The House met at 1330.
Prayers.
MEMBERS' STATEMENTS
FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Mr Chiarelli: Ontario is sadly disappointed by the performance of the Minister of Financial Institutions and Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations.
Over the past session, what have we seen in the way of needed legislative protection and reform from this minister? Diddly-squat. Zero. What have we seen for the 40,000 people whose uncertain future livelihood will hinge on his Utopian pie-in-the-sky scheme for driver-owned auto insurance? Nothing. What have we seen in the way of protecting Ontario's savings and loan industry in the wake of federal reform? Nothing. What have we seen in the area of safeguards for financial consumers in the wake of a collapsing real estate market and loose control of mortgage brokers? Nothing. On pension reform? Nothing.
Given unprecedented losses and layoffs of over 2,000 jobs in the securities industry, what have we seen to address the uncertain status of the Ontario Securities Commission? Nothing.
Despite the recession and mounting job losses across the province, not once has the minister stood in this House to announce a program, make a statement or introduce a bill to alleviate some of the uncertainty and increase protections for consumers and investors alike in these volatile economic times.
Has the Premier dispatched his cowboy minister out on to the range, never to be heard from again?
GO TRANSIT
Mr Tilson: My constituency, Dufferin-Peel, is one of the fastest-growing areas within and immediately adjacent to the greater Toronto area. Our area has experienced a huge increase in the number of people who travel to and from work daily. Orangeville alone, with a population of just under 20,000, is estimated to have some 5,000 commuters. But unlike most growing communities in and around the GTA, western Caledon and Orangeville lack GO Transit service.
The Ministry of Transportation has studied the possibility of extending GO bus service to Orangeville and found that such a service was justified. Caledon and Orangeville town councils have both passed resolutions calling on the province to institute GO. In the end, the former Liberal government took a position that as long as a private carrier was prepared to provide some sort of service to these communities, GO would not. The fact that the existing service is in no way comparable to what GO Transit could offer did not seem to matter to the former administration. Recently the chair of GO took exactly the same position, proving, I suppose, that the tail still wags the dog no matter who is in office.
The commuters of Dufferin-Peel deserve to have a reliable, efficient, frequent and fair integrated commuter service. In short, we need GO Transit service in Dufferin-Peel.
PAUL SYME
Mr Martin: Today I would like to extend my congratulations to one of Sault Ste Marie's outstanding citizens, Dr Paul Syme. Yesterday I had the honour and the privilege to witness Dr Syme receive the prestigious Corps d'élite award bestowed upon him by the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.
Dr Paul Syme is a visionary whose concepts have benefited hikers and conservationists throughout Canada. He founded the Voyageur Trail Association in 1972 and continues to wholeheartedly support the organization, of which he was president from 1974 to 1984. He was also an active promoter in forming Hike Ontario. Dr Syme's work with the National Trail Association of Canada established a national footpath from coast to coast.
His outstanding voluntary and professional contributions to the development of recreation and conservation to the community of Sault Ste Marie, to Ontario and to Canada as a whole are both noble and important. Last year the Sault Ste Marie Region Conservation Authority honoured Dr Syme with the 1989 Conservation Award in recognition of his dedication and commitment to conservation and to recreation.
In sum, I would like to commend Dr Syme for his insight, an insight which has helped us to enjoy and preserve our natural habitat. Most importantly, we give recognition of his work in keeping with the global idea of conservation and the protection of our environment, and for this he must truly be praised.
SMALL CLAIMS COURT
Mr Daigeler: Across the province people have been waiting anxiously to see the Small Claims Court limit raised at least to the Toronto level of $3,000. The previous government was planning to introduce this change by Christmas. We are now told by a spokesperson in the Attorney General's office that this plan has been put on indefinite hold. People in eastern Ontario and elsewhere are tired of waiting for benefits that have been available to Toronto residents for years.
In the throne speech, the NDP government promised to support groups and individuals that were without full access to government and its institutions. I myself have had several constituents in my office urging me to speed up court reform that would help them pursue justice themselves without having to rely on the expensive services of lawyers. Why, I ask, is the government shying away from helping small business people and others who do not have the financial resources to fight lengthy court battles?
The NDP's stalling on Small Claims Court reform is another example of this government's broken election promises. I urge the Attorney General to raise the small claims limit to the Toronto ceiling before the House resumes in March.
WASTE MANAGEMENT
Mr Cousens: This morning Pollution Probe held a press conference outlining its concerns with municipalities exporting their garbage. They highlighted Metropolitan Toronto's deal with Kirkland Lake as a prime example.
We have tried unsuccessfully to find out from the Minister of the Environment the details surrounding this deal. However, the problems we now face are much greater than any one particular waste agreement. The minister has time and time again expressed unquestioned faith in her so-called waste management plan. We have been asked to have confidence in her government's plans to enhance reduction, reuse and recycling initiatives across the province. But where is this plan? How is the minister going to achieve these goals? What are the incentives? Where is the legislation?
No one disputes the integrity of this minister, but as we speak, garbage continues to mount. The minister's response to securing a long-term landfill site for the greater Toronto area has been to refer constantly to her waste management authority. Our difficulty arises in having faith in an authority that has not yet even been created. We have no criteria, no mandate and no members, and until we have more direction from the Environment minister, we have no solution.
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GOVERNMENT POLICIES
Mr Bradley: I want to speak to the Legislature today in a very positive light about the new government. I want to compliment the government on three specific initiatives it has embarked upon since the beginning. These are initiatives which were begun by the Liberal government and carried through by the present government. For that they deserve to be complimented.
The first is the awarding of the contract for the Pelee Island ferry to Port Weller Dry Docks in St Catharines. When the previous government directed that there be negotiations with Port Weller Dry Docks for the purpose of this construction, we recognized that we were down to about 30 jobs at that particular facility. Now, as a result of this contract, there will be some 175 to 200 jobs. We are pleased with that.
The second is that the government has announced that the Ministry of Transportation is indeed going to move to St Catharines. The previous Minister of Government Services, Chris Ward, made that announcement originally. I am pleased that the new Minister of Government Services was prepared to follow through on that announcement and say that it in fact would be moving to St Catharines -- again, something positive for our community.
Third, the former Minister of Housing and Minister of Municipal Affairs, the Honourable John Sweeney, announced that action would be taken in the field of the last will and testament, which was being used for the purposes of dividing farm land up, circumventing the presenting planning laws in the Niagara region. I want to compliment the new Minister of Municipal Affairs and Minister of Housing for following through on that initiative of Mr Sweeney's and ensuring that good agricultural land is not lost through that provision.
GREG SCOTT
Mr B. Murdoch: I would like to bring to the attention of the House an act of bravery performed by one of my constituents.
Greg Scott of Owen Sound is a member of the Owen Sound ambulance service at Station Beach in Kincardine who volunteers with the Inter-Township Fire Department in my riding on his days off. Two years ago he received a distress call telling him that a group of swimmers was in danger in a severe undertow in Lake Huron. This valiant young man, with a team of others, swam out more than once, fighting the strong waves to save the swimmers.
This selfless act of courage was rewarded by a Medal of Bravery recently presented by the Governor General at a ceremony in Ottawa. I would like to congratulate Greg for receiving this honour and to thank him for his compassion and his devotion to his fellow man.
STUDENT LETTERS ON THE GULF CRISIS
Ms Haslam: I really appreciate this opportunity to speak about a group of students in my riding in Mitchell. They visited my constituency office on the weekend and dropped off over 300 individual, personal letters regarding their feelings about the situation in the Gulf.
These were not letters that were printed off and duplicated and had somebody sign at the bottom. They were asked to state their own feelings and their own outlook on these things. I appreciated their interest in bringing these to me. I dropped off a package to the Premier's office and I dropped off a package to the Lieutenant Governor's office. I know that they have also taken packages to the MP in my area and I am sure they have asked the MP to take them on into Ottawa.
I think students like these should be commended when they take the initiative to talk for peace. I wish the House to join me in commending them for this thing they did.
STATEMENTS BY THE MINISTRY
PAY EQUITY
Hon Mr Mackenzie: I want to announce new measures that advance this province's progress towards pay equity and extend the benefits of the legislation to a further 420,000 women. I am today indicating our government's commitment to working women and their right to fair wages. The Premier made this commitment and it will be carried forward.
For years we fought for the introduction of a Pay Equity Act, which was finally passed, not without flaws, in 1987. Even with these flaws, which were acknowledged by all parties concerned in 1987, the Pay Equity Act has had a great deal of success. Pay equity is already being achieved in the workplaces of more than one million women, and starting I January 1991, 4,000 additional employers, those having between 100 and 500 employees, will be required to post their plans for achieving pay equity in their workplaces. I urge those employers to proceed on schedule, for my remarks today do not change that legal requirement.
This government is determined, as the speech from the throne reaffirmed, that many more women will benefit from the act. Throughout this government's mandate, we will work with unions, workers, employers and women's groups to find practical ways of achieving equitable wages for all women.
Today I am announcing the next steps, a set of proposals to extend the scope of the Pay Equity Act. I will introduce a bill in the spring to add to the act additional approaches for making the job comparisons which are basic to the pay equity process.
The first approach is known as proportional comparison of job value. The government has consulted widely concerning this approach to pay equity. Both employers and unions find it effective. It is estimated that an additional 340,000 women can benefit from its use. Employers and unions that can meet the pay equity requirements for all female job classes by using the job-to-job comparison method already provided in the act will not have to use this additional method. Some workplace parties have already chosen to use this new proportional value method in their plans. The proposed amendments will confirm those plans that meet the act's requirements.
An information paper will be released in January describing these amendments in greater detail. The amendments will go further than proportional comparison. We intend to introduce in the public sector another method of comparing the value of female and male jobs, the proxy comparison method. In those public sector organizations where neither job-to-job nor proportional comparisons are effective, where there are no male job classes that can be used for comparisons, the act will provide for cross-establishment comparisons called proxy comparisons. Proxy comparisons will allow female job classes to be compared with similar classes in other public sector organizations. Similar pay equity adjustments can then be made.
We are all aware of the situation of child care workers and others in predominantly female establishments who are recognized as being underpaid for the important work they do. Without proxy comparison, it is not possible for these workers to participate in pay equity.
The information paper in January will outline the proxy comparison approach that will be contained in the proposed amendments. Given the unique nature of this undertaking, the paper will also raise a number of issues for consultation, and input will be invited, particularly in regard to the identification of appropriate proxy organizations in the act. Under the proposed amendments, the workplace parties will either use the proxy organizations identified in the act or they can bargain the choice of a proxy organization to achieve a higher benefit.
With the implementation of proportional and proxy comparisons, it is estimated that an additional 420,000 women, as I mentioned earlier, will be able to benefit from the legislation.
Even with the initiatives announced today, this government recognizes that more remains to be done before we can be truly satisfied that all Ontario women will have achieved the equitable wages to which they are entitled. There will still be women who will not benefit under the act.
For example, the act does not cover workplaces in the private sector with fewer than 10 employees. Our commitment to equitable wages for all women remains firm. However, as yet, no practical and effective method of pay equity has been found to ensure that women in those establishments with fewer than 10 employees actually do benefit. For this reason, we will release a consultation paper in March that will explore a range of approaches both within and outside of the Pay Equity Act for meeting the needs of women not benefiting from the proposed amendments.
This government is also well aware of the fact that some public sector employers are facing serious difficulties in meeting their financial obligations for pay equity. I am pleased to announce that we will provide significant financial assistance to help those in the most difficulty to meet their pay equity obligations. The Treasurer will announce funding plans to meet this concern early in the new year.
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I am pleased to announce that we will provide significant financial assistance to help those in the most difficulty to meet their pay equity obligations. The Treasurer will announce funding plans to meet this concern early in the new year.
I am also pleased to announce today the establishment in 1991 of a Pay Equity Clinic that will provide information, advice and advocacy, primarily to non-unionized women to assist them in asserting their pay equity rights.
To fund the start-up and first year of operation of the Pay Equity Clinic, this government will make available $500,000 within the next fiscal year. We will work with the Ministry of the Attorney General and members of the community to ensure that this clinic meets the needs of unrepresented women.
Finally, while I am very pleased to make these announcements today and while I believe the amendments in the spring will be recognized as a major and ground-breaking approach in the effort to make pay equity a universal reality, I know there is still more that needs to be done. We will continue to seek effective answers to ensure equitable wages for all women. Equity for women is not an optional extra. It is a right that we are determined to defend in conscience and in law.
REPORT OF ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN'S SERVICES
Hon Mrs Akande: I would like to inform the House today that I am tabling for the benefit of the members the report of the Advisory Committee on Children's Services. The committee was appointed in February 1988 by the Honourable John Sweeney and guided through its work by the member for York North. Individuals on the committee came from a variety of disciplines and a wide range of backgrounds.
Chaired by Dr Colin Maloney, executive director of the Catholic Children's Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, the committee was asked to examine services to children with a view of how best to ensure children's wellbeing into the 1990s. In fulfilling its mandate, the committee actively sought out input from a range of individuals and groups across the province.
I served as a member of this advisory committee until my appointment as Minister of Community and Social Services. I know of the dedication and the expertise of the committee members and would like to thank them for their energy, their diligence and their commitment of time.
Many of us know that the system does not always meet the needs of children. We also know that not meeting the needs of children can have dire consequences for them as adults. The report I am tabling today will play a critical role in challenging current thinking and practice surrounding the delivery of services to children.
Aptly named Children First, the report makes 63 recommendations designed to ensure the entitlements of children -- specifically, their right to services which contribute to healthy growth and development. The report supports the following four goals for services to children:
1. To make the wellbeing of children and the defence of the entitlements this society's priority;
2. To create an equitable economic base for families and communities so they can provide for the entitlements of children;
3. To write or amend laws so they express and give force to children's entitlements; and,
4. To make the government a leading partner in the creation of, first, a public agenda for children, and second, an integrated framework of services that ensures children's entitlements.
These four goals are supported by this government.
Many of the recommendations made by the Advisory Committee on Children's Services are far-reaching. We must examine them closely and in concert with the many groups that are affected by the recommendations. Accordingly, I have asked that this report be distributed widely to interested individuals and groups.
Dr Maloney and Mary McConville, who also served as a committee member, are with us today in the visitors' gallery. Dr Maloney, Ms McConville and the other members of the committee are to be commended for their work in analysing issues that influence children's lives and in identifying effective ways to address them. I know they have provided us with a useful and valuable tool.
The tabling of this report is very timely for this government. We are committed to the children of this province and we plan to deliver on our commitment. The ideas found in the report, and those generated by it, will be used to build the government's vision for children's services.
We will continue to work with the people of this province on children's issues. We must ensure that Ontario's children have a childhood that will see them achieve their full potential as adults.
NATIVE ISSUES
Hon Mr Wildman: I would like to inform the House about several developments in the government's approach to native issues.
The government has adopted several clear objectives and we will pursue them as we address aboriginal issues. In addition, we have adopted a set of fundamental principles to use in addressing aboriginal self-government and land claims. Our objectives are as follows:
First, we intend to make significant progress in establishing first nation self-government arrangements. This will be done by negotiating directly with first nations.
Second, we will negotiate land claim settlements with first nations to settle long-standing grievances.
Third, we will improve provincial programs and funding arrangements, with the objective of raising the quality of life in aboriginal communities.
Fourth, we will work with aboriginal people and their associations to deal with self-government and program concerns of aboriginal peoples who live off-reserve.
Fifth, the government will negotiate a statement of relationship with first nations. This statement will guide the future relationship between the government of Ontario and the first nations of the province.
In fact, I can tell the honourable members that the development of this statement of relationship is already well under way. We are working on its contents with the Chiefs of Ontario to set out the nature of our government-to-government relationship.
We will also be discussing our relationship with groups such as the Ontario Metis and Aboriginal Indian Association, the Ontario Native Women's Association and the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres. These groups will bring different needs, concerns and views to the process.
As I indicated, the government has also adopted a set of fundamental principles to guide our negotiations of aboriginal self-government and land claims.
First, we formally recognize the principle that aboriginal people have an inherent right to self-government. Recognition of this inherent right will guide Ontario both in constitutional discussions with the federal government and the provinces and in self-government negotiations.
The second principle is that aboriginal representatives at the negotiating table must be able to participate in our discussions as equals.
A third principle is that we will respect the special trust relationship of the federal government with aboriginal peoples.
Finally, the government has adopted the principle that where possible, we will undertake comprehensive community negotiations to attempt to resolve both land claims and self-government objectives at the same time.
The government's native affairs agenda is an ambitious one, perhaps more ambitious than that of any other government in Canada. Before we can accomplish the major task we have set before us, there is much work we must do.
With regard to that, the government has formed a subcommittee of the cabinet committee on justice to expedite our efforts towards negotiating and implementing aboriginal self-government. I will chair that subcommittee. Its members will include the Attorney General, the Minister of Northern Development, the Minister of Mines, the Minister of Tourism and Recreation and other ministers with interests in aboriginal affairs.
During its discussions on self-government, the subcommittee will consider the impact of provincial policies on the rights of aboriginal people to land and natural resources.
As the members may be aware, recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions have given greater recognition to aboriginal rights. It is clear that Canada's highest court expects governments to find a new and more appropriate balance between aboriginal rights and resource access.
I have said many times that we cannot hope to correct overnight the injustices of the past. But I also say to all members that our government will make steady progress towards its objectives in native affairs. I am pleased that we have made a strong beginning and am determined that we will make more progress.
VISITOR
The Speaker: Before continuing with our procedures, members may wish to welcome to our House a former member who is seated in the gallery, the former member for Welland-Thorold, Dr Mel Swart.
RESPONSES
PAY EQUITY
Mr Offer: In response to the announcement by the Minister of Labour, first, if I might, I am pleased to reaffirm my party's commitment to equitable wages as well. I would, in relation to the announcement, make three observations.
First, I note that part of the minister's statement which deals with proportional value. This is very much a reiteration of the statement by the member for Scarborough-Agincourt when as Minister of Labour he committed to amend the act to permit a proportional value method by this fall. In this regard, though certainly supportive of the announcement, I am a little disappointed that the amendments are not ready for tabling today, but are to be looked upon during the recess.
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I think it should also be noted that we made assurances when we formed the government that in dealing with proportional value there would be an assurance that plans already filed would not have to be reopened except for comparisons for job classes without the job-to-job male comparator, and that employers would not have to spend more for adjustment than the 1%. I think we would be looking for the minister's assurance and response in that respect.
The second matter I want to talk about is the matter of proxy. I note that it is limited only to the public sector, which of course leaves many women still excluded, such as garment workers and the private day care workers. We will be looking to see what the Minister of Labour has to say in that respect.
Finally, there is the minister's statement on the matter of financial assistance. As we know, there are approximately 6,500 employers, such as the municipalities, school boards and hospitals, currently in the midst of negotiation. What we will want to know and they will want to know is whether they will be eligible for the financial assistance the minister has very clearly committed to, but not with great specifics with regard to the announcement today.
NATIVE ISSUES
Mr Scott: I would like to congratulate the minister responsible for native affairs on his statement. With two particulars there is nothing new in it, as I am sure he will agree. It represents the policy of the previous government. As he and I know, there is a big and difficult exercise that moves from words, which these are, to deeds. I wish him well in implementing it.
One new particular is the commitment to aboriginal self-government. There is an ambiguity here that I know the minister will want to address in due course. The issue is, of course, whether that right will be constitutionalized or constitutionalized following agreement. I look forward to discussions with the minister about that subject in due course.
REPORT OF ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN'S SERVICES
Mrs McLeod: I would like to respond -- too briefly, unfortunately -- to the statement of the Minister of Community and Social Services in tabling the report of the Advisory Committee on Children's Services. It certainly is a very important report and I would like to join with the ministry in congratulating the members of the committee on the results of their work.
The committee was charged by our government with the development of a strategic framework for services to vulnerable children and youth and families. Clearly the report provides that framework. It presents a broadly based vision for future direction that recognizes the real complexity of meeting the needs of children and youth and families in a holistic way. It also very clearly recognizes that our current systems are working at overcapacity with far too limited resources, that the services are too fragmented and that service providers are working in isolation from each other.
The report identifies the absolute importance of an integrated, accessible service with support that is provided in the natural settings of home and of school. I am sure that the minister, with her own background, is well aware of the significance of those particular recommendations and the implications of those recommendations for the real changes that need to be brought about in the way in which services to children and to families are provided.
I well remember a meeting of some many years ago, when three ministries toured the province in order to talk about what we believed would be the co-ordination and integration of children's services. In fact, at that time what was represented was a clear separation of the services that would be provided by the Ministry of Health, by the Ministry of Community and Social Services and by the Ministry of Education. This report calls for an integration of services. It is a framework that is a call for an agenda for action.
I would call on the minister to recognize that the importance of the issue makes it imperative not just to make a statement of commitment, but to bring forward an early response and specific recommendations to bring about those real changes.
I would make the suggestion that perhaps as a first step, the minister might refer this report to the standing committee on social development so that in that committee we could become aware of the full implications of the many recommendations that are presented in this report and work with her in support of her to ensure that real change comes about.
NATIVE ISSUES
Mr Harnick: In response to the statement by the minister responsible for native affairs, I would like to congratulate him. This is indeed an ambitious program and we will be looking forward to seeing the details of the program as time marches on.
We will also be interested and hopeful that the details of these programs will promote a better understanding of the general public towards native affairs and native issues, and we will be anxiously awaiting the details of the programs we know are to come.
PAY EQUITY
Mrs Witmer: I am pleased that some new measures have been announced today by the Minister of Labour that advance the progress towards pay equity, but I am a little concerned that nowhere in this do I see any mention of nurses and I do believe that nurses have been very concerned about their lack of ability to have pay equity. I would also like to remind the Minister of Labour that when it is extended to nurses, it is going to cost the Ontario Hospital Association $50 million and I would like to know where that money is going to come from as well.
I am surprised that there is no mention here of extending this to the private sector with fewer than 10 employees. I am pleased to see that there is going to be some support for the public sector.
I would like to point out that in the past it has been the local taxpayer, unfortunately, who has been forced to pay up for pay equity. In fact, the cost to public school boards in this province has been $60 million, so although I am pleased I am really concerned about the additional cost. I regret very much that the amendments and all of the information are not available to us. I wish that we could have dealt with this during our recess.
REPORT OF ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN'S SERVICES
Mr Jackson: I would like to publicly thank Chris Hall of the Ottawa Citizen for his persistence as an investigative journalist, which I am quite convinced is the reason this announcement is being made today instead of on Thursday, which was the government's intention.
When one reads this report on Children First, one comes to several conclusions: that a majority of the recommendations come from various other reports that have been in existence in this province for the last four or five years, that the three years of analysis has in fact been an opportunity for the Liberals not to implement badly needed reforms, and that now as we move into a difficult part of our economy, there will be further impediments to the new government implementing some of these.
We have already seen and documented certain contradictions. For example, the report on food banks clearly supports what this report, Children First, says, that our children are suffering the most as a result of poverty, and yet the government has decided through the very minister who tabled the report today to proceed to fund food banks instead of getting at the implementation of the Social Assistance Review Committee, the George Thomson report.
Again, quite a few of the recommendations contained in Children First come from the SARC report, yet the government's stated policy approach, its funding of social assistance top-up and for accommodation, falls short of what the Conservative government brought in in 1982 at a 17.7% enhancement that year, when faced on the doorstep with a major recession in this province.
The fact is that the select committee on education has been talking for three and a half years about ensuring that we have a single-policy approach from the government in terms of its treatment of children. But what is interesting is what is missing from this report. What is missing is a clear enunciation of the need to co-ordinate human resources in the health care field as it relates to children, specifically child psychologists who are badly needed in this province.
When a child, an attempted suicide victim in this province, has to wait four and five months to have access to a psychiatrist, that is unacceptable. The member for Parry Sound has been pleading with the last two governments in order to ensure that we have a human resources planning approach to protect children.
What is new in this legislation is most fascinating. We should be aware that we are looking at extending shared, paid, full pregnancy leave -- up to 18 months is being recommended -- and yet we have heard from the government's own Minister without Portfolio responsible for women's issues indicating to expect a new announcement in the spring with respect to extending it.
It talks about school boards must institute year-round programming. It has recommendations that the Young Offenders Act be moved from the Ministry of Correctional Services into the Ministry of Community and Social Services. It recommends that parents and teachers should be put within the Criminal Code for employing corporal punishment.
This is a substantive report and should have been dealt with by this government early in this term and not sat on by the minister for the last month.
ORAL QUESTIONS
HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION
Mr Nixon: I have a question of the Premier. In His Honour's gracious speech at the opening of this session, he said, "No partnerships are more important than those with local government." Yesterday, the Minister of Transportation cancelled the funding for the regional Red Hill expressway and he said it was a moral decision.
I was interested to hear the mayor of Hamilton, Robert Morrow, say in a news commentary that he had tried for two months to discuss this matter with the minister and the Premier and had not been successful even in having his calls returned. It was part of the same news report that two NDP councillors were informed of the minister's news conference but no one else in the elected council of the city. Is this what the Premier means when he talks about a consultative partnership with the municipalities?
Hon Mr Rae: First of all, I think that the Leader of the Opposition perhaps does not agree, but surely he would agree that this government has the right to decide how it is going to spend at least $50 million of taxpayers' money with respect to projects that are proceeding. The regional municipality has the right to spend its money and we have a right to make a decision as to how we spend ours.
It is my understanding that the minister did have a meeting with the regional chairman and with the regional councillors. I have not discussed the issue with the mayor. I have discussed other issues with the mayor over the last couple of months. I have seen him on a couple of occasions and this topic was not raised in his discussions with me, but I can tell the member that the Minister of Transportation did discuss this issue with the regional chairman.
I might just quote back some words. Since the Leader of the Opposition has made a point of quoting words to me that I have said, perhaps I might quote back certainly the sense of words which he said to me when he was responding to the speech from the throne, in which he said that there are many people out there who assume that consultation equals agreement.
The fact of the matter is the Minister of Transportation did discuss this issue, has discussed it and has made a decision. If there are disagreements with respect to the decision, I understand that. It was not an easy decision for us to make, but the cabinet made the decision that on balance we felt that the expressway through the Red Hill Creek was not warranted, that it did pose environmental problems and that, in choosing, we decided to simply make a choice on behalf of the environment in this particular case.
Mr Nixon: I am not questioning the government's right to make a decision, even a wrong one, but in this instance consultation really was essential since the Minister of Transportation has a report indicating that the construction would involve 2,500 person-years in the Hamilton area, 9,000 person-years of employment related to the economic development and $400 million that had been previously approved. Surely to say that kind of withdrawal should or could occur without consultation flies in the face of the Premier's stated views in this regard. Perhaps I should put it on behalf of the people in Hamilton: What will the government put in place of the jobs abruptly removed from the Hamilton area by this unilateral decision?
Hon Mr Rae: The Minister of Transportation has indicated publicly, and I am sure he has indicated as well to the regional authorities, that there is money available for other projects which are now ready to be moved ahead. That money is available. What we are saying as a government -- and I can understand that some people disagree with it. Whenever we make decisions that involve a change and involve a decision not to proceed with a project, there is bound to be some unhappiness and there is bound to be some disagreement. I do not question that at all. I did not expect the decision to be universally popular with everyone.
What we decided was that Red Hill Creek is an area which, if I may say so, when the member's party was in opposition, most of its members, as I remember, who were on that side at that time and when the decision was originally in the planning stages through the early 1980s, was consistently opposed by many members of his party. The Liberals were then in government. They decided to go along with the project. We are now in government. We have decided not to spend our tax dollars on that particular project. We are happy to sit down and discuss with the authority what other projects can be up and running to replace the one which we have decided not to proceed with.
Mr Nixon: While I disagree with the decision the government has made, my question to the Premier had to do with consulting the elected municipal authorities, which he and his minister have failed to do. I think the thing that concerned me a bit was that the minister described it as a moral decision and at the same time I read in the Ottawa Citizen of 11 December and have heard repeatedly from my colleague the member for St Catharines that the $2.6-million job creation fund in eastern Ontario will partly be spent on the construction of a new logging road in Algonquin Park, which apparently is moral, whereas on the basis of stopping the road in Hamilton, it is a case of immorality. Will the honourable Premier indicate what his criterion of morality is in this particular instance, and what explanation can he have for the rather ironic approach to the expenditure of public funds?
Hon Mr Rae: First of all, let me say to the Leader of the Opposition that if it is true that the mayor of Hamilton has been trying to speak to me about this issue and has not been able to get through, I apologize to him. I am not aware of it, but if he has been -- as the member will appreciate, sometimes people are trying to get through and I am not aware of it. I apologize.
Mr Nixon: But your door is always open.
Hon Mr Rae: I hope the door is always open. It certainly always has been open to the Leader of the Opposition.
But I would say to the Leader of the Opposition that when he talks about there being no consultation with respect to the Red Hill Creek expressway, that is not the case. There was a discussion with the regional council. The minister did meet with the regional chairman and there was that consultation in place. It is, after all, a regional road which is being pursued.
With respect to the other question, which I had heard might be coming because of comments that were made by others in the House this morning, all I can say to the Leader of the Opposition is this: It is my understanding on the basis of a quick exchange with the Minister of Natural Resources that this particular project the member is referring to was heartily approved by the Algonquin Forestry Authority, which, as the Leader of the Opposition well knows, is an authority which is responsible for the management of the resource which is unique to that resource.
I say to the Leader of the Opposition that if he, in conjunction with the member for Renfrew North, would like to bring some concerns to us with respect to the construction of the road, and the member for Renfrew North and he would like to come to us and raise concerns about the construction of the road, I am sure that the comments of the Leader of the Opposition and the comments of the member for Renfrew North -- he is not here today, but I am sure he would also want to express his views with respect to the construction of the road. I would be glad to hear from both of them in that regard and I would be interested to see if they had the same thing to say.
Mr Nixon: The member for Renfrew North and myself understand the morality of building roads. I would say that the Premier seems to have mixed emotions in this regard.
CHRONIC CARE
Mr Nixon: I do have a question for the Minister of Health. It has to do with something that I personally have been very much concerned with over the last year. I was concerned that the NDP election program did not significantly refer to long-term care, for the elderly particularly but the chronically ill in general. The speech given by the Lieutenant Governor did not refer to it with any detail either. Does the minister plan to implement the policy of long-term care that was announced in last spring's budget?
Hon Mrs Gigantes: The answer is emphatically yes.
Mr Nixon: I am very glad that that announcement has been made since, as I say, the NDP has indicated a minimal interest in this matter and since the budget has $52 million to be expended this year. Can she explain how that money will be going forward so that we can develop single-access agencies, which was certainly an intrinsic part of the plan, and will she implement a reformed funding structure for nursing homes and homes for the aged which will move in the direction of enlightenment and on the pathway that has been marked for her?
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Hon Mrs Gigantes: Since this government was first installed, the ministers who are involved in the implementation of the long-term care reform have met several times, have been thoroughly briefed and are now in the final stages of deciding the kind of consultation program we will be carrying forward.
As the member knows, that consultation program was delayed this fall as a result of the fact that one government fell and another came to office. The consultation program will proceed, and we want to make sure that it proceeds along the right lines. We think there are a few items that need to be tidied up before we go back to people in communities around Ontario and ask them to join with us in developing a perfect plan.
Mr Nixon: I am glad that the honourable minister strives for perfection, when she was quoted in the Globe and Mail yesterday as saying that she did not have a clue about policy development. I thought that was an interesting quote from her.
I am trying to elicit a response that is perhaps more useful in this connection since there is a $52-million allocation that was to be largely used for the improvement of the pay schedules for the people involved in the basic care. Is it going to be necessary to wait for the Minister of Labour, who is notoriously slow in these matters, to move forward with his vision of pay equity, or is the Minister of Health going to allocate that money where it should be, to improve the pay schedules, which is what the allocation was for?
Hon Mrs Gigantes: The government is working very hard on these matters and we fully expect to meet our obligations, as we see them, under our program within the near future.
Mr Harris: I am delighted to learn that the former Treasurer is still committed to his budget plan on long-term care for the elderly -- that was the one that involved substantial increases in user fees and co-payments -- and hear that the NDP minister is committed to the substantial increase in user fees and co-payments with regard to the elderly and health care. However, my question is for the Premier.
TAX REVENUES
Mr Harris: On 13 August, the Premier told Ontario voters that he was against the employer-paid health tax. He agreed with me, I believe, that this was a killer of jobs and that it substantially penalized the competitiveness of our employers in this province. The Premier voted against this tax, as I recall, and he reiterated his commitment in the campaign that indeed this tax affected our competitiveness, killed jobs and in effect obviously is contributing to the recession that we are in.
This government has collected over $870 million in revenue from this tax since it has taken office. I wonder how much longer we will have to have this tax that the Premier is opposed to, that he acknowledges kills jobs, obviously contributes to the recession and obviously contributes to the uncompetitiveness of our employers. How much longer are we going to have to put up with this tax in Ontario?
Hon Mr Rae: I can recall very vividly the debate that we had in the Legislature with respect to the employer health tax, to say nothing of the discussion we had in our own caucus, because those discussions are always very interesting.
I would say to the leader of the third party that I am not a particular fan of the employer health tax. Neither is he. I can recall during the election when he was asked the question, "Would you get rid of the employer health tax," I think the leader of the Conservative Party said he did not think he could because he did not think he was in a position to do that.
Mr Harris: What did the Premier say?
Hon Mr Rae: I can say to the leader of the third party that obviously any decisions in this regard with respect to taxation are taken at budget time. They are taken by the Treasurer with regard to his fiscal responsibilities. That is the way these things proceed. The leader of the third party is fully aware of that. I do not think there should be any surprise in that regard.
Mr Harris: I think it is obvious we are in a recession now and the Premier acknowledged and agreed and told the people during the election that this was a contributor to the recession. I am presuming he is trying to fight the recession and do what he can to resolve our uncompetitiveness caused by high taxation and yet I see nothing on that front.
On 14 August, in the campaign, the Premier reiterated his promise to lower provincial gas taxes. He said at that time that the high gasoline taxes cost jobs, that they affected our competitiveness from an industry point of view, from a cost-of-living point of view and from a tourism point of view. Quite frankly, I agreed with him and he will recall that I made similar comments during the campaign.
But he is now Premier, not I. This government has collected over $500 million in gasoline tax revenues since he has taken office, each one of those dollars contributing to our uncompetitiveness, to our job loss and to the depth and breadth of this recession. How much longer do we have to wait until he lives up to his promise to lower the gasoline tax in this province?
Hon Mr Rae: First of all, all decisions with respect to taxation, with one exception, are going to be dealt with in the budget. That is a decision that the government has made. We made that early on in the life of the government.
But I want to say to the leader of the third party, I would have thought that he would have recognized that in our decision not to put the retail sales tax on top of the GST, we have in effect reduced taxation that would otherwise have been in place by some $500 million on a year-in basis. That, combined with the $700 million which the Treasurer has put into the economy, is worth over $1 billion in terms of injection of new money into the economy following our election.
Now, if the leader of the third party says that is not good enough and that is not enough, well, I am sorry. We are doing the best we can in the circumstances. We have reduced taxes with respect to the sales tax, we are proceeding with a capital works project which is the largest of its kind in the country, and other decisions with respect to taxation will be made at budget time. I am sure we will have a good debate about them then.
Mr Harris: The Premier, in response to a question about the gas tax, says he moved on another tax. I applaud that move. Obviously, we did not have to wait for a budget. That, I agree as well, is a recession-fighting move and I applaud the reduction of that tax. He will note we support it, unlike the Liberals, who had great concerns about cutting the tax by $500 million that way.
During the debate on a piece of legislation that the Liberals brought in to add a commercial concentration tax to Toronto, the Premier voted against that. He said it contributed to the uncompetitiveness of Toronto, to the cost of living in Toronto; that it would cost jobs. During the campaign he reiterated, as confirmed in the Toronto Star of 22 August, that he was opposed to that tax. Obviously now we are in a recession. This is a tax that is contributing to the recession here in Toronto. How long do we have to wait before he removes the commercial concentration tax?
Hon Mr Rae: All I can say to the leader of the third party is that all decisions with respect to taxation, with the exception of the GST, because that is coming in on 1 January 1991, are decisions that will be made at budget time. That is the way it has always been with respect to tax matters. I would think that if we were to do it any other way, he would be the first to criticize it.
Mr Harris: Given that all these taxes, according to the Premier, are contributing to the recession, one has to question whether this province can wait until a year into the recession before we have a budget, if that in fact is the way according to the Premier -- and certainly it was in the campaign -- that we should fight the recession.
FAIR TAX COMMISSION
Mr Harris: The Treasurer will be bringing down his first budget this spring, expected to be somewhere between $45 billion and $50 billion, I guess, depending on what kind of spending controls are brought in; probably closer to $50 billion, because I do not see any sign of them. I wonder if the Premier, since he has been very quick to refer everything off for a year later to the budget -- and the other stock answer we get is the fair tax commission -- can tell me if this fair tax commission is going to have any input into the Treasurer's budget that we expect some three or four months from now.
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Hon Mr Rae: The fair tax commission is, we hope, going to be up and running reasonably soon. We as a government have been discussing it and there will be, we hope very much, an opportunity on a very preliminary basis for the fair tax commission to have some advice for the Treasurer prior to the budget.
I just want to clarify one thing. In his preamble, the leader of the third party talked about a budget a year from now. No, the budget will be coming down in the spring of 1991, which will be, I suppose, about six months into the life and work of this government. I think that on balance that is the kind of thing the people in this province would expect to see, rather than a sort of whammo response to a government that has only been in for a couple of weeks, that has not had an opportunity to assess all the spending that is going on out there.
As for spending, I might say that his colleague the member for Parry Sound and all his colleagues have been asking questions about how we can spend more money. His colleague the member for Burlington South was talking today about how much more money we have to spend on children's services. It all depends on who is asking the question and on what day the questions are getting asked. It is quite clear that some days the members opposite are all Dr Spend and some days they are all Dr Save. We are the ones now who have to decide as to how we are going to do it.
Interjections.
Mr Harris: The response from the Premier, the Treasurer and in fact a number of other ministers to repeated questions from this side of the House concerning taxation has been --
Hon Mr Laughren: Don't be so provocative.
Interjections.
The Speaker: I realize that this is the season to be jolly, but at the same time this is question period and an opportunity for members to place questions. The leader of the third party was in the midst of placing a very important question. I would really appreciate it if I could hear the question, and I am sure other members would likewise like to hear the question.
Mr Harris: Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I know they are an unruly group and they are tough to control. I appreciate your efforts. Might I continue in my unprovocative way?
The Premier, the Treasurer and other ministers, when we have asked about taxation issues, repeatedly have said, "You'll have to wait for the fair tax commission," on a whole array of tax questions. I will get the Hansards of about 30 times that has been said. The Treasurer is shaking his head.
On 4 December the Treasurer promised a detailed report on its establishment in the near future. We have two days left before this House adjourns. This House does not plan, according to my assessment, from what I have been hearing, to sit again for two and a half months. Will we see the terms of reference, the membership and the criteria of this fair tax commission some time before the next two and a half months, ie, in the next two days?
Hon Mr Rae: I can tell members that we are working very hard on the matter. I can also say to the leader of the third party that we have already agreed with one of his suggestions, which is that the membership of the committee should be referred to the standing committee on government agencies, which we have agreed to. That will sit in the time between now and when the House comes back. I can certainly tell the member that any questions with respect to the membership or terms of reference can certainly be dealt with by the committee if it turns out that it is not possible for the Treasurer to make an announcement in the House in the next two days.
Mr Harris: We have not been consulted about the terms of reference or the makeup of this committee. I do not believe the official opposition has been consulted, whether it has any input as to who should be on the fair tax commission, what the mandate should be, what the terms of reference should be. The Treasurer is shaking his head. He confirms that. I am assuming, from the lack of consultation, that the government does not plan to consult with us at all.
The House leaders and whips have been meeting now to plan the time in between, the two and a half months when we will not be sitting. There has not been one single discussion on the fair tax commission, what it will be planning to do, whether there will be any input, whether we will be involved and whether it in fact will have anything to say about the budget that will be brought forward from the Treasurer.
Now, I would ask the Premier two things. First, does he plan to consult or is this just going to be a Premier-and-Treasurer-appointed commission: "Do and say whatever you want"? Are we going to be consulted on that? Second, how can he expect this commission to have any input into the budget, expected as he says in the next three or four months, if in fact it is going to be March or April before we get a look at having some input into this commission?
Hon Mr Rae: First of all, I would say to the leader of the third party that we as a government have some responsibilities with respect to our program. The fair tax commission is intended to provide advice to the Treasurer. We are doing something which no other government has ever done -- not the previous government and not the member's party when he was in government -- and that is to say, the names of the membership of this commission are going before the standing committee on government agencies. That standing committee, as I understand it, is capable of sitting in the break period. That will be an opportunity for the standing committee to ask the proposed commissioners questions with respect to their range of views.
Mr Harris: You're making this up as you go along. "We don't have that committee. We don't have the criteria. We don't have any of that yet."
Hon Mr Rae: I say to the leader of the third party, who is shouting at me from his desk, we as a government have a responsibility to bring forward our program. We are doing something which no other government has done with respect to a commission of the government. I do not recall his ever having done it when he was briefly a minister in the Frank Miller cabinet. I do not recall one member of the Liberal Party having done it when it was in government for five years. We are doing something which no other government has done with respect to consultation.
Mr Harris: When?
Hon Mr Rae: The leader of the third party now shouts out, "When?" I have told him. In the break period between now and when we come back, there will be an opportunity for the standing committee on government agencies to deal with the names of the people whom we are going to be putting forward as members of this commission.
LANDFILL SITES
Mrs Sullivan: On 7 June 1990, the then NDP member for Sault Ste Marie, Karl Morin-Strom, put forward a resolution in this House. It stated that the government of Ontario should adopt a policy that no municipal or other garbage from southern Ontario should be shipped to any location in northern Ontario for treatment or disposal. Interestingly enough, when the vote was taken, the now Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations and Financial Institutions, the Minister of Northern Development, the Minister of Transportation, the Minister of Labour, the Minister of Colleges and Universities, the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and the Minister of Mines supported that, as did the Minister of Natural Resources, who said at the time, "We must not ship that type of garbage from southern Ontario to northern Ontario." I support that completely.
On 23 November, the new Minister of the Environment wrote to Metro Chairman Alan Tonks and encouraged Metropolitan Toronto to preserve all of its landfill options, including Kirkland Lake. The minister has provided no information or facts to the House to explain the government's flip-flop between June and November, a very short period of time.
My question is for the Minister of the Environment. Does the minister support the export of greater Toronto area waste outside the greater Toronto area?
Hon Mrs Grier: This is a difficult issue and it is one that I suspect, if it had been easily resolved, my predecessor might have resolved it. What this government is going to do about waste is seriously try to reduce the amount of waste that is shipped, disposed of or landfilled anywhere in the province of Ontario. The issue of whether the ultimate site for the residue of Metro Toronto's waste is within the GTA or beyond the GTA has not yet been decided.
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Mrs Sullivan: Once again, the minister refers to the garbage authority although it does not exist. Of course, we know that the minister will have a direct role in shaping the mandate and the legislation governing that authority.
One of her senior officials in the Ministry of the Environment yesterday indicated in a telephone conversation that he did not want a copy of lists previously prepared in the regional exercises. Everybody else wants a copy of those lists, but he apparently does not. Rather, there will be new rules. He stated that the Ministry of the Environment will be forwarding its criteria for site selection to the consultants for a new authority when it is established.
Will the minister please outline for us today what criteria her ministry will be putting forward to the authority for it to use to identify host communities for Metro's garbage?
Hon Mrs Grier: I know the member for Halton Centre has had a lot of fun with lists and no lists and out of GTA and within GTA. Let me share with the member a press release that was issued yesterday by a group called Northwatch. I think one sentence in that is very telling and deserves repeating to this House.
It says: "It's clear that they" -- and they are referring to Metro and some developers and other people -- "want to create an impression that it's a done deal, but it's clearly not and it's dirty pool to create those false impressions." That is from an environmental group concerned about the thought that there may be waste sent to northern Ontario.
The authority, when it is established, will be dealing with the criteria, will be dealing with the process of site selection, and let me assure the member and all members of the House that the bottom line for this government is going to be what is in the best interests of the environment and that any criteria established will have that first and foremost in their consideration.
HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION
Mr Arnott: My question is for the Minister of Transportation.
Yesterday, when the minister was asked about his decision to cancel part of the Red Hill Creek expressway, he said he made it after reviewing the dissenting report of the Environmental Assessment Board representative on the joint board. The dissenting report makes up only about one third of the total report. The legal implications of the minister's decision are serious. The opponents of the project appealed to cabinet. Cabinet upheld the joint board's decision on 12 March 1987. The opponents then went to the Supreme Court of Ontario asking for a judicial review of the hearings. It was denied earlier this year. I want to ask the minister, on what statutory authority did his cabinet review this issue, when was it considered at cabinet, and did it include a review of the entire report of the joint board?
Hon Mr Philip: I met with the representatives of the regional council, including the regional chairman, on which the members of the Hamilton council sit. I considered their views.
I point out that it is not just the NDP and the environmentalists who were against this. Indeed, the conservation authority has been against this destruction of the valley. The Niagara Escarpment Commission has been against this destruction of the valley, and I do not happen to weigh evidence by the number of pages that it occupies. I made a decision based on the evidence that was there. If the previous government or the Conservative government had the wherewithal to look at the situation the way that I did, they would have come to the same conclusion and stopped it earlier.
Mr Arnott: Yesterday, the minister said his government is committed to a marriage between the environment and transportation. He said he made his decision based on the NDP commitment to the protection of the environment.
His government has just reversed a decision made in 1985, a decision which was upheld by the previous cabinet and the Supreme Court of Ontario, a decision upon which millions of dollars have already been spent, and upon which hundreds of planning decisions and investments have been made. The minister's decision has destroyed the public's confidence in the planning process and will undermine any future decisions made by a joint board or any government board. Is the minister now willing to refund the municipality its $15-million investment and pay for all costs of any legal actions which may result from his decision?
Hon Mr Philip: The city, the conservation authority and the Ministry of Transportation and, at that time, Communications, which was headed by a Conservative minister, was part of the study called the Hamilton-Wentworth waterfront study, which in 1974 came out against the destruction of the valley. Later, the municipality reversed that decision. We made a decision based on our right to spend the taxpayers' money under the budget that we have control of and that is the decision I made. I did not interfere at all in the decision of the authority.
JOB SECURITY
Mr Malkowski: I have a question for the Minister of Energy. Over the past several weeks, members of the opposition parties have raised alarming concerns about jobs being lost as a result of the nuclear moratorium. In one case, a member stated that thousands of jobs would be lost in a matter of weeks. Can the minister tell the House what job losses we are experiencing and will be experiencing as a result of the moratorium?
Hon Mrs Carter: I want to thank the member for York East for his question. There has been a lot of talk about job loss as a result of the nuclear moratorium. I am pleased to say it is inaccurate. The nuclear moratorium has not eliminated existing plants, nor has it cancelled the plans for Darlington. Consequently, the people who operate, fuel, maintain, supply and repair nuclear power stations are still in as much demand as they would have been without a moratorium.
This government continues to be committed to maintaining the safety and reliability of existing nuclear power stations, so there will also be continued opportunities for working in capital projects at our nuclear stations.
Mr Malkowski: The minister has indicated that the jobs related to existing nuclear power plants are secure, which is not surprising since those plants are not closing. But there are jobs in the nuclear industry, jobs in development and production of nuclear products, that existing plants will not call on. For example, there are jobs at General Electric in Peterborough and jobs at AECL at Sheridan Park in Mississauga that normally rely on the creation of new plants in order to continue. What will happen to these jobs?
Hon Mrs Carter: I am acutely aware of the concerns of the people that the member for York East has mentioned, at General Electric in Sheridan Park. The General Electric workers are my constituents and I have recently met with representatives of the nuclear engineers at AECL as well as other affected groups. This government is working with these groups to address their concerns. Members will be pleased to learn that the staff at AECL have indicated that they see no immediate prospects of job loss among their staff members. They have also expressed great interest in our objectives, relating to alternative energy sources and energy efficiency technologies, and are enthusiastic about job opportunities in those fields.
Similarly, General Electric has indicated its strong support for the government's initiative. The chair of the General Electric board told me that there were things in the NDP's new energy directions that would provide --
Mrs Caplan: Mr Speaker, this is a speech.
Mr Runciman: She has already read that paragraph.
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The Speaker: Just a minute. I would appreciate it, quite frankly, if members have a concern about either the length of questions asked or the length of responses, that they use a couple of different ways to let me know other than simply making noise. A point of order is certainly to be entertained or you may wish to discuss the matter after question period. Simply to make noise is not helpful to anyone.
If the minister has a few additional short remarks to make, she has --
Interjections.
The Speaker: Quite frankly, due to the discourtesy shown, I intend to allow the minister a few seconds to conclude her remarks.
Mr Elston: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I can understand that you would ask that the minister wind up her remarks -- I have no problem with that -- but for you to stand up in the House and say that because you think there has been a discourtesy you are somehow punishing the people, I do not think this is really very much called for.
I really was busy doing the business of the House with the government House leader. I was listening to this and I would have stood up. I was behind the Speaker's chair. This is another example of how they are carrying on, giving ministerial statements about government policy. I appreciate that you are concerned, but to make that last statement -- I was prepared to let it go till then -- was a little bit much.
The Speaker: To the member for Bruce, first of all, I could not hear the minister who was responding because of the noise from these benches. I am supposed to be able to hear --
Interjections.
The Speaker: The House leader raises a point which, quite frankly, I was considering. I was surprised that there was no response from the opposition. I would caution, as I have before, that the ministers have the opportunity to make statements about government policy during statements by the ministry. When there are matters raised which appear to be in fact ministers' statements, it is more appropriate to raise those during that time.
With the indulgence of the House, I will ask that the minister take a few seconds to conclude her remarks. In return, I will add one minute to the question period.
Hon Mrs Carter: With respect, Mr Speaker, I was not making a statement. I have been replying to questions.
I have, I think, a couple of important points here. First of all, the chair of the board of General Electric Canada Inc told me that there were things in the NDP's new energy directions that were --
Mr Mancini: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I am following the advice, sir, that you just gave to the House, which is that if we have a concern, instead of voicing it while we are sitting down, we should rise and voice it to you and to the whole House directly.
It was very evident, sir, that earlier on the minister was not answering the question. She was reading from a prepared text. You kindly allowed her to conclude the answer. She immediately again started to read from a prepared text. I submit to you, Mr Speaker, and to the House that this is not really an answer to a question; it is a ministerial statement. I ask you to rule on this, sir.
The Speaker: Stop the clock, please.
I appreciate the matter raised by the member for Essex South. I will tell you at the start that it is my intention to first hear the response from the minister, and I said to her that she had an additional few seconds to conclude her remarks. I will review Hansard and I will report back to you tomorrow.
I mention to members that under the orders --
Interjection.
The Speaker: No. We stopped the clock.
Under our procedures, members of all parties have an opportunity in rotation to ask questions, and there is a fine line between what is a legitimate question and what is in fact setting up a statement by ministers. If the three House leaders have a concern, I will be more than pleased to meet with them to discuss this matter immediately following routine proceedings today. It is my intention that question period be used purely for what it is intended to be used and to respect the right of all private members.
Now, I would ask the Minister of Energy to try to succinctly conclude her remarks and then we will move on with rotation. As I mentioned, we will add a minute to the time.
Hon Mrs Carter: Right, Mr Speaker, one sentence: I just want to state that not only are jobs not being lost as a result of our policies but they are being created.
ALCOHOL ADVERTISING
Mr McClelland: My question is for the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations. All members of this House will be aware of the tragic death of Jimmy Whiffen, the 15-year-old boy who died as a result of consuming the equivalent of a 26-ounce bottle of alcohol. A coroner's jury was charged with investigating this matter and recommended, among other things, a ban on advertising of alcohol.
Shortly thereafter, the recommendations were tabled after they were put forward. The minister was quoted in the press as stating that his government was looking at proceeding with imposing a ban on the advertising of alcohol and in fact indicated that it would act relatively quickly to move towards implementing that proposal. The minister also said that he would be meeting with members of the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario to discuss what steps might be taken.
I presume by this time the minister has had an opportunity to meet with the liquor licensing board. Can he tell us what specific steps he plans to take with respect to the issue and when, if ever, he intends to share with this House and the people of Ontario what he is going to do in response to the recommendations, specifically the recommendation with respect to the issue of advertising and alcohol?
Hon Mr Kormos: The coroner's inquest on the tragic Whiffen death is one that the ministry and the government have taken very, very seriously. The work that jurors and coroners do in that type of investigation is in no way ever to be diminished or denigrated, and I can tell the members, as this member knows, we responded quickly.
We responded by meeting the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario. We then met and continue to meet with groups ranging from PRIDE, People to Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere, to Dr Robert Solomon, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and an expert on the issue of alcohol, drugs and tobacco. We have met with the spirits industry, representatives of the wine industry, representatives of the beer industry and the unions, the people who work for these industries and have an interest in the outcome too because these are the people who share the concern of the rest of the community at the tragic deaths of not just Whiffen but of others, and the impact of alcohol and alcohol abuse and other drugs on young people, adults and families across the province.
I was shocked when I read of the member's comment to the press that he somehow did not feel that a ban on advertising would affect anything. I can tell members that I disagree with that type of statement. We are not committed to a ban on advertising, but I will tell members that we are committed to shortly introducing changes to the LLBO advertising rules, changes to the manner in which liquor and other alcohols are presented not just to young people but to adults as well, to help fight what has become one of the most profound and most devastating impacts on people's lives in this country.
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Mr McClelland: I might indicate that indeed the statement made to the press was one to draw attention to members who were concerned that in fact the liquor industry, including its broad range of advertising, does use some advertising for responsible advertising. I would hope the minister would acknowledge that clearly what he has suggested I said is not the case.
In light of that, two weeks ago I called on the minister in this House to immediately implement warning labels on alcohol as an effective and inexpensive way to educate the public about the potential hazards of excessive drinking. In fact, the minister himself has said, and I quote, that this "could be put into effect without any great deal of difficulty." To date, as far as I am aware, the minister has taken no action.
The minister must realize that the guidelines currently governing the advertising of alcohol in Ontario were put in place after four years of extensive public consultation carried out by the previous government. Those guidelines reflected the prevailing attitude of the public at that time.
The coroner's jury has suggested that more has to be done. Given the time that has passed since the jury handed down its recommendations, given the serious tragedy that occurred, what specific plans would the minister hope would follow from his consultation that he has advised us about, and can he tell us, after having met with concerned groups, what he is going to do to deal with this issue in a realistic and comprehensive fashion, and when he is going to begin to do that?
Hon Mr Kormos: I remember as an opposition member I dumped all over the then government, the Liberals, for liberalizing the advertising guidelines. They paved the way. Members have seen them, have they not? The black and the blue ads, the ones that are geared not just to 19-year-olds but beer advertising that is geared to 15-, 14-, 13- and 12-year-olds.
I find it hard to believe that a guy who was a member of the government that opened up beer advertising so that it can infect young people's lives would now show himself to be apparently so outraged. I am a little bit tired of guys like that jumping on my coat-tails and trying to make press out of the tragedy of the death of a child like the young Whiffen boy.
MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Mrs Marland: My question is to the Premier. This question has nothing to do with the person who currently holds this office, but I am speaking about the minister to whom the Premier has assigned two portfolios, one being that of the Environment and one being the greater Toronto area.
When he made that decision to give one minister responsibility for two portfolios, particularly those two, did he give any consideration to a conflict between the two portfolios?
Hon Mr Rae: I thank the member for Mississauga South for her question. It is a reasonable one and a good one.
Whenever I appoint people to portfolios, of course that is something in my mind. For example, when I appointed the Minister of Natural Resources to also be the minister responsible for native affairs, I thought it made sense for us to do that, not only in terms of the minister's qualities but also in terms of the mutual interest and the importance of having those ministries work together rather than work at cross-purposes. Frankly, as I have said on other occasions, time will tell as to whether this approach is the right one.
With respect to the appointment of the Minister of the Environment to be the minister for the greater Toronto area, frankly, there were a number of decisions with respect to planning in the greater Toronto area that I felt had major environmental implications, with respect to the waterfront, with respect to garbage as an issue, with respect to broad planning considerations in the GTA. I wanted to give those, if I can put it in the shorthand form, a green perspective. That is why I made this decision.
If it turns out that it is not a perfect match or that there are problems with it, of course we will deal with that. But as far as I am concerned, I think it is working well. I think the minister is working in co-operation with the Minister of Municipal Affairs. They are meeting regularly with respect to areas where they have to work together. If there are any conflicts in a technical sense or in a policy sense, I am certainly not aware of them.
Mrs Marland: I appreciate the answer, but I think now that the Premier can see what is happening the question is one of these two particular ministries working together, and I think even based on some of the questions he has heard in these last three weeks, he can see conflicts beginning to emerge.
I give the Premier a perfect example: the shipping of Metro garbage to Kirkland Lake. I think the reaction of the people who are concerned about the environment around the province is very real. Yet, the interests of Metro Toronto and what it does with its garbage plans are also very critical. We just find it impossible to see how this minister -- and again it is nothing to do with who is in that office today -- or how any minister can sit at the cabinet table and take one hat off, put another one on and say: "Now I'm dealing with the environmental issues. Oops, just a minute. Now I'm dealing with the GTA issues." How can he or she possibly deal fairly and be an advocate for those two opposing interests, because at times those interests are opposing? We have an example now.
Hon Mr Rae: I hear the honourable member and I can appreciate her point. I am afraid I do not agree with it. I do not see that the minister responsible for the GTA has any particular conflict with regard to her responsibility overall for the environment.
I cannot think of a more important, more practical and more immediate environmental question than we face here in the greater Toronto area, in the Ottawa area, in the Windsor area and across northern Ontario. It is an issue across the province. For the minister responsible for the GTA to have an environmental perspective and to be working from that perspective strikes me as a good idea. But if there are other problems which the member would like to bring to my attention, as always I would be more than pleased to hear from her.
GRAIN PRODUCERS
Mr Mills: Grain farmers in my area and throughout Ontario are in need of a new long-term stabilization program. I would like to ask the Minister of Agriculture and Food if he could provide this House with the latest information on the new proposed national safety nets and the timetable for these new plans.
Hon Mr Buchanan: I would like to thank the member for the question and report to him that I appreciate the concern he raises in terms of agriculture. I would like to point out to him and to the rest of the House that while we were in Brussels the safety-net question was raised and discussed with ministers from the other levels of government. We did reach agreement with the ministers who were there.
At the moment, officials from this government and other governments are putting the fine-tuning on the two safety-net proposals. The gross revenue insurance plan, known as GRIP, and the net income stabilization account, known as NISA, have been almost finalized. I had hoped to be able to make an announcement this week. We will have a program to put in place early in 1991.
Mr Mills: I thank the minister for his reply. I would like to see clarification on the status of farm-fed grains within these new plans. This is an important issue for the Ontario livestock sector and its continued viability in this province.
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Hon Mr Buchanan: In terms of farm-fed grains being included, this is a major issue for farmers across the country, and in Ontario particularly. I am happy to report that farm-fed grains will be included in these two programs, and further to that I have insisted that horticultural crops be included as well. Originally the two safety-net plans were just going to cover grains and oilseeds. I have asked that horticultural crops be included. I am pleased to say that they will also be included under these plans.
EASTERN ONTARIO DEVELOPMENT / DÉVELOPPEMENT DE L'EST DE L'ONTARIO
Mr Grandmaître: My question is to the Premier. Je voudrais dire au premier ministre que contrairement au Nord de l'Ontario, l'Est de l'Ontario ne jouit pas d'un ministère ou d'un ministre chargé de s'occuper des questions relatives à l'Est de l'Ontario. Souvent nous sommes critiqués ou notre palier de gouvemement est critiqué ou accusé de délaisser les gens de l'Est de l'Ontario. Souvent nous sommes accusés, en plus, de mal partager les budgets afin de respecter les demandes ou les attentes de l'Est de l'Ontario.
For those reasons and others, the former Premier of this province created the eastem Ontario cabinet committee to try to work with municipalities in eastem Ontario. Today I am asking the Premier, will he consider reinstating the eastern Ontario cabinet committee?
L'hon M. Rae: J'apprécie beaucoup la question du député d'Ottawa-Est. Je suis très conscient de nos responsabilités envers l'Est de notre province. D'abord, c'est la région de la province d'où je viens personnellement et c'est la région où je suis né. Naturellement, j'ai beaucoup d'affinité pour la région de l'Est de la province.
J'entends bien la suggestion du député et je vais y songer.
Mr H. O'Neil: The Premier mentions that he comes from eastem Ontario, but I also might mention that eastern Ontario stretches from approximately Bowmanville to the Quebec border and it goes north into Renfrew and Pembroke, with a very large area of the province. But we see that when he put forward this $42 million as a stimulus to try and bring along the economy, he only provided about 7.5% of that money for eastern Ontario. Could I ask the Premier, when he allots the remainder of that $700 million, will he make sure that eastem Ontario gets a fair share of it instead of about 7%?
Hon Mr Rae: Yes.
ASSISTANCE TO FARMERS
Mr B. Murdoch: I have a question for the Minister of Agriculture and Food. He will know that in August his predecessor agreed to a federal-provincial plan to assist fruit and vegetable farmers. Federal funds would be matched and distributed by the province to producers. Apple growers would receive $200 an acre. The farmers in Grey in Ontario need that money. Can the minister tell me when they will receive it?
Hon Mr Buchanan: I would be pleased to answer that question. The cheques will be out early in January.
MINISTER'S REPONSE TO QUESTION
Mr Sorbara: Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of privilege regarding the comments made by the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations during question period. His answer represented one of the crassest political comments that I have heard during my time sitting in this Parliament since the election. Unfortunately the Premier is leaving. I think he should hear this.
The Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations suggested in his response that the previous Liberal government liberalized regulations respecting the advertising of beverage alcohol in the province so as to allow the manufacturers and distributors of alcohol to advertise in a way that attracted children.
Because I was the minister who brought those guidelines to cabinet and had them ultimately approved by cabinet, I want to tell him that the development of those regulations was designed in such a way as to ensure that the manufacturers of beverage alcohol would not pitch their commercials to children. Not only that, those regulations were developed by the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario after broad consultation with all of the stakeholders in a very significant area and one we are all preoccupied with.
I would suggest that if the minister actually believes that those guidelines are designed to attract minors to the consumption of beverage alcohol, then he has no alterative but to demand the resignation of the chairman of the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario and all the members of those boards that unanimously recommended those regulations to the government.
The Speaker: I am not sure the member has a point of privilege, but I will be pleased to review the Hansard and I will report back to you later.
Mr B. Murdoch: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: I would just like to ask you if you added the minute to our time. I do not think you did. You promised us an extra minute. I did not see it.
The Speaker: It was added in at the time we had our little discussion here.
Mr Drainville: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: Pursuant to the points of order that were raised before, I just want to say that we on our side of the House did not make any comment at the time, but I want it to be registered, as you consider these things, that indecorous behaviour seems to be the norm recently from the other benches. Even the member for Mississauga South, when she rose to speak in the House today, could not do so for about a minute's time because of the comments that were being made opposite. I have to say that in terms of that we have had to enjoin upon the members of our own party to maintain a certain respect when questions are being asked in the House. In fact, when I spoke to members of my own party about this issue recently, I had to enjoin upon them the words of the great Plutarch. Plutarch once said, "Know how to listen and you will profit even from those who speak badly."
The Speaker: I appreciate the observations of all members of the House.
SUPPLEMENTARY ESTIMATES
Hon Ms Lankin: Mr Speaker, I have a message from His Honour the Lieutenant Governor, signed by his own hand.
The Speaker: The Lieutenant Governor transmits supplementary estimates of certain additional sums required for the services of the province for the year ending 31 March 1991 and recommends them to the Legislative Assembly. Toronto, 18 December 1990.
PETITIONS
SCHOOL CURRICULUM
Mrs Mathyssen: I have a petition signed by 70 constituents who request that the Parliament of Ontario require that equal time be given to the teaching of evolutionism and creationism in OAC history and science courses. They ask that equal time be given in presenting the underlying assumptions in each point of view, thereby allowing students to examine their own belief system and better appreciate an opposing point of view. I have signed my name to this petition.
PRESTATIONS PAYÉES AUX PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES
Mme S. Murdock : J'ai en ma possession une pétition de 3 300 personnes de la région de Sudbury qui déclare ce qui suit :
«D'après la loi, une personne handicapée perd ses prestations à la suite d'un mariage. Or, nous croyons qu'elle doit continuer à recevoir ses prestations à titre de personne handicapée ayant des besoins particuliers et un réel désir de devenir plus autonome.
«Nous vous demandons respectueusement, messieurs et mesdames les députés, de reconnaître cette injustice et de modifier le projet de loi en conséquence. Votre action immédiate contribuera à alléger le fardeau financier qui les accable présentement.»
J'ai apposé mon nom à cette pétition.
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INTRODUCTION OF BILLS
REPRESENTATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1990
Mr Villeneuve moved first reading of Bill 31, An Act to amend the Representation Act, 1986.
Motion agreed to.
Mr Villeneuve: I represent a very great and historical part of Ontario known as Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry. Under redistribution in 1987, this great riding was expanded to include the eastern section of Grenville county. Some 12,000 people reside in that section of Grenville county and yet they are not recognized in this Legislature.
The united counties that I represent are often referred to as SD and G. We have had the great unit of the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, among others. Our history is made. I will not bore members with any more than one more sentence. I am asking them to recognize the good people of Grenville county by changing the name to Stormont, Dundas, Glengarry and East Grenville.
REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY OF OTTAWA-CARLETON STATUTE LAW AMENDMENT ACT, 1990
Mr Cooke moved first reading of Bill 32, An Act to amend the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton Act and the Municipal Elections Act.
Motion agreed to.
Hon Mr Cooke: This legislation will permit Ottawa-Carleton voters to elect their regional chair. The people of Ottawa-Carleton want comprehensive reform of their regional government and this government intends to undertake that reform. There is simply not enough time to reach a consensus on that reform before the municipal elections next November. I plan to bring forward comprehensive reform of Ottawa-Carleton in time for the 1994 municipal elections. The one thing nearly everyone seems to agree on is that anyone in a position as powerful and as important as the chair of Ottawa-Carleton should be accountable to the people. It is because of this consensus that I am going ahead with the legislation today.
The Speaker: I would like to capture the attention of the Minister of Housing for a moment. Perhaps in future he would follow our set procedures about introduction of bills.
HEALTH DISCIPLINES AMENDMENT ACT, 1990
Mr Henderson moved first reading of Bill 33, An Act to amend the Health Disciplines Act.
Motion agreed to.
Mr Henderson: This bill amends part III, Medicine, of the Health Disciplines Act. A new section 52a prohibits members of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, except where required by specified statutes, from disclosing medical information concerning a patient to third parties without the patient's consent. The section requires members to give a patient sufficient information to enable the patient to decide whether to consent to disclosure, and in addition sets out the requirements for valid consent. Nothing will be shown in a patient's file or medical record to indicate that consent to disclosure of information was withheld.
WORKERS' COMPENSATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1990
Mr Henderson moved first reading of Bill 34, An Act to amend the Workers' Compensation Act.
Motion agreed to.
Mr Henderson: The purpose of this companion bill is to allow a worker to refuse his or her consent to disclosure of medical information obtained during medical examinations required by the act. Once the worker has refused consent, he or she can choose to withdraw his or her claim for compensation. If the claim is withdrawn, nothing will be shown in the worker's file or medical record to indicate the reason for the withdrawal.
MUNICIPAL OFFICES VACANCIES ACT, 1990
Mr Callahan moved first reading of Bill 35, An Act respecting Vacancies in Municipal Offices.
Motion agreed to.
Mr Callahan: The purpose of this bill is to provide that in the event of a vacancy occurring on a municipal council or school board, the council or board must appoint the candidate who received the second-highest number of votes at the election at which the councillor or board member who is no longer in office was elected.
ORDERS OF THE DAY
RESIDENTIAL RENT REGULATION AMENDMENT ACT, 1990
Resuming the adjourned debate on the motion for second reading of Bill 4, An Act to amend the Residential Rent Regulation Act, 1986.
Hon Mr Cooke: I am just going to take a couple of minutes to comment on the very appropriate and helpful interventions that have taken place over the last several days on Bill 4. I want to indicate that I certainly appreciate the recommendations that have come from the opposition parties, as well as from members of my own caucus.
Obviously the areas that are of major concern to people who are concerned about Bill 4, and have been raised by the opposition, are matters dealing with repairs and capital. I want to indicate very clearly to the opposition parties that this is a temporary moratorium, as we have indicated in the past, and that I really do not believe their concerns during a short-term moratorium are valid.
I believe very much that what we needed to do was to bring in this type of legislation to stabilize the market, to avoid the kind of situations that were occurring and that have been raised by such prominent people as Alan Redway in his letter to me last week, and to stabilize the situation while we thought through what type of rent review system and what type of rent control system will work in the long run.
I just think it would be totally inappropriate to go in the direction that the Legislature did in 1985, where we sorted out all the difficulties and brought in legislation and by the time the legislation came in it was doomed to failure because of the huge backlog of cases. This moratorium will prevent that from happening. When the new system comes in, we will in fact be able to start afresh and be able to take an approach with the new rent review system that will not have all of the difficulties the former system had.
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I can tell the members that it is our intention in the ministry, as much as possible, to have the permanent legislation and the system be a simpler system, a system that landlords and tenants will be able to understand without having to have the assistance of lawyers or expensive consultants, so that they will be able to access the system.
I can also tell members that, as the House leaders will be aware, the time frame for dealing with both the short-term legislation and the long-term legislation, I think, is one that we should all be trying to participate in. As members know, this bill, after it is voted on today, will be going out to the standing committee on general government. There will be public hearings on the bill during the break. It is our expectation that around 18 February, towards the end of February, the consultation document on the permanent system will be released. When I say 18 February, that is the target date. If we are a couple of days early or a couple of days late, members will please understand that. That is the target date for the consultation document that will outline potential direction and options for the permanent rent review system.
We have offered, and I believe the opposition parties have accepted, the proposition that this document will have some public hearings during the break as well. It is certainly my intention as minister to travel the province with the consultation document as well and receive input and suggestions from landlords and tenants.
I look forward to the process whereby we can together work towards developing a long-term rent control system that will in fact offer real protection to tenants and deal with some of the real and legitimate concerns that landlords have about the system as well.
I appreciate the participation of all members of the Legislature and I certainly look forward to the public hearings process on this bill and the consultation document.
The Deputy Speaker: Mr Cooke has moved second reading of Bill 4, An Act to amend the Residential Rent Regulation Act, 1986.
Is it the pleasure of the House the motion carry?
Carried.
Shall the bill be ordered for third reading?
Hon Miss Martel: No.
Hon Mr Cooke: General government committee.
The Deputy Speaker: General government committee. Agreed?
Mr Elston: Agreed.
Mrs Marland: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I did hear the Minister of Housing refer to the committee that he would like Bill 4 to be referred to. However, I did not hear you take a vote on that referral. We wish to vote on that.
Hon Mr Cooke: There is no vote on the referral. The member is talking about the vote on second reading.
Mrs Marland: I certainly am.
Hon Mr Cooke: That is why we were looking to the opposition.
Mrs Marland: That is what we have been waiting for.
Hon Mr Cooke: They called the vote, but we will go back to it.
Mrs Cunningham: Go back.
Hon Mr Cooke: They called the vote.
Mrs Cunningham: That's why we called the point of order.
Mrs Marland: The vote was not called.
Ms Haslam: Yes, it was called.
Hon Mr Cooke: It was called.
Mrs Cunningham: We already made an agreement with the House leader.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. I did ask, "Shall the bill be ordered for third reading?"
Hon Mr Cooke: You also asked if the vote should be passed.
The Deputy Speaker: That is right. He suggested to which committee. I said, "Agreed?" and everybody agreed. Would you like to make a statement?
Hon Miss Martel: To resolve this, we would be perfectly willing to revert back a few steps so that the vote can be taken, because we all expected a vote to be taken here and I was rather surprised when it went along so well. So if we can get some agreement, we will have that happen. Okay?
The Deputy Speaker: Is there unanimous consent that the question be put again?
Shall the bill be ordered for third reading? Is it the pleasure of the House that second reading pass?
Mr Eves: No, we have to vote on second reading.
Hon Mr Cooke: Yes, we have to vote on second reading
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VISITOR
The Deputy Speaker: Before we vote, I would like to recognize a former member of this House, the former member for Grey, Ron Lipsett.
The House divided on Mr Cooke's motion for second reading of Bill 4, An Act to amend the Residential Rent Regulation Act, 1986, which was agreed to on the following vote:
Ayes -- 87
Akande, Beer, Bisson, Boyd, Brown, Buchanan, Callahan, Caplan, Carter, Charlton, Chiarelli, Christopherson, Churley, Cleary, Conway, Cooke, Cooper, Coppen, Dadamo, Drainville, Duignan, Elston, Farnan, Fawcett, Ferguson, Fletcher, Frankford, Gigantes, Grandmaître, Grier, Haeck, Hampton, Hansen, Harrington, Haslam, Henderson, Hope, Huget, Jamison, Johnson, Klopp, Kormos, Lankin, Laughren, Lessard.
Mackenzie, MacKinnon, Mahoney, Malkowski, Mammoliti, Marchese, Martel, Martin, Mathyssen, McGuinty, McLeod, Miclash, Mills, Murdock, S., North, O'Connor, Offer, O'Neill, Y., Owens, Perruzza, Philip, E., Phillips, G., Poirier, Poole, Pouliot, Rae, Scott, Silipo, Sutherland, Swarbrick, Ward, B., Ward, M., Wark-Martyn, Waters, Wessenger, White, Wilson, F., Wilson, G., Winninger, Wiseman, Wood, Ziemba.
Nays -- 16
Arnott, Carr, Cunningham, Eves, Harnick, Harris, Jackson, Marland, McLean, Murdoch, B., Runciman, Stockwell, Tilson, Turnbull, Villeneuve, Wilson, J.
Bill ordered for standing committee on general government.
THIRD READINGS / TROISIÈME LECTURE
The following bills were given third reading on motion:
Les motions de troisième lecture des projets de loi suivants sont adoptées :
Bill 9, An Act to authorize borrowing on the credit of the Consolidated Revenue Fund;
Projet de loi 9, Loi autorisant des emprunts garantis par le Trésor ;
Bill 10, An Act to amend the Corporations Tax Act;
Bill 11, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act.
RETAIL SALES TAX AMENDMENT ACT, 1990
Ms Wark-Martyn moved third reading of Bill 1, An Act to amend the Retail Sales Tax Act.
Mrs Y. O'Neill: I would like to make a few closing comments before we pass Bill 1. I would like to focus again today and just underline the complexity of this bill, the complexity that will be added to 250,000 retailers across this province, as they are going to implement this bill in less than a month.
I have continued to ask questions about the administrative costs of double accounting and double collection of two different taxes by the small business people across this province. I have asked questions about the impact studies that I feel have not been undertaken, impact studies in the businesses that have varied commodities, that have different pricing policies and some of these take place within the company itself. Yet in my opinion the impact studies in the implementation of this act are yet lacking in much of the detail necessary to give directions to these people.
We have not done surveys of these complexities and I am convinced, especially after yesterday's debate, that the $500-million retail tax saving which we have talked about will in many ways be eaten up and consumed by the delivery costs of the 250,000 people who will have to collect this tax across this province.
My second concern is that the bill is going to allow the minister to bring about changes in regulations. The first are those that involve rebates. These of course will be done without public scrutiny for the first time, with no guarantee that there will be consultation with the tourists and tourism industry of the province, the hospitality industry, the convention industry. We do not know when these regulations will be forthcoming. It is a deep regret I have that the minister, in the many chances she has had and the opportunities in speaking to Bill 1, has nowhere shared with this House or indeed with the people who will have to implement Bill 1 any direction, any focus about how she is going to implement the regulations and the new powers that she has been given. I do feel this has created a sense of insecurity and in some cases I am sorry to say a sense of fear among some of the industries that I have just mentioned.
There are many sections of this bill that are still horrendously complex, and I just close my remarks today by asking -- and I hope I will be heard -- that the minister will with all her might help to clarify some of the uncertainties, and certainly some of the lack of information -- I do not think it is misinformation; I think it is just lack of information -- for the general public about the implementation of this bill, Bill 1, and certainly that will accompany the GST on 1 January, less than two weeks away.
I would humbly suggest that work be done in the daily and weekly newspapers across this province to help the people understand the new taxation policies that Bill 1 is bringing forward that will harmonize with the GST and will indeed be something that the people of this province have to face every day as they walk the streets and do their shopping. I do think that somehow or other there has not been the clarification, and I do not know what the reasons are, because we have had many opportunities in this House. I have asked many questions, as have other members, and the answers we have had are much less than specific.
So my final remarks are that Bill 1 is complex. I hope this minister and this cabinet will do their best to help the people of Ontario understand what is being passed in this House today.
Motion agreed to.
EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS AMENDMENT ACT (PREGNANCY AND PARENTAL LEAVE), 1990
Mr Mackenzie moved third reading of Bill 14, An Act to amend the Employment Standards Act with respect to Pregnancy and Parental Leave.
The Deputy Speaker: Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?
All those in favour will please say "aye."
All those opposed will please say "nay."
In my opinion the "ayes" have it.
Motion agreed to.
RESTOULE SNOWMOBILE CLUB ACT, 1990
Mr Eves moved second reading of Bill Pr9, An Act to revive the Restoule Snowmobile Club.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
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INTERLOCK PEOPLE LTD ACT, 1990
Mr Eves, on behalf of Mr Cousens, moved second reading of Bill Prl7, An Act to revive The Interlock People Ltd.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
CONYORK CONSTRUCTION & ENGINEERING LTD ACT, 1990
Mr Elston, on behalf of Ms Poole, moved second reading of Bill Prl8, An Act to revive Conyork Construction & Engineering Ltd.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
ORATORY OF SAINT PHILIP NERI-TORONTO ACT, 1990
Mr Mammoliti moved second reading of Bill Prl9, An Act respecting The Oratory of Saint Philip Neri-Toronto.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
CITY OF WINDSOR ACT, 1990
Mr Lessard moved second reading of Bill Pr21, An Act respecting the City of Windsor.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
GODERICH-EXETER RAILWAY COMPANY LIMITED ACT, 1990
Mr Klopp moved second reading of Bill Pr22, An Act respecting Goderich-Exeter Railway Company Limited.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
TOWN OF RICHMOND HILL ACT, 1990
Mr Elston, on behalf of Mr Sorbara, moved second reading of Bill Pr26, An Act respecting the Town of Richmond Hill.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
CITY OF VANIER ACT, 1990
Mr Grandmaître moved second reading of Bill Pr30, An Act respecting the City of Vanier.
Motion agreed.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
CITY OF TORONTO ACT, 1990
Ms Churley moved second reading of Bill Pr32, An Act respecting the City of Toronto.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
LORDINA LIMITED ACT, 1990
Mr Eves moved second reading of Bill 45, An Act to revive Lordina Limited.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
LA CAPANNA HOMES (NON-PROFIT) INC ACT, 1990
Mr Ferguson moved second reading of Bill Pr48, An Act to revive La Capanna Homes (Non-Profit) Inc.
Motion agreed to.
Third reading also agreed to on motion.
CHILD AND FAMILY SUPPORT STATUTE LAW AMENDMENT ACT, 1990 / LOI DE 1990 MODIFIANT LES LOIS RELATIVES AUX OBLIGATIONS ALIMENTAIRES
Mr Hampton moved second reading of Bill 17, An Act to amend the Law related to the Enforcement of Support and Custody Orders.
M. Hampton propose la deuxième lecture du projet de loi 17, Loi portant modification des lois relatives à l'exécution d'ordonnances alimentaires et de garde d'enfants.
Hon Mr Hampton: I am proud to move second reading of Bill 17, the Child and Family Support Statute Law Amendment Act, 1990, and I want to make a couple of preliminary comments to lead off the debate.
The amendments proposed by this bill will provide for a new method of payment of support obligations.
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In the future, each time a court makes an order for support, it will also make an order requiring payment by way of automatic deduction from income. This general principle will be subject to very limited exceptions. These exceptions will include cases in which the support payer is not in receipt of regular periodic income and cases where the parties agree to some other method of payment and the payer posts security which the court considers adequate. However, most new support orders made in Ontario in the future will be subject to the automatic support deduction plan. In these cases, support payments will be paid and collected in much the same way that income tax currently is, through payroll deduction.
The support deduction plan will also apply to support orders already made and to domestic contracts filed with the child and family support program upon the request of the recipient or where the program considers this to be the most practical enforcement alternative.
The amendments proposed by this bill seek to achieve a number of worthy and important goals. Most importantly, these amendments will fight child poverty by increasing compliance with support obligations.
The primary goal of the automatic support deduction plan is to ensure, wherever possible, a timely and regular flow of support payments to single parents and their children. We want to change the way society views the payment of child support and family support orders.
These amendments will establish child support and family support as a priority obligation. In addition to the major legislative reform that is being proposed, the child and family support program has already undertaken an aggressive campaign to deal with the current backlog of cases. I want to tell all members of the House that there is a dramatic backlog of cases -- somewhere near 75,000 cases.
We are also launching a public awareness campaign to inform the public about this important issue.
The legislative amendments proposed by this bill constitute a major step forward in the fight against child poverty. I am gratified by the support we have already received for these proposals. I welcome and look forward to the comments of all members of this House on this legislation.
Mr Sorbara: I am glad to hear the comments of the Attorney General on second reading of Bill 17. His remarks were brief, but I think he has articulated accurately what the purpose of the legislation is. It appears that we are not going to have a significant debate on this bill in this Legislature. I regret that a little bit. The timing of the debate is such that, looking forward to Christmas and the holiday season time, I think probably this bill is not going to receive as much attention in the debate on principle as it would otherwise have and, I think, as it ought to have.
I am going to try to keep my comments relatively brief. I do have some things to say about the current operation of the office of the director and the administration of the program as it stands now. I noted that the Attorney General pointed out in his comments that there is a significant backlog. I think probably it is that backlog that has given rise to the presentation of this bill.
Before I get into that, I think it would have been appropriate for the Attorney General to have pointed out in his opening comments that this bill, which I think his government can take appropriate credit for, is really a project that had been begun, considered, reviewed, supported and approved by the previous government --
Mr Harnick: And the one before that.
Mr Sorbara: My friend the member for Willowdale says, "And the one before that." Unfortunately, my friend the member for Willowdale was not in this Parliament during the period 1985-90 and of course that was not the case. In fact, the government prior to our government was not considering this type of legislation.
Legislation is a dramatic departure, let it be pointed out, from the normal way in which orders of the court, whether they be support orders or any order for payment given by a civil court, are collected. Indeed, the initial legislation, which is the Support and Custody Orders Enforcement Act, was designed to overcome the very problem which the Attorney General now says he wants to overcome in a different way. That is, in family courts, or district courts as they used to be called, or in any court hearing a matrimonial matter dealing with the support of one spouse or another and the support of children arising from the marriage of the spouses who are before the court, those support orders had historically in this province been in large part often ignored by the spouse against whom the order was issued. As a result of that, our government brought forward the Support and Custody Orders Enforcement Act to create a mechanism to assist spouses to collect the payments due from spouses against whom an order had issued in respect of payment for support for both children and spouses.
The Attorney General said that there has developed a tremendous backlog, and that is right. If this legislation is able to put into place a better system and alleviate that backlog, it will have been successful. I simply want to tell the minister -- who has now agreed, as the result of a brief conversation I had with him, that we will be considering this bill in the standing committee on administration of justice -- that this bill alone is not going to be effective in doing what he wants to do unless there is a dramatic enhancement of the resources provided to the office and to the director for the administration of this program. Indeed, one of the problems that the office has had over a long period of time is insufficient resources to do the work that it was mandated to do.
This new bill allows -- in fact requires -- a court when it issues an order for support to have that order for support go to this office and requires the automatic deduction from payroll of the amount due periodically, whether it be weekly or monthly. So this is going to be a very busy office indeed. In fact, it is going to be like the income tax department, collecting payments, automatically deducted by employers, from all over the province. It is going to have to manage a new and dramatically different relationship with employers in order to ensure that those payments come in regularly -- the amount of bookkeeping that is going to be required is very, very significant -- and then to ensure that those payments get out in time from that office to the spouse who is the beneficiary of the order for support, and of course the children as well.
If the Attorney General believes that he is going to be able to solve these problems simply with this act and not a dramatic increase in resources available for that office, the Attorney General and all of those spouses who are looking forward to the implementation of this bill are going to be terribly disappointed.
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It is a massive undertaking. It is a dramatic departure from the way in which support orders have historically been dealt with, even with the office that we now have. I hope the Attorney General, during his remarks on second reading of this bill, will tell us that in the upcoming budget or upon passage of this legislation those resources will be made available to the office and to the director. In the absence of those resources, the spouses who uniformly applauded this bill around the province are going to be at the door of the Attorney General demanding that he do something to fulfil the promise that this bill was designed to fulfil.
I mentioned in my opening remarks that the proposal being brought forward now is really a proposal that was developed by the previous Attorney General, the member for St George-St David, in his last year as Attorney General of the province. I know that because I was part of both the cabinet committees and the cabinet that considered and approved this project.
There are some things that are different about this proposal, and I hope that we are going to be able to discuss those during committee hearings. There was a feature, for example, that was known in our discussions of this proposal as a mandatory so-called kickout provision out of the system. That provision was designed to remove from the system those arrangements for support that were working perfectly well; that is, situations where there was no longer any indication that the payment of support from one spouse to the other would not be provided.
Apparently the new Attorney General and the NDP cabinet, in their wisdom, have decided not to include that provision in the bill, and I will be wanting to know from the Attorney General very specifically the reasons why he has removed that provision from the bill and he has not seen fit to make the administration of this system more effective than it will be under the provisions of Bill 17.
The other thing that I think ought to be mentioned during consideration of Bill 17 is that, in the absence of employment, this bill has no effect at all. It is very nice to say that we will have a system requiring an automatic deduction from income against the income of the spouse who is required to support his or her former spouse; but if that spouse does not have a job, there is no income from which to deduct the required payments.
If there is anything that has happened in this province over the past six months, anything of real significance, it is the dramatic rise in the rate of unemployment. Last night I had an opportunity to participate in the holiday celebrations of the National Congress of Italian Canadians. I had an opportunity during those celebrations to meet a contractor who pleaded with me to listen to his problems. He told me that last year at this time he employed 450 people on a variety of construction sites. He told me that at present his workforce is made up of some 80 people and that shortly after the holidays he will have no workers working for him. His business opportunities will come to an end. That is just one small example of the extent to which this province is in the depths of a very serious recession.
Notwithstanding the promises made by the now Premier during the election campaign and his own acknowledgement that we were in a recession at that time -- and his acknowledgement in this House that we are certainly in a deep recession and he is very dissatisfied with the fact that we are in a deep recession -- we have seen nothing from this government to deal with the realities of the unemployed in this province.
The Premier has talked about some $700-million fund that sooner or later is going to get spent. Maybe $40 million will be spent this winter. That is an interesting figure, because about a month ago the Attorney General announced the expenditure of $40 million to hire judges and crown attorneys to deal with a backlog of another sort, this time in our provincial courts and in our other criminal courts. He acknowledged at that time, I think in sort of a convoluted way, that it was not really very much but it was an expenditure that would help, along with a number of other initiatives, to deal with the court backlog. But what would it do? It would hire some 27 or so judges and some 40 or 50 crown attorneys. How many jobs is that? We have 450 jobs lost in the firm of one small contractor, and that story is repeated over and over again in virtually every single community in this province.
I remember during his days in opposition the member for Windsor-Riverside going on at length about plant closures in the Windsor area. What have we heard from this government about plant closures in the Windsor area since it has come to office? Virtually nothing.
If we do not do something urgently about the desperate situation in employment in this province, then for those mothers and those children who are expecting after the passage of this bill to have regular payments of support, the bill really is a sham; it will do nothing. It is of no assistance where the spouse who is supposed to be paying support has been laid off, has no income, has run out of unemployment insurance benefits and can possibly for a while call upon our system of welfare.
Let us get on with support and custody orders enforcement. Let us get on with this dramatic new intervention into the workplace to say, "From now on, it's going to be a matter of course, that if you owe support to your former spouse and your children, you are going to have to pay it, because it's going to be deducted from your income." It is unconscionable that a spouse who has an order against him or her does not pay that order -- we all agree about that -- and it is unconscionable that we have the kind of delays that we have in the current system.
We look to new adventures, to intervening in the workplace the way the income tax system does, to say, "We're going to take it before you get your cheque." I think the province's workplaces and workers and employers are going to be able to adjust to this. I think there is going to be some reaction. We are going to hear about that in committee, but let us get on with that.
But let us not pretend, as I think the Attorney General tried to pretend in his statement when he introduced the bill and in his statement today, that this is going to make some sort of important impact on child poverty. I regretted the fact that he referred to child poverty as an objective or as a goal he was going to alleviate. This is only a step in alleviating child poverty. Let us see what the government has to do to eliminate family poverty and poverty caused by the fact that workers in this province simply cannot find work.
This government announced $40 million to hire judges and $40 million to spend over the winter to deal with the recession. It is shocking for a New Democratic Party government -- which in some respects should know more about the tragedy of unemployment and the tragedy of unemployability because of the lack of work -- sit back and say, "Well, now, we are going to have a budget in the spring and we are going to consider these matters in our budget."
Mr Speaker, do you know what they are saying in my riding? In my riding, they are saying that this will probably be the hardest winter that Canada has seen in years and years. I do not think it is enough to say: "Well, we have just been elected; we didn't expect to be elected and we're not ready yet. After all, we're coming forward with a budget in April or May or some time in the spring and we're going to deal with those questions then. We're going to talk more about our tax system then and we're going to talk more about what we are going to do with the recession then."
What is going to have happened by that time? Workers will have lost their houses. Workers will have been unable to put food on the table for their families. Workers are going to have to suffer the humiliation of pleading for a meal at a food bank in Ontario. This is outrageous, that we have not had some response now. This is the second-last day that this Parliament meets before we adjourn for the holiday season.
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We have had all sorts of bills and all sorts of programs presented. Most of them, let's be fair, were initiatives that were not completed by the previous government when the previous government was defeated on 6 September, this Bill 17 included. But if we do not deal with the recession and the problem of unemployment, then what is going to happen over the wintertime is that families are going to fall apart and the case load for the support and custody enforcement branch is going to increase dramatically, because the evidence is clear about the dramatic impact that the loss of a job and the inability to put food on the table, pay the rent and pay the mortgage can have on the stability of a family.
We do not need more studies on that. We know that SCOE is going to have a fabulously large case load because of the very recession that the government of the day refuses to do anything about. I know about high interest rates at the federal level and I know about the high level of the dollar, but we cannot do anything about that. That is out of our hands.
It may be politically opportune for the Premier to talk about that and to say that he has written to the Prime Minister and he has condemned John Crow in public, but the fact is that people are losing their jobs. These are people who perhaps for the first time in their lives have been both without work and without any prospect of finding work. These are construction workers, for example. who two years ago could, if they wished, work for 50, 60, 80, 100 hours a week. There was always work there. They were turning down work. Now they come to my office and they say to me: "Can you help me find a job? Do you have any influence? Can I work for the school board? Can I work for the town of Vaughan? I'm strong, I'm able, I'm out of work. I don't know what to do."
One of the things that is going to happen to those families is that they are going to suffer terrible pressure from not being able to provide the things that they want to provide for their children, with their own spouses. What happens? Marriages break down. Families cannot tolerate the pressure of not being able to provide. We know about it. We have seen historically for years and years that poverty is one of the single most important causes of family breakdown.
We are going to have a great system. This is good legislation from the Attorney General, developed by the previous Attorney General, to make sure that when there is an order for support, it gets deducted from income. I am glad we are doing it. I am glad we are going to be considering it for some time in committee. I think both I and my colleagues from the third party will have amendments to propose to make the bill a little better, and we are going to hear from the public.
But surely to God, as we think about another deduction from income, automatically registered against the income of the working people of this province where they are under a legal obligation to support their children and their spouses, we also ought to be thinking about income itself. The one shocking failure of this government over its first three months in office and its first month and a half in Parliament is that in the midst of perhaps the worst recession that some of us will ever have seen, the government's response has been no response at all.
Ms Haslam: I question the honourable member's grave concern when he talks about loss of jobs and the impact on the stability of families and the large demand on SCOE. What would he suggest? He is not in favour of another deduction, an automatic deduction. Perhaps the alternative is to allow continued non-compliance and to let the most vulnerable in our society, the children and single parents, suffer because he thinks it is inappropriate to make an automatic deduction for their support. I wholly disagree.
I think this legislation is trying to look at the hard winter we have ahead of us and it is trying to say there are people who are going to be vulnerable out there and let us do something for those people. Those people are the children and those people are the single women raising those children who will be forced to go into a hard winter, harder if they do not have some visible support in this manner.
Ms S. Murdock: I would like to speak to the member for York Centre's comments, because I have worked as a constituency assistant for both Elie Martel and the member for Sudbury East for the past fours years and too often have had to deal with the very cases that SCOE, and the present system of SCOE, have set up. I know that in the past year, for instance, prior to the election, we petitioned the previous government time and time again to do something about the mess that SCOE was; that the delay was unreasonable; that it took far too long to get cheques paid to them, the ones that they deserved. The previous government did nothing about it.
Yes, we are dealing with child poverty and it is child poverty that this bill speaks to, because it is feeding the children, it is making sure that they have a roof over their heads. It is caring for the kids, and the single-parent families are the ones that are seriously suffering with the present SCOE system.
This bill is this government's initiative, as far as I am concerned, because if we were not here on this side of the House, we would still be waiting for SCOE to be taken care of. This child and family act will lay SCOE to rest once and for all.
Hon Mr Hampton: I want to respond to the member for York Centre, because he did raise some issues that I think need to be responded to.
First of all, perhaps he was not listening when the bill was announced and introduced for first reading, but concomitant with the introduction of the bill, $2 million in additional resources will be committed to the child and family support office.
I also want to point out to him that what payroll deduction will do is deal with the situations where there is money available. It will then allow the staff of the child and family support office to concentrate its work and their resources on areas where enforcement is difficult. What this plan will do is it will ensure that money will flow where money is available and it will free up the enforcement resources of the child and family support office to concentrate on those areas where there has been some difficulty for one reason or another.
I recognize we are in a recession; I think everyone recognizes that. I want to point out as well that studies show that in 80% of the cases support payers can pay support and that is the target, to zero in on the 80% of support payers who can pay support. That is what the former government did not do.
I also want to make just a general comment. The member refers to the fact that we are in a recession and the government should be spending more money. I want to say this government would love to spend more money. The fact of the matter is that people who came before us governed this province in five years with the greatest wealth the province ever experienced and left us with a $2.5-billion deficit.
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Mr Sorbara: Just to respond to my friend the member for Perth, I guess I did not make myself clear or she was not listening. I support this bill and I support automatic deductions. I saw the cabinet submission as it was initially drafted, I supported the previous Attorney General in moving the cabinet submission forward and I spoke vigorously in favour of it when it was considered by the previous cabinet. I am not complaining about income deduction. I think it is necessary and appropriate in this system. What I said, and I will say it to her again, is that if there is not an income, there is nothing from which you can deduct, and that is the real issue that we are confronted with in this province at this time.
My friend the member for Sudbury, like all members, will be dealing with these problems, not as a constituency assistant any more but as a member. She will see that if the Attorney General is only going to put $2 million into this new system, her constituency assistants are going to have problems five years from now.
I want to tell the Attorney General in conclusion that he must not be satisfied with an additional $2 million in the system. He is setting up a very sophisticated bureaucracy here. An additional infusion of $2 million is not going to buy him the kind of staff resources and machinery to make all of these deductions and to make this system work, and I want to put him on notice that we are going to be examining very, very carefully during committee hearings of this bill the kind of administrative system that is going to be put into place.
We have a tax system that makes automatic deductions and that is a very expensive system to operate, and we all know that can break down and those computers can get it wrong. His new system has to be resourced in a way to make sure that he and the people who are relying on it get it right, and we are going to stand for nothing less.
Mr Harnick: Mr Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to rise today and speak to Bill 17, the Child and Family Support Statute Law Amendment Act, 1990. As you are undoubtedly aware, the function of the support and custody office is one of immense importance to the 100,000 children which it serves. Without an effectively functioning support and custody program in the province, these children and their custodial parents would be left in a world of not enough. It is the job of the support and custody office to ensure that this does not happen.
Due to the high costs associated with enforcement, many people legally entitled to support have traditionally been unable to take the steps necessary to ensure that their rights are upheld. The vast majority of these individuals are women and many of them are single parents living below the poverty line. This makes the successful completion of tasks assigned to the support and custody office of vital importance. Every day there are 60 divorce cases granted in the province of Ontario and support orders dating back two years or more are being registered with the support and custody enforcement office at the rate of 1,000 per month.
Unfortunately, the success of the office has been woefully inadequate. The prime reason for this, as the member for Rainy River pointed out prior to the election, is an absence of adequate resources. The dedicated staff of the support and custody enforcement office cannot keep up with the demand for their services. There are simply too many deadbeat dads out there. The member for Rainy River has suggested that it would be necessary to double the current budget of $14 million if the office is going to be able to do what it is supposed to do. It is somewhat interesting to note that since he now bears the responsibility for this program, he has changed his mind.
The idea of $2 million in additional expenditure is somewhat like spitting in the ocean. The support and custody office currently has some 81,000 orders on file, of which 75% are in default. This 75% cumulatively owes $334 million in arrears. The Attorney General has said that this bill will allow the office to improve the efficiency of the support program to 60%.
Even the current 75% rate of arrears is an improvement over the situation of just a couple of short years ago. In 1985, it was the then Progressive Conservative Attorney General Alan Pope, then member for Cochrane South, who introduced legislation designed to create the Support and Custody Orders Enforcement office. When Mr Pope introduced the legislation to establish the Support and Custody Orders Enforcement office, there was no program of its like in Ontario, and it promised great things for families victimized by unwilling support payers. Unfortunately, the Liberal government that finally did establish the office left it tragically underfunded and without sufficient staff. In later years, one of the most often-heard complaints by members' offices from constituents was that those who had the need to talk with the enforcement office were unable to even get through on the telephone. The Liberal response to this was to install a new phone system with touch-tone phones -- not an adequate response.
I must, however, give credit to the member for St George-St David, who recognized the importance of this operation when he established it in 1987, two years after the Conservative legislation, and noted: "The effective enforcement of support and custody orders isn't simply a women's issue. It is a family issue. Matters of support and custody are vitally important to the wellbeing and successful rearing of our children and I am confident that this program will help to facilitate those needs."
He was right. This program does help to facilitate those needs, except that it now needs fine-tuning. For such an important program, which has only been in place for five years, I can accept that it is now necessary to fine-tune it.
It seems only a short time ago that this House was engaged in a similar debate over Bill 124, the Children's Law Reform Amendment Act. This government has said that it will not bring Bill 124 into force, and it must be congratulated for this. Bill 124 was a bad response to some very real problems. It was bad because it placed unrealistic expectations on the court system and failed to address the issues of supervised access, access rights of grandparents and the mediation process. The problems of the backlogged court system that we have seen thus far in Ontario would be nothing in comparison with the backlogs the system would experience had Bill 124 been brought into force.
Because the government will not be bringing Bill 124 into force, there is an issue which I would like to comment upon in addition to support enforcement, and that is access rights. While this is not a part of the bill before the House today, it is a corollary issue and should be addressed.
The decision not to bring Bill 124 into effect forces the members of this House to look once again at the issue of custody enforcement. What Bill 124 had hoped to do was to give some strength to the other mandate of the support office, for let us not forget that it also bears responsibility for custody enforcement.
As it now stands, a person who has been denied access can apply to the courts to have the offending parent found guilty of contempt of court for violating the original court order on custody. However, the only penalties available to the courts are jail sentences and fines and the courts are obviously reluctant to send a custodial parent to jail or impose financial penalties on him, in the logical belief that such actions would not be in the best interests of the children. As a result, the current process is slow, cumbersome, expensive and seldom results in improved access. Bill 124 sought to change this by establishing a series of deadlines to which the court had to respond in order to guarantee access, such as the hearing of a complaint within 10 days of filing.
Unfortunately, the previous government was somewhat unrealistic in its expectations of the ability of the court. In order for Bill 124 to work effectively in this manner, it required sufficient courts, judges and court reporters to handle the increased workload and short deadlines for hearing of the motions. As recent experience has shown us, this is more a romantic view of the courts than one grounded in fact. As this government has rejected Bill 124, it now becomes necessary for it to deal with what is left in its place, and that is nothing.
It is now the responsibility of this government to introduce new legislation to deal with the issue of access. As it stands currently, non-custodial parents are left with two options for enforcing access provisions. One of these is the courts, yet this is ineffectual because of the reluctance to put custodial parents in jail, as well as the extreme delays in the judicial process. The other option is withholding support payments. This is a distasteful method of attempting to enforce access provisions and one which we are better off without. Bill 17 rightfully removes this as an option for support payers. With the absence of Bill 124, it is the very real and very important responsibility of this government to introduce new measures to deal with access rights for non-custodial parents and grandparents.
My party has a strong history in the area of support and custody. In 1985 it was the Progressive Conservative Attorney General, the member for Cochrane South, who introduced legislation to create the support and custody enforcement office.
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In 1987 two private members' bills were introduced by members of this party. One bill, Bill 45, was introduced by the current member for Markham and sought to amend Bill 124 by clarifying the duties and qualifications of the mediators in child access disputes and establishing access rights for grandparents.
In November 1987 the member for Oakville South, Terry O'Connor, introduced a private member's bill, the Children's Law Reform Amendment Act,1987, suggesting the funding of supervised access centres and encouraging the mediation process.
During committee hearings into Bill 124, Conservative members of that committee sought amendments to establish supervised access centres and to improve the mediation process. However, the Liberal members, who were in the majority on that committee, ensured that the bill remained unamended. When this government does introduce new legislation to deal with the issue of access, and I hope that is soon, I hope it will bear these issues in mind and craft the legislation accordingly.
But the bill before us now is not without flaw either. What this bill seeks to do is to remove the middleman in the garnishment of wages for support payments. This reduces the administrative load of the support and custody office, enabling it to better spend its time chasing down the 75% of support payers defaulting on their payments. This is good, but the price is that 25% of support payers who are registered with the program and do regularly make their payments are going to have their wages, in effect, garnisheed also.
I know the government says that there is no stigma attached to this program that and no one will ever know because of the confidentiality provisions accompanying the legislation, but I am sorry, it does not work that way in the real world. In a large company, where there are many hundreds or thousands of employees, perhaps the employee is just a number and he gets lost in the shuffle and it has no effect on him, but most employees work for small companies and the reality is that there is very little personal information not widely known by co-workers.
The government holds that mass collection of these orders, like income tax or pension contributions, will remove the stigma attached with garnishment of wages. I am sorry, but I do not agree. Where a person has demonstrated in the past that he is willing and able to make his payments regularly in accordance with the requirements of the order, my party and I believe he should be allowed to continue to do so. Certainly, the problems associated with divorce, separation and custody battles are damaging enough to individuals. Is it really the role of the government to seek to remove any last shreds of self-esteem remaining? I do not think so.
To this end, I will be introducing two amendments to the bill. The first amendment seeks to allow those persons who are currently meeting the provisions of their support and custody orders to pay them directly to the director, without automatic collection. It is the responsibility of the director to forward these payments on to the support recipient.
In this manner, an individual who has demonstrated the willingness and the ability to make payments shall not be penalized for the 75% who are not. By making the payments through the office of the director, it still ensures that the director has control over the situation. As part of this amendment there will also be the proviso that if there is a single aberration from the order without explanation deemed reasonable by the director, the director will have the power to revert automatically to a direct collection method. In this manner, the recipient gets the support, the director maintains control and the support payer retains his or her dignity. I ask, where is the harm in that?
Similarly, the second amendment that I will be introducing will allow new support payers the similar dignity of presuming the willingness and ability to make payments, providing that the court is satisfied the debtor is likely to make the payments. As such, unless the court deems otherwise, first-time payers will be able to voluntarily make their payments directly to the director without presumption of guilt. Once again, a single failure to make payment without reasonable explanation will result in the imposition of automatic support collection.
These amendments are designed and intended to protect the rights and dignity of the responsible 25% of support payers who do meet the requirements of their support orders. Certainly, those who demonstrate that they are not willing to meet the provisions of their payment orders should be subject to automatic collection procedures. I would hope that my fellow members will agree with me and support these amendments.
There are other problems with this bill that may be dealt with through amendment or through regulation and I would hope the government would do so. One of these is the problem of collection from the self-employed. The bill provides for automatic collection where there is a regular income source or even where there are interim income sources, but fails to collect adequately from the self-employed. I would hope that the government would be able to determine some method of ensuring that this is not just a plan the middle class is subject to.
Additionally, the bill makes provision for the collection of orders from outside the province, providing that they are duly registered under the Reciprocal Enforcement of Maintenance Orders Act, 1982. All of the provinces of Canada have agreed to enforce such provisions on behalf of each other. However, as Ontario is one of the few provinces to have such an office, the actual rate of collection outside of the province is far from satisfactory. To this end, I would urge the government to seek some method of successfully collecting these orders outside the province as well, in order that we do not continue to see support payers moving outside of the provincial jurisdiction in order to avoid payment.
Hopefully, with the increase in efficiency of the support program to 60%, as the Attorney General has promised us, the officers of that program will be better able to seek collection out of province.
Finally, the real problem surrounding this issue is one of attitude. The previous government was quite successful in changing public attitudes surrounding the issue of spousal assault. Their advertising campaign "Wife assault: It's a crime" has been successful to a significant degree. Public attitudes and perceptions towards this issue are changing, and for the better. Similarly, it is necessary to change public attitudes and perceptions towards the payment of support, because there are 100,000 children who depend on it.
Child poverty is a very real problem in this province and one that support compliance could go a long way to reduce. Perhaps a similar advertising campaign is called for such as "Default on support: It's a crime." And it is a crime. It says so in section 11 of the act. What we need to do is to begin enforcing the act. Defaulters must be made to recognize that such default is a crime punishable by imprisonment. It is a crime against the law and against those who are dependent on the support.
It is only through a change in public attitudes that it will be possible to break the cycle of child poverty which is in part created by spousal default. I urge the government to become more proactive in ensuring that we work towards changing such attitudes.
The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Questions and comments?
Mr Cousens: I appreciate very much the direction that the critic for the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus is taking with his amendment. It is a very careful amendment. I would like to comment on it and I would like him to elaborate further. I know he will have ample opportunity when this goes to committee of the whole House.
What I see the member bringing forward is a philosophy of government that says, "Don't try to give the full, broad-brush treatment to everybody." If 75% of people are not maintaining their payments as they should, then let's look after them. If 25% are properly following through in fulfilling their obligations, why treat them in a way that they do not necessarily have to be treated?
What this honourable member has brought forward is an amendment to this bill that will hopefully address the one group that is the problem group, and that recognizes there is another group that has been responsibly handling its obligations. I would have to say that I appreciate the kind of leadership that the member for Willowdale is bringing to the House with this kind of thinking. It is unfortunate that government has to get so involved in everything. Let's deal with the areas where there are problems. Where there are no problems, is there not a better way of handling it?
If he could elaborate upon that and give us some of the background to it, this might be an appropriate time to comment on it. I appreciate the remarks he made and I appreciate also the kind of balance and perspective he is bringing to this bill.
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Hon Mr Hampton: I want to respond just briefly to the member for Willowdale. I want to point out to him that I agree with him. While I was in opposition I frequently criticized the support and custody enforcement office. In fact, we had a regular organized critique. At least one of us each week had something to say about SCOE.
I want to point out to him, as I pointed out to the critic for the Liberal Party, that the government is committing $2 million right now to begin to deal with the backlog. When the child and family support plan comes into effect we will be committing a further $3 million to ensure that the program will have the sufficient funds to work.
I also want to point out that the idea behind making income deduction a mandatory system is to do precisely what the member for Willowdale is concerned about, and that is to remove the stigma. If we can establish over the next two years a system that has won the acceptance that income tax has won in terms of income deduction, then there should not be a stigma for anyone.
The second point I want to make is this: Again, studies have shown that 80% of the support payers have the financial capacity to pay support. If through income deduction we can reach that 80%, the people who now work at the child and family support office will then be able to use their hours, their time and their resources to look after the other 20%.
I look forward to any helpful suggestions the member has, particularly in committee.
Mr Harnick: I note that the Attorney General, and quite rightly, says that there is no stigma in terms of income tax. Income tax is not a penalty.
Hon Mr Hampton: And this won't be a penalty either.
Mr Harnick: This will not be a penalty either, but income tax for some reason has associated with it the long arm of the law. If you do not pay your taxes, you go to jail. I hope that the Attorney General -- I alluded to it in my remarks, probably not in emphatic enough detail -- will start to use the provisions of section 11 and ensure that those who do not pay go to jail, because if 80% are able to pay -- I accept that; I am sure the minister knows that; I do not, but I am sure he is accurate -- if 80% have the ability to pay and the large percentage are not paying, they will pay if they know they must go to jail.
I do not think it is overreacting to say that this section has to be used, because the public's perception of this problem must be changed and it must be changed very quickly or this office will be inundated again and backlogged again to the point where they cannot dig themselves out. So I hope the minister will enforce the legislation. The old legislation, the legislation the Liberals brought in, had those provisions but it was never enforced, and without enforcing it, it has no teeth. It is very important that we establish a system of deterrents and respect for this legislation.
Hon Ms Swarbrick: As the minister for women's issues, I am delighted to be able to support Bill 17, the Child and Family Support Statute Law Amendment Act. I am extremely pleased with its provisions for automatic support deductions from paycheques of parents who have been ordered by courts to pay them.
This bill will have tremendous significance for both women and their children. As has been pointed out, there are now 77,000 support orders on file with only 25% compliance, with 75% non-compliance, something that should be seen as a social crime.
A study that was recently done by the Canadian Institute for Research in Alberta showed that this non-compliance is not the result of inability to pay. As the Attorney General just mentioned a moment ago, 80% of those with support orders against them are perfectly capable of paying. Unfortunately, they do not transmit that money to the women and children who need it, leading those women and children often to end up living in poverty.
The National Council of Welfare released a report in the summer of 1990 called Women and Poverty Revisited which stated, "Small as they are, support payments make a significant difference: 58% of the divorced and separated women who received them lived in poverty in 1986 compared with 75% of the women who did not." These support payments make a real difference as to whether women and children live above or below the poverty line. There are so many hovering right around it.
The failure of payment of support is a significant factor in the number of children who are living in poverty in Ontario, especially when we consider that 75% non-compliance in light of the 100,000 children who are involved in support orders on file. This is a crucial contributor to child poverty in Ontario. Of support orders, 89% do involve child support.
I believe that all of Ontario's taxpayers will welcome this new Child and Family Support Statute Law Amendment Act as they learn that it will mean fewer Ontario women and children are forced to rely on the welfare system for assistance. The National Council of Welfare has also pointed out that single-parent mothers who receive even modest amounts of support stay on welfare for much shorter periods than those who receive no support.
The national council has also stated that unless Canada strengthens fathers' obligations and government support to single-parent families, rising rates of marriage breakdowns will continue to shift an ever-growing share of responsibility for children on to the shoulders of society's poorest parents -- single mothers. In fact, we have to remember that 85% of all single-parent families are headed by women.
My government is proud to continue to be doing its part to strengthen fathers' obligations and to help create more equal relationships between men and women, including sharing in the responsibility for the parenting and care of children.
Research in the United States demonstrates that automatic support deduction increases collections, reduces default, prevents arrears from being caused and accumulated, and prevents the monthly crises that occur in the families of those single-parent women with children when that money does not come in.
It is this automatic support deduction program and the very nature of it being automatic and universally applied to all that will help in itself to strengthen the public image of paying child support as being a legal and a moral imperative. It appears to me that it is the universality of that automatic support deduction program that will ensure there is no stigma.
If we can provide for automatic support deduction for things like income tax and for benefits for employees and their families when they are together as a family, we certainly can provide for it in the same universal nature with regard to the support of children following marriage dissolution. It is crucial, I believe, to change our whole social attitude towards the payment of child support and family support, so that it is something that is universally applied to all.
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The child and family support program will mean that women will not be reduced to being supplicants, as we have been so often in the past, so frequently forced to go through the cost and the bureaucracy of both the court system and the welfare system to obtain the support payments that are due to them.
Bill 17 is one more step along the road to creating equal relationships and equal responsibilities between men and women. It is another step towards truly civilizing us as a society, in my opinion.
The other parties, especially the official opposition party, have made some reference to taking credit for this program, saying that the idea is one that has been around for some time. In fact, it is; it is one that we in opposition hammered home and one that the past government refused to act upon, one that the past government did nothing about.
I would like to conclude by commending the Attorney General for introducing this bill so early in the life of this new government and for the public awareness campaign that he has indicated to us he will soon be launching.
Mr Cousens: This is my first chance to recognize the fact that the member for Scarborough West once ran in 1987 in the riding of Markham. I publicly want to congratulate her on her appointment to cabinet and also on winning the last election in Scarborough West. I think she is an excellent asset to the Rae government.
Having given a compliment, maybe I can get an answer from her on one little matter. I do not think the Attorney General would have brought forward this legislation if it were not for this member's being in the cabinet because, quite candidly, I have to believe she has a strong and true commitment to issues that go beyond just women's issues.
This is a family issue and I happen to know the minister as a very balanced person. I do not want to give compliments to the NDP but I have to, though, because the minister is a very special, good person. Did she personally convince him to table this legislation quickly, and how did she do it?
Mr Sorbara: As long as we have the member for Markham up congratulating the new Minister without Portfolio responsible for women's issues, I just want to say that I remember that campaign in which the now member for Scarborough West was contesting the seat in Markharn, trying to unseat the incumbent member for Markham.
I am glad she moved for the 1990 campaign to the riding of Scarborough West because we have thought of innumerable ways to try to unseat the member for Markham. I think probably the current member for Scarborough West had the best opportunity in 1987, and I really wish she had done a better job then. We would have welcomed her here during the last Parliament, even though we all enjoy the comments, irrelevant as they are, from the member for Markham.
I look forward to the answer she is going to give to the member for Markham on whether it was her intervention in cabinet that really tipped the balance in the debates that went on there. I think probably she is not going to answer the question because that would be a breach of the solidarity and the prohibition against discussing the way in which decisions are made in cabinet.
There is only one minister who tends to do that now, the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations, who, when asked just about anything, runs off at the mouth and says the most outrageous things, but of course he is not going to be in cabinet long and there will be an opportunity.
As I was once the minister responsible for women's issues and thereafter moved to the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations, I simply want to tell the minister responsible for women's issues that she may shortly be taking on a new role in cabinet, replacing the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations, and she can continue to be an advocate for women's issues in that new role.
Hon Ms Swarbrick: I would simply like to begin by thanking the member for Markham, whom I did enjoy very much running against, for his lovely compliments at the beginning. I would like to assure him that I am quite pleased to answer the question he put. I was totally thrilled that the Attorney General introduced this legislation before I had time to even think to be able to get over to talk to him about it. I am extremely pleased with the collegial nature of the workings of this government and the initiative of my brother, who holds the position of Attorney General.
Mr Cousens: This is a bill that has tremendous importance and, like the critic for our party, I will be supporting it, but I would like to comment on it in a number of ways --
Mr Sorbara: Tell us how you feel about it.
Mr Cousens: I am coming to that. The honourable member for York Centre will find that I am not short on words. I will at least try to keep them on subject for my honourable friend and neighbour. I know that is very difficult.
I believe the government has brought forward an important piece of legislation to help catch up in an area in which there has not been action taken. When we start seeing the statistics they had to offer on it, there is no doubt that we have a problem. When we have 100,000 children being affected and 89% of the orders not being followed, it is time we addressed it. I appreciate the fact that the Attorney General has taken to this very quickly, as the member for Scarborough West has indicated. It is no accident that he did it. It is something he has obviously been thinking about.
I have been following the Attorney General with a close eye, not being a lawyer myself, but I have been with him on committees on a number of occasions with Bill 124 and a few other issues. I appreciate the fact that he has begun to do some of the things that the Liberals never did, and one of those things has to be to clear up the backlog in the courts. I hope he is successful in that.
When we were in the standing committee on public accounts earlier this year, I had assurances from the deputy minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General that action was being taken that would begin to remedy the problems in the courts. The fact is they failed to do that. Maybe the Attorney General's action now is a further step in the right direction.
Bill 17 has to be seen in the context of something that is going on within our society right now that goes beyond purely the needs of the children who are involved in a marital breakup. I think we also have to look at the whole relationship. When a couple decides to break up and the children are involved, every one of us in this House has seen it happen -- we have seen it happen within our families, we have seen it happen within our communities, with our neighbours and our friends -- we know the amount of hurt that comes out of it and how painful and agonizing this whole thing is.
It is almost worse than a death sometimes for those people who are caught in the legal entanglements that follow, who are separated from the children they love, with the pain of not being able to see each other when they want to, the cost that goes into it, the economic hardship, the whole ripple effect that goes on with the estranged children when they are with one parent or the other. They have to learn an awful lot that a family which is still together does not have to learn. How difficult that must be and how difficult it is for young people within our society.
I guess it has been so in every society. It has been there because of accidents in the past. It has been there because of disease, sickness and problems in a different age. But it is present in our society in a huge way with the number of divorces that are taking place. It is not for us to pass judgement on that. That is not my job and it is not our job as legislators to pass judgement. It is our job to make sure that we responsibly look after our society, our communities.
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I think of the failure in Rome that had to do with the breakup of the family and the small unit, the nuclear unit, that was the family. I know that the definition of "family" has changed a great deal in recent years. The Minister of Labour would give us a new definition of family, which I find rather difficult as it would pertain to adoption processes; we touched upon it yesterday and there will be plenty of opportunity to get to that later.
We are talking, though, about the drama, the neverending saga for those people who are caught up as the children are growing up and they want to have some way of reconciling this family unit, and we can do it. You have to have the financial component in place, but you also have to have the other parts, which are the social, psychological and the spiritual, considered when you are looking at people's needs.
The problem we have with this bill, if I have any major concern with it, is that it is dealing exclusively with the financial unit, which is important. It is an aspect that goes into the ongoing care and responsibility for the members of the family, the separated members and the new families that evolve out of that. But I truly hope that the Attorney General quickly addresses other concerns that pertain to custody and access and where we, as a responsible group of legislators, as a whole three-party system, hopefully can come up with some resolution to this problem that says there has got to be a way in meeting the needs of access.
At the present time, probably the most punitive thing that happens -- and you see it with both men and women -- it that when someone is not maintaining the commitment, the trust, the responsibility, to get him or her back the other party says: "Okay, I will get you back. You cannot see the kids." They may not say that. Though they have gained access to the children through a court order, come Friday night 5 o'clock the parent comes up all ready to meet the children and do something with them and the children are not there, the former spouse is not there. So they wait around and then they go away and have one of those terrible nights by themselves because they did not have a chance to see their children whom they thought they would be seeing, whom they were entitled to see through the access order.
So the next Friday night they have another date, and this is the entitlement that this parent has for a couple of hours or several hours or a night or something, and the children do not appear. I have to tell members this is a terribly agonizing part of what is going on and the pain of our society, because there are parents who are out there right now who have not seen their children, cannot see their children and will not see their children because someone is breaking the access rule.
The way the law is set up there is no easy recourse for them. Unfortunately, some of the 89% of those people who are failing to fulfil their financial obligations are using finances to punish the other spouse and the children. I do not know whether that is the case but I am assuming that is the case, because that is their only way of retaliating. That is wrong, because they have accepted a responsibility, a financial responsibility, for their family and it is their duty and their obligation to society and to themselves and to all of us to fulfil that responsibility and obligation.
But how do you fight back? There is no real way for people to fight back when in fact the other party has cut access to their children. What happens now is that you can go back to court and try to seek some redress of the other party for violating the original court order, and the penalties under the law as it stands now provide for contempt of court or for a fine or a jail sentence. For parents who have children, who wants to break them up any more by putting them in jail? Most of them do not have much money, so there is not much use in imposing a fine. So we end up still having the problem existing.
The current law provides no method for resolving access disputes when the custodial parent has reasonable grounds for denying access. And there are occasions when a reasonable parent is concerned that there is violence, there is alcoholism, there is the possibility of a kidnapping and taking away for longer. We are talking about one of the most horrible things that goes on in our society when there is a marital breakup. We as legislators owe it to all our society to deal with it honestly, openly and quickly, and not just drag our feet for an extended period of time.
It is something we have to deal with, because if we are talking right now about 100,000 children in the province of Ontario who are afflicted with the problem of the fact that their parents have broken up and they are financially suffering because of it, there is also emotional suffering and social suffering and other forms of hurt that we can begin to deal with in a proper way if we have a better way of resolving the access issue.
Our current law provides no method for the custodial parent to seek redress against the other parent if that parent infrequently exercises rights of access granted in the original court order. So I have to say, though this issue of access is not part of the bill, it should be part of the government's agenda to deal with the whole issue of what goes on when there is a marriage breakup.
I just have to say that it is draconian and it is wrong. It is almost like the kind of thing we saw in the Soviet Union or thought was going on. I am not sure what happens there any more because they are changing quickly and we are very slow to change. We will drag our feet, we will have the lawyers involved and we will get everybody involved and then we will have the three parties mushing around on the issue and it might take us years to get this out of the Legislature and into the committee. I hope it does not take that long. I hope we can have some kind of awakening that allows us to respond to the issue of these children, these families and these people, that takes a step further than we have been going in the past.
I commend the Attorney General for the effort he is taking in that part of the equation that deals with the finances, but I have to say -- and how can you demand it; you cannot -- that I plead with the Attorney General and I plead with the government to go a step further and look into access, to deal with it quickly, to deal with it intelligently, to deal with it in a balanced way. I realize the problems we had with Bill 124, which was the bill on access that was prepared by the now defunct Liberals. It is going to be buried.
Hon Mr Hampton: Do you mean the rump?
Mr Cousens: I do not know what one would call it. They are dead. The only person alive over there is the member for York Centre, my neighbour from the southern part of York region. He is always alive and well, and he even got to a barber this week, so I am really proud of him. That is his Christmas cut.
Mr Sorbara: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: I did get to a barber this week, and the fact is that the member for Markham rarely needs to get to a barber. I just thought I would point that out.
Mr Cousens: After what he did to you, I do not want to go to the same one, because I will not have anything.
I am talking about a very important bill -- and I am sorry, I did go off topic. The fact is the Liberals came out with Bill 124. We went through committee hearings, we talked about access, we talked about mediation, we considered ways in which we in the opposition would participate in a marvellous way, hopefully, to try to come up with something. We came forward with amendments and they were all voted down, but at least we had a chance to talk about it. Then they went through with this bill that they had to ramrod through committee and then they did not even have it proclaimed.
There are a lot of things that went wrong, but part of it has to do with the fact that the Liberal government that existed here up until 6 September failed seriously in dealing with access. I have to put this government on notice: do not do the same thing.
We are talking about grandparents who want to have access. We are talking about supervised access centres. We are looking at the possibility of court-appointed mediators who can help put together recommendations to assist these people in resolving the access problems and other issues that come out of access disputes. We are looking for ways in which mediation can pose a clear opportunity for opening up dialogue between the people.
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The government that just got defeated on 6 September failed to do that. I entreat the Attorney General and those people around him to consider very seriously what can be done with access. I appreciate the fact that the member for Willowdale, our own critic of the Attorney General, has raised this as an issue, and I think that begins to be part of it.
I just want to touch very briefly on some of the concerns I have with Bill 17. If this government runs the administration of this whole thing and starts looking at the support deduction order which comes through, I would have to say please do not let the people in the rent control system put together the computer system.
I have never seen a bureaucracy, with a heap of money, create a bigger backlog and wreck a system more than the previous government did with the rent control system. When they took power in 1985 it cost $8 million to run the rent control. At the end of five years they were spending over $40 million. That is a factor of five increase, and they still had the backlog, they still could not look after the renters and they still did not have the systems in order.
When the Attorney General gets to work on this for the deduction order, he should put together some systems that are going to work and that understand the need for dealing very sensitively with the dollars and cents that these people have. When there is a court order that requires a deduction to be made, that should be up to date quickly. Let's not get caught in a backlog that goes on and on.
The backlog we had in the whole rental system was for years. You cannot even afford weeks on this issue, because what you are dealing with is a matter of just sustaining your lifestyle, keeping things going. Most people in the province of Ontario are just one paycheque away from bankruptcy. They do not have that much money -- life is tough out there -- maybe two paycheques for the odd MPP. The Conservative caucus is half a paycheque away from bankruptcy; if you look at our party debt, that really puts all of us in debt.
The fact of the matter is, things are tight out there; people do not have spare cash. The minister should not allow his deduction system to drag along so that people are not able to have a quick response to it.
I have a good feeling that the amendment being put forward by our party, which would call for 75% of the defaulters to have to pay, is probably not going to carry; but if it does, then we will have only 75% of the problem. We would have some way of relieving some of the overload of work we are about to bite off.
I am saying strongly to make sure the administrative systems for this project are implemented correctly and well and can be responsive to the needs of those people who are going to be obliged to participate in it.
I really do not think the minister can just say he is going to throw $2 million at it and say he has got it solved. I think he had better make sure he has got his best bureaucrats working on that project to ensure that when the system goes in it is going to work, it is going to work quickly and it is not something we are going to have to look at very quickly in the standing committee on public accounts. In fact, that reminds me, I will make sure the Provincial Auditor is monitoring this one closely.
My second point is on administration. We, the government -- I am not a government, I am an MPP and I have tried to keep the government honest; that was a Freudian slip -- we are putting more and more of a load on employers in having to do the government's work for them. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where I do not see any other way around it. The employers are collecting the Ontario provincial sales tax, they are going to have to collect the GST shortly, they have to collect the workers' compensation and they have to pay separately for their health insurance benefits. There are all kinds of deductions they have to make.
Some time there is going to have to be a limit on how much we oblige employers to do. It costs them something to do it, but I see this as a societal obligation. The minister should make sure in this case that his administrative systems are not going to be difficult to understand, difficult to read or an extra effort for employers to handle. He should make sure the needs are related to employers effectively and well.
My third point about Bill 17 concerns the retroactivity of this bill. I said last night, when we were talking about Bill 4, that I deplore the whole possibility of retroactive legislation. Is there any way, when we are looking at this bill in detail, that we can talk about the time when it is going to be implemented? It has to be coincident with the computer systems being up and running and able to do the proper collection procedures. If they start implementing the bill too early and they do not have the systems in place to make it happen, then it is going to cause hardship that could have been averted had it been planned properly. I hope our own critic, the member for Willowdale, and others will be looking at that one closely.
My other point has to do with whether there is any way in which the system can address those who are self-employed, who might be able to otherwise escape the rules and regulations under this legislation. I have no idea how the government is going to do that, but I hope that the minister, who is in the House, will have a chance to consider that.
There are two other issues that relate to this bill and that I would like to see faced up to. I am a Canadian first, proud to be a Canadian, and the fact that I am a Canadian first and a member of the Legislature for the province of Ontario puts it in perspective: Canada and then Ontario.
They are trying to get me to hurry up. There is too much to deal with on this, and I have no intention of cutting short the opportunity of making a few more points; so thank you very much for all the signals. I think we are okay until midnight, are we not?
The first issue is something that should be addressed by everyone in Canada; that is, why can we not begin to have arrangements with all the other provinces for those people who try to escape their responsibilities by moving out of Ontario in order to escape the provisions that the court has put on them? There is no way, when you move to another jurisdiction inside Canada, unless I am missing a factor -- I have so many spouses who are looking for alimony payments and other payments but, because their former spouse is living now in British Columbia or another province, how can you get them to be paid? Can that be done? Is that being handled? Is that going to be handled? I hear the rattle of the brain of the Attorney General, saying it is going to be done.
Mr Sorbara: As he nods his head.
Mr Cousens: As he nods his head.
That is something that really has to be put in here. Is it in the legislation, and is it something we can legislate so that what we are doing here in Ontario applies right across the country? A reciprocal enforcement procedure is the kind of thing we need to have; to me, that is something that is elementary and required.
My other point has to do with the definition of parents, the people who are involved. I really do not feel like getting into that, but it has to do with some of the very insane ideas that started to come from the Minister of Labour last night. If you were to take some of the thinking he has in the definition of the responsible parent of a child, that could lead to some discussions that really are not -- I do not think they are worthy of the House right now, but I think they are worthy of being discussed at some point.
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to comment on this legislation. I think it has some good points to it. I sincerely hope the Attorney General will be attentive to the amendments that are going to come forward from our caucus.
Hon Mr Hampton: I just want to reply briefly to the member for Markham. I want him to note that Ontario does have reciprocal enforcement arrangements with other provinces so that support orders issued here can be enforced in other provinces, and many are. It is not always easy, I grant that. But I want the member to know that since we announced the child and family support program, at least two other provinces have contacted the Ministry of the Attorney General to ask us about the scheme and to ask us to give them the details so they may consider it themselves. In this way, Ontario is leading the way within Canada.
I also want to point out to the member that it is our intention to schedule this issue for discussion when the provinces and the federal government next get together to talk about family law issues.
I want to say that I look forward to the member for Markham's comments as we go forward into committee, because I think some of his comments on this bill will be particularly useful. I hear what he and the member for Willowdale have to say on the issue of access. I am glad to see they support the government on Bill 124 and the decision we have made not to proclaim Bill 124. I look forward to his useful comments in that area as well.
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Mr Callahan: I have a question of the Attorney General.
The Deputy Speaker: No. It is the member for Markham who just debated the issue.
Mr Callahan: Oh, sorry. I say to the member for Markham, this is a very effective way of -- he is not listening.
Mr Cousens: I am listening.
Mr Callahan: Oh. It is a very effective way of gathering money in a very worthy situation. I do not see anything in the bill -- I have looked through it very quickly -- about the question of whether or not an employer can fire the person the Attorney General is attempting to collect the money from by way of garnishee. If that is the case, it becomes counterproductive if there is not a provision in there to protect that job.
My experience has been, and I am sure the member for Markham's has been too, that garnishee proceedings more than once or twice usually result in the person's losing the job. If the net result of that is going to be a job loss, then the losers really are the recipients of the funds.
Through the member for Markham, I ask the Attorney General, who I am sure is listening very closely, is that going to be one of the provisions? If not, why not? What impact will that have on the effectiveness of this whole process?
Ms S. Murdock: I would like to comment on the concerns that the member for Brampton South has regarding people. It is in the act, under part II for employment standards, that employers can be penalized, fined or jailed if they do not comply with the order.
Mr Cousens: One of the sensitivities being raised by the member for Brampton South is still there. You could still be penalized in some way. We really have to make sure there is some way in which that does not happen. Legislation does not necessarily do it. We have got to be sensitive to that and our society has to be educated on it.
I just hope we can improve and streamline the ways in which we can have relationships with other provinces on the payment of amounts due to couples and people who are caught. The Attorney General is aware of the problem. He has recognized that it is a difficult one, but let's not just allow it to go the way it has gone, because I know many people agonize and agonize, who go for months and years and have not received proper payment.
Mr Wessenger: I am very pleased to participate in the debate on this bill. First of all, I would like to pay tribute to the previous Attorney General for the substantial preliminary work he did with respect to it.
I would also like to pay tribute to our Attorney General, because I do not think without his persistence this bill would be here before the House right now. I give him full credit for pushing it forward as his first priority. I am very pleased that I am able to support it.
What I think is most important about this bill is that it puts child and family support to the forefront. Child support is now recognized as the prime responsibility of the support payer. It is put in the same category as income tax or anything else in that category. Also, it continues a trend which we have seen in the law over the years; that is, to put the welfare of children at the highest level. This is just a further step in putting the interests of children above the interests of others.
I think this legislation will definitely help relieve the problems of child and family poverty. Right now only 25% of support orders are complied with. This legislation, we estimate, will bring in 60% compliance. The existing system, SCOE, is not working. I see that in my own constituency. Next to workers' compensation cases and social assistance problems, SCOE problems are the utmost that my constituency assistants have to deal with. They get complaints about the delay being anywhere from six to eight months. They get the problem with respect to lack of communication.
I am pleased that we are going to have additional resources to deal with this problem, both the $2 million to clear up the backlog and the additional $3 million or $4 million for the additional resources and a public awareness program.
As a former general practitioner in law, there is one little side-effect that I think this legislation will have. I believe it will encourage parties to settle their differences by separation agreement. I think it will result in savings of both legal fees for the parties and court time.
This in effect answers the problem raised by the member for Willowdale. He indicated that he did not like this program because it was mandatory. First of all, I would like to say if it is not mandatory it will lose its effectiveness and we will not have that 60% compliance. In effect, it leaves certain groups out now by choice. Existing orders are not under the act unless one of the parties or SCOE decides they should be.
Secondly, separation agreements are not under the act unless one of the parties files it for collection. It does give that option. In my experience in the practice of law, when parties enter into separation agreements they are more likely to keep their payments. When you have a dispute over the question of support, parties are more likely not to keep their payments.
Lastly, on the issue raised by the honourable member for Markham, I think this legislation will also assist with respect to the whole question of access. Because it is mandatory, because it is deducted at source, we will no longer have the problems of a support payer withholding support because of some difficulty concerning access or custody.
Overall, I think this is a major improvement in looking after the interests of children, and I am very pleased to support it.
Mr Sorbara: It has been reported in other areas that the Attorney General actually supports the notion that the government would be the payer of first instance under the new program he is defining; that is, the government would actually guarantee the payments, and if there was a default the government would see if it could collect the money.
I am wondering if the member for Simcoe Centre himself agrees with that proposal. Would he support a bill that had the government actually guaranteeing the support payments in all instances and then attempting to collect those payments and simply using its best efforts to collect the payments? Does the member for Simcoe Centre feel that the legislation should be moving in the way that the Attorney General suggests; that is, to become the guarantor in effect of all support payments?
Mr Wessenger: The honourable member for York Centre certainly raised a very interesting question and proposal. Certainly as far as I am aware, at the moment there are no plans to proceed in the direction suggested, although it is an interesting proposal; it could be looked at. At this time I do not see that there is --
Mr Sorbara: The Attorney General supports it. Do you?
Mr Wessenger: I am not going to comment on that. I have not studied the matter sufficiently or looked at the additional costs involved in the program. I think really what one would have to do, quite frankly, is to have a study to see what the cost would be to the Treasury; then it would have to be put as a proposal to the Treasury, and the financial aspect would determine whether it was feasible or not. I would certainly be prepared to take a look at it to see the financial implications.
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Ms Churley: I have been thinking hard about the best way to contribute to this debate, given that it is not really a debate. It appears as though, happily, members of the opposition and the third party are in support, which is very good to see.
I think we have had a lot of statistics given to us today and we can all go into that. I would like to say, though, I think my best contribution to this is to talk a bit about my personal experience with this, being a single parent of a young child and living in poverty for quite a while, for a while as a university student on student loans, for a while as a seriously ill person on mother's allowance and for a while working at low-paying jobs, and I never had custody support.
Lately, I have been remembering because it is Christmastime. I have been remembering, and as my child gets older and is basically independent right now, what it was like particularly at Christmastime. If I get a little emotional about this, I think there is very good reason, because I remember what it was like going shopping for my child at Christmastime and going to secondhand stores and my child seeing all those wonderful toys on television and saying like every other child does, "I want this, I want that," and my not being able to get those toys for my child. You can get interesting toys at secondhand stores, but I remember those days with in fact some nostalgia now. We did manage to have a lot of fun together.
As members can see, I am one of the lucky ones. I have done okay. I am here enjoying myself, making money now, and over the years things have become, yes, better for both my daughter and me. But I want to tell members that a lot of my friends, acquaintances and neighbours have not been so lucky, for a variety of reasons. I have very many friends, as I am sure people in this House do, who are living in poverty, and this is a women's issue. I differ with statements made by members of the opposition. It is a women's issue because, as the Minister without Portfolio responsible for women's issues said, most single-parent families are headed by women and more women live in poverty in this province than do men.
I have a friend who, ever since I got elected to Toronto city council, would come to me and plead with me to help her in some way because she is one of the 75,000 backlogged people and has been desperately, for years and years, trying to get support payments from her husband, who actually makes very good money, and has been unable to get that. For the first time since I have become an elected politician, I can now say to that woman: "In fact, something is going to happen. Because of this new policy, this government is going to make it possible for the law to go after your husband and make sure that he pays you support for your children."
I think, and I think we all agree, that child poverty is a national disgrace. It is a shame, and I believe that it is the highest priority of our government. This of course, as has been pointed out, is only one aspect of dealing with poverty. I, like the rest of the members in this House, am looking forward to working with the Attorney General, the Minister without Portfolio responsible for women's issues, the Minister of Community and Social Services and all of the other ministers and all of the other members in this House so that we can work together on all aspects, on all fronts of this and do what we can to stop child poverty in this province.
Mrs MacKinnon: Bill 17 addresses an issue of fairness. We talk about our justice system. One only needs to look around and see the number of people who have not received proper justice for those left without a source of support because of the weakness of our justice systems. One realizes why people have no trust in our so-called justice system. This bill is a positive method that thousands have waited for for a long time. Finally, we will give people the trust and fairness they deserve and have needed for years.
Where is the justice when innocent children are made victims of an inadequate justice system? Bill 17 gives a practical way to an effective justice system and I, as a member of this party, am more than proud to stand up for Lambton, as I said in my campaign, and work with our Attorney General to bring justice for the children of Lambton county and the province of Ontario.
Mr Sorbara: I just want to put the same question to the member for Lambton as I did to the member for York Centre. The member for Lambton probably did not see the report, but the Attorney General is reported to have said -- this report was in the Law Times -- that he would favour a system where the government, through this program and through the office for support and custody enforcement, would actually guarantee the payment of these support orders. That is to say that once the order had been registered, the government would make the payment if it was not able to collect the payment from the spouse.
I was not at the presentation by the Attorney General when he made those statements, as reported by the Law Times, but it is an interesting proposal and I wanted to ask the member for Lambton whether she would support a measure where the government actually guaranteed the payment of a support order that was made by the court.
Mr Callahan: I would like to follow up on that. There is some $300 million in outstanding support payments. I cannot remember the percentage, but it is rather minor in terms of those who do pay them. If in fact the Attorney General said that, and I cannot find the copy of the Law Times where he was reported as saying that, does that mean the NDP government of Ontario is going to pay out of the consolidated revenue fund support for children?
If that is the case, I have no problem in paying support for children. I think that children deserve it, they are entitled to it. As the member here has suggested, I am in favour of that as well, but let's do it up front.
Let's face it. SCOE has had its problems. I think we have all run into that difficulty, particularly when you have got $300 million outstanding in uncollected support payments, but is it appropriate that the government should take it over? Because there are perhaps fathers out there who are delinquent who have been hanging around because they truly love their kids and wanted to see them supported. The government has now given them a free ticket to Australia, to any place they want to go, because they can be sure that their children are going to be looked after by the benevolent policies of the New Democratic Party.
The net effect is that every taxpayer of the province of Ontario becomes the surrogate supporter of those children, and I go back to where I began. I have no difficulty in supporting children, particularly children who are in poverty, but let's not put it in the vein of the government unless it wants to come forward and say this is going to be another form of support from the government.
Mrs Mathyssen: We all know that there are some things which are cost-effective. I was a schoolteacher, and I would say to the honourable members opposite that when a child came in who was undernourished, underhoused, underclothed, it was very, very obvious. It was in that child's eyes and it was an effect that was not just temporary. The effects of poverty are lifelong. They create a cycle. That child suffering in desperate and devastating poverty cannot listen to the teacher, cannot focus on what is being said in the classroom. What hope does that child have?
I think that as a society we have a very clear obligation to our children, and this kind of obligation says very, very strongly that saving nickels and dimes in the present is going to cost us not just financially in the future but in terms of the human cost.
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Mrs MacKinnon: I wish to respond to the honourable members across the floor. I suggest that they refer their questions tomorrow in question period to the Attorney General. If he does decide to make any action like that, let me assure the members I will be only too happy to assist him.
Mr Callahan: I would love to ask the Attorney General that question across the floor, because he is in fact reported in the Law Times -- and I cannot find the date but it is recent vintage -- of reporting to the Advocates' Society or the law society that that was in fact the plan that he had proposed.
I go back to whence I came, particularly at this time around Christmas, that children are most important. The members opposite do not have any priority on children over there. I am concerned, as I am sure every colleague in this House is, about the adequate support of children, making certain that they do in fact come to school each day with proper food and proper clothing.
I suppose the difficulty I have is in terms of saying that the government -- we have already heard the Treasurer give up $500 million worth of funds that could be used for that program or for other programs by reason of this parallel tax under Bill 1. We now find that there is a suggestion that $300 million, which is the default on support payments at the moment, will in fact be picked up by the government. I do not know whether my good friend the Attorney General was flying by the seat of his pants when he told the legal profession this, but if he was not, then I suggest to him that it is a very serious situation.
If there is a problem, and I am sure there is -- poverty is a problem in this province and will continue to be a problem in this province and will have to be dealt with by government. It will not be dealt with by giving away $500 million out of the coffers of the Treasury just to gain some political points for paralleling the tax, as the NDP promised during the election. They are taking money out of the possibility of looking after these young children.
I also have concerns in the fact that if this is the program that is being formulated somewhere down in the bowels of the cabinet in terms of a way of dealing with the poverty of children, then I object to it, because what in fact it does do is relieve the fathers, where the responsibility should lie, of the responsibility of looking after the support of their children, and foists it on all of the taxpayers of this province. I do not think that is a satisfactory arrangement. That in fact means that the children who are not being adequately supported because fathers have abandoned their responsibility are subject to the whim and the economic downturns and upturns of the economy of the government of the day in power. That does not necessarily mean it has to be the NDP government; it could be any government. That is not satisfactory. I think children are entitled to have some secure basis for their support.
In fact, what it does as well is send a signal out to all those fathers who are paying religiously -- and there are a great number of them who are paying -- that, "Don't worry about it, Big Brother will look after your children." That is a bad message for the fathers who are our pursuing their obligations. It is a bad message for the kids themselves, because in fact they see themselves as wards of the state, which is not a terribly exciting start for a kid. It is almost like going back to Dickens, almost like going back to the workhouses. It really concerns me, and I will be and I have been trying to pursue a question to the Attorney General, because I would be most interested as to whether or not that is a policy that his government is espousing in the back rooms or the bowels of the cabinet.
There is no question that SCOE was an advance over what happened in the past. In the past, if you tried to collect on a support order for a mother, it usually resulted in extreme cost in just trying to get to the courts and trying to get the mechanism going, the garnishee proceedings against the employer. I applaud the government and I think that the Attorney General has already indicated, and one of the members has indicated, that this was really a measure that the Liberal government under the former Attorney General actually started. I applaud the Attorney General, the member for Rainy River, for bringing it forward. It shows real concern on his part. But I do have concerns, as I have said, and I do not want to reiterate them, about his comments to the law association about how he perceived that this would be done.
Finally, politics has to be practical. We have seen a whole host of programs here that were espoused by members opposite, and I am sure they did it in good faith, Bill 4 and so on, that they believe will really render equity in this province. They are great programs in a perfect society, but they are not great programs in the imperfect society that we live in. So in fact what they are doing over there is saying that we want to solve these ills, which I think most, if not all, members of this Legislature would like to see solved, but what they are doing is they are hammering them to death. They are not dealing with practical politics. They are saying: "Okay, we're going to garnishee the father's wages."
Now, I do not care what it says in the Employment Standards Act, and I am sure that my friend in the back there who spoke earlier, who is a practising lawyer, would recognize that the reality of the day is that if you garnishee an employer once, you get away with it. Garnishee him twice, maybe. Garnishee him three times and if he has been there for 45 years, you might get away with it. You garnishee him four times and I guarantee you he will not even know about the Employment Standards Act and will not care. This person will be tossed out on his ear. The father, who is making the support payments perhaps and maybe missed one and gets garnisheed, will be tossed out on his ear, and who suffers? The kids.
I really want them to look at the policies that their government is espousing. They are great on the surface, but if they do not look at the practicalities of them, they are going to wind up causing more unhappiness, particularly for young children and perhaps for wives, than they are trying to solve. They have not thought out their programs. Their programs are really those that they see as, I suppose, part of their political philosophy: "Don't leave it in the free enterprise system. Take everything into the public domain and we can look after it much better." It is difficult to understand that as they are philosophizing along those lines, we are seeing in eastem Europe where glasnost and perestroika are realizing that those processes do not work and they are in fact going back to a greater reliance upon individuals' responsibilities for looking after housing, for looking after their children.
I know it is difficult to perhaps divorce themselves from their own political philosophy and the political philosophy that got them elected, but for God's sake, they should think about it, think about what they are doing and follow it through to its logical conclusions. They should not just say that because the NDP espouses this particular philosophy they should follow it. They should not have, as I am sure many legislators in those seats over there did, perhaps even ourselves, applauded wildly when the ministers came up with these proposals, many of them actually that emanated not from the ministers but from the civil servants who reached into the bottom drawer of their cabinet and found one that had dust on it and thought, "Geez, this is a good idea," and handed it to the minister and he ran with it.
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They are the elected representatives. They are the people who were elected to this office to serve in this lofty position. They are the kings and queens of their own ridings. They go home and they are treated like celebrities. They also expect something; they expect accountability. If they are in fact not accountable, if all they do is come down here and applaud every time a minister stands up and espouses some policy, and there is no logic to it or no continuity or no thought process, then what they have done for the people who elected them is nothing. They have come down here and wasted their time, and time is precious because they may only be around for one term. You never know; these things can happen. I can tell them that.
Interjection.
Mr Callahan: I know the member would probably like to get out of here right now, and I think many of the members would.
Finally, to my good friend the Attorney General, if what he said to the lawyers of this province was accurately reported -- I know him to be a reasonable person, a sensitive person and I know he would not allow the fact that he had said it and that it was printed in the press to allow him to follow through on that, because the net result will be that he will have taken the responsibility out of the hands of the primary persons who are responsible for that support. He will have given a slap in the face to the men of this province who have lived up to their support payments for their children. He will have given a great tax holiday to those fathers who have brought children into the world, but did not consider it necessary to supply support for their kids and have required their wives to chase them all over the province to get the money.
I ask the Attorney General, and I hope he was misquoted. He is shaking his head that he was not misquoted, so I gather then that this is the policy that is going to be espoused by his party. I would say that if that is the case, the people of Ontario may still be quivering from Bill 4 -- it has not been passed yet -- and they will be quivering from Bill 1, quivering from what has been going on in Ottawa with the GST, but this is one that I think the fathers of this province who are living up to their responsibility of supporting their children should really quake about.
Employers who have to gear up for the GST are now going to have to gear up for constant orders of garnishee, particularly when they have the big, bad government, the power of Queen's Park, not the father but Queen's Park, taking over the whole responsibility in garnisheeing them.
I do not know. The Attorney General is shaking his head this way and that way, so I am not sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing, but I implore him not to let this policy take place. It should be thought out in a much better way.
Mr White: I am rising to speak to the need for Bill 17, the Child and Family Support Statute Law Amendment Act. In my previous life as a family therapist I often treated families that had recently undergone major disruptions. At times of separation and divorce, parents are often in states of such exaggerated hostility that they are incapable of dealing with their children's best interests. Essential to their children's best interests is firm and certain financial support. Clear sight of this goal is often lost and the child's best interests are forfeited to emotional neediness and bitterness at that very moment.
Child support is a parental responsibility and a family responsibility. Normally reliable and responsible fathers often bitterly deny their own children. The existing remedy, the Support and Custody Orders Enforcement Act, 1985, has not worked. Currently, there is only 25% compliance with support orders. This failure creates long-term child poverty and a tremendous drain upon our social spending.
The goal of this bill is to significantly impact child poverty by instituting mandatory payments of support orders. The bill is congruent with the Minister of Community and Social Services' statements that the attack on poverty and social inequality in all of its roots is an overall goal of our government, not simply of her ministry. To that end, I would like to draw the attention of the members assembled to the Social Assistance Review Committee report.
It has several recommendations which directly speak to the need for this kind of a bill. The Ministry of Community and Social Services is required, according to SARC, to engage with the Ministry of the Attorney General in a joint review of existing laws dealing with private support obligations, and to make lawyers and judges aware of the interrelationship between private and public support systems and to study the very kind of support mechanism that we are here recommending. That report, of course, came out in 1988, literally just months after SCOE was introduced and supposedly in full working order.
For our government, there is no question of child support being considered a privilege; it is a fundamental responsibility. Child support is a basic right, not an entitlement to be assessed. The scope of the problem of child poverty goes beyond the devastating hardship experienced by the children themselves and those who take care of them. It affects all of us in society. If the current trends continue, half a generation of children will suffer unnecessary financial deprivation. The message that this government is sending out to the parents of Ontario is that this is completely unacceptable.
It must be stated at the outset that we are talking predominantly of men as the payers and women as the recipients of child support since the division of family functions is still predominantly gender-based. As a consequence, we are talking about widespread systemic discrimination, particularly as it affects women caught between public and private support systems in their struggle to secure adequate financial support for themselves and their children.
In Ontario alone, 100,000 children are affected. Women who have the least education, are poor, have never been married, have a large number of children or are non-white have the greatest difficulty obtaining orders, receive the lowest sums and have the least likelihood of having them enforced. We know about the failures to pay. I will not mention those issues, but the issues that come up time and again are the tremendous disparity in incomes after separation.
After separation, women's incomes drop severely by an estimated average of 73%, a shocking statistic, a 73% decline, while men's incomes jump 42% in the year after divorce, and there is no proportionate sharing of these increases in income. The support payment that is awarded at the time of divorce is usually what there is, and that is usually not even paid. The gap just increases.
When we speak here of women's income, bear in mind that they are usually the custodial parents. We are speaking here of women's poverty and of child poverty. I have had clients where the wife and three children were in receipt of public assistance while the non-custodial father was purchasing a new yacht and maintained a rather stately manor home.
My experience with women who were separating from their husbands always reminded me of how frequently these women were in need of governmental assistance for themselves and their young families. Women who receive support are less likely to need financial assistance than those who do not need welfare to supplement their support and they are in receipt of it for a much shorter period of time.
In cleaning up the whole question of child support, this government will also be enabling women to leave abusive situations. In my past experience, failure on the non-custodial father's part to pay ordered support has often resulted in women being forced to return to a violent and abusive spouse. I can well recall a woman who struggled long and hard to remain apart from her abusive husband. She went through several transition homes, stayed on welfare, faced those degradations, and after a year of struggling without receiving a dime in support she capitulated and returned. Some insentient person might say she chose to return. I would say she returned under economic duress and had no choice.
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Her children and those other children in similar situations should have a fair share of their parents' resources and should benefit proportionately from all of those resources. They should not suffer decline in their standard of living. Equally to their mothers, children should not be forced to live in a violent or abusive home through economic duress. Studies clearly indicate that the effects of being witness to wife abuse are equal in their devastating developmental effect to actually suffering from physical abuse themselves, for those children. Knowing this, our government and this assembly would be actively condoning such maltreatment if we did not seriously address this issue.
I hope that this will, as it has in other jurisdictions, receive all-party support. This is an issue which has been resolved easily in other jurisdictions, in the United States, and I understand it has received some fairly good support across the world in other hemispheres.
Ms Haslam: This is my first opportunity to rise in the House and debate. I know that the Liberals have a party and are not as eager to debate tonight as they have been earlier in the week, but I feel very strongly about this issue and that is why I have chosen this issue, because I feel it is about children caught in an unfortunate modem dilemma of divorce and marriage breakup. Often accompanied with the marriage breakup comes poverty for at least one partner, and almost always for the children.
As a former teacher, I came in contact with these children daily. While I echo everyone's concern regarding the incidence of child poverty, I would also like to draw the members' attention to a secondary benefit of this plan. We talk about changing the attitudes of the public, how it will strengthen the public image of child support as a legal and moral imperative, but let's look at it even further, at how it will strengthen the child's image of his or her own self-worth.
We talk about the social stigma currently associated with the garnishment being negated through this method, since child support will become the norm. I think that the key word here is "support." A recent study conducted by the Canadian Institute for Research found, as we have all mentioned, that 80% of separated or divorced spouses had sufficient disposable income to meet their child support commitments, yet we find that in Ontario approximately 75% of support orders filed with SCOE are in default. The consequences of such high default rates are devastating for custodial parents, who are primarily women, and their children.
A recent study by the federal Department of Justice found that in 1988 approximately 46% of women with custody of their children reported incomes below the poverty line. This is not support for the children, and that brings me to my second point. A child suffers the added, extra stigma of not being supported by a parent, and I do not mean just in money.
There are many benefits to this family support plan and many of them have been mentioned tonight, such as the research conducted in the United States regarding automatic support deduction. It increases collection and reduces the incidence of default. It prevents arrears from accruing so long as the support payer has a regular stream of income. It will allow the child and family support office to target its resources towards more difficult cases. It will strengthen the public image of child support. Rather than being seen as a discretionary obligation to be complied with when circumstances render it convenient to do so, a support obligation is treated as an obligatory deduction similar to the income tax.
The social stigma which is currently associated with a garnishment is not attached to automatic support deduction payers. It is a convenient way for support payers to meet their obligations to their families, and an effective child and family support program will alleviate some of the burden on our social assistance programs.
I wonder how many members here were raised on welfare, how many members here went to school hungry, obtained clothing through social assistance and went to a summer camp supported by the Salvation Army. Not many, I will bet. It is these secondary effects on the children that I see being addressed in this legislation. Proper support paid immediately will help children overcome the stigma of poverty, which in turn will help them overcome other stigmas associated with this lack of support.
I thank members for this time to speak on this important issue.
Mr O'Connor: I know we are pressed for time here, so I will keep my comments brief, but I want to speak in this important debate because I feel it is important. As a member of this Legislative Assembly, I know all members on both sides must deal with an awful lot of problems with SCOE. In my constituency office, 25% of the case work done is SCOE. Every single case that has a problem with enforcement also has a problem with arrears. One of the reactions from one of my constituents was, "The sooner, the better." She is sick and tired of the legal hassles that she has had to deal with, court orders that were never being enforced properly. The former system had such a backlog that it made it impossible for my constituents to get any help from it.
The government is going to deal with the current backlog. It is also going to have a team specializing in enforcement personnel and set up a better communications network.
The system that we are introducing, the automatic deduction system from the support payer's salary or wages, is a far better system. It will speed up the process and make support orders enforceable.
One of my constituents said she could never locate her ex-husband -- he changes jobs regularly -- to try to get a payment out of him. With this new legislation the support payer will not get lost within the system. When the support payer changes employment, the plan moves with the support payer. That is very important.
Our government realizes that a public awareness campaign is an important factor in the success of this program. I was appalled by the number of support payers in default, as I am sure most of the members within this Legislative Assembly are. It is a travesty. This campaign will make people aware of the extent of the problem and will address it.
This program is going to take the necessary steps in rebuilding the self-confidence of the children and the spouses who have suffered under the past legislation. These changes are designed to fight child poverty in the province.
The payment of child support is both a moral and a legal obligation. We have suffered under the past legislation and I support the Attorney General in helping this government with Bill 17. I think it is a very important piece of legislation.
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Mr Mills: I am very pleased and honoured to stand here tonight in support of Bill 17, introduced by my colleague the Attorney General.
Single-parent families are the fastest-growing segment of society, due to marriage breakdown. Most of these families are female-led. Over one half of these families live below the poverty line and many of these families depend on child support. A significant number of orders are in default, due not to any inability to pay, but rather due to the unwillingness to pay. Through this, many families are forced to rely on social assistance through disrespect for a system that can no longer adequately enforce orders.
As Freeda Steel wrote in the article Maintenance Enforcement in Canada, a system of law that fails to achieve its obligations more often than it succeeds is never acceptable. Support payers are not treating their obligations to pay support with the same priority as their other debts. A more effective solution has to be found. Enforcement through default hearings, through garnishment, through writ of seizure or registration against property are the present ways, and they are not working.
The automatic deduction prevents arrears, ensures the payer with a regular income, and the automatic deduction will remove the social stigma of garnishment. It allows child and family support offices to target on the more difficult cases, for example, those who are self-employed.
The judiciary, the Bar, the employers' groups and labour unions support this program in principle. This unique bill shows the level of commitment of this government to progressive social change.
Ms Harrington: I would like to just briefly take this debate one step further and ask, why? When I look at the facts that the Attorney General has put forward, and that is that 75% of these payments are in default and we make that public statement, to me that equals a certain reality. That is that in the past and at present, women and children are not important. That seems to be the only conclusion, if you look at it very carefully, that you can draw from that statement.
Honestly, I cannot believe that this situation has been allowed to continue for so long without being addressed. I must admit to being one of the silent majority or the middle class, or whatever you would like to call it, who was not actually aware of many of the facts of the reality of our society. But since being elected, I have been of course faced with people coming into my constituency office, as all former members have, faced with these women needing simple, honest justice. I have since learned what the name SCOE meant -- I had no idea what the initials stood for. And the frustration of trying to bring some kind of enforcement -- the endless phone calls, trying to get through the answering machines. It seemed to be an impossible situation, which hopefully this government is going to change through this legislation.
I just want to end by saying the current backlog is a totally disgraceful statement about our society and its values. The bill talks about public awareness of the massive problem of unpaid child support. This is what the Attorney General, in his public statement last week, said, that he is going to go forward with some kind of public awareness campaign. I would like to say that I thoroughly endorse this aspect of the legislation, to launch a public awareness. I think we have to go public and tell the real story so that most of us and the rest of the public out there know what is going on.
I think this has been a hidden problem for too long and I want to ask, why? Why did we not know that 75% were in default? Could it be that women and children are not listened to because they are not a high priority in the halls of power or on the political agenda? I would be so bold as to suggest that there might be some truth to that answer and I ask that this government bring forward the often hidden or overlooked situations of women and children, bring these to light and continue to give equality to everyone in this society. What I mean by equality is actually listening to those who are not so powerful and who are not so easy to deal with, and I guess that means in our constituency offices. It is sad, very sad situations, and they will not go away until we actually look at them. We cannot simply ignore it and I ask that we look at our constituents, all of them, and tell them they are important.
The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Questions or comments? Further debate on Bill 17? Windup by the Attorney General.
Hon Mr Hampton: Mr Speaker, I would ordinarily, as you know from my past behaviour in this House, now go into an hour-long windup. However, I think everything has been said. The fact of the matter is, I think, that all members who have spoken from all three parties are very much in favour of this legislation. I have listened carefully to the comments that have been made and I think that everyone who has spoken today has made very logical and very sensible points about this legislation and about the issue of child and family support in general.
I want to thank all honourable members for their contributions. The comments that have been made will certainly be reviewed and looked at as we go forward from here. I also appreciate the comments that some members have made on the question of access, and I appreciate their comment that the issue of access must be revisited in another way, other than Bill 124. So in general, I thank all members for their very worthwhile and timely comments upon this important piece of legislation. We will make the best use we can of those comments.
Motion agreed to.
Bill ordered for standing committee on administration of justice.
The House adjourned at 1838.