Committee Transcript 1995-Nov-23 | Legislative Assembly of Ontario

Job Quotas Repeal Act, 1995, Bill 8, Ms Mushinski / Loi de 1995 abrogeant le contingentement en matière d'emploi, project de loi 8, M^me Mushinski

Regional Multicultural Youth Council

Aaron Goldstein, press officer

Sam Singh

McLarren Consulting Group Inc

Phil McLarren, president

Ontario Public Service Advisory Group on Equal Opportunity for Persons with Disabilities

Don Ogner, past president

David Lepofsky, counsel

National Action Committee on the Status of Women

Winnie Ng, southern Ontario regional representative

Nandita Sharma, member at large, NAC executive

Ontario Advisory Council on Women's Issues

Rosalind Cairncross, vice-president

Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association

Marilies Rettig, president

Carolyn Stevens, executive assistant

Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation

Pat Wright, executive officer

Rosemary Clark, executive assistant

National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women in Ontario

Maria Wallis, regional vice-president

Barbara Isaac, president, Toronto chapter, Congress of Black Women

Ontario Professional Fire Fighters' Association

Bill Cole, member

City of Toronto

Kyle Rae, councillor; chair, personnel committee

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, acting director, equal opportunity division

Organization for Quality Education

John Bachmann, president

David A. Hogg, vice-president

Alicia Payne

Bloor Information and Legal Services

Surjan Zirvi, board member

Anna Pratt, board member

Abul Hasan Community Resource Centre

Tarek Fatah, executive director

Access Action Council

Hamid Rezvani, member, board of directors

Jared Purdy, member, board of directors

Janaki Balakrishnan

Toronto Coalition Against Racism

Maurice Adongo, member

Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police

Jack Delcourt, chair, legislation committee

Sandra Martin

Provincial Federation of Ontario Fire Fighters

Mark Fitzsimmons, member

Disabled People for Employment Equity

Eric Schryer, former coordinator

Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation

Jeff Holmes, first vice-president

STANDING COMMITTEE ON GENERAL GOVERNMENT

*Chair / Président: Carroll, Jack (Chatham-Kent PC)

Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Maves, Bart (Niagara Falls PC)

Danford, Harry (Hastings-Peterborough PC)

*Flaherty, Jim (Durham Centre PC)

*Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East / -Est L)

*Hardeman, Ernie (Oxford PC)

Kells, Morley (Etobicoke-Lakeshore PC)

*Marchese, Rosario (Fort York ND)

*Pupatello, Sandra (Windsor-Sandwich L)

*Sergio, Mario (Yorkview L)

*Stewart, R. Gary (Peterborough PC)

*Tascona, Joseph N. (Simcoe Centre PC)

Wood, Len (Cochrane North / -Nord ND)

*Young, Terence H. (Halton Centre PC)

*In attendance / présents

Substitutions present / Membres remplaçants prèsents:

Bassett, Isabel St (Andrew-St Patrick PC) for Mr Kells

Boyd, Marion (London Centre ND) for Mr Wood

Caplan, Elinor (Oriole L) for Mr Grandmaître

Clement, Tony (Brampton South / -Sud PC) for Mr Danford

DeFaria, Carl (Mississauga East / -Est PC) for Mr Maves

Marland, Margaret (Mississauga South / -Sud PC) for Mr Flaherty

McLeod, Lyn (Fort William L) for Mrs Pupatello

Clerk / Greffière: Grannum, Tonia

Staff / Personnel:

Campbell, Elaine, research officer, Legislative Research Service

Kaye, Philip, research officer, Legislative Research Service

Tion, Nellie, policy analyst, Ministry of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation

The committee met at 1004 in committee room 1.

JOB QUOTAS REPEAL ACT, 1995 / LOI DE 1995 ABROGEANT LE CONTINGENTEMENT EN MATIÈRE D'EMPLOI

Consideration of Bill 8, An Act to repeal job quotas and to restore merit-based employment practices in Ontario / Projet de loi 8, Loi abrogeant le contingentement en matière d'emploi et rétablissant en Ontario les pratiques d'emploi fondées sur le mérite.

The Chair (Mr Jack Carroll): Good morning, everyone. I appreciate everybody arriving close to on time this morning. Since we have a long, busy day ahead of us, we'd like to get started.

REGIONAL MULTICULTURAL YOUTH COUNCIL

The Chair: Our first presenter this morning is Aaron Goldstein, the press officer with the Regional Multicultural Youth Council. His written brief has been handed out. It's in front of you at your desk along with a couple of other briefs from some groups that will not physically be here but wanted to express their opinions.

Mr Goldstein, you have 20 minutes, sir, to use as you see fit. Any time that you leave for questions at the end of that -- you do have 20 minutes -- will be divided evenly among the three parties, starting with the official opposition, the Liberals. The floor is yours, sir. Welcome.

Mr Aaron Goldstein: Let me begin by thanking members of this committee for allowing me the opportunity to express our organization's point of view concerning Bill 8. My name is Aaron Goldstein and I serve as the press officer of the Regional Multicultural Youth Council, the youth wing of the Multicultural Association of Northwestern Ontario, which is based in Thunder Bay.

For those members who want a little more information about our organization, you'll find a number of our activities on pages 1 and 2 of your brief. I will say that we have been active in a number of issues in the areas of education and training, labour, criminal justice and public safety and workplace discrimination, among others. So indeed we have been active on the issue of employment equity.

We are and continue to be supportive of the employment equity measures taken on at the federal level by the Progressive Conservative government during the mid-1980s and more recent measures taken by the present Liberal government. MANWO's support for employment equity extends far back, since its inception, when the Progressive Conservative government of Bill Davis initiated the first affirmative action programs in the province. We have consistently supported equity measures taken by Progressive Conservative, Liberal and NDP governments

It should then come as no surprise to members of this committee that we do not support the direction the government is taking with the proposed piece of legislation. We strongly supported the employment equity measures initiated by the previous NDP government, particularly because the legislation included both the public and private sectors and because of the incremental and decentralized nature of the drafting and implementation of employment equity plans.

We participated actively in the consultation process set up by the previous Minister of Citizenship, the Honourable Elaine Ziemba. On August 19, 1993, I, on behalf of the RMYC and MANWO, had the opportunity to speak before the standing committee on administration of justice, which was chaired by the honourable member for Fort York, to support Bill 79, which was to eventually to become the Employment Equity Act.

We of course are not surprised by the government's direction in policy. The intention of the Progressive Conservative Party to eliminate the Employment Equity Act was stated very clearly in the CSR and strongly emphasized during the provincial election campaign late this past spring. Clearness of mind notwithstanding, we nevertheless believe that the governing party's arguments cannot go unchallenged.

When the Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation initiated second reading debate on October 26, she argued that the Employment Equity Act, as well as equity initiatives in the Education Act, the Police Services Act and the Ontario Human Rights Code, were "unnecessary," "unfair," "ineffective" and "costly." We take strong issue with all four of these assertions.

The minister argued that employment equity was unnecessary because "discrimination is already against the law under the Human Rights Code." Does the minister mean to say that because race is a prohibited ground of discrimination in the code, racism no longer exists? The minister further argues: "The code guarantees all Ontarians the right...and freedom from discrimination.... We firmly believe the commission is the appropriate vehicle for dealing with complaints of discrimination."

While we would certainly agree that the Ontario Human Rights Commission is an appropriate vehicle for dealing with complaints of discrimination, we would also argue that the commission can only adjudicate remedies on a case-by-case basis and that its mandate goes beyond the scope of the workplace. Therefore, a separate governmental body is necessary to facilitate the surveying of the workforce, the identification of barriers to employment and the drafting and implementation of employment equity plans. The Employment Equity Commission would have acted as both a proactive and a preventive instrument that would have enabled the workplace to avoid the type of workplace discrimination cases that appeared before the Human Rights Commission.

The minister argued that employment equity was unfair because it obstructs "an employer's ability to hire on the merit principle, which is the hallmark of fair workplace policies and practices." Is the minister suggesting that employers do not assess the skills and qualifications of prospective employees who identify themselves as members of a designated group? The ultimate objective of any employment equity plan is to recruit and retain the highest calibre people from as broad a community base among the working-age population within a specific geographical area according to certain occupational skills.

All the employer has to consider are barriers which have no bearing on the performance at the workplace which have inhibited the employment of members of certain communities. These barriers include but are not limited to equipment and facilities at the workplace, physical impediments such as height and weight, or interview techniques.

The minister argues that employment equity is ineffective because it does not "address the root causes of the very issue it purports to address: discrimination." How can the minister possibly come to that conclusion? One of the best features of the Employment Equity Act is its decentralized nature. Employment equity plans are developed at the workplace level, in partnership between employers and employees. The Employment Equity Act gave workplaces three years to design their employment equity plans in order to enable employers and employees to carefully identify barriers to employment and to consider all options in bringing about a plan that will address those barriers. Furthermore, what empirical evidence does the minister have that employment equity plans designed under the auspices of the Education Act or the Police Services Act are in any way ineffective?

The minister also argues that employment equity is costly. She asserts that "employers have spent thousands of dollars on a variety of complicated and time-consuming measures. In fact, it's likely that there are employers in this province who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars." So what is the solution that the minister has brought forward? To compel employers to destroy information they collected in the workforce surveys for the purpose of implementing an employment equity plan. Yet we have heard from many employers who support employment equity and still want to implement an employment equity plan in their workplace as good business sense. Would these firms be forced to destroy this information regardless of their wishes and have to spend "thousands of dollars on a variety of complicated and time-consuming measures" on items in which they have already invested?

If there is any room for compromise and flexibility on this matter, we would like to suggest the following amendments to subsections 1(3) and 1(5):

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That subsection 1(3) be amended by adding after the word "effect," "unless one or both parties have written to the minister within 90 days of this act coming into force with the expressed wish that the said agreement or agreements entered into under subsection 26(2) of the Employment Equity, 1993, be continued."

That subsection 1(5) be amended by adding after the word "force," "unless said person has written to the minister within 90 days of this act coming into force with the expressed wish that information gathered in compliance with Part III of the Employment Equity Act, 1993, continue to be utilized for the purpose of implementing an employment equity plan at the workplace or workplaces of the said person."

We would like to believe that this government would, at the very least, be able to accommodate employers who have a genuine wish to implement an employment equity plan in their workplace and not bear them the undue imposition of spending money to gather information they already have at their disposal.

Bill 8 also provokes other questions. The CSR, in addition to calling for the repeal of the Employment Equity Act, proposes the development of a six-point workplace equal opportunity plan. Why hasn't the government come forward with its six-point plan with the same speed and enthusiasm it has in bringing forth this legislation? If the government should argue that it needs more time to work out the details of its plan, why could the government not bring forth this legislation when their plan was ready? Why does this legislation have to be passed before Christmas? Clearly, the implementation of a workplace equal opportunity plan has not been accorded the same priority as the dismantling of existing employment equity legislation.

Indeed, if a workplace equal opportunity plan did have the same priority, it would be encompassed in this legislation. Without a legislative and regulatory framework that makes these plans accountable to the people of this province, the six-point plan will do little more than give the appearance that something is being done to address the issue of discrimination in the workplace. Notwithstanding the employers that have demonstrated their support for employment equity, the issue of workplace discrimination, be it intentional or systemic, is far too important to leave to the charity or goodwill of a benevolent employer.

Just by looking at the situation that exists here at Queen's Park, it is clear that more measures need to be taken regarding employment equity in the workplace. We're not questioning the legitimacy of this particular Parliament or previous parliaments. All 130 members of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario have been fairly chosen by their constituents to represent them in this assembly, as set out in the Election Act. However, at the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that out of 130 MPPs only 19 are women. To put the number in perspective, if we look at the permanent memberships on legislative standing committees, as set out in the November 2 issue of Votes and Proceedings, we will find only four of the 11 committees whose female membership is in proportion to that of the Legislature.

In fact, on the standing committee the Legislative Assembly, the body that examines internal matters pertaining to all members of this House, all 14 of its members are male. With that in mind, we all recognize that men and women are equal before the law, yet they are not equal deciding the law of the land. Unless we are prepared to say that men are more capable than women in determining the laws of our land, we must acknowledge that in the electoral process there exists an institutional bias on the basis of gender.

In short, the electoral process systemically discriminates against women. Let me be very clear. Systemic discrimination and intentional discrimination are not the same thing. The men of this province did not conspire to only elect 19 female MPPs, but none the less there do exist barriers against women participating in the electoral process. They include, but are not limited to, income differentials, the raising of children, access to education and training, political connections, the ability to raise funds and the tendency of political parties to nominate women in marginal constituencies. Whether we overcome these barriers by implementing universal day care or moving to an electoral system based on proportional representation is another question entirely.

The point we are trying to illustrate is that with the abrogation of the Employment Equity Act and the repeal of employment equity measures, as set out in other acts of this assembly, there appears to be the prevailing attitude that because we have a Human Rights Code, discrimination, neither intentional nor systemic, exists. Yet we have demonstrated that systemic discrimination does exist right here in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. And we have not even included racial minorities, aboriginal people and persons with disabilities into the equation.

These attitudes do concern us because of other decisions this government has taken during its first five months in office. Section 4 of this act, which concerns the employment equity provisions in the Police Services Act, brings to mind the recent decision of the Solicitor General to eliminate the race relations unit in the OPP. The last five years have seen gradual yet enormous progress in improved relations between police and the communities they serve. What will happen to those relations over the next five years?

Other concerns we have include the decision of the minister who brought in this act to eliminate the Ontario advisory councils on disability issues, seniors, as well as multiculturalism and citizenship on the grounds that they threatened "the financial stability of Ontario" despite costing her ministry only $851,900 to operate for this fiscal year. The move by the minister to also eliminate core funding for the anti-racism project fund, the anti-racism operating fund, the anti-racism community placement program, to essentially eliminate the Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat, also concerns us. The decision of the minister to eliminate or drastically cut funding for cultural interpreters, native community branches, community action funds, immigrant settlement and integration services also concerns us.

All these decisions concern us because of their philosophical and electoral underpinnings. The governing party's campaign was reminiscent of a number of recent US electoral campaigns, such as the Bush presidential campaign in 1988, the re-election campaign of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina in 1990 and Proposition 187 in California in 1994.

All of these campaigns played on the worst fears of people about their neighbours and fellow citizens. It seems that the governing party literally took a page out of the Republican handbook and stepped up its focus on employment equity. The message was unmistakable: "You will not get this job because a black person or a woman is going to get it instead of you," the implication being that a black person or a woman could not be more qualified than a white male who, by his birthright, should have first dibs at the job, while never thinking that the black person or woman was actually qualified, if not the best qualified person for the job.

It should be said that the governing party does not support racism, sexism and homophobia per se, yet it is not above pandering to those in the electorate who have those particular views if this will get it to power, as it did last June, and will keep it in power. It seems that the governing party is essentially saying to those people that their views are acceptable in this province despite being contrary to the spirit of our laws. It is unfortunate that the governing party is creating a political climate where people can be comfortable with their prejudices.

Is this the kind of lesson we want to teach to our children, that it is okay to think less of someone because they belong to a particular community, that it is okay to tease, even injure someone because they do not conform to the model of acceptability and normality? The state cannot be neutral in matters like these. It either supports its heterogeneous character or it does not. If true leadership is by example, and if the latter is the model we follow as we approach the 21st century, I hate to predict what the future will hold for us and succeeding generations.

On a final note, it is important to remember that the government has not put forward any empirical evidence that would suggest that employment equity is unnecessary, unfair, ineffective and costly. Let us remember that the Employment Equity Act has been in force for barely one year. How can the government argue that employment equity fits any of the aforementioned attributes when there are more than two years before all the workplace plans would have had to have been submitted? One would think that with employment equity being in place in the fields of education and law enforcement, the government would have put forward a study that would have demonstrated the lack of necessity, the unfairness, the ineffectiveness and huge costs of employment equity in these areas, yet no studies have been commissioned, let alone released to the public.

Section 57 of the Employment Equity Act clearly states:

"A standing or select committee of the Legislative Assembly shall, on or before the day that is five years after the day this section comes into force, undertake a comprehensive review of this act and the regulations and shall, within one year after beginning that review, make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly regarding amendments to this act and the regulations."

Without the necessary empirical evidence that would be gathered by such a committee, how then can the government assert that employment equity is unnecessary, unfair, ineffective or costly? Why can't the government let the act takes its course and wait until 1999 to strike this committee? What is the hurry? We would like to believe that it is because the government might discover the merits of employment equity.

Once again, on behalf of the RMYC and MANWO, we thank you for this opportunity and I welcome any and all questions that members of this committee might have.

The Chair: Thank you very much, sir. We have exactly one minute per party for questions, so we'll start with Mr Grandmaître from the Liberals, and a minute isn't very long.

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Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East): Thank you, Mr Goldstein, for a very good presentation. I think it highlights all the points that the opposition has been trying to make in the last couple of weeks.

Do you believe that some of these savings that the government will be making by scrapping the Employment Equity Commission will be reinvested in the Ontario Human Rights Commission? Do you think this will resolve the problem?

Mr Goldstein: That's a very good question. I am aware of the promise that was made by the governing party to reallocate some of the $9.3-million budget of the Employment Equity Commission into the Ontario Human Rights Commission. No, I don't. I don't at all, and I believe I outlined some of those arguments in my brief. As we all know, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has had a long-standing backlog. It is a body, like I said, that deals with cases of not only workplace discrimination but discrimination in other areas and outside the workplace. So, no, I believe that any reallocation of funds into the Ontario Human Rights Commission wouldn't do very much. I do think that there needs to be special attention paid to the area of employment equity.

Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): Thank you very much for your presentation. I agree with literally everything you've said. Just a quick question.

The members on the other side have a zero-tolerance policy. They're against discrimination. They're saying the hallmark of this will be the Human Rights Commission and the Human Rights Code. We've had that for 30 years. If there's any empirical evidence about the problems we've had, it would be that system. Do you want to comment again about their equal opportunity plan and their zero-tolerance policy around the issues of discrimination?

Mr Goldstein: Again I expressed some concerns about their workplace equal opportunity plan, that it was not encompassed in this specific legislation. I might have felt a little better about it if it was. The fact that there is an emphasis on it being "voluntary, non-intrusive," in the words of some of the members of the governing party, where is its foundation? I think you can't really say you're committed to the elimination of discrimination without some sort of statutory or regulatory framework. The workplace equal opportunity plan may be well intentioned but it has no foundation on which to rest.

Mrs Margaret Marland (Mississauga South): Mr Goldstein, you talked about the fact that all forms of discrimination are systemic, and you gave as an example the Legislature of 130 elected members. I'm asking you this question as a female who's been elected in public office for 21 years and who has seen how the system works.

I'm wondering if you're suggesting that we do away with free, open elections where the electorate choose who represents them and instead of that appoint people by gender in order to deal with the systemic "problem" that you see in the current Legislature which makes up memberships in committees and deals with government policy through legislation of any government, not just the current government, because, as you know, the previous government had 28 females. I don't think that personally I would want to do away with the public deciding who sits in this building.

Mr Goldstein: Neither would I, nor did I suggest that. Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to work in the House of Commons in England. I worked for a couple of Labour MPs and I had the chance to meet with other people in social democratic parties around the world. Of course, most of the legislative assemblies in Europe are elected by proportional representation, and I did make a brief reference to that. There are some countries, the Scandinavian countries in particular -- the political parties per se do have an emphasis of trying to maintain gender parity on their electoral lists, which is why I pointed to proportional representation.

I don't think that you could do as you suggested in the first-past-the-post electoral system that we have right now, nor would I advocate what you suggested. Like I said, that's a question that's for another day. The whole point of pointing that particular example out is that systemic discrimination does exist. Like I said --

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Goldstein. I have been a little generous with the time with you, anyway. I appreciate your time. We have a very tight schedule. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but thanks very much for your interest in our process and being here this morning.

Mr Goldstein: My pleasure.

SAM SINGH

The Chair: Our next presenter is Sam Singh. I am going to be a little tough on the timing on the questions, because we have, as you know, until 10 o'clock tonight and we can't get behind. So if I cut you off, you will appreciate my insistence.

Good morning, Mr Singh; you have 20 minutes to use as you see fit. Any time that you leave for questions will be divided evenly among the parties starting with the third party, the NDP. Welcome to our process. You have the floor.

Mr Sam Singh: Mr Chair, members of the standing committee, I'm here to express my personal views on Bill 79 and Bill 8.

When Bill 79, An Act to provide for Employment Equity for Aboriginal People, People with Disabilities, Members of Racial Minorities and Women, was initially introduced by the former NDP government in the Ontario provincial Legislature in June 1992 I seriously questioned its rationality then. I knew from the outset that Bill 79 obviously had some hidden ulterior motives best known to the authors of the bill.

It was nothing but a political gimmick. It was no doubt a prominent plank in the election platform that gave Bob Rae and the NDP a surprise victory in September 1990. Mr Rae promised an end to discrimination in the workplace and a new era of fairness and equality. Surprisingly, it took him four years to enact and implement his employment equity package.

The preamble of the bill was very intelligently worded, in which a grave situation of discrimination in terms of hiring, retaining employment or promotion of aboriginal people, people with disabilities, members of racial minorities and women were highlighted. Bill 79 was perhaps the only viable answer to address the concerns stipulated within the preamble of the act, according to Mr Bob Rae. But this assumption was premature and completely unfounded. It must be realized that employment equity is always a short-term political solution to existing social, economic and labour force problems. It limits opportunities for all but the most qualified members of the four designated groups, as per the bill.

Bill 79 -- a backlash: The employment equity law of 1993, introduced by the former Ontario government, had a backlash. It was full of faults and full of shortcomings. It was based on no conceptual model, no background program, no demographic or labour force studies to support it. The law affected about 17,000 employers and about 75% of the workforce. The reaction to the law was mixed. Many advocacy groups felt it didn't go far enough; unions were worried about the safeguard of seniority; and employers, large and small alike, were concerned about logistics and response of developing and implementing equity plans that would comply strictly with the Legislature.

The communications director of the Employment Equity Commission said that nine months were all that she could take with the commission; it was too much. She had fundamental problems about positioning, philosophy and the bottom line. She believed in fairness for everyone, but the commission was only intended in employment equity for the few groups, and not the qualitative issues. The biggest error that the Employment Equity Commission made, according to her, was its focus on numbers. The numbers became the proxy for fairness. It was certainly a political disaster.

Small companies didn't have the personnel, the employee base or the cash flow to study and implement the cumbersome employment equity program. Even larger companies also found it expensive. Besides, most of them already had policies in place under the federal contractors' program. They didn't need a duplication, a second set of employment equity regulations.

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According to Michael Finlayson of the University of Toronto, the employment equity legislation was clumsy, interventionist, unrealistic and an impractical attempt to bring about employment equity. To him, because the NDP government was pushing employment equity and imposing the social contract at the same time, we had one half of the dream world trying to protect the jobs of the existing employees and the other half trying to create new jobs.

The federal perspective: Judge Rosalie Abella headed a commission on employment equity in 1983 consequent to her appointment by the then minister for human resources, Mr Lloyd Axworthy. The commission gave Canada a new definition of equality, coined the term "employment equity," and shifted the politics of the workplace away from class and on to race and gender issues. According to the critics, Abella turned a narrowly focused inquiry into a much broader employment equity debate.

Abella, as a result of her terms of reference, included only the four groups -- women, native people, visible minorities and the disabled -- who are perceived to be disadvantaged in terms of unemployment, income and occupational status. She took each of them in turn and gave each a different definition of equality in terms of their needs.

Consequently, her commission was not in fact about equality in employment, but about redress and affirmative action, a contradiction that has proved more constricting and problematic with the passage of time. She allowed employers flexibility in designing their employment equity programs and in setting their numerical targets. People were sympathetic to the barrier removal part of employment equity but were gravely concerned about the numbers, the targets, the quotas.

While Abella's critics strongly distinguished between goals and quotas, Abella differentiated between voluntary internal targets and externally imposed targets. Whatever it may be, a numerical target is a quota. Thus by concentrating on numerical goals, the act ignored the crucial points Abella had made when she suggested, "What precedes employment may be just as important as what occurs once employment is obtained." She recognized that "jobs can realistically be made available only to those who are qualified to undertake them." In trying to wipe out one inequity, another is created.

Due to the serious flaws in Judge Abella's recommendations and the negative reaction from both the employers and the employees in the public and private sectors, the federal government quietly introduced Bill C-64 in the House of Commons last month for the second and third readings. It was done at a time when the people of Canada were all preoccupied with the Quebec referendum. The purpose of the bill was to replace the government's existing employment equity legislation with something tougher. Employment equity is still only available to the same four groups -- women, aboriginal people, those with disabilities and visible minorities -- who were designated more than a decade ago. But Bill C-64 widens its scope.

However, the question is, do we even need an employment equity legislation? Some outspoken critics of Bill C-64 have rightly called it an act against Canadians. They believe there has been systematic discrimination in the past but the people hurt by employment equity today and those who will be hurt in the future are not guilty of any discrimination. Some critics even charge the bill which slipped through the House of Commons as based on a faulty foundation that Canadians are mean, that Canadians are regressive, that they are racist, and they're discriminating people. They argued that the workplace, particularly outside the federal government, is progressive; industry leads; it is a truly unnecessary law.

Personal experiences: I came to Canada in 1987 from Fiji, where East Indians and the indigenous Fijians form the bulk of its population. In the field of employment, before the imposition of martial law on the country in 1987, everyone had to compete on the basis of merit. It was fair and virtuous. Everyone appreciated and respected the value of competition. But after martial law, employment practices drastically changed. Employment equity for the native Fijians became a law. This led to a massive brain drain from Fiji. The country was paralysed. I fortunately, as a result, emigrated to Canada.

In Canada, I took a teaching position with the Peel Board of Education in the continuing education department. I was soon promoted, but what saddened me the most was a subtle reaction from my colleagues who perhaps attributed my appointment and promotion to who I was, thanks to the equity law. I personally felt the existence of a sense of suspicion, despair and abomination among my fellow teachers. My two decades of teaching and administrative experience, relevant qualifications, both professional and academic, perhaps had no bearing. I felt sad and disappointed as a result.

I wish not to undergo such trauma and nightmare again. As a member of a visible minority, I need respect, credibility and due recognition of the ability, knowledge and skills that I have. The equity law unfortunately undermines all the above.

During my visits to India, I've observed that the employment equity law there has created an enormous rift and rivalry between various castes and people of different social strata. My friend Mr Dave Dhaliwal, who is here with me today, could not cope with such reverse discrimination; he had to leave India to find better employment opportunities in Canada. Because he belongs to a higher caste, it would have been completely impossible for him to find suitable employment according to his qualification. The employment equity law in India has led the young educated people of higher social strata to commit suicidal acts due to the disappointing outcome of the equity law. What a tragedy.

From the above personal experiences, I have learned that there are many casualties, very subtle, in the workplace that has become a war zone in the ongoing equity battles, whichever countries they may be. Whether we think employment equity is apartheid in reverse, social engineering to redress historical injustices, or well-intentioned public policy that has gone awry, one thing is for sure: It has disrupted and destabilized the workplace, creating chaos.

Up to today, after extensively and exhaustively discussing with a cross-section of the members of the visible minority in Ontario, neither I nor they have been successfully able to comprehend and understand any constructive, valid, viable and helpful objectives of Bill 79. Scores of members of the visible minority groups want to enjoy and regain their self-respect, identity and goodwill.

This is possible only if Bill 79 is completely killed. Its nonexistence will be a blessing to the progressive community like ours in Ontario. To most of the people of visible minorities here, it has a negative connotation, with adverse effects, aftermath and racial overtones. It undermines the integrity and capability of the members of the visible minority groups. It has created dissent and suspicion in the workplace. It has resulted in unfairness, conspiracy and bigotry among fellow workers. Consequently, in the name of fairness, impartiality, honesty and justice, employment opportunities in Ontario should be open and competed for solely on the basis of merit.

It's only then that a fair society will be created in Ontario and everyone will be proud to be a part of it. I therefore am in full agreement with Bill 8. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for permitting me to express my views, and I'll be too pleased to accept any questions.

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Mr Marchese: Thank you, Mr Singh, for your presentation. I was a teacher in my previous life and one of the things that I remember researching was how we as teachers tend to categorize students. There was a study that was done and it studied a number of teachers and their perceptions of students. This was in grade 1. They were able to, with great accuracy, determine in grade 1 -- by two determinants, race and socioeconomics -- who was going to make it and who was not going to make it. It was incredible how accurate they were in grade 1 on where they would end up in grade 8 or in high school.

The point I make is that we have perceptions as teachers that we tend to self-fulfil, and so there is a problem, in my view, in terms of discrimination. Do you believe there's discrimination?

Mr Singh: What I personally believe is that -- it depends on how you use the word "discrimination" and how often it has been used, and how much has it been forced to be used in classrooms or otherwise.

Mr Marchese: Okay, do you believe people with disabilities are discriminated against?

Mr Singh: I do believe, but then there are solutions for that. The solution is not that you try to prepare a quota and say, "Well, we are going to accept so many people from this particular category and so many people from that particular category." The answer here lies in trying to overcome the problem, and the one area that I can see that we can possibly be able to overcome this area is by educating people, by getting people to that particular standard where there is equality among them.

Mr Marchese: So we educate them? In the last 30 years we've had a Human Rights Code and a commission that tries to deal with discrimination in general. We've had that. We've had voluntary programs. We've had a great deal of education going on and still all of the groups that we're trying to help say: "We're not there. We don't have access to the jobs."

The Chair: Excuse me, Mr Marchese. Your time is up. Mr Young.

Mr Terence H. Young (Halton Centre): Mr Singh, thank you very much for coming today and taking time out of your schedule to talk to us. I would like to ask you a question. I share your concern with dissent and suspicion in the workplace. I worked in a large company for years where there was employment equity and I saw it happen. Someone would get promoted who was a member of a visible minority or a female and there would be a whispering campaign.

What I'd like to ask you -- I was interested in your comments on India -- if Bill 79 were to stay in place, where would that lead us, what kind of society would we have, because they have problems in India?

Mr Singh: Well, if we still had this Bill 79, then our community would have been compartmentalized. There would have been more kinds of division. Our duty here is, as politicians and everybody, to bring the community together so that the community is one society, not that it is divided into different categories, by saying that you belong to this race or caste, creed or colour.

The Chair: Mr Tascona, 45 seconds.

Mr Joseph N. Tascona (Simcoe Centre): Mr Singh, are you aware that the employers have to destroy the data they collect under the employment equity legislation, and also that the government's not going to be regulating the destruction of the data? Are you in agreement with that process?

Ms Singh: Yes, very much.

Mr Tascona: And then, why?

Mr Singh: If I have to fill the forms or if my personal data are kept anywhere, I do not like to be seen classified under different categories, what race do I belong to, what minority group do I belong to, what other aspect of it. If I am in Ontario, I should be regarded as an Ontarian irrespective of my race or irrespective of anything else.

Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview): Mr Singh, what would happen to minorities, handicapped, women without the protection of Bill 79?

Mr Singh: That will give the minorities and others to be more competitive. That will give them to upgrade themselves. That will give them the ability to come to the extent where they can openly compete with the other people.

Mr Sergio: I have another question.

Mr Singh: Yes.

Mr Sergio: I appreciate short answers. You say you have met with a number of minority groups. Have you met with women's groups, handicapped people?

Mr Singh: I've met with a lot of women's groups in my community, in the Fijian community, and what we personally believe is that if our women in our community are not able to get the best of the jobs, it's not the fault of the society, it's not the fault of the government. It's their fault because they are not upgrading themselves.

My wife works in a plastics factory and she has been working there for 10 years. Tomorrow, if she wants to take up a certain other job, she has to be able to educate herself to be competitive.

Mr Sergio: In answer to a previous question, you did admit that there is discrimination and you say there are solutions. What kind of solution would you suggest?

Mr Singh: The solution, sir, is to create an awareness among all the community people to make the government provide certain options where there could be upgrading at workplace or otherwise. People are able to uplift their abilities, are able to get more education, are able to be more competitive.

The Chair: Mr Singh, we appreciate your attendance here this morning and participating in our process.

MCLARREN CONSULTING GROUP

The Chair: Our next presenters are the McLarren Consulting Group, Phil McLarren, president, and Wendy Sangster, program director. Welcome to our hearings. The floor is yours.

Mr Phil McLarren: Thank you very much for allowing us to come to your committee to present our views. I am Phil McLarren, president of McLarren Consulting Group, which is a successor company to ORC Canada. Several of you will remember the work we've done over the past 10 years with various governments, both Ontario and other governments, with respect to the issue of the evolution of employment equity and employment equity involvement by government initiatives.

We're human resources management consultants who pioneered employment equity starting in 1983, and since then we've made many contributions to the evolving governmental involvement with the subject. With respect to Ontario, in 1989 for the Liberal government we did an analysis of costs to develop an employment equity plan; we made presentation in 1992 on views on the discussion paper on employment equity legislation which covered a lot of the issues that had been addressed during the process of Bill 8 being evolved; and then, in 1993, we made a presentation suggesting amendments to Bill 79 which would enhance the merit principle and eliminate some of the issues that developed around the goal-setting process.

With our 12 years' experience developing employment equity plans, I should say that most of that experience has been with large, private sector and integrated companies. I would like to introduce my colleague, Wendy Sangster, who came to us after eight years as senior manager of human rights and employment equity for a large Canadian firm with 20,000 employees. She is a lawyer and is program director for our corporate equal opportunity group.

The CEOG, or corporate equal opportunity group, is probably the thing we're best known for. It's reputed to be Canada's principal and most effective forum for private sector business leaders to exchange views on human rights, employment equity and diversity. It was established in 1983 and it currently includes 57 member companies employing 450,000 Canadians, 80% of whom are provincially regulated and with Ontario employees. In presenting this submission, the views expressed are our own and not necessarily those of our clients or CEOG members.

First of all, Bill 8 wants us to believe that the Employment Equity Act is all about quotas, not mandatory planning to eliminate the discrimination that militates against merit. It implies that existing anti-discrimination law designed to penalize employers for past discrimination is good enough. Our experience suggests otherwise.

Our practice is to develop high-performance work environments, and in doing that, we start with a human resource management analysis. In other words, we find out, how do employment relationships work? Because of what we find in this work, we want to talk about merit principles and systemic discrimination.

Generally speaking, we have found that merit does not govern employment decisions, but neither the employer nor the employee realizes this because of systemic discrimination getting in the way. Why? Because systemic discrimination is subtle and can easily operate unnoticed. Its basic characteristics are: a policy or an action has an adverse impact on a group; a policy or action appears neutral and in fact is applied equally to all; the discrimination is unmotivated and unintended; and usually, in order to prove an allegation of systemic discrimination, we need to have statistical evidence. The defence against an allegation of systemic discrimination is that this action is a legitimate, bona fide business necessity, not a business convenience.

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If we look at all these things, rather than go and give an academic review of these things, I'm going to give you some examples of the sort of thing that happens in the workplace.

Recruitment: In most situations we come across, the vast majority of candidates to be interviewed for open positions are chosen from unsolicited résumés, employee referrals and walk-in applications. Many highly qualified people, often those from communities of people with disabilities, aboriginals and some visible minorities, have become so discouraged by seeing the ease with which less qualified candidates than themselves obtain jobs that they have lost the self-esteem and perseverance required to promote themselves effectively in the job market.

Employers find these recruiting sources effective, inexpensive and fast. It is fact that these recruiting processes do not fully tap the market of highly qualified designated group members.

Selection: After a list of candidates is identified for a selection process, they are usually screened first for technical capability. Our experience is that once a short list of equally qualified candidates has been identified, selection is often made based on "predictive behaviour" considerations -- a new phrase, a phrase of the 1990s. In other words, the person who gets the job is the person the selector feels would fit best and with whom other employees would feel most comfortable. As a result, those from the disadvantaged groups, who are at least as well and often more highly qualified, expect that they must go through many more of these processes to obtain work than do those of us who belong to the majority groups.

Work assignments: These are often given based on stereotypical notions of what groups perform best in which areas. Sales, marketing and key production jobs -- those that produce revenues for the company -- often go to white males disproportionately. Information, administration and support jobs -- those that do not produce revenues -- often go to others disproportionately.

The former assignments place employees in key lines of progression, but latter kinds of assignments lead to limited progression and ghettoes.

Promotions: Promotions are intended to be given to those with the best qualifications, performance records and other measures of merit. Our experience has shown that this is too often not the case. A major factor in progression is effective networking, self-promotion and other factors totally unrelated to merit.

Certain cultural and/or social conditioning means many people find self-promotion to be demeaning and undignified. Networking is simply not available to many, even if they were willing to try. Why should qualified individuals doing exemplary work not be able to expect recognition for their achievements based on merit? The raw truth is, they are not.

Can any of us say we have never rationalized comfort and fit decisions in terms of qualifications and performance? I know I can't. The statistical evidence concerning the rates of participation in the economy of those traditionally disadvantaged in employment is ample evidence that the answer to this question for most of us must be no, or at least we have to say it is a legitimate question.

This government suggests that education and training through their proposed equal opportunity program will help resolve the issues mentioned. We suggest that the advantages of making decisions based on comfort and fit as well as merit will ensure that qualified individuals from the designated groups will still have to make three to four times as many applications to get a job interview as those in the majority. They will have to endure many more interviews than us to obtain job offers. They will have to be passed over many times for promotions to which they may be entitled before their skills are recognized.

Will a woman who has been passed over for a developmental assignment on several occasions lodge a systemic discrimination complaint?

Will a black civil engineer who goes to 25 interviews before obtaining a job offer lodge a complaint?

Will a person with a disability who cannot get a job interview lodge a complaint?

Bill 8 throws the proactive, positive planning model "baby" out with the negative, reactive, punitive bathwater.

Will the equal opportunity plan do the job? No, it won't. It relies on education and training. It is voluntary in nature. It expects partners, namely, companies like the companies we deal with, to exchange their experiences.

Judge Rosalie Abella -- the previous speaker mentioned Judge Abella's report -- on page 8 of her report Equality in Employment, 1984, which is now regarded internationally as one of the few exemplary treatises on the subject of equality in employment, says:

"Education has been the classic crutch upon which we lean in the hopes of coaxing change in prejudicial attitudes. But education is an unreliable agent, glacially slow in movement and impact, and often completely ineffective in the face of intractable views. It promises no immediate relief despite the immediacy of the injustice."

Furthermore, on the basis of her vast research, she concluded at page 197:

"It is difficult to see how a voluntary approach, that is, an approach that does not include an effective enforcement component, will substantially improve employment opportunities for women, native people, disabled persons, or visible minorities. Given the seriousness and apparent intractability of employment discrimination, it is unrealistic and somewhat ingenuous to rely on there being sufficient public goodwill to fuel a voluntary program."

With respect to using the human rights law as a remedy, Abella said at page 8:

"The traditional Human Rights Commission model...is increasingly under attack for its statutory inadequacy to respond to the magnitude of the problem. Resolving discrimination caused by malevolent intent on a case-by-case basis puts human rights commissions in the position of stamping out brush fires when the urgency is in the incendiary potential of the whole forest."

In conclusion, the Employment Equity Act is unnecessarily intrusive, it overburdens employers with bureaucratic administration, and it focuses on numbers. However, it does require a plan to identify and eliminate the causes of systemic discrimination. It does enable merit to emerge as the dominant factor in employment relationships.

We suggested to the former government not to start with a complex, highly intrusive plan, but a simple one. That's in this report, by the way, dated September 1, 1993, and a previous one, January 1992. Mr Chair, I'd be pleased to make these available for the committee members if they'd like them.

We suggest to this government, don't trash the Employment Equity Act; strip it of its intrusive, bureaucratic adminstration and maintain as its main purpose to develop and implement a plan to reduce comfort and fit in employment decisions and enhance merit as a dominant determinant of these decisions.

To say the Ontario Employment Equity Act sets job quotas does a great disservice to those employers who support the principles of employment equity as set out in the act, and this has been said to be by many companies. Bill 8 repudiates these principles by inference. Bill 8 throws out the baby with the bathwater.

Bill 8 is a victory for uninformed business in Ontario, a reprieve for employers who do not want pressure to focus on merit and a disaster for qualified designated group members who are still waiting to have their merits acknowledged.

The Chair: Thank you, sir. We have about a minute and a half for a quick question from each party, starting with the government.

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Mr Tony Clement (Brampton South): Mr McLarren, would you agree then that employers in a broad range of industries and services discriminate, either directly or indirectly, in hiring promotion?

Mr McLarren: Unintentionally, yes. And so would they agree, by the way.

Mr Clement: Yes. And the proof of no systemic discrimination in a particular case would be that the hiring promotion would be based on a set of numerical targets that you would think would be reasonable in the circumstances?

Mr McLarren: Absolutely not. I think the whole issue of setting goals is really a matter of understanding. I think it's an indicator to help us understand whether or not we might be discriminating. If we find out that the general population says 20% of electrical engineers are women and we've only got 3%, then that is simply an indicator to us that something we're doing in our hiring practices might be discriminating, because if 20% of the people available are women, why do we only have 5%? The whole issue of looking at the numbers is to indicate to us that there's a possible adverse impact somewhere else.

Mr Clement: You're convinced that government involvement will solve that problem?

The Chair: Your time is up, Mr Clement. Mr Grandmaître.

Mr Grandmaître: You say that your firm specializes in helping large private sector organizations and that your approach to employment equity has been successful. Can you give me an example? I'm a client of yours and I want you to, let's say, come up with an employment equity plan for my business. Maybe my first question: When you say "large private sectors," can you give me a few examples of the large private sectors that you've worked with?

Mr McLarren: Yes. I'll do it chronologically, if you like.

Mr Grandmaître: No, no. Just give me a few names.

Mr McLarren: It's going to be chronological anyway. Shell, Alcan, Imasco, Nabisco, Dupont, American Express --

Mr Grandmaître: Okay, good. This is not a commercial. Now, I'm Imperial Oil, for instance. You've worked with Shell, so today I'm Imperial Oil. What kind of a plan would you offer me?

Mr McLarren: I wouldn't offer them any because they've got a darned good one right now. But no, I would say --

Mr Grandmaître: Give me an example.

Mr McLarren: The example would be: We would go into the situation, and you're talking specifically about recruiting, and we would find -- let me use the example that there's 20% female chemical engineers out there and we've only got 5%. What's wrong? We go in and we look at the recruiting and selection process and we would find, for instance, under recruiting, all this stuff that I mentioned in my paper is going on. We're relying on unsolicited résumés; in other words, the people who are really good at writing résumés are getting noticed in our process and we're relying on employee --

The Chair: Thank you very much. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to stop the answer there because time certainly is of the essence.

Mr Marchese: Mr McLarren, I find your presentation very, very helpful and I find your work and comments around issues of recruitment, selection, work assignments and promotion very insightful. I think sometimes people forget the specifics of how these things happen in the workplace and it sheds light on how in fact discrimination, however unintentional, happens. Your particular wording that in terms of selecting and promoting people this pressure often translates into choosing those who afford the best comfort and fit within the existing organization, I think that is very helpful.

I want some quick comment on how you felt Bill 79 was intrusive and bureaucratic.

Mr McLarren: It told companies what to do and how to do it. The federal legislation tells people what to do but not how to do it.

Mr Marchese: Where would they get help in terms of how to do it? They'd leave it to consultants like yourself, is that it?

Mr McLarren: Well, then I would side with the Conservative government a little bit and say that the role of government, getting back to Mr Clement's question, has to be looked at very carefully. There is a problem. I mean, Abella eminently pointed out what the problem is. She also, contrary to what the previous speaker said, didn't say what the solution was. She gave several approaches to get at a solution. All right? That, I think, is a very important distinction.

The Chair: I'd love to hear the rest of the answer, but unfortunately we have to carry on. Thank you very much for your time today. We appreciate your interest and your attendance here this morning.

ONTARIO PUBLIC SERVICE ADVISORY GROUP ON EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

The Chair: Our next presenters are the Ontario Public Service Advisory Group on Equal Opportunity for Persons with Disabilities, represented by David Lepofsky and Marion Hayward. Good morning and welcome to our committee this morning. I guess you understand the rules about the time, so the floor is yours. Questions will start, by the way, with the Liberals.

Mr Don Ogner: Good morning. My name is Don Ogner and I'm the past chair of the Ontario Public Service Advisory Group on Equal Opportunity for Persons with Disabilities.

On my right is Kathleen Naeyaert, a member of our advisory group, and on my left is David Lepofsky, the vice-chair.

I would like to briefly introduce David, since he will be presenting our brief. David is a highly regarded constitutional lawyer who, as his citation for the Order of Canada given this March states, "has used his professional knowledge to work tirelessly to protect the rights of disabled people. He has helped to educate and sensitize the general public and legislators to the obstacles faced each day by disabled persons."

He was also one of the persons responsible for persuading governments to include disability in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and in the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Mr David Lepofsky: Good morning. Mr Ogner referred to my Order of Canada citation. I was honoured by my country for taking steps to try to sensitize legislatures and legislators to the barriers facing people with disabilities and I feel that this morning's activity is, I hope, an effort by me to live up to the honour that my country has given me.

Let me begin by explaining who we are. The OPS advisory group is a voluntary association of government of Ontario employees with disabilities which has come together to be available to advise government and the Legislature at all levels about the equality of opportunity needs confronting persons with disabilities.

We provide unique expertise because our group involves people with all kinds of disabilities, people working at all levels of the public service -- that are prepared to hire disabled people, that is -- and, as well, people from all walks or wheels of life. We are tied to no political party, no ideology, except we believe that people with disabilities deserve equality. We have served both the prior government and this government in advising at all levels, including appearing before committees of this Legislature, and continue in that role today.

We hope to continue doing such in the future, though sadly, without any consultation with us, the person who reads our materials on tape, transcribes to Braille and otherwise makes materials available to us, was declared surplus yesterday.

We are here to provide you with feedback in relation to Bill 8 before you and hope that our expertise will assist you in deliberating on the issues before you.

To begin, the need for employment equity: We say with respect that there is a pressing need for employment equity for persons with disabilities. We restrict our comments this morning to the needs of persons with disabilities because we're not authorized to represent the needs of any other group, but we don't seek by our presentation on our needs to speak negatively or to derogate from the needs of other groups that employment equity seeks to promote.

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People with disabilities have been acknowledged in this country and indeed around the world to be a substantial and substantially disadvantaged minority group. This is not something one can wish away just because one is unaware of it, where some 15% of the public is disproportionately represented among welfare recipients -- who have their problems these days, I'm given to understand -- and as well disproportionately, indeed massively, represented among those who are unemployed.

Society expresses outrage when the unemployment rates in our community climb as high as 8% or 9%. People with disabilities would think they'd died and gone to heaven if they had the privilege of an unemployment rate of 8% or 9%, because most recent federal statistics suggest that our unemployment is about or in excess of 50%. Put simply, we face enormous ongoing barriers in the workplace, both pre-existing ones and new ones that are being created all the time.

Our advisory group has been very active in identifying them, and I'm going to ask Ms Hayward to assist you in this regard by distributing a document which we've delivered just recently to the Chair of Management Board and all the public sector unions bargaining in the workplace. This document seeks to identify -- as we have for the government for two years -- that one major set of barriers that we face in the public service are barriers in the downsizing and redeployment process.

This brief documents such and demonstrates the fact that not only are we the most underrepresented group in the Ontario public service but we get one major affirmative action program. We are overrepresented among those who lose their jobs during downsizing, and that is an affirmative action program that we would welcome being repealed, though I don't find that in Bill 8. We encourage you to look at this, because we're calling on all the contracting parties to identify and remove the barriers that face us in downsizing so that we can at least have a fair shake at staying in the public sector even while it is downsizing.

We submit, with respect, that our problems of disadvantage in the workplace are endemic, they are long term, and they have not been solved to date. They have not been solved by a Charter of Rights that has been around since 1982, a Human Rights Code that's been around since 1982, and with great respect to those who hold different views while they're on this committee or deposing before you, after 20 or more years of voluntary programs in educational programs, which many of us have participated in and which all of us know have not worked.

There is no evidence that 20 years of voluntary programs in education works. Our experience is that if you educate employers on disability without the club of a legal requirement to do something about it beyond that within the Human Rights Code, the fact is they smile, they thank you, they go to conferences, they have big lunches, they go back and they do exactly what they've been doing for 25 years, and that's why we have an unemployment rate in excess of 50%.

We'd like to suggest, with respect, that Bill 8 promotes affirmative action but not the affirmative action that we would commend. Bill 8 purports to put us into the position we were in before the Employment Equity Act was passed, and there was an affirmative action program in effect at that time. It was not legislated, it was not written down anywhere, but it was amply documented over decades and decades of experience. It was an affirmative action program for white, able-bodied men who got jobs disproportionate to their numbers and disproportionate to their merit. It was inconsistent with the very principles of fairness, merit and equality that proponents of Bill 8 purport to espouse.

We'd like to suggest that employment equity is neither a new nor a left-wing concept. It was introduced, as you've heard, federally by Brian Mulroney, not noted for left-wing leanings; it was introduced in the Ontario government by the Bill Davis and John Robarts Tories for affirmative action for women, again not known for left-wing leanings. It is enshrined in subsection 15(2) as a fundamental value in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a universally adopted document approved by Conservatives, Liberals and NDPs alike from those involved in the constitutional process in the 1980 to 1982 period, and it is considered frankly good business sense.

Those who argue against employment equity suggest that somehow treating people differently is to deny the merit principle and to discriminate. Yet the most sovereign legal body in our country, the Supreme Court of Canada, interpreting the most sovereign legal document in our country, the Charter of Rights, has held unanimously that equality can and often does require different treatment and that identical treatment itself can well be a discrimination.

We'd like to suggest, with respect, that those who feel that a workforce equal opportunity plan will solve the problems that we've identified are in error. For one thing, we've been told through consultations, usually convened about two days after we're notified of them and without opportunity to prepare, that the bedrock of the workforce equal opportunity plan is that it will be non-legislative, non-mandatory and voluntary. We say, with respect, that this is a formula for disaster. We already know that voluntarism doesn't work. We don't need, with respect, to prove it again.

We have been told that the equal opportunity program will involve potentially such measures -- and I should say in terms of voluntarism, if you need any better evidence that voluntarism doesn't work, this very government, under Bill Davis as Premier, started to try it for people with disabilities when it adopted the then handicapped employment program, now the Centre for Disability and Work, a model of exactly what the WEOP is supposed to be, in 1980. Thirteen years of experience, and I challenge anyone to find anyone working in that who will suggest that it is an effective alternative. It helps, but it doesn't help enough to solve any problems in a serious way.

Put simply, the ideas which have been presented to us through consultation are neither effective nor respectful of our true entitlement to equality. We've been told about ideas that are being considered, such as 1-800 numbers, pamphlets, awards for those who do well. That's great in the arts, but not great in the field of equality, with respect. We think that those kinds of measures are both tokenistic, patronizing and ineffective. Our best analogy would be if you went to a doctor, somebody having just shot six bullets into your head, and the doctor restricted his range of treatment to offer you either Anacin, Tylenol or Aspirin. Frankly, the options are not exactly ones the patient will find that intriguing.

At the very same time as the workforce equal opportunity plan is being developed, there is a troubling new initiative being undertaken in the Ontario government; that is, the gradual elimination of those in the public service who've been hired and trained at public expense to promote equal opportunity for people with disabilities and others. The employment equity offices in the various ministries -- whose major mandate has not been employment equity but removing barriers, preventing discrimination, Human Rights Code compliance -- put simply, are gradually being downsized and, in three cases, eliminated.

I'd like to also distribute a letter which I've sent on behalf of our group to the Chair of Management Board identifying this problem. Rather than keeping the very expertise that's been built up at public expense to ensure that workforce equal opportunity can be delivered in the public service, the very expertise that's been developed within the public service, at public expense, is being terminated before the workforce equal opportunity plan has even been finalized, developed or implemented. We say, with respect, that that's a waste of public resources and will only create new barriers for people with disabilities.

I turn for about one minute to the question of destruction of information in subsection 1(5) of Bill 8. That provision, we suggest, is unprecedented in the law, destroying information collected at public expense. It serves, we suggest, no social goal, no social value. It applies not only to employers but any person, any journalist, who has information that may have been derived from an employment equity inquiry may have to find their notes, buy some kerosene and get rid of it quickly to comply with this law.

What social purpose is that serving? It applies not only to statistical data from employees which, with respect, is already secured, is already protected and is already free from risk of abuse, but also would include any survey conducted within the Ontario public service of employees with disabilities to identify barriers that they face; in order words, information that is very important and useful to promote workforce equal opportunity practices. That information is required by this law to be destroyed. That information may well be relevant to human rights proceedings now and in the future. Put simply, it may be evidence that shouldn't be destroyed. We say that is not a constructive exercise, and ask that that provision be removed.

To conclude, we urge that employment equity be retained. If people think this law includes quotas -- it doesn't, but if people think it does, do what the federal government has done: Put in a clause that says, "No quotas shall be allowed under this act." If people think this law interferes with the merit principle -- it doesn't -- put in a clause, as the federal government does, saying hiring must be based on merit.

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To conclude, we wish to remind members of the committee that everyone either has a disability, knows someone who has a disability or one day will have a disability. Put simply, the only difference between us and you is that we've gotten ours already. Before your days on this earth come to an end, the chances are you will have one too, quite possibly while you're trying to pursue employment. When you consider whether to vote on this bill or how to vote on this bill, when you go to bed at night we ask you to think not only about the impact of your vote on us, who already have disabilities, not only on your children or friends who have disabilities, but on yourself some months and years ahead. Will you have made your own life a better one or a worse one, depending on your vote on this bill?

Subject to any questions, Mr Chairman, those are our submissions.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We have one minute left per party.

Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): Mr Lepofsky, quickly, your comments on the fines etc that could be imposed under Bill 79.

Mr Lepofsky: My comments on the fines that could be imposed under Bill 79?

Mrs Pupatello: Yes.

Mr Lepofsky: Probably about the least consequential provision of it as a matter of practice. The really material provisions in that bill are the administrative enforcement ones. Look, there's lots of ways of touching up that bill but you've got to have it around before you touch it up.

Mrs Pupatello: Yes. I happen to agree with you actually.

Mr Marchese: We thank you for the presentation. It was very helpful, I think, to all the members here. Sam Savona came before this committee, a person with a disability, and talked about how he searched for work for 10 years and found one day's work out of those 10 years. All of that happened while we had an equal opportunity kind of world.

We're likely to have that world reintroduced and we're going to see people who are struggling to get into the work market, like yourselves, finding it extremely difficult again. I think you've answered that question, but I don't know whether you want to speak to it again.

Mr Lepofsky: The cost to the public of repealing this bill is the cost to the public of maintaining barriers, of allowing new barriers to be created, which this law would have prevented. It is the cost to the public of maintaining people with disabilities on welfare, collecting public money, rather than being taxpayers and paying into the public purse. The cost of discrimination to the public is enormous. If one wishes to reduce the public debt, one should wish to promote employment for people with disabilities, and Bill 79 would have done that.

Mr Young: Mr Lepofsky, I want to thank you very, very much for coming here today. I think I can speak on behalf of my colleagues that we admire very, very much the work that you do. Your presentation was very helpful and excellent.

I do want to check something for the record and ask you a question at the same time. I want you to be aware that it's not the government's intent and never has been to cut welfare for people with disabilities or seniors. Those people will be taken out of the welfare rolls and put on a program more appropriate that will be separate and receive the benefits and help from the government which they should have.

With regard to your saying that there hasn't been progress, or you indicating there hasn't been progress in the last 20 years, is that what you're saying, that there hasn't been progress for people with disabilities getting jobs? If so, I'm a little confused, because you said the employment equity bureaucracy is being removed, so there's an indication to me there that it probably wasn't being effective. So what progress has there been in 20 years?

The Chair: Excuse me. It was a wonderful question. It just was a little too long. We have to go on to the --

Mr Marchese: Mr Chair, can we get unanimous consent to allow him to answer?

The Chair: The Chair has made a decision. Thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate your attendance here this morning.

Mr Lepofsky: Ask me outside. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Mrs Marland: Mr Chairman, I would like to register an objection, and I hate to do this, but in the past, when a question has been asked, even if we have run overtime, the deputation does have an opportunity to answer it.

The Chair: Basically the decision is that each presenting group has been told they have 20 minutes. How they intend to use it is up to them, but we are going to stick to the 20 minutes.

NATIONAL ACTION COMMITTEE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN

The Chair: The next group is the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Winnie Ng. Good morning and welcome to our committee. You have 20 minutes to use as you see fit. Any time you allow for questions will begin with the NDP. The floor is yours.

Ms Winnie Ng: My name is Winnie Ng. I'm the southern Ontario regional rep for NAC, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Beside me is Nandita Sharma who's the member at large on the executive board as well.

The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, NAC, is the largest feminist organization in Canada. At present, it includes more than 600 member groups, and the diversity of Canadian women and their communities is reflected in the NAC membership. In southern Ontario alone, I represent over 200 women's groups, member groups. That comes from national women's organizations, women's centres, service delivery groups, immigrant women's groups, disabled women's groups, aboriginal women's groups and women's committees of churches, unions and political parties.

Since its inception in 1972, NAC has been at the heart of the struggle for women's equality in Canada. NAC has been involved in employment equity in Canada since the Abella commission. NAC played an active role as part of the coalition lobbying to strengthen both the federal as well as the provincial employment equity legislation.

With that as sort of the background, we've prepared some notes and I'll just go on in terms of what we feel about Bill 8.

To the women's groups, Bill 8 is considered as the Harris government's agenda of inequality. It's designed to put women, people with disabilities, racial minorities and aboriginal peoples down and keep them down, keep them out of the workplace.

Since June 8, Ontario has been deluded with the Harris agenda of inequality: the freeze on minimum wages for the working poor, major cuts to pay equity, cuts to child care, slashing withdrawals of funding for Wheel-Trans services to the disabled, announcement of the closing of Ontario Welcome Houses, the closing of the Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat and other huge cuts to social agencies and support work that help children, families and the disabled. This is a program that has a goal, a goal to increase inequality in the province of Ontario, its harsh effects especially felt by women, aboriginal people, people with disabilities and racial minorities.

What Bill 8 has proposed is to deny the realities that have confronted the four decimated groups on a daily basis. What your Bill 8 is saying is that systemic discrimination does not exist, when we know systemic discrimination is so subtle, so insidious and so invisible that most of us take it for granted as the normal practice of society. So when we're talking about systemic discrimination in employment, it takes more than just the goodwill and volunteerism of employers. It takes strong legislation to dismantle the wall of systemic discrimination.

When we know full well that women with disabilities, racial minority women and aboriginal women also face double jeopardy and double discrimination in workplaces, the answer is more than just goodwill and having a piece of equal opportunity legislation. We have had that for too long, and I'm here to say enough is enough. We can't continue that practice.

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When women have been excluded out of work, then we also have women retired, women aging with less than an adequate income. Just for the record, in 1993 in Canada, Statistics Canada has reviewed that of women who are over 65 and who are single, elderly women, over 48% live below the poverty line. That's not by coincidence; it has a systemic and historical base to that figure. The fact that older women are now living in poverty has been based on the exclusions of being away from employment and being segregated into low-pay employment.

So I find it really, really -- what's the word? -- appalling and outrageous when the cover of the bill talks about restoring "merit-based employment practices." What you will be restoring is an affirmative action program for white, able-bodied men that we have had in Ontario, in Canada, in this society for the last 200, 300 years. Is that what we're restoring? Furthermore, in terms of the merit-based principle, who are the ones who decide who has merit or not? The ones who are on the other side of the hiring table making the promotion decisions or training decisions, again, will be the white, able-bodied men promoting the ones who look like them and the ones they feel comfortable with. We are here on behalf of the women from the different groups in saying we cannot do that. To do that, yes, it might be legally right, but it's a morally wrong action to take.

We know the committee will also probably hear arguments from employers that they cannot afford effective employment equity measures in this time of economic hardship. We argue that employment equity is required even more in these times. The four designated groups -- women, racial minorities, aboriginal people and people with disabilities -- even in the best of economic times have always been in a recession. We have always been excluded out.

If you take a look at over the last 30 years, a revolution has occurred in family status. In 1962, 64% of families were headed by a sole, male wage earner. In 1990, 30 years later, only 13% of families were supported by a sole, male wage earner and 15% of families now are headed by a sole, female wage earner. The majority of families require two incomes to survive. Women are becoming poorer at a much faster rate than men. When parents are poor, their children are poor. Employment equity is a critical measure to solve child poverty.

I just want to close by saying that the full participation of the majority of populations at every level of the workplace would enormously benefit society. Employment equity is a mechanism to remove the privileged positions that white men have occupied in employment. It's a recognition that discrimination against women, racial minorities, people with disabilities and aboriginal people is built into our employment systems and must be systemically removed and rooted out.

Good intentions or best efforts are not enough. As women, women of colour, women of disability and aboriginal women, we want to see results, not just lipservice. Having an equal opportunity bill is not going to create that climate and that will and the mandate among employers to get them going. We don't want and we don't need to wait another century before we see equality in the workplace.

Employment equity is good for everyone. It can create a more humane, more democratic and more productive workplace. It will improve the quality of life of workers from both the designated groups as well as the non-designated groups, and we believe it will also improve the corporate "bottom line" by making full use of the human resources available.

But the steps to achieving employment equity will create some discomfort and disruption as well as certain expenses, and that's where as elected representatives you need to take that political courage and leadership, and carry those moral obligations and transform them into actions. We're talking about having injustices addressed, and to ensure employers will make the best effort and the concrete effort that will ultimately benefit everyone in the country, strong legislation and leadership is required. Thank you. Nandita, do you want to supplement?

Ms Nandita Sharma: I would just like to add that the policies that we have seen coming forth from this government since it came into power have been reinforcing a cheap labour strategy. Taking away options from people in terms of social assistance, taking away options of women, people of colour, people with disabilities and aboriginal people from decent, paid employment that offers them the ability to be independent is feeding into a cheap labour strategy, and once again this government shows that it is enforcing systemic privilege.

As there is systemic discrimination against women, against people of colour, against people with disabilities and against aboriginal people, there is systemic privilege if you are a white, able-bodied male. Once again, this government has shown that it does not govern for the people of Ontario; it governs for the privileged of Ontario, it governs for the people of Ontario who are willing to make a profit on the backs of the most disadvantaged people in society.

The clearest indicator that your government is following not a Common Sense Revolution but a nonsense revolution is your indication in subsection 1(5) that you are demanding that every person in possession of information collected from employees for the purpose of ensuring employment equity should destroy that information. We would like to ask you a question: What are you afraid of? What are you afraid is in that information that you are demanding that it be destroyed?

What we know is in that information is the fact that employment equity has not been achieved, that women, people of colour, people with disabilities and aboriginal people continue to occupy the lowest rungs of the ladder in Ontario, and we have once again been shown clearly that your government continues to perpetuate that condition for us. We know that you are not governing for us.

The Chair: We have a couple of minutes per party.

Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): I want to thank the representatives from NAC for the presentation. Women make up 52% of our population, but we know that women are clustered in only 20 of the 500 different job categories and we know that racial minorities have to apply to three times as many jobs even to get an interview and that the unemployment rates among disabled and aboriginal people range from 60% to 80%. This government claims that this is a restoration of the merit principle, and I wonder if you would comment on whether you believe the term "merit" has become a code word for discrimination.

Ms Ng: There's always this perception that women are considered as a "special-interest group." I think when we listen to statistics about 52% of women who are in the workforce, you can't turn around and say it's a special-interest group.

The merit principle that we have right now is one that is designed and geared for white, able-bodied men, plain and simple. When you're talking about who is in the top decision-making corporate rooms, who are the ones, who are the faces that are there, it's not women, it's not women of colour, it's not women with disabilities or aboriginal women. When you have a system that is not accountable, when you have a merit system that is there designed to promote "corporate image," that corporate image reinforces what's there in the society. I'm saying that discrimination is not just racial harassment or right in the face, but it's discrimination in employment, it's much more subtle and insidious employment practices, in terms of excluding.

If you take a look, even in your own government as an employer, at who are the ones who are in the clerical entry jobs right now, a lot of them are predominantly women of colour, women with disabilities and aboriginal women who've just barely got a foot in the door right now. Now, with the restructuring and the downsizing, these are the women who are going to be first out of the door.

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Mrs Marland: I'm always very interested in what the National Action Committee on the Status of Women has to say because I feel, particularly this morning, some of the comments that you've made do your organization a disservice because some of them are quite inflationary. I think you do a disservice to those women who are in our boardrooms and holding down corporate jobs and people with disabilities who have tremendous success to their credit as individuals.

But what I'd like to ask you, because I have never been able to get an answer to this question as a woman, is, how do you assess the positions that you take? How do you get the information? I've never heard of you having a national conference or annual general meetings or sending out questionnaires. You are here, as you say, representing all of these different groups. Some of those groups and organizations I'm a member of, but I have never, ever been asked a question in all of my years, nor has my daughter, by your organization.

The Chair: If you want an answer, Mrs Marland, I suggest you wrap up the question.

Ms Ng: For your information, NAC has an annual general meeting every June in Ottawa and all member groups are sent notice to participate. That's where policies such as employment equity and pay equity are discussed, debated and voted on. If you are interested in getting more information, we'd be more than --

Mrs Marland: If you cannot afford to travel to Ottawa -- I'm talking about local areas.

Ms Ng: That's the annual general meeting and it's local reps. We send out mailings to all the regional members. There's also an Action Now newsletter that's sent out to all the groups. To say that you haven't received the information, maybe I should provide you with a membership registration form. If you agreed with NAC's policies, then you would be more than happy to participate as a member.

Mrs Marland: But I think it's --

The Chair: Thank you for your answer. Mr Sergio.

Mr Sergio: Ms Ng, equity within the workplace can be accomplished, can be maintained, can be improved without any government guidelines. This is the proposed Bill 8. Do you believe that?

Ms Ng: I believe we stated quite clearly that without the legislation it's not enough. By depending on the goodwill and the volunteer work of the employers, what we will get are the token representatives who might be in the boardroom, who might be in different positions. But if you take a look, at this point women only hold 4% of the skilled trade positions. Are we to interpret that women are not interested in non-traditional skilled trade jobs? No.

Mr Sergio: I want to try to get your views on another question if I have time. Women, as you said, are one particular group. What about other groups, such as other minority groups or the handicapped people?

Ms Ng: When I'm talking about women, people should understand that women include women of colour, aboriginal women and women with disabilities, so it's not just white women we are talking about. In terms of all the designated groups, we have come up here in the last 10 years time and time again asking different governments, "We need strong legislation that would dismantle discrimination in the workplaces, and that's the only way to work." We can't wait another 100 years.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We appreciate you participating in our process and your presence here this morning.

ONTARIO ADVISORY COUNCIL ON WOMEN'S ISSUES

The Chair: The next group is the Ontario Advisory Council on Women's Issues, represented by Rosalind Cairncross. Good morning and welcome to our committee. The floor is yours.

Ms Rosalind Cairncross: Thank you, Mr Chairman, and good morning to the honourable members of the committee. I'm not going to tell you what you've just heard and what I am sure my other colleagues have told you regarding employment equity, because you've heard that.

In South Africa, where I come from, we used to have a law called job reservation. It basically saved all the best jobs for the white, able-bodied people, mostly male. Now in Ontario we are about to have Bill 8: job reservation, the informal version, the Ontario version.

I'm a professional engineer, with lots of experience in both industry and government, so I've been occupying the white male world for a long time as a person. I can tell you that all this voluntary business simply doesn't work. Like Colin Powell, who was telling us the other day that he got his job because of affirmative action and that he wouldn't have gotten that job, no matter how talented he was, if he were not in such a program, I also got my jobs because the Americans had affirmative action.

For everyone who imagines that standards will drop, when I did join the company I was the only person with a degree, I was the only person with experience in the field equivalent to everyone else -- so you can see the standard really went down when I joined. That experience has been repeated over and over.

It didn't come about because of the natural goodwill, not that the people involved were not good-hearted people, but their experience told them, "The only people who can do this job are people who look like me." Therefore, no one else could possibly have merit. The merit principle, that's what it consists of.

In the old days, you got your job because your dad worked there. Look at Ontario Hydro: How many people worked there because their dad worked there? You can look at any number of situations. You could take, in Ontario, our auto companies. You got a job there because your dad worked there, or at least you were Protestant. If you were Catholic, you didn't get a job there.

We don't put up with that any more, but that's the old way. That's where we're going back to. At a time when our global economy is trying to get the most qualified workforce, the most diverse workforce, the people who can get us into the Pacific Rim, the people who can get us foreign markets for export, what are we doing? We're going backwards. Educationally, with the skills in the people we've got, we're not tapping into that because those people are minorities in the society. They just happen to be the minorities of a place where the market could be extremely good if we cared to tap into their talents.

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The purpose of employment equity law is to level the playing field. That you've heard over and over. I am more than happy to spend more of my time answering your questions, because this is not a theoretical position. I've been there and I've seen exactly what it does. I know very, very well that you certainly do not get an equal opportunity unless there is some motivating force pushing you to it. And yes, everyone will not be comfortable.

I remember when the Americans first brought in employment equity. In our lab, the proverbial white, able-bodied, male lab manager was saying, "When they brought in this law my worst nightmare was that I would get an application from a black, female PhD and I would have to hire her." And then it happened; he did have to hire her, and he said, "It's the best thing that ever happened to this lab." It wouldn't have happened without the motive force.

The Ontario Advisory Council on Women's Issues, since 1973 when it was established, has been, if not banging on the door, then certainly perhaps knocking its head against the door in favour of all the affirmative programs of every government that has governed since then, and we obviously support the employment equity law now.

The voices of women and all the designated groups are being silenced slowly, one by one, including our council. I couldn't leave here today without letting you know that our council has no idea whether we will continue to exist -- one more voice of women and the designated groups which is potentially in danger. I think we at least are entitled to clarity on that issue.

As to the programs in place besides the plan that the current government is apparently working on, I would like to make some comment on the Human Rights Commission, and again I make this comment from a personal point of view. I have been to the Human Rights Commission with a complaint against the Ontario government, where there is rampant discrimination, absolutely rampant discrimination. It took three years, with a very, very unsatisfactory result, and that was after the fact.

I urge you to think again. This is not about quotas. If merit had been a principle in the old days, the days before employment equity, no employment equity law would ever have been necessary. The problem was that it isn't.

Mr Young: Thank you for an excellent presentation. I know it was heartfelt, and I agree with you that it's not theoretical. That you've actually been through it makes it much more meaningful.

My concern is with any kind of quotas. We have a good understanding -- not firsthand experience, but we try to understand as best we can -- that a young black girl or boy, teenager, try to get ahead in school or try to get a job and they hit a barrier called systemic racism. But with quotas, what we would be replacing it with is a young girl or boy who might be a different colour, a Caucasian, for example, who faces the government saying, "You go to the end of the line for jobs because there are wrongs in other areas." How can a parent explain that to their child? I understand a black parent trying to explain to their child now, saying, "Well, that's the way our society is," but how could a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant parent explain that to their child?

Ms Cairncross: I'm glad you asked the question. The employment equity law was not about putting the black child, or whatever member of whichever designated group, ahead of the white Protestant person or child. It simply said that where you had the situation of two people equally qualified for a position, and that would go down the line for opportunities in training for young people and so on, the person from the designated group would be considered -- not jump the line, not get favours that they don't deserve, not be unqualified and get jobs. If they were equally qualified, that person would be considered.

It was necessary simply because very often, and I can again tell you that from personal experience, it doesn't matter how qualified or smart or hardworking or busting your gut you are, you will not get the job because you don't look right.

I am not in favour of people who don't have the qualifications. There must be an equality, but a real equality, providing that those two young people have come through the same opportunities. They've had, right from the start, enough to eat so that they can learn, they can go on. Discrimination doesn't just start at the end of the line there. It starts long before that. Providing those opportunities are equal for those two people, I say the person from the minority group should be considered, which is not what is really happening.

Ms Isabel Bassett (St Andrew-St Patrick): Not to dispute some of the things you've said -- equity has played its role in getting us where we are -- but now when there are so many people of different backgrounds in the workforce, people such as Al Flood, the chairman, chief executive officer of the CIBC, said last week, "Diversity is our future." The Canadian Bankers Association came out and said: "Banking on equity is the only way to go. Diversity means good business."

I wonder if in this day and age -- you're not talking about 1984 but 1996 -- you see that times have changed enough that it's good business to hire people of different backgrounds and that this in fact is happening. In the banking community, they are being promoted way beyond what they're required to do by the federal equity laws.

It's a question; I don't know the answer.

Ms Cairncross: There are some excellent companies who have just done this because it makes good business sense. One would hope that everyone would follow for exactly that reason. However, to give you an example, in our local mall, the store that used to be there was a Woolco. Even though we're living in a very diverse area in the west end of Toronto, very few minorities worked there. And then came WalMart, an American company where they have affirmative action. In the last two years, there has been a dramatic change in the look of the workforce.

There are excellent companies, but if you're not fortunate enough to work for them, in the same way as we're not all fortunate to work for IBM or whatever and we have to put up with what we get, if there is no motivating force driving those companies --

Ms Bassett: There is.

The Chair: Thank you very much for your answer. Time to move to the opposition party.

Mrs Pupatello: You come from a real fascinating background. I lived in South Africa in the early 1980s when apartheid was still there, and we've been fortunate to watch its dismantling. There they not only had reservations in jobs but land too, and water fountains and all of that. It's an interesting perspective. I can tell you I haven't thought about my stay there as much as I have in these last five months since the election.

It's interesting too that you would use a banking example. One of the worst records in terms of an industry in employment equity has been the banking industry, so I find that interesting.

Can you tell me about the quotas that are implied in Bill 79, what you could have done in terms of an amendment, such as the fines? Businesses really reacted to the fines being in place and really did view it as quotas.

Ms Cairncross: First of all, from the point of view of quotas, I didn't see Bill 79 as a quota bill at all, any more than a company having a sales target is having a sales quota and you get fired or punished severely if you don't make it. I saw it as a business plan, an intention of how to get to your goal. So from the point of view quotas, I can't answer you simply because I didn't see that as a quota. I saw it as a plan.

If there are difficulties with the employment equity law, we can work and sort them out. If businesses have problems because there's too much paperwork or difficulties, we can work that out.

Mrs Pupatello: Can you tell us what some of those amendments might have been?

Ms Cairncross: We'd be very happy to discuss this with you at greater length, have the advisory council make suggestions. Perhaps today it's a little difficult to do, to get into that.

Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much for the presentation. The advisory council has a long and honourable history of coming before legislative committees and pointing out difficulties to all governments of all ilk, what the effect of legislation is on women, and that's of course the task.

I was very interested that the member for St Andrew-St Patrick talked about the banking industry, because of course the banking industry is under federal legislation, as I understand it, and is under a regime of employment equity. Yet in the banking industry what we tend to see is lots and lots of diversity at the teller level, where it's up front in front of the public, but very little diversity as you work up the ranks.

I know you're an engineer, and I know that a lot of your work within your own association has been in trying to improve the ability of women engineers within their own profession. Would you like to comment on that?

Ms Cairncross: That is a typical symptom among many companies: at the floor level to have that sort of situation, but as you go further up the ranks, the whiter and the more male it gets. The banking industry typically is also one of those where the way you got to be manager was that you came and the tellers, the women in those days, trained you and then you got the bank manager's job. That's the way it used to be until things got a little better.

Yes, they have been driven by the impetus of the federal government, which is why we need some urging force here in the form of this employment equity law. The longer that situation pertains in terms of companies getting away with just hiring at the lowest level, whether it's women or people from the other designated groups, they will, which is why we need the law.

Mrs Boyd: Can you comment in terms of the difference between the experience you have had in the United States, where there is an affirmative action regime, in Canada and in South Africa? Are we worse off than the United States but better off than South Africa? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Ms Cairncross: My experience with American companies took place in South Africa. These were subsidiaries of American companies which were driven by legislation in the States. In fact, I didn't know this at the time, but I was hired precisely because I was from a designated group, because this was a requirement of the Americans to do business in South Africa.

When I came to Ontario, the reason I said that used to be the case is that that's precisely what I found. It wasn't a formal discrimination, it was informal, but it was nevertheless firmly in place. I could get a job, but I wouldn't get a promotion.

The Chair: Thank you very much. I appreciate your attendance here this morning and your interest in our process.

The committee stands recessed until 3:30 this afternoon.

The committee recessed from 1204 to 1535.

The Chair: Good afternoon. The House has now moved to orders of the day, so we can begin our committee hearings. Just one note, members of the committee: Before you at your place is the summary prepared by the researcher. Elaine, did you want to make a comment about that?

Ms Elaine Campbell: I'd just like to point out to the members that on page 7 of the summary at each of your places there is a reference at the top of the page to section 6 of the bill. That should read "section 7." It will be corrected in the final summary.

Also, a final summary will be made available Monday morning. I'd like to point out that it will not include the recommendations made Monday morning and we may not be able to get all of Friday's in. If there are presentations tomorrow without briefs, Hansard may not be available for us to supplement the summary with those particular recommendations.

ONTARIO ENGLISH CATHOLIC TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION

The Chair: Our first presenters this afternoon are the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, represented by Marilies Rettig, Carolyn Stevens and Greg Pollock. Welcome to our committee. We appreciate your interest in our process. You have 20 minutes to use as you see fit. Any time that you leave in that 20 minutes for questions will be shared evenly among the parties. We would begin the questioning at the end of your presentation with the Liberals. Thanks for attending. The floor is yours.

Ms Marilies Rettig: The Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association represents 34,000 members across the province, men and women who are teaching in separate schools in different parts of this province, teaching both at the elementary level and at the secondary level, from junior kindergarten through to the OAC level.

OECTA is affiliated with the Ontario Teachers' Federation, whose membership numbers 134,000 teachers employed in the publicly supported elementary and secondary system of education across the province.

Certainly OECTA is pleased to have this opportunity to present to you today and present our concerns about the proposed Bill 8.

The title of the bill is misleading, as it refers to quotas, not goals, as presented in the Employment Equity Act, 1993, as well as in policy/program memorandum 111. The title further states that it will restore merit-based employment practices in Ontario.

This is an affront to all persons who have been promoted during the life of the legislation being revoked or repealed. To even suggest that the women obtaining promotions to vice-principal, principal or supervisory officer status are unqualified for those positions to which they were promoted is both unfair and incorrect.

Within the past 10 years the qualifications required in order to apply as a candidate for the principal's course have increased. It has become necessary to hold two specialist certificates from the Ministry of Education or an approved master's degree. It is quite clear that men and women who have moved into positions of added responsibility are more qualified now than ever before.

For many years OECTA has worked towards achieving equity for all of its members in the Ontario educational system. However, despite these efforts, there remains to this day a disproportionate ratio of women in positions of educational leadership compared to their male counterparts, even though women educators constitute a greater percentage of all educators.

This is particularly true in the elementary level of education, where women number in the 60% to 70% range, but the percentage of women who are in positions of responsibility is certainly far lower than that. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of women vice-principals, principals and superintendents. This increase did not come about voluntarily.

When examining the Education Act, for more than 20 years there has been legislation in place to address the systemic barriers which discriminate against women and other designated groups, such as aboriginal people, persons with disabilities and members of racial minorities. Despite this, progress has been painfully slow. The low representation of certain groups has a negative impact upon students, who need both male and female role models, as well as role models from many races and many cultures.

In light of this long and difficult struggle for women and the designated group members in obtaining equitable recognition and promotion, it would now appear to be totally inconsistent and improper for the government to revoke the very measures put in place to address this unfair and unjust situation.

There's an urgent need to continue to identify and remove the barriers faced by women, aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and persons from visible minorities in obtaining employment and promotions to positions of added responsibility.

There is the need to continue to address the barriers in the areas of attitudes and perceptions as well as in the areas of recruitment and selection.

The whole area around training and development must be reviewed for barriers in order to be more just.

The area of communication must also be examined to ensure that it is barrier-free.

There has been some progress in the past 20 years in gaining more equitable representation of women and persons from designated groups in areas of added responsibility in education in Ontario. However, the progress has been slow and required much encouragement from the government of Ontario.

Our association fears that by revoking the sections of the Education Act relating to employment equity, there is a strong statement that equity for all educators is no longer important. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The common curriculum calls for respect and dignity of all persons. The government's legislative message now becomes contradictory and confusing to both students and teachers.

Certainly the recommendation that we bring forward to you today is that the sections of the Education Act relating to employment equity and memoranda 92 and 111 be retained.

In order for a police force to be effective, it must be fairly represented within the community that it serves. The sections of the Police Services Act relating to employment equity must be retained if there is to be true equity of representation of persons from the designated groups within the police forces of Ontario.

All of the different peoples of Ontario must see themselves reflected in the ranks of the Ontario police forces. The diverse range of citizens in Ontario must relate to the police forces in order to trust them and to cooperate with them in keeping Ontario safe.

Certainly the recommendation that we are bringing forward to you today is that the employment equity provisions in the Police Services Act be retained.

With respect to the Employment Equity Act, the act was passed in the hope of eliminating barriers faced by women, aboriginal peoples, members of visible minorities and persons with disabilities when applying for jobs or seeking promotions once employed. Ontario's population is racially and culturally diverse. Ontario is also a home to many persons with disabilities. Many women, persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities and aboriginal people, though qualified, experience great difficulty in being considered for employment, hired and ultimately promoted. There are many systemic as well as overt barriers that lie in their way. The act was passed to help these qualified citizens of the province gain their rightful place in the labour force.

Because the barriers faced by these groups of qualified people are so entrenched it was necessary to pass legislation and legislate practices, such as those in the act, to address the injustices that I have outlined. The procedures outlined in the act force employers to carefully review their practices and procedures in the hopes of recognizing and removing all barriers to fairness and justice for all people.

The Employment Equity Act did not speak out about providing opportunities for employment for unqualified persons. It stressed that persons seeking employment must be qualified candidates. Therefore, it was not quota-based legislation. That certainly is not what the current Bill 8 suggests. It is most unfair to those qualified persons who were able to gain employment as a result of the act to suggest that they were employed because of their gender or race and not their qualifications.

By ignoring the issue of discrimination addressed in the Employment Equity Act, this government risks the peace that this province currently enjoys. Marginalized people, whether they are women, members of visible minorities, aboriginal people or people with disabilities, will voice their disapproval and seek justice if the legislation is repealed. With the greatest number of eligible workers coming from these marginalized groups, can this government afford to deny them their rights?

If this government sees components of the Employment Equity Act as flawed, why then cannot there be some reasoned amendments made to the act while still maintaining the essential integrity of a fair workplace for all persons?

Many organizations and citizens are in favour of legislation which will ensure social justice for all people in Ontario. Many organizations have committed themselves to addressing workplace barriers by removing them. They see this as economically advantageous to their organizations or businesses as well as being fair and just.

Our association urges this government not to repeal the Employment Equity Act of 1993 but to consider making reasonable amendments to it which will ensure that the members of designated groups find their rightful place in the workplaces of Ontario.

This, in turn, will transfer into fewer hungry children in the classrooms of Ontario. There is no better way to build a healthy Ontario than ensuring the health and education of its future -- its children. Ontario needs these children from culturally diverse, physically diverse and often single-female-parent-supported households as leaders in Ontario in the next generation.

The recommendation we are bringing forward to you today is that the Employment Equity Act, 1993, be amended instead of repealed.

With respect to the Human Rights Code, repealing sections of the code relating to employment equity further erodes the rights of people disadvantaged in Ontario's potential and actual workforce. The code is the ultimate law under which persons seek help and redress. The code enshrines those basic rights afforded all individuals in Ontario. As such, it must be carefully considered.

Instead of repealing sections of the code, this government would be advised to amend the employment equity law of 1993 to better address the concerns of all Ontario job applicants or workers and subsequently amend the Human Rights Code so as to reflect those changes.

Our recommendation then comes forward as that the Human Rights Code be amended so it is consistent with the changes of the Employment Equity Act.

In conclusion, OECTA believes that the title of the new act, Bill 8, is inaccurate and unfair to all those people who have been promoted while the employment equity law was in place. It implies that these persons were hired or promoted for reasons other than their qualifications. This is not an accurate nor is it a fair assessment.

OECTA recommends that the government of Ontario abandon the repeal and instead amend the Employment Equity Act. The principle of fairness and justice for all Ontario's citizens in the workplace, as espoused in the act, is sound both economically and from a social justice viewpoint. Responsible amendments could enhance its power and could address the concerns this government has had with the Employment Equity Act of 1993.

OECTA urges the government of Ontario to retain the provisions in the Education Act and in the Police Services Act. Teachers and police officers are in a position to serve the public of Ontario. Ontario is radically diverse, racially diverse and culturally diverse. Therefore, both educators and police officers should fairly represent that diversity. The role models presented to Ontario's youth are invaluable.

OECTA strongly recommends the retention of both policy/program memoranda 92 and 111. Both of these memoranda encourage equity and justice for all of Ontario's educators and potential educators. Social justice must be modelled and not simply defined as an unobtainable ideal within the common curriculum.

The Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association trusts this committee will seriously consider our message and therefore reconsider the message of Bill 8 in light of the recommendations that we have provided to you today.

Mrs Lyn McLeod (Fort William): I essentially agree with the essence of your recommendations, so perhaps I could just ask you to say a little more, because you put, I think, an encouraging emphasis on the importance of addressing systemic barriers. If you could say a little bit more about the nature -- I know this is more than you can do in two minutes -- of the barriers and how you feel they can be better addressed in a legislated framework than in a situation with no legislation.

Ms Rettig: Certainly I think there's in essence a necessity to review the policies and practices; it must continue in order to recognize those barriers. We have to have a careful and a very clear assessment and examination of that. Perhaps they could be reviewed to determine what specific barriers do exist and face each particular group and look at mechanisms by which those barriers can be overcome.

Those barriers in the area of education focus not only on women, interestingly enough, but also on men, particularly those men teaching at the elementary level and not necessarily at the primary level.

Carolyn, do you have anything to add to that?

Ms Carolyn Stevens: I think it's also really important to have an assessment. Organizations, businesses and education bureaucracies have to have a look at who the potential candidates are coming in and also look at the makeup of the people that they're serving, so there has to be an analysis. Whether the analysis would be the same as what was asked for under the Employment Equity Act is not necessarily so, but definitely find out: Who are we representing? Who is available to serve? Who is qualified? What are the barriers to those people being employed and promoted? Have those analysed. Probably some of the greatest ones surface in the whole area of hiring: advertising, recruiting and the whole hiring process. I would think if there were one area that really needed to be looked at, it would be that one.

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Mrs Boyd: I'd like to thank you for your presentation. I was rather struck by the part you didn't read aloud, which traced the history of the notion of employment equity within the education system back to the early 1970s when the Conservative government was in power, clearly saying how important it was considered by that government over the rest of its mandate to continue the efforts towards employment equity.

The claim has been made -- certainly the minister made a claim -- that it is no longer necessary to have these kinds of policies in place. I'd like you to say a little bit more about why the decision that was made back in the 1970s by a previous Conservative government is suddenly not needed now, at least in the view of this government.

Ms Rettig: Certainly. I think there's a great error in the thought that it is no longer necessary, particularly in the area of education.

I cited the fact that the great majority of teachers at the elementary level are women, but they are a real minority when it comes to looking at positions of responsibility, either within the school or beyond the school at the board level. When you look at the number of vice-principals, principals and, ironically, even the number of teachers teaching at the senior level in the elementary school, grades 6, 7 and 8, it still tends to be very heavily dominated by the males. That is a very, very serious flaw within the system, because what our children need within our schools across this province are viable role models, and those role models just aren't there right now.

Mrs Boyd: I gather that your association has been supportive of the notion of getting more men teaching at lower levels so that children have those role models early on. You're really talking about real employment equity, aren't you, for men and women when we talk about gender issues?

Ms Rettig: Precisely, and that's why I alluded to that briefly in my initial response to the previous question. It does reflect on women gaining access to positions of responsibility, but there is also a component there where the greatest percentage of people and teachers working at the primary level tends to be female, and that has to be remediated and addressed as well.

Mr Young: I'd like to ask you what your association's position is with regard to the hiring of non-Catholic teachers, for instance Jews.

Ms Rettig: As you're aware, the trustees have come forward with a case and are challenging section 136 currently in the Education Act, as it was amended once Bill 30 was passed.

We historically haven't changed our position: We do not support, but we do not argue with, the right of Catholic school boards to assess at the point of hiring who they will hire based in part on denomination. That hasn't been the most exclusive decision made by the boards in the past, and they have hired non-Catholics. Indeed, people of the faith you identified are working within Catholic boards across this province.

But I must say that our association has sought intervenor status within the case, and the reason we have is that we feel that once a teacher has been employed, has been selected by the school board and employed, it is our right as an association to protect the rights and the interests of each and every member, and there shouldn't be anything that would deviate from the rights and the opportunities that are held by any teacher in the separate system for promotion and/or advancement.

Mr Young: I still don't know if you're for it or you're against it.

Ms Rettig: In terms of the hiring and the right of boards to determine at the point of hiring, we support the boards in their right and recognize that right. But we also acknowledge that once the board has made the determination as to who the employee would be, we will protect the rights and the interests of that particular employee.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We appreciate your attendance here today and your interest in our process.

ONTARIO SECONDARY TEACHERS' FEDERATION

The Chair: The next group is the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, represented by Pat Wright and Rosemary Clark. Thank you very much for taking the time to attend this afternoon, and welcome.

Ms Pat Wright: I hope I will be able to leave some time for questions, because I think the best way for clarifying positions is through answering questions.

First of all, let me say on behalf of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation how very pleased we were to be given this opportunity to make this presentation. Both Rosemary and myself have worked long and hard in areas of employment equity, and our organization has stood for equity and fairness since 1919.

Just so you understand our position, I refer you to our constitution, which says, we "protect members individually and collectively, to support and promote equal opportunity for members, employees and students, and to foster and promote the dignity of all persons regardless of race, religion or cultural origin."

Let me first off say, on the record, that we support Bill 79, the Employment Equity Act, as it was passed into law. We believe that that law allowed true democracy in the workplace because it had a key provision which required employees and employers to sit together and assume joint responsibility for ensuring that the policies that were determined to be appropriate for that employer were worked out and suitable to the needs of all the employees and worked well within that workplace environment.

Especially when we look at the 50,000 educational workers that OSSTF represents, who include office and clerical staff, custodians, psychologists and other professional services personnel and educational assistants as well as public secondary school teachers, you understand that our perspective is very broad. We look at the educational sector not from teaching only but this sector in its broadest concept, and we see the absolute need to maintain and retain within that system employment equity for the members and for the students who are part of that system.

Therefore, the key component of our presentation is to call for this government in Bill 8 to maintain within the Education Act paragraph 8(1)29 in its entirety. We believe that all forms of equity, including anti-racism and ethnocultural equity as well as employment equity, must not only be maintained but must be strengthened. That perspective is fundamental to the belief of OSSTF, which serves the interests of its members and the interests of the students and the communities.

Just to show you how deeply committed we are, I bring to your attention a book we have produced recently called Anti-Racism Education. We have, naturally, sent a complimentary copy to the Minister of Education and Training and assured him how happy we would be to work with him in making sure that the contents of this kind of book are implemented throughout the educational system, because it does provide support for staff working in the school system. That is the commitment we have to equity.

There are two key issues we would like the committee to consider. School boards must maintain their commitment to fight discrimination within the educational system, and this commitment must be demonstrated to the public at large. We also believe that self-policing mechanisms which allow boards to measure success in providing equity must be retained within the system.

Therefore, to achieve these two goals, we would make two key recommendations: that paragraph 8(1)29 of the Education Act be left intact so that all boards are required to develop an employment equity policy. The other recommendation is also fundamental, that joint employer-employee equity committees continue to be responsible for developing and implementing employment equity policies and plans.

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Why, do you ask, are we so committed to that belief? Within the educational system we find that employees who work at a variety of levels provide very important role models for the students. I want you to put yourself in the place of any of the groups mentioned in the Human Rights Code. You go into the school and look at the staff represented there and look at the clients those service providers have to provide service for. You will see that there is quite a disparity in terms of numbers. What our students tell us is that one reason for their failure to achieve as we would like them to achieve is the fact that we do not have enough role models in the system.

If, as this government says it is going to do, you were to repeal the Employment Equity Act and strengthen the Human Rights Code, I remind you that section 14 of the Human Rights Code contains provisions for special programs to achieve equal opportunity, and one of the very special programs that is absolutely necessary for our students is to provide them with role models to mirror themselves in the schools.

I do not see that it is contradictory at all to ask school boards to have in place policies. All we are asking them to do, in paragraph 29 of the Education Act, is to have that policy in place. It doesn't specify the nature of the policy, what is contained in the policy. There's absolutely no necessity to repeal that requirement. We're saying, put a policy in place so that all will know what the school boards stand for. We see that as a very clear requirement, and therefore we ask you, please do not repeal that section of the Education Act.

Similarly, we would make an equal plea for the Police Services Act, because policing goes hand in hand with educating. If you have an educated citizen and a citizenry that understands their roles and responsibilities within the system, then you should allow them to have in both places an equal representation in terms of the role models they see both in education and in policing.

Our federation is on record to this minister and to previous governments of being able to provide them with training materials, and we have done this. If you look at appendix A at the back of our document, you will see in there a number of training materials. We have conducted the workshops, we have conducted the discussions with our groups and with our school boards, and we have attached, as an appendix for you to study, the materials that could be used with school boards to achieve employment equity in the workplace.

But what we need to support that direction is clear policy from the board, and if you repeal the requirement for boards to have that policy, there'll be no incentive for them to go forward with it.

Let's talk about a self-policing mechanism and accountability. We've been told in the education sector that what education needs is a greater degree of accountability. We agree, and we can tell you how we can achieve that: by having joint workplace requirements between federations and boards, because then the onus is on both parties to make sure it works.

Any one-sided policy or program that's put in place will not achieve the desired results. Therefore, we ask that you maintain the requirement that we have joint coordinating committees, joint employment equity committees within school boards that are a joint responsibility both of school boards and all the employee groups that work with those school boards. That is one way we can maintain accountability.

If we allow those policies, the requirement for which I just spoke to, to be public and well-known, clearly demonstrated to the communities within which those school boards find themselves, then you will have accountability. I do believe that those communities will ask the boards themselves the questions, and they will ask the employee groups the same questions about how we maintain this in our workplace. We believe a self-policing mechanism can be achieved if we have joint workplace committees between employer and employee developing the policies, instituting those policies and implementing those policies.

That can also be achieved by having appropriate staff development, and we have materials that are available for anyone who wants them to go about how they would achieve that staff development. We have made it available to our groups, we have made it available to the boards, and we have got some of that material in as the appendix.

Making any workplace task a joint responsibility ensures that unions are as accountable as employers. We believe the Minister of Education could issue guidelines and criteria to boards of education for these joint committees which would enhance self-assessment and ensure compliance with the Human Rights Code. Our experience as OSSTF is that joint committees enhance the working relationship with the employer and are very effective in implementing change.

We welcome the initiative to beef up the Human Rights Code, but remember that the Human Rights Code is still a complaint-driven process and does not ensure in itself an end to systemic discrimination. Direct discrimination under section 5 of the code is readily identifiable and correctable through a complaint process. Although adverse-impact discrimination is prohibited under section 11 of the code, it is a form of discrimination that is very difficult for an individual to prove when that discrimination is inherent in the system, the very system from which that individual has been excluded.

We believe the Human Rights Code by itself cannot produce an equality of opportunity in workplaces. It must be supported by practical employee-friendly policies and practices.

In conclusion, I would put it to you that any equal opportunity plan within the education sector or anti-discrimination education program must address the real identified need to produce and provide for students workplace models at all levels of employment within the education system. Therefore, we will make only two recommendations to you: Amend Bill 8 to require boards of education to develop employment equity policies, and continue joint employer-union committee processes already in place for working towards employment equity. We believe we need this for the sake of the students of Ontario.

Mr Marchese: We thank you for your presentation. Obviously, the government members say they're against discrimination of any kind and against anyone, so they have a zero tolerance policy, they say. They have an equal opportunity plan which is very vague in terms of what it's going to do. We don't have any clarity on that at all.

We had a presentation made by the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario as well. They made reference to the equal opportunity approach in 1980 where, "In 1980, women were two thirds of the teachers, 15% of vice-principals and only 7% of principals. Even after intervention, persuasion, education and funds provided to the boards of education, 15 years later in 1995 women were three quarters of the teachers, 52% of the vice-principals and 33% of the principals." So they made some modest gains, but this only after many years, 15 or 20 years, this after intervention, persuasion and education, and that's what we're left with with the equal opportunity plan.

We think it would be worse for aboriginal people and people with disabilities and people of colour with respect to this. Do you believe that an equal opportunity plan is going to help women in terms of these modest gains, is going to help people with disabilities who have never even had these modest gains, or aboriginal people for that matter, or people of colour?

Ms Wright: As you have said, we have had affirmative action policies, equal opportunity policies -- and they go by a variety of names -- in place for a very long time. Still, we've only had women representing, by our statistics, 27% of principals and vice-principals in Ontario, and if you look in the secondary school system, for instance, we are just about 50-50 in terms of our male-female mix. Therefore, I agree with you that a plan by itself which is unsupported by very definitive policies that would, for instance, be in boards, what they present, be in the legislation through the Human Rights Code -- unless you have that, in a sense, legislative base upon which to stand, the modest gains will continue to be minimal all the way along.

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Mr Young: Mrs Wright, just as I assume that you are likely a role model for some children, of both sexes and different nationalities, I think back to my days in school, and my two favourite teachers, the ones who had the most profound influence on me, were both of a different race. Why can't teachers be a role model? Why must they be of a different race? Can a Sikh be a role model for a Hindu? Can a black teacher be a role model for a white student? And if not, why not?

Ms Wright: Well, I would use the term that I call "cultural synchronization." The extent to which you may have two cultures, albeit from different origins, could be synchronized in the sense that you have an understanding across the board, and that would be fine. If you were to ask the teachers, the teachers would say, "Yes, we can be role models for everybody," but when you ask the students, some students have difficulty approaching teachers who they see to be of a different culture because those cultures have not been quite synchronized.

For instance, let's just look at guidance. If you have male guidance teachers, you have females who may come from albeit different races, from different cultures. They may experience great difficulties going and discussing some of their personal problems with those male guidance teachers. So ask the students, and that's what they will tell you: "We need the role models."

Mr Grandmaître: One question from me and a question from Mrs McLeod. I'll be very short, Mr Chair. Thank you for your two recommendations. I think they'll be very useful. We can use them in the future.

I'd like you to refer to page 3. You say, "The majority of school boards indicated that they are interested in continuing the work of employment equity committees regardless of whether the Employment Equity Act, 1993 is repealed." I'm sure you must know of subsection 1(5), destruction of personal information. Section 39 of the Employment Equity Act, 1993, provides that "a person in possession of personal information collected from employees...shall not use or disclose it" except for the purpose of complying with the act. You're familiar with this section?

Ms Wright: I am familiar with that.

Mr Grandmaître: Most of your boards are interested in continuing an employment plan. Now, with this section, they don't even want you to use the information that's been collected. What are your thoughts on this section?

Ms Rosemary Clark: We've directed our representatives on the committees, who are anxious to continue this work, because most boards recognize that it is important -- if I could just add an aside, the few boards that we're having trouble with unfortunately seem to be boards with a heavy aboriginal population, so that we are noticing there is a trend in the boards who are not willing to continue.

In terms of the information, some of it was collected pre-employment equity, Bill 79, and is still valid information. We have told our members if this bill passes they have to delete the survey data, but there are many good things they can do without those data as long as they are required to do it.

The Chair: Thank you very much. Obviously, you didn't leave any time for Mrs McLeod.

We appreciate your attendance here this afternoon.

NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF IMMIGRANT AND VISIBLE MINORITY WOMEN IN ONTARIO

The Chair: The next group is the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women in Ontario, represented by Maria Wallis and Barbara Isaac. Welcome to our committee. We appreciate your attendance. You have 20 minutes to use as you see fit, and when we get to the question time, the government will begin the question period.

Ms Maria Wallis: I'm with Barbara Isaac, who will introduce herself.

Ms Barbara Isaac: I'm the president of the Toronto chapter for the Congress of Black Women.

Ms Wallis: In our allotted 10 minutes, I want to focus briefly on three points. After our presentation, we look forward to the following 10 minutes of questions from the committee.

First, for the record, I would like to protest the process undertaken by this government. After introducing this bill with short notice, the government is rushing it through the standing committee. Some of the people in the province, ourselves included, are finding out about this standing committee and our opportunity to appear before it by a telephone call. Many have not even heard of the existence of this committee.

Yesterday in the newspaper I noticed a public notice of a liquor licence application which asked residents to "make written submission as to whether the issuance of the licence is in the public interest having regard to the needs and wishes of the residents." Employment equity has 300 times greater significance than a liquor licence application. I want to know why the committee did not issue a public notice asking the people of Ontario whether this bill is "in the public interest having regard to the needs and wishes of the people." Is this government afraid of democratic participation by the people in their own government?

Second point: Reading Bill 8 and the Hansard record subsequent to its introduction, I see little or no understanding on the part of this government of the complexity, both in scope and breadth, of systemic discrimination. What I see instead in this bill is both rhetoric and vengeance. For instance, why is the government provoking the people of this province with an obnoxious title that implies that the rest of us do not yearn -- yes, yearn -- for merit-based employment? Why is this government asking for the destruction of data by employers who want to proceed with the recognition of diversity in this province? Why is this government repealing sections of the Police Services Act and the Education Act that have worked both to reflect the diversity in this province and to provide role models and hope for ourselves and our youth? Finally, given that employment equity was a key component of the Conservative election platform, why did the Premier of this province not speak to this bill? We want to hear him justify this bill by speaking specifically to its many draconian components.

Third and final point in three sections:

(a) A report titled "Drop out or Push out? The Dynamics of Black Students' Disengagement from School" was highlighted in yesterday's newspaper. Drawing on the experiences of students, the researchers report:

"...blacks are often alienated by traditional high schools.

"Many cannot identify with what's taught in class, with mostly white teachers or with the dominant social culture of schools.

"Others are alienated by subtle forms of classroom racism and teachers who do not expect black students to succeed."

(b) During the Nuremberg trials, by prosecuting the criminals responsible for the genocide of the Jewish people, the concept "crimes against humanity" was introduced in the arena of international law.

(c) Several studies, some quoted in the Hansard discussions as well as others, have reflected and given witness to the situation of racialized people in this country. Given the documentation of the dismal situation in housing, education, health and employment, among other areas, and the resulting destruction of hope, the shutting down of human potential and the disenfranchisement of people from their own institutions and government, I feel we have every reason to introduce the concept of crimes against humanity on the provincial level and to introduce with it our right to resist the systematic violation of a people's right to full development of human potential and human dignity.

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All of humanity loses when systemic discrimination exists. The spirit of this bill also violates the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights. In addition, by introducing this bill in such an undemocratic way, this government loses its legitimacy to govern.

I would like to conclude by saying we will scrutinize the process and policies in Ontario and we will hold this government accountable to all people in this province.

We would want to recommend public forums and open discussion. We want the people of Ontario to recommend measures that will balance the principles of individual and group rights. We also want to remind ourselves and everyone around us that justice delayed is justice denied. We want goals that can be tracked; policies, measures, outcomes that can be monitored. We want a legislated plan open to public scrutiny that will also encourage public discussion and thereby enhance both civic, education and our own growth. Thank you.

Mr Young: Thank you very much for your presentation. Where the rubber really hits the road in hiring and promotion in this province is literally thousands of personnel officers, human resources managers and managers at large who hire people for jobs. It mostly happens at the interview process. What I'd like to ask you is, given the pressure that's been put on a lot of these people hiring in those positions by the federal legislation and by some of the municipal governments that have contract provisions that you must hire companies that have minority employees etc, don't you think that some of the people doing the hiring take the short road, take the shortcut just to get the numbers and choose somebody of a different race who might be less qualified than somebody who's a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant? Do you think that ever happens?

Ms Wallis: But what we're also asking for is a process that will just go beyond raw numbers, that will look at a systematic review of practices, because, again, we're saying, focus on the way this is done.

Mr Clement: Thank you for your presentation. I'm just curious, since you did raise Nuremberg, we've had a number of examples this century of terrible crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated by the state, by a government, by a tyranny. So I'm just curious how you feel that in our context in Ontario, government has the solution: The state can correct an injustice. How does that fit with what you've correctly identified as a problem with state terrorism and state tyranny throughout the world this century?

Ms Wallis: There is room for government in addressing systemic discrimination. One of the things that keeps coming up time and time again on the government side in terms of logic is the notion of individual rights. I'd like the government to remember that one can only be an individual in a social context. If you say "I'm an individual" in a forest, you're just whistling in the wind.

Mr Bart Maves (Niagara Falls): Okay, just one, on page 3: "All of humanity loses when systemic discrimination exists." I don't think anyone disagrees and I don't think you should ever believe that we disagree with that. The question that we are putting is, how do you deal with that? How do you get rid of discrimination in a society?

The presenter before you talked about anti-racism education that they're doing. I applaud that 100%. We've had aboriginal groups come in and talk about a similar focus, outreach programs that break down barriers. I applaud that 100% because I believe in the power of education to enlighten people. I think you would agree with that too.

In the past, there have been all kinds of affirmative action laws throughout the world, and the record shows that quite often these have an opposite effect of hardening attitudes instead of ridding society of them. I don't really have a question, other than to put the point that I hope that you would consider that. We're not endorsing discrimination whatsoever; we're just disagreeing with Bill 79's method of ridding the society of it.

Ms Isaac: If I could just maybe speak to that statement a little bit, I've lived in this country -- I was born here. I'm a fourth-generation Canadian right here in Ontario and I've seen how stereotyping and people's comfort level means that people in my family, black people who were born and raised in Ontario, get left behind. It doesn't matter if you've gone to U of T. I have doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers in my family and they still face discrimination.

I think what has to happen is you need to have a policy from government that says this cannot happen. It needs to be legislated and you need to have education at the same time. If you don't have that two-pronged approach, then of course people's backs are going to be put up. I agree with that. So we're looking for two things at the same time, not just one thing.

Mrs McLeod: I'm going to give you an opportunity to expand a little bit more on that, by the way. I'm trying to pose this as a question that is hardly going to be answerable in four minutes. When the government presented this piece of legislation, there was one sole defence for presenting it. They said that we do not need employment equity legislation because discrimination is illegal in the province of Ontario.

It seems to me that even if you look at strengthening the Human Rights Commission, we have not dealt well with cases of blatant discrimination, that it has not been effective at all in looking at systemic discrimination. Even if we were successful in dealing with outright evidence of discrimination, we would not have provided enough to address the barriers to real equal opportunity.

I wonder if you might just want to say something about whether or not indeed we don't need employment equity legislation because discrimination is illegal.

Ms Isaac: As I said earlier, you're right, it's illegal; it's been illegal all my life and I've worked in this province since I was 14 years of age. But I've still been discriminated against. When you put the burden of proving discrimination on the individual, you put it on me every time I go for a job to say, "Something didn't feel right, something didn't seem right," or if you put the burden on black women to say, "Well, we've added up all the nurses in our unit and we don't have the right numbers," then you put the burden on us and that makes it more difficult.

Mrs McLeod: You want something more than a judicial process that you have to initiate, I would think.

Ms Wallis: Something that would also address the systemic components. Individual-based complaints are extremely difficult that way and so much of systemic discrimination in terms of my own research in schools -- how do you explain to somebody that when you come into a classroom there's hostility in the air? You sound like a flake, unless somebody is able to point out those kinds of systemic components and the way they come together and create the atmosphere.

Mr Grandmaître: I'd like to ask the parliamentary assistant a question. In the CSR you say that you will be introducing some kind of a plan to replace the Employment Equity Act of 1993. You were talking about a six-point workplace equal opportunity plan. When will we see this plan?

Mr Clement: I don't think that was in the Common Sense Revolution, first of all; I think it was a statement during the campaign, but you're quite right --

Mr Grandmaître: No, there are six points in the Common Sense Revolution.

Mr Clement: You're quite right, we did make an announcement during the election campaign based on our view of the appropriate role of government to promote and to assist in a non-coercive way employers and employees in the area of non-discrimination and equal opportunity. Our intention, as stated by the minister, is to introduce that plan very quickly. Certainly, it would be around the same time as we expect that this piece of legislation will be ultimately dealt with by the Legislature.

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Mr Grandmaître: So it won't be happening before Christmas.

Mr Clement: I don't know. I guess it all depends on how quickly we pass the bill --

Mr Grandmaître: Or you introduce closure.

Mr Clement: -- but we're certainly working on it right now.

Mrs Boyd: I'd like to thank you very much for coming as well.

Mr Young, when he was asking his question, was really trying to get at one of the great myths around employment equity, that in fact it is reverse discrimination and will result in reverse discrimination. It's always interesting to hear that, because of course we know from our experience in government and the real efforts that have been made by the Ontario government around employment equity that in the last year that statistics were gathered, 66% of jobs that were available in the Ontario government went to white males and they only comprise 38% of the population of Ontario.

How do you respond when people talk about reverse discrimination? How do you talk about the concerns that you have when this is seen as a turning of the tables, almost blaming people who have been the victims of discrimination by suggesting that they want to discriminate themselves?

Ms Isaac: I think you've answered the question yourself. I think what has happened is that over time, people have built up a particular vision of what black women can do or what Asian men can do etc, so we've been pigeonholed into those areas. So that has been discrimination. We want to look at that and say: "But we need people of many different races in many categories of jobs across the board. How do we get that?" That, to my mind, if you try to redress that, is not reverse discrimination, it's not righting wrongs of 100 years ago; it's looking at what we have right now and working forward from there.

Ms Wallis: It also assumes that we all start off on the same footing, and that is so wrong. I would also want to encourage everybody who's addressing this to go off into our classrooms and our schools right here in this province and see how the various high school students are segregated into racial groups.

That's what we're beginning from and we have to address that, not assume that doesn't exist. Therefore, then, what you're saying is, let's pretend everybody's equal and let's pretend that we can just walk ahead without seeing how the systemic discrimination that just walks through all of our ways in which we do things has to be addressed, and we have to figure out something in the interim too.

Mr Marchese: That's the point. I wanted to make a statement quickly by saying it is the role of government, governments have a responsibility to deal with inequities in society. We can't shrink away from that responsibility and say we can't do it or shouldn't be doing it; we should allow voluntary methods to get to the problem of inequity. How wrong. But this is how we are separated from the other side, because that's what they believe.

The assumption is fundamentally flawed too. It makes the assumption that we're all equal, and if we were, you wouldn't be here. If we were, we wouldn't be dealing with employment equity. If we were dealing with merit, you wouldn't be here, because black people, women and people with disabilities and aboriginal people say: "Hire on the basis of merit. That's what we want you to do." Mr Lepofsky, a constitutional lawyer, said that without the club, voluntary programs won't work. That's what we've had before, that's what they're recommending and I think you've spoken to that as well. Voluntary programs will not work for many people in society.

Do you have a comment on that?

Ms Wallis: No, we agree. Voluntary measures have been in place, and look what we have. We don't have the representation and we need that.

The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation.

Mr Young: On a point of order, Mr Chairman: A statement was made that students in our high school system are segregated.

The Chair: That's not a point of order. Thank you very much, ladies, for your presentation.

ONTARIO PROFESSIONAL FIRE FIGHTERS' ASSOCIATION

The Chair: The next group is the Ontario Professional Fire Fighters' Association, represented by Bill Cole. Obviously, Bill has somebody with him. Gentlemen, you have 20 minutes to use as you see fit. If you leave any time for questions, it will begin with the Liberals.

Mr Bill Cole: My name is Bill Cole. I'm here today on behalf of the Ontario firefighters' association. In essence, the firefighters' association supports the repeal of the Employment Equity Act for a variety of reasons. We have provided the committee with written submissions. I don't for a moment want to go through it page by page. Suffice to say that substantive reasons for the repeal are contained in the first section of the submission. I'm not going to focus on them today.

The submissions do rely upon the 30 years of experience of our southern neighbours and the successes and failures that they've had with affirmative action programs. I think it was said earlier with an earlier delegation, the idea of how employment equity has in many ways backfired, deepening feelings of people. I think you could say that with people who may begin to have a superficial concern, that may be corrective. When forced to deal with invasive legislation that compels certain things, those superficial and corrective feelings become much more visceral and in essence have a countereffect that the legislation is not intending to provide for.

The portions I would like to focus on today are the sections that deal with the Human Rights Code and the repealing of section 14 and special programs and special measures that can be introduced under that section.

The firefighters' associations and firefighting in general in the province is unique in the sense that over the last 10 years there have been considerable efforts by municipalities and firefighters' associations to put in place pre-employment testing procedures that can be deemed as bona fide. In the early 1980s, there was a considerable amount of attention paid to firefighter recruitment, the testing processes. There were a number of challenges before the human rights tribunal, a number of them successful on the part of the candidate, because the systems weren't bona fide, and of course municipalities, wanting to avoid that liability, undertook and retained specialized consultants to come in and, through some very highly empirical testing processes, create a process that could withstand those challenges.

In my municipality, in the city of Ottawa, we were one of the first in the province to do so, and we have worked very well within that mechanism now for about eight years. Under section 14 of the Human Rights Code, recently in the city of Ottawa we have moved away from that bona fide program.

There is a quote that I have on page 10 by Dr Norman Gledhill, who was one of the leading consultants within the province studying these testing processes. When he was in Ottawa, he undertook a study of every possible task that a firefighter could do in their line of work, with as many as 60 firefighters ranging in age from a recruit right through to senior officers. Dr Gledhill says, on page 10:

"Because loss of life and damage to property are at stake, the speed of a firefighter's response is critical. It follows, therefore, that the job-related performance tests should be accomplished within an acceptable period of time. Hence, the performance time of candidates is judged against a mean time, an acceptable time, and a maximum time based on the performance of experienced firefighters. Further, because there is an urgency to accomplish firefighting tasks as quickly as possible, recognition should be given to candidates who complete the job-related performance tests more efficiently than others."

In essence what Dr Gledhill is saying is that consideration should be given to the persons who are basically finishing at the top of the list. The systems that we have in place aggregate people in accordance to scores in a descending method from number 1 down and are hired in that fashion.

In the city of Ottawa, the program that has been undertaken now, the special program under the auspices of section 14, would see a master list, and I have that on page 9. The master list of candidates is then broken down into four subgroups, and the person would be placed in that subgroup in accordance with where they -- if a person finished 10th and they were the sole person in that category, they would finish first within that subgroup, and then when vacancies arose, people would be hired from the top of each list. I have that outlined on page 10. You can see the arrows sort of point to the way the system is broken down.

The concern that the firefighters have in general is the system is moving away from the most qualified candidate. If you had a single person who occupied a category, that person, if they finished 500th on the list, would be a first in that category and they would be essentially assured a position within the fire department.

The reason why this is a concern is that the testing process, at least in the city of Ottawa, has a range from 41 through to 105 in scoring, 41 being the threshold where the person would be placed on the list. At the end of the day, what that really means is that a person who finished with a 39% score could be guaranteed a job or would be put in that place. When you have 500, 600 people applying, candidates going through this process, there is a wide, wide, wide range of abilities within that spectrum. By supporting the repeal of section 14 within the Job Quotas Repeal Act, we'll be getting away from that and re-embracing the concept of hiring the most qualified person.

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The other point, the final point that we wanted to focus on today, was the support for the inclusion of subsection 1(5) of the act, which talks about the destruction of confidential workplace survey information.

We're probably all aware that in general there are certain questions that an employer would be unable to ask an employee throughout their employment. The Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, as well as the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, expressly outline an employer being barred from asking certain questions and would permit those questions only where legislation expressly allows for that, and that's certainly what the Employment Equity Act did. We would suggest that in the absence of the Employment Equity Act, the employer would also lose the authority to maintain that information.

We're not just trying to -- this isn't a trite argument, because we know that it is contained within the legislation that's being reviewed today. It's just that there have been expressions by a number of employers within the province that, regardless of the final outcome, they will be retaining the act. So I would ask the committee to seriously consider maintaining that section and having it apply clearly and concisely so employers would be unable to maintain that information.

I think that's pretty much all that we have as far as our submissions and we can open it up for questions. I would ask the committee to review the written submissions. We have expanded considerably on our three basic points within the submission. Those are our submissions for the day.

Mrs McLeod: I will certainly review the written submission. I appreciate the effort you've put into elaborating on each of the points here. I particularly appreciate it because I think the application of principles of employment equity within the firefighters is perhaps one of the toughest for all of us to get at in a way which is fair to the whole issue of qualified personnel. So let me try and focus my questions, just two questions, on that area.

You described in the Ottawa program specifically a range within which an individual can qualify. Would you feel comfortable that people at the low end of that range are nevertheless qualified? Is that a fair question to ask you? I recognize that you were talking in terms of most qualified, and obviously people at the top end of the range you would see as having been more successful than those at the lower end, but would all fit into a category of being qualified applicants?

Mr Cole: Because the scope is so broad in qualifications, from, as I said, the 41 to the 105 in the aggregated score, there is a significant difference in the ability of the person in that range. I think obviously, from a public interest point of view, there is a need to recognize the person who can perform the essential duties of the occupation more efficiently, and because of the nature of our occupation, that's usually a function of time. So there is a difference.

I would submit that we would encourage increasing the bottom of the range up and tightening that even more so we wouldn't have to deal with this sort of question. It was our position initially in 1988 and 1989 when the studies were done in Ottawa that the range be tightened, just for this very reason.

Mrs McLeod: Fair enough. And is there a problem here that starts at an even more basic level, which is a problem of recruitment, of attracting enough people from different groups not traditionally applying to be firefighters, so that you have a smaller number from the designated groups that are even taking the tests, and that kind of skews the results you see?

Mr Cole: Absolutely. Within the submission you'll see we have a failure rate of up to 75%. Three out of four white males fail these tests. This is not a question of colour or ability or anything else.

We have openly advocated outreach programs, at least within the city of Ottawa, and I know a number of municipalities in Metro have done similar. It just makes sense. If you increase the number of people, if you increase the catchment area of people that are applying for these jobs, you will get successful candidates.

There are also some cultural questions, cultural walls that have to be broken down, at least within our specific industry. I know the Asian community is very reluctant to apply to the fire department because in Asia the fire department is not a pleasant job and it's not a job people emulate or people pursue.

These are initiatives that are being done at the local levels, getting out and selling the fire department. We've openly advocated that continually.

Mrs McLeod: I appreciate your responses.

Mr Marchese: What other tests are used to test people's abilities to get in as firefighters? Is it just examinations, or others?

Mr Cole: It's very detailed, sir, and I'll give you a very, very superficial overview of it. On one of the pages in the submission, in a footnote, it goes into some detail on what the testing system would be, page 8, footnote 11.

I think the important point, though, and I think the focus in your question, is that the practical testing has evolved from what it was. I know when I started it was much more simple than today. Everything is focused on the task the firefighter's required to do, and that's why we can confidently say employers have certainly recognized that it's a bona fide system, a bona fide reflection of what the actual occupational requirements are. I'm not sure if that answers your question.

In a nutshell, there are aptitude tests, there are security tests, there are medicals, there's a general fitness test, then there's this very detailed practical test and then there are interviews and --

Mr Marchese: That's fine. Great. Quickly, we had today a submission by McLarren Consulting Group Inc where they say, with respect to issues of recruitment, selection, work assignments and promotions, "In terms of selecting and promoting people, this pressure often translates into choosing those who afford the best comfort and fit within the existing organization." So what they're saying is they're identifying a problem in terms of how we recruit, how we select people, the kinds of assignments we give and how people are promoted. It's based on "the best comfort and fit." What is your reaction to that?

Mr Cole: I think one of the beauties of -- and I'm not certain I understand your question totally, but what simplifies the issue in the fire service area is the empirical nature of the testing, which provides certain levels of comfort as far as determining a person's ability. This isn't a question of, "Are you a Harvard grad, are you a Yale grad?" This is a question of, "Can you do the essential functions of the job and do them within an acceptable window of time?" and aggregate those scores overall. It provides us a little bit of comfort in those sorts of questions, and certainly those are larger, broader questions, conundrums that employment equity struggles with in trying to determine qualifications. I'm not sure if that's --

Mr Marchese: There's no time for me to explore that.

Mrs Boyd: In terms of the question that was asked by Mrs McLeod, there is a range within which people are considered to be qualified. That's true in any profession. You and I don't know where our doctor landed in the range of qualification, or our lawyer, or our teachers, or our children's teachers. I would just say I'm rather puzzled that you would think firefighting is different.

Mr Cole: I have greater comfort in knowing that my doctor didn't finish in the 39th percentile.

Mrs Boyd: How do you know?

Mr Cole: Well --

Mrs Boyd: You don't know that.

The Chair: Thank you very much for the question and the answer. We now go to the government.

Mr R. Gary Stewart (Peterborough): Yes, a couple of very short little questions. Do you believe that discrimination was being practised in the firefighter profession prior to 1993 and Bill 79?

Mr Cole: Oh, not at all. As I answered before, because of the empirical nature of the testing and because of the -- I mean, this is a colour-blind, gender-blind system.

Mr Stewart: And I assume you are very high, from what you've been saying, on ability, and I'm talking not only physical ability: mental ability, educational, the whole works.

The other thing that I'm very concerned about is that over the past couple of years it appears that your standards have been raised, which I think is great too. I'd kind of like to have a firefighter, of whatever nationality or gender, being able to get me out of the burning home. One of the concerns that seems to be coming out is the physical tests are being raised all the time. Are physical tests not one of the big areas or emphasis in your particular trade or profession?

Mr Cole: It absolutely is, sir. I don't think it's a great step to -- I think we're all comfortable enough in knowing what the fire service provides.

Mr Stewart: I guess what I'm trying to say is that people are saying, "Well, you're discriminating against me because you're raising the standards." You're only raising the standards, in my mind, in the areas that should be raised for the protection of the people of the province.

Mr Cole: Absolutely. I just want to address this section of raising the standards. We did the test in Ottawa in 1988, and a number of Metro departments have adopted the same program with some minor modifications. So where it may appear that there's been an increase in the standard, it may just be the adoption of our programs. Even in 1989, we were very concerned about the direction this program was going, and it actually did increase the system we'd been using, so it raised it that way.

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Mr Tascona: I commend you on your submission; it's very detailed. I know the association has been the leader in protecting the rights of its members, certainly in labour relations in this province. Has the association taken any steps or is it considering any in their negotiations, at the city level and even at the provincial level, to promote equality of opportunity in view of the merit principle?

Mr Cole: I can't speak for many of the locals. They may not have addressed it within their collective agreements, but I do know there's been a broad acceptance of outreach, advocating outreach and things like that. It may not be embraced within the collective agreement language, but certainly it's been embraced elsewhere.

The Chair: Thank you, gentlemen. We appreciate you making a presentation to us.

CITY OF TORONTO PERSONNEL COMMITTEE

The Chair: The next group is the city of Toronto personnel committee, represented by Councillor Kyle Rae and Ceta Ramkhalawansingh. Welcome to our committee.

Mr Kyle Rae: I'm Kyle Rae, councillor for ward 6 in the city of Toronto. I'm the chair of the city of Toronto's personnel committee and the co-chair of the joint committee on streamlining. This committee is composed of members of the personnel committee and the budget review group. With me is Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, acting director of the city of Toronto's equal opportunity division. She will assist me in responding to your questions.

I have brought you copies of various city of Toronto submissions and reports, which I believe are coming to you now. I will refer to these and indicate their relevance to your deliberations. I will also provide you with some personal observations about the direction in which you need to head.

Discrimination exists in our society. That is a fact -- a historical fact. In 1893, the city of Toronto noted that discrimination existed in the community and passed its first fair wage policy. The city's non-discrimination policy was amended in 1973 to include sexual orientation and political affiliation. That was also the same year in which the Toronto city council considered the report of the Mayor's Task Force on the Status of Women in Toronto and established a task force on the elderly and the disabled.

The status of women report led the city to examine barriers to women's participation as equals with men in Toronto. Child care, family planning, leadership training, recreation and fitness, pay equity, affirmative action, and outreach programs are just a few of the programs that were identified as being necessary to achieve equality.

All of these were reiterated 15 years later in 1988 at the conference held by the city to consider the situation of women in the workplace.

The representation rate of women in our civic service was less than 15% in 1973. This percentage has doubled in the past 20 years. We still have a long way to go to achieve equal representation between men and women, but we have made significant progress in reducing the wage gap between men and women workers, from 21.5% in 1973 to less than 5% today. Whatever gap exists today is due to the lower representation of women in senior management, and that's only one reason to have goals and timetables.

The wage differential was eliminated as a result of the introduction of a comprehensive job evaluation program which compares all jobs against each other.

I refer you to our briefs made to the province in 1986 on pay equity, to the federal committee on equality rights in 1985, and to the federal Obstacles report of 1982.

The task force on the elderly and disabled, which also met in 1973, examined the employment and access issues for people with disabilities. Toronto city council in 1980 decided to expand its equity programs to include aboriginal peoples and racial and ethnic minorities.

These policies are not hollow. To get to fairness, to get to equity and indeed to a discrimination- and harassment-free workplace you need many measures, positive and supportive. You need policies, you need to have action plans, you need to set goals and timetables, and you also need to have data, and this is where we disagree with the approach the government has taken. It's a fundamental disagreement.

In every other segment of our lives, we use numbers to determine success or failure. The health of our economy is measured by inflation, interest, debt and unemployment rates. The health of a person is measured against heart rates, blood cell counts, etc. Why not measure the degree of equal opportunity by carrying out workforce surveys, by keeping track of the success rates of groups who have experienced discrimination by measuring their representation in the workplace? If you don't have and don't set yardsticks, you will never know how you have dealt with discrimination in our society. What are you afraid of? What is it that you want to do in secret? Do you want to keep privilege for just a few and hide it from being counted?

In 1983, the city considered a report about using a contract compliance approach to achieving equity in the workplace. Some suggested that this was unnecessary and a wrong move for a government. But isn't it the role of government to regulate and to ensure fairness? And how do you determine fairness? The contract compliance program was a successful program which should be regarded as a model for your proposed equal opportunity program. Data from more than 8,000 firms was gathered between 1989 and 1992.

It is our view that mandatory record-keeping required by the city's policy, the federal Employment Equity Act, and the federal contractors program had a salutary effect on workplaces. We have witnessed improvements for designated groups. Underrepresentation is the strongest form of discrimination. That's what we want to change and that's why you must have data, and you can do it without impeding the work of an organization.

Since 1991, the city has been concerned about its financial situation and embarked on a process of reducing our workforce. Throughout that process we have monitored the impact of workforce changes upon designated groups, and we did not stop our equity programs. We expanded them. We expanded our goals and timetables to every position in the city. We initiated a comprehensive review of the recruitment and selection of firefighters. We introduced a tough and aggressive human rights policy aimed at eliminating all harassment. Although we have reduced the workforce by 15% at the city, we have continued to maintain our representation rates and to work towards an increase. We have targeted every position for the potential hiring of underrepresented groups. This is equal opportunity at its very best.

We were looking at the figures this afternoon and 46.5% of all promotions and appointments since 1992 at the city of Toronto have been filled by a member of a designated group. Although we targeted every position, so it should have been 100%, only 46.5%. Merit was not ignored. It continued to be an important part of workforce skillsets that were needed in those positions, but only 46.5% could be filled by designated groups.

Let there be no confusion about this. This is not preferential treatment. It is not a lowering of standards or an abandonment of merit. Setting goals and timetables is perhaps one of the best ways of ensuring that you do have fairness in the workplace.

In the last few years many workplaces have become safer and more hospitable for the people of diverse groups in our communities. The use of the term "quotas" does not help to create a community which fosters dignity and respect for all people, but creates confusion, hostility and anger. If it is not clear to you, I refer you to the definitions that have been used for the past decade.

Quotas are rigid and often encourage filling of vacancies without regard to qualifications. Quotas, which are often fixed percentages, have to be maintained. They tend to be imposed by external bodies such as the courts, and to our knowledge are not enshrined in any legislation anywhere.

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Goals -- and that is how the city has achieved employment equity -- on the other hand are determined by the organization and are flexible measures of progress towards the achievement of employment equity. They are reasonable, they're achievable and pay attention to the organization's structure and to the qualifications of the position.

The city of Toronto does not support the use of quotas, nor were they required in the Employment Equity Act.

When the city approved its first formal policy in 1977, it was called an affirmative action program. This was changed almost immediately because we recognized the power of the language. We decided instead to call our program an equal opportunity program.

What we said almost 20 years ago was this: "Special measures are to be developed within the city's policies of merit employment and progressive human resources development.

"The equal opportunity program is a strategy of planned active measures designed to ensure equal opportunity for all employees and will be clearly distinguished from the already existing, more passive approach of non-discrimination. The program is results-oriented and will involve positive action by management."

Even with these policies, council has continually focused on the need for change, moving from setting goals for some positions in 1982 to goals for all external positions in 1985 and then to all vacant positions in 1992.

This policy approach of fundamentally incorporating equity into all aspects of our work improves the quality of the city. It improves the quality of the services we deliver. It improves the relationship between government and taxpayers. In other words, an inclusive city is a healthy city.

When you review this bill on a clause-by-clause basis, what should you consider? (1) Rename the act; (2) require that data be compiled by employers.

You should also restore requirements under the Employment Equity Act to carry out systems reviews, to hold consultations with designated group members and to introduce internal complaints procedures. All of these ought to be components of any equal opportunity plan.

Finally, positive and supportive measures need to be in place. Restore funding for TTC cuts. Do not cut day care funding. Provide proper benefits for workers and recognize same-sex spouses as full partners. Restore support for affordable housing and welfare. Restore funding for training and education programs. Be inclusive. That's true equal opportunity.

Mr Marchese: Thank you for your presentation. I guess we've heard on the other side that they believe that discrimination exists and that it's bad. The difference is, they say government should not intervene and we say government must intervene to redress inequities in society.

David Lepofsky, a constitutional lawyer, talked about the fact that if they wanted to address issues of quotas and merit, they could have done so by introducing language in the bill, so that if they're against quotas, they could introduce language in the bill that clarified that, including merit, but obviously they didn't want that. They went beyond it.

He also adds that without the club, voluntary measures will not work. Both of you have had different experiences -- one is a politician and one is a civil servant -- for quite a long time now. Is it your view that voluntary measures can effectively address issues of inequity?

Mr Rae: I believe that it is necessary to set goals and timetables. Why I say that is having worked at the city as an employee first and having to fill out the quota forms -- not the quota forms. What do you call them?

Ms Ceta Ramkhalawansingh: Equal opportunity.

Mr Rae: Equal opportunity -- no, no, there was another form. There was another form.

Ms Ramkhalawansingh: Utilization --

Mr Rae: The utilization form. The information that we were gathering, filling those out as a director, gathering that information, sending it to the city and then being able to work through the information that we provided was essential.

But also being part of the city now as a director, what is interesting is to watch how each department becomes proud of the equal opportunity goals and timetables it sets, and each department sets its own. They work together. There's a collegiality that they're working as a system to try and eradicate systematic discrimination. That is why, I think, a voluntary system doesn't achieve that. When you set the goal for a bureaucracy and say that this is an essential part of what we think makes a good civil service, they all work together. I think that's one of the key things I've found in this process.

Ms Ramkhalawansingh: I'd like to add, on page 46 of the attached document you will see a set of data from our contract compliance program. Mandatory data filing was a requirement if you wanted to do business with the city between 1989 and 1992. You will see that from a preliminary survey done in 1984, the representation rate of women among our suppliers was 30%. By the time we got to 1992, that had changed dramatically to about 46%. We attribute a lot of those increases to the fact that they had to scrutinize their workforce and to provide that data to us. We feel that the effect of mandatory filing was very significant in this entire process. I believe that the experience of both the federal contractors program as well as employers covered by the federal employment equity legislation also found the same results.

The Chair: Thank you very much. I have to go on to the government party.

Mr Young: I'd like to ask Councillor Rae, it's unclear to me, are you speaking in this submission for yourself or for the city of Toronto?

Mr Rae: The city of Toronto. This is a city of Toronto policy.

Mr Young: This is endorsed? I'll tell you why. Because some of the questions on the back, or the suggestions, don't relate to employment equity and I just wondered if that was endorsed by your committee.

Mr Rae: They do deal with the issue of positive and supportive measures. Those issues are in the rest of the submission, if you go through the --

Mr Young: Affordable housing and welfare and training and education programs and day care funding really don't pertain to this issue per se, but we'll leave that for now.

Mr Rae: I would disagree with you. They are positive and supportive measures that make work accessible to people.

Mr Young: I want to take exception to what one of my colleagues said earlier. The Progressive Conservative Party does agree with government intervening to make society fair, and we're looking at a Human Rights Code, a beefed up Human Rights Code. What we don't agree with is job quotas. I wanted to ask you, what is the difference between a flexible measure with a $50,000 fine and a quota?

Mr Rae: That is the recommendation of the bill?

Mr Young: That's what's in Bill 79, a $50,000 fine for businesses that are trying to survive, not the wealthy city of Toronto, that has enough money to do whatever they want, but a $50,000 fine. What's the difference?

Mr Marchese: Between that and a quota.

Mr Rae: Is it related to quotas? Would you want to answer that, Ceta?

Ms Ramkhalawansingh: I don't believe that requirement related to the setting of quotas. I believe the requirement had to do with other obligations under the act, so I think you might want to actually read the bill.

Mr Young: I assure you I've read it. Thank you for the advice.

Ms Ramkhalawansingh: I don't think it says that.

Mr Maves: Quickly, on the collection of data: Did you have numbers measuring your workforce prior to Bill 79?

Mr Rae: Yes, we did. We've been keeping --

Ms Ramkhalawansingh: Since 1981.

Mr Maves: Are you aware you can still keep that?

Mr Rae: The city of Toronto is going to maintain its equal opportunity program, despite what you do.

Mr Maves: But that data, you're still --

Mr Rae: We're still collecting it. We did not need your legislation to collect this data.

Mr Maves: On the collection of data by race, I wonder, do you draw a line on that? I don't like the idea of keeping crime statistics by race and things like that, but do you draw a line or do you think data by race is fine?

Mr Rae: It's my recollection, when I was filling out those forms with my staff, that it was self-disclosure, that it was up to the staff to disclose if they wished to or not. It was voluntary.

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): Councillor, the question I have is part of the bill is going to dictate that all municipalities, like Toronto, destroy all their data they've been acquiring on employment equity. What do you think of that proposal?

Mr Rae: It goes beyond -- I don't understand why they would want to move in that direction. We have been able to show through our program that we can make a difference, that we can make employment opportunities available to people who traditionally have not had access. So to destroy this information which helps us build a picture of discrimination and then sets us on a course to fix it, I think is going in the wrong direction. It's like you want to deny that it's happening, therefore the best way to do it is by destroying the records. It reminds me of some states that have done it in the past to hide the fact that they've been terrorizing --

Mr Colle: They burned books, I think.

Mr Rae: I think they burned books. One of the things I'd like to mention is that when my father arrived in this country in 1951, it was not what his merits, what his job skills were that got him a job, but it was what school did he go to, what did his father do and what part of Glasgow did he grow up in. I think that still happens in this country and I don't think that's healthy.

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Mr Colle: Just one other quick question, because I know you were certainly intimately involved with the challenges you had with the firefighters of the city of Toronto.

Mr Rae: Intimately.

Mr Colle: What's one, you might say, cogent piece of advice you might give in dealing with that challenging area of getting over the qualification and the physical constraints and at times opening up the firefighters to people from all walks of life?

Mr Rae: One of the things that I've found in the process is that there are some people who would like to hide behind super qualifications to be able to exclude other people. You will set standards that only very few people can afford to achieve, and I think that's what I was witnessing in dealing with the fire service; that you make people so overqualified that they get in and the people who can't afford or haven't got the ability fall behind and are not able to be hired. That's what happened with our system.

People who I think would have made fine firefighters, be they fire inspectors -- and you don't have to drag a person through a building to be a fire inspector -- or work on the trucks -- you don't need to be a bodybuilder for some parts of the fire service. I think super qualifications have been used by some to exclude designated groups.

The Chair: Thank you very much, sir.

Mr Rae: The other thing I'd like to answer is that there is a failure to continue to measure once they get in.

The Chair: Excuse me, sir.

Mr Rae: Five years later, are they still at that physical capacity?

The Chair: I've been quite generous with your time. Thank you very much. We appreciate your attendance here.

Mr Rae: Thank you.

ORGANIZATION FOR QUALITY EDUCATION

The Chair: The next group is the Organization for Quality Education, John Bachmann and David Hogg. Good evening, gentlemen, and welcome to our committee. You have 20 minutes to use as you see fit. Questions, should you have time for them, will begin with the government.

Mr John Bachmann: We, as the Organization for Quality Education, have some concerns about the issue of quotas and the school system and the impact it would have on the quality of education, and we appreciate having a few minutes today to bring those up with you.

My name is John Bachmann; I'm the president of the organization. With me today is Dave Hogg, the vice-president. We had to put this presentation together kind of over the phone, so I apologize for the fact that it's in two separate pages for you, but we'll try to put the thing together in the next few minutes. I'll ask Dave to start with his section first.

Mr David Hogg: My brief to this committee in support of Bill 8 is based on three principles:

One, respect for others: I do not believe that the qualities we admire in people -- integrity, intelligence, diligence, determination, ability to serve and care -- are the sole preserve of any one group of people. Two, fairness and reasonableness; three, negative or positive legislation. I would like to talk to you about each one of these.

Respect for others: I quip that in my family there is quintessential multiculturalism. I left England in 1960 to help start the first multiracial school in East Africa. The word "multicultural" was not yet invented, I believe, and my spell-check still does not recognize it as a word. I met my wife in Kenya. In my family there are two Africans, three Canadians, one East Indian and one internationalist. Having lived for long periods on three continents and travelled widely, I empathize with many places and many people.

During my travels, it has never been difficult to find good, to find common bonds. Good people come in all manner of different sizes, shapes and shades. I don't really know why we have to stress this, it seems so fundamentally obvious.

It was therefore disturbing for me to read yesterday about research out of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE): "Drawing on the experiences of students...often alienated by traditional high schools. Many cannot identify...with mostly white teachers...." It is trite to say that teachers judging students or students judging teachers by the colour of their skin is so superficial it will lead to superficial conclusions. Surely the matter of importance is whether the teacher can transmit learning and the student absorb it: good teaching, good learning. How did we get off on a tangent? How did we come to this state of affairs?

My years of experience in the multiracial school in Kenya were very different. At first, all the teachers and only a few students were white. The cultural chasm for some of our students was enormous. They had never even seen a meal place setting. The curriculum and examinations were English and therefore, in Ontario idiom, were not culturally sensitive. Our approach as teachers was pretty unsophisticated: Treat and teach the students decently, work and play hard together. The results speak: Almost every student qualified for university, many to world-class universities.

Students and teachers developed a deep affection for the school. It did not seem difficult. The exercise of simple respect is not difficult. There seems to be plenty of opportunity in our society for construction in the place of destruction. I know many, including my own family, some of whom are an invisible minority, who are offended by the concept that skin colour and sex may be gating job qualifications when the work involved is not related to either. They want to be judged on ability, not appearance, which latter they would consider belittling and demeaning if it was not germane to the job.

Having given you these thoughts, I'd like to hand off to John to continue.

Mr Bachmann: If minority students truly cannot identify with white teachers, we don't feel the best solution to this problem is quota hiring of teachers. Instead, we should be looking for other ways to bring meaningful minority presence into our schools.

Our first suggestion would be to encourage more community involvement by expediting the implementation of school councils. Such councils will have a significant community component, and in the case of a community with a sizeable minority population, this component will likely include strong representation from minority groups. Appropriately empowered -- and this is very different from the situation we have in the schools today with parental involvement -- these councils are more likely to develop locally appropriate approaches for dealing with the alienation of minority students.

Our second suggestion would be to enable the establishment of charter schools that will define themselves around different instructional approaches or subject emphases. Such schools should not be allowed to differentiate themselves on the basis of race, since most members of minorities that we've spoken with are not interested in ghettoizing their children through voluntarily segregationist schools.

Underpinning actions on any of these fronts, though, we must maintain an uncompromising insistence on high standards of instruction, literacy and numeracy for teaching staff. At all grade levels, teachers and their assistants must have the ability to communicate clearly and correctly in either English or French, and at the middle and secondary levels we must insist on mastery of the subject matter by the classroom teacher.

OQE does not subscribe to the assumption, lamentably so, within much of the public school system that some minorities, because of various circumstances, are not capable of achieving as well as the general population. The system then goes on to argue that we should reduce our expectations of these students and not traumatize them with things like standardized testing. We feel this mindset is, in the least, patronizing and, at worst, insidiously racist.

In OQE's view, the solution to minority problems within our schools does not lie in the direction of quotas but in challenging minority students to do as well as any other students and then encouraging community involvement and alternative approaches through school councils and charter schools to get these things to happen.

The change that results from this approach can be as immediate as a quota approach, we feel, without the negative generating of a quota backlash, and has the additional benefit of being more profound, through community involvement, and longer lasting.

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Mr Hogg: I'm going to pick up where I left off.

The second principle that I had was fairness and reasonableness. These are pillars of society, but can they be legislated? Should they be legislated? Is it fair to legislate in one area and not in another? Why would we do that? Isn't that the route to unreasonableness?

I'm far from being an expert in basketball, but it seems to me that small people are grossly underrepresented in that profession. Should legislation be introduced to open the sport to tiny people? And while we're at it, do we want to address the profession of jockey?

I do not want to trivialize a serious issue, that of executing particular tasks particularly well, but I sense there is a road that either leads nowhere or leads to irrelevance. I know I never had the requisites or the opportunity to perform even adequately as a jockey or in basketball. Why would I or anyone want legislative support to be second-rate? Would that corrode and compromise my dignity as a person?

Negative or positive legislation: From an educational perspective, the compelling and urgent sense is for a move to the best education each individual student can absorb. Rather than using punitive legislative force to restrict employee selection, at best a negative imposition, the government of our day would be well advised to legislate more pervasive opportunities for quality education as a qualification for quality employment and job satisfaction. OQE would be delighted to participate in that positive activity.

Mr Stewart: I've sat here for the last three or four days and listened to many, many presentations, and when I look at your presentation, that has words like "fairness," "reasonableness," "respect for others," it leads me to believe that maybe discrimination is not our problem, that our problem is attitude. Can we legislate attitude? Is that what this is all about?

I believe honestly, after listening to this, and many presentations have been extremely discriminatory, that one of the biggest problems we have is attitude. Can you as educators or in OQE change that and start to work on that end of it and could it be of advantage to us?

Mr Hogg: I think it can be changed. My problem, of course, as you see, and I think our collective problem is, can you legislate changes of attitude? I don't believe you can.

Mr Stewart: You can't, sir. That's why I asked.

Mr Hogg: I knew that you knew the answer.

Mr Stewart: Do you not think that's a start and that's where we're coming off anymore, or part of it?

Mr Hogg: I've got to go back to my experience that was so successful. In the school where I taught -- and I taught for a period of years there, six years, so it wasn't a quick in and out -- we had 400 applicants for every native African position in the school. That showed that even though the staff was predominantly white, the students respected what they were going to be offered within that school.

I think this is where you come from, that you have to change mindsets. I don't believe you can necessarily legislate behavioral changes. What you have to do is to go through behaviour substitution. If somebody believes that violence is an appropriate way to go, you have to show them and somehow change their hearts so that they realize that support and help is really a far more satisfying activity to indulge in and that it's more beneficial to them and the people they deal with, and that society, as a result, grows from it. I hand over to John.

Mr Bachmann: I really don't have much more to say on that.

Mrs McLeod: Mr Hogg, in your presentation you note that many, including your own family, would be "offended by the concept that skin colour and sex may be gating job qualifications, when the work involved is not related to either." Do you think that skin colour and sex are gating the entry to jobs, and if so, in what respect?

Mr Hogg: If you legislate quotas and the term we come up with is "visible minorities," the only way you can relate a visible minority is some visual differentiation, so whether it happens to be sex or the shade of a skin colour, that is what is implied.

The legislation has been in place. Obviously, my children are half-breeds, to use the offensive term that used to be used in the past. Nobody seems to use that anymore, but that's the reality of the situation: They're half Indian and they're half English. This has come up in discussion, and let me tell you, when it did, it was so offensive to them they didn't even want to talk about it. One of my children is visibly Indian and the rest of them could pass as Greeks or Italians or whatever, but I know this is offensive to them, that they should play on that to gain some sort of edge. What they want to do is to compete fairly on their qualifications and their abilities and skills, and this is resident in their human dignity. They would feel then that they had obtained the job and kept it because of that ability and the contribution and value added they would make.

Mrs McLeod: I think everyone would agree with that. When I read "gating job qualifications," my assumption was that skin colour and sex often keep the gate closed, but you seem to be suggesting that it arbitrarily keeps the gate open.

Mr Bachmann: Under quotas, a lot of the feedback we're getting through our members about the school system and places where some affirmative action programs seem to be taking place is that the standards are being lowered. I was talking to a teacher last week who happened to be sick one day. I know this is an anecdote, but the supply teacher could not correct grade 3 English grammar, and that was a person in a minority. That reflects poorly on that person, and I don't think it's fair that we have a system like that. We have reports of teachers who can't make themselves understood to the students so they have a tough time learning. We would just like to see common standards.

Mrs McLeod: But surely, just for the record of the committee, we can all cite numerous anecdotes of teachers whose ability to correct grammar we would be concerned about, where neither skin colour nor gender was the deciding factor.

Mr Marchese: Mr Hogg, would that the world were fair or just, and who doesn't respect principles of fairness and respect for others? We all agree that these should be basic principles. If the world were fair, we would not be dealing with this issue of employment equity. If equal opportunity were working, we would all be happy and wouldn't have to legislate anything. The point is that it's not working.

For people of colour, say, we've seen the statistics that they're very qualified, but their qualifications do not necessarily give them access to employment. They want to be judged on merit. They're saying: "If merit is the key and qualification is the key, why aren't people hiring us? They're not hiring us because of discrimination -- not attitude, but because of discrimination." What are you saying, or what is your response to that?

Mr Hogg: I agree that the world isn't fair, and I also have personal experiences. When I came to the country I had a couple of reasonably high-quality engineering degrees to my credit, and when I came in there was discrimination because they were asking for Canadian experience. If you have a nut and bolt and it happens to have been made in Kenya or India or wherever, who cares? I found that somewhat unreasonable and distasteful. However, I did get a job, and you overcome these things. I think it's somewhat understandable that an employer would want you to be instantly productive. Some employers no doubt have shorter-term visions and some have longer-term visions.

Mr Marchese: My point is that there is discrimination based on colour, and my additional point on disability is that people with disabilities say, "When people look at us and listen to us, that doesn't give us access through that door." Your answer continues to be, "You plug away, you struggle, and eventually fairness will be achieved." They're saying, "No, it doesn't work that way."

Mr Bachmann: Do you really believe that today in our public school system there are people who are excluded because of their colour if they have the qualifications?

Mr Marchese: Let me tell you, because I was a teacher for a while and I was a trustee for eight years full-time when I quit teaching to do the other job, I've read studies which show that in grade 1 the teachers were able to pinpoint who was going to make it and who wasn't going to make it -- in grade 1, not grade 8 or 13. Race and socioeconomic status were determinants, in their minds, of who was going to make it. How do teachers shape that differently? They weren't shaping it; they already determined who was going to make it. Yes, it happens. Do teachers say this is something they do consciously? It's there.

Mr Hogg: This brings us to a very important --

The Chair: Unfortunately, our time is up, gentlemen. We appreciate your appearance before us and your interest in our project. I hate to cut you off.

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Mr Hogg: I'd just like to say that we have had an instance where school boards aren't working. We agree with that.

ALICIA PAYNE

The Chair: Our next presenter is Alicia Payne. Welcome, and the floor is yours.

Ms Alicia Payne: Committee members, thank you for providing me with an opportunity to be here. I am here before you to say that I wish there was no need for employment equity legislation. I wish this because it would mean that we lived in a society where we respect one another, celebrate our differences and recognize our similarities, a society in which we acknowledge the fact that we are all human beings and are equal.

Many people mistakenly believe that racism and discrimination are no longer problems in our society. Acts of discrimination often remain invisible to some members while they are blatant to those who continue to experience them. Modern forms of discrimination are insidious. They have become acceptable. Many of them are so ingrained in our collective conscience that they are systemic.

Employment equity is one way to combat and rectify systemic discrimination while establishing a model to prevent discrimination from manifesting itself in employment practices of the future. I sometimes hear people say that employment equity is unfair because it is meant to address systemic discrimination from the past. What they forget is that systemic discrimination still happens -- right now, in the present.

For example, because of an oversight in our legal system, Ontarians lack protection from discrimination by foreign-based employers who are not designated as "operating" in Ontario by the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, Canadian Human Rights Commission, Employment Equity Commission, Ministry of Labour and the federal departments of Foreign Affairs and International Trade all claim that they have no jurisdiction over foreign-based employers.

With employment equity, employers can identify barriers in their hiring process and remove them. They determine their own goals and develop their own plans and timetables for complying. Employment equity is not a quota law. Since when is analysing resources and setting numerical targets bad for business? The business community frequently uses statistical information to monitor their industries. They then set all kinds of numerical targets for sales figures, expansion of client bases and capturing of market share. Why the outcry when it comes to analysing our human resources and setting numerical targets to ensure that our workforce reflects the community?

Many myths exist about employment equity. One such myth is that employment equity leads to lower standards and the hiring of unqualified applicants. What an insulting assumption. Employment equity assumes that you can find qualified employees within the designated groups. People who insist that employment equity will result in unqualified people being hired are insinuating that people from the designated groups are inferior and therefore will be unqualified.

Let's talk about qualifications. Is there always only one most-qualified person or best person for a job? Think of how many times you yourself may have applied for a job and been turned down. Do you really believe that you and everyone else who didn't get that job were unqualified? Or is the reality probably that you and some of the other applicants each offered different qualifications and could have done the job but there was only one opening?

How do we decide who is the most qualified? Employers don't usually give candidates an opportunity to perform the actual job they're applying for in the environment in which they will be working. Therefore, comparisons between candidates are not usually based on actual job performance. That's one of the reasons employers have probationary periods. New employees don't always work out, even with impeccable qualifications on paper and excellent references. Consequently, do we truly hire the best person for the job or do we hire someone we think will be the best person for the job?

The way we think is influenced by many things, including our personal experiences, personal preferences and the prevailing attitudes of the society we live in. The existence of racism and discrimination is irrefutable within the historical context of Canadian society. There was the mistreatment of aboriginal peoples. We had slavery right here in Canada between 1628 and 1833. It was legal and it was practised. Canada had racist immigration laws which discouraged and barred non-whites from entering the country. The Chinese Immigration Act is one example. Canada also refused to accept Jewish refugees escaping from the Holocaust.

The attitudes that permitted these abuses have not disappeared. There is modern-day evidence that certain groups are still discriminated against and denied opportunities for full participation in society. The attitudes that breed hatred and result in discriminatory behaviour are very present in our society. There is cause for much concern in the growth of the Heritage Front and similar organizations not just here in Ontario but around the world, and the racist behaviour of Canada's so-called peacekeepers in Somalia. Dare I mention the racist and sexist comments of not one but two of Quebec's leaders? And what about the comments made by the mayor of Markham, Ontario? To paraphrase Professor Irving Abella, how have we allowed ourselves to become a nation of immigrants who hate immigration? Discrimination in the workplace is very real.

In 1988 the Canadian Recruiters Guild released a study suggesting discrimination was rampant among professional job recruiters. In 1991 the newspaper headlines in Toronto reported an Ontario Human Rights Commission raid on two employment agencies, TES and Ian Martin. These agencies were discriminating against candidates on the basis of such things as age, marital status, religion, physical handicap, ethnic group -- or at least the ethnic group the consultants thought the candidates belonged to -- and accent.

Employers were asking these employment agencies to break the law and the agencies complied. Members of the four designated groups under employment equity are particularly susceptible to this type of discrimination. Ultimately, all Ontarians are susceptible.

What were the agencies doing? They were coding job application forms and résumés. For example, a paper clip on a résumé could mean Chinese and an asterisk beside a name could indicate that the person is handicapped. Sometimes they would simply write "Black" or "Jewish" or "Married" on the forms.

In 1991 the Toronto Star interviewed several agency consultants who admitted that coded language, verbal and written, is one way to meet discriminatory requests without getting caught. The consultants could shield clients from workers who wouldn't "feel comfortable" or "fit in." In one agency, "As a rule of thumb, visible minorities were sent over for filing or accounting positions out of the public's view."

This type of discrimination is insidious. It's easy to hide and it's difficult to prove. In fact the Ontario Human Rights Commission became aware of it only because a former employee of both agencies came forward with the revelations. This type of discrimination still happens today.

These two agencies were caught. Were they the only ones? What about all the employers who asked them to discriminate? Many of these companies are probably still operating. What changes in the system have been put in place since 1991 to stop employers from making these discriminatory requests? Employment equity legislation is a measure to protect employees from this type of discrimination.

What happened to the two agencies? Despite evidence which some commissioners thought clearly showed that the agencies were breaking the law, the Ontario Human Rights Commission chose to settle the matter at the regional level.

A policy manual at one agency stated:

"Because most of our staff work on the premises of clients and must fit in well, we find that a person's `fitability' is almost as important, if not more important, than her actual skills.... Usually unstated preferences or prejudices will exist with the particular individual on the client's staff for whom our girl will work. Such should be determined as quickly as possible, usually by an indirect approach, and taken into account when assigning someone. Also such items as young/old, citizen/non-citizen etc can be important."

Remember, employers were asking the recruiters to discriminate and the recruiters complied. It is now 1995 and the file on these two agencies was apparently closed this month. How was the situation resolved? I don't know. Since the case was resolved at the regional level and did not go to a board of inquiry, the settlement is confidential between the agencies and the OHRC. It is not a matter of public record. Is there any doubt that the behaviour of these two agencies had the effect of denying people equal opportunities to compete for jobs? How is the public interest being served by keeping these settlements secret?

Members of designated groups usually have less seniority than other workers. Remember, these are the groups which have faced the most damaging and persistent kinds of discrimination in employment. The current economic climate and trend towards downsizing means that many of the gains made by the designated groups are already becoming undone. In times of economic difficulty and high unemployment, people fear for their jobs, so they don't report discrimination as much. They put up with it. They shouldn't have to.

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Repealing employment equity and replacing it with a non-legislated equal opportunity plan means that employers who have consciously or unconsciously discriminated against the designated groups can and will continue to discriminate unless they are held accountable for these actions.

Minister Marilyn Mushinski claims that one of the reasons for repealing employment equity is that the Ontario Human Rights Commission can deal with the complaints. The OHRC already has an enormous backlog of cases and its present system actually discourages people from filing complaints.

Employment equity legislation helps prevent individuals in the designated groups from encountering the type of discrimination that has resulted in the backlog that rendered the OHRC dysfunctional. Why continue to send individuals to the commission with the same types of complaints? Why not help larger numbers of people at the same time by preventing discrimination in the first place?

Even with the support of the law, investigators at the OHRC don't always get the cooperation of employers. How will replacing employment equity with a non-legislated -- therefore optional compliance -- equal opportunity plan deal with the very real problem of racial discrimination in the workplace? It won't. How will encouraging victims to go to the already overburdened and dysfunctional OHRC help deal with the problem? It won't.

What of the already enlightened employers who voluntarily intend to continue with employment equity initiatives even if Bill 8 goes through? How will requiring proactive employers to destroy the information they've already gathered help deal with the very real problem of racial discrimination in the workforce? The passing of Bill 8 would also adversely affect proactive measures in the areas of policing and education.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police how-to manual 2, Police Race Relations: The Recruitment, Selection and Retention of Visible Minorities, states, "In ongoing efforts to improve race relations in Canada, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police passed a resolution on employment equity at the 1992 annual conference in Victoria, BC." The police are starting to develop forces that will reflect the communities they serve. Why does the government want to reverse these advances with Bill 8?

Education: Let us not forget that schools in Ontario were segregated until 1964. As Carol Tator has said, "Unless sweeping changes take place which penetrate all aspects of educational practice, our society's racist culture will continue to be transmitted to our children."

If anything, employment equity legislation is not comprehensive enough because it does not apply to every employer in the province. Employment equity legislation helps combat discrimination in the workplace and provides a model to prevent it from happening again, regardless of how the demographics of the population and the available workforce change.

In many ways our society is still tolerant of discriminatory behaviour. It has been said that discrimination is against the law under the Human Rights Code, the foundation for equal opportunity in our province. The OHRC is the enforcer of that code. We only need to look at the dysfunctional state of the OHRC to realize that equal opportunity in this province has no stable foundation.

Discrimination may seem like a serious crime on paper, but when it comes time to enforce our laws, discrimination is a low-priority crime. Right now, the OHRC is not helping victims effectively or efficiently. Those lucky enough or resilient enough to get help sometimes have to wait five to seven years for a resolution.

How would you feel in this situation? You're the victim of an assault. You know your attacker and you have the bruises to prove it. You call the police and report it. The police say: "Have you tried talking to the person who allegedly attacked you? They might not know what they did or maybe it wasn't done on purpose." You say: "No, I haven't spoken to them. Did you hear me? I just said I was attacked." The police say, "Call back after you've tried talking to them." You call the police back and they say, "Okay, we'll talk to them and call you back." The police call you back six or seven or eight months later and say, "We talked to the alleged offender and they said that nothing happened the way you said it did."

Perhaps you start to get agitated. You know that you're not imagining things. You were attacked. You assure the police that you're not overreacting and you ask them to investigate. The police say, "Okay, we'll start our investigation in about a year or so. Maybe." How would you feel if the police didn't bother to investigate at all? Would you be outraged? Most people would be. Victims of discrimination are routinely treated this way by the OHRC.

Would we as the individuals who make up our society tolerate the police routinely telling crime victims that they don't know when they'll start their investigation? I hope not. Why then do we let the OHRC do this? The OHRC polices discrimination crimes. Why do they start many of their investigations a year or two after the crimes have been reported? That's if a case even gets to the investigation stage.

Our government doesn't intend to reform the OHRC until, and I quote, the "longer term." Just how far away is the longer term? Much of the public is unaware of how extremely dysfunctional the commission is. Far too many victims of discrimination know. You'll know too if you read The Donna Young Report, The Handling of Race Discrimination Complaints at the Ontario Human Rights Commission and/or Dysfunction in the Human Rights Complaints System. I've provided copies of both; I urge you to read them.

How does addressing the problem at the OHRC in the undefined longer term help victims now? Employment equity plans will include measures to benefit most people in the workplace, not just the designated groups.

From recent events in this province, it is obvious that the government is committed to repealing employment equity legislation. Employment equity is not reverse discrimination. The very term "reverse discrimination" implies that initial acts of discrimination have already occurred. It is extremely selfish for any dominant group to cry reverse discrimination whenever disadvantaged groups try to address employment inequities.

The government is misguided in thinking that Bill 8 will "restore fairness in hiring," as they have stated. How do you restore something that never existed? Employment equity isn't about taking opportunities away; it's about eliminating barriers to employment and ensuring that all groups have the same advantages and opportunities.

Non-existent employment equity legislation, coupled with a dysfunctional Human Rights Commission, will leave a gaping wound in our society. A non-legislated -- read optional compliance -- equal opportunity plan will not be enough to fill that wound.

Why obliterate employment equity? Why not capitalize on its strengths and strengthen its weaknesses? If it must go, employment equity should be replaced by stronger and more comprehensive legislation that will really lead us towards discrimination-free workplaces: powerful legislation that will recognize past and present inequities.

Failing that, the government should reform the Ontario Human Rights Commission now, not in the longer term. The reforms must address discrimination in both hiring and promoting practices. If employment equity is repealed and replaced by a non-legislated plan, then we Ontarians are at the mercy of the OHRC to defend our human rights.

According to Premier Michael D. Harris, "Discrimination is against the law under the Human Rights Code, the foundation of equal opportunity in our province." I have this to say: Since the Ontario Human Rights Commission is the cornerstone of that foundation, the foundation has crumbled and we in Ontario have much to be ashamed of.

The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. All of the time allotted to this particular witness has been used up, so there's no time for questions. We appreciate your participation in our process.

The committee stands in recess until 7 o'clock. This morning Mr McLarren said he had some other information available that he would share with us. He has now made it available for anyone who's interested. At 7 o'clock we reconvene.

The committee recessed from 1749 to 1908.

BLOOR INFORMATION AND LEGAL SERVICES

The Chair: The first group is the Bloor Information and Legal Services, represented by Surjan Zirvi and Anna Pratt.

Just to remind the board members, and a special welcome to Mrs Caplan and Mr DeFaria, who are here for the first time tonight, tonight's presentations are only 15 minutes rather than what we were doing this afternoon, so you folks have 15 minutes to use as you see fit, leaving time for questions. The floor is yours.

Mr Surjan Zirvi: Thank you very much. We will not use much of your time. We'll perhaps finish our presentation within a few minutes.

Honourable members of the hearing committee, we are here from the Bloor Information and Legal Services to urge upon this government not to repeal the Employment Equity Act.

Bloor Information and Legal Services is a community-based information centre and legal clinic which provides services to communities in the west end of the city of Toronto. We have 11 staff members and provide services to our communities in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. We appear before this committee both as community advocates and as employers who believe in employment equity.

We support the Employment Equity Act in its goal of removing systemic barriers in the recruitment, hiring, retention, treatment and promotion of employees. As community advocates we know that systemic discrimination in employment in Ontario does exist. Persons who belong to the groups designated in the Employment Equity Act -- racial minorities, aboriginal, persons with disabilities and women -- do experience higher rates of unemployment than other people and are underrepresented in most areas of employment. We hear the experiences of discrimination in employment from persons within these designated groups when they come to BILS, our agency, for assistance.

We beg to disagree with the statement of the minister that the said act ought to be repealed because it introduces a quota system for hiring and promotions. The act nowhere commands any quota figures, neither does it say that it applies to all employers uniformly. The act is not inflexible either. All it says is that each employer should develop his or her own individual plan for hiring and promoting on the basis of requisite qualifications without any prejudice to gender, race and disabilities.

Yes, the Human Rights Code is there and it prohibits discrimination in employment, but it is our experience that the existence of this provision has not had a significant impact on redressing employment discrimination. The code has been a part of law of this province since 1981, and still systemic discrimination in employment persists. Moreover, the code sets up a reactive system to discrimination which requires a complaint before there is action taken. Alternatively, the Employment Equity Act created a proactive system which required initiative on behalf of employers to examine their workplace practices for potential barriers and to take steps to redress those barriers.

There are significant delays involved in the processing of a human rights complaint such that it could involve several years before the Human Rights Commission finally resolves the issue involved in the complaint. This period of time can act as a deterrent to potential complaints. The advantage of proactive legislation which requires an employer's action within a certain time frame is that it puts the responsibility on the employer to address discrimination now rather than to wait for possible individual human rights complaints.

The groups identified in the Employment Equity Act have been historically disadvantaged in employment. The limited resources and mandate of the Human Rights Commission make it extremely difficult for the commission to accelerate the rate of progress for those groups which have been disadvantaged for so long.

As an employer we prepared and followed an anti-racism plan of action prior to the introduction of the Employment Equity Act because we saw the need for this kind of plan for our workplace. We actively recruit throughout the communities in Toronto in order to ensure that qualified persons are aware of employment opportunities at BILS.

Prior to the introduction of the act, we believed that we were a model employer with respect to ensuring that discrimination was absent from our employment practices. Throughout implementation of the act, we learned that there were barriers in our practices also, particularly in qualifications that we used for hiring new staff.

We again urge upon this government not to repeal the Employment Equity Act. We believe that this legislation is crucial to ensuring that the systemic discrimination in employment is addressed in Ontario. We need legislation to ensure that qualified persons have access to employment without barriers based on gender, race and disability. We need legislation to ensure that employers set fair hiring standards, recruit actively and make hiring decisions in a non-discriminatory way.

The Chair: We've got a few minutes for questions, starting with Mr Marchese. You have about two and a half minutes, sir.

Mr Marchese: We believed, and as NDPers we still believe, that government needs to intervene in order to bring about justice and alleviate or reduce discrimination and inequities. They say they oppose discrimination but that we should do this whole matter of equity in a voluntary way.

One of the members, Mr Young, said they too believe in intervention, but it should be through the Human Rights Code. We argue the Human Rights Code and Human Rights Commission respond to people's complaints where in fact they do respond or put a complaint through. We know there are thousands of people out there who don't even know how to do that and do not do that; we know that where they do, there are delays anywhere from one year to five years or seven years.

They say they're going to be fed up; I say they're not. They're not going to put much money into that, and even if they do, it doesn't deal with systemic discrimination. Do you have a view on that?

Mr Zirvi: As I've already mentioned, the human rights process is very delaying, and very rarely do cases go to human rights. I have absolutely no figures about that, but it's not a question of one person; it's a question of groups, of sections of the society which are deprived of an equitable approach or access to employment.

I think, as we have already mentioned in our presentation, that government intervention is a necessity, even if it is in the shape of guidelines to the employers, and this should be done. In our view, the act which the government intends to repeal gives only those kinds of guidelines to the employers and leaves it to them to develop a plan of their own to ensure that equity is in place at their workplace. They will have to develop that plan according to the conditions which are prevailing in that area or in their own business. But the onus will be, of course, on employers, and I think it is the minimum which a government should do to direct employers.

Mr Carl DeFaria (Mississauga East): I would like to just ask you a couple of questions. The Bloor Information and Legal Services covers a certain portion in the west end. Do you know what the percentage, for example, of the population that you serve is of Portuguese background?

Mr Zirvi: I don't have exact figures, but Portuguese is of course one of the major sections of that community: Portuguese, Spanish, and of course Punjabis and other communities together.

Mr DeFaria: How many lawyers do you have?

Mr Zirvi: Two lawyers, in fact, and two sort of volunteer lawyers who work with our clinic, and some other law workers are also working there.

Mr DeFaria: Are either of the lawyers of Portuguese background?

Mr Zirvi: No, but we have a worker who deals with Portuguese clients there.

Mr DeFaria: But you don't have lawyers of Portuguese background on staff?

Mr Zirvi: No. In fact I doubt if each community can have a lawyer in a community centre like that, because we are a very small community centre. But it doesn't mean that we do not attempt to draw lawyers as such and workers out there in place.

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Mr DeFaria: You agree, though, that the Portuguese --

Mr Zirvi: Portuguese lawyers, you know, if there is a vacancy and a Portuguese lawyer applies for it, I think he can get the place if he qualifies for that. No doubt.

Ms Anna Pratt: If I may, I'm not sure what the point of your question is, but certainly if there are --

Mr DeFaria: That's the largest community --

Ms Pratt: I realize that. Expertise in the law is certainly one thing, and familiarity with the Portuguese community and the Portuguese language is another. Now, we offer services in Portuguese for the Portuguese constituents. They will be working through somebody whose first language is not Portuguese; however, that person has the expertise in the law that is necessary in order to provide the service to the Portuguese constituents.

Mrs Elinor Caplan (Oriole): What I've heard you say is that you hire on the basis of merit, but you look for people who can serve your community. Also, if the government were to provide additional funding for your clinic you could expand your staff to have more help in the community. Is that correct?

Mr Zirvi: We'd love to because we are under great pressure these days about our clients. The number of clients are continuously increasing and we will be very grateful if the government considers increasing our funding and we are able to have different community lawyers.

Mrs Caplan: I wouldn't suggest you hold your breath waiting for that to happen. The question I did want to ask you was if you could give us some examples of the kind of systemic barriers that some of your clients have faced that only legislation could address.

Mr Zirvi: For example, we can see the effect of the atmosphere in the advertisements which are appearing in the newspapers. I happened to go through some of the advertisements five or six months back when this act was there. In every advertisement it was especially mentioned that aboriginals and disabled are welcome to apply for this post. Now that's absolutely absent in all ads appearing in the papers. That's one thing.

Second is Canadian experience, which is a very big kind of barrier. Even if the person is qualified and has the experience, they were rejected with the plea that, "You don't have Canadian experience" and all that.

There are other kinds of things, very subtle. It's not that those are very sort of blatant or open, but the things are there, as we all know and experience.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Mrs Caplan: One last question?

The Chair: Your time is up, Mrs Caplan.

I appreciate your coming to be part of our process and your presentation.

Mr Zirvi: Thank you for being patient with us.

ABUL HASAN COMMUNITY RESOURCE CENTRE

The Chair: The next presenters are from the Abul Hasan Community Resource Centre: Tarek Fatah, Salim Ahmad and Rashid Hasan. Good evening, gentlemen. You have 15 minutes to use as you see fit. The questions, should you have time for them, will begin with the government.

Mr Tarek Fatah: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'd just like to introduce the centre first. The Abul Hasan Community Resource Centre is a non-profit charitable organization that has been providing counselling services in the areas of employment and immigrant settlement in the GTA since 1992. It is totally funded by private donations and does not receive any government support.

We strongly believe in the principles of community-based self-help in assisting segments of society that are less fortunate and face discrimination in employment and business. Our efforts to help the community through private and voluntary services should not be construed as any endorsement of policies that aim to dismantle government services and hand them to the private sector. In fact the Abul Hasan centre aims to complement what we expect the public sector should be doing in the first place.

In short, we are the front line when it comes to facing the effects of unemployment as a result of systemic discrimination.

As a community-based organization, we read the text of Bill 8 and were deeply disturbed by the title. It says it is "An Act to repeal job quotas and to restore merit-based employment practices in Ontario." It is our belief that the employment equity law being repealed by Bill 8 was not about quotas. However, the present government believes it is so and there is very little we can do about their ideological point of view. We believe that the real quotas that do exist come in the professions of medicine, accounting and engineering. We find the inability of this government to remove quotas from these professions a contradiction in its policies, to say the least.

But our real concern is with the latter part of the title of Bill 8, which refers to the restoration of the merit-based principle. "To restore" means that such a system existed. When and where, may I ask, did this merit-based principle exist?

Was it concern for merit when employment agencies were asked by their clients to short-list only white persons?

Is it a result of merit that 99.3% of all top executives in Canada are white males and only 0.7% of them women?

When over 20 members of a police chief's family is working for the same police force, does merit play any part?

Does the merit principle cause most front-line fast-food operators to be coloured and most top positions in that industry to be white and male?

And is it the merit formula that causes an overwhelming number of taxi drivers to be of Asian or African descent?

Ladies and gentlemen, we feel there can be one of two explanations as to why the government has chosen to call this bill the restoration of the merit principles.

(1) Either the government sincerely believes that prior to the enactment of the employment equity law all hiring was based on merit; or

(2) The government has deliberately distorted the truth about hiring practices to suit its ideological position.

Both explanations are scary. In the first instance, it shows how far the government is from the facts, and if the second were true, visible minorities are in real trouble. This makes our work as a community service organization very difficult. As a direct result of Bill 8, we feel even more doors to employment and promotion of visible minorities will be closed.

To the government members, I would like to urge them to see and feel the pain that their action will cause to thousands of households who saw a ray of hope for their children in the federal and provincial employment equity laws. By repealing the provincial law, you are further consolidating the myth that visible minorities are incompetent and do not possess this so-called merit.

It is not a coincidence that a high proportion of professions that do not guarantee a fixed income, like real estate agents, life insurance salespersons or even retail operators, are overrepresented by visible minorities.

Let me assure you, ladies and gentlemen, there is no genetic trait that forces visible minorities to choose these risky and low-paying self-employment positions. It is the inability of the unregulated free market to provide decent jobs that pushes such a high proportion of immigrants into low-paying self-employment with high risks.

We have heard repeatedly that language skills are the real reason for higher unemployment among the visible minority communities. Is it not strange that the black community that only speaks English has one of the highest rates of unemployment? Surely that takes language out of the question, unless what is really at issue is the right accent.

There are other explanations for the high levels of unemployment in the visible minority communities, 15% among blacks and 16% among South Asians. Another popular explanation is that we are going through a recession.

Let me give you a true story of the experience of one South Asian immigrant in the booming economy of 1988, when no one was talking about the debt, being too busy, I guess, flipping real estate and speculating in futures.

He was an advertising executive having handled accounts such as IBM, Daimler-Benz, White Consolidated and Massey-Ferguson in the Middle East. He had a background in TV production and filmmaking, having covered the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Advertising was considered a profession in high demand by Immigration Canada in the 1980s and worldwide there was a boom in the revenues of advertising agencies.

This person found to his surprise that jobs in the advertising industry were never advertised in the mainstream press and were almost exclusively based on referrals. After applying to every advertising agency in the GTA for an entry-level position, he could not get a single interview. This at a time when the economy was booming. This immigrant ultimately had to buy himself a job by acquiring a franchise, which is another story.

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Another myth about high unemployment among visible minorities is that they do not have the proper educational qualifications or their overseas credentials are not equivalent to Canadian standards.

Let me expose this myth as well. In 1993, I met a security guard who asked me to help him get a better job. On inquiring about his education, I was startled to find out that he had a PhD from the University of Toronto. Dr Aminur Rahim had struggled to find a better source of living but failed to find a decent job. I have been told he has left Canada and has found employment in Nigeria because of his PhD from Canada.

So, ladies and gentlemen, no matter how you look at it, the scales are weighed against visible minorities and it is not merit that is the issue.

At the Abul Hasan Community Resource Centre, we receive hundreds of stories of unemployed or underemployed people who are fast losing faith in themselves and their dignity.

Only last week I received a résumé of this immigrant from Bangladesh who had a degree in chemical engineering from a university in Great Britain, with training in Austria, Singapore and Indonesia. This gentleman's expertise in water management and purification is being wasted because the system is structured in such a way he will never find out the right door to knock on. Merit, ladies and gentlemen, is hardly the key factor the private sector is looking for in its employment practices.

The private sector, run by what the Financial Post describes as a boys' club, is not looking for merit. Otherwise, why wouldn't most jobs get advertised? We feel the boys' club is looking for the "right fit" and the code word for this fit is "merit." Unfortunately, people whose names or looks fall outside the right fit are often the ones serving hamburgers or driving cabs in Ontario.

In conclusion, I urge this government and the members here not to abandon fairness in employment and the most underprivileged sections of Ontario by repealing the employment equity law. A short-sighted move now will hurt a lot of people who do not have the means or the capability to put across their point of view or to fight for it.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We have about two minutes each for questions, starting with Mr Young.

Mr Young: The first thing I'd like to mention is, I do know a company in Toronto that's looking for 100 chemists right now, so if you'd like to talk to me after or give me your card or something, we'll follow it up for that gentleman.

Mr Fatah: I will reply to that. Would you please ask that company to advertise it?

Mr Young: I imagine they are. I don't know if they are. I invited them out to a job fair in my riding and they came and they were advertising in the high school. They're looking for chemists, so we could talk about that.

Mr Fatah: Thank you very much.

Mr Young: I would certainly agree with you that there's discrimination in our society; there's no question about it. Where we disagree is on the quotas, on the numbers. I want to tell you that our equal opportunity plan will include support for access to trades and professions. It's going to be one of the key pillars of that, so I appreciate your feedback on that also.

I have a real problem with numbers because numbers don't tell the whole story and I see your numbers here. It takes a long time to become a top executive of a company in Canada. We do have one, I can think of one, the lady who is president of General Motors of Canada, and there are a lot of medium-sized companies and small companies that have female presidents. If you look at the trends, that's happening more often all the time.

With the 20 members of the police chief's family working, is it not possible, and this is what I want to ask you, that those boys or girls in that family admired their father so much that they went into school and studied and became experts in that area and they actually qualified for those jobs?

Is it also not possible that many, many of the minorities can't get positions -- and I know there are many who are well educated -- because they don't have the training and because they don't necessarily have the education that's needed?

The Chair: Mr Young, if you want to have time for an answer, you'd better wrap up the question.

Mr Young: Sorry. The bottom line is, it's not just discrimination, there are other things. Don't you agree that there are other things that prevent visible minorities from getting jobs, or women?

Mr Fatah: I would not agree with that. One basic thing: I know how police cadets get jobs and it's got nothing to do with merit. It's inside referrals. Cadets get in and these jobs that are advertised, if you go into the police force and look at the atmosphere in which this recruitment is done, it is by itself a detriment for someone to go there.

Firefighters and police forces, no matter how tough the job seems, they're secure, they're 9 to 5, they're unionized and they are protected, well paid. This is where rocket science is not involved. This is where PhDs are not involved. This is where you start at grade 12. If these simple professions are blocked out, what I'm saying is -- and I'll give you an example of the TTC drivers --

The Chair: I am going to have to go on to the next question, unfortunately.

Mrs Caplan: I want to thank you. I think you've documented very well the issues of systemic discrimination. This piece of legislation has one section in it that actually refers directly to quotas, and that is the power of the commission to impose quotas if the employer has not fulfilled the obligations of the act in a reasonable period of time.

If you were wanting to remove quotas from the act and, as the name implies, restore a non-quota system, do you think that could be accomplished if you just eliminated that one section and took the power to impose quotas and left everything else? Would that satisfy the desire of the government to remove the notion of quotas?

Mr Fatah: I don't think so, but I'm really answering this more from a philosophical point of view. The very nature of the title is misleading. Everything else that follows, all the good nature that might be there -- if you're starting with a falsehood, how could we?

Mrs Caplan: I guess the point that I'm making is since the title says that their intent is to eliminate quotas and it's easily done by the repeal of one section, wouldn't that be better than a repeal of the whole legislation?

Mr Fatah: It could be. It could be debated that this could be a possibility.

Mr Marchese: Just to correct Ms Caplan -- and I was just checking it out because I was Chair of the justice committee while we did these hearings -- I never read or heard that the commission would have the power to impose quotas. It would have the power possibly to impose a plan, but not quotas. If Ms Caplan thinks that I am wrong, you should ask the ministry person who is here to correct us both.

But we need to be very careful about what we say, because we fall into the same trap the Conservatives put us in, and that's where people like Mr Young say they are against quotas and they continue to say that. Perhaps they have a strange definition of quotas that we don't quite understand, but this bill is not about quotas.

If they wanted to deal with quotas, they could do what one constitutional lawyer came to say this morning, and that is if you want to say in the bill that there shall be no quotas, you could do that. We could agree with that. But I'm not quite sure that's what they would want. In either case, we believe we need a bill like Bill 79 to deal with systemic discrimination and they obviously don't. They have an equal opportunity plan that hasn't worked for 30 years and that will bring us back to the old age, discriminatory practices that we haven't been able to solve. That's their plan.

Mr Fatah: I would agree that -- I've read Bill 79. I did not see any mention of quotas over there. I've extensively read the regulations. It was not the total answer to all the world's problems of employment, but I certainly think that what the Financial Post, which is no left-wing journal, said about the situation of employment in this province or this country could be rectified if Bill 79 had been there, and if the intent was to repeal quotas, this lawyer would be in a better position to do it. So just add that over there.

But we are facing -- it's a human issue for us. Please walk in our shoes for a day. Please travel the TTC and see what is happening out there.

The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate your attendance here tonight and being part of our system.

Mrs Caplan: On a point of order, Mr Chair: Mr Marchese -- I want to be very careful in my choice of words -- when he acknowledged that this legislation imposes a plan, that is the definition that most have accepted as quota. The imposition of a plan with numbers in it is what we mean as a quota.

Mr Marchese: But that's not a quota.

The Chair: I don't think that's a point of order.

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ACCESS ACTION COUNCIL

The Chair: Our next presenters are from the Access Action Council of Metro Toronto, Dr Ibrahim Conteh, and Hamid Rezvani. Good evening, gentlemen. You have 15 minutes. If you allow some time for questions at the end, we will be starting with the Liberals. Excuse me, just so that the lady from Hansard, Pat, knows who's doing the talking, could you introduce yourselves, please.

Mr Hamid Rezvani: My name is Hamid Rezvani. I have to apologize on behalf of Dr Conteh. He couldn't come here tonight. Instead of him, Mr Jared Purdy is here, who is another member of the board of directors, Access Action Council. If I may start, I will read the very handsomely prepared memo and then I will leave most of the issues which are going to be addressed here -- very familiar -- we prefer to have most of the time for the questions and answers.

On behalf of Access Action Council of Metropolitan Toronto, we thank this committee for giving us the opportunity to express our views regarding Bill 8, An Act to repeal job quotas and to restore merit-based employment practices in Ontario.

Our agency is an independent, community-based organization dedicated to advocating for fair and equitable access to human services for members of cultural and racial groups in greater Metropolitan Toronto. Access Action Council provides forums and carries out public education activities to influence change in government institutions and the human service delivery system. Access Action Council has 80 members. Its work is carried out through a board of 14 directors.

We are disappointed that the Ontario government has introduced Bill 8 to repeal the Employment Equity Act, Bill 79. We believe that the Employment Equity Act provided concrete and legislated solutions to some of the most important systemic inequities in Ontario. We also felt that within a relatively short period of time Bill 79 had symbolically reinforced major equity initiatives in the province, and for the first time members of the designated groups felt that they were not only recognized in the workplace but also given an opportunity to address the impact of the inequities.

Specifically, the proposed Bill 8 will negatively impact the following areas:

It sends the wrong message to all the designated groups of women, racial minorities, aboriginal people and people with disabilities, that this government is opposed to equity.

It impedes the voluntary efforts of organizations and employers who want to use the data collected from the employment equity planning started under the Employment Equity Act, Bill 79.

It takes away the onus of responsibility from the employers to remove barriers from the workplace through long-term planning and instead relies on the overburdened and ineffective institution of the Human Rights Commission, knowing that the Human Rights Commission has not gone beyond acting on personal discrimination and not systemic discrimination.

Although there is not a great deal of evidence to show that members of the designated groups have actually taken any positions without merit or qualifications, they would nevertheless feel vulnerable and subject to discrimination in the workplace without the legislated obligation.

The repeal of the Employment Equity Act would make public education efforts to do with equity more difficult due to the negative and anti-equity climate created as a result of this repeal and the negative context.

In conclusion, we strongly recommend against the repeal of the Employment Equity Act, Bill 79, and stress that the Ontario government build on the positive results and encourage harmony at the workplace and not polarize it.

Mrs Caplan: You've heard the questions that I've asked the other group that made representation before us, both about systemic barriers and also alternatives to the absolute repeal of the legislation. Did you want to make any comment on that so we could be looking at alternatives before this committee?

Mr Rezvani: I would rather that Mr Jared Purdy respond to this.

Mr Jared Purdy: I'd like you to repeat the question again, please.

Mrs Caplan: I was asking if you wanted to identify any specific systemic barriers that members of your organization or community have experienced and also, as opposed to a repeal of the legislation, if you've thought of an alternative, which might be just an amendment?

Mr Purdy: I think I'll deal with the first part of the question. You've got two questions; I'll deal with question number 1 first. Access Action Council is composed of a diversity of groups, so it's really difficult to speak of it in terms of any one particular community. With reference to citing specific examples of systemic discrimination in different workplaces, Access Action Council has been involved with various community groups and agencies over a number of years since its inception through the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto.

I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to speak about specific incidents as they relate to a particular agency, and certainly not to any other individuals, particularly where names are concerned, simply because of the nature of disclosing human rights violations.

Mrs Caplan: I was asking for examples, not specific names and cases. Of course, we want to respect confidentiality, but I think it's important for the committee to hear the kinds of experiences that members from your diverse organization have had and why you support this legislation and the need for it.

Mr Purdy: A lot of the work that Access Action Council has been involved in in the recent past has been through education, as well as through health care, as well as through a number of service agencies that deal primarily with youth -- as of late there was also some work with seniors -- relating to access problems; in other words, the problems that various members of diverse communities were having with accessing those services because there were barriers in place, whether the barriers were intentional or unintentional. That's often an issue that people like to raise, the intentional versus unintentional nature of problems. To the person who's on the receiving end of that practice, whether it's intentional or unintentional doesn't matter at all.

Mr Marchese: Mr Purdy, there is no doubt they will repeal Bill 79 -- we don't doubt that for a moment -- in its entirety. They might make one minor change based on information, but other than that, they are likely to repeal everything as we know it.

They're proposing several things. First, they say, "We're against discrimination," so that makes them all feel great. Secondly, they say, "Zero tolerance with respect to discrimination," so that makes them sound good. Third, "We will work with employers to make them carry out some plans so that they deal with this." I'm not sure how they will do that with all these thousands of employers across the land, but they're going to work with them voluntarily. Finally, "We have the Human Rights Commission and Human Rights Code, which will take care of discrimination." Does that give you comfort?

Mr Purdy: I would find more comfort, and I think Access Action Council and its member agencies would find a considerably higher degree of comfort, if there were a lot more specifics raised with respect to how these things are going to be done in a spirit that is going to bring results and in a spirit that is going to guarantee or suggest that systemic issues will be addressed, as opposed to the individual nature with which the Human Rights Commission tends to deal with things, in a very incremental type of fashion.

Mr Marchese: Same thing to tell you.

Mr Clement: I was interested in your remarks about the anti-equity climate and the negative context. We have had some deputations over the past few days where people have said that in fact employment equity programs can create a negative climate for visible minorities or other designated groups, because people feel that they got a job not because of their intrinsic merit but because of some quota program. How would you respond to that criticism of employment equity plans?

Mr Purdy: I find it very interesting when we use expressions that have become quite popular as of late, such as this thing we call "reverse discrimination," or when we talk about things such as how equity, as you suggested it, has a negative impact on members of those designated groups. I think what we're talking about there are very specific and singular examples. We're not talking about massive generalities and we're not talking about a broader systemic problem that employment equity created by trying to address past inequities. We're talking about things that come up and problems that come up in the course of action and that are often taken out of context.

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This issue of reverse discrimination is tied very closely to what you're talking about. Reverse discrimination, being the label that it is, is making reference to white people who have suffered as a result, a consequence, of employment equity. I would really like to see concrete numbers in terms of how many white people suffered as a consequence of employment equity. I've never seen any numbers and I've never even heard mention of them. I've only heard of this thing called reverse discrimination.

Mr Young: Our responsibility as government is to try and protect equal opportunity for all people.

Mr Purdy: Of course.

Mr Young: We have a concern because this legislation only addresses four groups. I have a concern about other groups that have been discriminated against historically that the legislation does not address and probably could never address: their discrimination. I wanted to get your comment on that.

I also wanted to ask you, do you think it's fair when an employer like the government of Ontario or the Ontario College of Art publishes an ad in the paper that indicates, either covertly or overtly, that they will not be hiring white males?

Mr Purdy: Okay, you've asked me two questions. The first one was in reference to groups that have historically or traditionally been discriminated against.

Mr Young: It could be Polish people or Jews or homosexuals or whatever.

Mr Purdy: Absolutely. I think that employment equity speaks to those issues. It's not simply making a statement on the basis of race alone. In fact, more often than not it was making a statement on broader ethnoracial issues, of which ethnicity is one.

Mr Young: But what does this bill do about it?

The Chair: Mr Young, you've used up your time. Unfortunately we're on a tight time constraint, so we have to stick within the time. We appreciate your coming to present to us.

JANAKI BALAKRISHNAN

The Chair: The next presenter is Janaki Balakrishnan. Good evening and welcome. You have 15 minutes to use as you see fit. If you have time for questions they'll begin with Mr Marchese.

Ms Janaki Balakrishnan: Thank you very much for the time that you have offered to me, Chair of the committee and ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Janaki Balakrishnan. I am an engineer by profession and a politician by beliefs, faith and conviction. Two years ago I was in front of the standing committee that required consultation on Bill 79, the Employment Equity Act. It is sad that I am here today to make a submission on an act to repeal the same. I do not intend to make a long submission and I do not believe that it is required. My discussions are based on only certain items, but not in detail, about the bill.

Destruction takes less time and requires less effort. Development of the Employment Equity Act took a number of years and a number of Ontarians' effort. Here we have a bill on a sheet of paper to repeal that, with no proof that this government has a better alternative to these acts that are going to be repealed.

Proven failure of Premier Harris's merit system within his own caucus: I did not say this. Mr Harris's colleagues said that and the news media publicized it. Here are the Toronto Star news clippings of his colleagues' complaints on appointments by Mr Harris within his own caucus. Can Ontarians rely on Mr Harris's government that it would come up with a better alternative? Will equal opportunity and merit be based on golf skills equally good as Mr Harris's, similar to old-boys' network?

Ontario needs an act to serve many public interest groups that make up Ontarians. Reviewing the list of members and groups who have volunteered to make submissions, these are not new to me. They were the same members and groups who actively participated in and contributed to achieving the Employment Equity Act and who represent the whole of Ontarians collectively. Is this repeal act designed to serve only one special-interest group which formed the present government? That is why I could see a motion here from the senior member of Harris's team, "We won this by ourselves and we owe nothing to anybody and are beholden to nobody."

Taxpayers deserve production, not destruction. The taxpayers contributed a lot in many developments in the last five years. I strongly believe they deserve some production out of the developments, instead of continued destruction by the present government.

I conclude that Bill 8 is introduced against the will of Ontarians. Therefore, I strongly recommend to the government of Ontario to revoke Bill 8.

Finally, I thank the standing committee for the time that you have provided and for having listened to my concerns.

Mr Marchese: Ms Balakrishnan, we thank you for the deputation. We saw you in the previous deputations with Bill 79. I want to ask you a similar kind of question that I asked the others.

I believe many of the members on the other side are sincere when they say they want to rid themselves of discrimination and that they want fairness for all. I suspect they are sincere when they say that. Their plan is the following: zero tolerance, no discrimination, fairness for all, and we're going to work voluntarily with the private sector and the civil service to make sure there is no discrimination or there are no discriminatory practices in the workplace. Where that doesn't work, presumably there's the Human Rights Code and Human Rights Commission. We've had the Human Rights Code for many years, 30 years, and before that under a different name.

I don't believe it's worked. It doesn't deal with systemic discrimination. Where it deals with individual cases it's often long, and it certainly doesn't deal with cases that we never hear about, because most humans I know don't even know the Human Rights Commission exists, and if they do know, they don't know how to even process a claim.

That's their solution. Does it give you comfort in terms of how they're going to deal with discrimination?

Ms Balakrishnan: I do not have to say any more, because I have clearly presented in my submission that having delays is not going to serve the Ontarians any longer. We ourselves have spent a lot of time in consultation on Bill 79. That clearly stated the benefits of the act and how it is going to remove the barriers and how it's going to promote employment equity in a regulated way. Whatever the present government says -- and it's clearly stated by its own members -- voluntary employment is not going to work. I have already worked in the workforce. I have experienced it myself, personally, and it's not going to work unless it is regulated properly.

Ms Bassett: First of all, thank you for your submission. I'd like to say that I am, and certainly our government is, for equal opportunity in the workplace for people of all backgrounds, races and religions. Just because we're going about it in a different way than you would want, by repealing Bill 8, is not to say that we don't have the same goal.

Now, that said, I beg to differ with you when you say that Bill 8 was introduced against the will of Ontarians. Mike Harris outlined very clearly before the election exactly the direction we were going to go. Everybody knew that this was going to happen, and we won the election. Now we have a mandate to do what the people elected us to do. I wonder if you feel we should disregard what the electorate said they wanted us to do or whether we should go ahead and maybe make amendments or whatever. I'd just like your views on that.

Ms Balakrishnan: I have been a politician too in the last election. Mike Harris did not make only this promise, but he had made several others; I do not know whether people have captured the interior, the inner side of it. There were many other promises that he made, that he was going to cut tax and other things, so the votes have not been received only for employment equity.

The numbers do not count only for repealing employment equity, and the Employment Equity Act is already there. If the present government wants to make some modifications, they can work within it rather than repealing it completely and introducing another thing which considerably spends taxpayers' money. That is one of the promises Mr Harris made when he was contesting the election.

Mr Stewart: I was just wondering: In your opinion, how do we stop racism and discrimination that some of the minority groups are practising themselves? I can mention a group; we're hearing about the aboriginal community. You don't see white people working on those reservations. You see disabled. They're all among themselves. You go out to the airport: Security out at the airport is all by basically one group. How do we solve the problem that the minority groups are practising within their own little organizations?

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Ms Balakrishnan: By introducing regulated employment equity, automatically you are going to introduce minority groups within the white-dominated groups, as well as a few white members within the minority groups, so automatically they are going to accept the reality and work within the system.

Mr Stewart: We can't have a few; we have to be equal if we're going to practise it on both sides, and that's the unfortunate part of it, that we're only hearing from certain minority groups. Yet, when we look around, the minority groups that are coming and making presentations to us are not practising it within their own communities.

Ms Balakrishnan: You are saying that you want to be more --

Mr Stewart: No, I want equity for everybody.

Ms Balakrishnan: So "equal" means more than representation in that particular group.

Mr Stewart: No. Equal, ma'am.

The Chair: Mr Stewart, would you let the lady answer the question, please. Are you finished? I was just asking him to quit interrupting you and let you answer the question.

Ms Balakrishnan: Okay, I did not know.

Mr Stewart: I will, Mr Chairman.

The Chair: If you've finished, the time is up. Are you finished?

Ms Balakrishnan: Well, if you want, I can answer that question. What Bill 79 promotes is representation percentagewise; it's not by quota. What it says is, in a geographical area, if the percentage of a particular community is leading, then there are more opportunities for them. Likewise, if it is a white-dominated one, then you will have more white members in that area.

Mrs Caplan: I certainly hear your frustration. Actually, I'm quite upset myself to hear some of the questions that are being asked, because I think it misconstrues the notion of equal opportunity. We know there are systemic barriers that people face. Women face them as well as persons who are new to Canada and visible minorities who were born here. That's the reality.

The promise that I heard during the election campaign was that they would repeal quotas, and the only section of this legislation -- I said this during the election -- that imposes what could be called a quota is the section that allows the commission to impose a plan on an employer who refuses to develop his own plan. I said during the election that I think the reason for the backlash that is out there is because of that one clause, and if that clause were removed, then the Harris government would achieve its goal of removing the imposition of what could be called a quota.

Do you believe that just removing that one clause would allow them to save face and meet their election commitment without having to scrap the whole piece of legislation? They do have a mandate to remove the quotas, there's no question.

Ms Balakrishnan: As far as I am concerned, in Bill 79 there are a number of groups and members they have put in there. They have thoroughly analysed and made research on that one, including that clause. It's required in order to regulate employment equity. Without that, I don't think there will be a reasonable representation of every community that has been historically discriminated against.

Mrs Caplan: I understand your point, and that's a fair comment. You're an advocate for the bill as it exists and you were here supporting it when it was before a committee, and your party affiliation is well known. But the point you raised here at committee was disputed by Mrs Bassett, who said: "We ran on an election campaign to eliminate quotas. We have a mandate to do that." And they do, but my contention is that they don't have to repeal the whole bill in order to achieve that objective. That's the only point I was making.

The Chair: Thank you very much for visiting with us tonight and being involved in the process. We appreciate it.

TORONTO COALITION AGAINST RACISM

The Chair: The next presenter is on behalf of the Toronto Coalition Against Racism, and it's Maurice Adongo. Welcome, sir. You have 15 minutes to use as you see fit. Time for questions will start at the end, with the government.

Mr Maurice Adongo: Thank you. I'm going to go pretty quickly, so that we can get the time done. I'm from the Toronto Coalition Against Racism. I'll read the statement and then make some comments, and I can take the questions.

First of all, the Toronto Coalition Against Racism was formed in June 1993, in response to violent racist attacks by neo-Nazi groups which, as we all know, are very well trained in this city. In just two weeks -- that is, in June 1993 -- one person was killed and another suffered permanent injuries. He is still in a wheelchair as we speak here tonight.

It was under these grim circumstances that a group of us came together to mobilize the community to fight back. On June 28, 1993, more than 3,000 people converged on the streets of Toronto to denounce racism and declare a commitment to stop racist violence. Since then TCAR has grown significantly. Today, TCAR has a wide membership of more than 60 organizations, comprised mainly of community groups, anti-racist organizations, women's groups, lesbian and gay groups, labour unions and many more. Obviously, we have not attracted much membership from Bay Street.

We are here today to talk about Bill 8, which has been introduced in the Legislature by the Tory government. We're aware that employment equity initiatives and legislation in Ontario have been portrayed as part of an attempt to "pander to special-interest groups." We have been told that employment equity legislation amounts to "reverse discrimination" and leads to "lowering of standards." We are going to address some of these myths as we go along, but first we want to focus on Bill 8.

We have studied Bill 8 and have identified some very serious issues of concern to our members. Specifically, we are talking about racism and discrimination in the workplace. We are disturbed by the fact that the Tory government in Ontario, through this bill, continues to perpetuate baseless myths and to spread false and misleading information which is clearly intended to distort the reality about the need for equity in the workplace and the economic development of this province.

The Toronto Coalition Against Racism is concerned about the misrepresentations and some frightening lies -- and I'm afraid we had to call them lies, because we really looked for a better word and we couldn't come up with anything -- that the government has been spreading through this bill. We are asking this committee to address this kind of racism, bigotry and political opportunism that is being promoted through this bill.

As an organization, we believe the role of the government is to bring the people together to deal with the problems and find solutions. The government has a responsibility to serve all the people and strive to create social stability that can provide a climate suitable for economic growth and development. This government has to make a choice between working with people to solve problems or continue with its confrontational approach. Either way, we are prepared to fulfil our obligations as citizens and as residents of this province. In other words, we're saying it's not our choice. You make the choice; we'll fulfil our obligations.

Coming back to Bill 8, we need some urgent clarifications -- and I want to stress "urgent" -- because we are really concerned. We don't want to go around in circles. We really don't have that kind of intention.

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The first issue we want to raise is about quotas. I've been sitting here, almost feeling like jumping through my skin when I hear people talk about quotas. We have analysed employment equity and I have it here with me. Nowhere in the act did we find any requirement on employers to fill any set numbers. There are no fixed ratios or percentages imposed on employers by the employment law. We are aware that the implementation of employment equity requires individual eligible firms -- eligible, because some companies or some corporations don't even qualify -- to do their own research and set their own numerical targets based on their own conditions. The question we ask ourselves is: Can these numerical targets be misinterpreted as quotas? We need a straight and direct answer on this matter because we believe it is at the root of Bill 8.

The targets are determined by the firms themselves, presumably taking into consideration the job market, the skills they require and all other circumstances necessary to implement employment equity. If they are all speaking the same language -- and most Tory MPPs, being Anglo-Saxons, should not have any problems with the language -- there is no way we can refer to individual employer targets required as quotas. I don't see any quotas; I don't think there are any quotas. Unless the Tories have some other information not available to the public, which I would want to have myself, we can only come to the conclusion that Bill 8 is actually based on a lie. This to us is a very serious matter.

I've been looking to Parliament and I see people clowning around. I don't think people can afford to clown around when you're talking about dishonesty and credibility of a government. I think we need direct and very straight answers, not a question of semantics. We're talking about: Do we have quotas or don't we have quotas? I need that answer.

The other stuff has been about the so-called merit-based. If you have read this thing, it talks about merit-based. Bill 8, right on the same heading, talks about restoring merit-based employment practices. Again, we went very carefully through the legislation and the regulations; nowhere did we find any order or instruction requiring employers to hire people who are not qualified.

In actual fact, those who are not qualified have no consideration whatsoever under the employment equity legislation as it exists today. Again we put a simple, direct question to this committee, and through you to the people of this province: Where in the employment equity legislation is the requirement to hire people because they are black, natives, women or because they have disabilities, regardless of whether they have qualifications or not?

This is a very important issue for us. The government is misleading the public to believe that black people, women, those with disabilities -- that is, the people in the designated groups -- are being employed even though they have no qualifications when the white males who really have the qualifications cannot get jobs. This is very dangerous propaganda. It gives the racists and white supremacy groups like the Heritage Front the moral backing and ammunition to carry on their racist acts of terror against people of colour, whom they claim are taking away jobs.

We would want to believe that this is not the intention of the government, but we must caution that it will be a sad day in the province of Ontario when one cannot distinguish between the propaganda of an elected government and that of hate groups like the Heritage Front. We are holding our breath for proof that this is not the case. That proof must come from the facts; it will not come from routinely repeating prepared texts or merely parroting the party line. We need facts, not rhetoric, on this matter.

Let us all be clear on a few things -- and I heard people talk about the mandate. When a government lies openly to the public and engages in spreading false and misleading information which helps to foster hostility and resentment against a particular group of people, in this case people of colour, we call it racism. Some of you may call it Common Sense. It is, pure and simple, ugly racism, and I'm sure people will bear with me on this.

The other thing we want to get very clear is that this government may have a mandate to implement its policies. It sure has, but nobody has a mandate to promote and spread racism in the province of Ontario. I've looked at the blue book. I didn't see you guys ask the people, "Can we promote racism?" If you did and they say, "Go ahead," then we will have to do other stuff to resist it. But there's nowhere you asked for this. And you are doing it deliberately by misleading people, by putting stuff that doesn't make sense, by lying openly, and all the time hiding behind this Common Sense thing that everybody repeats. I think they don't even read the stuff that's already available in public.

Connected to this other stuff is the merit. This is another thing that really pisses everybody off. Now, there's the merit issue that we are supposed to restore, and I will skip some of the stuff there. The bill says that you want "to restore merit-based employment practices." In other words, there was merit-based employment before; you want to restore it. Right? So you don't accept there has been a problem. On the other hand, you say, "Oh, but we also have this equal opportunity plan." Now you have this double stuff. I don't know, but I have been told they have a lot of intelligent people in the government. They are very successful business people. I don't think they run their business in this manner. So there must be something more devious than what we are seeing.

But anyway, I'll go to page 4. First, this other document that I've referred to. There is Judge Abella's report. This report, prepared by Madam Justice Rosalie Abella for the federal Conservative Party, looked into discrimination and this is what it concluded: "There are significant problems of discrimination against women, of discrimination against visible minorities, of discrimination against people with disabilities, which discrimination was systemic and which discrimination required a positive response...."

There's a whole list of things that I've put on. There's a report, Opening Doors, which I'm sure everybody has read since this is what you are discussing. This is the employment equity consultations report, which has a lot of details. We have another study by Billingsley and Muczynski entitled No Discrimination Here? Very well documented. There is another study, Who Gets the Work? A Test of Racial Discrimination in Employment, which showed that when they had black and white people with the same qualifications, all the time they employed the white person.

These are not things from me. These are not things from the NDP. There are not things from groups that are against the government. These are things that are objective facts and reality.

There's another documentary which I watched recently. It's called Access Denied, by Premika Ratnam, which chronicles dramatic and painful evidence of how systemic racism and other cultural barriers hinder access to trades and professions for immigrants and refugees who come here as doctors, engineers, accountants etc, but end up as security guards and cooks and all that kind of stuff, and there's all the stuff that has been there.

Now the question we have is on page 5. We want again to put a simple and direct question to this committee: Does the Tory government recognize that traditionally in Ontario there has been discrimination in hiring, in promotion against visible minorities, native Canadians, women and people with disabilities? Is there a recognition of that fact? If the answer is yes, which it must be, given the facts, then where are the merit-based employment practices that we want to restore? That's my question to you.

Are we trying to restore the discriminations of the past when the old boys' network, the word-of-mouth references and petty nepotism dominated our hiring and promotion policies and practices? So you want to restore the merit. We are saying there was no merit before. If you want to restore discrimination, please put it that way so that we can understand.

If the past was so good and the same government is coming with whatever it is they call an equal opportunity plan, then why do we want to change it?

Then I have on the same page the Ontario Human Rights Code. We have been told that discrimination is illegal. If you are being discriminated against, go to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Why don't we ask the white males who are claiming that employment equity legislation discriminates against them? Why don't we ask them to go to the Ontario Human Rights Commission? If the Ontario Human Rights Commission is good for women, is good for black people, is good for native people, is good for 70% of the population, why is it not good enough for those white males who are being discriminated against by the employment equity legislation? That's something that baffles me completely.

Then there is the other thing that says that we have to destroy the evidence. This is the one that really shocks me. Bill 8 requests that all information collected for purposes of implementing employment equity be destroyed.

First, let's ask ourselves just one question: What kind of information could this be? And I checked through the guide and I came up with three types of information. One is a survey of the workforce; that is, who is in the workforce, what groups and stuff. The other one is a review of employment policies and identification of barriers, and the third was employment equity. That is the information.

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Now the question: Why in the name of the devil would the government want this kind of information destroyed? Is it because it will expose the lies of this government? Doesn't this same government tell us that when you force these people to destroy this information, you all say, "We have this other plan." What information are you going to use to implement it? Are we going to have the taxpayer fund more data collection? Because this includes public organizations, crown corporations. You want them to destroy everything, but, "We are coming up with this other plan." How are they going to implement it? With what information, from where?

The Chair: Excuse me. You have one minute remaining. Do you want to wrap up, please.

Mr Adongo: Actually, I've finished that now. Generally, I was just saying that there are a lot of myths -- direct lies here. I accept that this government has a responsibility to go on with its mandate. I would just say one thing. We have a lot of problems in this province, and we are willing to sit here and talk. I've come here to present a willingness to discuss this problem. If the government came and said, "Look, if you have a problem with this legislation, let's talk about it, let's work it out," we would.

But I think we also have a responsibility to let the government know that if you declare war on people, if you want to fight people, believe me, we are not just coming here to beg you to sympathize. We are also coming here to tell you that we are ready to carry on with the confrontation. It is our only hope, our only chance. We are not going to lie down and tell people, "Roll on us." That has not happened in our history. Slave people fought with nothing; they didn't even have knives, they didn't have a stick. We have a lot to fight with. Believe me, the choice is yours.

The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate your interest in the process.

Mr Stewart: Mr Chair, on a point of order: I would like the record to show that I have grave difficulty with being called a liar.

The Chair: I don't think that's a point of order.

ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF CHIEFS OF POLICE

The Chair: The next presenter, on behalf of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, is Jack Delcourt, the chair of the legislative committee. Good evening, and welcome to our committee.

Mr Jack Delcourt: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. In view of the lateness of the hour, I'm sure that you and the members of the committee will be very pleased to hear that my presentation will be short.

I represent the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, and one of my responsibilities for the association is to chair the legislative committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you.

The OACP represents over 110 municipal police services in Ontario and the Ontario Provincial Police. In addition, our membership includes Royal Canadian Mounted Police senior officers, and we extend associate membership privileges to non-police individuals who may be employed as senior managers of security departments of large corporations. Our association is dedicated to efficient and effective policing in Ontario. The wellbeing of our citizens is our primary concern, and we are committed to the philosophy of community policing.

We are proud of the fact that over the years we have maintained an open and professional relationship with a number of solicitors general. While our concerns have not always been taken into account and the decisions taken provincially are not necessarily to our liking, our members have never faltered in their sworn duty to obey their civilian overseers. In fact, all members of our association accept and strongly support the concept of civilian control of the police. The alternative is simply too horrifying.

The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police supports Bill 8, but our comments will be limited to section 4, dealing with changes to the Police Services Act.

At the outset, we wish to state that chiefs of police do not object to the principles of employment equity. We agree that in this multicultural society, it does make sense to have an organizational makeup that represents the community being served. We agree that more women are needed as sworn members. We would also be pleased to have more representatives of aboriginal peoples and visible minorities as our employees.

All services in this province were prepared to institute positive measures to eliminate barriers within their organizations and to create outreach programs to attract qualified representatives of the target groups. In fact, for many police agencies, including my own, employment equity legislation was rather superfluous. Many of us, as professional leaders, understood the benefits of changing the makeup of our services to better reflect our communities.

We would have much preferred it if the government had understood that we do not have to be threatened before we do the right thing. Had anyone taken the time to look back in history, it would have been abundantly clear that police officers in Ontario are prepared to follow reasonable guidelines. We believe that guidelines that promote the elimination of barriers, that advocate the need for outreach programs and that recommend a goal of better community representation within the police service are quite logical and should be followed.

Unfortunately, the Police Services Act suggests that the failure to reach certain goals might result in the dismissal of the chief of police or board members. While the statute is specific as to sanctions for those who act in contravention of the law, it remains silent on what constitutes rewards for meeting goals, and rewards are mentioned in the statute.

It has been difficult for chiefs of police, all of whom are experienced professionals and well-educated senior officers, to accept a law which is extremely negative in tone and rather demeaning. Frankly, we do not feel that we earned this lack of respect.

Employment equity gave birth to a bureaucracy of rather large proportions. History tells us that bureaucracies sometimes tend to feed on the organizations they are intended to help, and that became very true in this instance. Police services in this province were saddled with the need to prepare voluminous reports at regular intervals, and their value is somewhat questionable. I would suggest to you that each report could have been condensed into a few pages, with no noticeable loss of impact to the reader. Many agencies were forced to hire personnel for the sole purpose of looking after this bureaucratic nightmare.

We do not wish to discount the value of some of the advice that our services received over the life of employment equity. In several instances, suggestions from members of the Employment Equity Commission proved to be rather astute. It is unfortunate that this good work had to be overshadowed by the onerous reporting requirements.

The police community in Ontario is pleased to support Bill 8 and we thank the Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation, as well as the Solicitor General and Minister of Correctional Services, for their efforts in bringing this bill to the Legislature in short order. Please be assured of our willingness to assist this government in the preparation of guidelines intended to replace employment equity. We agree with Mr Runciman that the employment equity legislation is unfair and we thank the minister for his vote of confidence in favour of the professional police officers and civilian employees of this province.

Mr Clement: Thank you for your presentation. I want to return to something that was raised by the previous speaker and a number of deputants prior to him, and I'd like your association's opinion on this, because they did take a position on Bill 79.

Bill 79, in subsection 55(2) says: "A regulation governing the content of employment equity plans may require plans to contain numerical goals determined in a manner prescribed by the regulation. It may provide that the goals shall be determined with reference to percentages approved by the commission that, in the opinion of the commission" -- not the business; the commission -- "fairly reflect the representation of the designated groups in the population" and so on.

Does that, to you, sound like a quota?

Mr Delcourt: I don't think I can answer that with a yes or no. I'd rather go back to the Police Services Act. My interpretation of the Police Services Act is that it was not a quota. Rather, it said you will strive to meet the targets.

Mr Clement: But when the commission is setting the goal rather than the police force, if the commission were setting the goal, if the government were setting the goal, would you as a police force interpret that to be a quota?

Mr Delcourt: Without the Police Services Act interpretation of that particular section, yes, I agree. But this was tempered by that particular section of the Police Services Act which said, "You will strive to meet those goals, and if you do not meet those goals, you will be assessed on the efforts that have been developed to meet the goals." To me that was reasonable. My biggest problem was with the reporting requirements which were killing us and were very difficult, particularly on smaller police services in this province.

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Mr Jim Flaherty (Durham Centre): My question is in relation to the matter you just raised at the end of your last answer with respect to reporting requirements. I think most people in Ontario today accept that we have limited resources, including limited resources that can be attributed to police forces. In your experience, what sort of demands were placed on police forces by this legislation?

Mr Delcourt: It required, of course, that we do a little bit more outreach in the community, for some of us. Some of us were already doing that, so that was not a problem.

There was a lot of good in the legislation. I don't want to say it was bad. It was good. It forced us to look at our practices, forced us to look at what may have been a barrier which we didn't realize was a barrier, and we got a lot of help from the Employment Equity Commission in that respect.

I'm not here to say the legislation was terrible. Rather, we had a problem with the fact that it was imposed on us with very little consultation. It was imposed on us without any regard to the need for us to hire additional people to look after the paperwork, and of course there was an expense involved because, as you may know, for each application we got in we had to send a survey form to that person, it had to be completed and mailed in. There were costs involved, and it's very difficult, particularly in smaller organizations that have very limited budgets.

The Chair: Mr Marchese, your friend has left you.

Mr Marchese: Mr Chair, Mrs Caplan volunteered her time to me as she left. I thought I would tell you that in advance.

The Chair: Do you have some sort of signed document?

Mr Marchese: She whispered in my ear. Many of you noticed that.

I have about four questions, but before we get to those, I want to ask Mr Clement, the parliamentary assistant, a question. If the fact that the commission could impose numerical goals were the offensive part and we agreed to remove that, would that solve some of your problems?

Mr Clement: Some, but not all. I would say it's the position of the government that the legislation is fatally flawed, that it sets an entire infrastructure in place to achieve numerical goals and that that would not satisfy us.

Mr Marchese: All right. Thanks a lot.

You say, Mr Delcourt, that the bill was good in many ways.

Mr Delcourt: The intent of having our services composed of people who represent the makeup of the community is good.

Mr Marchese: Okay. You then proceed to say that the only difficulty -- at least that I heard; there may have been other difficulties -- was the significant cost with respect to the reporting of plans, that that was onerous and you needed assistance in that respect. Why wouldn't you call for financial assistance as opposed to accepting a complete repeal of this act?

Mr Delcourt: As I stated in my remarks, we really do not need a statute for us to act. The guidelines are sufficient for us to act. We are professional people, and if we receive guidelines from the Solicitor General you can be assured that they will be followed.

Mr Marchese: So Bill 79 is good as long as it is in the form of guidelines and nothing more?

Mr Delcourt: Yes.

Mr Marchese: But you do believe that discrimination exists?

Mr Delcourt: In the police sector or in the province in general?

Mr Marchese: Particularly, generally, however you want to answer.

Mr Delcourt: Of course there's discrimination.

Mr Marchese: Judge Rosalie Abella says this of voluntary mechanisms to deal with discrimination: "It's difficult to see how a voluntary approach, that is, an approach that does not include an effective enforcement component, will substantially improve employment opportunities for women, native people, disabled persons, or visible minorities. Given the seriousness and apparent intractability of employment discrimination, it is unrealistic and somewhat ingenuous to rely on there being sufficient public goodwill to fuel a voluntary program." Your comment on that?

Mr Delcourt: You're talking about perhaps the private sector. I don't know.

Mr Marchese: I'm talking any sector.

Mr Delcourt: I'm strictly limiting my comments to the police sector.

Mr Marchese: That's fine. Let's say she's talking about you and your sector.

Mr Delcourt: If she's talking about the police sector, she's wrong.

Mr Marchese: In the police sector, all of this is happening? This voluntary approach to discrimination, particularly with respect to these target groups, is being dealt with and everything's okay? We shouldn't be dealing with this?

Mr Delcourt: It's being dealt with by law right now. Employment equity is still in place. But if you're talking --

Mr Marchese: So it's working because of employment equity or in spite of?

Mr Delcourt: No, I'm saying it is working. It has to work because employment equity is there. I also said in my remarks that a lot of services that I know of had started to work on this problem. I started to work on this in 1987, way before anybody had a chance to talk about employment equity.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Marchese. I'd love to believe that Mrs Caplan did in fact give you her four minutes, but I'm just not --

Mr Marchese: That means I have more time.

The Chair: Thank you very much, sir, for your presentation. We appreciate your interest in our process.

SANDRA MARTIN

The Chair: Our next presenter is Sandra Martin. Good evening. You obviously understand the rules. You have 15 minutes that you can use as you see fit. If we have time for questions, the Liberals --

Mr Marchese: Actually, she has instructed me to take her time, Mr Chair.

The Chair: Somebody will start the questions.

Ms Sandra Martin: I'd like to speak briefly. My name is Sandra Martin and I'm here because I'm a journalist and I have been studying employment equity in Ontario and Canada and abroad for the last year on an Atkinson fellowship, and the results of my research have just been published in the Toronto Star. So perhaps some of you have seen them.

I am not against equity in the workplace; I'm for it. I don't think any right-thinking person would be against it. I think the way we've gone about it has caused perhaps more problems than we needed to, and I'd like to emphasize that what I think we need to do is concentrate on systems now. We've tried numbers and we've had some unexpected results from the numbers. If you could bear with me, I'll give you a little bit of background from my perspective.

Canada, and particularly Ontario, has changed enormously in the last 45 years. We went from boom to bust. The face of urban society has gone from homogeneous to multiracial. The workplace is no longer the domain of the white male. Work and home have become inextricably mixed and the monolithic domestic market is collapsing.

Two of the biggest factors in all of this are the huge influx of women into the workforce beginning in the 1960s, and the arrival of a much more diverse group of immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s. If I could just suggest that the stuff you quoted from Rosalie Abella was from 1983, and I don't know that it's really pertinent now to talk about --

Mr Marchese: Really?

Ms Martin: I mean in terms of the number of women represented in the workplace. I think we've tried to accommodate those huge changes by enacting human rights legislation to protect people from discrimination and to work on behalf of groups, as well as individuals. We've taken a proactive stance instead of just a complaint-driven approach.

But I think that some of the things that have gone wrong are that in the name of fairness we're now actively discriminating on heritage and personal characteristics. When the 1996 census comes out, we will be asking people to self-identify in terms of race. This is one of the things we wanted to get away from with Human Rights Commission laws.

Women are being hired at a disproportionate rate to men in many places. At the University of Toronto, for example, 28% of the applicants for faculty positions were women in 1993, yet 56% of the jobs went to women.

What tends to happen with employment equity figures is that they're counted in terms of the entire workplace; they're not counted in terms of intake. So there are people who are stuck in that workplace, and many of them are aging males. Now, we have to either wait for them to retire, give them early retirement, or we can overcompensate on the intake part, and then we will just perpetuate a different kind of overbalance or set up a different kind of overbalance.

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Certainly, white, middle-class women have done very well out of employment equity. For example, in 1994, 77% of women with a university degree worked for pay or profit. When you take education out of that, it dropped to 36% for women who had not completed high school and to 17% for those who had not gone beyond grade 8.

What I'm suggesting to you is that it's age and skills and poverty and lack of education and support systems that are really discriminating against people being able to compete on their own merits in the workplace.

If you don't have safe day care for your child, then it doesn't matter if you have preferential hiring. If you don't have a way of getting to work if you're disabled, then what does a job mean? Those are the kinds of things I think we should be concentrating on.

I think also that employment equity is where all the other equities intersect in the workplace. I think the existing law puts the onus on employers to remove barriers preventing the discriminated groups from prospering, but the barriers are so loosely defined that they could represent anything that I feel, as a white woman, is standing between me and my goal, and that could be you. On one side, it promotes victimization, that "I didn't get the job because I am...." It just puts a completely different spin on everything that happens in the workplace.

One of the things that I found in my research was that demographer David Foot said that at least one half, and probably two thirds, of the representation of women and visible minorities in the workplace is due to demographics. Being there is a lot of the answer. What happens to you once you're there is a question of barriers. I think what has to happen with those barriers is that there has to be direction from the top and there has to be involvement from the bottom up so that everybody gets together and discusses barriers.

But you cannot leave people out of the workplace; they're there. That is what I think is the argument for diversity, that we're all there working, that a young man of 22 is not -- you can't blame past discrimination on current people.

It happened in the past. Let's try and change it now, but let's not blame people now for things that their grandfathers did.

That's basically all I want to say, unless you want to ask questions. I can tell you the sorts of things that I think we should be doing, but basically I'm not at all happy with the language of Bill 8. I think that it's vengeful and unduly harsh and I think that it has ignored some of the good parts of Bill 79, specifically the systems review. There was not one person I talked with who thought that a systems review was not a very, very good idea.

I think if that were put in in some kind of legislated way, so that instead of filing numerical reports on your employee representation, you had to set up diversity teams or equity teams which would involve employees at all levels of the organization and that you established your goals and you wrote reports every year on how you were meeting them and what the barriers were in your particular workplace and how you were addressing them -- I think those are really important points.

Another thing is that I don't think we should talk about employment equity as a goal. It's a process. It happens all the time. We can't stop it, we can't say when we've succeeded, and I think that we have to include everybody in it and think of it as an ongoing process.

I didn't read; I just talked.

The Chair: Are you available for some questions?

Ms Martin: Sure.

The Chair: In your absence, Mrs Caplan, Mr Marchese said you had given him your time. Is that true?

Mr Marchese: When she wasn't here.

Mrs Caplan: I don't remember having that discussion with him.

The Chair: Okay. The questions begin with you and you have two minutes.

Mrs Caplan: He may have thought that I might have said that.

Mr Marchese: Just trying to be helpful.

Mrs Caplan: Just a little misunderstanding, I'm sure.

I listened very carefully to what you said. Do you think that the existing legislation -- not Bill 8 but the existing act -- needs to be repealed, or can it be fixed? I agree there have to be changes to it.

Ms Martin: It has to be changed and I think it has to be changed quite drastically. I don't like the tone of it. I don't like the preamble, which says that the people of Ontario recognize that they discriminate. We may do that on an individual basis and we may do it on a systemic one, but I think it's unintentional. I mean, there are some overt cases, but I think that sets the wrong tone.

Mrs Caplan: I agree that the tone's very bad.

Ms Martin: The emphasis on numbers is a big mistake. No matter how you dress them up, people think they're quotas. And I think that you cannot have four designated groups.

Mrs Caplan: What about the provision of Bill 8 that requires the destruction of all of the data that's been collected? If you're going to make progress, don't you have to have the data in order to be able to gauge the progress that you're making, even if you are not establishing targets or goals?

Ms Martin: That's an argument that one hears a lot and that's the argument behind the census, putting race on the census. The trouble with numbers is that there are many ways of counting them, and this is what I found so interesting in terms of how you look at the numbers. I think a lot of the backlash that we hear about is because of the dissonance between what we see around ourselves in the workplace and the numbers we're being fed. We're told on and on and on again about the wage gap between women and men.

When you look at that wage gap, it's big for some women, and in fact there are other women who are actually making more than men. So I think the numbers are a real problem. I would get rid of numerical goals. I would get rid of the designated groups.

Mrs Caplan: What about the data? The question I have is --

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mrs Caplan.

Mrs Caplan: Do you agree with getting rid of all the data that's been collected?

The Chair: Mr Marchese is not as kind as to give you some of his time.

Ms Martin: I didn't answer her question, though.

The Chair: I know, but she doesn't have time to ask it.

Mrs Caplan: You ask the question.

Mr Marchese: I just have so many. I read your articles with interest, actually. I even highlighted them in some places.

The Chair: He wants you to autograph them.

Mr Marchese: I missed one or two. Sorry, not autographed. You said the quote that I read about Ms Abella was 1983, meaning to suggest that's it's almost out of date because what we've done since is good and therefore --

Ms Martin: No. My understanding is that the reason that the employment equity royal commission was established in the first place was that there was the anticipation that there was going to be this huge influx of women into the marketplace, into the workplace, and how are we going to accommodate them? So they asked her to look specifically at 11 crown corporations and to work in terms of four designated groups who had historically been discriminated against.

Mr Marchese: Ms Martin, the point I make that she makes is that the voluntary approach doesn't work. That's what they're proposing, and I suspect you're saying the same thing: that guidelines are good and, if done effectively, voluntary mechanisms will work not just for these four designated groups, but for everybody. Is that what you're saying?

Ms Martin: I'm saying that two thirds of the argument is demographic and one third is some form of legislation. I think we should have some form of legislation for everybody that you cannot discriminate against people. We have a Human Rights Code and we should be strengthening it, but I think that in terms of numerical goals that is going to have preferential hiring for specific groups, it hasn't done a lot for aboriginals and disabled people, and I think the reason it hasn't done a lot for them is because you have to have the skill sets, you have to have the physical accommodation, you have to have the training. With visible immigrants, for example, if they haven't been here very long and they don't have language skills and they don't have their qualifications accredited here, there's a problem.

Mr Marchese: I understand that. Black people, however --

The Chair: Mr Marchese, Mrs Bassett --

Mr Marchese: So many questions. Perhaps you can come back under a different name? Can I work on that with you? There's still Monday.

Ms Bassett: Sandra, first of all, I enjoyed your series very much because it focused on a lot of things that we think we're saying. We do want to make sure that there is equality of opportunity for everybody in the workplace, and the government feels that strongly. We're just going about it in a different way than my colleagues across the table.

I wonder if you can come back to the four groups, because we feel there are so many groups here from various countries. Do you think we should just get rid of that totally? Is that what you're saying?

Ms Martin: We have to sell the idea of diversity as a bottom-line business issue. When you appeal to people's self-interest, I think that goes a long way. I think there certainly is a role for government in promoting diversity, but I think in terms of serving a customer base in Canada, particularly in the urban centres, if you have a diversified workplace and you have -- if you're trying to work in the Chinese community and you have Chinese salespeople, of course you're going to have a better connection.

Ms Bassett: So you're saying it's good for business.

Ms Martin: It's good for business both domestically and internationally. If you're trying to penetrate a new market and you have somebody who came from that country or someone who has language skills in that area, of course it's going to be easier than just blundering in.

Ms Bassett: Do you think we've reached the stage where that's going to propel us on right now?

Ms Martin: I don't think enough businesses have bought the business case for diversity yet and I think more should.

Mr Marchese: How do we do it? What do we do, educate them?

Ms Martin: I think it's a very good question.

Mr Clement: Do you think that Ontario essentially is a racist and discriminatory society?

Mr Marchese: Do you think there's discrimination or racism?

Mr Clement: No, that's a different question.

Ms Martin: I don't think it's a racist society. I think there is discrimination. Compared to other societies, I think we would be better off than the United States. We worry a lot about discrimination and so on, but it's very interesting when we talk to our children, because they've grown up with diversity. We worry about us because it's new to us, because the population has changed so much in our lifetimes. But for kids going to public school, they don't make those kinds of distinctions.

The Chair: Thank you very much. There's a group of firefighters behind you who are anxious to come. Thank you very much for coming and sharing your thoughts with us.

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PROVINCIAL FEDERATION OF ONTARIO FIRE FIGHTERS

The Chair: The Provincial Federation of Ontario Fire Fighters, represented by Mark Fitzsimmons and Bruce Carpenter. Welcome, gentlemen. Please introduce yourselves so Hansard knows who's talking. You have 15 minutes to use as you see fit.

Mr Mark Fitzsimmons: I'm Mark Fitzsimmons and I'm here on behalf of the provincial federation of firefighters, that represents almost 5,000 firefighters in the province of Ontario.

I wanted to start by saying that the provincial federation of firefighters believes in a diverse workplace where all members of society have an equal opportunity and equal access to employment. We believe that a diverse workplace, equal opportunity for all and a merit-based system are 100% compatible; they work. We do not believe that gender, race, colour or ancestry are barriers to excellence. Employment practices that are fair, job-related and ultimately based on merit will not discriminate. Excellence is achievable by all. For these reasons, we support Bill 8.

Having said that, though, let me say some other things. We have to stress that unions, management and governments must work together to ensure that equal opportunity is a reality. It's no good to say you have equal opportunity if it's not there in reality. Union and management must work together to review hiring and internal policies to be 100% certain that bias, whether intentional or unintentional, does not exist. By doing this, all people can be evaluated on a level playing field and merit will rule. It only makes sense to hire the best candidates for any position. In an emergency situation, how can anybody justify anything less? To have the best all-round people hired as firefighters is common sense.

I have to emphasize again that while we have a responsibility to ensure that the testing procedures are fair, job-related and based on legitimate job requirements, we must also recognize that not all people have the same level of ability. Although you may get by with the minimum, you will have a better workforce, and in our case a safer workforce, by selecting people who have superior skills. We believe that ability up and above average must be valued when making hiring decisions, especially for firefighters.

Programs that favour one group of people over another are doomed to fail and will result in division and acrimony in the workplace. We agree with this government that all the people of Ontario must have equal access to employment in this province. To be sure that equal opportunity becomes a reality, this government must review the provisions of the Ontario Human Rights Code, with special emphasis on section 14, called "Special Programs."

Although we agree with special programs that reach out to all segments of society, make sure everyone knows the jobs available for them and creates a level playing field, we believe that this section of the Human Rights Code has been abused by some employers to enact limited-access hirings, which are quotas, long before the implementation of Bill 79. Without a revision to this section of the Human Rights Code, mandatory quotas may be eliminated; however, hiring practices that can exclude non-preferred groups -- and that's 35% of the population of this province -- can still flourish.

It has to be inclusion, not exclusion. We have to work together in an atmosphere of mutual respect to ensure that each individual -- and I stress each individual -- is treated fairly and equitably. That will result in a diverse workforce, and by doing it that way we can avoid the pitfalls of quotas and preferential hirings.

I'm open for questions.

Mr Marchese: Thank you for the presentation. You say that programs that favour some groups over others are doomed to failure. A number of people have made the observation that in some places in Ontario firefighters are completely white, and they say there's something wrong with that, that it's not promoting inclusion but exclusion, the very thing you're trying to avoid. Is there something wrong with that, do you think?

Mr Fitzsimmons: I think there's something definitely wrong with your logic. You assume that because the group isn't totally representative there's something nefarious or there's something wrong going on. I can assure you -- and I'm with the Toronto Fire Fighters Association -- the city of Toronto has spent, I would say, millions of dollars for outreach to try to get people to come in and be hired on to the job. The reality is that the applications aren't there.

The applications aren't there for a lot of reasons: one, women physiologically aren't as strong as men and a lower percentage of women will probably qualify for the job in any competition. That's not our fault; that's just physiologically. It doesn't mean that women can't do the job. We have women on our job and they're good firefighters.

Some new Canadians don't want a job that's associated with a uniform. They don't want it because they don't trust uniforms. We have an oriental gentleman who works out of our station on College Street, and when he came to the fire department his family was very upset because they don't see a uniformed job as an honourable profession. As you get into second-generation Canadians, those biases will disappear.

The reason you don't have a diverse workforce is (1) timing, immigration patterns, and (2) biases, but not biases of the white male, not biases of the fire departments; there are cultural biases of some people who come here. They don't see the fire department as a viable profession. As time changes, as you come to second-generation Canadians, yes, they will.

Mr Marchese: Councillor Kyle Rae said as an opinion that we make the qualifications aspect of our test for firefighters so high that by its very nature it will exclude some people. Your reaction to that?

Mr Fitzsimmons: When you're selecting firefighters, if you can prove that a set of skills will directly relate to better performance on the fire ground or an emergency scene, you're a fool if you don't take the person who has the higher skills.

Mr Stewart: We had the firefighters up this afternoon. One of my concerns is that many times in the paper when minorities or women or whatever are not hired, they tend to go back and say the standards are too high and blame it on that. My comment is that if I want to get out of a burning building, I want the best possible person, whether it's male or female, and I want those standards very high to do it. I assume that is the thinking of the fire professionals.

Mr Fitzsimmons: I agree with you, but what I would like to stress is that we recognize that the best firefighter isn't necessarily the strongest person, the smartest person, or the person who interviews the best. It's a combination of skills. The physical part is very important, but to have somebody who's real strong and real dumb doesn't do you a lot of good when you're in a life-and-death situation.

What you want is somebody who's strong, for sure, you want somebody who is intelligent, for sure, you want somebody who can think on their feet, and quite frankly you want somebody who can function in a community living situation. Those are the types of skills you have to test for when you're coming in. You test those skills, you get a composite score, and then you hire the people who have the best overall skill ratio. You will get women, you will get visible minorities and you will get white males, and there's nothing wrong with getting white males.

Mr Stewart: Those were the high standards I was referring to, and I think we have to have them to have the security or peace of mind, whatever.

Mr Fitzsimmons: If you talk to the women and visible minorities on the Toronto Fire Department, they are proud of achieving what they've achieved and they're proud to be there on their own merit. Nobody had to give them a hand up. They're there because they can do it, and because of that they're well accepted.

Mr DeFaria: Do you have any data that say newcomers don't like jobs that require uniforms?

Mr Fitzsimmons: Not here.

Mr DeFaria: Do you have it somewhere else?

Mr Fitzsimmons: I could probably get it.

Mr DeFaria: If you could get it and mail it to the committee, I'd like to see it.

Mr Fitzsimmons: Sure.

Mr Ernie Hardeman (Oxford): A question on the process of hiring the most qualified person: In the fire service it's based on a points system, and the higher up, the more apt that person would get the job. Is there any reason to assume, using slightly different criteria, that that same principle shouldn't be used in other jobs?

Mr Fitzsimmons: I don't understand, if I were hiring somebody, why I wouldn't want to hire the person who had the highest skill level for the function I was hiring them for. To me, it wouldn't make sense not to hire that person.

The Chair: Thank you very much, gentlemen. We appreciate your interest in our process and coming here and being with us tonight.

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DISABLED PEOPLE FOR EMPLOYMENT EQUITY

The Chair: Our next person is Eric Schryer, representing Disabled People for Employment Equity. Eric, welcome to our process. You have 15 minutes.

Mr Eric Schryer: My name's Eric Schryer and I'm the former coordinator of Disabled People for Employment Equity. Unfortunately, it's one of many, many groups that have lost their funding in recent weeks, but we're still here. I'd like to specifically focus in on disability issues and employment equity.

First of all, I and many individuals in our community support employment equity, and it's very unfortunate that it wasn't even implemented, didn't even get time to work. Many persons with disabilities looked forward to more job opportunities through the implementation of employment equity initiatives and legislation. On a practical level, we just saw employment equity, in many ways, as a business plan. In other words, any type of business plan has goals and timetables and measures and ways of doing things. Whether it's managing diversity or managing your manufacturing processes or getting sales up, it's a similar type of thing.

The other point I'd like to mention is that issues of disability and gender and race cannot be separated. They're very intermingled, and many members of our group were women with disabilities, visible minorities with disabilities and native people with disabilities. It was very diverse. Disability cuts across all socioeconomic and gender and racial lines, so that makes it very unique, and that's why we're a designated group.

I'm not going to talk about Bill 8 very much, other than recommending amendments, which I've handed around to everybody. The other thing I'd like to mention is that I've been involved in many committees and different things, everything from the co-vice-chair of the old Ontario Public Service Review Committee, employment equity, many committees of the commission, Minister of Citizenship etc.

One thing I was particularly disappointed in is that I am or was also a member -- I'm not even sure if these committees are in existence any more -- of the police constable selection committee, as a member of the physical abilities subcommittee, and worked for a number of years very quietly and very constructively behind the scenes to build a whole new pilot project in hiring police constables, the first standardized police constable hiring process in the province. It's supposed to be a pilot now, but whether it's still in existence, I don't know, because everything kind of stopped with the change of government. I'm not sure if that's still going. If that were stopped it would be a real tragedy, because the kind of things that happen behind the scenes, I would say with 80% of employment equity that's really happening; that's going to have a very, very positive impact on the future of Ontario.

Now, back to disability things. Unfortunately, if Bill 79 is repealed we lose a very open and inclusive definition of "disability." Any definition of "disability" must be inclusive. We've got to avoid talking about things like severe disability. I noticed that there are a lot of references in the Common Sense Revolution and many other initiatives in the government of restricting who's disabled. Only 35,000 of one million people are considered disabled in Comsoc and there's even talk about restricting that. We have to really watch that.

Okay, I'll give you the real picture. We're going to talk numbers here. Everybody loves numbers, I know that.

There are one million Ontarians with disabilities of working-age population. This is the 1990-91 census. That makes up about 13% of the total working-age population. More than half these people are not working, are not in the workplace. Of those who are working, many are working below their capacity and skill level.

If you ask any person with a disability, would you rather work than not work, 91% of people say they would rather work than not work. So that's quite a gap there. We have quite a dismal picture here.

If you also asked the question as to what kind of accommodations people request, because a lot of people just don't get into that area, by far the most common requests for accommodation on the job are work redesign and flexible part-time working hours. I think it outstrips it by 5 to 1, all requests for accommodation. Many of them are not very costly and so on. There are very, very few costly accommodations that come up.

What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to just read out quickly I think the kind of thing that should be there, because in the last four years in dealing with many employers the question they ask: Putting employment equity aside, what can we do, what are the things we can do in order to increase the employability and to hire disabled people and get them in the workforce?

I've got nine points here that I'll quickly read through of the kinds of things employers should do. I put it as a recommendation for amendment, because if this kind of stuff is not in Bill 8 it's not going to go anywhere, because equal opportunity is something you achieve after some activities. You don't just have equal opportunity; it's something that comes at the end of a number of initiatives and measures.

It should be recognized that an employer cannot be expected to increase the hiring and retention of persons with disabilities unless they engage in the following types of activities:

(1) Develop an infrastructure for delivering effective workplace accommodations so that the response will be timely if a request for accommodating the needs of an individual comes forward.

Everybody knows people have to be accommodated in their human rights. Where the problem comes in is when something happens nobody quite knows how to do it and that's going to be a big job to work on.

(2) Develop and implement an infrastructure that ensures that all information in alternative formats that is required by print-handicapped persons -- persons who are blind, visually impaired, have learning disabilities etc -- can fully participate in the workplace and do their work. This includes all forms of information technologies.

Again, large print: If you know how to do it you can do it in two minutes; if you don't know how to do it you run around for a month with about five different people figuring how to do it.

(3) Work towards full workplace accessibility for all types of disabilities. This includes all initiatives that ensure full workplace access to persons with mobility impairments, visual impairments and persons who are deaf and hard of hearing and all other disabilities.

We're talking a little bit beyond just wheelchair ramps and washrooms. We're talking about if a deaf person cannot hear a fire alarm there's ways of getting around that, and there's ways of putting together a workplace that becomes more inclusive and more open for people with visual impairments -- clear signage, clear language and designs. There's a whole range of things.

(4) Make sure that all communication infrastructures are barrier-free to ensure the full participation of all persons with disabilities.

Communications again, we're moving into a world of electronic communications. We have deaf people, TTYs. There are many things that can be built into the very nature of doing business. Again, it takes a lot of planning and a lot of work to do that.

(5) Develop a workplace accommodation policy that coordinates all aspects of access, information and accommodation in the workplace.

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(6) Put in place a central accommodation fund that addresses the cost factors for both individual accommodations and systemic access initiatives.

The reason we mention here "central" is so that individual profit centres and individual departments don't worry about, "Jeez, I can't accommodate somebody because it's going to affect my bottom line." It should be a very organization-wide type of initiative so that it doesn't have impact on individual profit centres.

(7) Ensure that the internal technical resources are in place to support accommodation and access to make sure that those responsible know where these resources are located, even if located outside the workplace.

There are times when you may not put the resources in place yourself. You have to know where to go. If somebody asks for something, you say, "Okay, I know where to get it," instead of doing all the research afterwards.

(8) Develop an education strategy within the organization that addresses the need to remove informational and attitudinal barriers.

Many employers have said that really there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of misinformation, there are a lot of attitudes that they have to struggle with. These things can be addressed, again, in a planned way.

(9) Develop an outreach strategy that provides a two-way street for introducing disabled persons in the community to corporate employer culture and for employers to learn about the culture of persons within the disabled community. This will ensure that all qualified candidates in the disabled community will be reached if a job opening comes along.

You have to really emphasize the two-way street, people just getting to know one another. For example in my case, I have never had a job in a large corporation; never in my life. When I was young, because I was vision-impaired, I didn't have those little jobs that people get. Many people who are getting a bit older and have had bad luck with the workplace have quite a rough time unless some corporations become interested in letting people know what it's like, what's going on. A lot of stuff can also be transferred over to other designated groups, because I'm just zeroing in on disability here.

Then you ask the question, how do you put this all together? There have been a number of studies done on what has to be put in place to make this happen. This is especially true for small corporations, and small businesses too. There is a need to establish a council or network that brings together employers, persons with disabilities from the grass roots and service-providing agencies to explore practical solutions for barrier removal in the workplace, educational and training needs of persons with disabilities and any other initiatives that may lead to increased employment rates.

At this point, those partnerships have not been in place. There have been some employers and some service providers and some disabled people. I'm only aware of one project right now that has a three-way partnership between people with disabilities, service providers and employers, which I'm involved in, called Partnership for Employment, looking at training needs of people with disabilities. This kind of thing has to be done on a much larger scale so that everybody can hear the kind of information and experiences that are required as we struggle with these problems.

I also want to emphasize that we need a made-at-home solution for increasing the employability of people with disabilities. It's very interesting when you look at the references in the Common Sense Revolution to where it's separating out disabled people from other groups, and then they talk about looking at other jurisdictions and some of the solutions in other countries and having special programs for only people with disabilities. We've studied this stuff to death for years and I really think that although it's good to look at some of these things -- and these things have been looked at -- we should look at a made-at-home solution and not look at things like lovely grant systems and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We can learn from those and we can look at some of those things, but they also have their problems, as we have found out. Ontario itself has some very interesting initiatives that other countries in the world have never done either. So we have to be very open and look for something that works for us and not that works in, say, a country where you have a different way that unions and governments and employers relate, because we have our own unique way. Things are much different here.

I would like to make two final points. The first one I put down here is a point called "shop for rehabilitation." What do I mean by that? Most rehabilitation in Canada has been done without any sense that people with disabilities will ever work. Most of the service-providing agencies, most of the research being done, do not look at people in the workplace.

There are a few places in the world where there is a much higher level of workshop rehabilitation, where the workplace becomes part of the rehabilitation process. In fact, some of the successes of some of the other programs have more to do with that type of thing than what they actually do in policy.

The last point I want to make is that it's about rehabilitating the workplace itself. I think one of the main problems is that in the past we've been so hung up on taking a disabled person and, through medical restoration and all kinds of other rehab, trying to make a person's ability so much like a "normal, ordinary" person's and, to the degree that you can do that, then you can have a successful candidate for the job. I think what we're going to have to look at now is taking the workplace and finding out how to make it more inclusive and start accepting disabled people for who they are and how they are, and accommodating through systemic measures, by changing the workplace itself. That can be done in the context of the re-engineering and jobbing-out type processes.

Many corporations, in fact the most profitable, successful corporations, do a lot of this type of work and we fail to include it in the initiatives to deal with the issues for people with disabilities. This goes back to the point I made originally, that the most requested form of accommodation fits almost perfectly in with re-engineering processes many corporations are going through, where you take all the skills and abilities in the workplace, put them into the barrel and then start divvying it out to the people around them who have the abilities and skills to get a process from A to Z or to deliver the goods from A to Z. I have suggested that to many employers, and they should look at that very seriously.

That's the end of my presentation.

The Chair: Mr Schryer, thank you very much. You've done a masterful job of using up your 15 minutes. There's no time left for questions, but we do appreciate your attendance here tonight and your interest in our process.

ONTARIO PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS' FEDERATION

The Chair: The next group is the Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation, represented by Vivian McCaffrey, Jeff Holmes, Christine Brown and Dave Lennox. Welcome to our committee. You have 15 minutes to use as you see fit.

Mr Jeff Holmes: Thank you. My name is Jeff Holmes; I'm first vice-president of the Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation. On my left is David Lennox, who is general secretary of the federation. On my right is Christine Brown, who is the research officer for the federation. Sitting to our rear here is Vivian McCaffrey, who is legislative observer.

In the time we have, in order to leave time for questions, I don't propose to read the brief that you have before you. I would like to draw your attention to some of the salient points.

In terms of the federation itself, the Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation represents 36,000 teachers, occasional teachers and educational support personnel who work in the public elementary schools of Ontario. Our membership includes all of the identified minorities within the equity legislation. We have in our ranks aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, women and visible minorities. In fact, over half of our members at this present time are women.

We believe that equal opportunity in schools, workplaces and other venues of public life is the cornerstone of a democratic society. Our federation is on record in its support of the various equity initiatives which have been brought to bear on the educational sector over the last few years.

The elimination of workplace barriers to equity is a painstaking and gradual process, and is a process that is not over. The disadvantaging of minorities is something that is with us still. It is better than it was, and part of that is as a result of the legislation, but it has a long way to go. Equity does not happen overnight. Each of the equity initiatives which has been undertaken in the educational sector in recent years has been a further step towards an extremely important goal.

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We believe that the repeal of the Employment Equity Act, as well as other changes proposed in Bill 8, will put the brakes on a gradual process and that the brakes will be put on in a dramatic and counterproductive way.

Ontario is in the process of turning back the clock. In this legislation and in other legislation that is before the House, we are in the process of returning to the 1970s, the 1960s, the 1950s, and we cannot afford to do that, as a province; we have come too far.

With respect to the proposed changes to the Education Act, we question the need to amend the statute. The specific powers of the minister which are at issue are permissive, not mandatory, and no change in that statute should be made lightly. It says within the statute that the minister may "require boards to develop and implement a policy on employment equity for women and other groups designated by the minister, to submit the policy to the minister for approval and to implement changes to the policy as directed by the minister," and the emphasis is on the word, "may." There is no compulsion. It is permissive.

With respect to the rescinding of policy and program memoranda numbers 92 and 111, we believe that this too is a retrogressive move which will send the wrong message to women working in the field of education. Women have made gradual progress in attaining better representation in positions of added responsibility in the schools. Memorandum 111 has been a part of that important process.

When I began my career, the largest percentage of my colleagues were women and the largest percentage of the administrators were men, and it has taken many, many years for that situation to change.

With respect to the repeal of the Employment Equity Act, we believe that the government's approach has been heavy-handed -- overly so. The process which was beginning to unfold in the implementation of a new law has proven that labour and management can cooperate when the initiative is in the right direction. The legislated process allowed for an orderly and informed debate among the various workplace parties. The legislated time lines ensured that this debate would reach closure within a reasonable period of time. Unions and management had equal power within the established structure and a real stake in a positive outcome. I would stress the fact that they had equal power; it is an unusual situation. It is one that, unfortunately, we feel has been turned back.

We must ask whether, with the process so far advanced, the government gave thought to simply amending the Employment Equity Act. Jettisoning the act in its entirety will result in the loss of a great deal of valuable work.

We recognize the government's stated intention to develop non-legislated voluntary initiative for workplace equity issues. We do not believe that such an approach will be very effective. There are times when legislation is needed to give a push to good intentions. While this government seems to favour a non-interventionist approach, there is no evidence that the presence of equity legislation is a job killer. There is no empirical evidence to that effect.

At the federal level, employment equity legislation has been in place since 1986. Significant progress has been made, for example, in the banking sector, on equity issues. Despite the imposition of such legislation, profits in the banking sector are at record levels. The industry has committed considerable resources to the goals of ensuring fair and equitable workplaces. There is no reason why employers in Ontario should not follow suit. They may find that it makes good business sense to do so.

We do not believe that the existence of the Human Rights Code is a substitute for equity legislation. We note an earlier commitment made to redirect to the Human Rights Commission funds saved through the winding down of the Employment Equity Commission. We believe that the Human Rights Commission could indeed make use of such funds, especially for the purpose of clearing their backlog of cases. However, serious proactive employment equity legislation will eventually mean that workplace barriers are identified and removed before the necessity arises to litigate before the Human Rights Commission. Preventive medicine, as any physician will tell you, is the best kind. It would be no surprise to us, as a federation, to see that backlog of cases increase manyfold as employees realize that their only access now is through litigation and through the Human Rights Commission.

Once Bill 8 is passed, some school boards may indeed decide to continue the equity discussions that have begun with their employees. However, they will be hamstrung by the requirement of the legislation that they destroy the information which has been gathered under part III. This will set the entire process back considerably. You cannot assess how far you have come if you cannot establish your benchmark.

There was much made of benchmarks today in talk of the need for accountability and the need for the people of Ontario to understand where they stand with regard to education. Well, they have the same needs with regard to equity legislation. If you don't know where you've been, you can hardly know where you are now.

We ask you to reconsider this aspect of Bill 8.

We are concerned about the message the present government seems to be sending on equity issues. Recognition of the rich diversity of Ontario's population is in an evolving process, a process in which government's role should be serious and proactive. We believe this government's stance in these matters should be revised and reworked. We do not believe it's necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Mr Young: Thank you for coming tonight to make a presentation. You made a statement that there's no evidence, or no empirical evidence, that Bill 79 was a job killer. Literally hundreds of employers have told us that they will not start up, they will not expand, that they don't want to deal with this legislation in Ontario. We know it's a job killer. There's no 1-800 number that somebody can call and say, "Oh, by the way, I'm not expanding," or "I'm not coming to Ontario because I don't want to deal with that legislation." But with other pieces of legislation, what kind of evidence would you expect to get, that that bill, among others, is a job killer?

Mr Holmes: Well, if I were to turn the question around, I would suggest that employers who are unwilling to come to Ontario and work in the kind of climate that would provide equal access to minority groups are questionable employers at best.

Mr Young: No, no, that's not what they've said. They've just said they don't want to deal with a document, with a law, that goes through a 26-point plan that they don't even understand when they read it. Some of these small companies can't afford to hire somebody to implement for it, so they just go elsewhere.

But how can we measure? There are 500,000 people unemployed and 1.3 million on welfare in Ontario right now, and employers have told us that's why they don't want to be here. It's great for the school boards and the banks, which have unlimited wealth. How can we measure the jobs we've lost?

Mr Holmes: It is perhaps the banks that set the trend, or perhaps the school boards that set the trend and provide an example. I have little faith, frankly, in the employers of this province to move unless nudged. I have very little evidence that would indicate to me that the employers of this province have voluntarily enacted workplace equity in their own workplaces. I do not see vast numbers of minorities being hired, and I do not see the glass ceiling, which has been there for time immemorial, being shattered.

Mrs Caplan: Just to clarify something -- if I make an error on this, I'll ask the parliamentary assistant or the staff people to correct me -- it's my understanding, contrary to the information that's been given by the Conservative member, the existing Bill 79 has no requirements for any private sector company under 50 employees. Is that correct?

Mr Marchese: That's right.

Mrs Caplan: And that there are minimal requirements for 50 to 100 and that the full weight of the act kicks in for those over 100. Is that also correct?

Ms Nellie Tion: Full, 100 and over; 50 to 100, I don't know if it's minimal, but it's modified.

Mrs Caplan: Modified. That's a better word. And we're talking here to a broader public sector transfer partner. First of all, I want to congratulate you on an excellent presentation and ask you -- and I know what the answer is but I still want it on the record -- the requirements of the Education Act, is there anything in there that would suggest a quota?

Mr Holmes: No.

Mrs Caplan: So the Conservative government could live up to its commitment to end quotas and not touch the Education Act. Is that correct?

Mr Holmes: That's correct. We do not view affirmative action as a quota.

Mrs Caplan: In fact, there's no obligation --

The Chair: I thought you just said that.

Mrs Caplan: There is no obligation in the Education Act to reach any kind of specific numerical number that could be imposed upon you by the provincial government, is there?

Mr Holmes: No.

Mrs Caplan: That's my question. Thank you.

The Chair: Mr Marchese, you get to finish it off today.

Mr Marchese: I was trying to understand what Mr Young was saying, because a number of them are saying companies recognize that representing the different people in our society is good. Some may not or many may not, but many recognize that it's a good thing, so that automatically they're doing it. On the other hand, I hear Mr Young saying that he heard a lot of employers saying it's not good, it's a job killer and that's why they're not either coming here or those who are here are saying this is bad. But I'm not asking another question, I'm just raising that as a comment.

You mention the banking sector making changes progressively for the better. In the record, on Hansard, I talked about a study the Bank of Montreal did. It was 1990, following the employment equity of 1986. If you heard the views -- and it's difficult to remember. I could get it for you. I should have brought it with me. The views the men have of women are rather interesting, because their views are so stereotypical that they bring you back to the 1950s and 1960s. This is in spite of employment equity at the federal level.

So I don't have all that confidence, as some do, that things are changing nicely because of demographics.

The Chair: Mr Marchese, you have a very short time for the answer here.

Mr Marchese: The voluntary plan that they're talking about, in my view, won't work. What is your view of that?

Mr Holmes: I agree with you.

The Chair: Okay, gentlemen and ladies --

Mr Young: On a point of order, Mr Chairman: I would like to correct the record, and I'll read to you out of the Education Act where it says the representation of women in certain occupational categories to 50% or more by the year 2000. These categories are supervisory, officer, principal and vice-principal.

The Chair: I don't think --

Mr Young: There's also a 30% goal for policy programming.

The Chair: I don't think, Mr Young, it's a point of order.

Thank you very much, folks. I appreciate your coming to share your thoughts with our committee.

The committee stands adjourned until 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.

The committee adjourned at 2133.