budget has been developed in northwestern Ontario.

Mr. Deacon: Where has it been developed? Here in Toronto?

Hon. Mr. White: Details which I will give you show the allocation of $9.4 million to 10 provincial ministries for regionally significant projects such as the building of resource access roads, assistance to the city of Thunder Bay to extend trunk line sewers and assistance to rationalize the delivery of social services in northwestern Ontario.

We have a DREE agreement touching northwestern Ontario which was signed, as the hon. member knows, on May 23, 1974. Under this agreement, the province and the federal government will each contribute $6,511,150 during this fiscal year. An interim Ontario Northlands agreement and an agreement for the Dryden area are also expected to be signed soon. I have information about Cornwall which I will save for the new member.

Mr. Cassidy: Read out what you have in the rest of eastern Ontario.

Hon. Mr. White: I am going to run through some of the details of this and when you’ve had enough, stop me, because there are three or four pages. Since 1970, a continuing interministerial programme has successfully begun implementation of many of the 69 recommendations contained in the northwestern Ontario Design for Development, Phase 2, policy recommendations. In the 1973-74 fiscal year a process of regional priority budgeting for northwestern Ontario commenced, whereby $2,440,000 was allocated by the Minister of Treasury, Economics and Intergovernmental Affairs to other ministries to expedite the implementation of these recommendations. In the 1974-1975 fiscal year this programme has been accelerated and programmes totalling $9,533,950 have been approved for allocation to 10 ministries, as illustrated by the following: Ministry of Colleges and Universities, the purchase of two mobile teaching laboratories for Lakehead University to enable residents of areas distant from the university to complete certain science credits, $110,000. I think I will take one example from each ministry and then I can add to that if you wish.

The Ministry of Community and Social Services: Design of an integrated service delivery system to rationalize the delivery of social services in northwestern Ontario, $61,700.

The Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations: Research to determine consumer needs and recommend a consumer education and information programme to meet these needs, $50,000.

The Ministry of Correctional Services: Hiring of native people as volunteer probation officers, $54,000.

Ministry of the Environment: Assistance to the city of Thunder Bay to extend trunk line sewers as part of the city’s programme of sewage system upgrading; the purpose of this project is to strengthen the city’s role as crime rate centre for the northwestern Ontario region; $2,625,000.

Ministry of Industry and Tourism: Tourism development in the town of Cobalt; $140,000.

Ministry of Labour: Research to determine the region’s manpower adjustment needs and facilitate the application of appropriate manpower programmes, $32,500.

Ministry of Natural Resources: Preparation of Lake of the Woods land-use plan, $75,000.

It goes on, for a total of $9,533,950 for northern Ontario.

I have a similar explanation for Cornwall if it is required.

Mr. Reid: How much of that is federal money?

Hon. Mr. White: Less than half.

Mr. Deacon: It is interesting, after hearing the explosive remarks made by the Treasurer to the member for Thunder Bay about socialist members, to relate that the other day I was having lunch with a person who said, “The really dangerous thing about the present Treasurer of Ontario is he pretends he is private enterprise.” As a matter of fact, he said, “I don’t think things would get worse; they might get better under an NDP government than they are under the present Tory government, pretending to be Tory but really socialist.”

Mr. Cassidy: That’s what the voters of Stormont thought too.

Mr. Ferrier: The red Tory.

Hon. Mr. White: In fairness, though, I have been a businessman all of my life. Now what policies doesn’t he like? What is he, a land speculator? What is he?

Mr. Deacon: I just started to tell you of some of the things he doesn’t like.

Mr. Bullbrook: You take yourself seriously; that is the problem.

Mr. Deacon: As an example of the things he doesn’t like --

Mr. Bullbrook: Let the Treasurer talk about his land speculation tax. Does he want to talk about that?

Mr. J. M. Turner (Peterborough): Does he understand it yet?

Mr. Deacon: -- is the fact that the whole plan for development of this province is really just a plan for big sewers in this province; that’s all it is. All the so-called planning to disperse development has been completely ineffective because it hasn’t been thoroughly done to provide the quality of life, the quality of environment that the people in each area want.

For example, this scheme that was announced the other day is something that will absolutely destroy any possibility of our having free enterprise provide housing in this area. What the ministry has done, what this government has done in its plan to concentrate development in a band along Lake Ontario has indeed made it possible for private groups to corner the land and then call their own shots as to what they are going to get for what they sell. It’s no wonder that people have had to pay so much for housing in Malvern.

Mr. Cassidy: That is private enterprise, Don.

Mr. Deacon: It isn’t private enterprise, because private enterprise is where there is competition. We haven’t had a surplus of serviced land in this area for 15 or 20 years, and until we do have a surplus -- as the minister darn well knows but doesn’t do anything about -- we will have speculation.

Mr. Cassidy: Oh, I see.

Mr. Germa: Tell us about the land speculators.

Mr. Cassidy: There is no such thing as good capitalism; it just doesn’t work.

Mr. Deacon: Yes, there is -- and there is responsibility in capitalism -- as there is sometimes responsibility in government, if the conditions are set up so that capitalism can operate in a competitive environment, just as government has got to operate in a responsible environment. If it doesn’t --

Mr. Cassidy: It is reputed to have happened briefly in England in the 1820s, but it didn’t last too long.

Hon. Mr. White: It certainly solved the problem of the socialists.

Mr. Cassidy: Wilson is putting together what the Tories rent asunder.

Mr. Deacon: The minister just has to take a look at the situation at Cedarwood to see what government ownership of land has done there. It looks as if there has been a disaster there, either a war, a flood or something; it just looks like a deserted disaster area. Go down to Nanticoke and look at the area down there.

Whenever we remove people from where they have any ownership or any sense of responsibility, then we get this disaster area aspect. You cannot build satisfying communities for people under those conditions. What we are developing for ourselves in these new so-called cities that we are building are centres of unrest and discontent that we are going to live to regret in the future.

What is the worst part of all this is that in Nanticoke, in Whitby, in Cedarwood, we’re using up the very best land we have got and this last project in my own riding, and in the Milliken area, we’re using some of the finest agricultural land in this province, land which, even before the days of all these special fertilizers used to grow record acreages of wheat, and now they’re just ploughing that under and destroying it to build houses, when we could be providing places for those houses, when we could be getting our housing problem solved in literally scores of hamlets and towns within 60 miles of this area to satisfy the needs in this area.

At the same time we should be out providing what is needed in other parts of this province for development and it isn’t by some scheme of priorities that is set up by the people in ivory towers around Queen’s Park. It’s by providing what the people in those areas say they need.

They need highways that connect cities in the same way that the Ontario government in the old days did see the need for such connections in building Highway 401 from one end of southern Ontario to the other, but what does the other part of Ontario have?

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Deacon: What of the other part. Have you ever tried to travel from Kenora down through to Timmins to North Bay? Have you ever seen the problems that these people in that part of --

Mr. Turner: You are getting off the subject.

Mr. Deacon: -- Ontario have to get to each other? Have you ever looked at the quality of medical services, education facilities that are made available to them?

What’s imposed on them is a pattern designed here in Queen’s Park instead of giving those people the opportunity to have the resources, the funds, made available to them unconditionally and so they can decide how they need to spend the money. Look at the Maple Mountain scheme; we’ve had volumes of reports done on it. What is that going to do for employment in areas such as the tri-city area, where the people already have their investment in their homes, already have the facilities there?

Why aren’t we doing things to improve the economics in those communities which basically are job opportunities, transportation access, service? Where are government departments being developed? The Hydro building here in Toronto; why shouldn’t it be in Cornwall? Why shouldn’t the Environment ministry’s management branch be in Sudbury, or some of those northern communities? Why do we have to have all these things centred down here? And this is what this government should be doing instead of talking of its fancy plans of theory for development and of how they’re going to do things.

Why don’t you get busy doing practical things in a way that practical people in that part of the country can tell you how to do it? You won’t get opposition from those people for development in those areas. They’re not the ones who are resisting something happening, not if it’s going to be under their control. They don’t want to have it under the control of those of us sitting here at Queen’s Park, trying to impose our ideas on them.

They want to have the resources of funds, of services, made available to them on a scale that they can seize and do an effective job. We’ve set up these bureaucracies of regional governments in such a way, on such a scale, and of such a size, and so remote, that we just aren’t getting responsible action on the part of those governments, because those governments do not have unconditional grants and unconditional funds to work with. They’re on a percentage basis. Of the savings that they might make, they know they only get a small percentage of it. In effect, it’s an incentive to spend more money.

I would hope that this minister would recognize that the way we can get dispersal of opportunity, and the way we can look after the people’s needs for housing -- those seven million people the minister’s talking about in the next 25 years -- is not by building the facilities in here around Metro Toronto or the “golden horseshoe.” A country like Venezuela might be able to teach the minister something about that because, when they studied the housing problems of Caracas, they didn’t decide to spend the money in dealing with housing in Caracas. They decided to spend the money in providing more opportunities in more remote regions of Venezuela and in that way they solved their housing problems in Caracas, instead of creating more congestion there, they created more opportunity in places where they can have a much higher quality of life at much less expense.

The member for Ottawa Centre made some statement about the average income being less in eastern Ontario. I don’t agree with him that this necessarily indicates that the standard of living is lower there, because the standard of living is made up of a lot more things that just a dollar figure. It’s in the opportunities available for one to get satisfaction from what one does in life, and that may be something that does involve getting a lower income.

But as long as one can have some choice, and one isn’t contained by bad housing conditions, bad services, and isn’t frustrated by those conditions, one can get a lot of satisfaction in life from a lot less than maybe one can earn in Metro Toronto. I happen to have a couple of children who have chosen that form of life. I think they have greater satisfaction from far less income than would be required to live in large urban areas.

Mr. Cassidy: We’ve got to be aware of not patronizing people who are poor.

Mr. Deacon: That’s right, but trying to decide for them what they want is being patronizing. What I’m talking about is trying to provide broad opportunities and broad choices which do not necessarily measure up in material returns, but do in other returns to a person in the way of a satisfying life.

And so I say to the minister that I hope in his studies of the economic development of this province he will take a look at some of the other jurisdictions that he may have missed in his travels around the world and realize there are some people who are finding far more effective ways of dealing with population growth and housing needs than we’re doing here in this province.

I’m disappointed when I hear the minister take off on a member, such as the member for Thunder Bay, when he says in effect that the sort of down-to-earth representation that we get from members who recognize local needs doesn’t really benefit their constituencies. I would venture to say that the member for Thunder Bay is far more honest in his approach to what is needed for development of his area than is sometimes the case with people sitting on the other side of this House.

Hon. Mr. White: Mr. Chairman, I have enjoyed these remarks -- just about the same as the speech given during the Liberal leadership campaign, if I remember correctly from watching the television that day.

Mr. Cassidy: You have a good memory.

Hon. Mr. White: It was, nonetheless, interesting to me.

I want to clarify a couple of things. I pay credit to the member for Thunder Bay as being one of the socialists who’s not a cry baby and one of the socialists who doesn’t spend all his time down here running down the employers in his riding and the management group in his riding, and so on. I’m not going to take that back insofar as it relates to about half of those northern members. They do more to destroy their own communities than anything else to date.

Now, I’ve got information from a senior official that we have been advised by the industrial association in Thunder Bay that the latest figures for capital investment in northwestern Ontario show more than $2 billion is to be invested by the private sector in the next four years. Not bad.

I may have led some of the members to believe that the $9.5 million for northwestern Ontario was shared 50-50. In fact, the $9.5 million was our provincial contribution. The provincial contribution in Cornwall is $2.6 million; and of course the feds add their $2.6 million.

It being 6 o’clock, p.m., the House took recess.