ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICES
CONTENTS
Tuesday 12 February 1991
Estimates, Ministry of Energy
Estimates, Ministry of Community and Social Services
Adjournment
STANDING COMMITTEE ON ESTIMATES
Chair: Jackson, Cameron (Burlington South PC)
Vice-Chair: Marland, Margaret (Mississauga South PC)
Carr, Gary (Oakville South PC)
Daigeler, Hans (Nepean L)
Hansen, Ron (Lincoln NDP)
Haslam, Karen (Perth NDP)
Lessard, Wayne (Windsor-Walkerville NDP)
McGuinty, Dalton (Ottawa South L)
McLeod, Lyn (Fort William L)
Perruzza, Anthony (Downsview NDP)
Ward, Margery (Don Mills NDP)
Wilson, Gary (Kingston and The Islands NDP)
Substitutions:
Charlton, Brian A. (Hamilton Mountain NDP) for Mr Lessard
Jamison, Norm (Norfolk NDP) for Ms M. Ward
Jordan, Leo (Lanark-Renfrew PC) for Mr Carr
Hope, Randy R. (Chatham-Kent NDP) for Mr Lessard
Owens, Stephen (Scarborough Centre NDP) for Ms M. Ward
Clerk: Carrozza, Franco
Clerk pro tem: Mellor, Lynn
Staff: Campbell, Elaine, Research Officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1006 in room 228.
ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF ENERGY
The Chair: I would like to call to order the standing committee on estimates. At adjournment last evening, we were left with approximately two hours to complete estimates, which we will do this morning. At that time, we were on vote 1403. I should advise the committee that we have spent up to three hours already on vote 1403 and that we have three additional vote areas to discuss in the remaining two hours. As well, when we adjourned the NDP had the floor; therefore, if there are no questions, I will recognize Mr Charlton, who has asked to proceed with questioning.
Mr Charlton: With the Chair's permission, the area I wanted to discuss was under 1404. The Ontario Energy Board has been an area of concern to select committees around the Legislature for a number of years now, in terms of its role as the overseer of Ontario Hydro's operations and specifically its annual hearings around rate applications.
One of the areas a number of groups in Ontario have been concerned about over the years is the area of price and whether you use increases in price to stimulate conservation in the province. The energy board also has the role, in terms of its review of prices, to look at the declining rate structure, which many have said is a deterrent to conservation because the highest rates are paid on the lowest increments of power used by consumers. Perhaps the minister could make some comments on what approach this government is taking to the whole question of price and conservation through price.
Hon Mrs Carter: The price of electricity does affect the use. That is obvious. In Ontario, the rate is determined by costs. "Power at cost" is the motto of Ontario Hydro, as we know, and that cost is determined through traditional cost accounting. The rate structures are based on the same principle, so a Hydro residential customer pays one rate for the first block of kilowatt-hours each month and a lower rate for the balance. This approach has been criticized because it does not support energy conservation. Economic efficiency would call for marginal pricing, where the price is determined by the cost of the last unit produced, which in this case would mean a higher price. Pricing for energy conservation would see the rate per kilowatt hour increase as the amount used increased.
This is a complex issue, and there are serious consequences for electrical customers in this province. The ministry and Ontario Hydro are looking at this issue in light of the changing environmental and economic priorities in our society. We do not want to rush into rate changes that will place an unfair burden on ordinary people, especially those who can least afford it. It is the massive cost of the Darlington station and the Tories' goods and services tax that have already caused considerable increases in power in Ontario. We are looking at an 8.7% increase this year, which had the GST added to it, and we are expecting similar increases next year and the year after to pay for the Darlington station's coming on line.
I will not be adding to that unless I have found ways to avoid disadvantaging the working people of this province. Higher rates would also affect the competitiveness of industry in this province, which has enjoyed very favourable power rates. It is critical that there be ways to offset the negative effects of a rate change before it is initiated. So with the GST and free trade, I certainly do not want to be putting new costs on at this point unless we can find some way of mitigating the effects they would have.
Mr McGuinty: As a follow-up to that, could you address specifically the issue of declining block rates, which is the policy now? Your party in the past has advocated inclining block rates as the best approach for reducing demand. Can you comment specifically on your position with respect to that?
Hon Mrs Carter: I did just mention that that is something that has been happening in this province and has been beneficial to industry and we do not want to affect the competitiveness of industry, but on the other hand I think we shall be looking at changes in the rate structure now that conservation has become so much more important. I ask my deputy minister if he would like to comment further on that or ask other staff to do so.
Mr Eliesen: This obviously is a very important area. Not only here in Ontario but other provinces and other provincial utilities are currently undertaking comprehensive reviews on the method and manner by which electricity has been priced in the past. Ontario Hydro, together with the Ministry of Energy, is undertaking a specific review, as the minister indicated, to measure the impact of any significant changes. Other main utilities that are as well causing such a review to take place include Hydro-Québec and BC Hydro. I think it is a common element that most utilities are viewing at present, that is, the manner and practice by which electricity has been priced in Canada, which of course has been power at cost, as public utilities make up the structure in 8 of the 10 provinces. That history is now being reviewed and assessed with an objective of seeing what kind of impact it will have on conservation and consequently the demand for new supply facilities that normally would be required with the existing pricing policies.
Mr McGuinty: When could we expect the completion of the review being conducted by Ontario Hydro?
Mr Eliesen: It is a review that we caused to be created just very recently, and we have not set any definitive time horizons because it is a complex issue and we do want to consult with as many stakeholders as possible. We also are carrying on a dialogue with other utilities in terms of their reviews. In addition, we do want to assess the evidence that is being put forward before the Environmental Assessment Board, which will be starting up in April, because we understand that there are a number of intervenors who will be putting forward certain proposals and we will be interested in the evidence that is being deposited there in terms of our overall review.
Mr McGuinty: If I might touch generally on the matter of energy conservation, your ministry has given emphasis to the control of the demand side of energy, and I am wondering if you could outline specifically for me your targets, if you have established these in terms of one-year or five-year plans, and monitoring mechanisms you have in place to assess the success of the conservation efforts.
Hon Mrs Carter: Actually, I prefer the word "efficiency." That is the core of our policy on not just electric power but fuel use in general, because you may be aware that it is possible to do the same job with less power or less fuel, and as modern technology advances this becomes more and more feasible. The symbol of that is the compact fluorescent light bulb, which actually is 15 watts but gives the light of a 60-watt bulb. That is the kind of thing we are looking at. We are not asking people to suffer, to do without power or anything else. We are not conserving in the sense of turning the thermostats down or tightening our belts; we are looking at doing more with less.
We deliver an array of programs aimed at conservation and efficiency. They range from technology research, development and demonstration to energy-saving conservation programs and administration of the Energy Efficiency Act and regulations. These programs are comprised of three general areas: research and development, industry programs and public institutional transportation and education. We are working in all those areas.
To look under the first heading, the research and technology development activities include financial assistance to Ontario industries to do innovative energy technology development and the monitoring of emerging energy technologies development around the world to provide analysis and advice on their application in Ontario. You may have heard of EnerSearch, which is a multi-year program which assists the private sector for their research, development testing and initial technical demonstration of innovative energy technologies in Ontario. That has been in operation since 1986, as I am sure Mrs McLeod is well aware. To date, 85 projects have been approved under that and the government contributed over $11 million to projects, which leveraged a much larger amount.
Then we have the industry programs, which promote and facilitate adoption of wise energy use practices in Ontario industries; development of parallel power generation to stimulate the transfer of technology and information in the industrial sector through demonstrations and technical seminars. Key industry programs are industrial energy services program, which includes free energy audits in industrial plants performed by consulting engineers. In the first three years of this program the ministry completed 323 energy audits and identified potential annual savings of $12 million in electricity and $29 million in fossil fuels. We have a cogeneration program, which is very efficient in the sense that you get the use of your fuel twice over for different purposes. We assist the development of Ontario's cogeneration potential, whether it is industrial, commercial or institutional. In 1990-91 we had 28 such projects.
We have the industrial process equipment demonstrations program, designed to encourage industry to increase its competitive advantage through the use of leading-edge technologies which improve the energy efficiency of industrial processes. We pay up to 30% of the equipment, performance monitoring and information transfer costs of that.
We have the small hydro and renewable energy program to assist the general public and renewable energy organizations with information, advocacy efforts in elimination of barriers. We give grants to that on a case-by-case basis.
We have energy efficiency programs, which stimulate energy conservation by promoting adoption of efficient energy-using practices among clients in all sectors: commercial, institutional, municipal, residential and transportation. Some of these focus on strengthened energy awareness, through working with professional educators and communicators to produce educational material.
1020
Mr McGuinty: Excuse me. I appreciate the information, but that is not what I was getting at. You are outlining for me programs. My concern is with respect to specific targets and monitoring mechanisms.
Hon Mrs Carter: I do not think we have specific targets. I think the objective is to do as much as we possibly can, and we feel there are very large opportunities out there. Monitoring is being done. You may be aware of the agreement with the Ministry of Government Services that was announced in December whereby Ontario Hydro is going to audit all government buildings and tell us what improvements can be made and what the savings are likely to be, so that we can follow up on those. However, I would like to ask my deputy minister if he has anything to say about that.
Mr Eliesen: If I can add to what the minister has indicated, there are no specific targets with regard to the general field of energy efficiency. The minister indicated yesterday as well as this morning that under the new energy directions major initiatives will be started up in a whole variety of areas, with specific emphasis on housing and transportation.
With regard to Ontario Hydro, we have asked it to undertake the following: it does have certain goals to the year 2000 on demand management. If we exclude interruptible power and load shifting -- they have a goal of roughly 1,500 megawatts -- their goal for the year 2000 on energy efficiency and demand management is roughly 2,000 megawatts. At the same time, they have identified economic potentially of roughly about 6,000 megawatts. What we have asked them to do, and to discuss with us, is to attempt to achieve within the next three to five years a doubling of their current goals of 2,000.
Similarly, with regard to parallel development or non-utility generation, they had a goal as recently as a year and a half ago of 1,000 megawatts for the year 2000. That was increased to about 1,600 megawatts, and in further discussions with ourselves, their current goal is 2,100 megawatts by the year 2000. Again, we have asked them to discuss with us ways and means of accelerating that particular area, because Ontario Hydro and the Ministry of Energy have both independently identified another 5,000 to 6,000 megawatts of potential that can take place through parallel development efforts. In fact, right now, as I talk, Ontario Hydro is negotiating with the private sector individuals, cogeneration, small hydro etc, roughly 4,500 megawatts of potential.
I want to make sure I am properly understood on this: we are not talking about the Ministry of Energy's efforts in the other areas I referred to, which obviously do have a major impact on the demand for electricity. This is solely demand management programs organized and initiated by Ontario Hydro. If they are successful with achieving a doubling of their current goals, we have estimated that under their current demand-supply scenarios, this would delay any decisions to be made on major supply options by at least anywhere from three to five years. Those are some of the preliminary discussions that we have been having with Ontario Hydro, and some of the money that has been redirected, the $240 million, will be going into these specific areas.
Mrs McLeod: I well remember many discussions about the studies that have been done in terms of what is technologically possible, theoretically possible, economically possible versus the ministry's own assessment of what was realistically possible. Where there is a political will, you can achieve what is realistically possible, and I second the political will aspects of looking at achieving a maximum amount of energy conservation, energy efficiency, obviously, so I was not, as minister, reluctant to see those targets extended, nor am I reluctant to see the attempt to extend them now. I do, however, recall being very discouraged about the fact that as Ontario Hydro presented what it believed to be one of the most ambitious energy conservation targets in a North American jurisdiction, to have heard from one of those ambitious American jurisdictions that it achieved only 10% of the target it had set. Clearly, the relevant fact is not the target alone; it is your predictions of what is achievable.
I guess, Minister, and if you wish to refer to the deputy, who was answering the previous question, I wonder if there is any evidence that there is greater progress in any jurisdiction in the achievement of some of the ambitious targets being set.
Hon Mrs Carter: Yes, I think there is. I cannot give you chapter and verse at this point, and I seem to remember that under the previous administration Ontario Hydro was offering to do audits of government buildings -- what we have now asked it to do -- and that it was turned down in favour of getting tenders from the public sector, which was going to cost the government some money, whereas Ontario Hydro would have done it free. So I do not feel that the drive towards energy efficiency under the previous administration was quite all that it could have been.
I would like to ask Assistant Deputy Minister Jean Lam if she would tell us some of the successes we have had with energy efficiency programs and maybe she can give us a little more inspiration as to what we can achieve in this direction.
The Chair: Anybody want to hear them?
Mrs McLeod: If you do not mind, there was a very specific question, and I have had some ample opportunity to hear from ministry staff in the past about the programs, although to be very honest with you, my understanding of what was being done under previous administrations is much more specific and much more constructive than the statement you have made this morning, including the approach that was being taken to do audits in order to achieve energy conservation in government buildings, and I just must refute that statement for the record.
I really am looking for something very specific. I would like to believe that we can set the highest achievable targets and work to achieve those. In terms of planning for energy security, for electricity security, we must have some realistic sense of what might be achievable, and looking for anything, any specific figure of achievement of targets in other jurisdictions.
The Chair: Does the deputy want to handle that one?
Mr Eliesen: Just to follow up on that, I think there is evidence and a very dynamic example which the minister mentioned yesterday in the context of the program which Ontario Hydro believed was going to be a pretty dynamic one of the lightbulbs and providing a discount of $5. Netbacks would be available but still the individual consumer would have to pay $15, and the uptake of the program was so successful that they are into back orders now for the next six months and there is an inadequate supply.
Similarly, from some of the behaviourial polling that both Ontario Hydro and ourselves do with regard to the general community, there is quite a significant perception to significant demand management or energy conservation programs in the community. I think if Mr Franklin and some of his officials were here today they would confirm they were very, very surprised, specifically by that program and by some other programs they have started up. So I think there has been an underestimation of the degree to which the community in general will be responsive and is willing to change its behaviour to effect reduction of electricity.
Mrs McLeod: Is it fair to interpret that, first, as precedent-setting in terms of any comparison to make with other jurisdictions' past experience? And if it is precedent-setting, do you attribute that to there being quite a different environment and, therefore, receptivity to conservation measures?
Mr Eliesen: I think it is a combination of both. Clearly, the latter factor of a changing perspective on behalf of the general community is in my judgement the prime motivating factor. I think people are concerned, and more so today than ever before in the past, about the manner and method by which energy has been generated and the impact on the environment, and I do not have to tell you, Mrs McLeod. In the context of the past, you were quite cognizant of that particular direction.
I think it has become much more sensitive and therefore there is a greater willingness on behalf of the community to participate in these programs. If I may add, it is not a question of government coming in or Ontario Hydro coming in and using a kind of draconian legislative or regulative method of trying to change behaviours. I think with the proper kind of incentive programs, the uptake by the community will be quite successful and beyond anyone's initial expectations.
1030
Mr Jordan: I would like to first of all really commend the minister for the strong interest of her portfolio in conservation and in general efficiency in the industry. As I expressed yesterday, my real concern is that, to me, from my experience in business, those are sort of fringe benefits that certainly should be taken into consideration in the operation of the Ministry of Energy.
But I still feel that this government should give some assurance of focusing on some good, strong bases, and who knows what the technology will be 10 years from now, or 15 years? It may keep improving, as it has in the past 20 years, relative to the nuclear base that is now providing 60% of our energy. In relation, I see that as a real void in the minister's policy as put forward to date and I would hope that she would perhaps reconsider that moratorium and make it more than open-ended so that the people of Ontario would have more confidence, that in fact there is a support there and that we are not going to be priced off the market and we are not going to run short.
Relative to the conservation program, I was wondering what breakdown there is of electricity use by industry -- commercial, farm and residential. Could you give us those figures, what breakdown you have of those sectors of groups?
Hon Mrs Carter: Okay. I think you still have not quite grasped what we are doing and what we are saying. It is as though you see nuclear-generated power as real and other approaches as not real. Can I remind you that a kilowatt of power saved through efficiency or whatever means is not only as real as a kilowatt generated, it is also cheaper and obviously more environmentally benign.
We are looking at large numbers here. Demand management is going to save us thousands of kilowatts, maybe 5,000, something like that, and we are also looking at, as was mentioned earlier, increased contributions from the parallel power field, the co-generation, small hydro and so on, that comes from independent producers, and that could easily reach a figure of 6,000 megawatts, so we are not talking chicken feed here. We are talking figures that would replace the need for power stations that we then do not have to build and this is much cheaper.
We are not looking at putting power rates up as a result of our moratorium. I think, if anything, we are looking at holding them down. The moratorium is open-ended. This means to say that there is no final date on it, but we are keeping an open mind. Obviously, we shall review the situation in particular as a result of the environmental assessment on the demand/supply plan which we expect to be reporting in about three years' time.
Mr Jordan: The other part of the question, the breakdown on electricity use.
Hon Mrs Carter: Yes, well, I would like to ask my deputy minister if he could give you those figures.
Mr Eliesen: I am trying to find the exact page, but it does not come to me. Maybe I can make it available to you. If what you are after is the breakdown by residential, commercial, industrial, those figures can --
The Chair: And rural.
Mr Jordan: It is a part that sort of frightens me in that this ministry is telling us that we are going save X megawatts here, we are going to save it there, and one save is one made and it is one not sold, so we can sell it again to somebody else because we did not sell it to you, through conservation and so on. But when you are going to deal with industry coming into the province, I cannot impress on you too much that you have to be able to sit down with industry and give it a concrete proposal of how you plan to meet.
You can come out to my house and do an energy audit and you can send them back a year later and I may have done part of it or I may have done none of it, but you are still dealing with people and people do not react in the form of statistics that we would like to see them react in and give us that projected load that we would like to see there.
It is not that I do not understand your program; I support your program. I just do not want to see you putting too much dependence on it to the point that we find ourselves in a squeeze, as the president said yesterday, where you have to take shortcut procedures to try and meet the demand with gas-fired, expensive units.
Now you do not have the breakdown.
Mr Eliesen: Yes, Mr Jordan, we do. We found our page and we can provide that specific information. I am going to ask Duncan Taylor, who heads up our forecasts, economic, etc, to provide that specific information if he would.
The Chair: Would they introduce themselves and their positions with the ministry for the record.
Mr Taylor: I am Duncan Taylor, the manager of economics and forecasts in the policy development and co-ordination division.
Mr Moore: And I am Larry Moore, the manager of energy management in the Ministry of Energy.
Mr Taylor: The committee was asking about the breakdown of electricity by sector. The demand is approximately one third divided among the major sectors of electricity use. In 1988, which is the table I have here, there were 147 petajoules in residential, 139 in commercial and 177 in the industrial, so roughly equally divided, electricity is used in all three sectors of the economy.
Within the residential sector, over half of the use is in appliances and lighting, but something like a third in those homes that are electrically space-heated.
Hon Mrs Carter: Maybe I could carry on.
The Chair: Well, Mr Jordan has the floor, Minister.
Mr Jordan: Thank you, Mr Chairman. Relative to your roughly one third breakdown to each sector of the province, which sector do you expect to have the greatest gains from in your study?
Mr Taylor: In studies done both for the ministry and by Ontario Hydro, the greatest potential for savings is in the commercial sector, in particular in commercial lighting. The estimates made in a study for the ministry which looked at a range of technologies, but not all of them, said at that time about one half of their estimated savings potential, which totalled 6,600 megawatts, would be in the commercial sector and the majority of that would be in improved lighting.
Mr Jordan: So you are expecting 3,300 megawatts from the commercial sector?
Mr Taylor: That was the estimate of potential.
Mr Jordan: Mr Charlton mentioned yesterday that you plan to keep a very close eye on the usage and on the conservation effects on the usage. Just what type of monitoring do you plan to do on commercial lighting, or commercial generally, when it amounts to half of your --
Mr Moore: Maybe I could help you on that. We are now talking about Ontario Hydro activities, its 2,000 megawatts, and hopefully considerably more than 2,000 megawatts, by 2000 target. We are working with them on their monitoring activities, and as you heard yesterday, they are making every effort to determine how much they are saving. In fact, our view is that even though they did meet their 1990 target, on their ramp up towards this 2,000-megawatt target, they are being really tough on themselves in terms of the system impact of the savings. So they are only counting a small part of the savings that they are getting in their programs in terms of counting it towards their target. Their total savings will be actually substantially larger than the are showing on their sheets.
1040
One of the things that may make you feel just a little bit more comfortable, in a sense, about these conservation efforts is that they actually are changing out technology. You know, less efficient motors are being changed out for more efficient motors. Less efficient lights are being changed out for more efficient lights, and those new motors and new lights simply cannot use as much electricity as the ones that they have replaced. So it is a concrete saving that you are getting with these activities. They are not counting in any of this turning out lights, turning down thermostats, any sort of reversible behaviour. These are all concrete actions that simply will save electricity.
Mr Jordan: I understand, but your method of measuring in megawatts, you are saying you are working very closely with Ontario Hydro, but we agreed yesterday that there would have to be a very close monitoring of growth and of conservation to off-balance the growth. This is what we are really saying here, that we can offset the need through growth, through conservation efficiency.
Mr Moore: If I may, you are quite right. The ultimate measure will be the low growth that occurs in the future. That is the ultimate measure, but activity by activity, Ontario Hydro has to monitor what it is getting through each program. They want to make sure the programs are cost-effective for a start, that they are getting more for their money through these conservation activities than they would, say, through an equivalent supply facility. But you are right overall, it is going to be the electricity growth that is going to count. But again, activity by activity, they can make, as I mentioned yesterday, at a minimum an engineering estimate based on what they have actually done, what they have changed out, the lights they have changed, the motors they have changed and that kind of thing, to determine the real savings.
Mr Jordan: You are aware, though, that the change in motors and the difference -- they have been changing street lights, for 15 years they have been changing to the high-efficiency motors for farms, for silo motors, for stable cleaners. That has been going on. It is an ongoing thing. There is very little of this that is new. The part that is new and that I like to see is that it is being given a higher priority, if you will, than it had been perhaps. But the way to measure it is very difficult. To be able to say, like five years from now, that I will not need a new generating plant, that is not easy, and I think the president yesterday leaned in that direction in saying it was difficult to measure the net result of conservation efficiency.
Mr Taylor: I think we would agree that it is difficult, but we will do our best to monitor both the aggregate load growth and, through Hydro, looking at the detailed program estimates of savings it is making.
The Chair: Mrs Marland has one question, if I could move to her briefly.
Mrs Marland: I think what we are hearing from this minister is pretty scary stuff. I do not criticize the answers from the staff, because the staff are dealing with a situation that they are now in, in terms of a philosophy of the new government. In spite of the fact that the chairman of Ontario Hydro said yesterday afternoon that they will need, even considering the plans for conservation -- he told us yesterday they will need another plant.
My question to the minister is based on some of her really amazing statements. We are talking today and yesterday as though conservation is new, and that is the point that my colleague just made. People have been readjusting their thermostats in the winter and the summer for a very long time now because it is too expensive to heat and cool their homes and their offices, so conservation is not new. It is not going to happen overnight, even though there are some very brave projections being made here.
If what the minister is saying is that she is planning to meet the future load demands of this province based on conservation, well, I am sorry, I think that is Alice in Wonderland, certainly after hearing what Hydro said yesterday. If the ministry knows more about the provision of electricity than does the utility which has the responsibility as an arm's-length government agency, then maybe we do not need a board or an administrative staff of Ontario Hydro; maybe that is the direction we should be going in. We should remove the responsibility from Ontario Hydro for the provision of this service and put it totally at the feet of this new government which thinks we can manage without nuclear power.
You said a few minutes ago to my colleague, "You see nuclear power as something real." Well, goodness gracious, if it is not real, what provides 60% of our power? You cannot have it providing 60% of our power on the one hand and then on the other hand say to my colleague, "You see nuclear power as real." You better believe that nuclear power is real to those people who depend on electricity to keep their medical equipment going, people on dialysis and oxygen and other medical aids. If 60% of the power is provided by nuclear generation and their life depends on electricity, it is very real to them. I would like the minister to tell us: How many years do you think it takes to put another plant in place while you are gambling on this conservation as being the answer and the alternative?
Hon Mrs Carter: First of all, I wish you would not put words into my mouth. You did that yesterday and you have done it again today. You have slightly altered what I said. Of course nuclear power is real, but so is power saved. It is not only as real, it is better, as I have just pointed out.
Let me give you a scenario. If we continue to build more generating facilities as we have been doing -- as you know, we are completing Darlington because the money was already put into it and so on -- we are then putting up the price of power. The recent increases in the price of power are due to the money we are spending on nuclear power stations.
Mrs Marland: No.
Hon Mrs Carter: That is true. You cannot avoid that.
On the other hand, if we conserve and become more efficient and do not need to do that so quickly, we can stave it off.
Mrs Marland: And we do not grow.
Hon Mrs Carter: Of course we can grow. Quite honestly, this is unbelievable that you people do not seem to be able to grasp this point. If industry can achieve the same results by using half the amount of power, even if the price doubles they would still only be paying the same amount. This is really a win-win situation, is it not?
The Chair: Have we completed that line of questioning?
Mrs Marland: I think I am out of time, but I certainly will come back to it, Mr Chairman.
Ms Haslam: I would like to ask another question. I have been looking at the ministry estimates. On page 87 it says, "Ministry of Energy, Energy Development and Management, Grant Projects by Technology." I notice that solar is a negligible recipient of grant projects. I wonder if one of the staff could comment on the reason that there are not more projects looking at that type of technology. Is it passé?
Hon Mrs Carter: The mix of money being given to programs is so far largely something we have inherited from our predecessors. We have made some adjustments already and I am sure we will continue to make more. My personal preference would be to put more effort and money into renewables. After all, even if they are not capable of, as it were, taking on the load at this point, it is something we have to look at in the future in the nature of things; non-renewables are by definition something that is not going to be with us for ever. I would like to ask my deputy minister if he has more to say on that.
1050
Mr Eliesen: Maybe I can get Bob Greven, who is our manager of research and development, to give a little background on the ministry's efforts in this particular area.
Mrs Marland: Karen, ask if it is going to get sunnier in Ontario.
Ms Haslam: Only if you are with us, Margaret; only if you are with us.
Mr Greven: The potential for renewable energy in general -- I would rather deal with it as renewable energy in general rather than any particular one -- can be approached either very negatively or very positively. Certainly, at this moment in time, none of these technologies are in a position to compete economically with conventional energy. However, there is a new day dawning, and new technologies are being developed which have the potential to greatly improve the economics of these renewable technologies. I think we all should stop for a moment and think about technologies we buy today, whether they are miniaturized television sets or one I found particularly interesting in a commercial last night, that you can now buy your new Chrysler with a car phone built into the sun visor. These are technologies we probably did not think about five years ago, never mind 15 years ago.
It is true that the sun does not shine here as much as it does in some other areas, but it still does represent a potential for power production, and as new technologies come along -- or avoidance of power in the case of power use, in the case of solar, photo-voltaics are widely proclaimed as being a potential. One of the interesting things on photovoltaics is that the cost per watt produced has fallen by a factor of 10 over the last 10 years. It is probably not realistic to expect that it will fall by another factor of 10, but they are approaching a point where certainly they are economic for some remote applications and are cheaper for some, what I would call, niche markets.
We have a number of EnerSearch programs. Because I am addressing primarily the research and development things that are 10 years out, I will hit a couple very quickly. Wind power is frequently mentioned. Unfortunately, the wind does not blow hard enough in Ontario to use the type of --
Ms Haslam: Do not say it, Margaret. Do not say it.
Mrs Marland: Even around here?
Ms Haslam: Gee, they could build it on the front lawn outside our offices, right?
Mr Greven: Let's say the wind conditions here do not permit the economic use of the wind turbines that are in use in Denmark and California. However, we are funding a company located in Mississauga that is attempting to develop a windmill that, first, will work in the Ontario wind regime and will also be much lower in cost. And in almost every case, the impediments are some place along the technological problem. There are technological impediments, but there are equally financial impediments and public perception impediments.
Mrs Marland: They have been doing it for 15 years, have they not?
Mr Greven: California has been doing it for a period of time, but anyhow --
The Chair: Mrs Marland.
Ms Haslam: That is okay. I will take up some of her time next time.
Mr Greven: Let me just wrap up. One we have, which I think is indicative of the type of thing that is coming and is solar: We are funding a company in Etobicoke which is developing a system that should make the cost of photo-voltaic hydrogen much cheaper. This is not going to be economic in the next five years; we might be 10 years out. But what is very interesting here is that the second phase of this project is being co-funded with the state of California. Once the equipment is proven out here, it will be shipped to California and then the hydrogen so produced will be used to power an automobile. Again, not economic per se, but if in fact future regulations much further restrict the use of carbon fuels in transportation in certain areas -- southern California would probably be the one -- this might become economic. It depends upon what disincentives are put in.
My point is that from a research and development point of view we are funding renewables. We are in the middle, at this stage of the game, of a study proposed to tell the government -- we have received solicitations or proposals from three major management consultants to address the issue of what we can do, as government or a utility, to promote effectively the renewable energy field, with the idea of taking this to a point where by the year 2005 we might have a significant installed capacity.
So while these numbers are 1988 numbers, in 1989 the level has gone up. I think we are intending to ramp up far more in support of renewable energy, but it is still at the research and development stage.
Ms Haslam: I notice that you only have two solar projects at this time. Are you saying there are more, then, than the two in this figure?
Mr Greven: It depends something on the definition of "solar" projects. Part of the difficulty we have had -- I would not call it a difficulty; it is intentional. The private sector must come to us for EnerSearch funding and it must come armed with its 50% funding in the design of the program. To date we have received the two or approximately three which are there. There is a fine definition of where does a photo-voltaic project -- is it solar or is it not solar? But in renewable as a whole, we do have approximately 30 which have a renewable connotation, which eventually will promote the use of renewable energy.
Mr Hansen: I think we are sort of losing sight of the way technology has been changing so quickly. As an example, when I went to school I used a slide rule; now my son uses a computer at home. To me, the atomic energy side is getting to the point of being obsolete as an alternative source. I think we have to take a look at other alternative sources and that more money has to go into that particular area as the direction as it is right now.
I know we were looking at demands on the steady growth of consumption here in Ontario, but I think if we take a look at the actual consumption compared to conservation -- in other words, that is dipping down now, so the demand will dip as conservation becomes more evident in the program. I was on the standing committee on finance and economics and there is a reference point: "Rose Technology Group have been looking at energy conservation directly reducing operating cost making institutions more self-sufficient, freeing up money resources for other priorities." To go on, in my particular riding, the St Catharines General Hospital did a retrofit and got an annual savings of $250,000 a year. In that annual savings, it actually "created employment for contractors, increased safety for patients and staff, reduced maintenance cost, equipment upgrading, and importantly, improved environmental quality to the benefit of the patients, staff and visitors. Ultimately the reduction of energy cost has provided increased funding for patient care and facilitated the delivery of health services."
So what we actually see here is money being directed to other areas. I think we have to take a look at the overall picture, not just the amount of kilowatts saved at one particular time. It is more of a global savings. I think Ontario is going to be a focal point for the rest of the world if we are the leaders in the conservation of energy. I am sorry to make a speech, but if you can comment on where we are going on this line of demand and conservation and how we are going to be dipping.
1100
Hon Mrs Carter: I think you really got the point, that conservation and efficient use of energy are a win-win situation. We gain in every possible direction. For example, there are employment advantages. Emphasis is placed on people who might lose jobs working in nuclear power stations, although actually, the way we are doing things, that is going to be a gradual process. Nobody is being thrown out of work -- or hardly anybody, at this point. But we are going to create more jobs. They are going to be in the places where people live. This is going to be good for business, because when you are operating efficiently energy-wise you keep your costs down. When you are creating goods that are part of an energy-efficient world you are going to have better sales.
I have looked at several industries in Ontario which are in this happy situation. The people who can see the way things are going are already benefiting from it, for example, the bus company in Mississauga which is producing buses that run on gas. They even have a refinement of that -- I mean Consumers' Gas -- where it is combined with an electrical component that makes it much more efficient.
Mrs Marland: Natural gas.
Hon Mrs Carter: Yes, natural gas. These people are looking at large export contracts. They are looking at helping the Ontario economy. They are looking at providing employment.
This is where we want to be. We want to be in the sunrise sector, not in the sunset sector. Energy efficiency is at the leading edge of how to succeed in the world nowadays so that we can all be better off. You are quite right: This is, as I say, a win-win situation. Businesses that can see this are going to be the businesses that succeed. They are going to be the ones that employ Ontarians, they are going to be the ones that help our balance of payments and they are going to be the ones who help save the environment. We really cannot lose on taking this tack.
Mr Hansen: I wanted an answer from staff on exactly how this --
The Chair: Then you should have asked for a staff answer. I do want to let Mr Wilson get on.
Mr Hansen: Fine.
Mr G. Wilson: Actually, it is to follow up some of the things Mr Hansen was saying. Specifically, it refers to an item in your report, Minister, about the ministries you are working with. I was disappointed not to see the Ministry of Education among them. That came of reflecting on some of the conversation here, even something simple like the use of the term "conservation" as opposed to "energy efficiency." "Conservation" suggests privation or having to do without; it is a negative attitude.
I noticed in some of the remarks you have been making that you have stressed the use of the term "energy efficiency," to say that things can be done differently. I think that is the guiding concept here, and that is why education is so important. It does fit in with what you said: "We will continue to work closely with other government ministries to ensure all provincial government organizations are practising responsible energy use" -- of course, we would like to see that in our schools and other educational institutions -- "and to help them contribute through their own mandates to furthering the government's New Energy Directions."
This, I think, speaks directly to encouraging pupils and students to think about how we can use energy more efficiently. I wonder whether you could comment on some of the directions you could use through the Ministry of Education and through our school systems.
Hon Mrs Carter: You are right. Education is a vital component in this. I am sorry if you have received the impression that it is otherwise. Maybe my deputy minister would enlarge on how in fact it is part of our policy.
Mr Eliesen: Let me ask Jean Lam to give you some details, as it relates to her area. Jean is the assistant deputy minister for programs and technology.
Ms Lam: The ministry does provide funding in the energy education area. It is certainly an area that is very important to the ministry, because, as you note, everybody is aware that the young people are really the ambassadors to the future and in many cases they are much more active than we are in spurring us on for energy-efficient activities.
We have a number of programs that deal with energy education. We provide funding to disseminate information to students, teachers and families to enable them to make informed choices on energy use. We have provided funds to the Kortright Conservation Centre, the Ontario Science Centre and Science North to develop energy-related education material.
A couple of the very interesting areas we are working on with community colleges is to develop energy management programs. Barry Beale, the manager of energy efficiency programs, would be happy to tell you about some of the work we are doing in the trading area, as well as to talk about one of the new initiatives we have just undertaken with the schools, STEM or the savings through energy management program.
The Chair: You are just about coming to the conclusion of your time allocation. Just be brief and we can proceed to the next line of questioning.
Mr Beale: Mr Wilson, one point of clarification: The Ministry of Education provides curriculum policy guidelines. They do not generally get involved with the development of curriculum material. They rely on ministries like ourselves and other interested ministries to do that, and we are working very closely with them to ensure that other ministries comply with those curriculum policy guidelines.
The Ministry of Energy -- of course, we are energy specialists; we are not specialists in energy education -- has for the last number of years been using a group of volunteer teachers known as the Energy Educators of Ontario to actually provide energy curriculum for schools and to network with teachers around the province to introduce that curriculum into the school system. We have a very active program with them. We expect to become more active based on many of the remarks you made which were quite true.
Students have an enormous appetite for this kind of information and we really view them as a prime market for the kind of message that needs to be made. We do as well, as Ms Lam mentioned, support other groups to provide energy programs. This would include the science centre, Science North in Sudbury as well as the Kortright Centre, which receive students into their facilities and provide half-day programs on different themes, energy being one.
Mrs McLeod: It involves the discussion we have had during Energy estimates on the costs of alternative forms of electricity generation as well as what can be achieved from conservation. Both those questions are to be addressed by the environmental assessment panel if that goes ahead as was originally intended. That may, in turn, redefine "power at cost" as we understand it, particularly if environmental costs are fully accounted for.
I want to come back to a statement that you made yesterday, Minister, in terms of power costs might go up a little. I think it is hard to predict what the actual costs of alternative energy forms might be, should those be required. So I would like to direct the question, following up on Mr Charlton's earlier question this morning, would you believe on a personal basis that energy costs could in fact go up significantly, even if it is not consistent with power at cost, as an incentive to conservation?
Hon Mrs Carter: As far as I am concerned, energy efficiency is going to be more cost-effective than the opposite. Ontario Hydro did not expect to put a new service in operation before the year 2003, so up to that point our policy really will not have much effect on electricity rates, because obviously the ones that are built already we have to pay for and that is what we are doing now. But the question assumes that nuclear power is cheaper than the alternatives.
Mrs McLeod: No, Minister, I very distinctly ruled out that assumption when I asked the question.
Hon Mrs Carter: All right. But the Environmental Assessment Board obviously will have its own opinions on this. They might conclude that an option that can be constructed quickly like gas turbines might be a good way for Ontario to go. It is really quite possible that electricity rates could be lower with the new directions, the way we are proposing to go, than they would otherwise be.
Conservation provides a lot of savings, at lower cost than any other supply option. For example, Hydro estimates that its avoided costs range from about 4 cent to 7 cents, depending on whether the conservation is on or off peak. For conservation, Hydro estimates the following costs: If we are looking at residential, insulation has life-cycle costs of 1.64 cents per kilowatt; a super-insulated house, R-2000, has life-cycle costs of 3.2 cents per kilowatt. We are looking at amounts below the cost of power, as you realize: energy-efficient refrigerator, 1.0 cents per kilowatt over its life cycle; a freezer 0.8 cents; and shower heads life-cycle costs of 2.2 cents. So we are really looking at --
1110
Mrs McLeod: A very specific alternative question, and I just need a yes or no answer. Perhaps you will wish to direct this to the deputy minister.
One of my areas of interests is time-of-use rates. I do not want to get into that extensively because I know my colleague is in an area of questioning in a limited time. Is it fair to say that the purpose of time-of-use rates is to encourage conservation, that if a region of the province, and perhaps particularly southern Ontario, were at some point in time to become a peak user over the summer, there would be a change in time-of-use rates so that the highest rates charged in the summertime would in fact encourage greater conservation?
Mr Eliesen: Yes, and in fact that is one of the areas we are looking at in the whole context of our review of electricity rates. As you know, Mrs McLeod, time-of-use rates were introduced recently as part of the Ontario Hydro structure. It impacts differently, particularly in northern areas like Thunder Bay, compared to others, and it is an area that obviously is of concern and requires monitoring. That item will be looked at intensely as we do our review.
Mrs McLeod: It was more than yes, but I am glad to hear it. I give in to my colleague.
Mr Daigeler: Minister, you are upset with us that we in the opposition do not follow your logic. I can tell you that we are upset too because I have the impression that your logic is based mostly on faith and not on facts.
We have been trying for some six hours now to get some clear target levels from you on what you think are achievable, reasonable energy conservation levels versus expected energy demands. Up to now what you have been saying to us basically is: "I am Jenny Carter. Trust me. Our new approach is going to work."
I am just not sure. In fact I doubt very much that the business leaders in Ontario, and especially investors from the world over, are simply putting their trust in you. I would like to ask you, are you meeting, have you been meeting with business people and what have they been saying to you about their energy needs and how those needs can be met?
Hon Mrs Carter: Yes, of course we have. I would just like remind you of a remark made by Mr Kerrio in 1983. He warned of the dangers of rushing ahead with new supply on the strength of scares and threats about blackouts and brownouts, some of which we have had recently and I think quite without foundation. I think his point was well taken and I suggest his colleagues do take it to heart.
I would like to refer to my deputy to see if he has any comments on that.
Mr Eliesen: What the minister has given directions on, to the ministry and also to Ontario Hydro, is really to ensure that there is reliability and integrity of the reliability of the electricity system for the 1990s. The policy of the government, to answer your question very specifically in terms of goals and standards -- I made reference to some of those aspects earlier in terms of demand management and also in terms of parallel development.
But clearly, it is part of the specifics that have been announced by the government and by the minister to ensure that the integrity and reliability of the system be maintained for 1990. That includes (1) the completion of the Darlington nuclear station, so you have 3600 megawatts coming on stream in 1992-1993; (2) Much more emphasis should be provided to this: a very active program of work to improve the performance of the existing nuclear stations. One of the difficulties over the last four to five years is that Ontario Hydro has been forecasting an 80% reliability, and as we have been learning from experience, particularly from the first kind of nuclear generating plants, they have not worked out; there have been problems that people had not been anticipating.
You heard yesterday from Mr Franklin and Arvo Niitenberg in terms of the 62%. So an active program has been confirmed by the government in which hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent over the next short while to improve the performance of the existing nuclear stations and to get them back to the goal which Ontario Hydro technical people believe is possible; that is, around 80%.
The third thing on which the government has made a decision is that there should be simultaneous environmental assessment reviews, specific sites on the hydraulic stations, and specifically, as the minister mentioned yesterday, we are talking about Quebec and Niagara Falls. We are talking about the Matagami stations; there are four, which are rebuilt stations. And we are talking about Little Jackfish.
The fourth that the government has approved is the approval of the Manitoba 1,000 megawatt sale, and again there is an early and expeditious environmental assessment review on the transmission line.
The two other areas are ones that I have already mentioned, and that relates to the parallel development, of which I said 6,000 megawatts are under our potential, and Ontario Hydro is now discussing 4,500 with private sector applicants, and there is the demand management which they and us have identified as about 5,000 to 6,000 megawatts.
When you add 5,000 and 6,000 twice, you are talking about roughly three more nuclear Darlington stations. What we are trying to see over the next three or five years is the degree of our success, both in demand management and also parallel development. So people, everyone, and particularly the Ontario community, will have an appreciation of what is possible in the context of the future.
As I mentioned, just a 50% increase from the current goals Ontario Hydro has in these two areas to the year 2000 will delay any major supply decisions for another three to five years. The energy conservation programs I admit are ambitious, but resources are being allocated in order to ensure that they are successful. If they are successful, and we are monitoring them, we will be able to see the results in the very near future. For the long run, that is where the government and the ministry are relying on the kind of evidence that is going to be presented to the Environmental Assessment Board, and the judgement of the board and its recommendations to government.
Mr Daigeler: I would still like to hear from the minister a little more specifically whether she has met with business groups or whether any meetings are scheduled, and what they have been saying to her.
Hon Mrs Carter: Of course I have met with business groups and I think there is no question that we can do more with energy efficiency. Let me point out that an industry that is using power efficiently is to that extent a more profitable and competitive industry. This is a way that it is in everybody's interest to go.
Mr McGuinty: Minister, with respect to the Energy Efficiency Act, when can we expect new regulations and of what will those regulations consist, and in particular what new appliances and motors will be included?
Hon Mrs Carter: Of course we are pursuing a general policy of tightening up regulations because we know that this is technologically feasible, and sometimes industries are a little slow to realize where their own interest lies and they get very slack about updating appliances as they could do. But for the details of that I would like to call on my deputy minister.
Mr Eliesen: I am going to ask for Barry Beale, who is in charge of this particular program, to give an update.
Mr Beale: Mr McGuinty, we now have 11 regulations in place under the Energy Efficiency Act. These regulations for the most part cover the white goods that we are familiar with in our homes: Dishwashers, clothes washers. We have also introduced regulations covering electric water heaters and oil-fired water heaters as well as -- a first on the continent -- eliminating continuously burning pilot lights on gas furnaces.
We have another set of regulations which we expect will be introduced before the end of the fiscal year, and these regulations will provide for even more stringent standards for refrigerators and freezers than the existing standard, as well as introduce regulations for additional heat pump sources of energy.
We have, as well, quite an ambitious program through the Canadian Standards Association and the Canadian Gas Association which we expect will leave us with improved gas furnaces; for example, improving efficiencies from the current average of the conventional furnace of 65% up as high as 78% or 79%. We are negotiating with the CSA on about three dozen more products that we would expect to see coming into the standard-setting process over the next three to five years.
This is really a success story, I think, for the Ontario government. It is always nice to be acknowledged as leaders in particular fields by your colleagues in other provinces and the federal government. As a result of our initiatives in Ontario, the British Columbia government has recently introduced its own Energy Efficiency Act and we understand that four other provinces, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Alberta, and Nova Scotia, are also investigating the possibility of acts.
1120
Mr McGuinty: Minister, the previous government had promised, with respect to global warming, to release a white paper which would outline the government's targets, some policy directions and some programs. I understand that was promised for December of the past year. Can you gave us some idea as to what stage that paper is at?
Hon Mrs Carter: Yes, of course we are working with the Ministry of the Environment on that. Both myself and the Minister of the Environment are taking this very seriously. That is why we want to make sure that when we do come up with our policy, it is going to be an adequate one. We are not too thrilled with the federal government's approach to this, which we feel is inadequate, that it is just trying to keep the level of gases that affect this question to recent levels whereas we feel that they have to be reduced. Of course it is not a problem that one government can solve. We want to be part of the solution in Ontario, and when our policy does come up I am sure you will see that it is a very positive one for taking action on this.
Mr McGuinty: When can we expect the paper, Minister?
Hon Mrs Carter: I think in about a couple of months. Where are we now? February. Probably by around April. We have somebody actually working on this quite intensively, because as I say we do take it very seriously and we want our policy, when it comes up, to be not only adequate in its goals but one that we can realistically achieve.
I am sure you understand that this is going to involve changes if we are really going to make a meaningful impact on this problem. The nice thing about it, of course, is that the things we have to do to reduce global warming are the same kinds of things we need to do for energy efficiency in a general way, so that we are moving in the same direction here.
There are no conflicts involved here. For example, we will have to make our vehicles and buildings much more energy-efficient. We want to do that anyway. We also have to look at agriculture, landfills, industry, which all have their part to play here. We are looking at a very all-embracing policy that is going to take all of this into account.
We expect to announce, as I say, a firm comprehensive plan and we want to make sure that we are going to do everything we can, that we are going to have realistic goals, but that they are going to be ones that are going to have some impact on this problem. Government of course can go so far on this. It is going to require contributions from everybody individually, from industry and from all the sectors of our society.
Mr Jordan: Minister, I found it interesting that your staff has reported that one third of the energy savings would come from commercial projects. I was wondering if you see a conflict between your ministry and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs relative to Bill 4 in allowing property owners to in fact upgrade and make their buildings more energy-efficient.
Hon Mrs Carter: You are referring just to commercial buildings?
Mr Jordan: I am talking the relativity of the legislation as put forward in Bill 4. It would appear to me to be in negative to your objective, to try and get the commercial buildings upgraded to a conservation standard, and now these people are going to not be able to do it.
Hon Mrs Carter: We do have programs in place that help people to do this. I think I mentioned this earlier. We have programs right across the board to encourage efficiency in buildings, whether they are commercial, industrial, government, private or whatever.
Mr Jordan: So you do not see a conflict therein the landlord or owner of the building under Bill 4 being limited in what he can do to upgrade the building to make it more energy-efficient, in line what you would like to see done? You feel that you can supplement him to the degree that he can go ahead and do this? Is that what you are saying?
Hon Mrs Carter: What is this conflict that you are thinking of in Bill 4?
Mr Jordan: If I owned this building, for instance -- thank God I do not -- but if I were to upgrade it, I would have to, as a businessman, pass some of the capital costs on to the tenant and I am not being allowed to do that, as I understand it. Do you see that as a negative effect on your conservation program?
Hon Mrs Carter: After all, landlords collect rent, and if energy is part of their cost, then they have to charge a higher rent if they are going to allow for wasteful use of energy. Now of course there is a question in rented property as to how it is set up, so if you have a metering system, the tenant pays, and if you have it all in, it is part of what the landlord has to get back from the tenants. But whichever way you look at it, there has to be an advantage in keeping energy bills down.
Mr Jordan: I was pointing more to upgrading the older building, where the rent has been fixed for some time more or less, and the upgrading would mean a large capital expenditure to bring it in line with your specifics for energy conservation. I just asked if you see one ministry supporting the other there, or do you see a conflict?
Hon Mrs Carter: I am sure this can be worked out. There are incentives and so on that can be used to achieve these objectives, and in general we are working very successfully with other ministries. We are not finding much problem in that line at all. Everybody sees that energy efficiency is to all our advantages, whether it is the Ministry of Transportation, Housing or whatever. We are finding this is something that we really work together on.
Mr Jordan: Perhaps I can move on then, Minister, to the list of projects being funded under vote 1403, energy development and management. I was wondering if you would consider tabling a list of those projects being funded and table them under the project name, the amount being funded and the individual company to whom the dollars are going.
Hon Mrs Carter: I believe my deputy minister has a list that might be pertinent to answering this question.
Mr Eliesen: We anticipated this kind of question would be asked, and therefore, rather than speaking for 15 minutes and giving you the list, we can table three copies with the committee providing the specific information that you have just requested.
The Chair: That is very helpful.
Mr Jordan: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I just want to move on for a minute to research. I noticed you have $180,000 for hydrogen research. Could you tell the committee what you plan to do relative to hydrogen research?
1130
Hon Mrs Carter: That is of a fairly technical nature, so I think I will ask staff to follow that up.
Mr Eliesen: I am going to ask our research and development manager, Bob Greven, who has been waiting for days and days for this opportunity, which is now fulfilled.
Mr Greven: Hydrogen is a technology that is again getting attraction and some private sector involvement and expenditures. We have at the moment three hydrogen-related projects, one of which is the testing or demonstration of a hydrogen-fuelled fuel cell at Dow Canada in Sarnia. The purpose here is to demonstrate whether or not it is feasible to take waste hydrogen produced by Ontario industry, of which there is a substantial quantity, and convert it into electricity using fuel cells.
The other two projects that I alluded to earlier are the photovoltaic hydrogen projects, which are being done again with 50% private sector funding, and we have a third one from an aluminum producer which is examining the potential of producing hydrogen from forms of waste aluminum that it is difficult to do otherwise with. So we have at this moment in time three hydrogen-related projects that are enjoying 50% private sector funding, which is, I think, an indication that the world of hydrogen is getting closer to economic reality.
In addition, we have volunteered for the last several years to contribute funding to a small-scale national hydrogen program designed to promote pre-competitive R and D or non-commercial R and D, to address some of the impediments facing hydrogen. This has not been picked up yet, because the federal government has not put its plan together. But again, the offer is still there. So we would conceivably next year be at a level approximately double the amount shown.
Mr Jordan: At one time Ontario was considering hosting a demonstration project. Is that still active?
Mr Greven: I am not aware of something per se called a demonstration project. Perhaps you could call Dow's project a demonstration project. It has proved to be far more a research program than a demonstration project.
Mrs Marland: I think that it is important that I put on the record that our questions about the value of conservation are not in the essence of the value of it on its own. It is just the argument that it will be a replacement and will meet the future load demands in this province.
We are, obviously, 100% behind conservation. In fact, I am having a forum on that very matter in my own riding, and my feeling about conservation is that we do not do enough. I attended a three-day meeting at the United Nations and another three-day meeting in Washington and, frankly, we are a long way behind in some of the initiatives that can and should be done in terms of conservation of energy in Ontario.
I want to say that I am very proud of the work of Don Sheardown with the Ontario Bus Industries, his progress with the natural gas vehicles in Mississauga. Mr Sheardown has been a leader in that industry in a number of areas from the very beginning and we are extremely proud of his work.
Minister, you said yesterday we have no immediate problem and I want to get back to that statement, because this morning you said we have already had blackouts and brownouts recently. Now you say that I am putting words in your mouth. I think when you read Hansard you will see that what I am saying is what you have said.
Hon Mrs Carter: Of course, we --
Mrs Marland: Excuse me, I have not asked the question yet. The question is, how is it on the one hand you can say we have no immediate problem and on the other you can acknowledge that we have had blackouts and brownouts recently? Are they not conflicting statements?
Hon Mrs Carter: Actually, I do not think we have had any just recently. I believe I said that there have been scares about them, not that there are right now. In 1989, I believe, there was a problem in December when there was a cold spell and everybody suddenly turned on their appliances. There was a problem, but that problem was largely due to the fact that a lot of the existing power stations were down or not functioning fully and the nuclear component was particularly to blame in that respect.
A lot of the nuclear stations were down for one reason or another, so that the full peak load requirement was barely being met. I believe the immediate cause of that was that an oil-fired station for some reason did not have sufficient oil available at that time, so that really this was not a function of the total capacity; it was a function of particular causes that came together at that time.
Since then, a lot of those stations have been rehabilitated, are functioning again, although we do admittedly have some problems still, particularly with some of the nuclear stations. As you know, one of the new Darlington stations is having some problems at the moment. But actually, as you know, we have continued the construction of Darlington. We felt that it had gone much too far; much too much money had been invested in it for us to cease doing that. So this is bringing large amounts of extra capacity on stream.
As you may know, we are in a recession; the actual demand for electricity has dropped this year, for the first time I believe since the Depression in the 1930s. So there is no immediate problem, and in any case the new nuclear facilities would not have come on stream for quite a large number of years so our policies have not in any way reduced the possible supply of electricity at this point or for foreseeable years to come.
The Chair: Thank you.
Hon Mrs Carter: In addition, of course, we are working on keeping things repaired and up to scratch.
Mrs Marland: Minister, in yesterday's speech in the printout copy that I had, the last sentence in your speech said: "Together we can transform Ontario into a truly energy-efficient society." When you read your speech, you did not say "energy-efficient;" you used the word "sustainable." I want to know whether there was a reason for you to transpose that word "sustainable" instead of "energy-efficient."
Hon Mrs Carter: We want it to be both obviously, energy-efficient and sustainable, and of course the two go quite closely together. If we rely on large expansion which is based on either fossil fuels --
Mrs Marland: So there was not any reason for you to change those words.
Hon Mrs Carter: No, nothing very profound.
Mr Jordan: We have been relating to Ontario Hydro throughout this hearing or debate, and given that Ontario Hydro is a wholesaler to the municipalities, I wonder what your leverage or control is over the commissions in these municipalities to implement your programs.
Hon Mrs Carter: I think that is a question I will ask staff to answer.
Mr Eliesen: Mr Jordan, with regard to the municipal utilities which I believe you are referring to, Ontario Hydro has developed an effective conservation program. They are sitting down with the Municipal Electric Association or the Association of Municipal Electrical Utilities and working through with them --
Mr Jordan: Yes, but who has the clout to make them act?
Mr Eliesen: Well, I guess the clout comes in two ways: The rates upon which they do charge have to receive approval by Ontario Hydro, so there is clout in the whole context of rate determination. There is also clout in -- I guess clout perhaps is too heavy a term. There is influence in the whole context of revenue flows. Ontario Hydro have specific incentive programs, for example, the lighting program which works through municipalities, $30 million has been allocated for that. Obviously, municipalities and municipal electric utilities are interested in having accessibility to those programs, and as Mr Franklin mentioned yesterday, this has been one of the big success stories in these specific areas.
1140
Mr Jordan: I guess what I am trying to find out is -- there is incentive through grants to upgrade lighting but there is no legislation per se to a municipal commission, a hydro commission that is set up by the people of that community. You do not have, outside of incentive grants, the leverage to get them to be part of your conservation program.
Mr Eliesen: Well, in the past as well as in the present and we hope in the future, the kind of partnership that has existed will continue, and in the legislative terms this is the specific action you are asking. Yes, Ontario Hydro does have clout, has leverage in allowing or not allowing specific rates that various commissions plan to charge in the future. In practice, that never takes place. In practice, the good working relationship that has been built up over the years continues into the future.
Mr Jordan: Thank you. In closing, I just want to recognize the minister's interest in going to see the atomic energy storage site for waste from the nuclear plants. I think you will be quite impressed with it and the safety that has been built into it in the different forms, and I congratulate you for your interest in that.
Hon Mrs Carter: Of course I had a tour of Darlington as well.
The Chair: We do not want the whole itinerary. Thank you, Mr Jordan. Ms Haslam has the floor.
Ms Haslam: It is interesting that you ended on that note because I have been reading on the select committee of energy in March 1990. They were looking at the CO2 emissions, so you have to take nuclear and CO2 and deal with it.
Mr Torrie, in that select committee, answering Mrs Grier, who was talking about, "It appears from what you say that if we go nuke, everything is nuke, and then we save CO2," said: "You cannot even start to think about converting the world to nuclear electricity. The extent to which nuclear draws investment away from the more attractive marginal investments, which are always efficiency and conservation and will be, no matter how hard we work at them, for another 10 years, to the extent that it does that, it is actually taking away from the best solution to the problem."
Again, Dr Burnham said: "If we have co-operation in the use of less electricity, the generating stations that we will cut back on first will, in fact, be our fossil-fuelled ones and we hope that energy efficiency will be able to help us reduce our reliance on the burning of fossil fuels. That is why the demand management and energy efficiency measures that we have are very important in minimizing environmental effects."
And Mr Holt said, "Our approach to the plan, as it says is to walk the line between these two various issues," the issue of CO2 and the issue that is in the paper, in today's Globe and Mail, "Drinking Water Tested After Radioactive Spill."
The Chair: You have a question in here, I assume.
Ms Haslam: Yes, walking the line. My question is: Is the government getting caught between these two competing objectives, nuclear on one side and fossil fuels on the other? People have been saying that the moratorium on nuclear plants is detrimental to our global warming, but are we caught between these two competing objectives?
Hon Mrs Carter: It is suggested to me that this is something that should be left to the environmental assessment that is coming up. But I should point out that a lot of the carbon dioxide produced, I believe 80% of it, is not due to power production at all, although obviously that does contribute, but is due largely to transportation and other uses of fossil fuels, such as house heating and so on.
Experts have looked at this question and they have decided that in order to substitute nuclear for fossil fuels in power production for this objective you would have to build at an incredibly rapid rate all over the world, which would cost them a fantastic sum of money, and that really, as I say, since this is only a small proportion of the carbon dioxide produced, this is really not a sensible way to go.
I think to reduce our need for power through efficiency is a much better way of spending our money. If we spend our money on nuclear power stations, then in this world where we do not have indefinite amounts to spend, we have to make choices and we would then lose out on the conservation and efficiency side, which obviously is also a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Mr Hansen: I have been an environmentalist and I have been a conservationist. Both were titles maybe 10 years ago that you would never want to associate with your name; today it is not bad to talk as if you are an environmentalist --
The Chair: Now you are a socialist.
Mr Hansen: That is okay too. That is all in one.
I have to say that when one of the other governments was in power, I guess back in 1984 and 1985, there was conservation at that particular time also. I do not think this government takes a look that they were not going on.
I was sort of pinching pennies also, and I took at a look at the conservation part of switching to an alternative fuel in my vehicle, propane. My home was the first to have a coal-fired electric heat pump, under experimental, which actually saved half my fuel cost; I was actually extracting heat from the air. So I have been around a long time in that area. A lot of times what people look for from conservation is saving money; saving money is one of the biggest things. With a cheap resource, sometimes it gets wasted. I think some of the ideas have been going on in the past and they are accelerated with our government now. I do not know if that is partisan or not.
But the question is that there has been some concern -- I think Mr Charlton was the one who brought it up originally -- that Ontario Hydro look at a program of giving free to every Ontario resident a fridge. I have a few concerns around that. Would they be frost-free fridges, which actually take more power?
Mrs Marland: Sound familiar, Brian?
Mr Hansen: The other thing is that I have talked to some other people and they are very scared that that other fridge they have at home becomes a beer fridge, so we have actually defeated our whole purpose. Also, with the fridges that, let's say, are taken in, is the Freon going to be collected or are they going to a scrapyard and release it to the atmosphere?
We have some good ideas out there, but before they are followed through -- I would like to hear the opinion of the minister or the staff on where we are headed in that way. Watching TV Ontario last night, there was an hour on exactly what we are talking here. There was a nuclear plant just about ready to go on stream, and a private company sold it to a municipality for $1. They no longer wanted it because of the cost of startup.
I think we have to look at this very closely, like I said earlier. I think we are going to have to take a look at alternatives and conservation, that planning for 15 years down the road could lock us into something we regret we have to pay for.
The Chair: I just want to caution people that the issue of the acquisition of a free fridge is a very sensitive issue around this building, so if you could limit your comments to the energy components of that question it would be appreciated.
Hon Mrs Carter: We have had energy scares in the 1970s and 1980s. Now the point is that it is for good; we have realized that this is not just a question of what is happening in the Middle East, although that is a factor, particularly now, but we do have to have a long-term view of this, because our fossil fuels are going to run out, we are going to get into global warming problems if we do not do something.
With regard to the fridge situation, my information is that when people turn in a power-guzzling fridge and get a better one, they do have to turn in the old one, right? You cannot just get a new one and keep the other one for beer. It has to go. There is no doubt about that. I am quite sure that the arrangement is made for the Freon to be extracted from that refrigerator before it is hopefully recycled.
Mrs Marland: You are saying they have to turn in the old one?
Hon Mrs Carter: If you get a new one on one of these special deals that may be largely imaginary at the moment. But this has been thought of; you do not give out the new power-efficient fridge and just allow it to be running in conjunction with the old one downstairs with the beer in. It has been thought of that the Freon should be extracted and recycled. Maybe staff would like to --
The Chair: If I might, minister. We have about four minutes left and I would like to recognize Mr Charlton for two reasons. First, he is on my list. Second, I wish to indicate that I am most familiar with the question being asked, and worked with and in support of Mr Charlton on the proposal and met with workers in the Hamilton area, so I am familiar with his proposal. I think perhaps it is best that he comment, if he so chooses, and that would be a recognition of his request to do so.
1150
Mr Charlton: I would like to ask a question, but I will make a very brief comment, simply to say that the proposal which was mine, not a product of or adopted yet by the Ministry of Energy in total, was a proposal to deal with all of the questions you raised including the collection of the old fridges and the discharge of the Freon gas and its reuse rather than its disposal in landfill sites. All of the points you raised are important points in terms of how we tried to design the program in question.
My question to the minister -- the minister may have to refer to staff on this question. My question relates to the report of the select committee on energy in January 1989. I took a quick run through it in relation to your opening remarks and the discussion that has gone on here over the last day and a half and just took a quick count.
The recommendations of the select committee, by the way, were unanimously endorsed by the members of all three parties on that committee. They made 33 recommendations, all of which relate to the topics we have been dealing with here. I will quickly read a couple of them.
Recommendation 6, for example: "No new major Ontario Hydro supply option should be approved until the Ministry of Energy is satisfied that the uncertainty regarding the amount of demand management which can be achieved is reduced by means of effective market research and studies of implementation feasibility," and so on and so forth.
On my count, it would appear that the ministry has already adopted 21 of the recommendations of the 33, that an additional six, the minister has said, are currently under serious review, and that there are only three recommendations outstanding; yet we have had all kinds of questions here about whether or not the new energy directions being followed by the Ministry of Energy are appropriate.
My question to you, minister, is: That select committee spent a significant amount of time and money receiving expert testimony, some of which has been referred to in other questions. Are you confident that the direction which the ministry has adopted is largely supported by fact and science and implementable, and that the current policies of the ministry largely reflect the carefully thought out recommendations of the select committee in 1989?
Hon Mrs Carter: The answer to that is absolutely yes. I have some concern for my Liberal colleagues in that they are having to appear to oppose a lot of policies which they themselves have agreed with in the past. But the details of that maybe Marc would like to --
Mr Eliesen: Just one quick observation, and I guess ironically it relates to the current recession that is under way, which does provide a specific comfort level. As the minister-has mentioned, last year, the year 1990, Ontario Hydro experienced a decrease of roughly 3%, or 1% on a weather-adjusted basis, which they have never had since the Depression. We forecast a flat demand this year and maybe even less.
Ontario Hydro, as I mentioned yesterday, has revised its plans because of the decrease in electricity consumption and has deferred any reactivation of the Hearn generating station and the providing of additional combustion turbine units there to provide peaking power. In the ministry's studies, we do have sufficient time to evaluate the results of the kind of programs that are being introduced not only in demand management but parallel development, and I should add as well the kinds of initiatives that are intended in the other major sectors of transportation and housing and the municipal area, which obviously will impact the degree to which electricity growth will escalate in the future.
The Chair: For purposes of Hansard, staff is now circulating the printed remarks of Robert Franklin, the president and chief executive officer of Ontario Hydro, and we would appreciate if the minister could express our appreciation for his circulating this for us.
We have now completed the assigned time for the 1990-91 estimates of the Ministry of Energy. I should now like to call a vote on each of the estimate votes.
Mr McGuinty: Mr Chair, I have additional questions. I wonder if it might be possible for me to file those.
The Chair: I am advised that you could read them into the record, if you so choose, or just file them with the clerk. They could also be presented as questions in Orders and Notices for the minister's consideration.
Mr McGuinty: If I am to file them with the committee, of course that would be on the assumption that the minister would respond to them. That was my intention.
The Chair: They will be forwarded to the minister. The minister may wish to provide you with her assurance that she will give responses to those questions.
Hon Mrs Carter: Delighted.
The Chair: "Delighted," I think, was the word the minister used.
Votes 1401 to 1404, inclusive, agreed to.
The Chair: Shall the estimates of the Ministry of Energy for 1990-91 be reported to the House?
Agreed to.
The Chair: This now completes the estimates for Energy. We will reconvene at 2 o'clock in this room, where we will begin the estimates of the Ministry of Community and Social Services.
The committee recessed at 1157.
AFTERNOON SITTING
The committee resumed at 1406.
ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICES
The Chair: I would like to call to order the standing committee on estimates. We are beginning estimates for the Ministry of Community and Social Services. It is now eight minutes after the hour of 2. In accordance with standing orders, we have been assigned eight hours for the purposes of these estimates and today's session should be completed by 6:08 today.
Before we proceed -- and indeed my intention, as I indicated earlier, is to ask the Vice-Chair to take the Chairman's role -- I wish to indicate a couple of points. First of all, this is a public proceeding. For whatever reason, there seems to be a considerable interest in the Community and Social Services estimates today. I must indicate that there are no demonstrations allowed within the building and no commentary is allowed to disrupt the proceedings, which are being electronically recorded for Hansard. In the event that that should occur, the Chair may rule that the room be vacated, so I feel that we must advise our guests today.
I would also indicate that we have a fire marshal's order and that standing in the room is not permitted, as I now see it before me. Unfortunately, that is a fire marshal's order and so I would ask people to move outside if they do not have a chair. If you would please comply with that, I would appreciate it.
We will proceed with an opening statement, in accordance with our standing orders and precedent, from the minister, Zanana Akande -- I would ask her to introduce her key staff who accompany her at the table -- followed by comments by the critic of the official opposition, Mrs McLeod, followed by Conservative Party commentary and then a response from the minister.
Minister, if you will take the chair.
Hon Mrs Akande: Good afternoon. I have brought the staff with me from the ministry. I wanted to bring them all here, but there is not sufficient room and so we had to make do with the deputy minister, Val Gibbons, and Barbara Stewart, who is the director of financial planning, and Udo Stillich. I hope you can hear me over this, but it seems as though I am going to be competing with that sound today.
I am aware as I address this committee today that the ministry estimates we are considering applied to the 1990-91 fiscal year, a year that will be ending in a little more than six weeks. Though the rationale behind this budget was sponsored and supported by the previous administration, it falls to me to describe it, to interpret it and to identify ways in which it might be used as a base for new directions.
So let us all take a look at the life and times of the Ministry of Community and Social Services. Perhaps I should have said, "the life and hard times," because I am appearing before this committee at a time when the recession has exacerbated all social welfare problems Canada-wide. For example, in 1989 there were 840,000 Canadian children living in poverty. That number has risen rapidly and increases daily.
The province of Ontario has enjoyed a relatively buoyant economy for a lengthy period. This would have been the time when preparations should have been made for leaner days. Those leaner days are here. I am sure you heard over the weekend the media stories reporting that many more jobs are being lost in the service sector. This means that women, in disproportionate numbers, will be adversely affected by the recession. In addition, numbers of manufacturing plants have closed their doors, permanently. This has eliminated thousands of jobs.
The numbers of people needing assistance in Ontario are escalating dramatically. Today, almost 35% more people need assistance than at this time a year ago. More than 338,000 children in Ontario are dependent upon social assistance. The need is real and distressing.
We asked the federal government, our partner, what can be done. They answered by telling us about deficit reduction and increased taxes and the high cost of war. They answered by limiting contributions for welfare benefits and social services. They answered with clawbacks and diminished unemployment insurance benefits. Our erstwhile partner is pushing people on to social assistance.
So here we are, facing the fact that this government does not have the money to solve the many problems the current recession has brought and the federal government has helped to create, but we have made a beginning.
We have dedicated $700 million to providing jobs and rebuilding the public infrastructure. We are planning creative ways to put people to work at projects such as renovating homes for the aged and other facilities. As part of the package, we are looking at ways to provide individuals with training that will increase their employment prospects. This government believes in investing in people, in helping them to help themselves.
I am here today to talk about the dollars that are committed to our mandatory services. I want to look at my ministry's priorities, directions and commitments to the people of Ontario. Let me emphasize the word "people." Yes, we are here to talk about estimates, budgets, dollars, but let us never lose sight of the fact that we are really talking about people -- children and women and men with many different needs and hurts and frustrations. As we proceed, can we look beyond the dollars and keep before us the faces of people, the many people in this province who are hungry or handicapped or hurting?
Let us base our day's discussion on the consideration of directions. Let us be open to maintaining the systems that work. Let us proceed on the premise that our deliberations are founded in good intentions and good will.
In times of plenty, the competition of adversaries is stimulating and welcome. In the good times, we can afford the luxury of banter and controversy around the directions we should take. In hard times, we all need to pull together.
Let us recognize the efforts of previous governments and build on that foundation. As minister, I assume the responsibility for keeping the ship afloat while changing its direction. I recognize that inheriting the budget means inheriting the responsibility to continue in present directions until well-considered changes can be made.
I cannot help thinking wistfully that "inheritance" usually carries a happy connotation instead of unpleasant surprises when the will is read.
For the fiscal year 1990-91, the Treasurer allocated $6 billion to this ministry. The money is being spent on the programs and services we are mandated to provide for children, for adults, for the physically handicapped, developmentally handicapped and those in financial need, a need that is overshadowing all our transactions. A need that must be met.
We may have to rethink and rearrange some services while we weather the recession, but we must deal directly with the ravages of unemployment and all its attendant ills. People who lose their jobs often lose their sense of dignity and their sense of self-worth, which can lead to depression, family abuse and family breakdown. We must find ways to ensure that existing and new employment programs are effective in opening doors for people who are out of work. We must provide more accessible day care so people will be free to accept jobs. We must provide counselling for those in distress and help them to help themselves. We will not leave people flat. We have to provide help right now and we have to give people hope.
I am inviting all of you today to get on board and work with us in effecting solutions. The future we must save belongs to all of us, but above all, the future belongs to our children, this country's greatest and most precious resource, but a fragile resource that is easily damaged.
This means, first of all, to recognize that government has a responsibility to support families raising children. We must become partners in parenting, rather than attempting to replace or supplant family, except as a last resort. Supporting families with children requires us to ensure that parents have adequate incomes to raise their children. It requires us to help parents balance the competing demands of work and family life by, for example, providing child care for working parents, to make sure that the systems serving children are sensitive to the needs and demands of parents.
We recognize that children do not develop in narrow compartments labelled health, education, social services and so forth. We must develop a system that attempts to deal with all the needs of the whole child. As a beginning, we have published and distributed the report of the Advisory Committee on Children's Services entitled Children First. We have established nine pilot projects to develop more effective models of service delivery for children at risk. This project is known as Better Beginnings, Better Futures. We have completed a major review of safeguards in children's residential programs to protect children and youth against physical, sexual and emotional abuse and assault. This review was conducted by the Ministry of Community and Social Services and the Ministry of Correctional Services.
1420
We are grappling with the reality of child and family poverty. I gladly accepted the opportunity to speak last week before a federal subcommittee in Ottawa on the subject of child and family poverty. We recognize that children are growing up in poverty because their parents are poor. We are squandering the futures of a generation of Canadian children because of their impoverished lives. Fourteen per cent of all Ontario children live in poverty. Thus, one in every seven children in Ontario is on social assistance of some kind. In the past 18 months, the number of children in Ontario dependent on social assistance has grown by 102,000, to reach a total of 338,000. While the federal government has introduced some measures to rescue people living below the poverty line, these people still face a marginal existence. A great number of moderate- and middle-income families have seen their standard of living drop in recent years. Young families struggling to raise their children are hit particularly hard. Many families caught in the grip of the recession find themselves turning to social assistance for the first time in their lives.
I have reiterated that Ontario is seeking a commitment from the federal government to re-establish our historic partnership of funding health and social services. I have urged the federal government to remember the commitment made by the Prime Minister at the United Nations, as well as the unanimous decision of the House of Commons, to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Ontario is prepared to work with the federal government and has already moved to address poverty on several fronts. These are some of the things the Ministry of Community and Social Services is doing:
This government announced plans for an interministerial approach to poverty in Ontario last November. I promised then that the government would take these steps:
We have put the social assistance reform on a fast track. I have asked the independent advisory group on new social assistance legislation to accelerate its valuable work. The group will advise me as to which recommendations of the Social Assistance Review Committee could be implemented without legislative change as soon as possible.
We have improved social assistance benefits through rate increases of 7% to the basic allowance and 10% to maximum shelter allowances. This adds 2% and 5% respectively to the previous government's commitment.
A committee of ministries led by the Ministry of Community and Social Services will co-ordinate the implementation of those SARC recommendations that go beyond the scope of any one ministry.
Since municipalities were not given advance notice of the increases for this year only, the province will pay that additional increase. We shall draw on a special fund to support employment programs for people receiving social assistance and people with disabilities.
We are working with other ministries on many more initiatives to address poverty. For example, we have, as I have said, provided $700 million for jobs through labour-intensive building projects. We have announced that the scope of pay equity will be broadened to cover an additional 420,000 working women. We have committed ourselves to raising the minimum wage to 60% of the average industrial wage. We have introduced measures to ease the transition of workers facing plant closures. These include $25 million for basic skills and commitment to a wage protection fund. We have established the Fair Tax Commission to ensure more equitable taxes.
We are working towards a revision of the child care system. Our aims are to achieve a comprehensive system that will contribute to healthy child development, will be more affordable and accessible and will be flexible enough to offer choices to parents.
Less than two weeks ago I announced funding amounting to over $52.8 million. This funding provides an additional 5,000 child care subsidies, includes 4,100 new subsidies for child care spaces already in the community, brings relief to parents currently on waiting lists for subsidies, includes 900 new subsidies to go to child care spaces in new schools in 1991.
A fund of $30 million will be used to enhance the salaries of child care workers in the not-for-profit sector who are currently underpaid. This is considered a down payment on pay equity. Although we recognize that all cannot be done at once, we are determined to do all that we can with the limited resources left us.
We are aware that, in the area of children's mental health services, the number of children who have been put on waiting lists is of concern. The ministry has been working with the Ontario Association of Children's Mental Health Centres to find resolutions to waiting lists for mental health services and perceived salary inequities between the professional staff in health, education and social services. The ministry has increased funding to community agencies, including the Ontario Association of Children's Mental Health Centres, from 4.5% to 5.5% in 1990-91 at the cost of almost $21 million. The ministry has dedicated, in this fiscal year, $58.1 million to direct care worker salaries in community agencies funded by MCSS.
The report of the Advisory Committee on Children's Services reiterates my own conviction that we need to make fundamental changes in the way we plan and provide services to children. We need to create a system that is truly flexible, co-ordinated and integrated and base such a system on the principles of empowerment, consultation, co-operation and accountability. This ministry is involved in a number of projects to increase interministry collaboration in children's mental health. I have pledged my leadership in seeking ways to link the various bodies concerned with children and families so they may work together to find solutions.
I would like to turn now to the multi-year plan, the plan that assists people with developmental handicaps by providing opportunities for community living. As perhaps you know, the plan has three elements: community development and nursing home and facility placement.
Community development has been emphasized to address the pent-up demands for services to clients who have not been institutionalized and the development of services to meet the needs of residents returning to the community. Many significant changes in service delivery have been achieved by redeploying resources at the agency level.
By 31 July 1990, placements from six nursing homes were completed with four homes being closed. As of 1 December 1990, 327 nursing home residents have been placed. New resources have been provided for facility residents, including 83 residents from Muskoka Regional Centre and approximately 500 residents from other facilities.
As you will recall, last November, I announced a temporary hold on community placement plans for residents of provincially operated institutions. During the hold, I met with representatives from a number of advocacy groups and we had frank and good discussions. Our meetings confirmed that none of the groups is opposed to deinstitutionalization. This is not to say that the current system is perfect, but I am convinced that creative approaches have been developed to meet the needs of people with developmental handicaps and their families in the community.
On 20 December I announced the lifting of the temporary hold. We are calling for a new beginning, a fresh start that recognizes and addresses the concerns of all the multi-year plan partners. Over the coming weeks and months, we shall sponsor a number of forums for consumers, families, advocates, workers, union representatives and leading experts in the field of services for people with developmental handicaps. The findings of this forum will help us to provide leadership in program development and delivery. We will also be looking for ways to improve the quality of service to developmentally handicapped people.
MCSS is involved, along with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Citizenship, in a comprehensive plan to reform Ontario's long-term care system. Reform is needed because of the growing number of elderly and disabled people in Ontario, the increasing prevalence of chronic conditions among them and their increased use of services. Since January, I have been meeting with Evelyn Gigantes, the Minister of Health, and Elaine Ziemba, the Minister of Citizenship, to review the proposals contained in Strategies for Change, which was developed by the previous government.
1430
We agree with the intent of the proposed reform and agree that reform is needed. We accept many of the recommendations, question some and require further consultation on others. We are also looking at ways of strengthening the emphasis on people remaining in their own communities and of enhancing the community's capacity to support people in their own homes and neighbourhoods.
Once we have completed our own review, we will be able to announce our plans regarding scheduling of the reform. This will take place as soon as possible. We are committed to beginning a broad-based consultation as soon as possible. This will be a consultation which guarantees significant input from all those most directly affected by the reform, particularly the consumers and their families.
In June 1990 this ministry committed $14 million to strengthen and support social services on provincial native reserves, with special emphasis on the continued development of the native children's services system. This ministry committed $4.8 million to develop newly designated, native-operated child and family services agencies in northern Ontario to provide guidance, counselling, family services and other child welfare services to native reserve residents.
This ministry committed an additional $619,000 for native child welfare activities in southwestern Ontario, including hiring additional prevention workers on reserves. It also committed approximately $7 million to go towards new native counselling programs based on reserves, to ensure the ongoing welfare of native children living there; $600,000 of this total to go to Payukotayno Child and Family Services, based in Moosonee.
This ministry committed $926,000 to provide on-reserve programs and supports to native youth. It committed $126,000 to provide a crisis hot line telephone service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This service is sponsored by the Shibogama tribal council and will serve several reserves in the Sioux Lookout area. It also committed $800,000 to support development and research of two Better Beginnings, Better Futures projects on reserves and it committed $500,000 for increased homemaking and nursing services for native elders who live on reserves.
The continuation of these initiatives is based on the government's respect for the right of native people to determine their own futures. We believe improved services for native children will give them a better chance to achieve their full potential and make contributions to their communities and to their culture.
The Provincial-Municipal Social Services Reviewyou cannot exactly Committee, senior representatives of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the Ontario Municipal Social Services Association and MCSS came together in 1987 to examine the funding, arrangement and delivery of social services. PMSSR consultation recently ended and responses from municipalities, community agencies and provincial organizations are still coming in and being reviewed.
As we look at the recommendations, it is clear that we cannot address the proposed changes to the social services system in isolation from the larger issue of provincial-municipal relationships. It is clear that current provincial-local arrangements must be made simpler, fairer and more efficient. It is also clear that the people of the province want services to be more accessible, more responsive and better co-ordinated. We have listened and we agree.
I hope our transfer partners will join with the government as we search for long-range solutions that will meet fiscal responsibilities while meeting people's needs. We may have difficult decisions to make in the future, but we must all work together to lay a solid foundation for economic recovery.
I would like to end as I began, with the hope that all of us can work together to find our way out of the economic gloom and doom surrounding us. Even while I was preparing these notes to speak to you today, news was breaking of more people in financial difficulty. In January almost 8,000 new names were added to Metropolitan Toronto's general welfare rolls. That is an 11% increase over December and an 83% increase over a year ago. While it is true that Metro does not precisely reflect the provincial picture, those are pretty scary numbers.
No single simple solution is going to get us out of this economic mess. Together we can bring an enormous amount of ability, experience and creativity to bear on this problem. It belongs to all of us. Let's tackle it together.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you, Minister. I am just wondering, before we continue, if we could open that other door so that the people in the hall could hear. It means that the people sitting in front of it would have to move while it is open. If somebody tall could reach the top to unlock it, it would mean that those people in the hall could at least hear. Thank you, Mr Daigeler. I appreciate it.
Who is speaking for the official opposition? Mrs McLeod? Thank you.
Mrs McLeod: Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. Minister, I appreciate your remarks, and perhaps most particularly your second paragraph, which suggests that indeed the estimates we are reviewing in committee are the estimates prepared and supported by a previous administration, but that we will not make this process simply a review of those estimates and the achievements of the past but also a basis for looking towards the challenges of the future and some of the continuing concerns.
That is certainly what we would like to use the estimates process for, although I will begin my very brief response to your comments by sharing in your recognition of the efforts of previous governments and the fact that what you will indeed be doing is building on the foundations that were laid.
We recognize that the initiatives you have outlined in your opening remarks reflect achievements that we will be able to identify in going through the estimates process and that the initiatives you will be continuing into the next year are in very large measure initiatives that were begun by the previous administration: everything from the Social Assistance Review Committee to the Maloney report, to Better Beginnings, Better Futures, to the native social service workers, to the review of safeguards, to the proposals for long-term care.
I suggested to your colleague as we did the previous estimates that there is a rather generally held consensus in our caucus that your government is at its best when it is continuing our initiatives, and we will certainly continue to support you as you take forward progress in these areas.
I do want to state for the record as we approach the 1990-91 estimates that I have a great deal of personal pride in having been part of a government that was able to make truly giant strides in so many areas of social reform, and to give due credit to your predecessors, Minister, my colleagues John Sweeney and Charles Beer, for their commitment and their efforts in order to take that agenda forward.
You have indicated that you will be continuing with many of those initiatives and also looking at changes in direction, and we will certainly look with interest at the proposed changes in direction. I know that there will continue to be shared goals, just as there are shared concerns. When we share the goals and share the sense of progress, we will certainly support you in those new directions. There will also be areas in which we have differences in perspective, differences in belief about what should be done, and I think very legitimate challenges to bring to bear.
I do want to just comment on one part of your introductory comments again. That was the inference on page 2 that the province of Ontario enjoyed a relatively buoyant economy for a lengthy period and this would have been the time when preparation should have been made for leaner days. With all due respect, I suggest, knowing the budget fairly well, that there were in fact preparations made for leaner days. While indeed there is a recession and indeed that increases both the need and the difficulty of responding to the need, there is still some surplus of over $650 million, even though there was an operating surplus to begin with in that budget of some $3 billion. I think it is important that we recognize that there were plans made for leaner days, fortunately, so that the progress that was made in social programs can be sustained even during this recessionary period.
I would certainly concur with you in your expressions of concern about the decreasing role of the federal government in providing support for social programs. My colleagues shared that concern, as our government did. That concern was expressed on many occasions by both John Sweeney and Charles Beer, and we will certainly support you in continuing to express that concern to our federal counterparts.
1440
We are going to approach the estimates process with a recognition of the specific issues that have to be addressed if we are going to make progress towards goals which we do in fact share. I will just very briefly indicate the areas that we plan to address during the course of the estimates.
Certainly some general areas in which we will want to raise some questions are the allocation of program budgets by the Ministry of Community and Social Services and exactly how those budgets are determined, how the global budget is taken to a regional level and from a regional level to a program level. We will raise these questions not because we want to discourage flexibility in the administration and delivery of programs, but because I hear growing concerns about equity and growing questions about just how priorities are determined from region to region across the province.
We will raise questions about capital budgets and how capital budgets in the Ministry of Community and Social Services are set, again looking at the issue of the global budget being broken down into regional budgets and how in fact priorities are then set between the needs in different programs and how reasonable costs for new facilities are established so that the dollars can be stretched to as many pressing needs as possible.
You have touched on a number of the areas which we will want to raise further questions in, certainly the area of long-term care reform: more specifically, the status and the commitment that your government will bring to taking forward the proposals on long-term care, and in the past year's budget, some details on the expenditures of moneys that were set aside in the 1990-91 budget for long-term care provision.
We will want to discuss the issue of extended care beds and the balance that is found in setting priorities between placement in facilities, those who need to have a facilities placement, and providing support for care at home. Obviously, the support for care at home is essential and the extension of the integrated homemaker program is equally essential to the success of long-term care reform, but clearly too it cannot be one or the other. Residential care will still be needed, and we will be looking for answers to the question of balance.
I think we will want to raise some of the questions about the beginning of the implementation of long-term care reform and the appointment of the co-ordinators and how you would expect those regional co-ordinators would begin to function in taking forward the next steps in reform.
The area of social assistance, of course, will be a focus for our concern during this estimates process. You have indicated the January increase in the Metro welfare rolls. I can assure you from reading the clippings, as I am sure that you do, that this is not exclusively a Metro Toronto problem. Durham region in October was reporting that there was a 60.9% increase in the number of individuals on welfare over the previous month. In Waterloo in October, there were 5,223 families on welfare in the previous month, up 71% from September of the year before. Clearly this is an area in which we have to address the questions of the new stresses on social assistance as the recession has its impact, but we are also going to want to ask you about planned directions for the future and the progress you believe can be made in taking the social assistance reform recommendations further on in the next steps.
We will want to come back to the issue of deinstitutionalization. Having spent some time at the social development committee on this issue, the areas of our questions will be on the question of support for community placement and the degree of flexibility as well as the adequacy of the support.
You will be well aware that the questions related to child care are ones in which we will want to raise issues, both of the adequacy of support, of the need for additional subsidies and spaces, but also related to your most recent decisions about the effect of provision of what is essentially direct operating grants exclusively to the not-for-profit sector.
We will get into questions about children's aid societies, the numbers of children coming into care; the number of child welfare reviews over the past year, and the response to inadequacies in support for children's aid societies that have been identified in those reviews; questions of transition houses, whether new programs are to be implemented and whether there will be access to federal funds for new centres; and certainly -- an issue you touched on in your remarks -- the issue of children's mental health centres and whether or not, in anticipating an effort to increase resources to deal with waiting lists, adequate resources can be put in place in order to be able to move towards the Maloney report recommendations.
A further issue, of course, over a general range of programs will be the issue of salary equity and community agencies, which again we touched on in the social development committee.
We look forward, Minister, to going into the estimates on a vote-by-vote basis so that we can raise these very specific concerns, both to identify progress that has been made, the challenges of the future and what we can anticipate in next year's budget.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you, Mrs McLeod. The spokesperson for the third party, Mr Jackson.
Mr Jackson: Thank you, Madam Chair. At the outset let me say that I am pleased to be able to participate in the estimates process so that we are bringing attention to what I consider to be one of the most important ministries of the new government. We were only given the opportunity for six estimates and we are fortunate that this ministry is available to us, as is the minister, so that we can discuss the very pressing issues which, we all can agree, require attention. So it is very timely that we are here.
I would concur with Mrs McLeod that our approach as the critics will be somewhat different than the previous estimates that occurred this morning, in that it would be our intention to look at line-by-line items with respect to the budgeting process, with respect to what will be done with surplus dollars and the reasons behind why certain expenditures have run in excess.
It is an opportunity for us to cross-reference that with the Provincial Auditor's report, who was more than active in this ministry in his last auditor's report, which I notice the minister did not reference. There are several things the minister did not reference and I will come to that in a moment. But let me first briefly comment on the minister's statement.
I find passing strange the initial comments of the minister with respect to blaming at one point, a very clear line, the problem of poverty in this recession as solely that of the federal government. I guess one might suspect that the minister has more aspirations in Ottawa than she does to the performance here in Ontario. I can only come to that conclusion because it was obvious in the last election that your leader and your party made it very clear that the recession was very much the problem of the Ontario government of the day, because of its 63 tax increases and the very nature in which it was structuring taxation and not addressing certain social issues. It was the genesis of your Agenda for People in fact. However, I believe that a minister sitting in your position will ultimately be determined by performance under pressure.
You go on in page 4 to then turn your attention to Ontario and say, "Yes, I may go to Ottawa and criticize the federal government, but when I come back to Ontario, we really must join hands and have a non-adversarial approach." Now, Minister, you are a former educator, and if you were marking this as an essay, when you got to page 4 you would have made a side notation to your student that he had just contradicted himself. I do not know what mark that would ultimately get, but for me I see that as a bit of a double standard.
I can only say to you that my version of how I operate is that I advocate according to my conscience and I am fortunate that my party allows me to do it. We should be fair to say that when one changes from opposition to government, the ability to do that is severely limited. But while I am in opposition, I appreciate very much my opportunity to speak according to my conscience and to speak as loudly as I am able to do. So therefore I will not see the non-adversarial approach as anything other than some kind of compromise. When matters of discrimination exist, I cannot compromise and join hands with the government.
1450
Setting that aside, I should like to agree with the comments from my colleague in the Liberal Party, Mrs McLeod. I too have great respect for John Sweeney and some of the work that he did. It was very abundantly clear the power that he had in cabinet and the ability that he had to convince the cabinet of the day that the special needs his ministry had required immediate government attention and an injection of funds, and the list is very long where he was able to succeed.
On the other hand, it is also fair to say that the auditor's report does contain an examination of the previous government and not your government, Minister, and that it uncovered some very serious matters. I cite the Brantwood case as the most serious and dramatic of all cases.
I guess I would like to conclude my comments vis-à-vis the response of the two previous speakers by suggesting that the importance of a partnership with any level of government is best understood when we examine perhaps the reason why there has been a capping on the increase of the transfer payments you discussed.
That has much to do with the fact that the Ontario government two years ago implemented an employer health tax which, as every member of this legislative committee understands -- the federal government is the largest single employer in this province, and therefore, when the provincial government produced the employer health tax, it created a bill to the federal government that is far in excess greater than the transfer payment we lost in the sweepstakes.
Essentially the federal government says: "We have a responsibility to all the provinces in this nation. We act as parents in a family of provinces and when one province decides that it should grab an undue share of the resources of our nation, that we have to somehow compensate." I very much see the difficult situation in Ottawa as a function of this opportunity for provincial governments to punch a larger hole in the same pail of taxation revenues that are paid in this country.
I would like to approach that in a more balanced fashion, and I have tried to indicate to the minister that there are many things we could have presented before the all-party committee in Ottawa dealing with child poverty that might have proved more helpful. I might even go so far as to say that if Sheila Copps -- everybody has an opinion about Sheila Copps, but if Sheila Copps can put together a comprehensive proactive package to present to the federal government, I think the least that the Minister of Community and Social Services in this province can do is something comparable. Having said that, I wish to now focus on the areas as you as minister have defined them in your presentation.
I would ask you to correct me in turn, but I can only presume that the comments raised in your brief represent the priorities for your government. They do not constitute all your priorities, but they represent a list of the priorities as you see them currently. I note that you have started with child care, and I note -- as I think Mrs McLeod has noted -- that it was a substantive election promise. We know how difficult it is to implement election promises, but the issues of child care have become far more complex today, based on your announcement two weeks ago, than they were during the last provincial election when it was simply expanding spaces and dealing with the inequity of pay equity and legitimate pay equity needs of workers, professionals in day care centres in Ontario.
I understood that you were unable to expand the system to the extent that you had hoped, but I was shocked that your treatment of child care workers was specifically to offer the enhanced funding for those in the public sector and not for those in the commercial sector. In my view that represents a form of discrimination and one of the questions I certainly would like you to address at some point --
[Interruption]
The Vice-Chair: Excuse me. We do not permit any form of demonstration in this committee room, so I would appreciate it if you would take regard of that ruling. Thank you.
Mr Jackson: I would ask the minister if she could please indicate what legal counsel she was given with respect to any test that might be given where persons performing the exact same work under the exact same circumstances for the exact same children can be discriminated against from a funding point of view from the province, and further, based on the notion that the current funding has checks and balances within it, a safeguard that ensures there is automatic pass-through of these provincial dollars right directly to the hands of the teachers and child care workers.
So I would ask the minister to explain in more detail why this was allowed. I recall very vividly your Minister without Portfolio responsible for women's issues (Ms Swarbrick) stating that there was great hope for the Rae government on the issue of women's issues because there were now 11 feminists in the cabinet. This is a matter of Hansard.
I was fascinated by this statement. I understood the statement. I understand she was at least including you in that statement. But I cannot believe for a moment that Ms Swarbrick can publicly articulate a defence of this position which so blatantly discriminates against a segment of workers in this province who are women. I joined the NDP in voting against pay equity because it excluded all day care workers in this province, not excluded the ones that were comfortable with my ideology.
On children's mental health, which you mentioned as your second area of concern, I have concerns because you and I discussed in the exact same forum several weeks ago that your government's emphasis was going to be on prevention. You have provided some pilot projects, but you would also be aware that we still have 10,000 children on waiting lists and that those children are experiencing increased difficulties because we cannot provide the services.
In my own community there was a headline just this last week and I will share it with the minister, but we have had an unprecedented increase in teen suicides in my community and people do not want to talk about it, certainly not publicly, but it is one of the ugly consequences of our inability to reach out and help these children.
This cuts across all lines, as you know. It has nothing simply to do with poverty; it is not simply to do with family violence. It is a complex issue but we have identified those in need. They are calling out to us and yet we seem not to have the political will to make that a priority. I can state with clear conscience that it is a priority for our party and we have clearly made that position both in committee and in the Legislature.
To illustrate the point, we discovered in our last committee hearings that moneys were being used to assist the bump funding for pay equity, but in fact the total number of spaces for children's mental health services is actually declining in this province.
With respect to the multi-year plan, Minister, we very much disagree. I do not wish to dredge up the matters that both Mrs McLeod and I raised in the Legislature about your halt, but again I would have hoped you would share with this committee some of your plans with respect to the multi-year plan in more detail.
I wish to let you know my concern with respect to the delivery of speech and language therapy programs. The minister has been written to by several groups. I know she has received direct correspondence from the St Catharines Association for Community Living and others such as the Down's Syndrome Association of Ontario. These organizations have explained to you that we have a gap in service. The Ministry of Health will not deal with these children because they are not developmentally delayed and yet Comsoc will not deal with them because they are developmentally disabled, and this gap allows far too many children in this province to fall through the cracks. Certainly, you are the minister who needs to be advocating to correct that situation.
1500
Long-term care: I share the aspirations of the minister that the long-term care objectives be successful. But in two previous forums, you and I have exchanged our concerns and I am nervous about any envelope system for funding which allows various groups to fight over a limited-dollar envelope. As much as we would like to say things are rosy in long-term care, the fact is that there are about 1,200 fewer beds available today in homes for the aged in this province than there were four years ago. To the extent that number is close to being accurate and current, that is unacceptable.
It is unacceptable when we consider that you had an election promise that you were going to increase the integrated homemaker program, because if you are not going to be in an institution you will be in an integrated homemaker setting. Yet in your throne speech, there was no mention of the integrated homemaker program. That is when we saw it was being dropped.
Today in your presentation there was no mention of the integrated homemaker -- that was a $62-million-over-two-year election promise. Now if you cannot do it, fine, but we cannot also continue to reduce the beds for homes for the aged, nor can we allow them to remain vulnerable in an envelope funding system, if the government cannot find the moneys to deal with it.
I would hope that we would be able to have some time to discuss what your plans are and how you are going to approach the Minister of Health (Mrs Gigantes), who in many cases has the upper hand, but quite frankly you have the ability to change the direction more dramatically than any other minister, in my view.
I have expressed to you my concern about the fact that we have district health councils growing in strength as a delivery mechanism for funding. We have school boards competing as another council dealing with an envelope of funds, and we have the Maloney report, Children First, which also deals with the concept of an envelope system and setting local priorities for a delivery system. Nowhere can I find any politician in this province, or any bureaucrat, who can talk to me about how we ever hope to integrate these three competing agendas when we are all fighting over the same child.
Now that leads me to a point about the concept of a Ministry of the Child. You would make my day if you would publicly state your views on whether or not this province should have a Ministry of the Child. I know that several organizations in the same committee that you presented to on child poverty in Ottawa indicated their absolute support for a Ministry of the Child, as did the national teachers' body, as did Colin Maloney and the Children First report. But I leave that to your own option as the minister, if you are comfortable in talking about that. I certainly support it and I use that as one example of how we have competing groups.
I only have a few minutes left. I will not address native social services except to say that it was abundantly clear in children's mental health services, when we examined them -- we had before us two representatives of the native community in this province, native peoples, and they indicated that they were a native service in name only, and that until the government is able to train and promote qualified personnel to be front-line workers with solvent abuse, with family violence, unless these are members of the native peoples talking and healing within their own council band healing circles -- that you can pour three times that amount of money into the program and we will still have a long string of native leaders coming before legislative committees telling us that we are a native service in name only.
I wish to close on perhaps the most important issue to me today, and it is one of the most important issues that our party has expressed. That has to do with the fact that there has been no mention in your presentation on the fate of transition and interval house funding in the province of Ontario. In fact, I am surprised that there is not one reference to domestic violence and the services which they are entirely dependent on your ministry for.
If the minister is not aware, certainly her deputy is aware of the positions I have taken with respect to pushing this agenda, and I am rather concerned that we are not seeing it emerge as a priority for the government. I am concerned that in the provincial-municipal social services review there have been serious questions about leaving transition and interval house funding to local option, when we know that there are serious problems with municipalities, which take a rather sexist approach to the delivery of this service -- municipalities that are charging far more for their per diem rates, municipalities that will not allow for expansion. And yet we would hope that during these estimates you would be able to make a clear statement of where you stand on the issue as it relates to the future fate of transition and interval housing.
There are between 8,000 and 10,000 women who are turned away from shelters who are the victims of domestic violence, and some suggest an equal if not slightly larger number of children. It strikes me that if there is one thing that we can be doing to help future repeat offenders of violence to break the cycle, it would be to assist these families in removing themselves from violent situations. The solution is not counselling done during the hours of school, because the child goes home to a sexually abusive situation or to a violent situation, and so the answer is clearly to remove them from the violent situation.
And yet, in recent meetings with you -- this is not my opinion, this is a presentation made by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses -- they have indicated that they cannot get a positive answer from you in terms of supporting a change in the funding mechanism. So I would ask, Minister, that we spend some time during the estimates process dealing with this very important issue.
Three other issues which were not mentioned, I will not talk about. I will simply say I hope we will have time to discuss the deficits of children's aid societies. I have several letters to share with the minister, where programs to families are being cut at a rapid rate in order to deal with children's aid society deficits. We have not mentioned anything about food banks and I am sure the minister would like to discuss what is happening to food banks.
In closing, I would hope that the minister could give us a specific time line for a social worker act. I know she shares with me concern when reports in the newspaper indicate that a person in a community in this province who has a record of sexual abuse is able to set himself out as a social worker and present himself to provide day care services. To the extent that that is true, part of the problem is we have not got a regulated social worker act in this province.
Minister, if it appears that I am being overly critical, it is because I am impatient for reform when I look at the conditions in my community and others in this province. I know that all members of all political parties share those concerns, but I believe very much that the process of reform in this province is very much aided and assisted by all those who advocate for what they believe in. Thank you very much.
The Vice-Chair: Just for the benefit of the committee members who are here this afternoon who were not here this morning or yesterday afternoon, I would like the concurrence of the committee that we proceed as we have been, if you are in agreement, which is that we rotate through the parties. The minister is going to have 15 minutes to respond and then --
Mr Jackson: She has half an hour.
The Vice-Chair: Another half-hour, and then we are going to rotate 15 minutes per caucus. Is that still a consensus?
Ms Haslam: Sure.
Mrs McLeod: May I just raise perhaps a variation in the procedure. As we looked at the estimates from the Ministry of Energy, because essentially all of our questions focused around one vote item, it seemed appropriate for us to deal with time blocks. In the case of the Ministry of Community and Social Services, I would think that there are very few vote issues on which we do not have some substantial questions. I am wondering, for the sake of continuity and following through the issues, whether we might go by vote or by issue.
1510
Mr Jackson: I am amenable to any approach, but while I was sitting in the chair, the minister shared with me that one of her key personnel is available this afternoon for one of the votes, and I think it would be important that that be shared with the committee so that we can govern our time accordingly with a specific vote. Other than that, I am willing to go with whichever --
The Vice-Chair: Who is that?
Hon Mrs Akande: The former chair of the Social Assistance Review Board, Joanne Campbell. She is currently unemployed and in the meantime she could be here. Is it this afternoon at 4 o'clock?
The Vice-Chair: What vote number is it? What vote number does that come under?
Ms Stewart: Vote 2 -- sorry, vote 1.
The Vice-Chair: Vote 1, okay. Then perhaps if the committee is in agreement we could -- all right, somebody from the government.
Ms Haslam: I would like a point of clarification. Are you asking that we take a vote after every issue?
The Vice-Chair: No.
Ms Haslam: No. Because I prefer what we did this morning, that is, vote at the end of the time.
Mrs McLeod: I have absolutely no difficulty with the reordering of the votes. My sole concern was that there be some continuity in our questions rather than jumping from area to area. But I would certainly be happy to accommodate the presence of particular staff or issues that members of the committee wish to focus on in order of priority.
The Vice-Chair: I think we will do that, but I think in fairness we decided that it helps the new members if we do not keep it so structured that they cannot go back into another vote and ask a question that has arisen from some other area. I think that way they can extract as much information as they wish.
Mr Daigeler: Am I right, then, that we are going to proceed by vote, and within each vote each caucus will have 15 minutes until they have completed with each vote?
The Vice-Chair: No. We are going to have the actual voting at the end, which will be tomorrow morning, and I think we will start with vote 1 this afternoon because Ms Campbell is available. But I understand that she is the only resource person who cannot be here for the --
Mr Daigeler: But within that discussion on vote 1, we will still pursue the previous practice of giving 15 minutes to each caucus.
The Vice-Chair: That is right. We will have the 15-minute rotation, but if someone does not have a question on vote 1, he is quite free to use part of his 15 minutes on any other vote. I think we will proceed.
Hon Mrs Akande: You know, of course, that Joanne Campbell can only be here this afternoon.
The Vice-Chair: That is right. The committee understands that Ms Campbell can only be here this afternoon. Minister, you have your half hour to respond.
Hon Mrs Akande: Thank you very much. I expect that the best way that we could go through each of these topics, and I hope that it will be so, is later on in much more detail as you ask questions and in particular. But I did want to make some general remarks concerning the areas that were mentioned.
I did in fact in my opening remarks call us all together in other than an adversarial attitude in order to come to some conclusions or some solutions which might be effective for the people who we serve. That was not, however, to imply that there should not be criticism. I am a firm believer that where two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary. So I welcome your criticism and as a matter of fact, I depend on it and I have grown to expect it. So I would like to clear up that. Many of the decisions that are made when everyone agrees are not the kind of things that one would think are well-thought-out.
Let me talk first of all about the design of the budget. When one designs a budget, it is used, most definitely, to indicate the priorities of that government. It is used to indicate those areas where we feel that a great deal of money should be spent because a great deal of focus and attention is required. It certainly is used in a way that identifies where we feel the need is, and where we think that need must be served basically and entirely.
However, when one defends a budget which is designed by someone else, it is assumed that the intentions of those who designed the budget were of the best intentions. I can and my ministry staff certainly can speak to the priorities as the budget has indicated them, but I make no claim for their being entirely mine. There are many that I support; there are some that I question, however. They are the budget priorities as designed by the previous government, and as I say, there are many initiatives which I would support, but others which I cannot.
Let's look for a moment at the initiative around long-term care, because it was one that both Mrs McLeod and Mr Jackson have mentioned. When we received the information on long-term care, one of the things we identified was that it required a wider consultation. Within my office now and certainly within the ministry, there are several letters, a great deal of communication, where many people have written to us and requested further consultation on the long-term care. In fact, they have suggested, and perhaps erroneously, that they have been omitted from the consultation and consequently they feel that their particular position is very risky, that in fact something is about to be implemented which may act in contradiction to what they see as being effective for seniors and for the disabled eventually.
What has happened among that group -- there are several, not the least of whom are the francophone population and also the multicultural community, who have felt that some of the design has not allowed for a consideration of the fact that they have developed some of their own services and what that accommodation would look like in the initiation of a new program.
There has been no decision from this government to reject what has been done with long-term care. Rather, what we have decided is to study it and to ensure that those groups that have contacted us have an opportunity to be consulted, have an opportunity to tell us what their concerns are. I met with such a group this morning.
Some of the things about their concern are in fact some of the things that are raised by Mrs McLeod and Mr Jackson -- the district health system, which has been a concern, the envelope funding, if I may use your expression, and what particularly is being done by the managers of the system who were hired in long-term care and who they are consulting with and what decisions they are making. As a matter of fact, the communities have stated that rather than being consulted, they were informed about the actions and did not have an opportunity, except if they submitted in writing, to respond otherwise. So some have communicated their concerns, others have not. We have begun a period to make sure that we are consulting with all these people.
While that is happening, you mention about the extended care beds and let me say very emphatically that we recognize the need and we are not about to leave anyone at risk or to operate in a system that is once again going to enlarge a system which we eventually feel will be decreased. What that means is that we have actually moved towards fast-tracking our consultations on long-term care. It is a committee which exists at the ministers' level and the three of us have employed staff to focus in and work very quickly around these initiatives because we realize that we are not interested in enlarging at the area where we feel it is necessary to reduce it.
1520
We also recognize that there has to be support for care at home. In fact, the longer it takes for us to bring in long-term care, the more we have to be concerned about ensuring that there will be support for care at home. We have asked all of our agencies and all of our area offices to be alerted to any areas where they feel there is a deficiency in need so that we can move quickly to respond to that.
I am sure that you will have particular questions about long-term care when the question and answer period begins. I did want to mention to you and emphasize once more that it was not our intention to bring this whole area into long consultation and long discussion, because we recognize the need is immediate and because we are unwilling to grow a system that we will eventually be moving or changing.
I wanted also to talk to you about your mentioning the growth of social assistance and your feeling, or at least as I inferred it, that this was not appropriate to mention to the federal government. Let me give you some clarification about that.
Certainly when one talks to one of its partners in the provision of social assistance to this province, it is only appropriate that we should talk about the funding relationship. The federal government has made it quite clear. It is certainly not an issue that any of us can be unaware of. The federal government has capped, put a cap on CAP, and has made it quite clear that it is gradually moving out of providing social assistance to people.
You mention of course that Ontario's growth in the social assistance area and its use of funds and its, if I may quote you, overspending of funds, is really common to Ontario alone. Well, this becomes a problem that must be addressed, because of course Ontario is one of the provinces which is extremely attractive in times of recession. What happens is, many others from many other provinces, as well as people who are immigrants, move to Ontario feeling that the economic situation may be better here, they may be able to find work. And so our numbers have grown. The mandatory nature of those particular programs means that there is not really any control that can be put there.
Now, for the federal government to pull out or to reduce its support means that the province must carry more and more of the responsibility -- this at a time when the municipalities are also suffering from the funding -- and the cost of social assistance makes it doubly difficult. Recognizing that or identifying or emphasizing that for the federal government is only to remind it of its responsibilities to the people of Canada; it is not to deny our responsibilities to the province of Ontario. But this is a shared responsibility and I think it is only fitting at a time like this, at a time of recession, that this should be emphasized.
Further to that, the federal government, I believe, has contributed to this recession. There are those who claim that this is a made-in-Canada recession and that the federal government's previous policies, which I will not take the time to outline now, only to mention the absence of the training programs that were promised when free trade was initiated and in any great numbers that allowed people to retrain for other jobs, certainly are an example of that; the additional GST tax which also brings hardship to people. The federal government has considerably contributed to the difficulties that are being felt by the people who are on social assistance and even those who are the working poor. So it seemed to be fitting to go to the federal government and to make a presentation to it about the need.
I wanted also to mention the multi-year plan. This is something that, as Mr Jackson has stated, we have discussed in this forum before. The multi-year plan is certainly a plan that all of us, I believe all three parties, do support. I do not believe there is anyone who would support the developmentally handicapped being maintained in institutions when in fact they can be moved into the community. The support of that initiative was never in question. What was in question was the process by which it was being done and the end result for some individuals, so a temporary hold was put on that multi-year plan; a short time, something like six or seven weeks. But during that time it allowed me to clarify some very important questions. Let me discuss those questions for you once again.
One of my concerns was that there was no standard process allowing for individuality of the clients, no standard process by which people were devolved from the various institutions. What that meant was that there often was no single standard, no criteria, no set of written supports that were shared by the facilities and the community agencies and the family. What that meant was that what might happen in one part of the province or in one facility may not occur in another. The absence of those standards made monitoring difficult and also made it difficult for me to have assurance that no one was being put at risk.
Another concern about the multi-year plan: There was great concern that the workers be treated fairly. One of the speakers has referred to the difference in terms of the salaries and the supports given to the workers who moved to community facilities. What that encouraged, of course, is that workers were often leaving. Sometimes the facilities themselves complained that the workforce or the labour force was unstable and that they would leave. This, of course, would also put clients at risk. We were concerned that workers were treated with a degree of fairness, so that we could be assured that people were not at risk.
During the time we put the multi-year plan on hold, we were in consultation with several people: Mr Zwerver from the Ontario Association for Community Living and several others, including those members of groups who were concerned about their child being moved away from government facilities. We felt it was important to confer with all groups before we made our decision.
In connection with the auditor's report, and that flows naturally from our discussion, you have mentioned Brantwood as an incident or example of something which I had not addressed. The auditor's report, I am sure you will recognize, was the report of the running of the agency during the previous government's mandate. We did react, though, to the auditor's response. We have asked Pat Mandy, a nurse, to review the facility, to review the services. She has been in touch with me; she will be reporting directly to me. She has been into the agency at this point three times and is continuing to assist them in implementing the recommendations that have been put forward by the auditor and others we made when we went to visit.
1530
Subsequent to the information about Brantwood, when we heard about the auditor's concerns the Premier and I went directly to the facility. We did visit it, we did respond with speed and with the kind of thoroughness that would ensure that people were not at risk. What we found, let me be clear to say, was that many of the clients there were medically fragile, requiring a great deal of care, and were being cared for by staff who demonstrated a great deal of sensitivity to their needs and a great deal of concern, and recognized that while errors had been made, they were the result of changes in staff, temporary staff being called in when there was not full-time staff and a requirement for additional staff.
Pat Mandy is still in there reviewing the situation and assisting them with implementing those recommendations, and finds, as I have stated, that those clients are being cared for with a great deal of sensitivity and with a great deal of concern on the part of the people involved. I do not think many people recognize the medical frailty of the people they are caring for, so I did want to mention that.
Concerning the transition homes, I want to tell you that during this year we are looking at there have been 11 new homes and 98 beds opened for women who require emergency housing. That is not to suggest that that is enough. That is not to suggest that it comes even close to being enough, but it is to suggest that this ministry is consistently committed to doing all it can for people who are at risk and are in need of services and support.
It was not our decision to leave this entirely to the municipality. No decision regarding that has been made at all. As a matter of fact, I have received many lobbies from various groups, and we are quite aware that people in certain municipalities would rather those homes not be included within the towns or within the areas close to the towns where the actual needs or the actual abuse occur. That has us very aware of the fact that we are not even considering that we would leave this entirely up to the municipality, not only the decision about whether they would have such homes but also the decision about how those homes would be funded and whether they would be funded. It was never our decision to move it directly and make it the sole responsibility of the municipalities.
One other area I did want to mention was the children's area. When I talk about the children's area, I am going to talk about it generally. I was part of the advisory committee on children's services that produced Children First, which Colin Maloney chaired, and I am very familiar with the process we went by in order to get the information and to address ourselves to that report and why we came out with it as we did.
The children's area requires revision and so we have begun; revision, because, as you know, the services for children are currently allocated directly relative to the particular ministry, whether it be Education, Health or Community and Social Services. Children are not compartmentalized; therefore, they require a service that is all-inclusive and addresses their needs rather than transferring them at a time when one group thinks it is no longer its responsibility.
If you look at the revision of the system, then of course you must include all of those things that involve children. You must look at not only children's mental health, but also child care. You look at a system which involves the provision of services for children from the time they enter it, whether it be child care or initially on their entrance at school, to a time when they are adults. It means those services must be community-based, that they must be easily accessed, that they must not have different lockstep entrance points as one moves from the other, that they must be influenced in terms of design by the community they serve, and that they must be somewhat responsive to that community.
The decision about a children's ministry or a children's authority is certainly not one I have rejected. What I have said is that one must always be aware that in the creation of a ministry, you create yet another bureaucracy -- with all due respect to my colleagues. You create, perhaps, sometimes, another hurdle that has to be crossed. You create another entrance and exit system, and sometimes you operate in a way which prevents a co-ordinated and collective activity rather than supports it.
So I am saying it has to be looked at carefully so that it does not act as a prevention to the very thing we are trying to effect but in fact sponsors those things and increases the way they operate.
One last thing I did want to mention, native social services. I wanted to mention that because it is very timely; we have been meeting with various native groups. The native social services -- there are three; there is a precedent. We do have three native Children's Aid Societies that operate somewhat on their own, but they do operate currently under the Child and Family Services Act. That is, for some of them, the tie that binds. Some of them feel it prevents the way they deliver services because they must be accountable to a certain process that is authorized in that legislation.
Interjection.
Hon Mrs Akande: Food banks? No doubt we will discuss food banks. We have had pros and cons on food banks. Some of the very food banks that said they did not want the money to get themselves out of the food bank business accessed the money to get themselves out of the food bank business. It is interesting to me. Today there is a story in the news about somebody who is getting out of food banks. We are very interested in that, and I am interested in the ways in which -- perhaps we will have an opportunity to talk about that -- people have been using the money to work themselves out of food banks.
I do not want to run over my time.
The Vice-Chair: Actually, you have another five minutes.
Hon Mrs Akande: I think I will stop there, because I believe, if you will bear with me for a moment --
Mr Jackson: The social workers' act.
The Vice-Chair: You are being coached. "The social workers' act," he said.
Hon Mrs Akande: I am sure he is going to ask about that. You did ask, Mr Jackson; I will tell you. Concerning the social workers' act, I have currently received three groups -- am I correct, or is it four? -- who have come to discuss with me the pros and cons of the social workers' act, and how -- it is not whether, it is how -- they feel it should be written, who they think it should include, who they think it should exclude, the framework in which it should be given. We are really quite interested in addressing that. It is the fact that to exclude some groups from the social workers' act is to leave some communities, notably some of the multicultural communities, without services or without services that they feel are adequately labelled. I will stop there.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you, minister. Now we are into questions and answers.
Mrs McLeod: And, Madam Chairman, whether or not we are going to go vote by vote. I understood you wished to have one particular vote first --
1540
The Vice-Chair: There are only two votes, but if there are any questions on vote 1 and you need the resource person, Ms Campbell, here, then I would suggest that those questions on vote 1 in her area are asked today, because she will not be here tomorrow morning. If you would like to proceed in rotation at 15 minutes per caucus, we will start with Mrs McLeod.
Mrs McLeod: I need to clarify the procedure. I recognize that there are only four votes, but there are subitems in each one of those, so it would be helpful if we knew specifically which item you would like to have staff members address.
The Vice-Chair: There are only two votes, and we can discuss anything within those two votes. I am saying that if you have questions in vote 1, which is Ms Campbell's area, she is only here today, but it is up to you how you use your time and what area you deal with. If it is vote 1, it has to be with Ms Campbell's area today. Is Ms Campbell here?
Ms Stewart: She is expected at 4 o'clock.
The Vice-Chair: Well, that answers the question. Ms Campbell is expected at 4 o'clock.
Mr Daigeler: To start with the first vote and put a general question in the context of the first vote, as we of course are able to do: Minister, I am interested in your basic approach to your portfolio. Mr Sweeney was highly successful in his effort to convince his cabinet colleagues, in particular the Treasurer, to increase the budget for Comsoc. If I am not mistaken, he almost tripled his budget when he was in office. We are not talking peanuts. There was a lot of increased funding that was provided to that ministry.
Do you hope to repeat this feat? If not, which I think is likely -- after all, the pie is somewhat limited -- where do you see your priorities? If it is no longer possible to increase the allocation in comparison to the other ministries for the Ministry of Community and Social Services, how are you going to plan to manage the tremendous needs that are without doubt there?
Hon Mrs Akande: First of all, let me tell you that I hope not to have to increase the budget. I am talking on a percentage increase; I am not talking only dollars. I hope not to have to, because it is the feeling of this government that you do not even begin to address the question of poverty by increasing social assistance. You begin to address the question --
Mr Daigeler: I do not think Richard Johnston used to say that.
Hon Mrs Akande: Maybe there is an advantage, or perhaps there is a disadvantage, in my not having been here when Mr Johnston was here. At least I do not have to accept responsibility for his comments.
Mr Jackson: They were pretty good, though.
Hon Mrs Akande: I am sure they were. I have no question about it, but you are stuck with me, so would you let me answer the question?
I hope not to have to do it, because I really do believe that the way in which to address the question of poverty is not to have more and more people needing social assistance and therefore more and more dollars to shore them up; it is to find ways to put people back to work. This is why I have said so often that the question of poverty is going to be addressed by this government interministerially
We will be looking at back-to-work projects. We will be looking to the Minister of Labour, and he has already responded in terms of his pay equity announcement and the increase in the minimum wage. We will be looking, as we did, to the honourable Howard Hampton, when he addressed the question of parents being responsible and the possibility of wages being garnisheed for parents who did not carry on their child welfare.
What I am trying to say is that it has to be addressed by many ministries and it has to be addressed in a way that puts people back to work and allows them to continue their lives with some pride. Otherwise the problem becomes cyclical. In my other life, as I am wont to say, I was a schoolteacher, and one of the things that became very, very clear to us, and you certainly did not need to be a schoolteacher to know that, is that when children grow up in situations where their parents have lived on social assistance, the likelihood is that that becomes cyclical. They too feel defeated long before they are even in the game, so you have very little opportunity to make a real difference with them. That is why I am here, and it is for that reason that I say that increasing the budget is not the most important thing to me.
Having said that, I have to turn around and say that certainly I have to go to my cabinet ministers, as I often have and as I often do and as they have responded, and ask for increases. These are mandatory services, services that you have to pick up and you have to support. This is why, if you will permit me, I refer to the federal government. If the municipalities are hurting -- and they are hurting -- and if the federal government is pulling out, the load will fall to the provinces. We are in a recession, and that is no secret. So eventually what happens is, how do you support the work? I am saying that all of these things from all of these ministries become extremely important.
Mrs McLeod: Again, I am just going to clarify. We are going to deal then with vote 801 and attempt to move through the questions on an item-by-item basis. Are you having a time allocation for each of the caucuses?
The Vice-Chair: Yes, 15 minutes per caucus, but the order of questions is entirely up to you.
Mrs McLeod: But you do want those restricted to vote 801?
The Vice-Chair: No.
Mrs McLeod: You are going to open that wide-open?
The Vice-Chair: Yes. It is the wish of the committee.
Interjections.
Ms Haslam: No, the committee agreed to open it up.
Mr Jackson: No, that was not the minister's -- Madam Chair, since the point has been raised, my understanding was that you indicated that those who wished to could. We would respect the presence of Ms Campbell here, but you did indicate that we would still respect the right of members to pursue questions in any other area if they so choose.
The Vice-Chair: That is right.
Mr Jackson: That was the assumption I thought we were working on. If we choose not to interview Ms Campbell with respect to our questions on SARC, we reserve the right to ask those tomorrow of the minister, and conversely, if I wish to ask other questions while Ms Campbell is here -- I might also remind that Ms Campbell is here at the need of the committee and not the need of the ministry. We just found that out recently, so we will proceed according to -- the committee sets its own agenda. That is my understanding of the house rules.
The Vice-Chair: Exactly, and you recall that yesterday we did not necessarily refer questions of a matter to the person who was here, but we dealt directly with the minister. That is the choice of the committee.
Mrs McLeod: In that case, Minister -- and I am going to keep coming back in the hope that there can be some continuity -- I was hoping that we could recognize that I think there are a number of people here with a particular interest in one item and that we would move to that item within the second vote and perhaps deal with that issue. I would be happy to have those particular concerns recognized at any point so we can focus on them.
The Vice-Chair: Mrs McLeod, that is entirely up to you. The only thing I am saying is that if you had specific questions to Ms Campbell, you would have to ask them today when she is here. She is not here until 4 o'clock. If you do not choose to ask her any questions, that is up to you.
Mrs McLeod: Madam Chairman, I understand the ruling. I would have preferred something that allowed us to focus in area by area, but in an attempt to do that with the questions, I am going to ask the minister to look at the area of child care which falls under vote 802, item 5, and as well is referenced on page 20, indicating your new initiatives.
Specifically on page 20, included in the total of your estimates for 1990-91, is the $2 million to provide direct operating grants to 3,200 new licensed child care spaces. I would like to ask if you know, looking at that specific estimate figure, how many of those are in not-for-profit centres and how many are in for-profit centres and what the average subsidy then would be per space?
Essentially, Minister, I want to establish the basis for the direct operating grants, which are currently being provided to both for-profit and not-for-profit centres, to get some sense of the distribution of the existing direct operating grants to the not-for-profit and for-profit sectors, and I will proceed from that to asking further questions.
1550
Hon Mrs Akande: Historically, the direct operating grant was offered to the for-profit sector child care centres that were in existence as of December 1987 and those were the only for-profit sectors that did receive the direct operating grant. Any other for-profit child care centres that came into existence after December 1987 did not receive it. The not-for-profit child care centres all receive the operating grant. The difference is that the for-profit child care centres receive half of what the not-for-profit sector receives.
Mrs McLeod: I am aware of the history, of course. You are quite correct in stating the history, although it is not a long history since they were introduced very recently.
You are probably aware, as I think many of us are, that the direct operating grants were established specifically in order to address the issues of salaries within the child care centres. I understand that there has been considerable success in achieving that goal with funding that was put into direct operating grants in both the not-for-profit sector and the for-profit sector. In fact, if my understanding of the figures is correct, some 99.5% of the direct operating grant given to the for-profit sector was directed towards salaries for people in the child care field.
I think I will turn from an estimates question to a future directions question, Minister, because with the announcement that you made this week of funding to deal with the issue of salaries in child care sectors, you have made it specifically for the not-for-profit sector. I want to assume that you intend to continue the principle of pay equity which is non-discriminatory, as my colleague has indicated, extends to both public and private sector, and as you extend that to the child care sector, that you would continue to make it non-discriminatory.
Therefore, I assume that you would expect the for-profit sector to find a way to deal with pay equity but without apparently any increase in funding from the government to be able to deal with the implications of pay equity. Is it, therefore, your sense that the for-profit sector will have no choice but to close its doors, which will then have an impact on access? To make it a specific question: How many spaces do you anticipate we will lose over the next year?
Hon Mrs Akande: First let me answer your general question. Certainly we expect that the pay equity initiative is one that, because of its legal implications, will be taken by everyone. We are not anticipating that anyone will not move into pay equity and that it will not cover those people who are employed. It will bring relief or assistance to hundreds of women, as you know.
The latest announcement to which you refer really was a wage adjustment package and it was our decision and our government, very much like the Liberal government, has certainly stated a preference for not-for-profit child care. Certainly, it means that the community and the family and the parents are more involved and get a service that is much more directly applicable and supportive of community involvement and parent involvement and much more responsive to their needs. So the wage adjustment that was offered went specifically to the non-profit sector. That is not to imply that the pay equity will exclude that.
Mrs McLeod: I understand that.
The Vice-Chair: I am sorry, Mrs McLeod, that is the first 15 minutes. Mr Jackson?
Mr Jackson: Thank you, Madam Chairman. I would --
Interjections.
The Vice-Chair: We are rotating through the three caucuses, so the official opposition will have another opportunity in turn for another 15 minutes. I just explained the procedure to the people present. We would appreciate if you do not have demonstrations or outbursts. They are contrary to the standing orders for committees of the Legislature. Mr Jackson.
Mr Jackson: Thank you, Madam Chair.
The Vice-Chair: The minister has drawn attention to the fact that Ms Joanne Campbell has arrived, Mr Jackson and the other members of the committee.
Mr Jackson: First of all, two quick observations from the minister's response and then I too would like to go into this area of child care. It strikes me that when the minister was talking about the multi-year plan and the disabled community and day care programming, she gave as a rationale, and this will be borne out by Hansard, that additional funding was provided to all workers so that they would be treated fairly, so that the clients were not at risk because of the turnover.
As I say, Minister, Hansard will bear your comments out. It strikes me as very odd that you have that clear understanding and sensitivity as it relates to your comments around the multi-year plan, but you have not applied that for children who are not identified as developmentally disabled, who are currently operating in day care centres, because the decision you have made to discriminate on the funding of --
Mr Perruzza: Child care, Cam, child care.
Mr Jackson: We are talking about the same thing. If you knew the portfolio, Mr Perruzza, you would know that I am talking about exactly the same kind of service.
The Vice-Chair: Please, through the Chair, and no interruptions. Mr Jackson has the floor.
Mr Jackson: As I was saying, Minister, you have a clear understanding that a high turnover of workers has an adverse effect on the clients. I suggest to you that no truer statement can be made about the fact that your government made an announcement with respect to pay equity adjustment, but only for about 55% of the workers, for a similar reason, that you were in effect attempting to limit the amount of mobility on the part of workers in the day care sector. Yet the decision, it is assumed, will create even further pressures for mobility and disruption of service for children if there is no opportunity other than to raise fees for the commercial day care centres.
You may wish to comment on that. I just thought it was interesting that we have this apparent contradiction, but a clear understanding of the implications of dividing workers within the same -- provide the same series of supports. If you do not wish to comment on that briefly, then I will put that as a question.
Hon Mrs Akande: First, the entire question of the commercial sector is one that is currently under discussion. Second, the entire question of wage adjustment is an operation that can occur under pay equity, and the commercial sector is encouraged to sponsor that particular initiative. Third, if in fact, and that seems to be the implication, commercial sector child care centres are feeling that they are unable to comply with the pay equity direction and feel that it is advantageous to move into the non-profit or not-for-profit sector, there are incentives and initiatives for doing that and there is a process open to do that. My staff will gladly accommodate that discussion.
1600
Mr Jackson: You are saying that there are incentive moneys to the private sector for day care.
Hon Mrs Akande: I am saying that those commercial sector child care centres that feel that they are unable or will have difficulty in complying with the pay equity initiative may feel that they will wish to move to the nonprofit sector and there are funds that will support their doing that.
Mr Jackson: That is an interesting point then. I understand it more clearly. What you are saying is, "If you convert your business, then you will become eligible and the funds are available." Can I ask you then, Minister, what kinds of funds you are making available for these conversions?
I am familiar with a letter to you from the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, dated 6 February. It compliments you on your announcement and goes on to suggest that there would be these conversion teams going in from the ministry to help the conversion, that a fund be set up for the purchase of certain capital items. What kind of money have you put aside in order to prepare for these interested parties?
Hon Mrs Akande: Any commercial day care centre that is interested in converting will be given the direct operating grants plus startup funds, and that will support their converting and of course your pay equity.
Mr Jackson: They will get the pay equity boost. That is for sure. But let me put it to you in this context. I have a letter from Lullaby Landings Infant Toddler Daycare in Nepean. They are in dire straits. They are a non-profit and they have written you an extensive letter, which they have been kind enough to share with me, dated 31 January, where they are seeking from you for 44 spaces some $750,000. They are currently in debt in excess of half a million. Now they have run this debt up. It is a non-profit group.
Obviously this is of concern to you and obviously you are going to have to have some funds in this budget in order to help them or, as they indicate to you in their letter, they are going to have to shut their doors because they will collapse under their own financial weight. If the non-profit sector is experiencing these kinds of difficulties, how do you expect to have the money to assist the commercial operations to convert? Which has priority in your mind as the minister?
Hon Mrs Akande: The priority in my mind, as a minister, is certainly the provision of appropriate child care spaces for children and for families who require it. In order to do that, we are certainly encouraging and supporting groups that wish to continue to provide good child care for their clients. If in fact they are finding -- because there are commercial sector child cares that are not having any difficulty or at least they have not notified us as such or anyone else -- if these particular groups are finding that their commercial child care is in difficulty and they wish to convert, then in an effort to provide spaces for children and for families, we will provide them with the direct operating grants and with the startup funds.
Mr Jackson: I would hope that your deputy will make available to this committee some sort of current list of those who have applied to you for assistance. I certainly am aware of several. You will forgive me if I say to you, Minister, that when I raised these questions or similar questions in the Orders and Notices, I am still waiting for those after several months and there is a process for that.
I hope that the minister, through your deputy, will be able to provide us with those operations which are currently in difficulty. I know my community has recently benefited from one of your grants, a $783,000 grant, which worked out to about 20,000 a unit. I guess what strikes me as odd is that we have commented on the discriminatory nature of the bump funding, but it strikes me that taxpayers generally have a legitimate question to ask any government as to why they are taking existing operations where the operators are paying municipal taxes, are paying all the risk capital there on the covenant at the bank, and yet moneys that you could use for expansion of the day care system, badly needed in this province, are now going to be used for the conversion of existing facilities which are operating close to or at the margin.
I am very pleased that you have not entered into this debate the issue of huge profits in day care. To your credit, you have not made that public statement and yet others have in the past. But you have not and I think you are aware that the positions are not that strong.
I am familiar with two operators in Toronto who used, in the last two years, almost all their profits because they were struggling with the additional pressures of operating in Toronto, so that their women workers were able to be on a more comparable plateau. But they cannot do it in years three and four. They are definitely going to have to look at raising fees, converting, as you have indicated, or they are going to have to look at --
Mr Perruzza: Madam Chair --
Mr Jackson: I have a minute or so left.
Mr Perruzza: -- my questions --
The Vice-Chair: Excuse me, Mr Perruzza, you do not have the floor. Mr Jackson has the floor and Mr Jackson is able to use his time as --
Mr Perruzza: I thought -- Madam Chair, please?
The Vice-Chair: Excuse me. Mr Jackson may use his time as he sees fit, as may you when you have the floor. Thank you.
Mr Perruzza: He can engage in a direct speech for the entire 15 minutes without any questions directed at the --
The Vice-Chair: If he so chooses, Mr Perruzza, and --
Mr Perruzza: Fine.
The Vice-Chair: -- I would appreciate you following the procedural rules for committees.
Mr Perruzza: It is good that you made that clear, Madam Chair. That was not clear earlier on.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you, Mr Perruzza. You are using Mr Jackson's time.
Mr Jackson: I hope not. Finally, then, Minister, I would ask if you could comment on the fact that you have the funding for the one and perhaps not the other for the expansion, but perhaps in the rotation we can come back to this issue. I also would like you to comment why, when the auditor has very clearly identified serious problems with the delivery of day care in this province, when the auditor has expressed concern about the variance between municipalities in terms of access -- all those have been extensively identified -- you may be employing additional people to act as sort of financial auditors to check the books of private operators so that they can convert, when in fact issues of quality of care, the safety of some kids in centres which have been addressed and presented to you in your government are not being implemented.
I will leave you with the notion that the Day Nurseries Act enforcement practices review report has been on your desk for some time and we do not know of any examples of the implementation of those recommendations. It strikes me that instead of looking at the quality and access issues, we are looking at the financial issue of wanting a public service for day care. In my view in this recession that is an expensive approach. So I will leave it at that and perhaps you could comment on those two areas that I have raised.
Hon Mrs Akande: Actually, you are quite right, Mr Jackson, the day care situation in this province is indeed an imperfect picture. It is uneven at best and there are communities where in fact people do not have much of a choice in terms of its selection. However, I will state that this government has made clear, as did the previous one, that our preference is for the non-profit sector, simply for many reasons, the most important of which is the involvement of the parents and therefore the responsiveness of the system to their needs.
We have already initiated a revision of the system which looks very totally at how the child care system can be revised so that it might be more accessible and more affordable and more evenly distributed and there for parents who need it. But at the same time, I do not want to leave anyone with the impression that we are encouraging or pushing people towards conversion. We are saying that if in fact the commercial sector, and there are many -- and I say this point again -- there are many child care operations within the commercial sector that, if I can use the colloquialism, are not crying uncle, are feeling that they are not under any great pressure.
Pay equity does in fact address the need for them to improve the payment of workers, and if they can do that within their commercial funding, fine. It only offers, to those who feel that they would rather move from the commercial sector, the operating grants which are offered now to the non-profit sector, and also some start-up costs.
1610
Ms Haslam: I have a lot of different interests in this particular issue, not the least being child poverty. For instance, I noticed, and I come from a teaching background too, and I found out that the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Canada says that for every dollar spent on a high-risk child we can save $7 down the line in social assistance when the troubled, disadvantaged child becomes a troubled, disadvantaged adult. So I think it is very important we deal with the issue of children and child poverty. I know that there are a lot of contributing factors to child poverty. I can see it was one of your priorities in the speech you had, and I wondered if you could elaborate a little on some of the causes and on some of the directions you are going to attack some of these causes of the child poverty.
Hon Mrs Akande: One of the things that is very obvious is that poor children have poor parents. These are children who live in homes where in fact people are on social assistance, and some who are working -- there is such a thing as the working poor -- who are unable to provide for those children the kinds of incentives, the kinds of introductions to outside stimuli, the kinds of experiences that other children have.
Poor children, as you know, do not necessarily eat well, often do not eat well, often do not eat enough. They are not necessarily well clothed. They lack all kinds of stimulating experiences. They lack opportunities. They feel defeated even before their school life has well begun and therefore are not likely to do well. We know that from the statistics. Even those who do well within the school system often find it impossible to promote that education beyond because of need.
What are we doing? It seems to us that if in fact we are saying that, the basis of this is poverty. One of the things we have to do is address the entire social system and look at the distribution of wealth, get people back to work, balance all those ministry programs in a way that is directed towards getting the most out of people, and certainly encourage retraining programs so that people will be employed and increase the minimum wage so that in fact you are not looking at people who are working for less than they are able to live on.
We also have to work, because we are concerned about children, at the revision of our system so that it is more co-ordinated, more collective, not operating in lockstep categories, so that it includes a child care system so that children access the system when they begin child care, rather than it being separate from what goes on in education, and that where it focuses on child care as child development rather than baby-sitting, which is to use the colloquial term, and begins a child's supportive development, it is in fact a kind of direction that positions the Ontario government as a partner in parenting. It is a direction that says that if we better support all children, then fewer children are likely to be ill and require exceptional services, and that those exceptional services, because they are interwoven, may be better addressed and achieve better results.
The Vice-Chair: Thank you, Minister. Ms Haslam?
Ms Haslam: No, it was those measures I wanted to have a little more direction on.
Mr Owens: My question is with respect to the multi-year plan. It is my understanding that you recently visited the Huronia Regional Centre. I am curious to find out about your findings on this trip and how the multi-year plan and the deinstitutionalization of the residents at this institution falls within our stated plan to implement the multi-year plan and to provide the support services within the receiving communities?
Hon Mrs Akande: Actually there is a very active community living group, the Ontario Association for Community Living, out in the Barrie area, and it has been working, it seems, almost exclusively and directly with Huronia in arranging and moving developmentally handicapped clients into various community settings and involving them in both plans.
I visited just a few homes, a few centres, and also a day centre, a workplace, a therapy place. The question becomes, and they raised it with me, about the critical mass. There comes a time when you are supporting, are funding the basic facility, the main facility, the government facility, and it has a number of clients, and then we as the government are also transferring funds out to the community facilities in order to support those who are out in those facilities.
It is not a matter of tradeoff, but it is a matter of recognizing that these huge centres were built -- that one was built in 1870 -- and the buildings stand. Some of them, I might say, perhaps should not, but do, and they have people in certain areas of them, yet many of the clients have been moved out to the community settings. Some of the questions are: At what number does it become impossible to maintain both settings? What are you going to do with it?
We are answering these questions. Those people who are so fragile, so medically fragile, are so dependent that finding a community setting or moving them out to the centre becomes a risk question and so therefore they will require something much more formal, much more traditional.
This is another area that I find very interesting. Like you, I have been getting delegations and invitations to come out and I have come across two philosophies of the multi-year plan and the fact that you are putting them into community living. One of them deals with the idea of a group home situation and the other philosophy deals with the fact that they actually live alone and have 24-hour care. Besides the philosophical difference between those two, there is a large monetary difference between those two. My concern then is the cost of integrating people into the system. I do not know what the answer is, but do you look at the two philosophies or is there one philosophy that we are dealing with?
1620
Hon Mrs Akande: No, what you really look at is that you are trying to personalize, and as I understand and as I have studied the plan and as we are continuing to implement it, and certainly as the OACL works, you focus in on the needs and the abilities of the individuals who are being moved and try to find settings that are most appropriate to those particular needs and abilities. They do differ, and so does the costing.
But the client is the primary focus, and I am certain that Ms McLeod, who is well aware of this system, will agree there that the client becomes that focus. That is not to say that the funding or the money is irrelevant, but it is to say that you try to find the efficient use of funds, but within a setting and within a kind of environment which allows the client the least restrictive environment according to what he or she is capable of. That becomes difficult.
Ms Haslam: Yes.
Mr Owens: Minister, I am intrigued by your comment about the use of funding. Some of the commentary we heard during our social development hearings around the flexibility of funding was essentially that perhaps existing funds are there, but are not being put to use in an appropriate manner, that if a person is granted X number of dollars to provide a service, it is apparent that the family may not require that service between designated hours, but could use it perhaps at a later time or at various fragments during the day.
I am wondering what your thoughts are on the flexibility of funding and what kind of plans you have as a minister to implement that type of flexibility in the system.
Hon Mrs Akande: This is not a new discussion for me because the flexibility of funding is something we hear again and again, not only in the special support programs but in the special services at home program and in the many other programs. You get this feeling that, "Yes, I want that but I don't want it for that allocated length of time," or, "I don't want it in that time frame and I want to use it differently." Certainly there are reasons why the funds come sweatered as they are, and allocated and directed as they are.
At the same time, certainly it is my focus to work towards greater flexibility because we recognize, as we do with child care, that it is not a traditional thing. It is not just saying, like we used to say, that people got it from 7 to 6, that you have to have flexibility because of the way people operate -- their lifestyles, their directions are entirely different -- and the funds should support their living style, rather than be a fine in a way, that people have to fit into what they want.
Mr G. Wilson: Actually, I do not really have time to put the question and perhaps we may return to it, because I think it centres on the lack of money in the system. I think, as an MPP, probably all of us have been faced daily with delegations that are coming in all kinds of areas with their lack of money.
I am very pleased to see in your remarks that you mentioned, I guess, the intergovernmental approach to this, and specifically the federal government's peculiar, I would say, approach to the issue of social spending at a time when, as you point out, the Prime Minister went to the United Nations to address the question of child poverty and I think addressed the need to eliminate it. There was, as you mentioned, a House of Commons unanimous decision to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Yet we have this cap on social spending which you also referred to.
As well there is the new issue of the war in the gulf -- again, I do not have to mention it, but two delegations have raised as well the peculiarity of the funds that are so readily found to support the war effort, and I must say too, not only the economics of it, but also the morality of it. Here we have a very moral statement on ending child poverty, which I think we can take as being in fact a moral commitment, and having to find funds to fight what some would see as an immoral project.
That being said, perhaps you could just say some of the programs that are being cut by the cap.
Hon Mrs Akande: I can say that our cap on the Canada assistance plan -- by the way, I agree. I find that there is a marked difference between what the federal government says and where it puts its money. I am only the Minister of Community and Social Services; I am not the federal government, so I do not know but I have to say this: I feel that the federal government cap on CAP means we are not going to be in the same funding relationship as the increase goes beyond that 5%. What that means is that if the municipal governments continue to have the difficulty they are having, the expectation -- we are already receiving letters like that -- is that the provincial government will fund all those programs. Of course, with the difficulty in funds, with the recession, that is just not possible. That is the difficulty there.
The federal government has also said it is going to announce at some future time a new program that will deal with some of the difficulties of child care. We have not heard from them on that. They have already reduced their unemployment insurance involvement, so that means that people who are not working move faster to social assistance.
Mrs McLeod: I am going to return to the child care issue, although before I do, I cannot resist commenting, as you discussed, the federal-provincial funding levels. Coming back to Mr Jackson's opening comments about one province having had more than its share, more power to Ontario: It directly reflected the fact that we were doing more in social services than other provinces.
But to come back to child care, the question I had left on the table was specifically the impact of the decision about -- I am going to continue to refer to them as direct operating grants, because the direct operating grants were provided in the past budget process to both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, recognizing that the for-profit sector could not afford to pay increased salaries without government assistance, and that is the only budget line with which we can work to anticipate the way in which you may provide some direct funding to assist in salaries, that you are now directing to the not-for-profit sector exclusively.
But if the for-profit sector is also required, as I think you will and should require, to meet the pay equity requirements, and as I think they will want to do in providing fair salaries to the child care employees in their particular sector, and if they cannot raise fees to pay for those increased salary costs, they really seem to have very little alternative. Surely they cannot reduce the quality of service to children to such an extent that they could cover increased salary costs in that way. So their alternatives seem to be outright closure or the conversion, which you referenced in your response to Mr Jackson. The history of encouraging conversion has not been particularly successful. I wonder if you could, recognizing that this is 40% of the child care spaces in the province, respond to my question about the impact you anticipate in increasing the crisis in access to child care.
Hon Mrs Akande: First, I would expect that there will be some for-profit child care places that can maintain and support the pay equity initiative without the direct operating grant. There will be those. There will be others that will require assistance and will make that known to us. We are, as I say, currently involved in an entire discussion, not just child care but an entire discussion, around the commercial area of child care and looking at what effect that will have and trying to manage and look at the numbers across the province and the difference in different communities, to which I have referred before.
In terms of lowering the standards of child care, you know that those standards are governed and we would continue to monitor to see that the standard of child care is maintained; that was one of the things you said and I feel I should respond to.
1630
Mrs McLeod: Perhaps I can ask a further question in the child care area, then, in terms of the subsidies that are provided, where subsidies are provided, and how those subsidies are determined. Are there benchmark subsidies that apply equally in all regions, in all communities of the province, and, if so, how are they determined?
Hon Mrs Akande: The municipalities to a large extent do manage -- not everywhere, but in most situations -- the subsidies. That is why it is certainly in conjunction with them that we try to operate and to focus on where they are going to put their subsidies, but we have no control over that. Some municipalities are indiscriminate in where they put their subsidies. They put their subsidies in the for-profit sector -- that is not something over which we have any control -- they put their subsidies in the nonprofit sector, and some of them actually tie the subsidy to the person, and the person goes and gets the child care they require from whatever child care station there is.
There are cases, minimal, I might add, up north where the government directly operates the subsidies. But for the most part the subsidies are managed by the municipalities involved.
Mrs McLeod: Can you tell me, then, what percentage of the child care budget is directed towards support for subsidized places?
Ms Gibbons: Seventy-five per cent.
Mrs McLeod: The new initiative alone in 1991 was $8 million for subsidies, I understand. Is that correct?
Ms Gibbons: That is right. It is in the book.
Mrs McLeod: I am concerned that such a large amount of provincial funding should be allocated in a way over which, the minister is now indicating, we have absolutely no control, no way of providing equity in its distribution. Am I understanding correctly that that is what you told us?
Hon Mrs Akande: That the municipalities do manage the subsidies, and they are managed differently in different municipalities, and there is a relatively minor percentage of cases where the provincial government manages the subsidies independently. Is there something you wanted to add to that?
Ms Gibbons: We would make our allocation to the regions and areas, as you know, Mrs McLeod, based on some child population. At the area level, we would work with the municipalities to determine who are able to uptake at this particular time and who are not. To the extent that the municipalities cannot, we will try to develop some strategies to see if there are other ways that one can get the subsidies into the system. The minister is absolutely right; there are some limitations placed on using the municipalities as the vehicle.
Mrs McLeod: This will be a question which I will try to come back to in other areas. It relates to my concern that provincial funding in social policy areas, while it is designed to create a great deal of flexibility, seems to be lacking the criteria which would ensure that there is a degree of equity, at least there seems to be to me.
Hon Mrs Akande: I know I am contradicting here, but this is a point on which I agree. This is a system I have inherited and I have focused on altering, because I feel it takes the management -- 75% of those subsidies -- out of the province's hands though the province is doing the funding, and it is differently managed in different areas.
Mrs McLeod: I can understand, then, from your comments that you would be looking at a system of providing subsidies which reflects real cost, real need and benchmark criteria for determining the level of those subsidies and consequently the budget?
Hon Mrs Akande: That is right. Also, that directs them in areas where they are relative to need rather than limiting them.
Mrs McLeod: A final question on child care, although we could go on in every area for the full length of estimates: There is probably a reasonable explanation on page 71 of the 1989-90 estimates for $326 million plus -- I will not get into the detailed figures -- and the 1989-90 actual being significantly lower than that. Could I ask for an explanation of the underspending?
Hon Mrs Akande: The underspending relates to -- 50% of the operating grants for the commercial centres were held back; employment support services expansion was delayed; and the takeup or slow startups of some child care centres meant that money did not have to be used at that time. Those are the three. Are there additional?
Ms Gibbons: No. The biggest block of that, Lyn, you will be aware, is the fact that on holdback was the 50% of the DOG.
Mrs McLeod: Then taking it to the 1990-91 estimates, do you have any kind of almost final-quarter report on the current expenditure, which was the underspending plus another $37-plus million. Has that been fully expended in this current year?
Ms Gibbons: We are not at year-end yet, so you will know we are moving towards coming to that calculation. But it is not surprising in any system that tries to move out dollars on an as-centres-get-ready-to-receive-it basis that as centres struggle to get ready to open and operate that they do not have a full-year budget and utilization. But year over year, what is not utilized in-year gets fully actualized the next.
Mr McGuinty: I wonder if I might address the matter of the Social Assistance Review Board. You may, in this context, wish to draw upon the advisory assistance of the chairperson, who is here. First, could you tell me how quickly at the present time decisions are being made and delivered? I understand that the board is mandated by legislation to reach a decision within 40 days, but that that has been the subject of a subsequent judicial interpretation which draws a distinction between the reaching a decision and the delivery. I am wondering what kind of time frame we are operating under now. How quickly are decisions being made and delivered?
Ms Campbell: You are correct that there has been a court decision on that. We were judicially reviewed on the issue of how long it would take to issue a decision. The legislation is slightly ambiguous, and the court's interpretation of the legislation was that it was not the board's obligation to deliver a decision within 40 days of the date of a notice of a hearing, that it was the board's obligation to reach a decision within that time.
In the world of the courts, looking at statutes and interpreting the wording of the statute, the courts also looked at the history of that statute, which in fact had a clause that talked about delivery forthwith that had been taken out. So if you looked at the history in the wording, it was the court's determination that in fact the board was not required to deliver a decision within 40 days. What the board is required to do is to reach a decision within 40 days. The board reaches a decision in 90% of the cases immediately following a hearing, and then the board member goes away to write that decision up.
The issue of how long it takes us to deliver, get decisions actually in the hands of people, which clearly is the concern of people who are waiting for a decision: the last time I appeared before this committee -- there are so many new faces, I am not sure most of you would remember; Cam, you are still around -- the board had a significant backlog. I had just arrived as the chair, and had been given the mandate essentially to reform the board. The board had been the object of enormous criticism in the courts. It was quite unusual for the court to take the position it had taken in the case of the Social Assistance Review Board in many cases.
1640
Normally, the courts, in their attitude towards an administrative tribunal, operate on the basis of what is called curial deference, where they respect the decision-making and the expertise of a particular board. In the case of the Social Assistance Review Board, in many, many cases, the courts stepped out of that position that essentially their job is to respect the greater expertise of the tribunal, and essentially lectured the board on how to weigh evidence, how to test credibility, how to do the kinds of thing it is assumed an administrative tribunal can do, with a very clear direction from the courts that we had to turn the board around, get better training, board members who were skilled at conducting hearings, understanding the issues and writing clear decisions that recognized the importance of both what was written in the statute, what evidence you received, and what the courts had said.
In the process of trying to reform the board, we established a rather hefty backlog. At the moment, the board essentially does not have a backlog. Most of our decisions come out within somewhere between 40 to 50-odd days. The difficulty is those decisions which are difficult and complex.
The other thing that has happened with the board over the last few years is that, as we have become more consistent in our decisions and clearer in the writing of those decisions, the easy stuff does not come to us much any more. We have seen a significant impact in the system from a board that listens to the evidence, understands how to weigh evidence, understands how to look at court decisions and interpret those decisions, knows the principles of statutory interpretation sufficiently that it can write a good decision.
And we attempt, as a board, to be consistent in our decisions. One of the goals I had as an incoming chair was to not just impact that individual in his particular case, but through clear, consistent decision-making on our part to impact the whole system by extension; having clear, consistent decisions then understood by those who were reading them, both in the welfare administrations and by provincial family benefits officials, so that if they understand what we are saying, and they assume that if we decide one way in this circumstance that in a similar set of circumstances we are going to decide the same way, more and more issues are being resolved before they come to a hearing.
One of the things that is significant in the board in the last while is that while we have had a significant increase in the number of appeals requested in the last few months, we have not really had a huge increase in the number of hearings we hold. We are better at determining in advance of the hearing whether we have jurisdiction and not having to go to a hearing to discover that we do not have jurisdiction. We scrutinize the case in advance of the hearing and try and clear out any of the issues that may be resolvable before a hearing.
Also, I think what is happening in the system is that an informal review process has developed to look at the decision before coming to a hearing: "Is this a decision that we, the welfare administration, or we, the family benefits administration, want to defend before the board? Is this a good decision that we've made?" We are getting a lot more withdrawals before the hearing actually happens because people are settling.
That is a very long way of answering a question. Essentially it is that it is hard to predict on a case-by-case basis whether that decision is going to come out in 40 days, because it may be extremely complex and take us a little longer. I can assure you that we are very serious about getting them out quickly.
The Vice-Chair: We are out of time for that caucus. If we could keep the answers as short as possible, in fairness to all the caucuses.
Mr Jackson: I do not wish to offend Joanne, but if she is going to be with us till 6 I have some questions in my next cycle I would like to ask her. But I would like to just complete a couple of final questions with respect to child care expenditure in the province.
Minister, this summer past I was trying to track the third-year cycle funding of the then government for day care expansion. I was led to believe it had been halted in or around the third week of July, and I know that several centres that were slated for expansion in funding did not receive it. I know Mrs McLeod has looked at some of the numbers and the underexpenditure. Can you give me a sense of how much of that underexpenditure you are putting back on track, and to what extent you are committed to that? I realize that you are using some of the funds that were underspent from the previous administration, but are you following those applications or are you accepting new ones? I am trying to get a sense of several centres that may have got caught in the gap, because there was a clear gap, as I understood it, and centres contacted me all across Ontario.
Hon Mrs Akande: You are quite right. I became aware of that about the middle of October. Actually what we are going to do is to focus all of that, we are using all of that funding. I am trying to pick up tracks and the staff is tracking those centres and actually supporting their moving into the child care sector. So unless they withdraw, and that is a decision that they themselves would make, they would be supported in funding if they are appropriate.
Mr Jackson: If I can pursue questions around the equitable distribution of child care resources by geography around this province, I know there was some criticism from AMO towards your announcement on the 31st that it had not been consulted. On the other hand, I can understand that if you talk to one municipal politician, it is no longer a secret in this province, and you reserve the right to make your own announcement. So I understand that as well. However, I have to come back to the auditor's report because I think, as I have said, it is not your doing that the auditor made such harsh commentary or flagged so many concerns, but it is your responsibility now, as the minister, to react to the auditor's report. He talks to this issue of a more equitable distribution very directly. Can you talk to the committee about what specific mechanisms you have in place, not only bringing us back on to the third-year-cycle funding but also your most recent announcement.
I really want to pursue several questions on how we are going to ensure that we somehow get spaces into communities like Thunder Bay and Sault Ste Marie or others that have expressed their inability, if I can be fair to them, or their unwillingness, but I think it is their inability to seek them out. And yet, that may not be fair to the children in the families who require them. What are we doing to be a little more proactive and ensure that these expanded spaces, which we all support, are in areas of acute need?
Hon Mrs Akande: You are quite right. We recognize that problem and we are dealing with it. One of the things that I have asked the staff to do is to keep records of where in fact the municipalities have refused or say they are unable to pick up those spaces and those subsidies. Because in fact what that does is put a child care in that particular area, and this is throughout the province. We are looking at rescuing, if it is absolutely necessary, those areas so that in fact people will not be left without subsidies because of the municipality's withdrawal or inability.
The thing about that, though, is that it is not as easily done. I mean, you cannot rescue the world. Neither can you, as you pointed out, go and ask them for their books and say, "Let me see that you can't provide these services." You cannot be as aggressive as that. But what we have been doing is certainly engaging the municipalities in conversation around the takeup of spaces and at the same time keeping track of areas that have to be designated, where you have to focus. For example, there are certain groups up north where the spaces are of great need and left solely to the management of the area, the region, they would not necessarily be picked up, and it is the government's responsibility then.
Mr Jackson: If I can pursue that, Minister --
Hon Mrs Akande: I wanted just to respond to one other thing that you -- well, go ahead and I will get back to it later.
1650
Mr Jackson: Okay. One of the known mechanisms available to any government -- and I guess I am seeing evidence of it with the Treasurer's announcement yesterday of a 5% transfer payment to municipalities -- a lot of governments have done this around Canada, and I suspect with your half-smile that it may have even cropped up at the cabinet table -- is to be low on your transfers and use the carrot of, "Well, now, if you don't want child care, we are not interfering with your economy, but if you somehow saw your way clear to changing your mind we certainly have these boost funds."
Now, I know you cannot say that is what you are doing, because the Premier would be upset with you, but by the same token --
Mr Perruzza: Madam Chair --
The Vice-Chair: Mr Perruzza, do you have a point of order? That is the only reason on which you can interrupt. What is your point of order?
Mr Perruzza: My point of order is that I would like Mr Jackson to be a little clearer in what he is suggesting.
The Vice-Chair: I am sorry, that is not a point of order.
Mr Perruzza: It seems to me --
The Vice-Chair: Mr Perruzza, that is not a point of order.
Mr Perruzza: Madam Chair --
The Vice-Chair: Mr Perruzza, excuse me. I have the chair and you are out of order. Continue, Mr Jackson.
Mr Jackson: I will just come to the point. I am familiar, with my six and a half years here, with those areas that the minister is able to respond to and conversations in cabinet she is not; therefore, I am aware that she cannot comment on that, and that is exactly what I said.
Minister, if that in fact is an option, and I will let you interpret what you meant by we will -- I forget the words you used -- "bail out" or "help" --
Hon Mrs Akande: Assist.
Mr Jackson: -- assist these, whatever the format takes, would it not be a lot simpler for you to respond to what the Social Assistance Review Committee report has said should be done, which the very committee in Ottawa that you spoke to has recommended, that the Provincial-Municipal Social Services Review Committee has suggested that we stabilize the delivery of day care services in this province so that it is not left to the whims of municipal politicians, so that women in this province and those requiring day care service have a legitimate right to access this service fairly and equitably in this province and you are not, by virtue of the structure, left to consider the kinds of options that I have suggested have been used by other governments in the past?
Hon Mrs Akande: That is exactly why we are involved in the revision. That is exactly why we are involved in the revision of child care and we are looking at the entire system, because in fact as it is currently presented, it is at best patchwork. It leaves children and families at risk because of the fact that it is uneven. There are areas where there is not sufficient child care; there are areas where there is not adequate child care; there are situations where the regions and municipalities may not in fact pick up the costs. All of those things certainly make the system less than equal and certainly less than adequate. It is for that reason that we are involved in a revision of the entire child care system.
Mr Jackson: I have two very quick questions and then I will yield to my colleague.
Minister, do you believe that there is any difference between the services provided by child care professionals in commercial centres over public, non-profit centres? Do you believe there is any difference between the work that they are performing, the skills that they apply?
Hon Mrs Akande: I believe that they are both providing child care services, if that is what you are asking.
Mr Jackson: You do not see a difference between the two centres in terms of their delivery or skills?
Hon Mrs Akande: No, I think that they are both providing child care services.
Mr Jackson: Another final question: Do you believe that children are somehow at greater risk by being in a commercial centre over a non-profit or public centre?
Hon Mrs Akande: No, I do not.
Mr Jackson: Thank you.
Mr Jordan: I would like to ask the minister a question regarding the results of moving disabled residents from institutions to group homes.
Now, in the riding that I represent, this has been going on for a period of time. We have reduced the facility from approximately 2,000 to 800-and-some residents. There is no communication being established with the municipality as to what you plan to do with that facility as you gradually empty it, and of course this affects the municipality, because now it almost turns against the program because it sees this going on.
We talk to the people at the Ministry of Government Services and they say, "We can't do anything until you declare it surplus." I am saying there should be a plan, because you know where you going with your plan. Then there should be some communication with Government Services so that it can make a plan and let the municipality know what it is going to do with that facility. It sits on 400 acres of beautiful land overlooking the Rideau River, and I am sure there must be some use for that facility. We would be greatly pleased to hear of what your plan is.
On the other side of the coin, the community group homes in the town of Perth go into a subdivision and pay $40,000 for a lot, when they could get one for $15,000, and this is taxpayers' money. We can supply them an excellent group home on the $15,000 lot and yet these people have chosen to purchase a $40,000 lot. This again turns the people against the program.
Hon Mrs Akande: Let me respond to the first part of your question first, and that is that we are actually, I believe, in ongoing discussions about the stage at which we are moving people out of the large facility and about the possible uses of that facility. I am surprised by your comment, because it was one of the questions that I had asked when I arrived, and that is the information I received. I would be happy to discuss anything with you more specific to the area that you are speaking of.
In terms of the lot, I am sitting here and I really cannot answer that. I do not know where these other lots are. You say they are in Perth, but in comparison to what particular areas of Perth and what the differences are, I would certainly be willing to discuss that with you at any time.
Mr Jordan: Thank you very much.
The Vice-Chair: There are two minutes left. Do you wish to use them, Mr Jackson?
Mr Jackson: I would not dare give it up. I said I was finished with day care, but if I have only got a minute, let me ask a short question then.
I understand that there has been some criticism levelled at you, Minister, for meeting with the Association of Day Care Operators prior to the decision of your ministry inviting it -- it may have been a staff oversight -- to the press conference that you held. Given that their interest in meeting with you was to deal with their employees, would you be willing to meet with the employees, the actual workers who are affected by the decision, as opposed to just the operators? Would you be willing to do that?
I understand you have agreed to a meeting with the operators, but would you be willing to meet with the professional staff? I would assume you are going to be discussing their fate and the impact of your decision on them. Could I recommend that they be invited to attend as well so that you could meet with them?
Hon Mrs Akande: Certainly I am willing to meet with any group. I do not know whether the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario is also including front-line workers. That meeting was arranged, I do not know, a couple of weeks ago, 10 days ago, whatever, and I am certainly willing to meet with other groups. I have met with many groups, for-profit and non-profit.
Mr Jackson: My understanding is they do wish to meet with you, and they would have no difficulty if they were to meet with you on Thursday.
1700
The Vice-Chair: Mr Hope.
Mr Hope: I have just got to reflect on a few things, because as we are here today and we are witnessing workers in front of the government today and as I reflect back on my previous life as president of a local union and president of a labour council, it brings to mind of some of the issues that we were faced with back in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1989 about the issue of child care. The issue to the workers that we had in our collective agreements that we had to supply and make sure that the children of our workers were properly taken care of fell upon deaf ears, both of the federal and the provincial governments.
We were not able to establish proper child care facilities for our workers at that time frame and now, as we enter into a new market, a market as it is set by the federal government's agenda, we witness these workers still here today and we witness another group of workers, the workers who at one time were asking for these people's services, the people who are sitting in this room today, their services for their children, and the unfortunate part is, it was not there.
As I look at some of these workers, and still have very close contacts with my brothers and sisters through the labour movement, there is a cry out there and the cry is dealing with the social programs, the part of welfare, the agenda the federal government, now entering into a trade agreement with Mexico which is going to lower our ability to compete. Research and development techniques are not being put forward to Ontario's seeing as we want to see them to keep us competitive and make sure.
I understand the concerns that these workers have who are here today expressing their viewpoints. The bigger concern in the bigger picture is that there is a certain sector that is out there that requires the services that these people put forward, and that service is the middle- and lower-income families of Ontario. I am going to talk more generally of the area that I live in. It has two major industries, agricultural and the automotive sector and the independent parts and suppliers industry, the small parts producers. Their major concern has really changed dramatically since that time frame. Their concerns to me are maintaining the jobs that they have established. Child care requirements are not an issue with them today. Because it is not an issue with them, their major concern is dealing with the ability to get back into a workforce.
They went through a 1981-82 recession and were able to come out of it because they knew their jobs were there. The unfortunate part now is that the overwhelming attacks by a certain group out there in the community called the tax revolters, who are watching every move that you and I and every member of this government and the federal government and the municipal government makes -- they say that the workers are overpaid, an overstatement I would call, because as most of us fight for a decent wage to put back into the economy we keep seeing the extreme costs that are being put forward.
The high interest rate policies are another issue that affects everybody in this room and everybody who is here today supportive about their cause.
But I have a group of people that I want to air a concern out with and the concern is dealing with the workers themselves who are out of jobs. Child care services is not an issue with them; general welfare is a concern with them. As they have been attacked by UIC changes which have now cut their requirements, unable to collect UIC, now they are resorting to a thing called welfare. Hard for a lot of them to adapt. Tears coming in their eyes. Self-motivation has disappeared from these people who at one time were very instrumental in helping me in my fight to convince politicians that the concerns of child care, quality child care was an issue at that time.
They are coming to me and saying: "Randy, you have to get priorities straight. Priorities have to be with your government to, number one, make sure that our social programs are not being attacked."
One of my major comments to them was, as I met with a good friend of mine over the weekend, Howard McCurdy, who was a federal member of the New Democratic Party -- raised some things that really started adding a lot of questions in my head. Number one was the federal government's commitment by the year 2000 to deplete child poverty and by the year 2004 the federal government plans to not have any more transfer payments to social assistance. That double-talks themselves.
I want to be more direct in one of the questions I have -- and I somewhat know in the back of my mind because I have been a political activist for a while -- what is the trend of the federal government in its views of a user fee process? What effect is it going to have when we find out one day that when we go to the cupboard of the federal government, there is no more money there?
What effect is it going to have in addressing the concerns that your ministry will be faced with in the upcoming years -- because we do not see economic turnaround as many have forecast -- and what is your ability going to be to function in support of some of the groups that are here, some of the groups that are in my community? What is your ability going to be to function as a minister of a major ministry that is heavily required in a time frame of recession?
I know it was a long-winded speech, but we have got 15 minutes to go at it.
The Vice-Chair: We were not just quite sure you were finished.
Hon Mrs Akande: The sure thing is that if you ask the impossible, you are absolutely certain to get it. What will my position be? My position will be and my position is currently that I think we had better get busy and make sure that we have devised a system, used our social programs, used all our other ministry efforts to get people off social assistance.
There will always be those who will have to be dependent on social assistance, those people who cannot be employed, but we will be better able to shore up those people if in fact the rest of the population is employed, is working up to the level of its ability, is involved in a community to which it is contributing, and this is the only way we can do it.
I am shocked but I have heard it before, and I continue to be shocked that by the year 2004 the federal government expects not to have to pay any transfer payments. I think it has to be said that if the federal government is pulling out of transfer payments, we really have to be looking at a system which allows us to provide for those people in the province in a way that we will not depend on the federal government.
Yet I cannot foresee that day. I do not know at this point where the funds will come from and I am glad that it is in 2004 and not in 1991, though that is small comfort. But certainly it emphasizes for us that we have to focus our activity today in a way that will provide employment, make it more possible for people to exist independent of social assistance.
Mr Perruzza: It is interesting to note as I sit here, and I sat quietly this morning listening to the other debate on energy, but it is amazing when we moved into this ministry how there was an abrupt turnaround in the politics of this committee. Where we had general consensus this morning, we now have an audience, and it always startles me to note that when we have an audience, politicians will play politics.
I have listened and I have listened closely to both the opposition and the third party and to their comments in addressing particularly the child care issue and the child care announcement that was recently released by the minister. I have listened attentively but I have yet to hear, and I was out of the room on a couple of occasions -- if I am incorrect in this, somebody please correct me -- but I have yet to hear the Liberals clearly say that another $30 million should be announced by the minister to the profit.
I have yet to hear that from either the Liberals or the Conservatives, for that matter. I know that we are quite cautious about what we say in these committees because you will note that there is Hansard here and Hansard transcribes word for word what the members say and basically do. We are very careful about what we say and how we say it. I have not heard that, I think, for some obvious reasons from what I dub now the champions of the profit child care providers, Mr Jackson spearheading and leading the way and Mrs McLeod in close second. I had hoped that you would both come out and say that that is what in fact the minister should be doing in her redress of this particular crisis, and I had hoped that we would do that.
1710
Mr Daigeler mentioned earlier about the record of Mr Sweeney, and I suspect that that had something to do with Hansard as well, commending a former minister. I would also suggest that perhaps the budget for the ministry was increased in duplicate or in triplicate form, but I believe there were 32 new tax increases which --
Mr Jackson: Sixty-four.
Mr Perruzza: Sixty-four. Mr Jackson corrects me on that one. There were 64 new tax increases passed on to the people of this province.
Having made those comments, I want to ask the minister a question. I have been meeting with a barrage of child care workers and child care providers in my community because I represent a high-need community. I am not ashamed to say that Downsview riding is a high need and there are a number of child care centres and this hits home, it hits hard. I am sensitive to this particular issue and I have met with a series of child care providers and, yes, there are some serious concerns and some things that really need to be redressed. I think that the minister has suggested today that she is going to be looking closely at that. I know that I, as a member, am going to take up some of these issues in my own riding.
One of the concerns that was raised by one of the workers and it struck home for me despite -- I mean, we are in the middle of a recession and government funds are being depleted on a daily basis by jumping welfare rolls and so on. That this minister would find $52.8 million for child care is quite something. I think she should be applauded for that. But one of the child care workers I met with, at the end of our talk -- and we talked at considerable length, for about 45 minutes in fact, and dealt with an array of issues related to child care and so on -- as she was leaving my office, she said:
"You know, I understand your point of view. I understand what your party believes in and I voted for the NDP before I came in here. I wasn't going to vote for the NDP any more, but I may reconsider it because this isn't as simple, clear-cut and dry an issue as I thought earlier on. But, you know what, I was threatened. If I didn't come here and if I don't go and meet the other members of the New Democratic Party, I'm going to lose my job. My job was threatened by the day care that I work for." I am not going to name the day care, but I could.
The Vice-Chair: Through the Chair, Mr Perruzza.
Mr Perruzza: And I could name the individual involved, but I am not going to do that.
I would like to hear from you, Minister, what you think of or what your views are on child care agencies being able to threaten their employees if they do not initiate a bombardment of lobbying.
The Vice-Chair: I am sorry, Mr Perruzza --
Interjections.
The Vice-Chair: Excuse me. I do not want to have to repeat what I said earlier this afternoon. I think most of you have heard it twice.
Mr Perruzza, you have used all your caucus time at this round. Mr Owens was on the list and the minister has no time to reply. Mr McGuinty?
Mr McGuinty: I must take issue with some of the comments made by Mr Perruzza.
First, we did not achieve a consensus this morning and I do not think that is our obligation or intention here. It is rather to bring to light, to air, some of the issues which are of concern. Our particular obligation, as members of the opposition, is to raise those issues on behalf of those groups, those individuals, whose causes have some merit, and that is what we are doing here today. You have earned the right of frustration which is associated with government and you are beginning to experience that, I think, for the first time. In any event, whatever you do, you must justify it, and that is that.
Now, I would like to return to the matter of the Social Assistance Review Board, if I may, Minister. In particular, one of the aspects of the board which commends itself to me is the training which the members receive. I do not see a budget for that training. I wonder if that appears.
Ms Campbell: There is a very large budget item called "Services," and all of the board members are paid out of that part of the budget. Because they are order-in-council appointees they are not paid out of salaries and wages, they are paid out of services, and it is out of that portion of the budget that we also fund the training.
Mr McGuinty: Do you know what portion of that consists of the training?
Ms Campbell: It does not cost us a lot of money to train our members. We put enormous emphasis on training. We meet every week as a board and every board meeting has issues that have come up through board committees, but always each board committee, on outreach, on policy, on procedures and on members' services, is about how we do the job better. Every committee is mandated to have a training aspect to any issue it presents to the board.
If we are reviewing our procedures as a board, how we are going to conduct a hearing, then the obligation on that committee is to come forward not just with recommendations around how we are going to proceed with things such as swearing in of witnesses, whether or not we deal with cross-examination, then re-examination and the board's understanding of that. Each time we present an issue to the board the committee that does so has to have a training plan, so essentially we train ourselves.
We have legal staff on the board who do a lot of the training. We have had enormous help from outsiders who have not charged us anything. We have had provincial court judges and we have had Supreme Court judges who have come and given us sessions in decision-writing. There are not a lot of courses you can send people on to learn a lot of the things that a tribunal member has to learn, so we do it in-house. We use our own expertise that we can come across and we use other tribunals.
There is an agency called the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals, CCAT, which is a national agency that has a really good three-day conference that we encourage our members to attend because it is one of the few formal training opportunities we have. But although we are spending a lot of money on computer training, it does not cost us a lot. We do it very extensively internally.
Mr McGuinty: Thank you. I have one other question with respect to SARB, Minister. I understand there are 21 full-time members on the board. I believe there is at least one vacancy at this time. I understand as well that the first three-year term of this board will be expiring this year. Does the government intend to reappoint the experienced members on the board?
Hon Mrs Akande: What we have done is, currently there is Maureen Adams, who is the acting chair. She is an experienced member and she is acting because we have advertised for a substitute or a position to take Joanne Campbell's place. When that person is in place, we will deal with the other vacancy.
Ms Campbell: If I could add, we have the most open process in the province for appointments to the Social Assistance Review Board. I set up a process whereby we advertised extensively for positions on the board. We set criteria for how we would short-list. I then established a panel of people who would interview, a community representative who would represent the community's interest in a quality board, a human resources expert who brought the interviewing skills, etc, and it was on our recommendation that people were appointed.
1720
This government accepted my recommendations on reappointment of members. Earlier, at the very start of the term, on my recommendation, they reappointed various members whose terms were expiring. We actually have an ad out now to replace three vacant positions on the board. It has been made clear to us by the minister that that process of openness will continue and the process whereby the chair establishes a panel and makes recommendations will continue. I have actually left. I now work for the Metro government and came back for today, but my position has also been advertised and will be filled through competition.
Mr Daigeler: If I am permitted, I would like to move on to a different subject, and that is the care for children and adolescents. I would like to raise the question of the treatment of adolescent chemically dependent people.
Minister, your government has indicated that you want to reduce the money that is going to the United States for the treatment of Ontario residents, be they adults or adolescents, and I certainly agree with this objective. For the treatment of adolescents, which I think falls within the responsibility of your ministry, at the present time we do not have any such centre in Ontario. There is a proposal from my area put forward to your ministry from a community group that would like to provide that kind of treatment, at least for the Ottawa area, possibly for eastern Ontario.
I am wondering, Minister, how are you looking at that question of providing treatment in Ontario rather than the United States for adolescents generally, and more specifically are you looking favourably on the provision of these services by community groups, especially in the Ottawa area, and what time frame are you looking at in which you will make a decision on these questions?
Hon Mrs Akande: One of the things that I am sure you will recognize is that that decision of course came to us through the Ministry of Health. It was Health that was funding the services in the United States. But once you close a door, you have to be certain that another one is there to be opened. Therefore, Mike Farnan is very much involved with it at a committee level, deciding and designing and making recommendations towards what will be necessary to take up or to provide services for those groups of people who in fact are turned away from the United States.
That is going to have an effect on us where it concerns children, and for that reason we are very involved in those discussions and trying to decide not only how we would or where those services would best be initiated, but how. We are interested too in groups that have made presentations, some self-initiated.
I am not meaning to imply that we have solicited presentations, but some groups have, on their own initiative, submitted presentations to us to serve this group of population. We are aware that we will have to increase services in this area for children and youth if in fact the health initiative is as extensive and results in such an increase as we expect.
Mr Daigeler: I had originally written to the Minister of Health and she actually referred me to you with regard to the position of and the treatment of adolescents, because apparently they fall under your ministry. How the actual allocation of the dollars happens I am not quite sure. From the remarks that you just made, I take it that you are looking at providing these services in Ontario -- tell me if I am going too far -- that you are planning to have a treatment centre for adolescents in Ontario. Is that correct, and in what time frame are you planning to make a decision?
Hon Mrs Akande: Let me say this: We are planning to provide treatment. I am not able at this point to say that I am planning a treatment centre, but we are planning to provide treatment. There are two new specialized treatment services that were announced in Ottawa and in Windsor and we are collaborating with the Minister of Health and the Minister of Correctional Services on these new programs, but what newer programs might look like and how they would be designed, and whether in fact they would be smaller community facilities that would be spread about in Ontario so that the access question could be addressed, are all things that we are discussing. The other thing is that we have to look very carefully at what we think our numbers will be.
Mrs McLeod: I would like to take us into yet another area. We have a lot of ground to cover in a short space of time. I will specifically deal with transition houses, and if there is time take that into a more general question about capital funding and capital priorities within the ministry. I am dealing with vote 802, item 4. The budget indicated that for 1990-91 it was a relatively small increase that was planned and yet you indicated in your remarks that, I think, there were 11 new transition houses.
Hon Mrs Akande: Eleven new houses in the year and 90 new beds.
Mrs McLeod: Which sounds as though it is in excess, even, of what was planned. I would like to ask how the budget works to establish new transition houses. Is it in response to proposals, and if so how many proposals are you looking at and how many existing houses have proposals for new facilities?
Hon Mrs Akande: I am going to refer this question, because I do not have that --
Mrs McLeod: If you wish to simply table those with your further information, I am quite comfortable with that.
Ms Gibbons: I could take a crack at it. Year over year that particular line is about a 12% increase in the funds allocated to it. At the moment we have two and a bit available to provide staffing support to capital expenditures. We do not know at the moment what the federal government's family violence initiatives will be and in terms of this government's priorities, as you know, we are working through the process of establishing next year's allocations.
We had anticipated the federal government would be making an announcement and in the announcement would solicit our co-operation and add support dollars to that. That has been put on hold, I understand, for the time being.
Mrs McLeod: Project Haven funds are still available for new facilities, though? Have I the right fund?
Ms Gibbons: As far as we understand.
Mrs McLeod: Are we currently accessing Project Haven funds?
Ms Gibbons: We have dollars allocated to do that in the budget, $2 million and a bit that have not been attached to a capital project yet, so we have dollars available to do that.
Mrs McLeod: I am torn between pursuing operating issues for transition houses or going back to the question of capital. Perhaps on the more general area, with the moments that are left, can you give me some sense, and I know it is a cross-program, how the capital budget for the ministry is established? I cannot point to a vote line because a number of items involve capital expenditures. How do you respond to the needs? A new office for a children's aid society versus a young offenders' facility versus a transition house versus --
Ms Gibbons: This ministry operates on a five-year rolling capital plan, so at an area and regional level the areas respond to requests from agencies to develop, renovate or replace existing capital plants. The in-year process is to make decisions about how one addresses the yearly priorities and that is done on an "as capital is available." We have had over the past few years about roughly $85 million in our capital budget against which one plans for the year from the five-year plan.
Mrs McLeod: And regional priorities? Is that money then responsive to regional priorities that have previously been submitted as part of the five-year plan?
Ms Gibbons: It is rolled up from the area through the regional to the corporate level and at the corporate level the operations management team signs off on what will be their priorities. They then go to the minister for her endorsement. The minister would not at this stage have been involved in finalizing that plan for the coming year. That will come to her in the next short while -- week, Barbara Stewart tells me.
1730
Mrs McLeod: So there is a need and an effort, then, made to prioritize the projects submitted from one region to another.
Ms Gibbons: I am sorry, Lyn?
Mrs McLeod: When a regional office submits its list of capital priorities, another regional office submits its needs. Do you fund the top two, the top three, depending on the budget of each region, or is there a prioritization between the regions?
Ms Gibbons: There would be prioritization within the region and between regions.
I would just like to go back for a minute to this multi-year plan to deinstitutionalize the residents from the -- I am speaking, as I have mentioned before, about the Rideau Regional Centre in Montague township on the perimeter of Smiths Falls. There is a percentage of the remaining residents there who are confined to bed 24 hours a day. Does this still plan to move those kinds of residents into group homes?
Hon Mrs Akande: One of the things we have had to face and to look at, certainly as a part of our discussions and our concern, is the fact that we realize there are people in every facility who are in fact very dependent, who are medically fragile, and who it may be difficult to find accommodation for in the community. It may well be that there will be some, hopefully a small group, who will not be able to be moved into community facilities as easily.
But of course you realize that as you move away from something as large as the Rideau centre, or something as large as Huronia, it becomes economically inefficient to maintain that kind of a centre for a core of residents who must stay there. So then of course you are looking at the development of a facility of an appropriate size to accommodate those who must remain in a facility. Then that causes you to ask yourself the question, or the staff the question, are there community groups that will accommodate to that degree of dependency and can we really devolve with those people into -- I hate to call them mini-institutions -- but mini-facilities? Those are all things that have to be decided and discussed.
Mr Jordan: In connection with that then, at the present time we have over 800 people employed there and are very uptight about, if you will, the whole situation and so is the community surrounding that. The question arises then, if there are a percentage at the centre in Montague township who require 24-hour bed attention, what about across the province? Considering a location, such as Rideau centre, as the one place in the province for that type of resident who does need 24-hour attention, it is there, it is active and the trained employees are already there.
Hon Mrs Akande: I recognize your concern to support the maintenance of that centre relative to the workers and also because you see it as filling a need, but one of the ideas about community living is the proximity of these people to their families, to their communities, so that they can maintain regular contact with them. That is why we move people right into the community and for those who cannot be moved right into the community, it certainly would be best if they were closer to the areas where their families and their friends live, so that they can maintain some kind of regular contact.
I know, though, that there are people in the large facilities now who come from quite distant from where they are living, but it is certainly not an approach that I would want to support sponsor or continue.
Mr Jordan: I can understand that, but these ones I refer to have no one to come and visit. They are now in their 40s and their parents never did, if I might say, in a lot of cases either have the time to travel the distance, or for some reason, so that they are really being best serviced in the community's opinion by being in that institution and getting the professional care that they are getting.
Hon Mrs Akande: You know that maintaining a large institution for a few people is not appropriate and moving them all to one centre -- I am sure that is true of other centres, that might be true of Huronia, and they would say, "What about us?" But certainly the whole idea of having large institutions where we place people and have them living is farthest away from a regular kind of community life, and I think is in opposition to our point of view.
Mr Jackson: Thank you, Madam Chair. I had two areas I wanted to pursue. I thought we had finished with child care, but Mr Perruzza has moved me to extend the discussion slightly, so I want to thank him for allowing me the opportunity to clarify a few points.
First of all, it would be considered unparliamentary to impute motive that I am an apologist for private day care operators. However, we will let that pass. What I would like to say, and this is a matter of extensive record in this Parliament and in the community, is that I am approaching this as a women's issue, and I have been fighting for it for several years. We would not have day care workers in this province under --
Interjection.
Mr Jackson: I am talking to the Chair, thank you, Mr Perruzza. This would not be an issue of pay equity if there were a lot of male workers in day care centres in this province. That is the sad truth of the wage and women's issues in this province and in this country.
But I think it is important, and for that reason I would like to table with the clerk, so that he can distribute it to all members so that you do have the benefit of the press conference that was held on Monday, from the workers in the centre, and its title is, "Ontario Government Discriminates Against 8000 Working Women." I certainly would appreciate it if the clerk would circulate that to all members including -- I am sure the minister has her copy.
I would also like to point out that 85% of the operators of day care centres in this province that are commercial are owned and operated by women. I think that as the financial attractiveness of operating these businesses drops like a stone, it is a sad testimony to the fact that more and more women are hanging on and putting their own personal assets at risk because they believe in their centres and believe in their employees.
If we would take the time to investigate some of this, we would find that for whatever reason, history will record that day care as a centre was very much on the leading edge of women and entrepreneurship and that their profits were not excessive and were put back into the business. So it is a very sensitive women's issue for me and I am fighting it on that basis. Certainly the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care knows of the 9 or 10 items that it supports, I support.
But I have been very clear, consistently, that I do not support this methodology of putting money into the conversion of the centres when that money could be going into expansion. I would like to leave that on the record, because I very much see this as a women's issue. It discriminates against the women operators and it discriminates against the 8,000 employees.
If I may move to transition funding, I want to discuss the two elements that I had raised in my preamble statements, but I have some further concerns, and that is the plans for expansion.
I am familiar with the Project Haven funding, because Ontario was the last province in Canada to access this fund. In fact in the three or almost four-year window -- Minister, you would be familiar with this -- provinces in Canada had accessed this rather large fund and commitment from the federal government to attack family violence, and that some provinces had actually built their units and had people moving into them before Ontario had accessed any of its money. When this was identified, the answer from the government was "We're moving in that direction." The truth is that in the last provincial election we saw a hasty announcement because the federal government had threatened the provincial government that its moneys was going to go to other provinces. That is a matter of record as well.
1740
Other provinces were desperate to get additional moneys and Ontario's funds could be sent to another province, so you were being very kind when you said that the 11 or so centres are just being completed and constructed. Some have not even been started, but it is because they were delayed until an election. I cannot but say how many victims of violence were not served because we delayed the implementation of those units. So I think the more appropriate aspect of our discussion is where you go from here, because I am not terribly impressed with how hard people had to fight to move the transition home agenda in this province in the last five years.
I would like to know specifically, knowing that Project Haven funds was a four-year window and that those funds are nearly complete, how many specific projects you may have on file and in what communities and if that can be shared by the deputy with this committee. I can tell you that the deputy was unwilling to share that with us under the previous administration. I could not get those answers during the election, as to what applications were available, the quantum of the applications and the specific cities in which they were in. The Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses will be the first to tell you that they cannot even get who has made applications. There was this unwillingness to share.
I am hopeful that you are a minister who will be willing to share that complete list with us, so that, again, it can be part of a discussion as to which communities are not being given the support in order to ensure with that domestic violence, which knows no geography, that women have opportunities to have access to those funds in those parts of the province where they are quite inadequate. I do not need to identify them. You know where they are in northern Ontario and other jurisdictions.
Hon Mrs Akande: Actually the deputy does have that information and can provide it.
Ms Gibbons: I have drawn a complete blank as to rejecting providing you with that information.
Mr Jackson: No, the coalition asked it. I am sorry if you misunderstood me. It was the coalition that requested it. My research staff tried to get it but the coalition specifically, in our quite frequent meetings, tells me it cannot get the list.
Ms Gibbons: I can only imagine that they were asking at a point in time before there was discrete approval for something, so I was unable to provide them with that information, but to the extent that we have this information available at the moment around decisions that have been taken, I can surely provide it to the committee.
Mr Jackson: I would appreciate that.
The Vice-Chair: Tomorrow morning?
Ms Gibbons: Will be fine.
Mr Jackson: Another very brief question that has to do with -- I have identified to the minister and I hope she would comment about the implications of the recommendations of the Provincial-Municipal Social Services Review Committee and its treatment of transition homes differently from other comparable forms of care.
I would ask the minister to respond to that recommendation as it contrasts to recommendations 244 and 247 of the Social Assistance Review Committee report which specifically talked to the vulnerability of children and adult women with respect to transition lodging, that it not be left in the context that municipal social services review suggested. SARC makes a very clear recommendation that women would in fact be at further risk of access and you have stated to me you have not made that decision. I am hoping we are going to be hearing from you, because underlying all of this is their concern that you are unable to proceed with the revised funding model until apparently this larger question has been resolved.
Hon Mrs Akande: Certainly the relationship, not only the funding relationship, but the relationship and the responsibility that are shared or assigned to the municipalities and provinces is one of the big questions. I have to say two things to you about that. Yes, we are, as I said earlier, consulting about that. I have to say, number two, that yes, I am concerned, that I am certainly not leaning in favour of giving total responsibility to the municipalities for reasons I have stated previously, and what that might mean in terms of whether the service is provided as well as how the service is provided.
The third thing I want to say is that in regard to the funding of those services and how we access funds, and we were speaking before about a window that certainly was open to funding through the federal government, the larger question is down the road, because, although I would love to see great changes being made and this problem being solved, it does not look as if it is going to be solved.
As a matter of fact, as more people come forward and require that help, more and more people continue to come. So it looks as though that funding question is going to be one that we will have to deal with and may have to carry a great deal of responsibility for. However, those decisions have not been made. But I hear your concern about leaving it to the municipality.
Mr Owens: Minister, I would like to turn your attention to your statement on page 23 of your submission. In your statement you say that in January almost 8,000 new names were added to Metro Toronto's general welfare rolls. I am curious to know how you contrast that with the $12 million surplus or $12 million being underspent in the budget for employment programs. I am curious to know (a) how you justify that and (b) what you are doing about it in light of this rather disturbing information that you have included in your statement.
Hon Mrs Akande: One of the things that was difficult to design and get on track very quickly was the kind of programs that would be appropriately designed for our disabled population. We felt that it was important to allocate certain funds to that population to make sure that they were included in that package. That design is, I am happy to say, now complete. We have pushed and constantly -- I hate to use the word "nagged," it sounds too feminine, if you will forgive me -- but we have insisted upon it being implemented, and we have now arrived at a point where we have a design that is appropriate for our disabled population.
Those programs, I might add by way of information, are difficult to initiate very quickly in that they include bringing a lot of others on side and making sure that they are involved in a way that makes the program meaningful and useful.
Ms Haslam: I am just going to make a nice, quick plug for Perth county because I have a midwestern centre in Perth county, and before you put everybody in his riding, would you think about putting some in mine? Because it is a problem.
I will give you a hint. What I did was I had somebody come and look at the building and say, "There are other uses for this building." I am not about to let it go down the tubes because we are into a multi-year plan, and we are doing some of this, so come and see me later and I will tell you who it was and you can have him visit your riding and take a look at your building. But I want first dibs on use of the building because it is a problem with this type of thing. As I mentioned before, it is an area that I am becoming more and more interested in because I am having more and more people come to me about the situation and about this problem.
But I would like to go to another situation in my riding, and you will excuse me if I talk about my riding right now, because all of us deal with riding situations and all of us have our things that we have to deal with in a particular riding. As a matter of fact, if you were in your outer offices within the last two days, you will have seen a delegation from my riding in the form of the Perth county councillors. Two of the councillors came to talk to your parliamentary assistant, and I do thank you for letting them come and meet. I also have supporting letters from the mayor of Stratford, from the mayor of St Marys and from the mayor of Listowel.
All of them are quite concerned about the process involved in children's aid society budgets. It is not just as if they are saying there is a problem with the money, which there always is, and I must tell you that the first time they had me come out to a children's aid society and they said, "Karen, we would like money," I had the unfortunate responsibility of saying to them, "You are the 22nd person that I have been to visit and you are the 22nd organization that has asked me for money and I haven't even been sworn in as the government yet."
1750
We do have those things we have to deal with, but what they are now dealing with is the process where they have to draw up a budget, where you cannot say no to a child in need, where a lot of the cases they deal with are abuse, both physical and mental abuse. Their mandate is to take the children in, their mandate is to provide a service for their children, but they are operating on a budget that if they go over the budget, they are in a position of having to come back to the councillors and having to come back to the municipalities and having to come back to the ministry and say, "You haven't approved our budget yet. We are now overspent on our budget," and the ministry has to come back and say that the municipality has to come up with extra money and hurts the taxes, the county has to come up with extra money.
The reason I am asking for your comment is because in your presentation here you say, "We look at the recommendations, the proposed changes to the social services system." It is clear that the current provincial-local arrangements must be made simpler, fairer and more efficient. I would like some comments on how we can make this process a little easier for them to deal with in the budgeting, in the county budgets and in the municipality budgets and in the children's aid society budgets when we are looking at an increase of 17.1% in the estimates and part of that problem is not just increasing it 17.1% but changing the process of that whole system.
Hon Mrs Akande: One of the things I want to say is that we have been receiving a lot of information from various areas, not just yours, about this CAS and its problems.
The question that is constantly asked and that is one of the things I have asked that we look at, is the timing of the budgeting process and how it does not seem to coincide with -- I recall when I was becoming familiar with this and of course, as all with the naïve, your first question is why and "Why can't we change it?" I have heard the reasons, and in a moment I will allow the deputy to share those reasons with you. However, I am still not satisfied and I am looking for a change in the timing of the budget process because that clears up one of the problems.
The other thing is that the mandatory services that they provide are such that they are facing a situation that is somewhat similar to the situation in which the provinces were. You are paying for a mandatory service, you cannot say, "I'm not going to shore up these people," but in effect you really do not have the money, so that there is only a certain extent to which you can say, "Okay, let's look at altering priorities." But, if in fact your function is such that much of it is mandatory, and it is, you really have to look at the extension of the budget and then we get back to looking at the municipalities and where their share is at fault.
Ms Haslam: I understand that you cannot leave it open-ended either.
Ms Gibbons: I would just add that it is indeed a complex process and you are right that, in the best of all worlds, all of us would have it differently constructed. But, as the minister suggests, it is tied to two realities. One is that the municipalities who cost-share with the children's aid societies operate on a calendar cycle and we operate on a fiscal cycle and the Treasurer does usually try to get his announcements out around transfers to accommodate their planning.
In addition, at the local level, we get into a service plan and a budget cycle, so there is ongoing planning at the local level about the needs of the CAS. But we cannot always account for, and this is the complex part, in-year what kind of volume problems the children's aid society is going to have to face. So we are in a position where at year-end we need to work with them through the exceptional circumstance process to say, yes, in fact the volume has increased and, yes, in fact we can address it through moneys that we can provide after the year-end.
This solved just a piece of their problem because then they need to deal with the administrative costs associated with more volume and we have yet another process to do that and that takes time. So they do live I think in a world where they are somewhat uncertain about their funding for large periods of time. As the minister said, we are seized of that now, and she has asked us to see if there are not some ways that we can streamline it so that there is some relief of the uncertainty of the local level.
Ms Haslam: I understand that you cannot exactly say it is an open-ended budget and go over our budget and come to us for more money. I understand that problem, but you are talking about two other stages and two other steps they go through. Are they ever turned down? The problem is sometimes the budget that they ask for approval for is not approved and they come back with special circumstances. If they are lucky it is approved, but if it is not approved then they come back to the municipality and they come back to the council and they need extra money. My concern is that --
Ms Gibbons: Nobody has the luxury of submitting a budget and having it endorsed totally.
Ms Haslam: I know.
Ms Gibbons: I would love to live in that world too, as would the minister, I am sure. Yes, in fact exceptional circumstance requests are often approved. Child welfare reviews are less often positively responded to either because the people doing the review do not find that the need is there or because the money is not there to address it.
Hon Mrs Akande: The other thing is, though, that I must say that my feeling about it is that it is a petition-heavy process. It is back and forth and back and forth, and I recognize the need and I have heard the arguments about why it should be the way it is.
Ms Gibbons: She did not buy it then either.
Hon Mrs Akande: I just want it to change. That is all.
The Vice-Chair: Another question, Ms Haslam?
Ms Haslam: No, I am going to leave it with a brief comment. We are entering into a major recession, time of depression, and with so many people, and I am talking about my riding, three factories closed down, a lot of people out of work. When we look at how that affects the social programs, it does not just have the effect, as Mr Hope has suggested, that more are on welfare. It is like a spiral. You end up on social assistance, which is not enough, which then affects your family.
I have a major, major concern about the stress placed on families because of unemployment, because of having to go on welfare benefits, on social assistance, the stress that erupts into violence, which then goes into a situation where I only have one hostel for women in my riding and it is not going to be enough, and which again comes back to the children's aid society getting involved and there being an increase in budget there. It is so intertwined.
I have a major concern when we look at our social programs. I understand that you have found extra money to put into some of those well-needed programs at this time, but I want to go on record as having a major concern that while people are saying, "Gee, we are heavy in social programs," the need is going to be so evident in the next while.
The Vice-Chair: I do not hear a question there. Do you wish to make it a question?
Ms Haslam: Not everybody asked a question.
The Vice-Chair: No, you did not have to. I am just clarifying that the minister does not need to speak.
Ms Haslam: No, I just was very concerned.
The Vice-Chair: Okay. In fairness there are two minutes left. Mr Hope is the next person.
Mr Hope: All of two minutes?
The Vice-Chair: But the good news is you have four hours tomorrow.
Mr Hope: Okay.
Mr Perruzza: Madam Chair, how did I get bumped?
Mr Hope: Because she forgot all about me.
The Vice-Chair: No, that is incorrect.
Mr Perruzza: I want to give Mr Hope the floor, but --
The Vice-Chair: For goodness' sake, this is your own caucus, and you are using his time.
Mr Hope: Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to stem on some of the comments that Mr Jackson brought forward, and I am glad he did, dealing with the whole issue of pay equity and women's issues, how it was brought to light to me is my wife is a domestic engineer and when she told me she was going to withdraw her services, then I started understanding about women's issues quite quickly. I have been a fighter for women's issues. I think the pay equity legislation that was passed by the previous government excluded one million women and it was very discriminating upon women, and I think it is important that the value of service has to be calculated into our programs.
Dealing with the value of service, there is a certain part of society out there that is an elderly society, which is called our senior citizens, who have been very instrumental in the founding of the nation and the founding of social programs. I noticed in your statement you talked about the long-term care proposal and you said that there is a group out there that has been missed on the consultation. I am just, out of curiosity, wondering what time frame you would be looking at and what process you would be looking at in implementing this program.
The Vice-Chair: Mr Hope, I think that the minister will be happy to consider your questions overnight and the points that have been raised and answer them.
Mr Hope: Excuse me, Madam Chair, was it not eight minutes after? According to that, we started at 2:08 and --
The Vice-Chair: Excuse me, you are out of your 15 minutes. If you want to start back, it is the Liberals' turn. What we have decided to do, because we have finished equally with 15-minute periods this afternoon through the three caucuses, is to start in the morning with the official opposition. We will ensure that there will be sufficient time so that the entire eight hours will be used. Excuse me, what are you saying, Mr Jackson?
Mr Jackson: I just wanted to thank --
The Vice-Chair: Oh, I will do that. Thank you.
Mr Jackson: -- Ms Campbell for coming today. I appreciated very much your attendance.
The Vice-Chair: Ms Campbell, your obvious commitment and dedication is ongoing by your attendance back here today and we do thank you for being here. The committee stands adjourned until 10 o'clock in the morning and we have four hours tomorrow.
The committee adjourned at 1802.