Legislative Assembly of Ontario

SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF TREASURY AND ECONOMICS (CONTINUED)

---

The House resumed at 8 p.m.

House in committee of supply.

SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF TREASURY AND ECONOMICS (CONTINUED)

On vote 904, economic policy branch; item 3, industrial leadership and development fund:

Mr. Laughren: Mr. Chairman, I have very little more to say, because the Treasurer (Mr. F. S. Miller) has obviously decided he is not going to respond anyway.

I was not even going to speak again when we resumed this evening, but I was going through some of the mail in my office during the supper hour and I came across a report entitled The Ontario International Corp. It does not report to the Treasurer; it reports to the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

What does this Ontario International Corp. do? "It is to act in foreign markets as a primary marketing agency for the promotion of Ontario government expertise in planning, designing, constructing and operating hospitals, schools, power plants, transportation, industrial and communications systems and other forms of infrastructure development abroad; to provide the government-to-government link wherever needed in conducting business with developing countries; to identify export opportunities for the private sector in capital projects and to ensure through the creation of consortia the integration of private interests with government endeavours in that field."

That is the mandate of the Ontario International Corp. I looked at that and I thought those were all admirable goals. We should be out there promoting exports for Ontario. I asked myself what would be the equivalent of that inside Canada. If there is a number one problem we have in this country it is replacing all the imports. Oh no, we do not have anything that sensible. We do not have an Ontario Canadian corporation or an Ontario domestic corporation. Oh no, we have an Ontario International Corp. which has taken upon itself the mandate of promoting exports. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but if there is an opportunity for the development of the Canadian and Ontario economies, surely it is the replacement of imports. How often do we have to talk about the $21-billion deficit on manufactured goods that we have in this country?

This government continues to think the solution is the promotion of exports. Fine, that should be one arm of the strategy; but it should not be the beginning and the end of an economic strategy. Yet that seems to be what it is. We do not have an equivalent of the Ontario International Corp. that would seek out opportunities to replace imports that currently are coming in not just to Ontario but to the rest of Canada as well. That is a further example of how this government is closing its eyes to the opportunities that are there and simply refusing to act.

Mr. Stokes: Mr. Chairman, I am not going to speak at any great length, but I was provoked by the Treasurer in some of his comments in response to my colleague the member for Windsor-Riverside (Mr. Cooke), when he took advantage of the debate this afternoon to talk about the pronouncements made by the social affairs committee of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops on New Year's Eve.

One realizes bishops are not economists. One realizes bishops are not provincial Treasurers or federal Ministers of Finance, but when one gets learned people with a social and moral conscience finding it necessary to speak out on behalf of one and a half million unemployed across Canada one wonders why their comments would be disregarded so cavalierly by the Prime Minister of this country, by an assortment of economists and representatives of business groups and, indeed, by some federal backbench members of the House of Commons.

When our Treasurer comes before the House asking for supplementary estimates in the order of $70 million, one wonders why he would even want, let alone choose, to hide behind that old redneck bugbear of saying anything is akin to what is going on behind the Iron Curtain that does not talk about and extol the virtues of the status quo, that is the capitalistic system, the free enterprise system, the free market system, anything from whatever source that calls on those old, worn-out, tired, conventional wisdoms.

The Treasurer chose to speak about the sad state of affairs in Poland and in some of the other Iron Curtain countries and to suggest that applies to anything that calls into question the verities that are hung on to so jealously by governments at Ottawa and at Queen's Park. It makes me wonder how people who hold those philosophies have the general and substantial approbation of the majority of citizens in this province or this country.

I read what the bishops had to say, not so much from an economic point of view because I am not an economist and I certainly do not presume to have all the answers, but when they relate the concerns of a good many people in Canada in social and moral terms one wonders why the Treasurer could not call those people in and say: "What did you mean by this? What kind of positive alternatives might you propose to address these very serious economic, social and moral issues that are facing Canadian society?"

8:10 p.m.

I am the first one to admit and to fully appreciate that the dilemma half a million people in Ontario face is not solely of the Treasurer's doing, because we all know that so much of the economic and social disarray we find ourselves in is induced by external forces, some that we have very little control over.

But I want to report to the Treasurer that we in Ontario, the industrial heartland of this great country of ours -- probably until recently the most affluent province in the richest country on the face of the earth -- have close to 1.5 million people for whom we have no productive work, no prospect of productive work in the foreseeable future, and there are a good many of them who were on some form of social assistance who have now been categorized, or characterized, as exhaustees; some of those who no longer can find work can now also no longer qualify for programs such as unemployment insurance, and we are in a collective dilemma as to how we are going to meet our collective responsibility for those less fortunate,

That is all the bishops were saying, questioning some of the conventional wisdoms. Everybody appreciates, even the Treasurer, that what we are doing is not appropriate. It is not an answer to anything and, if we have any brains at all, if we care a hoot for those less fortunate, we obviously have to come up with a better way of doing things, a better way of organizing our social and our economic life, and, indeed, reassess our own individual and collective moral values.

Is there anything wrong with that? I do not see anything wrong with it, and yet when we raise it in the House in the context of supplementary estimates in the order of $70 million for short-term employment, and we use it in the context of the comments by the bishops, what does the Treasurer do? He runs behind the Iron Curtain and says, "While we do have some problems, anything that the bishops suggest smacks of communism, Marxism, or socialism."

I am not very good at putting names on things, but any time we have a situation in Canada and in Ontario where we have so many disadvantaged people wanting to participate in the mainstream of economic society in Canada we, collectively, and the Treasurer more than anybody else in Ontario, have a responsibility to react to that crisis and to take constructive and meaningful advice from whatever source. That is all my colleague the member for Windsor-Riverside (Mr. Cooke) was attempting to say.

In more specific terms, I heard the Treasurer give us a breakdown in his opening comments about where the money was being channelled for short-term employment, which he hoped would create 7,000 new jobs. Some of it is going into supplementary estimates for the ministries of Community and Social Services, Correctional Services and Colleges and Universities. Some of it is going into the creation of jobs under a federal-provincial arrangement whereby anybody in receipt of unemployment insurance benefits can qualify for a job in the resource sector, created by using a combination of unemployment insurance benefits and some of these funds for short-term employment.

I do not know whether the Treasurer answers all of his own mail, but I know he is aware of at least a fair bit of it. If his mail is anything like mine and that of almost all other members of this assembly, he will know that one specific program, the one that blends federal funding by way of UIC with provincial funds to make up the salary of somebody who is fortunate enough to get in on one of those programs, is not filling the bill. I repeat, it is not filling the bill. I have had calls from three or four people in the last week who are trying to get into that program, but because they have not had 20 weeks of employment within the calendar year they do not qualify for unemployment insurance. They are capable of working, they are willing to work and they are actively seeking employment, but they do not qualify for the Treasurer's make-work scheme because they do not qualify for unemployment insurance benefits.

I have talked to the man in charge of the program in Ontario, and he said: "That was one of the objections we raised with the federal authorities when we set up the scheme. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about it." If I am wrong, please correct me -- and perhaps we should replace the person in the service of Ontario who administers this program -- but I think he is right.

Given that, I want to know how all of our high-priced help, either at the federal level or the provincial level, could sit down and devise a make-work scheme that would exclude or disallow so many people who are capable of working, willing to work and actively seeking work. How could they be refused solely on the grounds that they were not in receipt of some form of social assistance like unemployment insurance benefits?

8:20 p.m.

Let me be more specific about the nature of some of those tasks that have been assigned to those relatively few numbers who have met all of the criteria for employment under these short-term make-work schemes.

In a previous incarnation, the Treasurer had the responsibility, for all too brief a time I might add, for the managing and the husbanding of all of the natural resources in this province in his capacity as the Minister of Natural Resources. Would that he was still there.

If he had continued on over the last four and a half years with what he had apparently attempted to do in that ministry, I probably would not be up talking about this issue right now, but I see all of the Mickey Mouse things that are being done with this so called make-work program. There may be half a dozen people in Ontario who are committed to the regeneration and the silvicultural treatment of the most important resource that we have in Ontario, not only in terms of the volumes of exports but in terms of the jobs that are created and in terms of the tax revenue that accrues to all levels of government as a result of the exploitation of our forestries.

In view of the fact that we seem to be implementing the recommendations of the Armson report, which has now resulted in the signing of at least six forest management agreements, where we have had a limited amount of funds now being dedicated to that purpose, where we have entered into federal-provincial agreements for access roads to these resources that have been neglected in the past, if he asked those half a dozen dedicated people who care a darn about the most important resource we have in this province, they could have come up with literally dozens and dozens of imaginative ways that we could have used the funds he is asking for tonight in a much more useful and a much more acceptable manner than what he is doing at the present time.

He can point to some of the Board of Industrial Leadership and Development funds that have gone into agreements with people who are going to set up nurseries to grow the stock that eventually will go into regeneration of our cover-over areas. That is the kind of thing I am talking about.

I see funds that the Treasurer is asking for being spent on recreational trails and a lot of other Mickey Mouse kind of things, when we could be employing 10 times the number of people in these make-work projects if the Treasurer had gone out into the province and asked the people who know about the resource where we get the biggest bang for our buck. That is the greatest criticism. It is not that the government is spending money -- Lord knows we need an infusion of capital -- the thing that bothers me is that we are not getting the kind of economic return and long-range benefit that we could be getting out of programs such as this.

There is nothing wrong with BILD. There is nothing wrong with supplementary estimates. We welcome them. But who does the Treasurer consult with at the federal level, or in the bureaucracy down here, to come up with these airy-fairy schemes of how to make the best use of scarce capital in order to maximize employment where it is needed most and to use that capital in socially useful ways so that not only will these make-work schemes be all right of themselves but will augment what a number of ministries should be doing and should have been doing on a long-term basis? Naturally I am referring to the resource sector of our economy.

I could name many instances where people have been turned down; little communities like Port Severn and Allan Water Bridge that have made application for assistance under a variety of programs that are under the overall umbrella of BILD. What do we get? We get an apology from an assortment of ministries saying, "We only have a limited amount of capital and unfortunately it is all spent." When one looks at how it is spent, therein lies the problem. When one embarks upon a program like this, whether it be under BILD or any of these other agencies or programs, why does the Treasurer not talk to opposition members or the people out in the field and say, "You tell us where we are going to get the biggest bang for our buck"?

I would not be at all backward about giving the Treasurer the benefit of my thoughts. They would not be politically motivated either. I think the Treasurer is trying to make the best use of social capital but he does not have all the answers. The people who advise him do not have all the answers. Some of us who are exposed more to the conditions that exist in the resource based sector of our economy, while we do not have all of the answers, could be of assistance to the Treasurer.

I am certainly not going to vote against this $70 million or $80 million that he is asking for, but I think it is a red herring if the Treasurer stands up and hides behind the Iron Curtain when people want to talk about the philosophy of government, the responsibility of government to act as a catalyst whenever the economy goes sour, when there are so many people who deserve a better social and economic fate. If the minister really wants to get a bigger bang for his buck he should be much more willing to co-operate with a variety of people to devise programs and schemes for these short-term, make-work projects.

8:30 p.m.

I wish he would give me half a dozen people to go up north and say to me: "All right, we have X number of dollars, how can we best use it, not only to create short-term employment but for long-term benefits for something as important to Ontario as our resource-based sector."

I hope the Treasurer will comment on a few of those observations.

Hon. F. S. Miller: Mr. Chairman, I will respond to my friend the member for Lake Nipigon, and I hope when I say "my friend" he believes I mean that. Even though we have not always shared total agreement on some things, I both respect and like him as a member. I quite accept the comments he made that my experience with him in his riding has always been on as nonpolitical a basis as one can have when one is in politics. I have never felt any fear or threat when he offered advice to me about matters in his riding he felt I should know about as the minister of the day. I always found his advice good and I hope he understands I tried to listen to that advice when we had that opportunity, particularly when I was in the Ministry of Natural Resources.

I guess if I had to go through the three jobs I have had in this government the one I loved was that job. I am also a very fortunate person in that I happened to be the minister on the day Professor Armson's paper hit the ministry. The only passion I have had in all my political time is my feeling about the forests of this province. It seemed eminently good sense --

Mr. Nixon: That is very uplifting.

Mr. Laughren: What else does the minister care about?

Hon. F. S. Miller: There are many things I am interested in, but when I think about a place where a very few more government dollars could make a dramatic improvement in the future of the country and its economic foundation I would have to argue for my area of Muskoka. There the forests are totally mismanaged because they are all on private land and allowed to go to fallow. I almost cry when I get out there and see what may be the most productive forest lands in Ontario not being used.

A reading of the discussion this afternoon will show that it was not quite as black or white as we have been painting it in the discussions that followed the comments of the member for Windsor-Riverside. He referred to the bishops; and I said, of course, they had the right to offer their point of view. He referred to them, saying they espoused a number of --

Mr. Cooke: Then the minister went on to talk of Poland and Russia.

Hon. F. S. Miller: I am trying to be serious. They espoused a certain set of principles he and his party found easy to believe in, and we got off on that other tack. The other day I was asked about the chamber of commerce brief, which painted a set of recommendations to government that was really the way I thought when I was a small businessman on the main street of Bracebridge. Somebody asked me how --

Mr. Stokes: The minister said he agreed with them, but the government did not.

Hon. F. S. Miller: No, I do not think I even said that. I said, "They are enunciating exactly the things I came here believing in, the way the world was as I thought it should be." I said I have learned a lot about politics since I entered this business, and I have had the opportunity to look at the way the economy is as opposed to the way I would have liked it when I was a small town businessman, or as the member who has practised a more socialist point of view would like it. I said: "The world isn't as left-wing as the New Democratic Party would like it to be; it isn't as right-wing as I would like it to be. It is a very mixed economy." I added as a footnote, and I noticed that one station ran it, "It has left a lot of mixed-up politicians."

That is as honest a statement as I can make. As a pragmatist dealing in the world the way it is -- and I must be as a minister -- I recognize that. Just because I came here believing in a set of things that I still hold very truly, and the members opposite have come here with a set of beliefs they hold very truly, does not mean that the world will be our way no matter whether the members opposite take my place or whether I am in my place as I am now. I have to deal with it the way it is and the way the people of the province believe it should be. And I do that within the limitations imposed on any practising politician.

Regarding the question the member raised a few moments ago about who could and who could not qualify, please look at the two parts of the program. The very reason Ontario has $50 million of its own not subject to any approvals by the federal government is that we found the limitations imposed by them onerous and difficult. We felt we should not have any strings on the current status of the person applying for work under the provincial scheme of things. We proceeded on the assumption that if you increase the total amount of work out there, surely you give work to some people somewhere who need work.

That, from Ontario's point of view, was our major objective: to create more work in total while doing a number of jobs that ministries had asked permission to fund but had not been able to receive permission to do so.

Mr. Stokes: But there is still $20 million in here, if I understood you correctly.

Hon. F. S. Miller: Okay, I am coming to the next part. The $20 million does relate to this year's cash flow under the Canada-Ontario employment development program. We had two negotiating sessions. The member asked me to whom I spoke at the federal level. I spoke to Mr. Axworthy, and in the first meeting we had with Mr. Axworthy the day after the Lalonde statement announcing the $500 million we made no progress to speak of. It seemed we did not know what he had to offer and the few conditions he mentioned were too tough to be practicable.

We asked to have two weeks to work with our staffs. At the end of that time a number of improvements had been made, and we could at least accept in principle that if they were responsible for unemployment insurance and the benefits that flow therefrom, as they are, then they had certain rights to impose conditions. We did tell them this would put a real brake on the use of that money. We still feel that, and we are still working, with some modest success, on a day-to-day basis to see that they gradually relax some of those conditions on individuals.

I will give members an example in my riding. One gentleman who just lost his seat as an elected municipal politician had been a carpenter. He does not have any benefits to fall back on, does not qualify as an exhaustee and does not qualify for general welfare assistance; therefore, he does not fall into any pot -- at least they said exhausted benefits or welfare are the two conditions.

We brought our program in to try to find ways and means of avoiding those problems, and that is why the basic part of the $70 million has no strings attached. The other $20 million has the strings attached by the federal government, and we continue to work hard to try to relax those so that, for example, the tourist operators or small business people of the north are included in that program.

Perhaps they do not even know it. I wrote my weekly column for the local papers last week because I was convinced the tourist operators in Muskoka did not realize they might be able to do a winter works project of their own and qualify for 25 or 50 per cent of the cost while employing people in Muskoka. The member opposite will have them in his riding, and I am sure some of them may not be aware of it. We have a responsibility to see those jobs made available.

I know one thing: if a tourist operator anywhere in this province lays out some of his money, it is going to be for something that needs to be done, I am satisfied of that. There will not be any airy-fairy make-work projects in the tourist camps of this province, so to my thinking we should be working for those small business groups who qualify and letting the word be known. I am certainly going to be trying to make sure they get their fair share.

I appreciate the sincerity with which the comments of the members opposite have been offered. I believe there are more forest management agreements being signed or on the verge of being signed, and I know that funding for those is always a problem. I can assure members that after the allocation process was all over and the money was not there I put it there.

8:40 p.m.

Mr. Conway: Mr. Chairman, I do not intend to belabour the debate, and I regret that I was not here earlier to listen to the exchange between the minister and the member for Windsor-Riverside about what our Catholic bishops have or have not been up to. I leave that to more learned analysts than I am to adjudicate.

I want to be very specific in directing my remarks to the supplementary estimates. However when the minister tells the member for Lake Nipigon he ought not to be concerned about the airy-fairyness of any tourist operator's conduct in these times, my colleague the member for Wentworth North (Mr. Cunningham) breathes in my ear, "Does that speak also for what goes on at Minaki Lodge?" Perhaps I will leave it at that.

I want to make a few comments from a purely parochial point of view on this subject.

Mr. McClellan: The more parochial the better.

Mr. Conway: I sometimes feel I am not nearly parochial enough in this place.

The member for Lake Nipigon invited discussion about the resource sector, which is of real concern to me and of real relevance to my constituency; however, there are communities in that part of my electoral district that touches upon that part of north Hastings represented by my friend from Stirling, whom I see in the House, where in fact the federal-provincial initiatives have been very successful for this winter.

I think particularly of the community of Whitney, which is the east gate to Algonquin Park, where I can honestly say I think this winter for the first time in many years unemployment is substantially lessened from previous experience, and there is no question about the fact that the federal-provincial initiatives are largely responsible for the decrease in the unemployment during this very trying winter season.

The Treasurer ought to be prepared to accept some measure of credit for that. I have on earlier occasions condemned the government for its failings in some of these smaller communities. I was in a community just a few days ago and was struck by the very few people from there who were contacting me. I checked with the local welfare officer who confirmed that there were relatively very few people looking for work at this time in a traditional area of high seasonal unemployment. I was told the federal-provincial initiatives -- and there are three or four of them, most or all of them related to the resource sector -- are taking up a very substantial amount of the slack during this period.

I draw to the minister's attention, however, that a number of those people who were seeking employment were people who would otherwise have been employed by the Ministry of Natural Resources. It is largely because of the rather difficult casual policy being followed by the Ministry of Natural Resources that so many of these people are available for work during the course of these winter months. As the minister will recall from his experience as Minister of Natural Resources, there is a policy of what I call permanent casuals. Those permanent casuals are getting smaller and smaller amounts of full-time work and are being thrown back onto other alternatives, such as the one I just mentioned, for times like this.

So I think the minister deserves credit for providing opportunities, along with the federal government, to take up the slack that is there. It has been well accomplished in that community this winter. However, I hope he will look carefully with his colleagues the Minister of Natural Resources (Mr. Pope) and the Provincial Secretary for Resources Development (Mr. Henderson) into this policy of casual labour in the Ministry of Natural Resources. It is so extremely important to communities such as the many I represent in the Renfrew county and south Nipissing areas.

Mr. Chairman, I know you have a keen interest in the current federal-provincial initiatives. I had the opportunity to attend a meeting at the Petawawa National Forestry Institute, I believe it was a week ago Monday, in the presence of, among others, Mr. Andrew J. Dabrowski of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. He represented the provincial government, and the federal government was represented by a spokesman whose name I cannot recall. They came together with, I believe, all the municipal leaders from the county of Renfrew, along with the federal member and myself, to go over the joint federal-provincial employment development strategies that are in place for this winter.

Mr. Nixon: That county council is bigger than this Legislature.

Mr. Conway: It almost is.

A couple of things were very clear to me at that meeting about the new employment expansion and development program that has been put together over the past few months.

Hon. F. S. Miller: That is federal only.

Mr. Conway: NEED is federal and the provincial opt in through the employment --

Hon. F. S. Miller: That is COED.

Mr. Conway: COED. All right. There are so many acronyms that a poor country boy like myself has a very difficult time following the trail.

Mr. Nixon: Don't you believe it.

Mr. Conway: I just want to say to the minister, and to his colleague the Minister of Transportation and Communications (Mr. Snow), his guardian angel sitting beside him --

Mr. Nixon: Some guardian, some angel.

Hon. Mr. Snow: Guardian maybe: angel no.

Mr. Conway: On the latter point I must, on reflection, agree with the Minister of Transportation and Communications.

But it was very clear to those of us sitting in that room that the federal and provincial programs have been thrown together in this respect rather rapidly. If one were to sit back and listen to the civil servants there speaking to the programs one would get the very clear impression there are an awful lot of i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed as we head into the worst of this winter recession.

I indicated there was one community in my constituency, namely Whitney, where the problem was much reduced over previous winter experiences, but there are a host of other places -- communities such as Rolphton, Alice and Petawawa -- where the problem this winter is worse than in many previous ones. As I sat in that room that day and listened to the provincial individual, who did as good a job as could be expected under the circumstances, and then heard the federal individual, a number of difficulties came to light.

I was pleased to announce, in the absence of my colleague the member for South Renfrew (Mr. Yakabuski), who was away on December 31, $667,800 worth of provincial funds for the county of Renfrew; it was spread around in $15,000 allocations to each of the 30-odd municipalities. I was very careful to make the announcement in accordance with the rules set out in the material sent to me by the Minister of Labour (Mr. Ramsay). What resulted was that people who were eligible were primarily those who were ex-beneficiaries of unemployment insurance or who, as a result of that first instance, were thrown on to social welfare assistance.

I was told by all the reeves in the meeting that day that there had been a great parade to their homes and to their municipal offices by these kinds of people. They said when the individual municipalities sat down and worked out their $15,000 allocation they determined they probably had about three or four positions for each township for this season.

I cite one example in the united townships of Rolph, Buchanan, Wylie and McKay, a series of townships that circle the town of Deep River. One of the councillors who is in charge of this initiative came to me with data indicating that after the announcement of the $15,000 allocation, he and the council were able to put together very quickly a list of 60 eligible candidates. There were 60 people in that township of about 1,800 who fitted the criteria for the programs they were developing, but with a $15,000 allocation they could hire only three or four, maybe five if they stretched it.

So the practical effect of what we had done was as follows: We put very substantial pressure on the local politicians to indicate to people that they either had to be out of unemployment insurance or, failing that, on the public assistance roll.

8:50 p.m.

I do not know whether my friend from Algoma-Manitoulin (Mr. Lane) has had this experience. However, it has been reported to me right across the county in recent days that there has been great pressure on the local welfare rolls from people who see that as the only way they are going to qualify for some of this provincial assistance. That is a really worrisome problem.

We have a host of municipalities that are now in the unhappy situation of having programs almost ready to go which are probably going to deal with five to 10 per cent of their case loads. At the same time, more and more people are coming in every day and going on public assistance.

A number of people in our part of the province, and I am sure it is the case in Muskoka, are loath to go to their municipal office and sign up for social assistance; it is not considered the proper thing to do. But when faced with the fact they may get a job only after they get on that roll, there is a lot of encouragement from within and without to do that.

We have created pressures in the community by virtue of increased expectations and, more important, there are significant new pressures on the social assistance rolls of many small rural communities in my county. This means they cannot begin to deal with the problems they normally have in this respect, quite apart from what they are going to have as a result of a few more weeks of this.

I recommend this to the minister's attention. I indicated this to the provincial staff who were on hand for that seminar. It was a good idea having those people available and trying to have us all, elected officials from both the municipal and senior levels of government, together in one place so we all had a rough idea of what was being proposed.

I think the provincial program -- and I am sure the Treasurer will nod affirmatively if I am right or negatively if I am wrong -- involves some kind of municipal contribution of upwards of 20 per cent. I think that is a good idea in this respect only: It could force the local municipalities to look more carefully at developing programs than might otherwise be the case. These are not the kind of programs my friend the member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Stokes) was worried about. I have had the feeling from talking to my municipal leaders that they are now prepared to commit local funds perhaps a little more prudently than might have been the case if there were 100 per cent funding from the senior levels of government.

The principle of having some kind of municipal share is something I find appealing. Whether or not 20 per cent is too prohibitive I suspect is something we will find out, although I gather the rules are fairly relaxed and will be applied in a fairly generous way.

I wanted to say something positive in that respect as well. However, I would sincerely invite the Treasurer and the Minister of Labour (Mr. Ramsay) to look at the problem that has been created in many of these rural communities. There is a public perception that people who want to get employment through these winter works programs have to get on the township or village welfare roll before they will be taken off and hired for one of these initiatives. That is creating serious difficulty and I hope there is something within the realm of public sector competence to deal with that.

Just a couple of quick words if I might: I notice a number of the programs that are under way in my area in the Algonquin Park perimeter are related to our forest resources. Though I have some indirect conflict of interest in that respect, I feel pleased about that because the forest resource in the Ottawa Valley is an extremely important and positive one that we expect to continue to play a vital role in the community.

I noted with considerable concern in the past number of weeks the shutdown of a couple of mills in the county -- one in Eganville and one in Killaloe -- throwing something in the order of 80 people out of work. When a mill employing 35 people shuts down in a village such as Killaloe, that spells serious problems. I was delighted to see the owner of that mill was true to the commitment he made a few weeks ago. He said market conditions left him no alternative but to shut down, but that he would try to the best of his ability to start up as soon as he could. He has done that and the shutdown amounted to only two or three weeks. So those people are back to work and that community is obviously relieved.

We have had an ongoing shutdown of the G. W. Martin Lumber Ltd. mill in the village of Eganville for some 13 to 15 months. I hope, without prejudice, that I could invite the Treasurer and Minister of Economics to take some of us from the northeastern Ontario region into his confidence to find out what precisely is going on with my friend G. W. Martin, whom I have known for some time.

That is a business which is expanding very rapidly throughout Hastings, Renfrew, Nipissing, Sudbury, Timiskaming and I understand now up into the Sault Ste. Marie area. I have always found Mr. Martin to be a very vigorous entrepreneur and, as I said, I have known him for some time. But we have mills that are shut down, such as the one in my county about which I am primarily concerned, and it is creating a lot of community upset.

There are 50 people in the Eganville area who have been out of work as a result of that shutdown for about 13 or 14 months. Quite frankly there is a widespread suspicion that some kind of fast-and-loose game is being played between the Ontario government and Mr. Martin with respect to the allocation of timber resources in our area and outside. Because I have not been able to produce any evidence of that kind of action, I have tried to downplay those suspicions.

However, one of the questions that is vital and central to the people of Renfrew county is what part the Ontario government imagines G. W. Martin is going to play in the development of the forest resources of the entire region. I would hope the Treasurer would take advice from the Minister of Natural Resources. I have not discussed this matter with that minister in recent weeks because I find it rather delicate given the fact that some of my relatives do business in the area as well.

I know the member for Renfrew South (Mr. Yakabuski), the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Natural Resources, has to share this concern because most of these people are his constituents. They are wondering when, if ever, that mill is going to open up.

We are told repeatedly that one of the big difficulties is the forest resource. I read of the expansion of the Martin empire throughout much of northern Ontario. Again I refer to my friend the member for Hastings-Peterborough (Mr. Pollock), who I know represents an area which the Martin Lumber business affects very centrally.

It is without prejudice and certainly without malice that I raise this concern, but for too many people in Mattawa, Eganville and elsewhere, that is a very important and heretofore unresolved question. Knowing the minister's keen interest in that area, I would certainly invite him to discuss the issue with the Minister of Natural Resources. Perhaps privately or publicly, at his leisure, he would also communicate with some of us who have a responsibility to answer these people who are out of work in our areas as a result of whatever is going on -- quite apart from market conditions. I would certainly like any advice or counsel he might care to offer.

Finally, I read again in these supplementary estimates of the role of the Board of Industrial Leadership and Development. This summer I built a modest little cabin. I am so accustomed to the use of that word "modest" by the Premier (Mr. Davis) -- also the word "provocative" -- that I find myself falling into that horrible trap. But in this case, it is a modest little cabin about 30 miles south of where I live in the great city of Pembroke. I drove that 30-mile stretch a number of times, and I kept saying to my friend the member for Renfrew South that he must have known this was the year I intended to build a modest little cabin high upon the hills of central Renfrew. I was amazed because every road between here and there was substantially reconstructed.

9 p.m.

The number of beautifully blue BILD signs that festoon that 30-mile trip warms the cockles of every Tory's heart, if not mine. Mr. Chairman, as a man of good common sense and business acumen, you would share with me a certain suspicion, if not concern, about every culvert replacement being announced on both sides, coming and going, with a BILD initiative sign. In the rural reaches of Renfrew county it is proof positive that the parish-pump politics of Maurice Duplessis are alive and very well.

Mr. Dean: Who got the sign contract?

Mr. Conway: My friend the member for Wentworth inquires aloud who got the sign contract. Whosoever got the sign-painting contract is holidaying, if not at the Muskoka Sands, then perhaps at Treasure Island in sunnier, warmer climes.

I am not inherently suspicious, but some day I would like to set loose on the accounts of the Treasurer (Mr. F. S. Miller) a couple of crackerjack accountants -- the likes of which you employ, Mr. Chairman, to consolidate your not inconsiderable wealth in northern Ontario -- to ascertain precisely what BILD really is, where those moneys have come from and where they are going.

I get the feeling that BILD is a kind of Conservative casserole, a kind of party hash that is intended literally to encompass anything and everything going on any given day or week of any given month or year.

Maybe that is too narrow and partisan a perspective, but I get the feeling that it is a kind of grab-bag out of which funds come for this and for that. Like the member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Stokes), I am not in any particular way sorry to see the funds being advanced for worthwhile projects. I see my colleague the member for Renfrew South is here, and I would join with him and with any other member on either side of this House in seeing to the appropriation of funds. Certainly I will in no way stand in opposition to these supplementaries.

But I say to the Treasurer -- remembering, as some of us do, that creative tension that we heard existed between himself and the now Minister of Health (Mr. Grossman) as to what BILD was and who would be in charge and where it would go as the principal engine of economic recovery in this province -- I just want to flag yet again my interest in that which falls under the umbrella of BILD.

It comes to my attention that it is probably more notable today in terms of government appropriations in this province if it is not a BILD appropriation than if it is. It is something that I hope we can get some firm accounting of before this parliament is over.

One wonders how much new money ultimately is involved here. If there is a genius of the Ontario Progressive Conservative hegemony, it is surely their facility over the years to take a number of very ordinary appropriations -- the likes of which would routinely go, for example, to the constituency of my colleague the member for St. Catharines (Mr. Bradley) -- and from time to time simply to lop off a variety of these ordinary appropriations into a nice big basket, wrap it with a big blue bow, send the Deputy Premier down to the courthouse steps in St. Catharines, call the media in and make a big announcement with the very clear hope that the good people of the Niagara region will get the idea that this is new money when, in fact, it is not.

It is a shell game that has been played so long and so well that even on this side we have to view it with a certain amount of cynical admiration.

Mr. Bradley: They are not easily fooled in the Niagara Peninsula.

Hon. F. S. Miller: The member for St. Catharines has proved that is wrong.

Mr. Conway: I note that the people of the St. Catharines area are very careful in their choice of representation in this assembly.

I do want to indicate to the minister that at some point I, as one member of this assembly, would very much like to have an honest accounting of the BILD fund, particularly with reference to new programs and new money, because one gets the impression that in many cases this is old money or ordinary money being recycled in rather new and creatively political ways.

I am sorry I have spoken at such length, Mr. Chairman; it was not my intention, but I did want to share some observations, I hope some positive and some cautionary. In the presence of the member for Renfrew South (Mr. Yakabuski), who I am sure has heard that I have heard from many of our municipal people, I ask the Treasurer (a) to please gather together his officials to see what can be done about providing more funds for the amount of enthusiasm that has been developed as a result of the federal-provincial initiatives, because local townships that are forced to face the fact that they have only dealt with five per cent of their case load are not particularly happy about it and (b) to please undertake to give some kind of commitment to deal with the very serious problems and pressures that are developing on the local welfare rolls as a result of these announcements.

Hon. F. S. Miller: Mr. Chairman, to respond to the points: First, the $50-million allocation was a first cut, done fairly quickly, to get some moneys available right away to give us time to see what provincial projects might qualify and to see what reaction there was from the private sector for the balance of the moneys. We are also told by the federal government that there is always the possibility of the $200 million being increased, because in the very beginning Ontario said it did not get "a fair share" of the original moneys made available.

Second, we agree with the honourable member in terms of the qualifications. I said that to the member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Stokes). Since the problem is not with our government, may I suggest to the member that he whisper quietly in the ear of his federal friend and say. "Look, this is the way it is working." He knows it is. I ask him to please tell them down there that Ontario is right and to ease up on the qualifications for employment, because they are all federal; there is not a provincial requirement there.

Third, I thank the member so much for all those comments about BILD. I have a great deal of trouble making my colleagues in cabinet and caucus believe that anyone knows anything about it. I am just delighted that the member has seen fit to make these criticisms, because now they will believe me.

Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, I rise to enter the debate briefly. It is time that we, as members of this Legislature, made the government understand that we are faced with a very serious crisis. What the government is proposing to the assembly and to the people of Ontario amounts to an admission of failure which is becoming more and more tragic. The consequences of the ineptitude of this government are felt by people who are real, who have their problems and who are suffering day after day in Ontario and in Canada.

I do not think it is fair that the government comes to this assembly and asks for a further allocation in a budget that does not respond to the present needs of the province. We have seen this province slipping year after year since 1970. For years we have been the only province that not only has been last in terms of increased production but also in 1982, according to the Conference Board of Canada, had a decrease of 4.2 per cent in real domestic product -- with the exception of British Columbia, the province with the largest decrease in real domestic product.

Every day we are faced with a crisis that involves the most important economic sector of the province, the manufacturing sector; but we have a government that is sitting totally idle, without any idea of how to overcome a crisis that touches the very foundation of the economy of this province.

9:10 p.m.

The Tories were proud for many decades when the growth and the boom were taking place. even though they did not merit it. The members will remember, as I do, when plants were opening in Ontario, not because of an ingenious and intelligent policy and framework of this government but because of the advantages of the branch-plant economy that was mushrooming in Canada as a result of the tariff barriers that existed and the incentives given by the various governments to the multinational and American companies that were locating in Ontario.

At that time, this government was taking credit for what was happening in Ontario. Now the minister is suggesting that perhaps the Liberal caucus members should whisper to their colleagues in Ottawa that they should take some course of action because this government has no responsibility for what is happening. But we know this government is very much responsible for what is happening in Ontario.

We had a budget in May that, in the language of the Treasurer (Mr. F. S. Miller), remembered the phraseology of Herbert Hoover: a budget to precede a recovery that would come shortly. When we have more than 200,000 jobs lost in Ontario as a result of the Treasurer's budget, I think the minister should at least have had a second thought and said, "Okay, this is the time to do something dramatic, something to change the course of action." But no, the minister wants to hold the course as does Reagan in the United States.

I know he made a comment on the pastoral letter that was released early in the month by the Canadian bishops on the economic crisis. He said the bishops had the right to express their opinions. What he did not understand was what the bishops meant when they said this is a moral crisis, because it is bringing home the very real problems that we thought would no longer exist in this province, because poverty no longer had any place here and because there never would be a time when people would be chasing for jobs. It was thought that there was plenty of wealth which was distributed to every sector of the population of the province. Now we have those problems. When we have such high unemployment, the government not only has a moral responsibility but also a political responsibility.

Since I was elected, I have never seen people coming to my office the way they are now. This is a limited experience and does not by any means reflect the tragic reality of thousands of other people of whom I am not aware. But in the brief time I have been a member of this Legislature, I have never seen people coming to my office literally crying because they have lost their jobs many months ago, perhaps 14 months ago. They have lost their unemployment benefits and their dignity and they do not know where to turn for a job. They do not know how to earn a wage for their families so they could eat and so their children could respect them as breadwinners. These are very real problems.

It is easy for the Treasurer to say that the federal government should do more because it is not our responsibility, but we know very well that in December 1982 we had 29 per cent, or 52,000 people, unemployed in the construction industry in Ontario. In Metropolitan Toronto we had 35.2 per cent unemployed, 11,606 people, more than a third of the 33,000 members of the construction industry trade unions.

If the Treasurer does not think this is a very serious problem, then I would like to ask him what is a serious problem? If we look at any other aspect of the economic activity of Ontario, if we look at the bankruptcies in the commercial sector, Ontario had a 33.5 per cent increase. Personal bankruptcies increased by 46.7 per cent.

As the previous speaker said, we have listened to a barrage of propaganda from the government since the last election when it went around Ontario to launch the big BILD program, which would solve the industrial problems. After one year we are looking at the consequences. The government was not serious then and it is not serious now. Perhaps that is because they do not understand the real problems of the province.

The previous Minister of Industry and Trade (Mr. Grossman) came into this Legislature day after day praising the policy of the government, which was to encourage the winners but never to encourage the losers. Now what do we have? We have bankruptcies involving winners and losers, because the structure of the economy in this province was not set up in such a way as to compete successfully with the corresponding industries of other countries.

We saw this government coming into the Legislature and raising the great idea of world product mandating and the big achievements that would be made when the multinational corporations would choose Canada to make products they would sell around the world. Westinghouse was the only example that was mentioned. We know that is no longer the case; the multinational corporations are retreating and producing in the countries where they are rationalizing their production, because they are preparing themselves for the next cycle. They did not choose Canada, of course, because they had no attachment to this country and no loyalty to Ontario.

The winners have disappeared and we have a very large number of losers. We have an automobile industry that is suffering the consequences of the inaction of this government -- which, incidentally, understood the problems in 1978. I remember when the previous Treasurer, Mr. McKeough, released a study on the future of the automobile industry in Canada.

Despite what is now happening in the reorganization and retooling of the North American automobile industry, we are suffering very specific consequences because we have been unable to rethink in Canadian terms what we want to do with the automobile industry.

9:20 p.m.

It has been extremely difficult to make this government understand that it cannot depend completely and totally, without any bargaining power, on an industry that is concerned with production runs and with marketing needs that go far beyond the needs of Canada.

We have reminded the government that Canada is by no means a negligible market, because it is comparable to a sizeable European market such as that of France or Italy. and we know those countries have their own national automobile industries. We know also, and we have said repeatedly from this caucus, that if one looks at serious integrated industries, some degree of decision-making is required in Canada and we do not have that decision. We cannot make decisions about the models, we cannot make decisions about research and development and we cannot make decisions about marketing the products. Therefore, we are in a totally subservient and colonial position to the big North American auto makers and will be dependent on them.

No matter what the Premier (Mr. Davis) will say in the Legislature; no matter what the Minister of Industry and Trade (Mr. Walker) will say in the Legislature; no matter what the Treasurer will say in the Legislature, we have no say in the decisions that are made in Detroit. I believe that spells disaster for Canada, because it means we will be tied forever to the wellbeing of the American industry. If it is convenient for them to invest money in Canada, they will; if it is not convenient, they will not.

The situation of the manufacturing industry in Ontario is even more tragic than that of the other industries because, as I said at the outset, the manufacturing industry is so important to this province. We know that, because of the structure of that industry, Canada's trade deficit in manufactured products has been increasing constantly from 1974 on. In 1974, members will remember, the trade deficit in manufactured products was $9 billion; in 1981, it had ballooned to $21 billion.

There is no industrialized country in the western world that can survive with such an incredibly large trade deficit. I know there is a school of thought that says Canada can survive by using its almost-infinite natural resources. The federal minister, Bud Olson, was quoted last summer as saying there are other countries that are more able than us to refine natural resources; so we should let them do the job. But what he did not understand was that if we export our natural resources we must import manufactured goods, which means we are increasing our trade deficit and our inflation and we are lowering the standard of living of the people of Canada and Ontario. That is not the only reason, of course, but it is one of the factors.

While inflation is going down in every other country, and in the United States in particular, which is our major trade partner, it is going down very slowly in Canada because of the inflation built into the import of manufactured goods. I do not think the government understands the problems. I am not surprised that the Treasurer does not understand them. But because of this situation and because of the structure of our industries, we are paying very dearly for the wrong decisions made by both the federal and Ontario governments.

If we look at the outflow of interest and dividends, and if we look at the balance of payments, we see that the Canadian situation is deteriorating year after year. The same is happening in the automobile sector, especially in the parts sector.

We see this government taking no action whatsoever. It is waiting for the federal government or perhaps the American economy to bail it out. But I think it is making the wrong assumption because, even though the American economy will recover this year or next year, and we know the unemployment figures will be very high even in the presence of a recovery in the American economy. the structure of the Ontario economy will be changed. This government is not doing anything to prepare the province to develop the type of industries that will respond to the needs of this province.

Mr. Chairman: Can you tie this back into the supplementary estimates? I have been listening closely.

Mr. Di Santo: Yes, Mr. Chairman. I am talking to the supplementary estimates.

I am saying that this government cannot come to this Legislature and ask for a supplementary allocation when we are faced with such huge problems. This is why I thought it was important for me to speak tonight. I think that I speak for many people in Ontario who have no voice, who are not listened to by this government. There are many people who are losing their jobs daily, who are losing their houses, and people who are being neglected by this government. I think they have the right to a spokesman for them.

I hope the Treasurer understands it is not a political plot, it is not a political position we are taking; we are reflecting a real situation that exists out there in the province. For those reasons, we will be voting against the allocation.

Hon. F. S. Miller: Mr. Chairman, I can only say this: I have just been told the member was voting for it. I find that interesting.

Mr. Bradley: Mr. Chairman, I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate and to bring to the attention of the minister once again some of the problems that confront us and that can be alleviated through actions on the part of his ministry.

He will be interested to know that last Saturday morning, a number of Tories -- I knew I would get his attention if I said "Tories" -- gathered at the Holiday Inn, believe it or not, in St. Catharines. It was not the Parkway Inn for a change. A number of the councillors of the regional municipality of Niagara, five out of the six provincial members and all of the federal members gathered primarily to discuss the economic situation in the Niagara region and how the province and other jurisdictions might assist in overcoming some of those problems through the supplementary estimates of the ministry.

9:30 p.m.

The idea that came forward has been mentioned by other members of this assembly, that is, the new employment expansion and development program, which, while we recognize that it is good for those people who have been off unemployment insurance benefits for some time, has drawn considerable fire.

Hon. F. S. Miller: May I point out to my colleague that the NEED program is not in these estimates tonight.

Mr. Bradley: It is not?

Hon. F. S. Miller: No.

Mr. Bradley: It was a good program nevertheless, and it was discussed.

Hon. F. S. Miller: It is strictly a federal program.

Mr. Bradley: The minister would understand that the reason I think it is in these estimates is that I know he has discussed it with the federal government and indicated his concern about the provisions in the NEED program. As a result of them, people such as Rick Anderson, the Canadian Union of Public Employees president for the outside workers of the city of St. Catharines, has expressed his concern that the people who are being assisted in a very direct manner by the programs at the senior levels of government are not the recently unemployed such as those who were laid off by the city. Because the NEED program did not meet their particular requirements, he was hoping that the Treasurer would have a different program and some additional funds for municipalities. I will get into that in a moment.

My understanding is that tomorrow the Treasurer will announce or indicate to the municipalities of Ontario how much money his ministry will transfer to them. The minister shakes his head no. Let us say at least some time in the near future he will be or should be indicating to the municipalities and the boards of education --

Interjection.

Mr. Bradley: Well, all right, the other minister. We all know the Treasurer is the one with the purse-strings.

Hon. F. S. Miller: May I gel up for a second? I think sometimes there is an irony in life allowing for all this power in my purse-strings. I just read my astrograph for the day and it says: "Keep a tight rein on your financial expenditures today. If you let your guard down, there is a chance you will spend more than you should."

Mr. Bradley: That might well be the case if we were talking about government advertising, on which the government spent some $40 million in the year immediately preceding the provincial election, but it certainly is not the case in terms of spending to create employment opportunities in places such as the Niagara Peninsula.

I want to indicate to the minister how important it is to provide to the municipalities -- the Chairman who now sits in the chair is one who would understand this perhaps better than the rest of us in the House, having been very deeply involved in the Association of Municipalities of Ontario during his days in Stoney Creek --

Mr. Conway: When he was such a good Liberal.

Mr. Bradley: -- when he was still a progressive individual. He would understand that when the senior levels of government, particularly the provincial government, come to the municipalities and on the one hand say, "You must restrain your expenditures to keep taxes down in keeping with our restraint program," and then a few weeks later come back and say: "But if you want to take advantage of the job-creation programs, there is a municipal component there. There are funds that must be generated by the local municipality."

If the minister is not prepared to give the municipalities, through his transfer payments, a sum of money which will permit them to carry out their responsibilities and at the same time to create new job opportunities, then he is going to find that they do not take full advantage of these job creation programs and, in some cases, the unemployment rolls will remain rather high.

I come from the St. Catharines-Niagara area, which is what it is called for the purposes of Statistics Canada. In our part of the province, we have an unemployment rate of 20.2 per cent. It is rather sad for the people in our area, many of whom are now moving from Unemployment Insurance Commission funds on to welfare funds. It is a traumatic step for them. It is a devastating blow to the egos of these people who have prided themselves on not receiving any kind of assistance which they would refer to as welfare. But they cannot avoid it. They may not be proud of it but there is no reason they should be looking downcast about accepting it, because they have been producers in our society. Nevertheless, it has a devastating effect on them.

I need not go into great detail. I do not think, as many do, that we on the opposition side have a monopoly on people issues and concern for people. I accept that the Treasurer has concern too. His way of showing it and his policies may be different. He may feel that through less government intervention in many areas he can achieve the same thing we seek through his direct action. I accept that the minister too has a heart, is concerned about unemployment and is not simply dismissing what we say because he happens to be unconcerned about it.

However, I think there are some suggestions he could adopt that would alleviate many of these problems. One of them is that he not penalize the municipalities this year when the people there are hard hit by inflation and unemployment. Those same people are forced to pay property taxes. Everybody in this Legislature knows property taxes do not take into account a person's ability to pay. If a person is unemployed or making $30,000 a year, he still has to pay property taxes or he will pay a high penalty when his taxes go into arrears.

We have to lessen the impact most particularly on those municipalities that have an unemployment rate many would consider to be totally unacceptable, as if any rate is acceptable. Certainly our 20.2 per cent and, as my friends from Sudbury would indicate, an unemployment rate of over 30 per cent are totally unacceptable.

The minister will recall and no doubt spent a long time studying the recent letter I sent to him, dated January 11, 1983, in which I made a number of suggestions as to how he might at least alleviate some of the unemployment problems in the Niagara Peninsula.

Before touching on that, I want to implore the minister to provide a sum of well over five per cent in terms of an increase to the municipalities and boards of education in this province so they are not forced to go to the people and raise municipal taxes. They will be forced to do that if he talks about this five per cent or less in terms of transfer payments.

It is absolutely essential that the Treasurer transfer to the municipalities and boards of education in Ontario a sum of eight per cent across the board as the bare minimum in terms of an increase, so they will be able to cope with the inflationary pressures and not be forced to go to the people locally, either to cut essential programs, as some might have to do, or to raise municipal taxes.

I have suggested as well that the Treasurer provide an extra emergency per capita grant to individual municipalities and boards of education in the Niagara Peninsula since he is calling upon these bodies to assist the province in providing employment opportunities for people residing within their jurisdiction.

It is nice to stand over here and suggest a lot of things to him, because he has to accept the ultimate responsibility when the deficit increases. He will get some criticism from certain sectors of the population, sometimes even from us, when the deficit soars to certain heights. We will point out that he blows money on advertising at a great rate and on foolish things such as Suncor and so on.

Mr. Conway: Frank agrees with us half the time.

Mr. Bradley: I know the minister agrees with me on this, but I do not want to be excessively partisan tonight. There will be the odd partisan intrusion in my remarks, but I do not want to be excessively partisan nor excessively long, the minister will be happy to know.

Mr. Stokes: Are you for deficits or against them?

Mr. Bradley: I did not say that tonight. We are prepared to suggest that the deficit need not be quite so high if spending is cut back on such things as Suncor. I know my friends in the New Democratic Party would prefer they buy 51 per cent of Suncor and let the deficit go higher. I would not want to propose that. I would say that expenditure should not be made. However, I promise not to be excessively partisan nor to respond to the intrusions of the members to my left.

What I am suggesting to the minister, which is not going to cost him a lot of money, is that he specifically key in on those communities that are particularly hard hit by unemployment and that he provide an extra emergency per capita grant to both the boards of education within those jurisdictions and to the municipalities, over and above what they would normally get, in order that they can meet their responsibilities in job creation and avoid, as I say, the kind of tax increases at the local level that I think would be counterproductive.

9:40 p.m.

I think he should accelerate the timetable for the construction of any provincial projects that have been planned for the future in our part of the province. This stimulation of the construction industry would have a beneficial spinoff effect on suppliers and would provide employment for the many who are out of work in the construction area.

I noticed in the St. Catharines Standard, sometimes suggested to be the Progressive Conservative organ in Ontario --

Mr. Conway: Sometimes?

Mr. Bradley: Most of the time. It had a headline that read, "Construction Bombs Out, Building Projects Down $13 Million in St. Catharines."

I point out to the Treasurer the area needs stimulation. I am not suggesting that he go out and dream up some projects that are going to be costly in the long run in terms of operations and operating costs, nor things that are not needed. But there are many projects that the Ministry of Government Services and the various ministries have on tap for the future in the Niagara Peninsula. I am suggesting the minister could accelerate those projects.

We have one at present which is almost completed and which is totally unnecessary. That is the Taj Mahal that the regional municipality of Niagara has constructed for the senior civil servants and other civil servants and regional councillors. I can tell the Treasurer, I hope he is not there if he is invited, and I certainly will not be at the official opening of that kind of foolish expenditure.

I am not talking about foolish expenditure; I am talking about the kinds of projects that are essential to the region, whether they be road construction projects or other capital projects that can generate the kind of construction that is necessary and that will help the private sector which the Treasurer cherishes so much and which all of us feel should be stimulated in some indirect and direct ways.

I would like him to give through other ministries -- I guess the Ministry of Industry and Trade would be one -- priority to the local businesses that have made applications for loans to create jobs by establishing new operations or expanding existing operations. I am not advocating that he say to the rest of the province that it cannot get any money; I am saying that when he sees some good potential projects in the private sector, he could fund them either through grant programs or loan programs and he could get those small businesses going. He will have the support of those of us in the opposition. He will certainly have my support at a local level, vocally and publicly, if he is prepared to do that. I think that is the stimulation we need for the local economy.

I think he should assume a greater percentage of the cost of social services in the Niagara region by having the province accept responsibility for perhaps 40 per cent of the cost rather than 30 per cent.

Interjections.

Mr. Bradley: I do not want to get into Saskatchewan. I do not want to hear that speech again. I will not respond. Did I not read in the paper -- the Treasurer could correct me, or perhaps the Chairman -- that even the government of Manitoba now is looking at restraint or something like that? Did I not read that somewhere? I do not know. I will not say it. The Chairman will implore me to ignore the interjections from the radical left and so I will.

I have heard it said that the minister should assume the whole cost of social services across the province. I am not suggesting that. I know that is unrealistic. What I am saying to the Treasurer -- and the Minister of Community and Social Services (Mr. Drea) agrees with me in this regard, because he expressed it to the member for Prescott-Russell (Mr. Boudria) the other night when he made a similar suggestion -- is that when a municipality reaches a certain unemployment threshold, at that time the Treasurer should provide for those municipalities a greater percentage of the cost of welfare for that period when they are experiencing that unemployment.

For example, let us throw Out a figure of 15 per cent, which is an extremely high figure of unemployment. Let us say 15 per cent might be a threshold at which the government would assume 35 per cent of the cost of welfare, instead of 30 per cent. If the threshold reached 20 per cent, the government might then assume 40 per cent, and so on. The city of Sudbury, under those threshold circumstances, would likely then be in a position where the government would be almost totally funding the welfare payments within that area. They would target areas rather than doing it on an across-the-province basis. It is not going to cost them as much money and it is going to breathe new life into those municipalities which are extremely hard hit.

I heard the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (Mr. Bennett) rise in the House the other day to extol the virtues of his program, the $5,000 interest-free loan that was offered to potential home buyers. I would have thought that because it was the success he said it was, it would have been worth while extending that for perhaps another six months and then looking at extending it beyond that if it were necessary.

I think that program did have some benefits. I am prepared to say that publicly I told the minister that when he was coming under some criticism. I thought it was a program that was supportable although it was not the entire answer and there were some defects in it. Going along with the federal program that came out, which was a $3,000 grant, it was a good program in terms of generating some new construction or at least getting rid of the homes that were empty at the present time and encouraging people to build some new homes. Certainly within our area of the province, I notice the applications in St. Catharines are either 36 or 44 or something of that nature.

I also suggested, because we had a particular problem with the environment in the Niagara Peninsula -- and the Treasurer has heard of the problems, as my friend from Niagara Falls (Mr. Kerrio) would describe them, with the Niagara River and with other sources of pollution within the Niagara Peninsula -- that I would have thought that at a time of economic stagnation in the peninsula it would have been a good opportunity for the Treasurer to infuse new sums of money into the peninsula, to clean up the beaches, to take action in assisting industries to meet their obligations and be involved in the tertiary treatment of sewage, for instance, where the government wants the phosphates removed but wants the municipalities to assume a lot of that cost.

These are some of the suggestions I have for the minister. I do not have all the ideas in the world on how we can solve this problem, nor does the Treasurer, nor does anyone in this House. The member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Stokes) suggested it was wise for the government side to be listening to the people out in the hinterlands and to the people who sit on the opposition benches as well as to his own advisers, some of whom do not have their fingers on the pulse of their communities perhaps to the same extent that we in the opposition do, some of the people on the government back benches do, and indeed some of the cabinet members do.

I see a major role for the Treasurer to play. I was interested to hear that Ian Sinclair, a person one would expect to talk about a lot of restraint and say that we should be cutting down the deficit, was recently suggesting -- as many have for some time now -- that what is needed is a stimulation of the economy. Our recession has reached such depths that what we require now is a stimulation through an infusion of funds from the various levels of government.

This is not the answer forever. We cannot be forever spending our way out of all situations, but at a time when we reach these depths, it is a good step to take. Then when we get into better times the government is not forced to assume the same responsibility and role because the private sector has picked it up, the economy generally has improved and the funds are flowing back into the government's coffers and it can even meet its own standards in terms of the reduction of the deficit.

What I am saying is that the minister has a role to play. We are looking to him. The municipalities, which I thought, according to my mayor, were going to be getting the word from on high about how much money they were getting from the province, would hail the minister if he were to provide those funds in this difficult year. They would say this looks almost like a return to the Edmonton commitment, or at least the minister is making up for the lack of adherence to the Edmonton commitment, which was announced with such fanfare in 1973 and which I reminded the deputy minister of when he was busy being critical of the federal government.

I suggested at that time that if they wanted to have any credibility, he should advise the minister and the government to treat the municipalities in a more favourable fashion and not play the tricks on them that the minister says the federal government plays on him.

9:50 p.m.

The minister has a chance to be somewhat of a hero in this province. He has a chance to be looked upon as the person who helped to pull us out of the depths of recession into which we have fallen. The recession is partially due to the policies he has adhered to in the past, partially due to the policies of the federal government, and to a certain extent due to the policies adopted south of the border by the Reagan administration which was hailed with such fanfare by the right wing in this country. Finally, it is due to world conditions, which are bad whether one is in a socialist country, a conservative country or one where a party of the centre is in power.

I ask the minister to respond, positively and favourably, to those suggestions. I hope that even if he is not prepared tonight to say, "I agree with you and will adopt this and that," he will give further consideration to them at cabinet meetings, and at the policy discussions with his advisers and members of the caucus.

I look at the member for Brantford (Mr. Gillies), the member for Algoma-Manitoulin (Mr. Lane) and the member from Stoney Creek and other areas. I hope these people will place the same kind of pressure on the minister that we have in the opposition to generate a new and different economy to help us on the road to recovery in this province. If he does that I will be the first one to stand in this House to congratulate him, and of course I will put a picture of him in my next constituency newsletter.

Mr. Chairman: The member for Bellwoods. I am sorry, the Treasurer. Are you going to participate?

Hon. F. S. Miller: Yes, I do in between each speaker.

Most of the comments the honourable member has made are really for a budget rather than on this matter. I will be entering that pre-budget period. I will be meeting with some 45 to 50 groups. I will certainly be discussing matters of that nature with caucus and formulating the policies as we go along.

Mr. McClellan: Mr. Chairman, we are obviously into a general discussion on the economy --

Mr. Bradley: You gathered that, did you?

Hon. F. S. Miller: I can argue we should not be.

Mr. McClellan: Yes, but we are. I simply have to go on the basis of precedent. I do not intend to take very long, but --

Mr. Conway: You know where that got us.

Hon. F. S. Miller: Do you want me to challenge?

Mr. Chairman: No.

Hon. F. S. Miller: I mean it.

Mr. McClellan: I have been sitting here patiently listening to a number of people speak. There are just a couple of thoughts I want to share. I am intrigued to listen to the recipes of my colleague and friend the member for St. Catharines (Mr. Bradley) who talks about us having fallen into a depression as though it happened somehow accidentally. It is vital to keep in mind that this is a completely man-made depression.

The fact is we have two million people out of work, 750,000 in Ontario, as a result of deliberate, conscious decisions taken by our government in Ottawa. This is the consequence of Mr. Bouey's monetarist folly. This is the consequence of the policies of the Liberal government. I remember clearly this Treasurer supporting those policies over and over again when members on this side warned that monetarism, this obsession with inflation and high interest rate policy, was going to put tens of thousands of people out of work.

That is precisely what has happened. Now everybody comes back into the Legislature wringing his hands and saying: "Oh, my gosh, how did this happen? It must have been something that was done in the United States. It must have been something that was done in Japan. Maybe it was the Outer Mongolians who somehow torpedoed our economy."

My friends, our own democratically elected government in Ottawa can be thanked for the fact there are nearly two million people out of work. Our Treasurer supported that policy lock, stock and barrel. His words are recorded in the Hansard of this Legislature. Time and time again he was urged to support a made-in-Canada interest policy and time and time again he warned us against the evils of inflation. Now that we are in the deepest depression in 40 years, who will put Humpty Dumpty back together again? The same people who smashed him to smithereens in the first place?

It is an irony, perhaps -- and I say this as a Toronto member -- that this province does not take account of economic phenomena until they hit Toronto. It was quite all right for the governments in Ottawa and here at Queen's Park to do nothing while the economy of Sudbury was absolutely destroyed, while the economy of Windsor was absolutely destroyed, while the economy of Oshawa, of St. Catharines or of Hamilton was absolutely destroyed. Now that the depression is here on our own shores, on the shores of the great imperial city itself, on the shores of the great media centre of Ontario if not of Canada, now that unemployment is in double digits in Metropolitan Toronto, governments begin to wring their hands.

I suppose that is just the way politics works in Ontario despite all the lip service the governing party pays to its concern for what is happening in small-town Ontario and in nonmetropolitan Ontario. The fact is they do nothing until the problems become of interest to the media. The time lag in this depression has been nothing short of obscene. Nobody shed a tear until the waves started lapping at the foot of Lake Ontario.

At any rate, the reality is that it has hit Toronto, but it is just beginning to hit. I represent a riding where most of the people work in the service industries or in the building trades, particularly in construction.

Mr. Boudria: A lot of people don't work.

Mr. McClellan: My colleague says a lot of people don't work. The fact is there has been a bit of a boom in construction in Metropolitan Toronto, and in many respects we have been cushioned against the kind of catastrophe that has hit other communities. But if you look at projects in the building trades in this city, they are all nearing completion, and it is my distinct impression that very few companies have anything on the drawing boards or in the planning stages, because nobody was planning when interest rates were 19 and 20 per cent. Nobody bothered to do any planning, and the trough is running dry.

I am told, for example, that when Jonathan Cape finish the museum, they do not have anything else, and I believe that is typical in the building trades. The real impact is going to hit not this winter but probably next winter and perhaps even the winter after that. You cannot torpedo the economy through a high interest rate policy and then somehow turn the tap back on,

Hon. F. S. Miller: Mr. Chairman, I have to point out that I do not think interest rate policy is on the supplementary estimates tonight.

Mr. Chairman: That is a good point. What do you think, member for Bellwoods?

Mr. McClellan: He may be right.

Mr. Chairman: Now you tell me.

Mr. McClellan: But I have sat here through most of the debate and --

Mr. Stokes: He warned you what he was going to do.

Mr. McClellan: I think it is regrettable there are not additional funds in these estimates for serious job creation programs -- and we are talking about job-creating programs. Part of it, obviously, will have to do with the Treasurer's budget preparation work. However, this is the only chance we have to talk about that before the budget, and it is legitimate to raise concerns during supplementary estimates that deal ostensibly with job creation. It is legitimate to talk about why we are in the mess we are in and how inadequate the supplementaries are to deal with the crisis that confronts us, and to make a plea for the government to come to its senses.

There should be money in the supplementary estimates for a whole series of special projects: housing, municipal works, essential municipal services. There are all kinds of opportunities the government is choosing to ignore. Will it take a welfare case load of 70,000 in Metropolitan Toronto to persuade this government to act? What is the magic figure that will impel this government to take our depression seriously? Is it 50,000 welfare cases in Metro or is it 70,000?

10 p.m.

Mr. Kerrio: You do not have to answer that.

Mr. McClellan: It may be funny in Niagara Falls, but it is not funny in most communities.

Mr. Kerrio: It is funny because the member is asking the Chairman. He cannot answer questions and the member knows it. The member should not try to turn things around, but just say what he has to say.

Mr. McClellan: That is what I am trying to do. This government guaranteed, to the tune of $75 million, the refinancing of Massey-Ferguson, which happens to be in my constituency. There was a big recall written up in the newspapers not too long ago. I phoned John Duff, the president of Local 439, what is left of the Massey-Ferguson works in Toronto. To go back to work one needs 25 years' seniority. Thirteen hundred workers are still on the streets; a couple of hundred have gone back. I point this out because people are saying, "Massey is recalling its work force," as if somehow we have turned the corner and it is not necessary for the government to bring in supplementary estimates of real significance, it can bring in this kind of stuff we have in front of us tonight.

Mr. Grande: It is nonsense.

Mr. McClellan: Yes, it is. Nobody has turned any corner in the manufacturing sector. John Inglis, also in my riding, is still working a three-day week because nobody can afford to buy the appliances it manufactures. Farmers can still not buy the combines that are made at the Toronto works of Massey-Ferguson. The recall is not what it appears to be in the media.

Mr. G. I. Miller: Farmers cannot afford to buy.

Mr. McClellan: People are still out of work. Farmers cannot afford to buy, as the member for Haldimand-Norfolk points out. Construction is drying up in Metropolitan Toronto and it is not somehow miraculously going to turn around. Government is going to have to intervene in a major way to put people back to work. Alternatively, our welfare case loads will skyrocket. Paul Godfrey, that notorious radical, that Bolshevik, predicts that --

Hon. Mr. Gregory: Paul Godfrey is not a Bolshevik.

Mr. Laughren: No, Frank Miller is.

Mr. McClellan: If the bishops are interested in the russification of Canadian society, then Paul Godfrey must be a Bolshevik. Comrade Godfrey is calling for -- I am just paraphrasing what the Treasurer (Mr. F. S. Miller) so graciously stated in the afternoon sitting -- a massive federal-provincial works program to put capital funds into projects that will (a) provide construction work and (b) long-term jobs -- not short-term temporary Mickey Mouse projects; that is not going to help things at all.

I have one final point, something of a milestone that should be noted. At a time when our housing programs are pathetically inadequate, when waiting lists for subsidized housing are so astronomical that the intervention of any of us as legislators is utterly futile, for the first time since I was elected, and my colleagues on this side of the House are sharing the same experience, nothing can be done about getting desperate families into subsidized accommodation. The waiting lists are just staggering.

The milestone is that some poor soul was found frozen to death of exposure in the city of Toronto on January 16. With the number of homeless people in this city it was inevitable that this kind of tragedy would occur. It simply speaks to the enormity of the social tragedy that this kind of a depression produces.

There are more and more people who are literally living on the street in our cities, and this government comes in with this inadequate set of supplementary estimates and the promise that it is going to talk to some people before the budget comes down in the spring, while we simply endure the winter and while the occasional victim will be found frozen to death on the street.

There is the opportunity to put people back to work through a major expansion of our housing program, a revitalization of the housing industry, but I am not allowed to talk about that because that is out of order.

Mr. Boudria: Mr. Chairman, I want to speak briefly to the job creation program of the government. While some other honourable members were speaking tonight in the House I went into the lobby to telephone a constituent who had phoned my constituency office yesterday. This constituent was telling me that he is on general welfare, and has been on it for three years.

That, believe it or not, is very ordinary in my riding. Unfortunately, the unemployment phenomenon is not a new one in my area, not that it is fortunate to be recently unemployed as opposed to having been unemployed for a long time; the ideal situation is to have a job and not to be in that kind of situation.

The constituent who spoke to me earlier this evening was explaining to me the level of general welfare assistance that he is on. There are seven of them in the family, five children and two parents, receiving $775 a month. The local welfare social worker sat down and drew up a budget with them. The budget was $300 a month deficient. That has created a situation where, as that parent was explaining to me tonight, tomorrow their children are not going to school because there is nothing to make a lunch for them to take to school. That is the kind of situation we are in with general welfare assistance.

I had not even wanted to speak of this tonight but that really struck me. It is not the first time that people have come into my constituency office telling me they have no money to buy food. Unfortunately, that happens all too frequently lately. In this particular incident tonight, involving five children, the welfare worker admitted sitting with them -- at least the parent informed me they had sat down. He explained to me that he just cannot make ends meet; he is always a few dollars short. When the welfare worker tried to make up a budget with them, she found that in her best judgement they would have needed $300 a month more to make ends meet.

That is a very sad situation. It has to be rectified in two different ways. The ideal way is through job creation programs which would create some employment in my part of eastern Ontario.

The Treasurer has been in my constituency. As a matter of fact, he was guest speaker at my predecessor's nomination meeting in the last election, if my memory serves me correctly. I am sure he has been there on other occasions as well, and he would be well aware of the fact that the economy of my area is certainly not rosy.

Mr. McClellan: Is he available? Can we invite him into our areas?

Mr. Laughren: His speech must have been widely reported.

Mr. Grande: Your stars must be falling.

Mr. Chairman: The member will speak to the supplementary estimates.

Mr. Boudria: Mr. Chairman, I can see that the Treasurer coming to my riding is having quite an impact on some members of this Legislature. They seem to be very impressed with that.

Mr. Laughren: Well, we see the results.

Mr. Di Santo: it has also had quite an impact on the member.

Mr. Boudria: Yes, as a matter of fact, it had a big impact on me. It worried me even more.

Mr. Piché: Wrap it up.

10:10 p.m.

Mr. Boudria: The member for Cochrane North (Mr. Piché) should be well aware, he having for many years attended a post-secondary institution not far from my constituency -- only two or three miles from the border of it. I am sure he has been in my riding many times and he knows well what the situation is like.

Some mechanisms should be derived by the government to create jobs in those areas, again on very useful projects. I am not an advocate of make-work projects per se, but there are capital construction projects; many of our roads need improvement, many areas need to be addressed. One particular area the Treasurer will recognize, because I wrote to him about it, is the eastern Ontario subsidiary agreement that Canada and Ontario signed in 1979. He knows that under the agricultural sector of that agreement, there are at present no federal funds left.

In 1979, when we were in a similar situation and when an election could have arrived any day, the government put up the federal share until the new agreement was signed. I believe they did that for almost one full year. While there is just a little over a year before the government has to negotiate with the federal government for a new agreement again, I would suggest that the same kind of strategy could be used now. We are in 1983 and presumably a new agreement is going to be signed in 1984.

As we are approximately a year away from the new 1984 development agreement between Canada and Ontario, I would hope the Treasurer could provide the necessary one-third grant. That would create many construction jobs in my own constituency. As he knows, the construction of municipal drains is very labour-intensive. It provides employment for many people in the construction industry in my riding and many other areas of eastern Ontario. I do not see very many eastern Ontario government members here right now, but I am sure the member for Victoria-Haliburton (Mr. Eakins) would agree with me that we could generate considerable employment by the construction of those municipal outlet drains.

Also, we touched briefly earlier this evening on the fact that agriculture in our province is suffering tremendously. The member for Bellwoods (Mr. McClellan) was explaining to us the problems that a farm implement manufacturer in his own constituency has right now. The Treasurer would recognize that unless economic conditions improve for our farmers, not only the people of Prescott-Russell but the people of Bellwoods will be affected as well, and those of many other constituencies including Brantford where they do manufacture some of that farm machinery.

The vibes we are hearing in the agricultural area are certainly not good for this coming year. The price of milk quotas has gone up drastically. I know interest rates have gone down, but the prices of so many other things have gone up that it is very difficult for farmers to produce. We also know the milk quotas were cut, so that if one wants to buy more milk quota, one is going to spend an outright fortune with the increase in them right now, and farmers are in such dire straits that they have no money anyway. I would hope the Treasurer would do something in regard to the eastern Ontario subsidiary agreement.

Mr. Chairman: It occurs to me feverishly that the honourable member is not following the estimates in front of us.

Mr. Boudria: I would like to tie that in, and we will see how it is done.

I am sure the Chairman, as a member from eastern Ontario, will recall the Board of Industrial Leadership and Development announcement that clearly stated one of the objectives of BILD for agriculture was to have improved drainage for the agricultural areas of eastern Ontario and northern Ontario, as I am sure the member for Cochrane North also will recall. I was just explaining how the eastern Ontario subsidiary agreement had no more funds in it, and how we could inject those funds in order to fulfil the objectives of BILD as stated in those supplementary estimates.

Mr. Roy: I thought the objective of BILD was to win the last election.

Mr. Boudria: There is a possibility that one of the objectives of BILD was to do that.

I hope those kinds of things will be addressed by the government shortly. That is the kind of policy many of us would like to see.

In the area where the Treasurer's funds are destined towards social policy, it is mind-boggling to see that the most important announcement by the Provincial Secretary for Social Development (Mrs. Birch) was how to celebrate 1984, which, believe it or not, is the 200th anniversary of 1784, whatever that is supposed to mean. I may not be speaking on behalf of everyone when I say this, but I have not yet understood why we should spend money on that sort of thing. We know from the history of this country that the Quebec Act was signed in 1774 and that the Constitution Act was signed in 1791, but there is nothing that ends in 1984.

Mr. Chairman: You are stretching it; come on.

Mr. Boudria: Those funds should be destined for positive job creation instead of artificially celebrating a date that in my view has questionable meaning, although Maurice Careless, as a historian, may disagree.

I will conclude my remarks, Mr. Chairman, because I see you are becoming a little more strict than you were earlier on this evening as to just how far we can extend discussion of the economic policy program of the government.

If I can ask for your guidance, Mr. Chairman, would the Canada pension plan fall under the economic policy program of this government? Does the repayment of what the government owes it have anything to do with it?

Mr. Chairman: In my learned opinion, no.

Mr. Boudria: I will conclude my remarks, but there are many things we would like to know about the CPP, especially the child-rearing dropout provision. I will reserve the rest of my comments for the Provincial Secretary for Justice (Mr. Sterling).

Mr. Laughren: Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Chairman: Haven't you been up already?

Mr. Laughren: Not for a long time.

What is bothering us a great deal is that the Treasurer brings in these supplementary estimates with an air of casual indifference as if to say: "Ho hum, I have some make-work money I want to get approval for by the assembly. We will get on with this and I will be finished by suppertime." That is the attitude he brought to the chamber this afternoon and which was revealed in his answers to us on this side.

The Treasurer has an attitudinal disability when it comes to dealing with unemployment in Ontario. I think it had better start to sink in that there is a growing sense of anger across the province and it is being reflected by those of us in this chamber who represent communities that are suffering a great deal. Without exception those communities find the two senior levels of government wanting in their responses to their economic crises.

Mr. Boudria: Especially this one.

Mr. Laughren: If I were a Liberal, I would not be pointing too many fingers.

I was thinking earlier about why governments end up with these make-work projects of job creation. I could not help but think that if we were sitting up above our country, as an unmoved mover as it were, we would be looking down and saying: "If you could give any 24 million or 25 million people on the face of the earth everything they need to create a good and equitable society, you could not give them more than this country. If you wanted to deal with eight million people, you could not give them more than we have been given in Ontario."

10:20 p.m.

Yet for some strange reason, despite the incredible wealth we have been given in this province and the kind of people we have in this province to make it all work, it is not working.

As long as the Treasurer continues to come into the chamber with, as I said, that air of casual indifference towards the unemployed in Ontario, he is going to run into difficulty getting even the smallest estimate passed by the opposition in this chamber. I suspect it is only a matter of time until his own back-benchers start saying: "Enough is enough. Our communities and the people in them are hurting too much. They simply will not tolerate it any more."

It was not too long ago that I wrote a letter to the Premier (Mr. Davis) in which I said to him that in my constituency office I am increasingly getting people coming in who are saying: "I do not know what I am going to do next. I am not going to take it any more." Through no fault of their own, they find themselves in situations so foreign to their entire makeup, their entire character, that they do not know how to cope with it, and they see an inadequate response from the people to whom they are paying lots of taxes to resolve the problem.

This has been going on for years. I look at the Sudbury situation, just as an example, with two major employers. Inco, for example, has laid off. No one will go back to work at Inco with less than about eight years' seniority. Can one imagine a community without a work force between the ages of 20 and 30 in round figures? That speaks volumes about the future of that community.

It is not a problem that has been addressed by the government. I could not help but think what an enormous hole that is in a community when there are two major employers and there is a gap in the work force between the ages of 20 and 30. Those people in that age group are terribly important in building a community. We are not going to have them with the major employers in the community.

That was not the only reason, but it was one of the reasons we said to the Treasurer and to the federal Minister of Employment and Immigration, Mr. Axworthy: "For heaven's sake, you are carrying money into this community in the form of unemployment insurance, welfare and all the short-term, make-work projects, which will leave no lasting impression on the community; why don't you transfer those short-term, make-work projects into something meaningful and lasting which will stay in this community and will make it a better community for years and years to come."

That is what has us so angry, that plus the fact the Treasurer has yet to express or show us any kind of hint he really understands the plight of the unemployed in this province.

I look at people who now have been on unemployment for a year and those numbers are very substantial. I want to say, and this is what I tried to say to the Premier when I wrote to him, that when those people run out of unemployment insurance benefits and are put on the social assistance rolls, there are going to be problems in communities. They are already starting to surface.

It is incumbent upon this government to make sure it does whatever is possible to alleviate those problems which are not inevitable. But I do not see the government, I do not see the Treasurer taking it seriously yet. They have this blind faith that the thing is going to turn around and things are going to get better. Things are not going to get better before many of these people on unemployment insurance benefits run out of benefits and end up on the social assistance rolls. That is when we really get into trouble.

I will get no satisfaction in saying, "I told you so," but we are heading for trouble. My colleague the member for Sudbury East (Mr. Martel) and I tried to say to the government: "Here are some positive projects. Call them make-work projects if you like. Here are some projects that will have lasting benefit to the community." We did not get a decent response from anyone in this government.

Do the members want to know why e are angry when the Treasurer comes in here with supplementary estimates and expects them to be passed without a battle? Not a chance. It is a two-way street out there. If we thought for a moment that the Treasurer was taking the problem seriously instead of just putting everything on a holding pattern, then we would not feel so angry about it and we would not be so obstreperous in our opposition.

There is not one reason we should assent to what the Treasurer is trying to do here this evening. I suppose because there are supplementary estimates that are going to create some short-term work, he will get his supplementary estimates through. It is almost like the Crown Trust takeover: we want some answers first. We see no reason we should sit here and have the same kind of blind faith in the system that the Treasurer has and not put up a protracted battle in our demands for some meaningful make-work projects. I do not even like to use the word "make-work."

There is no reason we should not stand in our place and demand a different kind of strategy from this government for resolving the unemployment problem, because if the Treasurer thinks make-work projects are going to solve the problem in Windsor, Sudbury and these other communities where unemployment is so high, he is sadly mistaken.

Even though Inco is going to go back to work on April 4 -- Falconbridge is already going to go back -- that does not deal with the approximately 3,000 to 4,000 jobs lost in the community already. The Treasurer is not dealing with them one bit. There is not even a pretence that the make-work projects that have been put in place are going to resolve that problem.

We are saying we have had enough. It is time the Treasurer came up with some projects that will have lasting benefit to the community. Quite frankly, it is not as though there is any paucity of suggestions: we have told the Treasurer what the solutions are, his own people have told the Treasurer what the solutions are.

Interjection.

Mr. Laughren: Well, you may not like my solutions, but the suggestions we put --

Mr. Nixon: I like them about as well as I like the Treasurer's.

Mr. Laughren: The solutions we put to the Treasurer came from his own government. If the Treasurer does not like our suggestions, perhaps he needs a housecleaning in his own government. That is where we got the suggestions. Whether it had to do with pollution abatement, with the building of mining machinery, with the mini steel mill in Sudbury or with further refining, all of those suggestions came from the government.

They came at different times. All we said was, "Let's put it together in one package so the government can sort out from that package what they think is appropriate, in consultation with the private sector."

I have never said our proposals for turning the economy around were the only ones that should be considered; I have never said the Treasurer should not have some of his own to put in place, but that is not what he is doing.

I will tell the members something else. There was an opportunity in Sudbury actually to build mining machinery in conjunction with the private sector. Mr. Clark from Jarvis Clark, Noranda and Inco were prepared to go into a consortium to build mining machinery. The Treasurer and the Minister of Industry and Trade (Mr. Walker) said: "We will go along with that. We will put in $4 million," I believe it was. "We will help out." There was rejoicing throughout the land.

Then the federal Minister of State for Mines said: "Wait a minute. I want a piece of this action too." So the provincial government held back and said: "Well, if the feds are going to come in on this, we will not rush into it. We will get some federal money in here too. It will save us some money, and it will be a joint venture among the federal government, the provincial government and the private sector."

Then what happened? The federal Minister of State for Mines could not deliver; she could not get the money. In other words, her money was not where her mouth was. Then, of course, the economy turns down, and the private sector decides it is going to pull out of the project. What a beautiful opportunity the federal government gave others in the project to back off. It is not as though mining machinery were going to be built at the very moment right now; it is a long-term project. Yet because the federal government interfered when they should not have, it allowed the others to back off.

Our position is that the provincial government should step in and say, "Even if the federal government is not prepared to go in, we are going to go it alone, because we have a commitment to build mining machinery in the Sudbury basin." Oh, no. That has not happened either. I would like to know how the Treasurer thinks we are ever going to build mining machinery in this province. I think he understands the import problem. In the neighbourhood of 70 per cent is being imported --

Mr. Chairman: I draw the honourable member's attention to the time.

On motion by Hon. F. S. Miller, the committee of supply reported progress.

The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.