Committee Transcript 1997-Feb-06 | Legislative Assembly of Ontario

Consideration of Bill 103, An Act to replace the seven existing municipal governments of Metropolitan Toronto by incorporating a new municipality to be known as the City of Toronto / Projet de loi 103, Loi visant à remplacer les sept administrations municipales existantes de la communauté urbaine de Toronto en constituant une nouvelle municipalité appelée la cité de Toronto.

TOM CHURCHILL

The Chair (Mr Bart Maves): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the standing committee on general government. Mr Churchill, I believe. You have 10 minutes this morning to make your presentation. At the end of that 10 minutes, if there's any time remaining, I'll ask the NDP caucus to use that time for some questions.

Mr Tom Churchill: My name is Tom Churchill. Like many of the residents of this great city of Toronto, I am an immigrant. I grew up in the town of Fairfield, Connecticut, in Fairfield county, which in the late 1960s and mid-1960s had the highest per capita income of any county in the United States.

Fairfield was in many ways a typical New England town. The hub of town life was the town centre. It was a wide green public square surrounded by white colonial-style buildings: the town hall, the church, and the large, graceful homes that some of the founding families had built and lived in. It was a town in which people took politics, which meant direct democratic process, very seriously; in which the town meeting was a real and vital and, very often, contentious forum for discussion and resolution of local issues. Many considered life in Fairfield idyllic. It was safe, it was pretty, it had an excellent school system. There were those among the population who thought that the homogeneity of the population was an additional attractive feature. Life was good there.

In one very important way, though, Fairfield was not a typical New England town. It was also a suburb of New York City. It took exactly 60 minutes to get from my front door to Lincoln Center in the heart of Manhattan, although, it's true, it was fast driving. Being so near to New York, I grew up with an image of the city as two realities. There was a New York I actually saw and was allowed to experience and that was always exciting and exhilarating to visit: the New York of Broadway theatres, Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Museum of Natural History, the Empire State Building. Then there was the New York that I heard stories about but only actually ever saw from the train when it stopped at 125th Street: the hideous and dangerous New York epitomized by the bleak reality that was Harlem: ghettoization, poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, crime, racial hatred, crumbling infrastructure and an educational system in utter disarray.

Now, although my parents and my friends' parents didn't have to say out loud how lucky we were to live where we lived, the message permeated every aspect of our lives, in which the city and its problems formed an ever-present backdrop against which we measured and understood our privilege.

Imagine my surprise, then, and my unexpected delight, when I came to Toronto in 1970 to attend the University of Toronto. Here was a city with life. Here was a city that people actually chose to live in. Here was a city whose streets were safe to walk at night. Here was a clean city. Here was a city of neighbourhoods, where people took pride in their homes and their gardens. Here I found something I had never been prepared to anticipate: a major North American city that was completely liveable, right down to its core.

Imagine my family's surprise too as my graduation day approached and I told them I had decided to stay and make my life here in Toronto. Although they had visited over the years and come to love Toronto for its vitality, they were actually horrified. They said: "It's a foreign country. You can't live in a foreign country." Remembering Quebec and the War Measures Act, they said: "It's politically unstable. It's not democratic. There's no Bill of Rights, there's no Constitution." Try to forgive them for thinking the American way is the only right way. It's an ingrained idea and very hard to shake.

I tried my best to explain and defend the system of parliamentary democracy here in Canada, and until now, through many difficult political issues and some crises, have never doubted the integrity, viability and basic democratic commitment of this system of government.

But now I see on the horizon the demise of my Toronto under the guise of administrative efficiency and fiscal integrity through the proposed amalgamation of Toronto, North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, East York and York in Bill 103.

I oppose this amalgamation for many reasons that I'm sure you have heard already and will hear again. When you threaten a common and cherished way of life, as Bill 103 does, you must expect that many who come before you will speak with similar misgivings.

Five specific points:

(1) Not one study, not even the one commissioned by the current government, has concluded that amalgamation will result in dollars saved.

(2) There is no convincing evidence that the proposed amalgamation will achieve administrative efficiencies. Indeed, many of the provisions of the bill seem to complicate rather than simplify the process of governing the cities involved.

(3) There is no provision in Bill 103 defining the uses to which the approximately $1 billion in municipal reserve funds can be put. There should be such a provision.

(4) Urban experts have pointed out that a government of the sort proposed in Bill 103 will be much less able and probably much less willing to respond with unique solutions to the particular needs of and opportunities presented by different areas within this city. Local councils can, and do, do so and this is one reason that our cities are vibrant and liveable.

(5) I believe it is a terrible mistake to fund social assistance out of property tax revenues as the related Bill 104 proposes. The property tax base is not flexible enough to deal with the increased need for social assistance during times of recession. Indeed, the burden on the city of Toronto would be disproportionately onerous, given the higher percentage of the population here who receive some form of social assistance.

I fear that Bill 103 will result in a distinct and ongoing erosion of the quality of life in the Toronto that I have made my home; the Toronto that is the only home my children have ever known, where their schools now are safe, vital and sound places providing opportunities to learn and develop in many ways; where they have learned to respect the ethnic and cultural traditions of their classmates and friends; where they learn compassion and the need for personal commitment and action in helping those less fortunate than themselves; where they experience our neighbourhood as lively and safe. I fear Bill 103 will turn Toronto into the fearsome New York City of my childhood.

I fear that much of what is good about Toronto is at stake in Bill 103. But I feel a still deeper fear when I see the way in which the current government's proposals suspend democratic process. Let me refer for a moment to an excerpt from the World Book Encyclopedia description of democracy:

"Throughout history, the most important aspects of the democratic way of life have been the principles of individual equality and freedom. Accordingly, citizens in a democracy should be entitled to equal protection of their persons, possessions and rights; have equal opportunity to pursue their lives and careers; and have equal rights of political participation. In addition, the people should enjoy freedom from undue interference and domination by government."

Let me repeat those last points: Citizens should "have equal rights of political participation. In addition, people should enjoy freedom from undue interference and domination by government." The Ontario government's placing of local elected city councils under trusteeship clearly violates these essential aspects of democratic process.

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As you know, Bill 103 provides for the organizational and staffing structure of the new municipality to be determined by a transition team appointed by the cabinet and reporting to the Minister of Municipal Affairs. It provides that the new council cannot overturn staff appointments or other decisions made by these provincial appointees and that none of the decisions of the transition team may be challenged in court.

Let me quote again from the World Book article on democracy: "An essential characteristic of democratic government is an independent judiciary. It is the duty of the justice system to protect the `rules' and the rights of individuals under these rules, especially against the government itself." Bill 103 nullifies the power of the courts to protect essential democratic rights of individuals in Ontario.

The Minister of Municipal Affairs was quoted on page 1 of the Globe on February 4 as saying: "We are at a historic moment in the life of this city. We have a one-time opportunity ahead of us to take advantage of the best ideas in government innovation and planning." We are indeed at a historic moment, a moment that may well mark the departure from democratic process in Toronto and in Ontario. I entreat this committee and this government to let the people whose lives and communities will be most affected by Bill 103 decide whether the ideas contained in it do in fact represent the best ideas in government innovation and planning. Listen to the results of the upcoming municipal referendums.

In the same article the Globe quoted Mr Leach as saying, "I think the legislation is pretty good. There will be some minor changes," but nothing sweeping. I entreat this committee and this government to let the people whose lives and communities will be most affected by Bill 103 decide just how good this legislation is. Listen to the results of the upcoming municipal referendums. Let our democratic traditions prevail. It is clearly a duty of your office.

Winston Churchill was a defender of democracy without whose leadership in the Second World War we might well all be living under a very different system today. He said government of the people, by the people, for the people, still remains the sovereign definition of democracy. Robert Maynard Hutchins, who is a former dean of Yale Law School and president of the University of Chicago, said, "Democracy is the only form of government that is founded on the dignity of man, not the dignity of some men, of rich men, of educated men or of white men, but of all men."

In closing, let me say this: When I took back on my decision to live in Toronto, I know it was not from naïveté that I assured my American family that democracy was alive and well here. It was not through lack of knowledge of the workings of a parliamentary democracy that I believed I would enjoy the right to meaningful participation in government. But I had no idea that this right could be summarily suspended at the whim of a few individuals. This should not be the case.

I urge you to reconsider Bill 103 in its entirety. I believe this legislation needs sweeping change, not just some minor amendments.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Churchill. You've done a very good job of exhausting your 10 minutes completely, but I want to thank you for coming forward this morning and making your presentation to the committee. Thank you very much.

BRONWYN DRAINIE

The Chair: Bronwyn Drainie? Good morning, and welcome to the committee.

Ms Bronwyn Drainie: My name's Bronwyn Drainie. I've lived in this city all my life. I wonder if any of you remember the Yonge Street mall? Remember that? We had it in the early 1970s for about three or four summers, I remember. I can't remember exactly where it started. I think it was College Street.

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): Gerrard.

Ms Drainie: Was it Gerrard? From there south? I have the happiest memories of strolling on that mall and watching the city go by. But my best memory is of an evening when my friend Rafe and I were ambling along and we saw a man standing by himself looking in a shoe store window and we both did a sort of doubletake and said, "Isn't that Jack Albertson, the movie actor?" Jack Albertson had won the Oscar the year before for The Subject Was Roses, so that's why his face was very familiar to us. Sure enough, it was him. We kind of poked each other in the ribs and dared each other and eventually we went up and introduced ourselves to him and told him that we were big fans. He was delighted to stop and talk.

In those days, we were just starting to make movies in a big way in Toronto and things weren't very well set up to handle the talent that came to town. They'd be busy all day working on the movie set, but then they'd be kind of at loose ends in the evening in a city where they didn't really know anybody. Jack Albertson kind of fell in with us and we strolled the Yonge Street mall together for another half-hour or so, listening to the street musicians. Finally, I invited him back to my apartment with Rafe for coffee and we all became friends. He was much older than I was, and I ended up setting him up for a couple of golf games with my stepfather, because he was a big golfer, while he was in town.

As we were drinking coffee that first night, he said to us: "Do you have any idea what a miracle this is? Do you have any idea what an incredible city you live in?" We both looked a little surprised and he said: "Look what happened to me tonight. First of all, I could stroll around this downtown area of the city, not just feeling safe but actually enjoying myself, not having to veer around piles of garbage in order to walk on the streets. Then I met you, perfect strangers, and here I am drinking coffee in your apartment." He said, "You know, I've worked in just about every city in the United States and I haven't been in one where you could do this for, I don't know, 20 or 30 years."

In fact, he was so moved by the Toronto experience that the next day he called his wife and daughter back in Los Angeles and told them, "You've just got to come up here and see this city while I'm working here. You won't believe it unless you see it with your own eyes." They came and we all became friends.

That's the kind of thing that can happen in Toronto because it is Toronto, because it's been cared for by the citizens who love it and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Of course the place has changed over the years and it will continue to change. That's in the nature of cities. I'm old enough to remember the horse-drawn milk wagon that used to come down our street and the day four-year-old Mary Jane Johnson got kicked by the horse and the ambulance came, with the sirens. It was quite an adventure. I remember Joe and Luigi, two brothers from Naples who brought their fruit and vegetable truck around three times a week, and they taught us how to dance the tarantella in my mother's kitchen when I was seven years old.

There's no more of that kind of curbside delivery today, but in its place there is an array of food shops and restaurants as varied and as sophisticated as anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the world. You lose some things; you gain others. Do you remember the Lieutenant Governor's mansion in Chorley Park? It was a veterans' hospital in the years when I was growing up and my parents used to take us to play in the park sometimes, but I was sure it was a fairy castle, it was so romantic. Then one day it was suddenly gone and I felt a terrible pang.

But around that same time my parents started taking us for excursions over to the island, a tradition that I've continued with my own children, piling our bikes on to the Ward's Island ferry and cycling along the southside boardwalk all the way to Hanlan's Point, stopping off for a game of Frisbee in the middle and listening to picnics in a dozen languages.

I'm a real downtowner. I've always lived within a mile or two of the Park Plaza. Over the years I've added new parts of the city to my regular haunts, areas like the Danforth and the St Lawrence Market area, Harbourfront, College and Clinton. All those other areas "out there" were just the suburbs, as far as I was concerned, until family members started moving, one to Etobicoke, one to East York, another to Scarborough. I started to realize when I went to visit them that they didn't all live their lives yearning for Yonge and Bloor the way I did. They all had their own town centres and malls and areas where they liked to drive you around in December to show you the beautiful Christmas lights, their own local newspapers and churches and charity drives and neighbourhood associations.

This became even clearer to me when my oldest son started playing select hockey in the north Toronto league, which meant me becoming intimately acquainted with just about every hockey rink from Lawrence Avenue north to Lake Simcoe. I remember one arena, in the city of York, where we felt like we had stepped back four decades into the 1950s. I remember another in North York where the hockey rink shared the arena with the bocce courts, where older generations of Italian men came to play and drink espresso. I remember another arena in East York that had a beautiful handmade quilt on the wall, designed and made by Central American immigrants to Toronto -- it was in squares -- describing the process of becoming a Canadian citizen.

What all these places have in common, I believe, is that they truly belong to their citizens, to the people who live in them, through a system of local government that they freely elect, manageable enough in size that they can know and reach their school trustees when they need them. Decisions do not get made in these cities until they have gone through a democratic, consultative process with the people who live there. No one in this province -- not here, not in the 905 area, not in Windsor or Elora or Ottawa or Kingston or North Bay -- voted to take that process away from the people.

We've created some wonderful things in Toronto: Massey Hall, the Harbourfront Centre for arts and recreation, the CNE, the beautiful network of walkways through the ravines and the Don Valley. We've created some awful things as well: Roy Thomson Hall, the Harbourfront towers that block the lake, the SkyDome, the Gardiner Expressway. The point is that we created them all. We did it, making decisions through our elected representatives, so we get to glory in the achievements and we have to take responsibility for the failures. That's how democracy works, and I sincerely hope it's how it will continue to work in this province.

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I disagree with every single aspect of the new legislation the government is trying to introduce: the megacity, the trusteeship, the transition team, the downsizing of the school boards and the contempt the government is showing for them, and of course the downloading of welfare and social housing costs on the municipalities. But I am grateful to this government for one thing: It has wakened us all up. It's been said before, but it has never been truer than today in Ontario: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I intend to remain vigilant until this government comes to its senses and restores to Ontarians the democratic rights and freedoms that all Canadians, including all of you in this room, I'm sure, love and cherish. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Drainie. We have about a minute and a half for Mr Silipo.

Mr Tony Silipo (Dovercourt): Ms Drainie, my favourite dance is the tarantella, so maybe we can find an occasion, if it's not being too forward.

But let me pick up on the more serious point you made. I find amazing your recounting of what makes this for you, very much following from the previous speaker also, the great city it is. It's that sense that change, as you said, will continue to happen, needs to continue to happen, but the way that change has to happen is in a way which involves people in those decisions and in those discussions, not in the unilateral way Mike Harris and his government are behaving.

One of the things we are continuing to see, even as we are sitting here -- yesterday, as these hearings were continuing, I was in another committee room, dealing with the proposal from this government around the referendum process it wants to put in place to cover the whole province. Yet they continue to say they won't heed the referendum process and the referendum vote in Metropolitan Toronto that's taking place now. What's your reaction to that?

Ms Drainie: This is news to me. I wasn't aware that the Ontario government was planning a referendum. On what?

Mr Silipo: No, they're not planning a referendum; they're planning to put in place a referendum law that would cover the process in the future. But of course they're saying it shouldn't apply in this case, because this is too complicated an issue, it's not the kind of issue you should put to referenda. There are about 55 different arguments they put about why it doesn't make sense.

Ms Drainie: It's a very selective use of a process, isn't it? We can all play that game, but basically it should be the same strokes for all the folks.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Drainie, for coming forward this morning and making your presentation.

BRIAN MEESON

The Chair: Would Brian Meeson please come forward. Good morning, Mr Meeson. I know you've been back there for a little bit, so welcome to the committee. As you probably heard, you have 10 minutes to make your presentation. At the end of your presentation, if there's any time remaining, I'll ask the government caucus to ask any questions.

Mr Brian Meeson: Thank you very much. Before I begin, I must add something to Ms Drainie's love of the island. I think you will recall that there was a long fight to ensure that the citizens had a right to live on the island. It was the intent of large government to overrule that right. It was only the will of the people, fighting on their own, with the support of local municipalities, that ensured that the island would remain a viable community, cared for by the people for the benefit of all the people in the city, and not just for the benefit of those who wished to play golf.

I have requested to appear before this committee because no other avenue is available to me to express my response to Bill 103. My elected MPP does not reply to any correspondence. My elected MPP has not appeared at any public meeting in his ward, that I'm aware of. The Premier of Ontario does not reply to any correspondence. My right to influence the actions of my municipal councillor is cancelled by his being arbitrarily placed in trusteeship. The trustees have been instructed not to communicate with me or the public. My right to appeal this multilevel and unilateral disfranchisement in the courts is denied by article 12 of Bill 103.

Above all, my capacity to think clearly and address this bill simply has been undermined by the bill's being bundled with a dozen other measures that directly relate to it and cannot be separated from it.

I want to assure the committee that what I say is not part of an orchestrated campaign, as Minister Leach has suggested. It expresses, I hope with some force and sincerely, with no offence, a personal reaction after reading this bill carefully. I am not a lawyer, but I have difficulty in reading the wording of Bill 103 as a guarantee of ordinary democratic rights. Indeed, certain clauses lead me to the sense that the bill violates my rights as a Canadian and those of my fellow citizens.

Beyond the generally arbitrary and assumptive nature of its provisions, there are three specifics which grant extraordinary powers to the minister and his appointees, powers that usurp individual rights:

(1) The power granted to both the minister-appointed trustees and the minister-appointed transition team is placed beyond the reach of the judiciary. Such bypassing of the courts might be justified in a democracy in time of war or dire emergency. When such conditions clearly do not exist, such appropriation of powers must be challenged as a shift towards tyranny.

(2) The trustees are granted the right to operate outside the limits of the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, as also will the transition team.

(3) Both ministerially appointed bodies are granted the power to violate the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

With such provisions, the minister and his appointees are placed beyond the law. The ultimate authoritarian twist is spelled out in clause 25. Here the minister grants himself the power to seek a court order to enforce any part of the act. At the same time, the act bars a citizen from recourse to a court to seek redress for any violation to democratic rights committed by the minister or his appointees. The most obvious redress any citizen would seek is for the disempowerment of those elected representatives who actually do respond to communications, namely, municipal aldermen and councillors.

As an ordinary citizen, I cannot accept the supplanting of those who represent me and whose powers are designed, as in any effective democracy, to exert checks and balances on other levels of government, and on people who are responsible to nobody but the minister who appointed them. My opposition is to trustees appointed by orders in council, to a transition team appointed by orders in council, and by restrictive impositions forced on elected councils by ministerial fiat. In effect, such appointees serve at the whim of the minister and cabinet and are neither responsive nor responsible to the people. They are simply not accountable.

My determination to take action is not founded on selfishness. I agree that there must be changes and that they may not be to my liking. I am compelled to act because this bill attacks a deeper sense of what democracy and community mean to me. I believe that a successful community is built on the desires and efforts of each person in that community. The smaller the community, the more the competing desires and efforts can be balanced and coordinated.

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Because Ontario's cities have been built from small political units in which all citizens have a direct voice, they have a strength and effectiveness that make them, and pre-eminently the municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto, the envy of the world. Their success is their size. That size allows them to be open, responsive and efficient. On these three counts, they equal any city of comparable size. On all three counts, they significantly outperform any larger city in the world. With such small political units is built a city that is genuinely world-class.

This model is regarded as inefficient by a government that refuses to listen to any version of common sense but its own. Its own ideal models, New York and Chicago, are by any measure vastly less efficient. I ask the committee to name a local government in Ontario that has significantly failed to operate within budget constraints. By way of comparison, I ask them to name any other level of government in this country that exhibits similar fiscal efficiency. Then I ask them to look at the sad fiscal and social record of New York and Chicago.

There appears to be nothing in the idea of amalgamation that could not be more easily accomplished by means other than fiat. Some other, and hidden, agenda must be driving the unseemly haste to scramble this bill into law. Regardless of what agenda pushes its implementation, two assumptions underlying it I feel are deeply subversive.

The first is that change imposed with such violence and haste as proposed can in fact be achieved without increased cost. The implementation of this bill, if passed without amendment, and significant amendment, will I believe trigger huge social resistance and cost overruns that have not been factored in because they are not even contemplated.

The second and more dangerous assumption is that there is only one right model. From the government point of view, its must be the right one. Why? Apparently because every report and expert has testified that it is wrong. But because the government holds the power, it presumes that it has the nod from God -- the right divine of kings to govern wrong -- and therefore needs no help from others.

Ultimately, this bill is not about amalgamation; it is about power and the authoritarian misuse of power to grab more power. A government that sets an example of violent and authoritarian behaviour sets the standard of behaviour for those it governs.

I am no more nor less than any person in this room. Each of us has been enormously privileged to grow in a democratic society. I think we would all probably agree that a democratic society is a collection of human beings held together by political laws which ensure their freedom from arbitrary restrictions.

One fundamental right underpins democracy. It is a simple tenet: Humans have the right to be treated as ends in themselves, not as means to something else. When they are treated merely as means, they can be overridden, as they are in this bill. When they can be treated with contempt, something is seriously skewed.

I ask you to join with me in consulting our consciences. When we consult our consciences, we have a sense of what is true. Then we'll begin to see this bill for what it is: a disregard for that tenet, or put more bluntly, a Fascist act.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please, ladies and gentlemen.

You've effectively used up your 10 minutes, sir. Thank you for coming forward this morning and making a presentation.

BARRY LIPTON

The Chair: Barry Lipton, please. Good morning, Mr Lipton, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Barry Lipton: Thank you. I'm a heavy-construction worker here in Toronto and I'm also certified under the occupational health and safety laws of this province. I have worked on the Gardiner Expressway rehabilitation and also on the subway.

I would like to focus the first part of my presentation on part of the hidden cost that this government is planning for the new megacity of Toronto. There is a cost that so far has not been alluded to by anyone, as far as I know. I do not think anyone at the municipal level has considered the cost of downloaded workers' compensation cases on to welfare rolls due to Bill 99, which is currently before the House. The government is about to change the way many injured workers' benefits are paid. They are going to transfer many of them from workers' compensation to the general welfare and family benefits.

Already there are around 6,000 cases where inadequate WC benefits must be supplemented by welfare, so the municipal property taxpayer is already subsidizing companies with bad safety records. Under Bill 99, literally thousands more will be added to the welfare rolls, with 50% of the cost downloaded to the municipalities. This will occur in several ways.

Almost twice as many injured workers are being denied benefits in 1996 than were in 1991. These denied workers go directly on general welfare and family benefits. This number will grow with the destruction of workers' health and safety by the Harrisites and the increased claim denial rate by the WCB.

There is a ticking time bomb that the Harrisites have left for the municipalities. Over 50,000 workers are on permanent disability benefits which up until now have been fully indexed. Their pensions are being de-indexed by Bill 99 and slowly over the next 10 years the municipalities will find that their family benefit caseloads will explode by up to 50,000 families. This is a nice gift to the Harrisite corporate friends, paid for by the municipal property taxpayers. This is only one reason I am totally against the proposed amalgamation of the seven municipalities that compose the present Metro Toronto.

Why is this government hell-bent in its plans to destroy the economic engine of Canada? I see three basic reasons for the course of action proposed by the Harrisites:

(1) To pay for the 30% provincial income tax cut for the rich, they have to steal at least $1 billion from the property taxpayers of Metro Toronto.

(2) Most of the open and vocal opposition to the Harrisite agenda comes from the urban area of Toronto. Harris said this past weekend at the Big Brothers Bowlerama that he was doing this to silence the voice of the lefties in the city of Toronto.

(3) The government's neo-con agenda calls for the withdrawal from and the destruction of social services. They will do this by downloading them to the level of government that is least able to pay. This will absolve the Harris government of responsibility for killing these programs. Services will wither and die at the municipal level.

The Harrisite welfare policy is the welfare policy of the last Depression, the same policy that led to the bankruptcies of municipalities across Ontario. It was the welfare policy of charging the poor with vagrancy, beating them with clubs and escorting them to the edge of the municipality. It was the policy of barbed-wire camps for the poor in Canada. Read your history.

I find the emasculation of the democratically elected municipal councils and school boards and the forced amalgamation of Metro Toronto by this government the most repugnant part of this government's plans.

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I want to read you a quote: "There is no cost for a municipality to maintain its name and identity. Why destroy our roots and pride? I disagree with restructuring because it believes that bigger is better. Services always cost more in larger communities. The issue is to find out how to distribute services fairly and equally without duplicating services." This is a quote of Mike Harris in the Fergus-Elora News-Express of September 24, 1994.

Those who complain about the expense of democracy do not know its true cost. Let them visit the cenotaphs; let them visit the Canadian war cemeteries in Hong Kong, Italy, France, Belgium and Holland. Then let them complain. Those who complain do not deserve to live in a democracy.

My father volunteered for service in the Royal Canadian Air Force in October 1939 to defend democracy against a foreign totalitarian regime. My mother and four uncles were also volunteers. I can do no less than to defend democracy from its enemies here in Ontario. The imposition of the trustees, the transition team and a handpicked bureaucracy smacks of the imposition of the government of Vichy, France. Those who collaborate with this anti-democratic process deserve the same respect as the Pétain regime.

The government has shown its contempt for the Parliament of this province and its citizens. The ministers of this government have continued to tell the citizens that their taxes will not go up and their services will be more efficiently delivered. The citizens already are paying more than a thousand new user fees. The government shows its contempt for the citizenry by assuming that they are stupid sheep and that the citizens cannot tell when their services are going down and their taxes are going up.

There will be a real citizens' response to this course of action by this government. It will be the citizens giving themselves their own tax relief. This government has set the stage for a tax strike. The citizens will not pay their taxes to a government that has lost its legitimacy by suspending the democratic rights of over two million citizens. No taxation without representation.

What do the small shopkeepers have to lose by withholding both their property tax and PST payments? Nothing. They have the choice of going bankrupt by paying these increased taxes or fighting this government. The same goes for all citizens. The withholding of provincial income tax and property tax will be but one response to this government's actions.

In closing, I would like to suggest to the government to withdraw its ill-conceived plans for amalgamation and entanglement. The government should put in place a constituent assembly drawn from the elected representatives and citizens of the entire GTA and Metro areas. This assembly would utilize all the studies about governance in this area, taking all viewpoints into account, and come to a consensus. A constituent assembly worked to develop a new Constitution for the new South Africa and it could be used to develop a working governance system for over four million people here in Ontario.

If a democratic solution to this crisis is dismissed by this government, Harris will bear the responsibility for destroying civil society in Ontario.

I left Saskatchewan in 1988 to come to Ontario. At the time I left there was an arrogant Tory government in power there. We have all seen the results of a government that was arrogant and held its citizens in contempt. I see history judging this government and its members just as harshly. Thank you.

The Chair: Mr Lipton, you've also effectively used your time for your presentation, but thank you for coming forward and making your presentation this morning.

JOAN FORGE

The Chair: Would Joan Forge please come forward. Good morning, Ms Forge.

Ms Joan Forge: Thank you. My great-grandmother was born in 1844 in the village of Yorkville. My mother was born in 1896 in the town of York. Both Yorkville and York were incorporated into the city of Toronto, and that's where I was born, in 1924. So you see, I'm a Torontonian through and through.

When I was a kid, Toronto was a staid, white-bread city, and spaghetti only came out of a can. They called it Hogtown back then, and now it's composed of five cities and a borough, each distinct in its own way. My city has become a vibrant, multicultural metropolis, and I'm very proud of it.

Bill 103, the megacity bill, is a flagrantly undemocratic piece of legislation which would remove local control from our local governments.

Proponents of amalgamation think it would be beneficial because money would be saved. But will money be saved?

Ron Hikel, a partner in KPMG -- I'm sure he has been quoted several times already -- the management consulting firm which was commissioned by the Harris government to prepare a study of the economics of amalgamation, told a news conference at Queen's Park that there has been no amalgamation of which he was aware that would demonstrate the certainty of savings in Metro Toronto.

Professor Andrew Sancton, an expert on municipal government with the University of Western Ontario, points out that the academic literature is unanimous: Amalgamation always raises the cost of government.

Furthermore, the cost of government increases with the size of the amalgamated city. Wendell Cox, a US author and consultant with international experience in designing legislation, gives us some interesting statistics: Cities with populations of more than one million spend 21% more per capita than those with populations from 500,000 to one million, and they spend 18% more than cities with populations from 100,000 to 500,000. These facts were drawn from the US Census Bureau. Mr Cox says:

"In theory, savings should occur when bureaucracies are combined. In practice, however, such savings never occur.

"One problem is that administrative costs account for only about 15% of the cost of government. Even if you cut administrative costs 20% by eliminating excess bureaucrats, you've still only cut the overall budget by 3%.

John Barber writes in the Globe and Mail that any operational efficiencies of amalgamation will almost certainly be eaten up by demands to equalize varying salary and service levels across Metro. Given the nature of politics, that means raising salary and service levels to the highest standard rather than reducing them to the lowest.

Indianapolis, Indiana, is the only major US city to undergo a forced amalgamation in this century. An article in National Geographic, entitled Indianapolis: City on the Rebound, describes a street party in a downtown neighbourhood. The purpose of the street party was to raise money to replace sidewalks in the neighbourhood. Street parties to raise money for sidewalk repair? Is that what we want for Toronto? Will Toronto suffer the same fate? Will we amalgamate only to find that megacity is a dismal failure? Let us hope wisdom will prevail.

The Chair: Thank you very much. Will you receive questions from the government caucus, starting with Mr Gilchrist.

Mr Steve Gilchrist (Scarborough East): Thank you, Ms Forge, for coming today to make your presentation. As somebody with such a long family history in Toronto, I have to wonder, given that your family has seen well over a dozen expansions of what was originally called Toronto in that time period, the boundaries have gone from something that was only a few blocks square to a city of 660,000. In every one of those cases it was merely moving out the boundaries of the city of Toronto. You may recall that in 1950 the city of Toronto applied to the Ontario Municipal Board to annex basically all of what we know today as Metro Toronto. That's what the municipal government of the city of Toronto wanted to do 47 years ago.

I have to ask you a question. What has changing the artificial political boundaries done to negatively impact the Toronto we live in today? There have been over a dozen so-called amalgamations in the past.

Ms Forge: I don't think we're talking about boundaries. I don't think it really matters how large the boundaries are, as long as each of the individual cities and boroughs inside those boundaries have a say in what's going on.

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Mr Gilchrist: Okay. Let's look at this, Ms Forge, because again, in the same time period in which you've been an adult in Toronto, we've had towns like Weston absorbed by the city of York against their will at the time, but now obviously an integral and still-thriving community. Leaside didn't want to become part of East York. Had all those local resistances to change been adhered to, we'd still have 13 different communities here and you'd have things as small as Mimico and New Toronto.

Let's leave aside Metro Toronto as a government; that's gone too. If we look at this as nothing more than the boundaries of the city of Toronto being changed to incorporate a larger area, how would that in any way reflect on the culture or the lifestyle of any community within that area?

Ms Forge: I don't know that it would reflect so much on the lifestyle. The question is, are those people going to be adequately represented in an amalgamated Toronto? I don't think they are.

Mr Gilchrist: That's a good question. Let me ask you, do you believe that representation by population is fair, that each of us should have more or less an equal vote when we go?

Ms Forge: That's the whole basis of democracy, isn't it?

Mr Gilchrist: Thank you. You may or may not be aware that right now -- I'll let you put the adjectives to it, but I know we could agree that a lack of action on the part of politicians in the last number of decades has led to a variance where some councillors are elected by less than half the number of voters than other councillors within the same city. In my city of Scarborough, for example, some councillors are elected by 24,000 people and others happen to represent 60,000. They keep getting re-elected, so clearly they're doing a good job.

Would you not agree with us and with the mayors, who in their own report said they believed they could go down to 48 councillors simply by coming to a far fairer averaging of the number of constituents served? Would you not agree with that goal as well?

Ms Forge: I think it has some merit.

Mr Gilchrist: Let me just say to you that by doing that, you wind up with a population that's about 30% smaller than what a Metro councillor represents today. Considering that Metro spends three quarters of all the money, I think a case can be made that if a Metro councillor can represent 70,000 and the new councillors will represent barely 50,000, access to our local politicians will not only be improved but it's certainly doable because the Metro councillors have been doing it now for nine years, as directly elected.

Ms Forge: It all boils down to, will they be properly represented? I'm not entirely sure they will be.

Mr Gilchrist: I'm confident we'll still get good people running.

The Chair: We've come to the end of the 10 minutes. Thank you very much, Ms Forge, for coming forward and making your presentation today.

JOHN FOX

The Chair: Would John Fox please come forward. Good morning, Mr Fox, and welcome to the committee. You have 10 minutes this morning to make your presentation.

Mr John Fox: So little time and so much to say. I've already learned a lot sitting in the room today, and I hope I'm not alone.

My name is John Fox. I'm a lawyer in Toronto. I live in the city of York. I've read Bill 103 in light of the transfer of responsibilities the government is proposing between it and the municipalities. My conclusion is that Bill 103 is a flawed piece of legislation and, together with that redistribution of responsibilities, is a potentially devastating combination of legislation to the city of Toronto.

I'd like to make three recommendations to the committee this morning: first with respect to public consultations on the megacity, second with respect to the danger of downloading and, third, with respect to the importance of local democracy to this city.

First, the need for public consultation: One of the mandates the bill gives to the transition team is to hold public hearings on the functions to be assigned to the neighbourhood committees and on the rationalization of services across the new city.

Generally speaking, if I can be so bold as to reword that, it is to say that the transition team will consider local governance and who should best perform what task. It's an excellent idea and others have had it as well, the Golden and Crombie reports being products of similar ideas. However, it seems to me that kind of consultation should take place before the megacity legislation becomes law, for the following reasons:

First of all, consultations may give the government some better Toronto-specific data on the costs of amalgamation. The speaker before me outlined to you some of the evidence which has come through in the papers regarding the costs of amalgamation, and the conclusion for most of us is that the majority of this evidence indicates that there are no guaranteed saving coming out of this amalgamation.

Second, such consultations could let you know which services in particular could be profitably amalgamated without incurring those costs.

Finally, the effect of representation could also be reviewed. As you know, we've heard a lot about numbers in terms of dollars, but a democratic institution isn't measured only by the efficiency with which it uses its resources but also by how well it can respond to its constituents. It is trite to say that the better the ratio between representative and represented, the more efficiently it can respond.

My first recommendation, therefore, is that public consultation should occur on the rationalization of services before this bill becomes law, not after this bill becomes law.

I want to turn to the dangers of downloading. I know is not the subject of Bill 103, but I believe they are inexorably linked; in fact I can only understand Bill 103 and in particular the haste with which it is being brought forward in the context of the downloading of services because it is only that downloading which, to my mind, generates the need for an immediate megacity.

Let me review my reasoning with you and why I believe this is a mistake.

It would be a standard reprise of most urban planners and economists that income redistribution programs should not rely on municipal funding. Municipalities are small jurisdictions relying on property taxes for income. It stands to reason that the smaller the jurisdiction, the more precarious the funding. For example, if my apartment building began redistributing income among its tenants, it's clear who would stay and who would leave. Similarly, the logic can be applied to the municipal level: As the demand for soft services increases, those who pay for them -- businesses and property taxpayers -- are tempted to leave.

The cost of these programs to municipalities depends on the number of its citizens relying on social services, and this government has acknowledged that. It stands to reason that Toronto, with a high proportion of the province's welfare bill and a high number of its senior citizens living within its border, will be hard hit. In the event of a recession, the effect is evidently amplified.

I can't believe that the government could proceed with the downloading without the amalgamation, because cities like Toronto and York, with even higher per capita proportions of seniors, of children in need of subsidized care and of welfare recipients, would have difficulty almost immediately dealing with their new responsibilities. The megacity will last longer. It has a broader tax base and it will assume any surpluses in the current municipal treasuries.

The combination of legislation brings forward a highly disturbing scenario to my mind, that is, that at some point the megacity will find itself caught between its taxpayers and its needy, caught between a decision between mega-taxes and mega-despair. You will have to resolve that. The potential damage to Toronto's social and economic viability and fabric are incalculable at this time.

Let me summarize. I want to be plain. I'll join my voice to the metropolitan board of trade. The downloading of income distribution programs to the municipal level is a mistake. I recommend that you do not proceed with that.

Finally, I want to turn to local democracy in Toronto. When I go around to my friends and even other parts of the country, other countries, very few people object when I say that Toronto is one of the best cities in the world. It is safer, it is cleaner, it is a great place to live; it has great restaurants and all kinds of great things going for it.

But it didn't necessarily start that way. Since its inception, the citizens have been trying to improve it and continue to do so. Those improvements have come from debates in city halls, from arguments around dinner tables, the normal way in which democratic societies evolve. We're still looking for ways to improve ourselves and I think the Golden and Crombie reports set out a pretty good blueprint for how to do that.

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In my view, however, Bill 103 does not respect those traditions. It places elected representatives under a trusteeship as though they're not to be trusted, as though those who elected them cannot be relied upon to elect competent representatives. It leaves the basic organizational structure of the megacity in the hands of the transition team, not just its organizational structure but its bureaucracy as well, as though those who were elected to deliver municipal services should have no say in the future development of Toronto.

Finally, the government proposes to ignore municipal referenda as though the citizenry itself should be blocked out of contributing to this discussion.

In my view, Toronto should continue to develop as it was before Bill 103 was brought in. Amalgamation, whether to one city or four, should be considered in light of the recommendations of the two reports which preceded this bill and should take place commensurate with the creation of a body to coordinate regional issues across the GTA, complete with its own set of rules and responsibilities. The realignment of governance in Toronto does need not to take place at the expense of Toronto's tradition of participatory local democracy.

Thus, my third recommendation: The amalgamation of Toronto should be reconsidered, taking into account the two previous reports and the results of municipal referenda. The amalgamation should be completed, if at all, within the context of an overall GTA restructuring which will involve input from local politicians and interested citizens.

I want to leave with one parting comment, and that is this: You, the government, are proposing to change one of the best cities in the world, in terms of its structure and in its responsibilities, in the face of evidence which should tell you that this is a mistake. If you proceed, if you go this route in the face of all this the evidence and in the face of those who sit in this chair and tell you it's a mistake, I want to tell you that you will be held responsible for the results.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Fox. Mr Colle, you have about a minute and a half.

Mr Colle: As you know, Mr Fox, some of the cheerleaders for the megacity are saying you need a megacity to handle the provincial downloading of social services. You can't have the province unload these services and have the cities survive; therefore, you need megacity to make this change the province is undertaking work. How would you respond to that?

Mr Fox: The point that I was trying to make, Mr Colle, was that the megacity is a necessary part of that downloading. It in essence buys time for the government before the full implications of downloading will be witnessed, whereas if the amalgamation does not take place, the evidence in Toronto and perhaps our own city of York would manifest itself much earlier.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Fox, for coming forward this morning and making your presentation to us.

ELIZABETH LINES

The Chair: Would Elizabeth Lines please come forward. Good morning, and welcome to the committee.

Ms Elizabeth Lines: I hope my voice will hold up. To the Chair and members of the committee, my name is Elizabeth Lines and I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

In terms of my background, I grew up in Etobicoke and have been a resident of the west end of the city of Toronto for all of my adult life. Like many others coming before this committee, I am a product of a strong and capable public school system and have attended two of our local universities, York and the University of Toronto. I make my living engaged in a variety of research and writing activities across this city.

I'll be speaking as a resident and worker in the city of Toronto, but I want to say, in terms of the other Metro municipalities, that what in part makes them great is the diversity we have both within and among such municipalities.

I would also add by way of further introduction that, like some others appearing before you, this is the first time I have felt compelled to become politically active in such a direct and personal way, including requesting an appearance before a legislative committee such as this. In the final analysis, just as the personal is political, so too the political is personal.

I have spent some time questioning my own minimal political involvement to date, and I have considered that the notion of complacency, at least in part, can be constructed as a condition born of public trust. While that trust surely has been battered and bruised by the nature of our political process well before now, I would have to say that this fundamental public trust has most definitely now been shattered by the actions of this government in the hearts and minds of many people.

I would like to voice a couple of on-the-ground concerns that I have about amalgamation, since amalgamation seems to be what much of the discussion revolves around, both here and out on the streets, in the press and so forth, and to a degree rightly so. But I will move on from those personal reflections to my real concerns about the entanglement of the concept of amalgamation within Bill 103 and some entanglements within the concept of amalgamation itself.

First, in terms of my personal experience and life in this city, I am proud to be able to say that I have had the good fortune of working with both the Toronto Board of Education and the city of Toronto department of public health on several projects over recent years. They are both recognized internationally as leaders in their respective fields for their innovative, progressive and community-sensitive initiatives.

I have been able to witness and participate first hand in strong, trusting, and cooperative relationships that have been carefully developed and maintained together by the various communities, city or board staff and elected officials, that allow for a sharing of expertise and resources directed towards the development of practices and programs that are appropriate and can make a difference. I would be very concerned that should the city be amalgamated and, as well, our board of education dissolved, with our locally accountable and responsive councillors and trustees being removed from our reach, not to mention the many other barriers that would emerge, much of this good work would have to be abandoned. Yet my strong feeling is that in the long run, what is a loss to the city, what is a loss to individuals or groups is in the end a loss to us all on many levels.

By the way, I do realize that Bill 103 is not about education, but Bill 104 is, and it too is being rammed through the Legislature as we speak, before we can catch our breath.

"Oh, look, what was that? Was it a bird? Was it a plane?" No, just another superbill winging its way from out of some dark recess into our lives to forever change them, without our input or consent, moving at such a speed that unless you have the time to devote your life to monitoring the daily activities of this government, your capacity for even any attempt to participate or question is absolutely impossible. Turn around and, bang, it's another one.

I'm not sure if there are any contexts in which such tactics are really called for at this point in what I thought we could call civilized society, but I know for sure that the context of democratic governance is not one of them. This is of course one of the ways in which this government is consistently in contempt of its citizens.

Finally, to return just briefly to my on-the-ground concerns about Bill 103, in conjunction with the other components of the mega-package, I worry too that the community where I have lived for over 20 years, Bloor West Village, will go into a severe tailspin. The commercial strip, which was I believe the first business improvement area of the city and has served as a model to others, that has grown to be so vital that even now, due to its popularity, the leasing costs for retail space are prohibitive to many, will be at risk of reverting to its pre-BIA state when more and more businesses cannot afford to operate here. While we are on the subject, what would happen to the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas under amalgamation?

Now Bill 103 and amalgamation: I would like to turn to some of the conceptual issues that I see surrounding the bill, but I will tell you right now that I think the bill is a tragedy, that it must be immediately and completely withdrawn. But I feel it is most unfortunate that Bill 103 and amalgamation are being viewed as one and the same thing.

I will approach the topic of the bill now from the perspective of entanglement, that very de rigueur concept of the day. To my mind, there are two very distinct issues that have become entangled in this bill. Certainly others have addressed these components, but the issues still tend to get caught up in one another. I'm coming to think that they must be viewed separately to make sense of either the bill or amalgamation. I will address each of the these issues in turn.

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One issue -- supposedly the substantive issue -- is the amalgamation of our Metro municipalities. Never mind that this idea came out of nowhere, that not only was it not part of the government's platform or mandate, but the Premier and other PCs, notably Joyce Trimmer's task force, which included Derwyn Shea, my MPP, spoke against such an idea. Oh well, so what?

Now never mind that well-informed opinion and experience does not recommend or may actually warn against amalgamation, especially as a standalone reform. Never mind that amalgamation not only won't save us money but will cost us, not only in dollars but in the time and energy that will have to be devoted to what I perceive to be an unnecessary exercise premised on an abuse of power and for which we will all pay dearly in numerous ways for a long, long time to come.

No, never mind all of that. Instead of carrying on with arguments against amalgamation -- we've heard them, we know them; it does make no sense -- I want to get on to another conceptual entanglement.

Even within this issue of the arguments for amalgamation alone, the government, in defending this rather hollow concept, repeatedly entangles issues of service provision with issues of representation and governance. We know that service provision and/or improvement of service provision can be achieved without the dismantling of local government, and that distinction still often gets blurred.

It's much safer for the provincial government to keep these two issues entangled, because how could they come out and argue directly against people's rights as individuals and communities to have elected representatives? How could they say, "You don't deserve to be adequately represented"? Does the government think that if it keeps talking about fire departments, the citizens won't realize they are being robbed of their voice and their representatives and a say in their own future? This is the case right now under Bill 103, and it will remain so throughout the process that Bill 103 sets in motion.

I'm not really aware of any evidence or solid pro-amalgamation arguments as a standalone entity. It doesn't make sense. That's the reaction people have. So what is it actually all about?

I have heard the minister speak of Bill 103, that is, amalgamation, as the "foundation" bill, and of course it is the bill that opens the door to MVA and downloading, so in that sense it certainly is just a beginning. But if we think about a real foundation for the building of a bigger and better city, isn't there usually a fairly comprehensive plan in place before one lays a foundation? Otherwise, how do you know what size or shape or type of foundation you need if you don't know what you're building? But here we've seen no serious plan, no full plan for this great city. This is just another way in which I see the bill as not being about amalgamation. That is, it's not about building a better city, it's not about building a city at all; it's about something quite different and something quite sinister. I think now that the bill is a complete ruse.

So now, Bill 103 versus amalgamation --

The Vice-Chair (Ms Julia Munro): I must point out that you have approached the 10 minutes. Could you wrap up in a few moments, please.

Ms Lines: In my opinion, the essence of Bill 103 is the breach of public trust, through the process through which this bill has come to be, also through the hostile takeover of our municipalities by the province, an action ensconced in the bill.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. You have exceeded your time. We appreciate your coming here today.

MARY HAY

The Acting Chair: Is Mary Hay here? Good morning, Ms Hay.

Ms Mary Hay: I appreciate the opportunity to speak here today. I would like to say that I'm not here as a member of "John Sewell's group." I spoke at the first opportunity at city hall when this bill was first proposed. I have attended a couple of meetings because it is one clearinghouse for an astonishing array of people from across the city of Toronto who are profoundly upset by the ramifications of this bill. I am appalled by what Mike Harris's group is proposing for the future of the city.

I'm here today as a 45-year citizen of the city of Toronto. I'm here as a mother of two sons who I hope can continue to live here in a city which is still a livable, exciting, vibrant place to be. I have very, very severe qualms about the city that they will be growing up into as adults if this bill goes through.

I'm also here as someone who has been actively involved in community issues and in the type of careful local attention that is paid in the city of Toronto to planning issues in a very unique city which needs that type of fine-tuning at the local level.

As both a mother and a citizen and as someone who has been actively involved in community groups, I'm concerned most about two things here. One of them is what I see ultimately as the contempt of a government that would foist this type of legislation upon the citizenry and then say they will not even listen to the voice of the people when they do express it within a referendum. I'm also profoundly concerned about the ramifications of the bill, because Toronto is a city that works particularly well within the North American context. We are, as Fortune magazine and many others have pointed out, a model for the rest of the North American urban experience.

I'm going to talk not so much about those issues in the broader sense, because certainly many, many people have addressed them magnificently. I'd like to talk about it within the context of my experience with an umbrella organization which has given me their full approval to speak within that context today.

I've been involved with an organization called the Toronto Waterfront Coalition, which is an umbrella organization of 21 waterfront-based citizens' and residents' associations. We've been involved for eight years now, and we had our inception through the Crombie commission hearings where we met each other and found that we had many common points of concern and interest in terms of encouraging development of the waterfront that continued to bear in mind people's access to the waterfront, a greening of the waterfront, and productive development. Certainly we are not anti-development, but we know that Toronto has an opportunity to have a waterfront that can be the envy of the world and we want to encourage that type of development.

We have within our membership the most astonishing array of social, economic and political backgrounds that you could possibly imagine, but all of these people who have become involved through these local organizations and have then gone on to speak at committees at the city of Toronto and helped to form policy at the city of Toronto have a profound appreciation for the city they live in. They have taken the time, which is sometimes quite taxing, to get involved in their communities and to help make Toronto the place it is today.

One of the issues we have been involved in is trying to make sure the future of the Toronto Island Airport, otherwise known as the Toronto City Centre Airport, does not include its becoming something that will overwhelm the other uses on the waterfront. Around this issue we circulated a petition. We had, with not that much effort, a snowball effect of people phoning back in wanting new copies of the petition. Over the course of approximately a year, we collected 9,524 signatures on that petition saying that people wanted the size of the airport curtailed so they could continue to enjoy the wonderful resource that the waterfront was.

Those people are from across Metro. They care about a local planning issue, as it's perceived in the city of Toronto, because it has broader ramifications. We have from that a mailing list of 2,011 people who want to be kept informed on this issue.

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For me it was a revelation. I had somewhat timidly become involved in the issue because I was annoyed by the personal effects it had upon me, but to find that there are that many people willing to commit to getting involved in their neighbourhoods, to coming to committee meetings at the city of Toronto to help form public policy within the city of Toronto, was both a humbling and a very gratifying experience. Toronto has truly committed citizens, and it's because of that that it is still a highly livable city. It's the type of fine-tuning that we've been able to do through the responsiveness of the local government that has allowed the city to be what it is today.

In talking to the other executive members and people within the member organizations of our organization, there was almost unanimous agreement on the fact that what is needed in this city is what many of the advisory panels that the government has consulted and ignored said. People almost unanimously felt that what we need is that GTA governing body and to maintain at least four levels of local government within what is now known as Metro.

I don't wish to be cynical, but cynicism certainly does creep in here. I think it's precisely because of this, because of this act, that pesky citizens in the city of Toronto do get involved and do sometimes object to things that larger bodies or larger interests, or very narrow but powerful interests, want to have happen, that this government wants to eliminate that level of local involvement and local control. It's interesting to watch that they do so with the full encouragement of, for instance, the Toronto Star.

I have an anecdotal report that John Honderich was heard to say at a Christmas party in North Toronto, when asked why he was so vociferously in favour of amalgamation, that it's because of the type of stupidity of organizations such as the city of Toronto objecting to jets at the Toronto Island Airport that we want this to go through. That appals me. This has been a public process. The city of Toronto has listened to, and heeded to some extent, the overwhelmingly expressed wishes of the citizens on this. If that level of checks and balances and local planning is demolished, democratic representation within the city of Toronto is essentially over and we will become one of those North American cities that don't even get looked at by Fortune magazine and that people will start to flee from.

I'd like my children to be able to live in this city and to have their children in this city, but I am revising that personal hope on my part right now; I'm looking beyond. I don't think the city can afford to have people thinking that way.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. We have about a minute and a half for the NDP caucus.

Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): I want to thank you, Mary, for your presentation. I have to say to you that I'm very gratified to see many citizens like yourself who have come today and yesterday and will be coming to the hearings with a passion for what they feel is going to be deranged as a result of this bill and how that will affect their own life. So I'm happy that people like yourself are here to make a statement.

Leach said: "Recently, Fortune magazine called Toronto the best city in the world to live and work in, but today a city can't just rest on its laurels no matter how high the praise. Given the relentless competition from the global marketplace, Toronto has to move forward just to maintain its current position." He argues that we have the opportunity through this governance structure to save money, remove barriers to growth -- I guess the way we're organized is a barrier to growth -- and help to create jobs. What is your response to that type of statement?

Ms Hay: I think it has been proven time and again -- there are no studies, as we know, that prove that it will save money. I think it's significant that in the issue of the Island Airport, one of the most strongly involved people, who is currently continuing to be involved, although he's been stationed for two years in Mexico City, is a financial analyst. He's a senior partner in a downtown financial firm. He is a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal with small-c conservative leanings. He's lived in a lot of cities around the world. He's lived in Paris, Hong Kong, most of the major cities of the world.

He maintains a residence here in Toronto because this is what he wants to keep as his base, and he's appalled by this proposal. He thinks that this is not progress. He thinks, out there within the larger business community, the city of Toronto does show what big business does want. Fortune magazine has not chosen this city accidentally. It is livable. It is affordable. It is going to continue to be a strong business base as well as a place to live. He knows --

The Vice-Chair: I must interrupt you. Your time is up. Thank you very much.

MARIE BAMFORD

The Vice-Chair: Marie Bamford, please. Good morning and welcome to the committee, and you may begin.

Ms Marie Bamford: First I would like to thank the members of the committee for listening today. My name is Marie Bamford. I was born in Toronto and I have lived here all my life. I am the mother of four boys and now live in the upper beach area.

When I first heard that the government of Ontario was considering amalgamating the six municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto, I didn't even take it seriously. So much has been written about the important role that small and effective local government plays in maintaining the strength and vitality of the downtown core that I did not think any government would be senseless enough to press forward with an amalgamation plan. Obviously, I was wrong.

When I heard that our six workable municipalities were to be merged into one monster megacity, I felt physically ill. I couldn't breathe, and since that day I have felt so threatened by Bill 103 that I walk around feeling as though somehow has a knife at my throat.

I love this city. I love Toronto. And I believe, after reading everything that I could on this matter, the Ontario government is going to destroy the heart and soul of this city, and I don't think you care.

Small, accessible local government is what makes Toronto a viable and livable city. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, the respected author on urban studies, writes: "Planners like to think they deal in grand terms with the city as a whole and that their value is great because they `grasp the whole picture.' But the notion that they are needed to deal with their city `as a whole' is principally a delusion.... In truth, because of the nature of the work to be done, almost all city planning is concerned with relatively small and specific acts done here and done there, in specific streets, neighbourhoods and districts.

"To know whether it is done well or ill -- to know what should be done at all -- it is more important to know that specific locality than it is to know how many bits in the same category of bits are going into other localities and what is being done with them there. No other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning, whether the planning is creative, coordinating or predictive. The invention required is not a device for coordination at the generalized top, but rather an invention to make coordination possible where the need is most acute -- in specific and unique localities. In short, great cities must be divided into administrative districts."

In the new megacity, there will be fewer and larger administrative districts. Each councillor will not only have to be familiar with his or her own riding, but will need a far greater knowledge of the whole of the Metro area. Their knowledge will become less detailed and more generalized, which is the opposite of what we need in a local councillor.

In my area of Toronto, our city councillor has a very detailed knowledge of our ward. He is also very accessible. He always returns phone calls promptly and does what he can to help. In contrast, the only time I have called my Metro councillor, he did not call back. I feel a much greater connection to my city government than the Metro government.

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I am also concerned that the present small city of Toronto's voice will be lost in the newer larger council. The things that matter, the things that are of importance, all the unique programs that the city of Toronto runs, may not be of equal importance to the new amalgamated council.

I grew up in West Hill in the east end of Scarborough, and I know that the mindset of a person who lives in West Hill is very different from someone who chooses to live in the city. We have different concerns, different needs and a different lifestyle. They would not choose to be regulated to become more like downtown, nor do we want to be regulated to be more like West Hill. Responsive, accessible local governments can better meet the needs of a diverse population. Bill 103 would make municipal government less responsive and less accessible.

I am extremely concerned about the unprecedented powers being given to the trustees and the transition team. The sweeping powers given to the Minister of Municipal Affairs are truly terrifying. Why do we need trustees? Our local governments have not acted irresponsibly. In fact I think the Ontario government will be the one to act irresponsibly and, to prevent that happening, I think the governments of the six municipalities should move quickly to transfer municipal assets and reserve funds into a trust fund to protect local taxpayers' assets from the government of Ontario. I fear the government is going to seize these moneys and assets to help pay for their promised tax cut -- a tax cut that benefits the wealthiest members of our society most.

Another thing I am concerned about is the cost of running for mayor or councillor in a megacity. I think that municipal politics will become blatantly party politics because the cost of running for an election will be prohibitive. This means that councillors will no longer be able to vote to represent their constituent, but will have to take the party line. Inevitably, we will see the disappearance of real representational local democracy. If provincial representatives could vote truly representing their ridings, then Al Leach, Dave Johnson, Isabel Bassett, Derwyn Shea and others would be voting against amalgamation. They would have to do this in order to serve the will of their constituents, the very people who voted them into office.

If reform is needed in government, surely it is at the provincial and federal level because a majority government at that level can become a parliamentary dictatorship if they refuse to really listen to and consult with the opposition parties and the people, the citizens of Ontario.

The municipal level of government is working well as it is. What I would say to the Harris government is: Clean up your own house first and leave our home at city hall alone.

I have sat in this room today and yesterday listening to other citizens of Toronto making their deputations to the committee and I am amazed, pleased and proud of how well informed everyone is. I have learned so much about the history of Toronto, about housing issues, taxation and other urban affairs. The wealth of wisdom and knowledge and creative thought that is being offered to this committee is wonderful.

I hope the government members are listening to these intelligent, thoughtful and often very experienced people, people who have made time to come out and try to stop this government from making a tremendous mistake. Please listen to all these wise people. So much of what I have heard in the past two days of hearings makes profound sense, perhaps even common sense.

Withdraw Bill 103. Begin a new and real consultative process to make legislation that really would make a wonderful city even greater.The people of this city have so much to offer. Listen to them. Stop Bill 103. Don't destroy Toronto.

Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): Thank you very much for bringing together a great many of the ideas that have been expressed over the past few days. However, I just wanted your comment on the fact that we're looking at 200 years of a process of amalgamations in this geographic area. People have talked about what Toronto used to be. We've had many people who've talked about how many generations their families have been in Toronto, and certainly I have to say I'm one of those.

It seems to me that we've always seen a process here of communities having to come together for administration, for the service delivery, yet many people have talked about how community life continues to flourish, the fact that they have very strong community neighbourhoods and so forth.

I just wonder, if you think back on the experience that we have come to at this date, what your comment is in terms of the history, if you like, of amalgamations and the ability of Torontonians to continue their community identity.

Ms Bamford: I think you reach a certain level of diseconomy of scale. When things get too big they stop working, and I think if you do this, you'll reach the point where it's too big and it will stop working.

Mrs Munro: I guess we could argue that might be the case for a country or a province or something like that in terms of --

Ms Bamford: Democracy works best at the lowest level, at the local level, and you lose your voice as it gets higher. We need small, local governments; that's what works.

The Chair: Thank you, Mrs Munro, and thank you, Ms Bamford, for coming forward this morning.

DEBORAH WHEELER

The Chair: Would Deborah Wheeler please come forward. Good morning, Ms Wheeler, and welcome to the committee.

Ms Deborah Wheeler: Thank you for this opportunity to address you today. Because I am very inexperienced at public speaking, I will be reading the text.

I should first like to mention a few details about myself so that you may understand why I, and others like me, have chosen to take a stand on this issue and to oppose the amalgamation of the six municipalities of Metro Toronto.

I have lived in East York for almost nine years. Two of my sons were born in the borough. My husband is self-employed and our income is less than the average household income. Out of this we pay substantial property taxes, and unlike city of Toronto residents, we must pay for all the recreational activities our children make use of. But we have decided that the benefits of living in the borough are worth it. East York has a family-oriented, small-town feeling. We like that and we don't want to lose it.

I mention these facts because I am sick and tired of hearing any opposition to this bill dismissed as motivated by narrow self-interest, whether of local politicians and bureaucrats afraid of losing their jobs, or of well-off Toronto residents with particular axes to grind. Why is it so difficult for this government to accept that ordinary citizens can be passionately interested in how they are governed and wish to be treated as full partners in the process?

I do not have a low opinion, as this government seems to have, of my elected representatives on East York council. On the contrary, I have a high regard for the contribution they make to our community and believe that, for the most part, they are motivated by a spirit of public service. I am proud of the efficient, responsible leadership Mayor Prue has provided and know that Dave Johnson, the government House leader, gave good service, too, when he was mayor of East York. Under the existing structure of government, I know that I can count on open access to members of council as well as to school board trustees, and they have proved a valuable resource to me over the years.

Let me tell you about a personal experience that brought home to me one of the more intangible benefits of living in a smaller municipality, the kind of benefit that will be impossible with amalgamation. Some months ago I was with my seven-year-old at the civic centre in the vicinity of the mayor's office and the mayor happened to come out. He invited us into his office where he showed my son the regalia of office and explained the duties of a mayor. That was my son's first lesson in democracy. He was able to put a real and friendly face to the workings of government. Can you imagine such a creative encounter taking place with the mayor of a megacity? I can't.

This ease of access and relative openness of government mean a lot to residents and are worth preserving, it seems to me, even at the cost of some overlap of services. You, members of the committee, must know as well as I do that there is much more to the satisfaction of living in a well-governed community than can be gained by simply focusing on the requirements of bottom-line accountancy.

The endless repetition of such catchphrases as "cost-effectiveness," "efficiency," "rationalization," "less government" and "lower taxes" cannot be allowed to drown out the still, small voice of disbelief that says: "Hey, wait a minute. Whose interests do they really have at heart in making these changes?" I believe the real intention of this legislation is not better government for the citizens of Metro, but control by the provincial government of the roughly $1 billion worth of reserve funds held by the municipalities.

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How many people realize that their basic democratic rights are being eroded by this bill? The province has appointed trustees to oversee and if necessary veto the decisions of our elected representatives, and a transition team, again of government appointees, has been given the responsibility of designing our future for us. There is no appeal from their decisions. Their actions are not subject to challenge in the courts. What kind of accountability is that to the taxpayers and voters of Metro? The Premier and his government have made a mockery of my role as a responsible citizen. This is insulting. I feel cheated and I bitterly resent it.

I see that the three major newspapers in Toronto editorially support amalgamation -- reason enough for suspicion -- as do the Metro board of trade and other representatives of business. I also note that it is only when proposed changes incur the criticism of the business and financial community that any possibility is acknowledged of the government changing its mind. When you add to this the categorical statements of cabinet ministers that it is pointless for municipalities to poll the opinions of their residents because the changes will go ahead anyway, then I must wonder whether this government really cares at all about the views of ordinary concerned citizens.

What is the purpose of these public hearings? The integrity of the whole process is inevitably called into question. We are being drowned in a tidal wave of legislative changes and there isn't the remotest chance of giving them proper consideration in the allotted time. There are changes in the method of property assessment, there is the consolidation of school boards, there is the transfer of funding and control of education to the province, and the downloading of increased financial responsibility to the municipalities for social assistance, public health and other social services.

Then there is the amalgamation of Metro's municipalities, which is the subject of these hearings. Clearly, it is wrong to consider the restructuring of government in isolation from the reallocation of financial and administrative responsibilities for services. It is not only wrong but wilfully irresponsible, for the consequences of these changes will profoundly affect, for the worse, the economic and social wellbeing of the people of this region.

The government's approach betrays its impatience with the democratic process. Out of its fundamental contempt for the political process, it seeks to substitute managing for governing. Good management is obviously a necessary condition of good government, but by itself can never be enough. The missing ingredient must come from the conviction that one has a voice in decisions affecting the quality of life in one's community. It is the apprehension of losing this voice that accounts for the energy with which so many concerned citizens have mobilized to oppose amalgamation.

The proposed neighbourhood committees are not an adequate answer. These committees, according to the bill, are intended to allow citizens to get involved directly in decisions made by the megacity, but just consider the hurdles that a recommendation from one of these committees will have to negotiate if it needs the approval of the new city. It will first have to get the attention of the elected councillor for the ward in which the committee is located, and there will be several such committees competing for her or his attention. Remember that each ward will be twice the size of existing wards.

The recommendation will then go to its respective community council whose six or seven councillors will be responsible for an area roughly equivalent in size to one of the present municipalities. If it clears that hurdle, it will go to the appropriate special committee of megacity council and then, if approved, to the megacity executive committee. If it clears this committee it will go to the full council of megacity where it will have to compete with the concerns of the other 43 councillors representing, in all, a population 20 times the size of my present municipality.

The purpose of this arrangement, I should remind you, is "to ensure that local voices are heard loud and clear." Anyone who wants us to believe that is either woefully ignorant or terribly cynical.

In offloading so many functions from elected representatives to volunteers -- school councils and neighbourhood committees are but the two latest examples -- there is the risk of these functions falling under the control of an ever-shrinking pool of volunteers. I work as a volunteer in our school system and I know the demands made of them. If they are preoccupied with these tasks, who will have the energy and interest to attend to other issues of government? Perhaps that is the intent.

To conclude, this last month I have been out on the streets, in the malls and in stores talking with people and encouraging them to think about this bill and to vote in the referendum. From the 300 or more people I have spoken with so far, about two thirds are strongly opposed to amalgamation, some are undecided and only a handful have expressed themselves in favour of it.

The message for this government is clear: Slow down and re-examine your position on both amalgamation and the reallocation of financial responsibilities between the province and municipalities. Lift the present deadline for enactment of Bill 103 and, with the benefit of these hearings to build on, approach the restructuring of Metro government with the same measured care and respect for local differences that you believe to be so important in developing a new, coordinated system of governance for the greater Toronto area.

The Premier, I'm sure, is big enough to accept the embarrassment of admitting to error. It is such a small price to pay for the avoidance of a colossal blunder with fateful consequences for the urban region that our children will inherit. Thank you for listening to me.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Wheeler.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please, ladies and gentleman. We've been through the rules before. Thank you for coming forward and making your presentation. You were the closest person yet to 10 minutes flat.

STUART HAYWARD

The Chair: Would Stuart Hayward please come forward. Good morning. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Stuart Hayward: Mr Chairman, members of the committee, I am here today representing myself as a citizen of Etobicoke, Metro and Ontario. I am both pleased and saddened to be here. I am pleased because it means that the mega-bills, in particular Bill 103, have not yet passed. I'm saddened because I know this process is a sham. On Monday all doubt was removed as I watched the opening process on the legislative TV channel. I will be given a hearing but I won't be heard. The majority of the members of this committee are bound not to me as a citizen but to their political party and power.

As I watched the individual presentations on television I became aware that there was little new that I could add to the eloquence of my fellow citizens. Collectively they have said it all, but there are three points I wish to state.

First, I am amazed at how easy it is to strip away democracy. This government was elected to govern by 28% of the populace. They have interpreted this as a mandate to rule. Due process in the Legislature has been curtailed, studies have been fragmented and misused and the experience of other cities and the advice of those whose life work is in this area has been ignored.

We are witnessing the realization of the speculation of authors such as Huxley and Orwell: Newspeak such as "less is more," or to paraphrase a statement by Mr Leach in his opening remarks to this committee, "We will tell them what they want." His version was, "We will look and decide what is best for each region."

The terms of the imposition of trustees and transition teams on our municipalities give appointees and their provincial masters unbridled power to gut our institutions, steal our reserves and reduce us to serfdom, and also to appoint their cronies to sensitive posts.

I am not a student of these matters but I would like to read to the committee some quotes from one of the greatest centralizers of our time. I think this government is well aware of them.

(1) "All propaganda has to be popular, and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself."

(2) "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a great lie than a small one."

I will not draw the obvious parallels, but there is one other quote you should hear from the same source: "One should guard against believing the great masses to be more stupid than they actually are."

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Recently we had cause to have two home care nurses in our home. As it turned out, both of them had come from Serbia. Mentioning the upheaval in their homeland, I asked them what they thought of what was happening here. They both responded in the same way: "This is the way it started in our country." Such a cycle must not be allowed to play out in this city or in this province, and sooner or later you will listen.

Second, Mr Leach has suggested that we have this one-time opportunity to use the best ideas in government innovation and planning to amalgamate six municipalities into one great city of 2.3 million. He presented it as though it was a great experiment with no chance of failure. But the experiment has already been done, and recently. Lessons have been learned and conclusions made. Professor Michael Keating, writing in the Globe and Mail, recently stated:

"[N]obody has seriously argued that economies of scale continue past a population of about half a million. At this point, as Europeans have discovered, you have to put in an additional tier of administration in any case, just to keep the span of control manageable. This additional layer, and the needs of coordination, can make very large governments even more expensive." He goes on to say that the "megacity is at best an irrelevance, a throwback to the 1970s era of `big is beautiful.'"

Mr Leach has also said that almost three quarters of the amalgamation is already done, that he's just trying to complete the process. Mr Keating has some thoughts on that process as well, and I quote:

"Even in the United Kingdom where local government was devastated in the Thatcher era, the opposition parties are examining the need for new structures for Greater London and the main regional centres. These new metropolitan governments are not about delivering everyday services, a task now seen as better entrusted to a more local level. They are not top-heavy bureaucracies seeking to control local affairs from one central point. Instead, they have light structures and powers tailored to their needs. They are about economic development and planning, infrastructure, integrating the needs of human capital development and training with those of hard services, ensuring coherent development and seeing that the benefits of growth are equally distributed."

He continues about interunit competition but states that the current course will make the problem worse. If Metro needs some fine-tuning, let's get out the piano wrench, not the wrecking ball. There is no rule saying that Canadians must pick up outmoded ideas and implement them just as others are abandoning them. Mr Harris and his caucus are outdated, not those of us fighting for the survival of our community structure.

An anthill will provide a useful analogy. The anthill is made large by the action of many individuals working both together and independently. Several small structures may coalesce to make one large structure, but there is no need for a mega-hill supervisor. There may be several queen ants, not dominating but assisted by all the other ants pursuing their essential job in the community. In contrast, the Egyptian pharaohs, by driving and organizing their human machine, made great pyramids, but they were intended to house the dead.

This is not to say that I believe we, as humans in a large community, do not require some coordination and order in our affairs but that top-down management in all affairs destroys the initiative and innovation that develops great ideas on a small scale before they are applied on a larger scale. With all humility I say to the government, equalize the tax burden in the GTA, don't make it worse. Make us part of the process, not subject to it. These are our cities, with all their warts and their bandages, and we will support you if you show us reason.

My third point refers to the loading of social service costs on to the municipal structure. I would like it to be a different facet of this proposed legislation, one that others have missed. But this sticks under my skin as a particularly inconsistent and ill-conceived idea. If the government really believed that service is better delivered on a centralized basis, why are they going against the pattern on this one issue? Why are they fragmenting a system that is in place and has worked reasonably well? Why is the government willing to take this step against the most vulnerable of its citizens and virtually ensure that there will not be adequate funding throughout Ontario? I am aware that this formula for disaster is couched in another bill, but this feint is easy to spot in the fancy footwork of mega-week.

The creation of a massive social deficit in the name of fiscal responsibility is not in the best interests of the community, nor is it in the interests of that provincial government which should serve that community. Analysis after analysis has shown that the exchange of education tax for a social service tax is going to put a greater tax burden on property, which can only result in poorer service. Quite possibly, subsidized housing and public institutions will be put up for sale. The social deficit thus created will not attract investment, improve our city or contribute to the development of our human capital.

In this topsy-turvy world it seems that you do not need an education to be Minister of Education, nor do you need a social conscience to be minister in charge of societal welfare. You just have to be part of the team.

Mr Chairman, if I have a minute left --

The Chair: We actually don't, Mr Hayward, sorry.

Mr Hayward: I was going to claim it for a minute of silence.

The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward and presenting to the committee today.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please, ladies and gentlemen.

HANOCH BORDAN

The Chair: Would Hanoch Bordan come forward. As Mr Bordan is coming forward, I remind members of the audience -- I think the clerk spoke to everyone at the beginning -- that outbursts from the audience are out of order. We're already a little bit behind time, and I don't want that to affect the amount of time that presenters have to make their presentations. Each time I have to make an announcement like this, it does just that, so I'd appreciate it if you'd not participate in that fashion.

Mr Bordan, welcome to the committee this morning. You have 10 minutes to make your presentation.

Mr Hanoch Bordan: Thank you for allowing me to come here. Last year my wife and I bought a new house in Toronto -- it wasn't really a new house; it was an old house but it's new to us -- around the corner from where we used to live, right on the border with East York, where road crews sometimes get a little confused as to who is responsible for what pothole.

We love our house, off the Danforth, close by the subway, and to make it even better we decided to add a sunroom. It took us months to get a Toronto building permit and we complained bitterly about city hall red tape. We are told by our neighbours that it takes half the time to get the same building permit in East York.

Based on our experience, one might conclude that road repair should be centralized while at the same time building permits should be decentralized. Maybe, but I think we would all agree that we need more evidence than that before making such changes.

I delight in making snide comments about city hall bureaucracy and I crack jokes about the border on our property line. If you come over, I'll show it to you. I may even put up a plaque there one of these days. Everybody complains about city hall. It is an old tradition in a free country. But whatever our complaints about city hall, one thing is absolutely clear: The way to make things better is definitely not to burn down city hall, which is what Bill 103 figuratively would do.

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When I appeared here more than a year ago opposing the infamous omnibus bill, I urged Tory parliamentarians to be true to their conservative traditions. I now renew my call. I'm not a politician and I'm not a member of the Progressive Conservative Party, or any political party, but I certainly see merit in preserving that which is worth preserving and at the same changing that which needs change.

There may be value in some of the proposals in Bill 103, but the pity is that this bill seems to have been designed in haste based on the notions of a handful of politicians, bureaucrats and editors. You would think that any truly Conservative government, before revolutionizing how a quarter of the province's population is governed, would allow enough time for detailed discussion of any proposal. A truly Conservative government I suggest would perhaps issue a discussion paper -- and this bill is as good a starting point as any -- allow for public debate of several months, come up with a draft and have more public meetings until the bill is put in final form for consideration by the Legislature. Even then there would no doubt be changes.

A truly conservative government, I submit, would have respect for Metro Toronto residents and allow enough time for us to digest the proposed changes and speak on them, not limit people to just 10 minutes, even limiting so prominent a person as Jane Jacobs, that renowned urban expert we are privileged to have in our midst.

A truly conservative government would not make us feel as if we're being governed as part of a colonial empire. We are free people and we may even know what's good for us, and we won't be pushed around.

A truly conservative government would not heap scorn on our local politicians. Aren't you politicians yourselves? Is not politics a noble calling? If it isn't, why do you do it?

I am offended that a conservative government would not show proper respect for people who in good faith oppose their schemes, ridiculing citizens for wanting to preserve the city they love and where they have made their homes. This government has acted as if it is the radical revolutionary party, not the Progressive Conservative Party.

What scares me is the possibility that this mega-scheme may destroy this marvellous city, with its sidewalk cafés and street musicians, its hot dog vendors and fruit and vegetable stands, its mixed uses of buildings, its mixture of people of all ages and economic status and ethnic backgrounds; a city rich in diversity, a city to live in, a city to walk in, a city to love. Amalgamation poses a major risk: that people with a different vision will predominate. The spectre of, for instance, another Spadina Expressway comes to mind, for I believe that was the defining moment making Toronto a great city: the cancellation of the Spadina Expressway by Bill Davis a quarter-century ago. Oh, that we had Bill Davis as Premier today.

They say that Toronto is the most livable city on the continent. If you don't believe that, just visit downtown Detroit. What we have here is a treasure: Toronto. We are now in the heart of it, right here, and surrounding this jewel are many communities in concentric circles, a vast metropolitan area, all more or less measuring themselves by how close they are to Toronto city hall.

Many decent citizens fear that this bill carries with it the seeds of destruction of our gem of a city, and if we are right, we may find that the city we love has been destroyed. And if Toronto ceases to exist, the reason for the existence of the surrounding communities vanishes as well. It will be a metropolitan area with an empty inner core, a body without a heart, without a brain and without a soul. The implications are immense. It would destroy our homes, our lives, our economy and maybe even our province.

I speak for myself only, but I have been to a number of meetings. Make no mistake, the spontaneous groundswell against this bill is truly a civic phenomenon. I have never seen such a public outcry in Toronto against arbitrary government. Even if, perish the thought, this bill becomes law next month, I predict the fight to preserve our city will continue by every legal and honourable means.

I say to you, elected representatives of the Progressive Conservative Party, you ignore this movement at your political peril. Surely conservatism demands that before such an immense step is taken, wide-ranging discussions be held. We all want to improve the city and the metropolitan area, but let us make sure that before irrevocable steps are taken, sober second thoughts prevail. I urge all Tories to return to their conservative roots and make sure the ideas in Bill 103 are treated with true conservative restraint.

The Chair: You have effectively used the bulk of your time, sir, and I want to thank you for coming forward this morning to make your presentation.

GAVIN MILLER

The Chair: Would Gavin Miller please come forward. Good morning, Mr Miller. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Gavin Miller: Mr Chair and members of the committee and all attending the hearing, I am a citizen of Toronto. I have lived in the greater Toronto area all my life, and in the city of Toronto most of that. I am concerned about the wellbeing of a city that has been incorporated since 1834. Bill 103 represents a threat to a constellation of places that over two million people call home.

To be sure, life would go on in the new megacity. There would still be Yonge Street and the CN Tower. The Leafs would probably still be around and they'd probably continue to lose games. The Don River would continue to flow. We could still count on humid spells in the summer and lots of slush in the winter. People would still marry and raise families, at least in parts of the city that retained some social cohesion. The squirrels in Queen's Park would still come bounding up in the hope of getting peanuts from you. We would even have a city council of sorts.

But it is time for a sober assessment of what this bill means in terms of social stability, environmental sustainability and civic responsibility. I grew up here and I know the greater Toronto area. I've ridden her transit lines; I've traced her rivers to their headwaters in the 905 belt; I've been to six of the seven municipal halls in Metro for various reasons, as well as one outside, witnessing the often fractious, frustrating, but democratic and human scale of their political procedures.

The greater Toronto area has beggars and saints, businesspersons and nurses, foxes and salamanders, 450-million-year-old bedrock exposed in places and yet the latest fashions. It also includes all the citizens who have been speaking here and who will continue to speak here at the hearings.

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Let's look at the issue of social stability first. We live in a time of profound cultural upheaval. So many things that people counted on, so many loyalties, so many institutions and so many of our roots all seem to be losing importance or even falling apart. A conservative mind should be concerned about all of this. Yet Bill 103, like so much recent legislation, has a profoundly destabilizing effect on our city and on our communities. This is at the same time that it suppresses the flexibility and creativity for the innovation that we need and that local municipalities can provide, as Jane Jacobs has pointed out very clearly. Let's face it: Our municipal governments now, while they're flawed and sometimes frustrating, work generally well. We're dealing with the human condition here.

Although there is a disturbing increase in poverty and social distress generally, crime is still lower than in the US. Such things as blue box and garbage collection are reliable. We have good public libraries and recreation facilities. There has been an improving attitude toward our natural heritage in most of our municipalities. Public consultation opportunities have improved in many departments in the municipalities. Municipal councillors in the current system have a manageable scope of responsibilities and a reasonable ward size which allows for a certain availability to people who want to consult with them. This will not be the case for the megacity.

The municipalities as such are in better shape than, say, the health care system, so why do we need such radical surgery and a massive takeover by the province? The upheaval induced by the megacity will be destabilizing and demoralizing. Confusion over departments, jurisdiction, administrative districts, staff and bylaws will likely last for years. Bylaws passed by previous councils will still follow old municipal boundaries. Staff will be dismissed, with the likelihood that they will be replaced by people chosen, not by the elected city council, but by the province's transition team in accordance with the province's view of how Toronto should be run.

There will be fewer staff and politicians than is now the case, and this is presented as a cause for celebration. The current staff and politicians understandably want to keep their jobs. What's wrong with that, especially when their work contributes to a high quality of life and a responsive local government? Good services and responsive government don't appear by magic. You need to have people on hand.

Given the tremendous upheavals our society is undergoing, we do not need to destabilize it further with such massive, divisive, heavy-handed actions as Bill 103. The downloading of social services which is coming in tandem with amalgamation is a recipe for increased poverty, conflict and disorder. It will pit people against each other, and the weak and vulnerable will bear the brunt. This proposal for downloading has been condemned by a broad spectrum of parties, including the board of trade. We need to maintain provincial funding of social services, along with retaining our local municipalities.

My second point, environmental sustainability: The general opinion of all recent studies of governance in the greater Toronto area has been that we need to emphasize the greater Toronto area's problems, not simply Metro's. There must be clear and unambiguous regional coordination for the GTA to protect ecological features such as the Oak Ridges moraine, which is rapidly disappearing under urban sprawl; make public transit a priority; and where necessary equalize relations between local municipalities.

We must not risk a bankrupt, decayed core of the GTA, coupled with more unsustainable, unregulated kinds of development gobbling up farm land and natural habitats. The track record of the current provincial government when it comes to these critical environmental issues is frankly poor and these issues have not gone away. Canada's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, largely from cars, is, I understand, nowhere near getting under control. The megacity is likely to be less effective in dealing with these issues than the local municipalities combined with GTA coordination. Witness, for example, the careful attention to detail displayed by the city of Toronto with respect to ravines. It is clear we need both the large scale of the GTA and the micro-scale provided by local municipalities.

Finally, the amalgamation legislation is, I'm afraid, symptomatic of a deeper malaise in our culture. The provincial government is overriding local governance and granting to itself sweeping powers over Toronto but in a certain sense, we, as a people, have brought it on ourselves. Democracy is hard work and requires a foundation of commitment to truth and really thinking things through. We have not taken it seriously, although a lot of the people who are speaking here, the ones I have heard today, have shown a lot of thought and a lot of commitment.

The climate in which decisions are being made is not one of contemplation and discernment in the quest for wisdom. Instead there is a cycle of blame, protest and suppression in which all of us in varying degrees are caught. This is a serious time of reckoning for us as a society. We must become quiet, engage in self-examination and rethink the governance of our municipalities and protect local democracy. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Miller. You've used up your entire 10 minutes, and I want to thank you for coming forward this morning and making your presentation to the committee. Thank you for taking the time.

ISABEL SHOWLER

The Chair: Would Isabel Showler please come forward.

Applause.

The Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to have to continue to make announcements about applause. I want to let you know that we're not empowered to sit past noon. We have 50 minutes of presentations to come so, please, let's not keep that up.

Good morning, Ms Showler, and welcome to the committee.

Isabel Showler: I want to thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to you. I think those of us who are older and have long years of experience have some responsibility to try in times, particularly critical times, to share that experience with you.

I was born in Toronto. I feel a little bit like a business that has just been subjected to a hostile takeover and is contemplating downsizing and restructuring and is very worried about what the results are going to be, for something into which I have put a great deal over the years.

When I was 19, I spent two months as an intern at what is now the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the old Ontario Hospital in Toronto. I didn't go back to it again until 26 years later, in 1967, when I went there as an occupational therapist on staff. The building was exactly the same but the dynamics were different. There was a tremendous feeling of change and of excitement and exploration of new ways.

A group of very inventive people had taken one ward of about 80 men whose average stay in the hospital was more than 20 years and had begun to get them ready to leave hospital. They taught them to eat with a knife and fork again. They taught them to care about their grooming. They got them into workshops working. They went out into the community and found homes for them and they moved those people out into the community. It was a very exciting thing to see.

During that first year I went down to Indiana on a visit and I visited a state hospital down there and I found a group of people down there that were excited because that day, for the very first time, they had taken a group of patients outside the hospital on a visit and they felt they were breaking new ground. They were very excited about it and I realized how far behind us they were.

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Then, a few years later, Queen's Park said to the psychiatric staff at Queen Street: "It should be possible for you to get some of these patients out of the hospital. It has been shown that chronic patients can leave hospital with the new medications and all these things." The psychiatric staff said, "We have done that with the patients for which it's suitable." Queen's Park didn't believe it and they just said, "Do it."

It was my first experience of what I think of as the toothpaste approach to reduce services, which is that you squeeze on the system as hard as you can and you see what falls out and you try to deal with that. This has been our approach, in many ways, to health care since and it has been very hard to see.

The reason I tell you this is because I have this awful suspicion that people at Queen's Park don't know what goes on. People at Queen's Park don't really understand what goes on in the relationship between the administrators of the city and the councils and the citizens. They probably have no idea of the degree of communication which is available there, and if they do have an idea, they are probably envious. I'm sure it's going to be destroyed by Bill 103.

I suppose everybody knows the story about the English second-language class at the United Nations that was asked to write an essay on the elephant. The German wrote on the classification of the elephant, the Frenchman wrote on the love life of the elephant, the Englishman wrote on hunting the elephant in deepest Africa, the American wrote on bigger and better elephants and the Canadian wrote on the elephant, is it a provincial or a federal matter?

The concept of bigger and better as being better is not a Canadian concept. It's certainly not a Toronto concept. Many of the ideas that this government has seem to have come from below the border and not to be our way. The setting up of the Who Does What committee was a much more Canadian thing. Trying to sort out whose responsibility this is and whose responsibility that is is the kind of typical Canadian approach that we have had, probably generated by our Constitution. We seem to be going to throw that out. They will take any particular bits of it that they like. They will not listen to the chairman of that committee which suggested that changes that are made should go slow. They are not doing it in a Canadian way. I feel very much that this is an imported kind of attitude.

I want to talk to you about time frames. It seems to me that we do things in three kinds of time frames: the short term, the long term and the eternal. In the short term it doesn't matter very much what we do. If we decide what we have for lunch today, it's not going to matter in the long run if we make a poor choice. We can make a different choice tomorrow.

But Bill 103 and Bill 104 are very much long-term decisions. When I think of a way of looking at the approach to long-term decisions, I think about living on an island in Georgian Bay where the way out in the winter was across the ice five miles. The first people who went walked very carefully and they had a long stick, and the long stick would go in front of them and they would bang, bang, bang on the ice, and as they went along they would make sure that the ice was going to hold them. I see no equivalent to that long stick in the way in which Bill 103 is being implemented. It seems to me it's more like somebody who says: "Oh, a trapeze is kind of interesting. I think I'll grab it and fly out and see if I can catch anything."

I'm feeling ashamed because I feel that the democracy which I am proud of and believed in and have enjoyed for all of my 75 years is being destroyed in one swoop of a pen. Bill 103 cuts at the roots of all of the things that made democracy responsive to people. It's replacing the decision-making by elected people by decision-making by appointed people. I can't imagine anything that could strike harder at the roots of democracy than that. I'm ashamed that I have not been able to maintain this democratic thing for my grandchildren and my great-granddaughter. I wish they could somehow or other have the same kind of opportunity to live in a democratic society that I have had up until now.

Then there is the eternal. The eternal time frame is the one in which we hold our values. Toronto, in my lifetime, has gone through some terrible times: the Depression when people really suffered. We had a hotel and I can remember as a teenager standing at the desk in the hotel as people came in to apply for a job which paid $4.22 a week for seven days of work a week. I would say, "The job is filled," and they would say, "Will you please put my name down?" I would write down name after name with phone numbers, knowing that there was no point in the world of doing this except to make the people that were applying feel a little better, because this $4.22 plus room and board job was not available to them but might turn up later.

I think we have built a city here that has some values. I think we value truthfulness, I think we value caring. I'm terribly afraid that those values are being attacked at the same time by this Bill 103. There is no opportunity for caring in it, and I do not feel the government was truthful to us in what they were planning to do when they got themselves elected. I feel that those values have not been the same and a city that doesn't have eternal values is going to be a city that has lost its soul.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Showler. You've effectively used up your 10 minutes. I want to thank you on behalf of the committee for coming forward this morning.

FRANK SHOWLER

The Chair: Would Mr Frank Showler please come forward. Good morning, Mr Showler, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Frank Showler: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee. I do hope the presentations that are made by various people will have some effect on what happens in relation to this bill. I too grew up in Toronto, and while I have lived in other places, I have lived here for the major portion of my life.

I'm concerned about a government, in this case, looking at a situation which is not broken and trying to fix it. The danger when you do that is that you destroy the thing that you're supposedly trying to fix. We have a city which has a reputation for being a good place to live. It has won various awards and commendations in that respect, and I'm concerned that those things are going to disappear.

One of the things that we have in the existing six municipalities is some chance for each municipality to do the things that it wants to do. The things that the people of North York want and the things that the people of Toronto want are not necessarily the same and, because of the structure that we have, those things can be different. They don't all have to be controlled by one body which is insisting that they be done in a particular way.

The other thing that I noticed, particularly in the city of Toronto, the current city of Toronto where I live, is that we have a lot of committees set up so that there's a lot of good input by citizens into what happens. In Toronto we have a safe city committee which has citizens that look at all kinds of things related to safety, whether it has to do with buildings or safety on the street or whatever; we have a committee which deals with race relations; we have a committee which deals with transportation. Those are all citizens' committees that have some input and influence on what city council does.

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I think it's going to be very difficult to see how that can be done in the large kind of city that this bill creates, and it's particularly hard when you realize that not only is it going to be a much larger city, it's going to have a small number of representatives. It's interesting that up in North Bay, where our Premier comes from, you can have 10 people on council and therefore you have one representative for every 5,500 people, whereas in the new city here we will have one representative for every 50,000 people.

It isn't just the kind of input I've been talking about that I think is necessary, it's also the small number of representatives, so that even if you want to make representation to your local person, it's going to be very difficult to do that. It's also going to be very difficult to get elected to such a position unless you have lots and lots of money or some group backing you which has lots and lots of money. One of the things that I see happening is the large city being turned over to those who have money, because they are the people who will be elected to council.

The other thing I should say at this point is that democracy doesn't depend on elections. This government seems to believe that they must be a democratic government because they were elected and because they seem to be maintaining a reasonable amount of support among the public. Well, Hitler was elected too, and he maintained a considerable amount of support through all the time he was in power.

One of the things that democracy has to do with is the input that people can have on decisions that affect their lives as well as the kinds of civil liberties. We still have the civil liberties kinds of things where we can come and talk to you, protest and all those kinds of things, and I hope at least that will continue, but it's going to be much more difficult to influence a large government for the whole city than the local government we have now.

Specifically in relation to the bill itself, I'm concerned about the powers it gives to the board of trustees, for example. There are things in the bill that I hope this committee will make some changes on, if the bill has to go through at all, which I hope it won't. But if it does, I hope to see this committee making some changes on it.

One thing that bothers me most about the trustees is not just that they're appointed by the province -- although I think it would be much better if they chose people who were elected from councils in the existing municipalities rather than simply appointing whoever they decide to appoint -- it's the power they have, that instead of the democracy of a local council we will have those people controlling what is done.

For instance, subsection 11(5) gives them the power to control the budgets of the municipalities this year. I think you ought to look not only at that particular clause but at all the powers you are giving to the trustees. A lot of those go much further than they need to even if we're going to have this megacity.

The other thing that bothers me is that once this year is over, we have a transition team which, again, is appointed by the province and is not directly responsible to the people in the municipality it's working on. Of course the people in that municipality are also required to pay the costs of that transition team. One of the things the transition team has to do, is required to do, is in clause 16(4)(b):

"(b) consider whether restrictions should be imposed on the amounts the new city may raise and the amounts the new city and its local boards may spend in any year, and make detailed recommendations...."

This means in any year -- that's what it says -- presumably to the end of the life of that committee -- though there's no requirement for a specific end to the life of that committee, and it's up to the minister when it should end, apparently from something else later in the bill. That means one of two things is going to happen, in view of the changes in costs that are being put on to the municipalities. Either the result of those costs is that taxes will have to rise, or this committee could look at that and say: "You're raising taxes too much. You can't raise them that much, therefore you must not go beyond this limit."

The Chair: Mr Showler, you're coming to the end of your time. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I hope you could wrap up.

Mr Showler: No problem. My point is that it's either going to raise taxes -- and we have to remember that they affect people in apartments because their rents go up with the taxes, not only homeowners -- or they're going to refuse to allow that tax rate to be put into effect and therefore all sorts of things will have to be cut even though the local council doesn't want to do that. Please take a look at that section and make some changes.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Showler, for coming forward and making your presentation this morning.

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BARBARA HALL

The Chair: Could Barbara Hall please come forward? Good morning, Mayor Hall. Welcome to the committee. You have 30 minutes to make your presentation this morning.

Ms Barbara Hall: Thank you, Mr Chair, Minister. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here and have this opportunity to speak with you. I regret that the committee decided not to come to city hall or indeed to the city halls around Metro. We are open places. We like to welcome people. I know, Minister, before you were elected, you came as part of the Trimmer inquiry to city hall and had a discussion with citizens there at that time.

The anti-amalgamation campaign has mushroomed into a movement which is packing halls and churches across Toronto and neighbouring municipalities. It's not a few politicians making speeches but thousands of citizens from all political, cultural and economic backgrounds who are genuinely worried about the future of their city. They're sending a powerful message to this government: "We support change, but only if it's done properly. Slow down and get it right. A massive change affecting 2.3 million citizens needs to emerge through consultation and consensus."

That's why people want to be heard and that's why we are holding a referendum.

Let's be very clear on what's involved here. The amalgamation of Metro Toronto is the equivalent of merging seven complex corporations into one. Bill 103 would create a so-called local government larger than six provinces and almost as large as a seventh, Alberta; a government with 54,000 employees and a $7-billion budget; a government which is supposed to be accessible and responsible to its 2.3 million citizens. The potential for chaos and uncertainty is enormous, and that's the last thing Toronto needs right now.

This city, which is the economic engine of the province, is only now emerging from the devastation caused by the last recession. The real estate market is picking up steam. Investors once again are looking favourably at our city. There are shovels in the ground as new projects come on stream. You may have heard the announcement in the last couple of days that the Raptors have started work on their new stadium at the foot of Bay Street. I got the cheque for the building permit. The revitalization of Yonge Street is under way and major firms are moving back to the city.

In today's world of global competition, job-creating investment flows to tranquil markets. Rapid change and uncertainty make the business community very nervous, and that could shatter what is still a fragile economic recovery.

But the amalgamation debate is not just about dollars and cents. The Saturday after the so-called mega-week I was at the Regent Park Community Health Centre in your riding, Minister, listening to neighbourhood kids celebrating Dr Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. It was a bittersweet event. The children talked with great eloquence about Dr King's inspirational life, particularly his famous "I have a dream" speech.

But then they talked in an even more powerful way about the poverty, the violence and racism which are far too common in their lives. It struck me, as I walked home from that meeting, that when we talk about the impact of Bill 103, we can't talk in abstract terms, because Toronto is much more than a collection of buildings and services or a column of program costs which can be easily moved from one ledger to another.

The city is home to 650,000 citizens who live, work and play and want to realize their dreams. Now the province wants to tear out the foundations and start over. The question is, why? It's a question for which the province has no sensible answer.

With legislation as sweeping as Bill 103, the public would normally be presented with a carefully prepared white paper which explained the government's proposals. But aside from a flyer in our mailboxes, there have been only a few speeches and background releases. What has emerged from those pieces is a series of dubious claims that are not supportable.

For example you, Minister, claim that amalgamation will save money, but your only evidence is the hastily written after-the-fact report. The report says that most of the projected savings would come not through amalgamation but by privatizing some police services, computer operations and water treatment plants. What does that have to do with amalgamation?

Where the savings argument really falls apart is in the face of the US experience with megacities. Wendell Cox, a self-described conservative expert in the field, has found that the bigger the city, the more it costs to operate. US cities of over one million in population spend between 20% and 40% more per capita than smaller cities. Higher costs lead inevitably to higher property taxes or fewer services. In all likelihood, both will occur in the megacity, with devastating results for every sector of Toronto.

The province claims that the calibre and availability of services will not decline when seven different local governments are suddenly mashed together, but they have no proof, no studies and no research, nothing but hope that amalgamation won't cost taxpayers more.

I challenge this government to produce today the cost-effectiveness studies, the expert opinions, the well-researched policy papers. The onus is on you to justify amalgamation, and so far you've failed to do it.

That's not good enough for the citizens of Toronto. They deserve more than poorly conceived policy which will so radically change the city that works, the city that regularly receives international acclaim.

Let's slow down and get it right. There are just too many unanswered questions.

What will happen to our recreation programs and facilities in an amalgamated city? Will our citizens still have the kind of access they now enjoy? Or will a megacity mean darkened arenas and unsafe playgrounds? The province can't tell us.

What about the critically important programs which help seniors, the homeless and those living with AIDS in our city? These programs are pushed to the limit now, but if amalgamation brings higher operating costs, as the experts say it will, can they survive cost-cutting? The province can't tell us.

Toronto's vibrant neighbourhoods were built and are preserved and sustained through partnerships between citizens and their local government. How will such sensitive community planning survive in a megacity? The province can't tell us.

Declining services and higher taxes will drive businesses and people away. How will a megacity protect the quality of life and job opportunities for its citizens? The province can't tell us.

It's clear to me that the government doesn't understand the magnitude of the change they're proposing. People familiar with restructuring are appalled at the lack of thought and planning put into this proposed mega-merger of seven distinct corporations.

This new megacity is expected to integrate 54,000 employees with different work practices. Yet this huge corporate merger is to occur at year's end with a complete new management team and a new board of directors. It's a formula for chaos, and an expensive one. The estimated transition costs alone will amount to a staggering $200 million to $400 million.

It will take years for the city to recover from the organizational trauma, to say nothing of the trauma inflicted on dedicated municipal employees worried about their jobs. Let's slow down and get it right.

Think of all the time and energy wasted in trying to weld together an unwieldy megacity structure. Meanwhile, crucial neighbourhood and community issues will be neglected. Investment opportunities will go elsewhere because no one's paying attention.

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With officials mired in a swamp of reorganization, the citizens I represent will be left with a distant and unresponsive government. It's a very high price to pay for such a poorly thought out proposal. This is a corporate merger which will eventually destroy the corporations instead of making them stronger.

So far I've been talking only about amalgamation, but let's make no mistake: Bill 103 and the lopsided dumping of social service costs on to municipalities are firmly linked. Ignoring the lessons of the Great Depression, the province has offloaded major income maintenance and health care costs on to property taxpayers. As the dust settles from the mega-week blitz, a very disturbing picture is emerging.

For starters, property taxes will need to rise 11% in the city of Toronto in order to meet a $202-million shortfall in the tradeoff of education for welfare, long-term care and other program costs. This will worsen the tax disparity between the 416 and 905 areas, prompting an exodus of jobs and people from the city.

What happens to fragile social and infrastructure spending programs when a recession hits again and welfare costs jump, as they did in the early 1990s? What happens when increasing numbers of seniors rightfully seek the support they need in old age? What happens to property taxpayers who have to absorb two financial blows, the added costs of social programs and market value assessment?

As with amalgamation, the province's actions prompt far more questions than answers. They promise special funds here and special funds there. But all that means is greater entanglement and dependency of municipalities on the province. Will these funds survive? What about the citizens?

Where does this rushed reorganization leave the families in Parkdale, the business owner on Dundas, the couple in the Beach or the widower on St. Clair? What about the next generation coming out of our schools? The evidence suggests that the legacy of the megacity would be crumbling neighbourhoods, user fees, bureaucratic chaos, gutted rec and social programs, darkened arenas, higher taxes and fewer jobs. I am convinced that no one in this room wants that. I'm also convinced that we all agree that the status quo is unacceptable. So what do we do?

We take the time and we do it right. Let's step back and examine the whole picture. Let's look ahead to see what will be needed 25 years from now. As it stands, the province has embarked on a partial solution to an ill-defined problem. Instead of rushing ahead with flawed legislation and bad public policy, give the citizens of Metro the same right as everyone else in the province: a chance to work out local solutions through consensus and consultation. More specifically, let's build on the excellent studies we have -- Trimmer, Golden, Crombie. Let's find ways to implement their major recommendations, not ignore them as is currently being done. We have ideas, the citizens have ideas. Let's sit down together and continue to build this great city.

If that means delaying implementation, so be it. What's more important? Doing it fast and getting it wrong or doing it right? The answer is obvious. I'm not here today because I'm trying to save my job, I'm trying to save the city I love.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mayor Hall. We have four minutes per caucus for questions. The problem I have is that we're going to have a bell any minute now and I have to let everyone go to vote. We're going to start with the Liberal caucus and see if we can get through its four minutes and then I hope reconvene after the bells for the NDP and Conservative caucuses, if that's agreeable to everyone on the committee. I believe it would be.

Mr Colle: Thank you, Madam Mayor. I hope when the minister questions you that you again ask him to fulfil his commitment which he made in the House and in the press to visit each one of the municipalities as he closes their doors, and I hope you confront him with that again because he's gone back on his word on that.

In terms of your point, I think what you're basically saying is, like in the movie Jerry Maguire, "Show us the money." I don't think you're ever going to see it, because what has obviously happened here is that you've seen the Trojan Horse. The megacity is the Trojan Horse for the downloading of social services on Metro. That is why they're in such a mad rush. That is why they won't slow down, because that is their hidden agenda. That is the minister's hidden agenda: to dump social welfare, family benefits, social housing and child care on to the property taxpayer. That is the machiavellian scheme. That is why they won't turn back. But I want to get to something more fundamental.

Today and over the last few days we've had excellent presentations from citizens of your city, and the one thing they keep referring to is beyond the money. They say: "How come we've come to this point? How come we've let democracy slip away?" I know Mrs Showler said she was ashamed that she's allowed this to happen. I tell her, "Don't be ashamed; you're fighting it." How could we let this happen when in the legislation it's so darned specific that Mr Leach is putting the trustees and the transition team above the law?

These people have taken over government here in Metro. "The decisions of the transition team are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court." He's even said that the Statutory Powers Procedure Act does not apply, which means you could hold meetings behind closed doors and not notify people. In other words, the rules of natural justice are gone.

This is what this minister has done in black and white and yet people are basically complacent or cheerleading this. But thankfully there are enough people who have come here who have seen through this charade, this unmitigated attack on democracy by this minister and on the citizens of Toronto. Perhaps you would like to comment on that, Mayor Hall.

Ms Hall: I think what's happening in the city right now is that thousands and thousands of people view their community as at risk and are coming out to understand what's happening. People are concerned about that. I go to four or five meetings a night. Steve Gilchrist and I at least once a week are on a panel or in a debate somewhere. I get invited to a dozen meetings and am only able to go to three or four. In church basements and schools and community centres, hundreds and hundreds of people are coming out.

The important thing about that is that people are saying: "We helped to build this city and we want to be able to continue to do that. We're prepared to do that, local government has enabled us to do that, and we want an opportunity to express our opinion on changes that we believe will significantly limit our ability to be involved in the future."

I think it's an opportunity for all of us who care about the health of this community -- the provincial government, the local government, business people and citizens -- to sit down together and say, "What is the change we need that ensures that coordination is done on the GTA basis where it's required but that strong local government still exists?"

People have been awakened by this, no question. Let's all take advantage --

The Chair: I'd like to get in the NDP's time because I think we'll have a five-minute bell.

Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview): Do I have a few seconds?

The Chair: No.

Mr Silipo: Barb Hall, I want to tell you I feel very proud to be able to call you my mayor today, given your presentation. Thank you very much.

I'm not going to try to outdo your presentation. I have some questions I want to ask because I think it's important that we pursue these in the short time. If there was more time, I would actually be happy to have the minister get into more of an exchange with you than for you to hear my voice.

The business aspect is one of the pieces that you touched on, the reaction from business and the instability that could be caused. I want to ask you to elaborate a little more on that because of the danger that see that might cause to the city, to the future of the metropolis.

Ms Hall: Business leaders, if they merge, when they merge, have thought it through well. They have a board of directors that has a common vision and goal. They select staff to achieve that. They do it carefully. What they view here is a brand-new board of directors of 44 taking on senior staff who've been hired by someone else, acquiring seven corporations. They see the lights being turned out in seven corporations at midnight on December 31 and someone going to flip the switch at a minute past midnight, and their fear is that the light won't come on. That's not how businesses would merge.

The other thing that many business people recognize is that what can be economies of scale at a lower level, lower size, become diseconomies of scale at a larger level. The minister often says it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that one fire department would be cheaper than six, but it's interesting that in Kingston where they've amalgamated, a voluntary amalgamation that the communities worked out, the legislation provided --

The Chair: Excuse me, Mayor Hall, I hate to do this, I hate to interrupt, but there are three minutes left on the bell and I have to allow all members three minutes minimum to get up for a vote. We'll recess and we'll come back and Mr Silipo can complete his questioning. We'll recess for about five minutes.

The committee recessed from 1203 to 1215.

The Chair: Come to order, please. We have about two minutes left for Mr Silipo.

Mr Silipo: Mayor Hall, one of the questions I'd like to ask is around the referendum process. You've no doubt heard comments from a number of government members, I think most recently the parliamentary assistant to the Premier, implying if not stating outright that somehow the referendum process was not appropriate or not legal because the mayors, as he put it, are in control of the whole process. I'd like to get your comments on that.

Ms Hall: Maybe I wish we had that much power. We don't. It's a legal process. It's the same process we went through when we had a referendum about the abolition of Metro. We thanked the provincial government for changes in the Municipal Act which allow voting to be done in new ways. I think it will be good for all of us, in terms of democracy, that more people will vote in all municipal elections because of their ability to do so by mail. It's also cost-effective; it will reduce the cost of elections.

Certainly our staff were very surprised to see those comments. They had discussions with provincial staff about the manner in which they're doing it. There are many protections built into our vote and the way it's done. This is a referendum where I have said and council has said that we'll be bound by the outcome of that. As you've heard today, I feel strongly about amalgamation, but if the majority of Toronto voters vote in favour of it, then I'll drop my opposition, and I call on the provincial government to do the same thing.

The Chair: Now we're moving into the time for the government caucus.

Hon Al Leach (Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing): Thank you, Madam Mayor; my mayor, as a matter of fact. Just to get a few things straight, it's been indicated that the size of council wouldn't be able to respond to local citizens and yet the mayors' proposal, I believe, recommended that you go to 50,000 to one, and in Scarborough at the present time it's 60,000 to one.

Ms Hall: What I meant by that was a council of 44 versus a local council.

Hon Mr Leach: But you recommended a council of 48, with six mayors.

Ms Hall: That was the regional, GTA body that would do the coordinating as opposed to the local council that I would recommend stay small to deal with the very local issues.

Hon Mr Leach: The report that the four mayors put out, presented to the Premier and me, recommended that the councils within Metropolitan Toronto, the six councils, be reduced from 106 to 54, 48 councillors and six mayors.

Ms Hall: That's correct.

Hon Mr Leach: That's pretty close to 44, except that you just saved six mayors.

Ms Hall: But the point that I've made about the size of councils is the group of people who are making the decisions. For example, last night I was at a meeting in your riding, at the Rosedale United Church. People there were talking about a number of local issues they've been involved in and how they came to city hall and how in that situation, faced with a council of 17 when they wanted to get involved and clean up the Don and make that a public recreation area, they had to convince nine councillors. In the new council that's proposed, they would have to go to a council of 44, some of whom I suspect will have never heard of the Don or won't know where it is, and convince 25 people.

Hon Mr Leach: You're quite aware of the community council proposal that would have either seven or eight, which is less than nine, and be responsible for local decision-making, such things as cleaning up the Don.

Ms Hall: I understand from Mr Gilchrist's comments on that, because there are no details in the legislation, that community councils would be made up of the local councillors from an area together with an equal number of appointed citizens and that this group would be advisory only to the larger council.

Hon Mr Leach: No, our proposal is that the community councils would have the ability to make decisions, provided that they were within the corporate guidelines. The neighbourhood committees are very similar to what you have in the city of Toronto right now.

Ms Hall: So this would be then seven appointed citizens, as opposed to accountable elected citizens, who would be making decisions?

Hon Mr Leach: No, you would have six or seven elected councillors forming a community council. They would ask the advice of neighbourhood committees, very similar to what the city of Toronto does now when you advertise for citizen input, and would be empowered to make local planning decisions.

I just want to get one other thing on the record.

Ms Hall: Is that included in the legislation? I've read the legislation and not seen that.

Hon Mr Leach: The neighbourhood committees are there.

Ms Hall: It says "neighbourhood committees," but it doesn't saying anything more than --

Hon Mr Leach: In all of my speeches, including the kickoff speech that I made, the community council was done.

I just wanted to mention --

The Chair: Minister, as much as I'd like to let you go on, I have to be fair with the time for everybody. You've come to the end of your time. I just want to thank Mayor Hall for coming forward today to make your presentation. Thank you, Mayor Hall.

Mr Silipo: Point of order, Chair.

The Chair: Now on a point of order.

Mr Silipo: We're not going to get many occasions as a committee to have these kinds of useful exchanges between the minister and one of the mayors, so I'd like to ask for agreement that we extend another five or 10 minutes and just allow some of these points to be fleshed out in this way.

The Chair: In order to do that, I have to ask for unanimous consent from the entire committee. Can I say that we'll ask the minister for another five minutes of question and answer?

Hon Mr Leach: I'm here till 12:30.

The Chair: Okay, I understand we have unanimous consent of the committee. I want to ask Mayor Hall if she would mind that.

Ms Hall: I would love to have an opportunity to talk with the minister about these issues.

Hon Mr Leach: Any time.

The Chair: Because of unanimous consent, we'll just continue for another five minutes. Go ahead, Minister Leach.

Hon Mr Leach: I just wanted to make sure that we had on the record that the member for Oakwood said that the trustees had special powers by the courts not being able to overturn them and not being subject to the Statutory Powers Procedure Act. I'd like everyone to know that that's common legislative language in just about every bill that goes through this Legislature, including all of the bills that were presented by the NDP and the Liberals. This is not something that's unique to this bill and I just wanted to make sure that you understood that.

Ms Hall: But I also understand that I was elected by the people of Toronto and that if the bill is approved as it's drafted, between then and the end of my term my powers and responsibilities will be significantly reduced as a result of that legislation.

Hon Mr Leach: I disagree with that totally. The trustees are there just to ensure that nothing untoward takes place. If the council carries out its responsibilities in the manner in which it normally does, and I'm sure you will, you won't even know that the transition team is there.

Ms Hall: As an elected mayor, I find it insulting to suggest that I need a trustee to monitor me. I think about the city of Toronto, where we have not increased taxes for five years, we've reduced our costs significantly, we are even now as we speak reducing our amount of debt towards the year 2001 when we will be debt-free. I feel that from a financial perspective we have been probably the most responsible level of government and yet we are being told that appointed people will look over our shoulders and, if one reads the legislation, have the ability to cancel our budgets. It says they must approve them, approve expenditures over $50,000, approve any hiring of staff, all of those things. You may not view that --

Hon Mr Leach: Well, let me ask you this --

Ms Hall: What my staff tell me is that my power that I was elected by citizens to perform is --

Hon Mr Leach: Let me ask you this: Do you think it's appropriate that the city of Toronto council -- I'm not sure whether it was council or a committee of council -- passed a motion looking to explore ways to --

Interjection.

Hon Mr Leach: No, Toronto passed a motion to explore ways of getting rid of assets in the same manner as the borough of East York. The borough of East York passed a motion saying, "Put them into a" --

Ms Hall: Actually, I spoke with staff in your office and I sent them a copy of the motion that was actually approved. I make the point that all expenditures by Toronto city council are made in a public forum. What we approved was a motion asking our staff to report on the action that East York council had taken. Somebody stood up in council and said, "East York is looking at various options around their finances."

On the basis of our asking for a report on what another municipality was considering doing, we should have trustees appointed to oversee our work? I think you would be extremely upset if the federal government were to do that to the provincial government. We at the local level are extremely insulted by the action that your government has taken on this issue.

Hon Mr Leach: I can assure you that if the city of Toronto carries out its responsibility, as I'm sure you will, in a manner that you normally do, you won't even know they're there.

Interruption.

The Chair: Order.

Hon Mr Leach: I also found interesting a couple of comments in your speech that you're concerned about welfare costs leaping as they did during the recession. I just wanted to make note that welfare caseload doubled between 1985 and 1990 when we were in the midst of the best economic times we ever had under the Liberal government.

Mr Silipo: So what's the point? They're going to increase. You're saying they're going to increase.

Hon Mr Leach: The point is that you just can't assume you're going to have a downturn and welfare will go up. That's why we've set up a fund. Whether in good times or in bad times, we will have a fund there to make sure that you can --

The Chair: Sorry, Minister. We've actually gone a bit beyond the five minutes that was allotted. I want to thank Mayor Hall --

Ms Hall: If I may just answer that question?

The Chair: No, we've gone beyond, Mayor Hall.

Hon Mr Leach: We can carry on after.

The Chair: They can continue a discourse at another time. There will be a subcommittee meeting in room 110 in two minutes. We're in recess until 3:30.

The committee recessed from 1228 to 1544.

The Chair: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the afternoon session of the standing committee on general government. Order, please. Thank you for your patience. Some of the members are trickling in. As I said, we had a little bit of a different process this time around, so I think there's some confusion.

Just at the outset, I know the clerk has been speaking with many of you as you've come in the room. As the audience, you're treated the same as an audience in the chamber. There are to be no outbursts, and noise is to be kept to a minimum. It's not a participatory thing from the audience. We are here to hear people who have made their presentations. We're already behind and if we have to have too many discussions about that, then we'll lose even more time and people might lose the opportunity to do their deputation today.

DON HEAP

The Chair: With no further ado, I'd like to welcome Mr Heap, a former member, I might note, from Trinity-Spadina, I believe. Welcome, sir. You have 10 minutes today to make your presentation. At the end of your presentation, if there's any time remaining, the Liberal caucus will have the opportunity to ask some questions.

Mr Don Heap: Thank you, Mr Chairman. First, I want to use the expression "Let only the truth be spoken here, and only the truth be heard." I thank you for inviting me to speak with you on Bill 103.

At first, I was unsure what to bring forward from my active background: the usual academic training for the Anglican priesthood, which was briefly interrupted by the Second World War; the three years in charge of a rural Quebec parish; 18 years in Toronto as a factory labourer; or 21 years as a New Democrat elected representative, first in city and Metro councils and then in the House of Commons? Well, I decided that those experiences would be well covered by others, and therefore I offer you some reflections on all of that, reflections I made especially during the past three years of voluntary retirement while I continue my voluntary service in an Anglican parish.

You have likely heard the old story of the sheep and the goats. They all come before the throne on Judgement Day and the bottom line for each one is, "As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me." I used to ask myself, when I heard that story, "Am I a sheep or a goat?" I've decided that I am both. That story is not so much about heaven or hell -- that is, after death -- as about the choices we make here and now every day. Do we serve the needs of our neighbours, especially the poorest, or do we ignore them?

I say to the members of the committee on the government side that I believe that you believe you are doing what needs to be done, what is right, but you have forgotten the least of God's brothers and sisters. I believe your long days of work shut in this building have helped you to forget many of the people you pledged to serve here.

With this bill you are cutting off, killing, the human networks of life in our cities, in the communities where we live in Metro Toronto. You are doing it to save taxpayers' money, you say, yet you cannot prove that against the mounting evidence of experience that shows you will more likely waste taxpayers' money.

You appeal to the philosophy that cutting the deficit and cutting income taxes will restore a healthy economy and good work for all who want it in Ontario. Twelve years of that philosophy practised by the government of Canada has brought to most people in our country declining real incomes, fear of being jobless, fear for the health of our environment and shock at the high-handed actions of the elected government, particularly of Ontario.

I will not argue against your philosophy, both because others more expert in economics are doing that and because I wish to focus my words on what is being done to human beings. I believe you are wiping out the social paths by which people in our cities talk with each other for the public good. During many generations, Toronto's people built these paths, these links, so as to decide together what we will do as a city or as cities, to find our mistakes and, together, to create better ways.

You are harshly closing off debate in the Legislature and abolishing the municipal forums of debate because you do not wish to hear a voice other than your own. In fact, your government has boasted that no matter what is the result of a referendum, you will ignore the people you pledged to serve.

I believe that you intend to disempower the people, robbing us of the structures of democratic consultation that we have created so that you can rule a population of two million people who will unable to bring effective democratic opposition to your plans. You are confiscating through your board of trustees and transition team the wealth that was accumulated by the people of our cities over many generations. You are rejecting an essential part of the rule of law by denying the right of citizens to challenge any unjust or foolish decisions your trustees and transition team may make. No doubt they are good people, but they can make big mistakes.

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You are setting up a dictatorship over two million people. You're granting yourselves and your friends the right to privatize all the public services that the people of our cities have created, to hand them over secretly, for a price that cannot be challenged in court, to people who will see them as mainly a licence to grow richer, without any respect for the people who give the services or for the people who need them. You are abolishing all possibility of democratic, lawful challenge and change. In doing that, you will deny and attack and harass the people of our city.

You will wound the human dignity of most people who are now living here peaceably as neighbours. You will bring massive confusion and bitter quarrelling, even violence, that will wreck the very economy you say you are improving. You are showing a terrifying contempt for human beings. Why? I believe you are in a trap. Old habits of commerce that for generations seemed to many people to produce good results from the rule of wealth are now causing mass unemployment in a rich country and rapid ruin of our soil, water and air, and they're once again generating the world trade wars and re-armament that led to the First World War and the Second World War.

We need a deep change in the way we live together, but not by making the rule of wealth an absolute dictatorship. I beg you to reflect.

For myself, it was six years ago, near the end of my time in Parliament, that I began to find that I needed a deep change in my life; not a change of goal -- my goal was and is a society of cooperation and mutual help -- so much as a different manner of working towards that goal. For half a century I had accepted the usual manner of doing it, including hostile struggle against enemies. I joined the Army in 1944 and trained to kill Germans or Japanese, as the case might be, but fortunately the war was ended by others soon after I finished training.

Since then, I entered into the political and economic struggle against the minority of wealthy men who control our economy. I said many harsh and hateful words about the wealthy and their government allies, words for which I am now sorry because they do not move us towards life. I must now take much more seriously the words of Jesus in the sixth chapter of the Good News according to Luke: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who abuse you."

Therefore, because you are doing to the people things that make me see you as enemies, I must also love you, I must seek to do you good, I must pray for you. I have come today hoping to speak the truth in love, as the apostle Paul urges in the third chapter of his letter to the Ephesians. Accordingly, part of my daily prayer has been for some time that God be with you and with all who have undertaken the burdens of ruling us, the burdens of making decisions for us, the burdens of running the risks of being betrayed or of betraying others, the risks of opening divisions among us and creating occasions of hatred. God is with you too.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Heap. You have exhausted your 10-minute time. I want to thank you for coming today to make your presentation to the committee.

MARIO SILVA

The Chair: Would Mario Silva please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Silva.

Mr Mario Silva: I want to thank the members of the committee for providing me the opportunity to make a presentation about Bill 103. My name is Councillor Mario Silva. I am the chair of the city's economic development committee and I also represent the city's west end, ward 3.

Members of the committee, you have to understand that the megacity will cost more than what we have now. Big governments cost more. Bill 103 will fundamentally change the economic development process for a region that is larger than six other provinces. This change, combined with mega-downloading, means investor uncertainty about the approval process, higher taxes, fewer services and job losses.

We certainly know the situation of what happened in Quebec, particularly when the separatist government got elected and talked about the referendum and separating from this country. This great uncertainty is driving businesses away from our city as well. If we talk even about the situation that every city in Metro has different official plan amendments, that they have different zonings, the whole structure of having to deal with that and putting in place a system that will pinpoint how to equalize that, it will create a transition period of maybe one or two years. Investors who are presently coming to this city do not want to wait that long.

Megacity is too much, too fast. The only group that will move faster than this government is business from Toronto if Bill 103 is passed.

Look in the binder. I'm sure all of you got the binder the mayor presented this morning. You will see that Metro spends 55% more per capita than the regional government in the 905 area. Metro's population is 2.3 million. Each region in the 905 area in less than 800,000.

I want to point to this particular chart that I think most of you got today from the mayor, at tab 8. The city of Toronto talks about the population; all of you are aware it's 2.3 million. In most other regions, like I said, it's 800,000 or less.

Let's look now at the spending. Metro spends $1,800 per person. The region of Durham spends less than $800 per person. We can say that welfare is probably the number one contributing factor to that, given the fact that Toronto still acts as a magnet for many people throughout the country who are unemployed. This is the place that they come because of the services that are offered within cities: the hostels, the facilities and the different social agencies we have as well.

But even if you take welfare, for example, out of Metro, Metro is still 55% more expensive than the other regions. So we have here a situation where bigger is not better.

In the binder you'll also see what the Fraser Institute says, what Wendell Cox says and what Andrew Sancton says, that big government costs more.

Again I want to point to the binder. I'll read from one of the gurus of the Tory party, Michael Walker -- not the councillor Michael Walker, but Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute:

"On the surface, collapsing a number of small businesses into one big `efficient' governmental region seems like a cost-saving slam-dunk. After all, do you really need five separate water departments, five separate garbage departments, five separate building inspection departments, etc?

"However, there is another side. That can be seen most readily in the fact that municipalities proposing to eliminate cost and duplication by amalgamation invariably have within their borders many competing suppliers of goods and services that the taxpayers want in their role as consumers. For example, it is hard to find a region that doesn't have several automobile dealerships or many providers of automobile repair and service. Wouldn't consumers be better served if those duplicated facilities were provided by a single provider? In fact, why do we need to have more than one automobile company, more than one garage and more than one gasoline provider?

"We have to have alternatives, because without competition, the quality of the product deteriorates, and the consumer, while perhaps initially saving the cost of duplication and overlap and facilities, ultimately gets a very bad product. That was certainly the experience in East Germany with the production of the car driven only by those who had no alternative, the Trabant. If amalgamation doesn't serve the interests of consumers as buyers of autos and other goods and services, why do we expect that it will serve their interests as consumers of government services?"

I think most of you will agree with that.

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In the US, Wendell Cox has noted that cities with a population of over 1 million people spend 20% to 40% more per capita than cities in the 100,000 to 1 million range -- so more government, bigger government, more cost.

Downtown Toronto is the economic engine that drives Ontario. Scotiabank just did a study. Financial service is the biggest generator of jobs in the GTA, bigger than the automotive sector, and the GTA is 50% of Ontario's economic output. However, the Scotiabank study says that those financial jobs can't be taken for granted, that this sector is highly mobile and we could lose it. Today all you need really is a telephone and a desk and you have your own business. People no longer need office buildings downtown. This is the report that was produced by Scotiabank. It's called Financial Services at the Crossroads.

Page 2 illustrates that the financial service contributes 48% of Ontario's output. This, unfortunately, could be gone. Most of these financial services and buildings downtown could be looking at a tax increase of $1 million to $2 million to $3 million annually, but I don't know exactly what they'll be getting in services in return for that money.

I encourage all of you to read this report by Scotiabank. I think it's a fascinating report because it deals with a lot of issues in the downtown core. I think the major argument we've been making as a city, why we are concerned about amalgamation, is basically about the hole-in-the-doughnut effect. It is about the quality-of-life issues. It is about keeping a vibrant and exciting downtown core where businesses stay and prosper.

If business communities have concerns, your government should have concerns as well about the amalgamation and about the downloading of services.

What you are giving the economic generator of Ontario is a bigger government that costs more. You may think that if you take out the cities it costs less, but that is not what the evidence says.

In the last two years of my being chair of the economic development committee, we've been working on a strategy report on how to get investments and cut some of the red tape, all things that I think most of your government will be interested in knowing, what we've been doing as a city. The city of Toronto has engaged in several partnerships, both with the financial sector and some developers, to look at particular office buildings that have been abandoned, look at ways of using those particular buildings for live-work spaces, for conversion. So we've done quite a bit as a city.

You'll be fascinated to know that our unemployment rate within the city of Toronto is lower than that of the GTA. It's about 7%. The GTA average is about 8%, 8.5%, 9%. We have lower statistics than the GTA for their own population within the downtown core.

"Toronto is Canada's financial centre, as was stated in this report," called Vision Forward. "It boasts the tenth-largest stock exchange in the world and an abundance of brokerage and insurance industry head offices. Toronto's financial core is home to five of the seven schedule 1 domestic banks." It gets about 82% as well of all foreign banks within the country. So you can see that --

The Chair: You'll have to wrap up, Mr Silva. We're getting towards the end of your allotted time.

Mr Silva: Certainly. I'll wrap up by quoting from another book, that is Fortune magazine, which ranks Toronto number one in the world. We obviously must be doing something right. Although we hear constant criticism about this government, about Toronto, the city of Toronto is recognized as a leader in the world. We set the trends in the world. This conservative magazine states the fact that we are a leader in the world. We want to make sure that we continue to be a leader in the world and we are afraid this particular policy will destroy that.

It was stated over and over again by every research that was done that "bigger" means more money. It's as simple as that.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Silva.

HELEN RILEY

The Chair: Would Helen Riley please come forward. Good afternoon, Ms Riley. Welcome to the committee. I guess you understand you'll probably be interrupted in about six minutes or so, but if there's any time remaining when we come back from voting in the Legislature, that time will be allotted to the Liberal Party to ask questions.

Ms Helen Riley: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee today. I have given the clerk a written presentation. If I read that, it will take the full 10 minutes. I would prefer to speak very briefly, maybe two or three minutes, and then I would like to ask my sister Raging Grannies to come and join me with a song for you, with your permission, Mr Chairman.

The Chair: Let's hear your submission first.

Ms Riley: Thank you. I live in East York. My children and grandchildren also live in East York, and in Toronto. Since I retired from my position as senior economist at the Ontario Ministry of Finance I have spent many volunteer hours on both local and Metro issues. I now chair the East York safety council and I chair the Metro pedestrian issues subcommittee. I do not belong to any political party but I consider myself a red Tory. I voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial election. John Parker is my MPP and I'm glad to see him here.

I am proud to be part of a stream of articulate and reasonable citizens who are coming before you to tell you that Bill 103 is an abomination. I will not repeat all the arguments against the appointment of a board of trustees and a transition team, their unprecedented powers, bureaucrats overriding elected councils, mandated cooperation, secrecy of meetings with municipal bureaucrats, lack of any recourse to the courts tying the hands of even the new mega-council -- you have heard it all and will continue to hear it from other deputants.

This provincial government is acting like a Third World dictatorship, or like an old-fashioned central Communist government. When I was a teenager visiting Tito's Yugoslavia, students there maintained that a one-party system was so much more efficient than western democracies. Why not declare yourselves rulers for life and have done with it?

It's important to note that this bill will affect all of Ontario, not just Metro. Our democratic rights are being taken away. Bill 103 begins it, Bill 104 continues it, and who knows what will come later? At the very least, all the provisions of Bill 103 dealing with the appointment and powers of the trustees and the transition team must be deleted, but that is not enough. The whole bill must be withdrawn.

Toronto is known as the city that works and it is the envy of many. Why destroy it? A mega-council cannot hope to consider local concerns. The destructive car culture of the suburbs will overtake us.

Extensive discussion could lead to some clarification of roles, some simplification of funding. Instead, we will have mass confusion for several years, service disruptions, a multiplicity of bylaws and regulations, a loss of investor confidence, and a disfranchised and discouraged electorate. Also, as anyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy knows, the larger the bureaucracy the more layers of management, the more wasted time, the more wasted money, the less responsiveness. We will all be paying more for less.

Is Toronto undergoverned? Of course not. We need all the local councillors we have. I'm not so sure about the Metro councillors.

Neighbourhood committees are no substitute for local government. I serve as a volunteer on many committees but I do not know why anyone would want to serve on such an unpaid, all-purpose advisory committee, and I don't know why I should trust the future of my community to such an unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable body.

Far from being a direct line to the top, as the minister contends, it will be a bureaucratic nightmare. East York has a very high number of volunteers. How many people will volunteer after amalgamation? You have no mandate for amalgamation; no one's recommended it. It's not desirable. It's a disaster, and a disaster for Metro Toronto will eventually mean a disaster for the whole province.

Bill 103 must be withdrawn. I know it will be difficult for the government to back down. It will take courage but it can be done. For the love of our city, for the love of Ontario, think again.

Finally, although it's not part of Bill 103, I would like to add my dismay about the offloading to all municipalities of increased costs of health, social services, welfare and family benefits. The property tax base simply cannot cope with such costs, nor should it have to.

Here's a suggestion: Take education off the property tax base, as announced, but don't transfer any income support, social or health costs to the municipalities. The government can then take credit for a 50% cut in property taxes in lieu of the suggested 30% cut in income taxes.

Thank you for your attention. Here now are the grannies.

The Chair: Ladies, you have to come quickly and sit down in the chairs. I can't allow you to do it from the audience, and you can't have props, ma'am.

Ms Riley: We can't have props? We can't put our hats on?

The Chair: You can't have props, ladies. It's in order. You're coming down to three minutes.

Ms Riley: Can we just put our hats on, Mr Chairman?

The Chair: Sing your song, ladies, quickly. We have to go and vote.

Toronto Raging Grannies: Megacity, oh, what a mess

You will create here and so much distress,

Destroying the province along with the city.

No use in future to say, "What a pity."

Mr Harris! Give us a break!

Won't you admit now you've made a mistake?

It's not too late to stop Bill 103.

Say "goodbye" to megacity.

Megacity! What can we say?

We don't want one city. We don't want to pay.

We don't want appointees or trustees to rule us.

Dissing us all! Don't think you can fool us!

Mr Harris! Give us a break!

Won't you admit now you've made a mistake?

It's not too late to stop Bill 103.

Say "goodbye" to megacity.

The Chair: Ladies, I'm sorry to interrupt. We have to recess while we go to the House for a vote.

The committee recessed from 1613 to 1620.

The Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, please quickly come to order. We're going to have a lot of problems with time today. The bells are going to be ringing quite a bit. We're going to have to be up and down for votes, so the more orderly we are in here the more help it is and people will be able to hear the full presentations.

Speaking of full presentations, ladies, I understand you have a third verse. Go ahead.

Toronto Raging Grannies: Megacity! What an idea!

Property taxes will go up, that's clear.

Offloading of welfare, and health care, and others,

Transit, and programs for children and mothers.

Mr Harris! Give us a break!

Won't you admit now you've made a mistake?

It's not too late to stop Bill 103.

Say "goodbye" to megacity.

Megacity! And mega-change too!

Restructuring funding. It will be a zoo!

And nothing was broken, so why try to fix it?

Swallow your pride then.

Turn thumbs down and nix it!

Mr Harris! Give us a break!

Won't you admit now you've made a mistake?

It's not too late to stop Bill 103.

Say "goodbye" to megacity.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Riley, for coming forward, and, ladies, for your accompaniment.

BERNARD CHAMBERLAIN

The Chair: Would Bernard Chamberlain please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Chamberlain, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Bernard Chamberlain: I thank the committee for allowing me to present at this committee meeting. My name is Bernard Chamberlain. I'm a resident of north Toronto and I'm a member of the Avenue Road and Eglinton Community Association. I've lived in Toronto for many years and brought up my children here.

Metro has been pretty successful. If you believe Fortune magazine, other people around the world think so too. We have an urban centre that is vibrant, safe, tolerant and visually appealing. It's also, by world standards, affordable. It, with the other Ontario urban centres, is a wealth generator for the province.

What seems to me the most pressing task of the province is the management of the huge area that forms the GTA, with its rapidly developing suburban and industrial areas spreading out far beyond Metro, with uncoordinated services and without a plan or vision of what this very beautiful and fertile area is to develop into.

The most promising recommendation made by the Who Does What committee is the formation of the Greater Toronto Services Board. Instead of following this, the provincial government is concentrating on forcing through Bill 103, a massive leap into the unknown.

The city's health is vital to the prosperity of the rest of the province. To preserve the city's quality of life and wealth-producing ability -- and I suggest they are connected -- it's necessary to keep the things that have made it work well and protect it from loss of its means to innovate and develop, and to protect the surrounding countryside from indiscriminate development.

In the proposed legislation, where is the vision? I would expect the province to provide the incentives, planning and controls to encourage urban renewal in Metro and managed development in the GTA. Instead we have a shortsighted plan to grab Metro's tax base to harvest the city's wealth. This is done in the most cowardly and dictatorial way: first, by seizing control of the elected municipal governments by installing an unelected junta, thereby suspending democracy; then in reducing citizen representation in Metro in municipal affairs to the lowest level in the province; thirdly, by hamstringing the future megacity government by denying it control of its budgets through holding back essential moneys in reserve funds controlled by the provincial government.

Is this going to work? At the start of these hearings Minister Leach predicted big savings. Apart from the $400 million to $1 billion in startup costs, and while some members of the government have been candid that there are no assurances of savings from amalgamation, many studies show the opposite experience. The new megacity council will have to manage over 100,000 existing bylaws based on the present boundaries -- this is provided by the bill -- in addition to the new bylaws that it will have to enact. This is a recipe for chaos.

There has been enough information revealed by the press in the short time since Bill 103 was announced about experiences in urban areas in other parts of the world that equate the structure proposed in Bill 103 with higher costs, fewer services, higher taxes, minimized local representation, urban decay and hollowing out of the city core. Am I to believe the provincial government doesn't care? Is it of no consequence to them because what they want is to control the Metro tax base and, cynically, provide a means for funding an income tax reduction?

I am appalled that there is no glimmer of vision for preserving the quality of life in this great city and the surrounding rural areas by the provincial government, and certainly not in Bill 103. Even the Greater Toronto Services Board, the cornerstone of the Who Does What committee, seems to be abandoned.

The megacity is not the only proposal, it's not the only alternative. Ward and city boundaries can be re-evaluated and the municipal tax system certainly can be updated and made more equitable. But to leap into the unknown by throwing out completely the structures that have been developed over many years, by a hastily drawn-up, 20-page, patently flawed document, can destroy forever this great city and change it from a generator of wealth into a financial liability.

I plead with this committee to search for alternatives and a radical change to Bill 103 -- and preferably to scrap it -- a change that leaves the democratic process of this city in place. I encourage wholeheartedly putting in place a fair and stable property tax system but one that does not give an incentive to abandon the city in favour of development of rural areas. Lastly, I strongly support a determined attempt at coordinating services in the GTA.

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Mr Sergio: Thank you for making a presentation to our committee. Mr Chamberlain, when the legislation was introduced, both the Premier and Mr Leach, either defending their legislation or promoting their legislation, said this would reduce taxes, save a lot of money, make the system more efficient and of course reduce politicians. We have been asking in the House, especially our leader, to be provided with that information, with whatever reports, secret reports, back up their contention that this will be more effective, will save money, will lower taxes and so forth.

We have not been able to get any information from the government. It is our contention the bill should not proceed until we have all that information. Was is your view with respect to that?

Mr Chamberlain: Certainly, the bill provides none of that information and from what I hear around the city it's information people need. People were most upset by the fact that the bill was introduced just before Christmas, which took away a considerable amount of time for people to get organized, to find information, to react to the bill, and I feel that there isn't enough information. The information is coming from outside, from people comparing with large centres in other parts of the world and we're not getting hard information from the Ontario government.

Mr Sergio: Do you feel this is a big enough issue to hold a binding referendum on this issue?

Mr Chamberlain: Yes, very definitely.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Chamberlain.

MARY CLARK

The Chair: Would Mary Clark please come forward. Good afternoon.

Mrs Mary Clark: Mr Chairman and committee members, I am speaking to you today about the megacity, Bill 103, not only to express my own views, but also those of my husband, Clive Clark, who planned to speak separately but is out of the province on business.

We are architects and urban planners who are gravely concerned about the effects of Bill 103 and other so-called commonsense measures on the quality of life in the city of Toronto. This city was our birthplace 60 years ago and over the years has become a unique, stimulating and civilized environment in which to live, work and raise a family. We attribute this quality of living to the democratic evolution of a government structure that responds to the values and concerns of citizens and businesses locating here, while pursuing goals of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Over the years we have seen the evolution of local Metro governance, the amalgamation of small communities with the city, the formation of Metropolitan Toronto and, in the 1980s, the move to directly elected local and Metro councillors. While these developments in the management of Metro and its municipalities were not always popular, the details of the planned action and vision of the resulting effects were available for public knowledge, open to public discussion and referenda. They were not simply imposed by a provincial government through trustees and a transition team making decisions behind closed doors in the guise of common sense.

To us, Bill 103 is simply outrageous in its disrespect for due process and democratic procedures that have been inherent in the historical development of Toronto. This bill provides no opportunity for the general public to understand, discuss, debate and react to the actual changes developed by trustees behind closed doors before they are imposed by the transition team on the current quality of life in the city of Toronto.

It takes away the democratic and discretionary powers of not only our currently elected representatives but also of the proposed megacity council by giving overriding powers to a few provincially appointed trustees, transition team members, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and the Premier, without any recourse to justice through the courts.

It freezes our taxpayer reserve funds and gives the provincial rulers of our destiny the right to restrict future budgets and taxation measures for the funding of services to our cities. In short, it replaces municipal democracy with a form of provincial dictatorship that, in our view, is morally corrupt and an insult to all citizens.

Secondly, the taxpayers have already paid for several reports on proposals for restructuring government and services in the GTA. We have had the Golden report, the Crombie commission, the mayors' report and the KPMG report.

The first two reports were based on comprehensive non-partisan studies by professionals who have been active in municipal and provincial planning for decades and who understand that the quality of urban life is a very complex matter and not merely a product of cost-effectiveness, while the KPMG report was hastily crafted to support the partisan theory behind Bill 103. Since all these reports contain different ideas on how restructuring might be beneficial, our common sense tells us that the next step should be to bring these experts together to develop, with extensive public input, a consensus on an overall plan for government within the GTA.

In lieu of an overall vision for the GTA, Tory politicians have hastily and simplistically seized upon the megacity concept as a quick method for having the appearance of meeting cost-cutting promises by the time of the next election. I emphasize the word "appearance" because there are many opinions that amalgamations into megacities do not lead to cost reductions. Some opinions even suggest that the major cost-savings will be found at the regional or GTA levels of governance.

Furthermore, the more personal and quality-of-life costs to citizens are still unknown and omitted from the equation. It really rankles us to see Premier Harris on TV simplistically buffaloing uninformed taxpayers into believing that substantial tax savings will be coming their way with no mention of how the quality of these taxpayers' lives may be affected.

How does the megacity concept of Bill 103 intend to preserve the distinctive quality of life and values inherent to each local municipality with a political system where each municipality will have a minority position on mega-decisions and mega-budgeting?

We have already witnessed this situation at our Metro level of government where the transit-oriented city of Toronto can be outvoted by road-oriented suburban cities on transportation and development issues that are critical to the qualify of life in the inner city.

Now other questions arise:

Will user fees for park and recreational facilities be applied uniformly without regard for social benefits?

Will public support for the arts decline to current suburban levels?

Will the quality of services decline to a homogeneous level throughout the megacity so that they neither respond to specific needs nor preserve the standards that led to residents and businesses locating there?

Without even considering the looming effects of AVA, actual value assessment, will the mere actualization of megacity values have a detrimental effect on property values?

Will our local city centres, when stripped away of any political significance and activity, become unkempt, lifeless holes in our urban landscape? Or will the Toronto city hall be sold to McDonald's and have its skating rink arches painted yellow?

To date, these questions and many others affecting the quality of life remain unanswered. Bill 103 excludes any opportunity for public forums on these types of issues.

Nor does the Tory plan have any criteria for the restructuring of local functions that address any personal costs to citizens imposed by megacity thinking. These costs include increased travel time and cost to reach centralized locations, more volunteer time required to sit on yet another neighbourhood committee, reduced access to political representatives due to their increased workload, and many others.

We have already experienced the closure of the only vehicle accident reporting centre in the city of Toronto, which I am told is due to Metro police cutbacks. If this and other types of services are no longer affordable in the centre of Metro where you live, why live there?

We are very concerned that the megacity proposal will lead to citizen apathy towards municipal government and to lack of respect for established laws that maintain the civility and quality of life that are a feature of our local cities. People may become tempted to take the law into their own hands. If times get rough, residents and businesses will move out of the area if they can afford to. The quality of life in Metro, and particularly the inner city, must be preserved if they are to retain their vitality and international reputation.

The current frenzy associated with the passing of Bill 103 and other related, far-reaching legislation has been likened to a corporate takeover. We believe this is the Tory strategy and we find it flies in the face of democracy and the rights of local citizens.

Please, either scrap Bill 103, or at the very least extend the time lines and open the process so that a vision of consensus can be properly developed that will ensure not only cost-effective management, but also citizen effectiveness, support and respect.

Mr Silipo: Just very briefly, Ms Clark, the words you've used are fairly strong. You refer to the trusteeship as "provincial dictatorship," but the noticeable thing is that in fact those are words we are hearing more and more from average citizens as they look at what's going on.

The only question I really have of you is, do you think the referendum is at least a way that will allow not just the public obviously to express its view, but the government to finally take a look and say, "Maybe if the people really don't believe this is the right thing to do, this is at least the way we can show we are listening to some extent."

Mrs Clark: Frankly, I'm worried about the referendum, because I believe with all this television advertising that's going on out there, as I mentioned in my presentation, people are getting false ideas that they're going to get reductions in their taxes and that they're going to be substantial, and they have no idea how this is going to affect their lives.

I'm worried that there are too many people out there who are uninformed and not aware of what they're going to be voting on. That really worries me because I think the people who are informed understand and, yes, therefore they can vote on the referendum however they wish to, but from the point of view of the majority of our citizens, who don't have time to be informed -- they're at work, probably two people in each family working all day, children to take care of and so on -- they don't have time to understand, attend meetings like this and listen to what's happening. I am frankly very worried that the referendum -- I would love to have a binding referendum, but I am wondering whether it's going to really be representative of an informed opinion.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Silipo, and thank you, Ms Clark. We're in recess until after the vote.

The committee recessed from 1645 to 1656.

FIONA NELSON

The Chair: Would Fiona Nelson please come forward. Ladies and gentlemen, let's quickly come to order. We need to hear from Ms Nelson. I'd like your undivided attention, please.

Ms Fiona Nelson: Mr Chair and ladies and gentlemen of the committee, thank you very much for hearing me on Bill 103. On Bill 103, you're going to hear a great many deputations using a lot of adjectives that you may not like. I must say, when I read it, I tried to see if I could find any unconstitutional wrinkles to it. I couldn't, but it is, in my opinion, very bad public policy.

I've been a resident of Toronto since 1956 in the same house, and since 1969 I have been elected nine times to the Toronto Board of Education. I've also been on the board of health and the planning board, the historical board and the Metro school board so I've been involved in the city of Toronto for quite a while. I've been representing a ward called Midtown, which is a very interesting part of the city. It goes from Bloor Street up to Eglinton and from the Don River over to Christie Street. It is the middle of town.

It's a very interesting place because it's a collection of villages really that manage to maintain a great deal of their own identity and integrity while working very closely together. It is also an extremely politically active part of the city. For example, in the next two and a half weeks there will be 17 meetings in the ward on the subject of Bill 103, and I suspect that shortly thereafter there will be another 17 on Bill 104.

It's very interesting to me that while we have a written Constitution in this country, we also in the British tradition have a very big unwritten constitution which is a sort of social contract between generations, gradually improving the political and social life of the country and of our municipalities and, between generations, attempting to make sure that our democracy is made stronger and stronger. It worries me very much that this bill is significantly weakening the democratic structures in the city and virtually taking over local government, which to me is the real strength of the democracy in this country.

I know by the time these hearings are over you are going to have read so much stuff that you won't want to see anything in print for a month. But I would recommend, if you are interested in it, this book called Making Democracy Work by Robert Putnam. It is a fascinating study he did of what he called "civic" and "uncivic" communities in Italy. The little old cities of northern Italy are very civic communities, according to him, because they have a vast number of voluntary groups and associations that cross class barriers and various other things, which make those cities very cohesive, working very well, and incidentally are not expensive.

It seems to me that change, to be effective, requires the consent of the people, and the proposed change to help achieve that consensus requires experts who agree. Neither of these conditions has been met with Bill 103, and it seems to me that we are entering into a period that is very dangerous for the democracy of this society and for the life of this city. Having lived in Toronto for over 40 years, according to Putnam and other people who do a lot of thinking about this, this is a very civic society, and it's not a recent thing.

If you go back 100 years there was in this city a movement that produced a strong civic tradition that didn't permit public squalor. For example, the medical officer of health then worked very hard to bring in sewage treatment, water treatment, pasteurization of milk, slum clearances, in the interests of the health of the public. That tradition in the board of health has continued since and up till the present time.

When AIDS first became a problem in the 1980s, I was on the board of health then, as I am now, as well as the board of education, and the MOH and the health authorities in the city of Toronto came forward with a plan for public education to prevent AIDS. It was going to cost $11 million. We passed it at the board of health and convinced city council to fund it, and this was at a time when North York was convinced there was no AIDS in North York. I'm not sure whether Hoggs Hollow was an impermeable barrier or what, but that was the case.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s when we went into a recession and we were seeing a great many hungry children in the schools, the board of health and the board of education jointly entered into a school feeding program and they jointly funded it and it continues to this day, some very good health programs and feeding programs in the schools, and that kind of cooperation between the board of health and the board of education is something that I think is extremely significant in the city of Toronto. There are a great many other instances.

I'm quite convinced, for example, once again, that the ward I represent, which is a hotbed of political activity, was extremely resistant to the Spadina Expressway and I suspect a great deal of the energy to stop it came from that area, particularly from the Annex. The board of education saw the implications of slicing the city in half with an expressway. When Mr Davis and the cabinet finally put a stop to it, I remember at that time we had blocked off Yonge Street with a pedestrian mall and we had a dance from College Street down to Queen. I can't quite conceive of that sort of thing happening in a great, huge city where there is such a split between the pedestrian-conscious city and the car-conscious suburbs.

When Mr Crombie was the mayor in the 1970s and brought in that utterly irrational idea called the 40-foot height bylaw, which held all development until the central area plan had been developed, the city council hired dozens and dozens of planners and assigned them to local neighbourhoods so those neighbourhoods could develop part 2 plans under the central area plan, a very interesting and unusual process that involved hundreds and hundreds of citizens in actually planning the ambience of the city. I think that those things last till this day. The idea of community planning committees seemed unusual at the time but I think it has had a tremendous payoff.

It seems to me that if we're going to build a civic society, we're going to build a society where people care about one another. It worries me very much that the political climate in North America, certainly at the moment, is one that Mario Cuomo called one that made compassion something we could dispense with, and I think that at the basis of a sense of community and a community that cares there has to be that kind of compassion.

A couple of years ago my house was burgled. At first I thought a raccoon had broken in the door and then I realized that it had been something stronger. But the police came very quickly and dealt with things to the best of their ability. While they were still there, my next-door neighbour came over and said, "Would you like to come over for a cup of tea and do you want to spend the night?" I said, "I'd love the cup of tea but my cat is too upset, I have to sleep here tonight."

Just as soon as the police left, the young man who had just moved in across the street came over and said, "It's none of my business, but what happened?" and I told him, and he said: "I've got a black belt and here's my phone number. If you're worried about things, call me any time." I was working out in my garden, and in the city of Toronto we have sidewalks, which means people walk around a lot. A couple of older men up the street who are lamp makers came by and they said, "We heard you had a burglary and you didn't call us." I think that sense of community in a neighbourhood is really quite wonderful.

The neighbourhood I live in is one that has been under constant threat from development for decades. One of the former presidents of our ratepayers was Roy McMurtry, and we fought a huge development just to the south of where we live during his reign. I've also been president of that ratepayers. The interesting thing about it is that we've got a telephone tree; we can get around the neighbourhood in about half an hour to about 1,000 households; we can raise money. I suspect we've been to the OMB more often than many lawyers because of the place we live. This gives us a wonderful sense of cohesion and community and commonality of purpose and it seems to me that's what makes Toronto work.

All the research I have read says that Toronto is at the absolute top size of a city that can work in that way. It's tragic to think of losing that to no gain that I have been able to see. I've been on the city of Toronto assessment reform committee for 10 years. We have tried, even under freedom of information, to get some of the impact studies to do with this work and we have been unable to do it. It seems to me that if we don't have a consensus among the people -- and certainly we don't. Last night at the South Rosedale ratepayers meeting I attended in Rosedale United Church, where their sitting member of the Legislature didn't show up, they were talking about recall --

The Chair: Ms Nelson, I apologize for interrupting you. You'll have to wrap up.

Ms Nelson: All right. The people there were solidly opposed to what is happening. This has been the case in every one of the meetings I have attended so far in my ward. I want to tell you that we want the city to survive, we want it to stay prosperous and healthy, we want it to be a civic society, and to do that we need your help to burn this bill.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

VI THOMPSON

The Chair: Would Vi Thompson please come forward? Welcome.

Vi Thompson: Thank you very much. I live in an apartment building for seniors. I asked my neighbours, "What do you think of this amalgamation of all the municipalities in Toronto?" They said, "Smaller is better; big is not good." One person said: "I lived in the city of Toronto. I called city hall and asked a question. They said, `We'll get back to you.' I never heard from them again." That's thinking that the city of Toronto already is much too big. I live in East York and I call the civic centre and what happens? My questions are answered immediately. One person said to me: "I lived in Scarborough. I come to East York and the feeling in the air is different. Why, the mayor even comes to visit our apartment building. That couldn't possibly happen in megacity."

Then I looked in my dictionary. My dictionary defines "democracy" as "government of the people, either directly or by elected representatives," and "the acceptance of equality of opportunity and treatment." This standing committee has the semblance of democracy but it is not giving equal treatment to each municipality affected by this legislation. It has refused to go to the different municipalities. Just think: on TV I've watched this committee working. I have not seen anyone from Etobicoke or Scarborough or North York. I have seen people from Toronto and I understand there have been other people here from East York, but why was it impossible to go to these different communities so that more people could have representation and speak about their concerns? When reports go back to the government, will the government heed what the people have done? The committee has a limited time for hearings. That means that a great many people who would like to speak to this committee will be unable to do so.

Now I come to East York. East York is democratic. The council meets every second Monday of the month. What happens is that the first item of the agenda of that meeting is always deputations. Deputations come and they are heard until there are no more deputations. The rest of the agenda of East York council is done after deputations are finished. I have been one of the many deputants who have been there. I have spoken on questions like pesticides, on parks, recreation areas.

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One of the last things we did with the East York peace and environment committee -- we're concerned about the environment and we wanted to do one little thing that perhaps would help to change the environment for the better. We went to East York and said, "When cars are moving along O'Connor Drive westward, sometimes some of them want to turn right and go up Don Mills Road, but they can't turn and they're idling and that makes more pollution for the atmosphere" because they're there idling at the corner waiting to turn the corner. We said, "East York, could you please make that point at Don Mills and O'Connor Drive a `right lane must turn'?" It happened, it works and the now the cars go around the corner. The people going west continue in the inside lane. So it works.

Other deputants have been there. Sometimes they go again and again, saying, "Yes, I know I've been here before but there's something I want to add about what I told you last time." They're always heard politely and listened to and concerned. Sometimes the council decides to send the business to committee and the person who is making the deputation is allowed to go to the committee hearings. East York has a very democratic method of working. Councillors are available. Although my councillor is a part-time worker, I call him and he is there, available to answer my questions. The mayor is available.

East York is efficient. I think it would be impossible for megacity to be as efficient as this small borough is -- small in relation to Metro; in reality it is quite a large municipality, larger than many. I'm not quite sure of the number, but I think it's somewhere about the 10th-largest municipality in the whole of Ontario, or 17th, something like that, but quite a large municipality in comparison with much of Ontario. Yet it works; it is efficient; it has streamlined services; there is a small staff.

East York is financially responsible. The municipal portion of taxes has not been increased for four consecutive years in spite of the fact that revenues from the provincial government have decreased by 57% since 1992. This is the fourth year of increased business building permits in the borough. East York is working. The capital projects are funded from current revenues leaving the borough debt-free. It will still be debt-free in the year 2000. East York is accessible. Call the mayor and he will respond. Call your councillor and he will answer you.

East York has a great many volunteers. In fact, about one in seven people living there is a volunteer in some form or other; for the whole of Ontario, it's maybe one in 10. We have a great many volunteers. This is one of the reasons East York works so well. Another reason so many volunteers are there is the sense of community we share. Or should I ask, do the volunteers come because we have a sense of community? They work together. It is our community and we care about it.

Knowing all the parts of East York, it makes it my home. I know East York from Leaside, the little bit of East York that is close to Rosedale, the other side of the Don Valley Parkway; I know it in Thorncliffe; I know it all the way to Victoria Park. It's a place I can relate to. I think of FODEY, one of the many community groups in East York. FODEY is a small group concerned about environmental things; its name means Friends of the Don of East York. They are working to keep the Don clean and every park area and every space of that kind in East York.

In East York on July 1 we celebrate Canada Day together. We have an enormous celebration. We have a parade with floats. There are booths in the Stan Wadlow park where the different community groups come and make their presentations and show the kind of things they're active in. Services are there: The police are there and the fire department, showing the kinds of work that are done. There are competitions, there are displays of all kinds, and of course there's lots of food to eat. The library is there. You can get secondhand books -- all kinds of things. It's a great deal of festivities. You meet your neighbours, you have a picnic, and at the end of the day there's a great fireworks display.

Megacity cannot give me what I have in East York. It would be impossible to do this in the great amalgamation of our municipalities. I beg you to keep East York as a working municipality, working for its people.

The Chair: Thank you, ma'am. We have about two minutes left for a government caucus question.

Mr John L. Parker (York East): Good to have you here this afternoon. Thank you for helping with our process. I just want to touch on your story about the right-turn lane at O'Connor and Don Mills Road. Those are both Metro roads.

Vi Thompson: That's right. East York had to take it to Metro first, but it was done very quickly.

Mr Parker: Yes. It's been expressed to me that one of the downsides to the proposal for a megacity is that the outlying areas will lack the appreciation of the needs and concerns of the local communities, that the suburban outlying districts have an interest that is averse to and different from the interest of the urban area. I'll put East York in the urban area of this duality. The example you give suggests that this is a case where Metro was persuaded to give East York and the citizens of East York something that was valuable to them, of a strictly local nature. Can you comment on that?

Vi Thompson: Because it's a Metro road, it's scarcely of a particular local nature; otherwise it would not be a Metro road, it would be an East York road. It's not, it's a Metro road, meaning --

Mr Parker: No, but the concern was brought forth by residents of East York and it was --

Vi Thompson: Our concern was about pollution.

Mr Parker: You put it forward to us as an example of East York's responsiveness to the needs and the concerns of the people of East York.

Vi Thompson: To the needs and concerns and also to concern about the pollution of the atmosphere in East York.

Mr Parker: But this was a decision that was made by Metro, so that suggests to me that, in this case at any rate, Metro gave you the kind of service you were looking for. Here's Metro, that represents the entire area, all 2.3 million people in this urban district.

Vi Thompson: But Metro is not megacity. It's a different thing altogether.

The Chair: Thank you, Mrs Thompson, for coming forward and making your presentation.

The committee stands recessed until after the vote in the House.

The committee recessed from 1718 to 1727.

The Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, let's please come to order. Would everyone please take their seats or take their conversations out in the hall.

ANNA LOU LITTLE

The Chair: Anna Little.

Ms Anna Lou Little: Where are the members of the committee?

Mr Dan Newman (Scarborough Centre): We're just getting back from a vote. They're rushing back.

Ms Little: Shall I wait for them?

The Chair: No, you'd better begin.

Ms Little: I'd better get started? Okay.

The Chair: Yes. Sorry.

Ms Little: Mr Maves, member of the committee, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak to you. Please excuse me for reading my comments.

My name is Anna Lou Little. I raised my family in downtown Toronto, where I have lived for over 30 years. I am a homeowner, a social worker, a community volunteer and a citizen. I care deeply for my city.

Yesterday I was in this room and heard six speakers talking about their city and its governance. I was struck by their diversity, their richness of experience, their eloquence, their expertise and the determined dignity they brought to these hearings. I avoid public speaking if at all possible, but I feel compelled to add my voice to those of my fellow citizens.

To amalgamate the six municipalities didn't make sense to Anne Golden or David Crombie. To quote Anne Golden, "The present Metro two-tiered system should be adapted and extended to meet the needs of the new city region." The amalgamation of Metro Toronto in no way emerged as a viable option. So why do it?

I haven't read anything that convinces me that the megacity will save money without reducing services or firing workers -- my taxes will not be reduced -- or that one big, remote city government can respond as well to local needs. I'm told that this change will bring a better future. Who for?

Not covered in this bill but related is the downloading of welfare and health services on local government. Even the board of trade objects to this inappropriate measure, which would cripple communities and reduce services when they are most needed.

After reading Bill 103, I am particularly distressed by the way this megacity is to be achieved. Even those who don't have a problem with amalgamation find the process flawed and, I believe, ultimately dangerous. The appointment of trustees and then a transition team to control our local elected representatives for an undetermined period of time, accountable to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, not to our elected representatives, is unacceptable.

Particularly odious is that the decisions of the board of trustees are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court. They are protected from any personal liability for their actions. This lack of accountability and shackling of our elected local councils, the one government where people really do have a direct say in the running of their city is dangerous. These measures display a complete lack of trust and contempt for our elected officials who represent me.

For a number of years I was on my residents' association steering committee, an elected body. I felt our voice was valued and acted upon, when possible, by our councillors. Local traffic, parking, safety, noise, policing: These were some of the issues which interested our neighbourhood. How can one councillor for roughly 50,000 people be able to respond to our needs or even interact with us? The proposed neighbourhood committees are being appointed by city council. Who are they accountable to? I was directly accountable to my community, not city hall.

I have already heard two women beautifully describe the complicated process necessary to gain access to their megacity government. There is no need for me to repeat this.

I would like to give you a specific example of how our residents' steering committee operated. In response to people's concern about the heavy traffic, we designed and put forth a traffic maze plan for our area. We studied the traffic flow, responding to the streets with the highest number of cars, the location of schools, safety, concerns of parents etc.

We thought our plan was terrific. We worked with our councillors and called a public meeting. It was raucous and passionate. It interfered with the citizens' daily living. Metro didn't like the plan because it interfered with Palmerston. The result: People voted against it. It didn't get implemented. But over the years, a traffic light here, a traffic light there, some traffic calming techniques added -- all acceptable to the community. Yes, it was frustrating. Yes, it took a lot of time, but it didn't divide our community or ignore its citizens. I'm sure I don't need to spell out what I'm saying.

In my experience, the current system works well and people have a voice in the affairs of their community, a link that must not be lost.

On March 3, there will be a referendum and all citizens will have their chance to speak. To ignore their wishes is to ignore democracy. To say that these referenda don't count is unbelievable. I completely agree with Mary Clark, who spoke to you earlier on the point that the public needs to be informed and have access to unbiased information. I look to you to make that possible.

I request that Bill 103 be withdrawn and that you, as legislators, take the time to re-examine this bill in light of what you have heard, along with the results of the coming referendum. Use the many resources you already possess, the studies, the voices of Toronto, your skills as legislators to build a better Toronto for all people. Don't be bound by party politics but by your commitment to the common good and the knowledge that Toronto is the best city to live in.

Do not squander or silence the real wealth of Toronto, the voices of a diverse and vibrant community, committed voices who want to participate in the governance and quality of their lives.

The Chair: Thank you very much. You've effectively used your 10 minutes. We appreciate you coming forward to the committee this morning.

ANTHONY RAPOPORT

The Chair: Would Anthony Rapoport please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Rapoport. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Anthony Rapoport: I'd like to start by describing just a couple of examples of my experience of local government.

I'm a professional musician and a founding member of the Aradia Baroque Ensemble and the Toronto Classical Players. When Aradia was founded in 1995, we approached Mayor Barbara Hall of Toronto to ask her for help in being able to use the old St Lawrence Hall at King and Jarvis, which is a city of Toronto facility, for our first public performance. She helped us arrange to have access to the facility at very little cost. As a result of this performance, Aradia gained an international recording contract with Naxos records, a number of subscribers for our first season and some favourable press reviews.

We are contributing to the cultural life of our city. We're generating wealth in our city and we're gaining international recognition which reflects well on our city and on Canada. We're in the midst of our second full season at St Lawrence Hall, for which, ever since that first concert, we've paid full market rent. We feel proud of the work we've done and grateful to Mayor Hall for her help, a rather small thing, in helping us get started.

The Toronto Classical Players is at an earlier stage of its development. Last fall, we gave one of our first public performances at the Etobicoke Fall Arts Festival. The festival provided us with an excellent venue, publicity in its festival brochure and administration for ticket sales, all of which were beyond our means, and we were very grateful to Etobicoke for that help in starting up our musical group.

These are just a couple of examples that in my view show that local government works when it's small enough to care.

Next, I'd like to move to a specific aspect of Bill 103 that I'm particularly concerned about. It's not the only aspect I'm concerned about, but when I was preparing my remarks based on what I've seen in the papers about what you've heard already, I didn't think this was adequately brought up so far. This afternoon I have heard a number of speakers talk about it very well, so I'll try to keep my comments about it brief.

You may have a copy of my notes that refer specifically to the bill. I'd like to read this -- it's just a few sections -- because I'd like to very specific about what I think the problem is on this aspect.

Sections 9 and 16 provide for the appointment of a board of trustees and a transition team.

Subsections 9(10) and 16(12) leave the continued existence of the board of trustees and the transition team, beyond January 1998, completely at the discretion of the Minister of Municipal Affairs.

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Clause 24(1)(e) allows the minister to prescribe duties for the trustees and the transition team in addition to those stated in the act. Clauses 9(6)(a) and 16(5)(a) require all elected officials, board members and employees, both of our current municipalities and of the proposed new municipality, to comply with the requests of the trustees and the transition team. Sections 12 and 18 place the actions of the trustees and the transition team beyond the reach of the courts.

Minister Leach is attempting to create a power base for himself above the law. This is completely unacceptable. The only basis of legitimacy for the exercise of political power is the rule of law. I hope we all agree on that, because to disagree is extremely dangerous.

Minister Leach has said that accountability is one of his justifications for the amalgamation. There is no way that accountability is compatible with operations that are outside the rule of law. There is no accountability where you don't have public access to some kind of process of review of the decisions of the powerful. I think that what Minister Leach meant by greater accountability was that the new city council will be more accountable to him than our current municipal governments. That is not public accountability. In fact it's the opposite.

Now I'd like to go on to my concerns about the process by which Bill 103 is being enacted. I was in the Legislature when the Speaker ruled that the government was in contempt of the Legislature because of its pamphlet, which described its intentions in regard to amalgamation without regard for the legislative process. I think I should remind the government that the opposition members of the Legislature are not there as some kind of concession to minority political opinion. My representative, Mr Silipo, did not lose the last provincial election. He won the election, defeating, among others, a Progressive Conservative candidate. When you show contempt for the Legislature, when you show contempt for my representation in the Legislature, you show contempt for me.

Premier Mike Harris has said that the unanimous opposition of the six mayors to amalgamation is self-serving. All of these mayors were elected. Many of them have been elected to multiple terms. That means they have run on the basis of their records in office and been returned by the public, a test which the current provincial government has not yet faced.

Mayor Hall was directly elected in a large city. I haven't compared the figures myself, but my guess is that she probably received many more votes than any member of the provincial Legislature, including the Premier. To say that Mayor Hall is self-serving when in fact she is serving and representing me is to say that I do not exist. To show contempt for the mayor of Toronto when she is performing her duties is to show contempt for Toronto; it's to show contempt for me as a resident of Toronto.

According to the Globe and Mail, both Mr Harris and Mr Leach have said they are unwilling to consider any major changes to Bill 103 as a result of this hearing process. In my opinion, government members of this committee, this shows contempt for you and for me and for everyone who participates in this process.

I'd like to remind you at this point that you are not employees of the government. You are not employees of the Progressive Conservative party. You are representatives of the residents of your ridings with a responsibility to the people of Ontario, and in this case a special responsibility to the people of Metropolitan Toronto.

I'd like you to consider whether you feel contempt for me or whether you're simply committed to following orders. I'd like you to consider whether you feel contempt for yourself, or whether you're simply committed to following orders.

I would like you, at the end of these hearings, to recommend that Bill 103 be withdrawn, or to recommend that a negotiation process be begun involving the province and the seven municipalities with the aim at arriving at consensus on the future of local government here. If the government ignores your recommendations, I would strongly urge you to cross the floor and vote against Bill 103.

I realize that this is a very rare and difficult procedure or decision for a member in our parliamentary system, with its great tradition, its long tradition, of party loyalty. But you have the opportunity to be heroes in the history of the struggle for democracy in Toronto. I strongly urge you to consider your responsibility very carefully. This decision might very well be difficult for you, but as you heard yesterday, we are willing to support you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Rapoport, for your presentation. You've come to the end of your time.

BEVERLEY DANIELS

The Chair: Would Beverley Daniels please come forward. Good afternoon, Ms Daniels.

Ms Beverley Daniels: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm here in part because I value the city I live in and in part because I value all the democratic elements of the society I live in. How could I stay silent when either of these is endangered? Therefore, I'm here to speak on three related topics: the preservation of the city, the overburdening of that city with social service responsibility, and the erosion of democracy.

I appreciate the city of Toronto so keenly because I know what it's like to grow up in a place that is not well governed. As children growing up in an incipient suburb outside Metro, my sisters and I could not walk anywhere without the possibility of harassment from men no one seemed to know who might linger on the roadsides and in other public areas. After several such incidents, our movement in the community was limited to the little cluster of houses where we lived, for there was no public transit. The nearest library was many miles away. It was a dull and dangerous place, a place no one seemed to care about or be able to defend. The local government was unresponsive to the needs of its citizens.

When I visited relatives in Toronto, I was envious because of the freedom with which they moved about the city on cheap public transit, visiting libraries, swimming pools and parks, all free. I resolved that when I grew up I would live there too. As an adult living in Toronto, I have indeed appreciated the libraries and the rec centres. In additional contrast to the place where I grew up, here I have experienced little harassment from strangers. Our lovely, densely populated downtown neighbourhoods, with their houses facing closely on the streets, tend to protect their pedestrians from threat of bodily harm, but they tend to protect us also from the social harm that arises when people hunker down behind their garages and venture out into the street only encased behind their windshields, avoiding all meaningful contact with any fellow human beings they don't know by name.

I fear that in an amalgamated city these attributes that make the city's core an attractive place to live will disappear because the voices of those who value them will be drowned out by the clamour of the suburban majority. I would like to offer here a simple illustration of the difference between city and suburb.

I'm a cyclist. When I ride about the city doing errands and so forth, I'm reasonably safe because drivers in this city are accustomed to accommodating cyclists. It has not always been so, however. Bicycle-user groups formed and over time they were able to influence city council to take steps to affect traffic's movement on city roads to make it safer.

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You may think this is a frivolous or insignificant example of successful local politics. However, bicycle use improves the air quality and makes it easier to get around. Contrast this accommodation of bicycles in the city to the situation in the suburbs, where there is nowhere to dependably lock your bike and where the drivers often honk at cyclists when they are making legal and reasonable use of the roads.

Suburbs are designed to accommodate cars. Their very structure makes cycling difficult. Furthermore, most people who choose to live in the suburbs are happy with this structure and would oppose any change that would make cycling easier, for these changes would make driving more difficult. No amount of raising political awareness about this situation would make much of an impact.

This has been just one example of the difference between urban and suburban ways of life. There are others: the mixed use of neighbourhoods, which intensifies and extends the hours of their use and thus makes them enjoyable and safe. The structure of old-style main streets, the storefront facing directly on the sidewalks, enables and encourages pedestrians to explore small stores, small businesses that would have too low a profile to attract the interest of a suburban shopper busily driving by. Diversity, so important to a strong local economy, is buttressed by the very physical surroundings of a traditional city.

I could cite many more examples of the conflict of values between older cities and suburban-style ones. The boundaries between the municipality of Toronto and its more sprawling neighbours are not artificial; they are politically meaningful and they need to remain.

Make no mistake: Toronto has been recognized by business publications as one of the best places in North America for investment because its quality of life makes it stable and thriving. A major reason for the city's attractiveness to investors is the same as the reason it's attractive to its inhabitants: Its separate municipal governments have been able to be responsive to the needs and respectful of the values of their citizens. A megacity government could not be responsive to all those it is supposed to represent.

If you tamper with local government as it stands, you tamper with the health of the city. If the city is healthy, it strengthens the province. If the city is sick, it becomes a heavy burden on the province, one that the province will not be able to escape, try though it might. Downloading on to the city expensive social services like welfare and homes for aged will not ultimately protect you from their cost. We all will pay the price as business moves out of Toronto and ultimately Ontario, and crime moves in to fill the vacuum.

You may invest thousands of dollars of citizens' money to pay for print and video advertising appealing to foreign investors, but why not put that money where it has been -- in the service of fairness and democracy -- and let the investment appeal take care of itself?

A city is a like a furnace in the house that is the province. If you, the house's custodians, turn down the heat or refuse to pay the fuel bills, you do so at the peril of all the inhabitants of the house, including yourselves.

The responsibility of government involves recognizing the dangers not only of wasting public funds, but also of refusing to spend tax money to safeguard basic shared values. If you, as an elected government, do not discern that democracy is a basic value, then the voters can only conclude that you have striven to get yourselves elected for much more cynical reasons, and that if respect for democracy is in the way of these purposes, you would not hesitate to push it out of your way.

You might protest that your aim is efficiency, that the megacity will be streamlined and less expensive. Other city amalgamations have shown that's not true. But even if it were true, surely to sacrifice democracy to ensure efficiency is to get it backwards. Democracy is worth time, money and effort. Let's sacrifice some efficiency to ensure democracy.

However, I believe it may be true that you hold democracy in low esteem. Consider section 9 of the proposed legislation, which provides for appointed trustees, their salaries paid by us, the citizens, to monitor the councils we elected. Further, section 12 states that no court may review the decisions of these trustees. Surely this means these trustees, who are not permitted to speak to us, are above the law.

Finally, section 13 provides for an appointed transition team to control and monitor taxation and spending decisions made by a newly elected council of a newly amalgamated city. Why bother with elections at all then?

Democracy is precious and challenging. I urge you to face up to it and protect it.

The Chair: Thank you very much. There's about a quick minute left for the Liberal caucus. Mr Kennedy, very quick, please.

Mr Gerard Kennedy (York South): I wonder if you have any feelings about the government's haste in this matter in terms of what it does to your sense of the place you live in and what you'd like to see.

Ms Daniels: I feel that the government introduced this legislation just before Christmas, when most people were very busy and then pushed it through in great haste, as if there was a war on and we needed the War Measures Act. Because it's such a momentous decision, we really need time to think about this, talk about this and work it out among ourselves so that we know how we feel. I feel it's unfair that this has been rushed.

The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward and making your presentation today.

HAMISH MCEWAN

The Chair: Would Hamish McEwan come forward, please. Good afternoon, Mr McEwan.

Mr Hamish McEwan: My name is Hamish McEwan. I am a citizen of Toronto.

Back in the fall of 1996 I had been following the progress of David Crombie's Who Does What panel and for the most part I was pleased with their recommendations. Let me say that I was a little concerned about the intentions of this government when they talked about disentanglement and streamlining at the municipal level, but the creation of Mr Crombie's panel gave me a certain sense of security.

When he recommended partial amalgamation of the municipal governments of Metro, I thought, "Great." When he recommended pooling the education portion of the property tax to create a greater equality across the province, I thought, "Good choice." When he suggested the creation of a GTA council to replace the Metro government, I was pleased. Every recommendation seemed well thought out and well supported with study and fairly detailed statistical and financial information. The 905 area would be brought into the fold with the rest of Metro to create a strong economic entity easily recognized by the world, while the local governments would preserve the voices and concerns of the neighbourhoods so valued by their citizens. I began to relax, confident that all would end well.

Then, on December 18, I opened up my morning paper and began to read about Bill 103. I was instantly confused. Where did this idea come from? What information supported this? Who asked for this? I know that Mr Crombie recommended partial amalgamation within Metro, but that was within the framework of a larger amalgamation of the 905 municipalities and the creation of a GTA level of government to replace the Metro level. I also know he never recommended that it occur in such an undemocratic fashion. No study has recommended this model and certainly no study recommended this process.

The next thing I know, I'm going to meetings and handing out flyers and sitting in the visitors' gallery at the Legislature, trying to figure out how this bill was created and how I might help to slow it down or stop it, and I'm not the only one: Scores of citizens from all over Metro are springing into action.

The battle begins and a few concessions are made: Bill 103 will not be forced through the Legislature with a minimum of debate and little or no public hearings. In fact we'll get to have our vote in a referendum before the bill is passed and we'll get over 100 hours of hearings.

I'm all excited. We are actually going to be given an opportunity to respond to the legislation. Democracy works: "Speak and you will be heard." Well, not quite. Apparently I'm only going to be heard if I can present some new information or new evidence.

On Monday, February 3, in the Globe and Mail Mr Leach is quoted as saying, "Unless there is some information that we are totally unaware of, and I don't believe that there is, then we will be moving forward with our agenda."

If it's new evidence you want, then I guess you don't mean the fact that it's completely anti-democratic for the province to appoint unaccountable, unelected trustees to usurp the power of local representatives. It also wouldn't be new information to tell you that cutting the number of local politicians would save the new city of Toronto less than 1% of its total budget, or that the destruction of our city councils and their subsequent amalgamation would amount to a potential saving of 50 cents a week for the average household, according to the only study that you even accept, the highly dubious KPMG report -- saving that could be easily be achieved without amalgamation and its estimated transition costs of $150 million to $400 million.

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How about the fact that in the new Toronto there will be one councillor for every 53,000 people compared to one for every 5,300 in North Bay? Why should my local vote be 10 times less effective than someone else's in Ontario? But that's not new information either.

In trumpeting this bill, you have talked about ending duplication, making government more accountable and more efficient. Mr Gilchrist said yesterday, while questioning one of the speakers to this committee about waste and duplication, that the city of Toronto has two and a half times more employees per capita than the city of Scarborough. Mr Gilchrist, as a citizen of the city of Scarborough, I'm sure you are very proud of that statistic, but as a citizen of Scarborough, why should you even care what happens in the city of Toronto? You don't even pay taxes here. In fact, if the city of Scarborough is so well run, why would you even see an advantage in it throwing its lot in with the wasteful and bloated city of Toronto?

If the citizens of Toronto want and/or need the services and programs that require those employees and they are willing to pay for them with their property taxes, which I presume they are, judging by how they vote, then who are you, Mr Gilchrist and the rest of the members of this government who do not reside in this city, to dictate to us how our local government should serve us?

Let me create a hypothetical situation. Let's say for the sake of argument that the provinces, according to the Constitution, were wards of the federal government, and let's say that after years of study and observation the federal government looked at Ontario and said, "My goodness, there's a poorly run province; look at all that waste, look at all that bureaucracy; something has got to be done," and they decided to pass a law that would fundamentally change how the people of Ontario were to be governed, and to make sure that in the transitional phase no member of the provincial government went on a spending or hiring spree, because they're all crooks, don't you know, the feds appointed three trustees with far-reaching, non-accountable powers. How would you feel?

How would you like to have federal MPs from all over the country telling Ontario how to take care of its business? You wouldn't like it. There would be a huge outcry, constitutional challenges, lots of "Who do you think you are?" Many of you would probably say that only the people of Ontario have the right to determine the function of their government. There has been very strong opposition at the provincial level across the country to the federal government's demanding compliance without granting control. There has been much talk about the legitimacy of the federal government.

Let's talk about legitimacy. John Ralston Saul said in The Globe and Mail, January 30, 1997, "Democracy is about the nature of legitimacy and whether the repository of that legitimacy -- the citizens -- are able to exercise the power its possession imposes on them." In this case the "citizens" would be those of the cities that make up Metropolitan Toronto and those they elected to serve them. Legitimacy does not lie with a bunch of MPPs from outside of Toronto who were never given the mandate to amalgamate.

The question must be asked, whom are you serving? Of the 82 members of the Progressive Conservative government, 66 represent ridings outside Metro. Three of the government seats on this committee are held by members outside of Metro. Perhaps you could tell me how you would explain to a constituent who needed your attention that you were too busy sitting on a committee dealing with the fate of 2.2 million people you don't represent.

Why are you even sitting on this committee? How could you possibly be familiar with the needs and desires of the citizens of this community? You don't even live here. I can't even imagine what the four of you would report back to your caucus: "Gee, they seem pretty upset. I don't know why, but let's go ahead anyway."

Let's talk about this bill and establish what you are being asked to vote for. Lots of people have mentioned the appointment of trustees and how that handcuffs our politicians, my politicians, retroactive to December 17, 1996. We also know that this bill has many details on how the trustees get to control things, but it is devoid of any detail concerning the form or function of the future government of the new city of Toronto. I know that according to section 5, we'll get neighbourhood councils established by the new city council, but I have no idea how they will be formed or who gets to participate. I know that we'll get a provincially appointed transition team, as laid out in section 16, and they will lay out the city's new structure and hire employees as they see fit. They get to run the new elections too.

Speaking of those elections, not only does this legislation nullify the previous municipal elections but it effectively makes the next round of elections meaningless. Why would politicians even want to run for the new council, knowing they had to answer to the transition team? How could a candidate even know what his or her powers are? There are certainly no hints in this bill. Imagine a political speech in the run-up to the next election, "I promise you I will do everything that the transition team allows me to, whatever that is, I mean, you know, if they'll let me." Not only did you take away my last vote, but you're taking away my next one. My vote will be useless if I don't know what I'm voting for.

You must ask yourself the same question: What are you voting for? There is such a lack of detail in this legislation that I don't see how any of you can vote for it when its implications are so vague. There are five pages about the new city and 15 about how to obey the trustees. How could you vote in favour of something so potentially destructive and yet so incredibly unclear? How does a government ask for the support of a bill, the effects of which fully 80% of its own members have no way of knowing, nor will they ever have to suffer its consequences? They don't live here, unless you know something I don't.

My wife and I have lived in Toronto for over 12 years. We were very unhappy about leaving Montreal and coming here but we needed work, so we came. I swore I would never like it and would move as soon as I could. Now we own a home and we will be adopting a child through Metro children's aid this year. We love this city. We have lived in the same neighbourhood for over 10 years where we have known, complained to and volunteered for our local representatives.

If we needed help to slow down drug dealers or prostitutes, they were there. If we needed help in controlling traffic flow or finding parking, they were there. If we wanted money for community events or an advocate for local business, they were there. I have never had any difficulty in getting hold of my local councillor or a member of his or her immediate staff. This is government that is efficient and accountable as well as being effective and responsive.

Toronto is the most livable city in North America because of its people and their elected representatives and the structures we have created together to manage it. It has been that way for over 150 years and should remain that way well into the future. Let the people decide.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr McEwan. You've come to the end of your time.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please. Folks, there's not to be any audience participation. I've been very liberal, way too liberal, and if I have to start calling recesses, time won't be added on for other people's presentations.

MADELEINE MCDOWELL

The Chair: Can Madeleine McDowell please come forward. Ms McDowell, you have 10 minutes to make your presentation, but I'll let you know beforehand that at the seven-minute mark you're going to be interrupted as we go for a vote. Go ahead.

Ms Madeleine McDowell: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I'm speaking on behalf of myself, but also I'm authorized to speak on behalf of the Federation of Ratepayers for the City of York.

I put in hundreds of hours each month in volunteer time working in heritage, education, social services and the environment. While I chair and serve on several boards and committees, the majority of my work is very hands-on, from chipping down to the original plaster in 150-year-old buildings or leading a naturalists' walk to delivering a lady to detox or running a weekly fund-raising bingo until my hair stinks of cigarette smoke, and I'm a non-smoker.

I fear for the future of each of the projects with which I and my many colleagues are involved. I also fear for my future ability to keep my home. The house doesn't matter that much but the rare rosebushes that my grandmother, who was a suffragist, planted over 70 years ago do.

Property taxes are feudal in their conception, and by 20th-century economics a regressive tax, totally devoid of relationship to the ability to pay. Property taxes should relate to the provision of services associated with the occupancy of that property, roads, sewers, lighting, security, recreation and green space, for examples.

We have in the past considered education as a direct service tied to occupancy and school districts related to population. Human services such as health, welfare, children's services, social housing, and transportation serving through traffic, such as some county roads and all highways, are a larger societal responsibility. They may fluctuate drastically with economic forces, serve the whole population, and should be provided for out of provincial revenues. They are usually most effectively administered by local municipal governments and NGOs within that framework. They are an unrealistic burden for the local property tax, most particularly the resident and the local employer.

Provincial divestment of a larger portion of responsibilities in these areas will cause tax increases of 20% to 25%, depending on how you look at it, on the Metro area assessment base. This will result in an increase in defaults in municipal taxes and a default tax increase spiral similar to that in the early 1930s, in which many municipalities went bankrupt. The Ontario Municipal Board was created to administer the trusteeships of these towns and townships, of which York was one, in 1932. The trustee was A.B.J. Gray.

I am concerned about the loss of our local boards and commissions, particularly York Hydro, which is the cheapest and most efficient in the GTA. It has an economy of size in services and administration.

I am concerned about the fate of local architectural conservation advisory committees. Planning has been divested by the province to the municipalities, which in turn may govern development "with regard to" rather than "consistent with" Ontario regulations. The province has also withdrawn almost all funding from architectural heritage and a great deal of the environmental and archaeological. With a larger single municipality with a population almost the size of Alberta, it will be difficult to impossible to maintain local communities and heritage, which the province has already weakened by withdrawal of both financial and regulatory support.

During four elections and 14 years in public office, because I was a public school trustee, I represented just under 12,000 constituents, or about two thirds of my ward's population. Most of the children knew me, as did many of the separate school supporters. When I walked down the street or was shopping or banking, people talked with me. Sometimes it was the weather or to ask what was happening, but usually it was whatever was bothering them. They knew me and I knew them. I understood the needy, under-the-surface currents and made sure the administration did too. I had both the children of privilege and Metro housing in the same classrooms. It's easy to see the gloss and miss the cracks in the glaze. I relate my personal experience because our members of council have the same.

In a ward where one represents about 20,000, this sort of intimacy is possible. The little old lady down the street or the barely-English-speaking newcomer from a totalitarian regime is not intimidated; neither does anyone perceive themselves as a voiceless statistic. Their democracy is real to them. If they don't like their representatives or their actions, they can and will act on it.

In the 1930s, when things were really bad, a small group of very responsible local citizens kidnapped the reeve, Marsh Magwood, and held him prisoner in a local community hall until he had heard their problems and agreed to take some action. The municipal government had become a little too distant. Nowadays these men -- a teacher, a carpenter, two market gardeners, a plumber, a storekeeper -- would all go to jail. They were very frustrated by the distancing of government and a dead child. The ratepayers' organization that they were members of still holds its charter.

The 1-to-20,000 ratio for representation in a Metro area of 2.5 million would give us approximately 120 representatives, with six functioning councils of 12, plus or minus two, and a mayor to preside. A small council of mayors and deputies from area municipalities would also be needed to deal with cross-jurisdictional concerns. It could enlarge to encompass the GTA.

The 44-seat congress of the new Toronto imposes a form of government that is not friendly to municipal jurisdiction. It means parties, it means money and it means concentration of power. It freezes out the little guy. It implies a large level playing field of grass, well-mown --

The Chair: Ms McDowell, I'm terribly sorry to have to do this, but I have to allow the members three minutes at least to get up to the Legislature to vote, so we'll come back immediately after the vote and hear the remainder of your presentation.

The committee recessed from 1815 to 1823.

The Chair: Ms McDowell, if you'd like to continue, I apologize for the interruption.

Ms McDowell: It's all right. I was speaking of well-mown grass, when we should be moving to naturalization and propagation of indigenous species and other compatible plants and trees.

The British, European and aboriginal people who founded Ontario, from John Graves Simcoe to Joseph Brant, had a dream of a slave-free state with free speech and opportunity for all. It ran into some problems in the 1830s and a number of people died for the cause of responsible government in 1837-38. The aftermath gave us an experiment in government unique in the world at the time and the Baldwin Act of 1842 gave us the basis of our current municipal governments.

It also gave us the philosophy of our Constitution of 1867: peace, order and good government. The first two are the essence of civilized life and they are entirely dependent on the third. Good government is responsive, responsible and non-intimidating. People see the federal government as dealing with affairs of state and income tax; the provinces, highways and sales tax. The municipality is their day-to-day lives, garbage collection and street safety. They must have a real role in it, and that is only real when it involves elected representation.

I do not believe in empowering people, they have to do that themselves, but the mechanisms have to be in place for them to do that. One of the most important of these is the office of our elected representatives, and by "office" I do not mean four walls and a desk. The office must be accessible to those seeking it responsibly and it must be perceived as neither remote nor biased by those whom it serves.

Government should not intimidate. It does. Government must be our government; that is, within the realm of possibility, participatory democracy at the intimacy of the municipal level.

My city of York has had an ongoing assessment liability problem which was answered by the Robarts commission recommendations and which can be dealt with by their implementation. It means a little nibble at the city of Toronto and a small bite from North York of property that was York within living memory, although not mine.

What will it cost to recodify or rationalize existing municipal bylaws? How will this be done? The transition team, which is appointed sine die by the Lieutenant Governor, has sweeping powers which override elected representation and deal with the very structure of government and its administration, without appeal to the courts. We pay them, their agents, employees and expenses. We don't even set the rates and it's to be found within the budget; the same for the trustees, as of December 1996.

The people and governments of the Metropolitan Toronto area are not criminal, bankrupt or incompetent, but there are trustees. Those who do not trust should perhaps look within themselves.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms McDowell, for your presentation. We've also used up the 10 minutes. I want to apologize again for the interruption. Thank you for coming before the committee.

We'll recess now until 7 o'clock, when our first deputant will be Mr Lang.

The committee recessed from 1826 to 1903.

GREGORY LANG

The Chair: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Our first presenter this evening is Gregory Lang. Mr Lang, I want to thank you for waiting. I know you were scheduled to be the last presenter at 5:50 but we ran behind quite a bit in time. You have 10 minutes to make your presentation this evening. At the end of that, if there's some time remaining, I will ask the NDP caucus, Mr Marchese, to ask some questions.

Mr Gregory Lang: I'll actually be brief. I would prefer to field questions. Basically my view is that the megacity Bill 103 is driven not by an analysis of what's good for or bad for Metro Toronto but rather by the greater issue of how a government can deliver on a promise to reduce taxes by 30%. It's part and parcel of the restructuring of taxes and downloading of social welfare costs to the municipalities, which current municipalities can't bear the burden of, therefore they require a larger municipality which probably still can't bear the burden but at least has a better shot at it.

In the process of developing this policy, this legislation, it seems to me it's a six-beer solution, something that was conceived at the end of a business day in a bar. Unfortunately, it's a six-beer solution to the wrong problem. It answers the question of how do we deliver an election promise rather than answering the question how do we improve municipal governments, the effectiveness of the Toronto area.

It amuses me that in 1953, when Metro was conceived, half of the geographic space that it was to cover was agricultural land; today half the greater Toronto area is also agricultural land. By eliminating the municipal councils and going to a Metro council, it seems to me that in 2003, 50 years later, we'll come up with the same solution that we came up with in 1953 and introduce a GTA-level government and another tier of government, which is exactly what we have now except at the wrong level, because of growth. So going back to old solutions doesn't make sense.

One issue that really stands out in my mind is the lack of provision in the bill for the reserve funds of municipal governments, approximating, in my understanding, $1 billion. Usually in an amalgamation of this kind, legislation of this kind, some provisions are made for the dedication of those funds, where they're going to go etc. No mention is made. It seems to me that helps along the way to delivering a 30% tax cut to Ontario, but anyway, that's not known for sure.

One other thing: In the level of government that's most effective and most efficient, there are two things that happen. One is a process and one is a product. When the product is identical across all municipalities, then indeed the processes that are redundant are inefficient. When the product is not identical, when it is dissimilar enough, then the processes also need to be dissimilar because that is more efficient.

I'd liken it to manufacturing shoes, if you would. You could make one size of shoe and then refit those shoes for the different sizes of feet or you could make various sizes of shoes for the various sizes of feet. One has less redundancy in process but more efficiency in product. Having a smaller layer of government closer to the people is more efficient in actually delivering the services desired by the people.

Mr Marchese: Thank you, Mr Lang. I appreciate the presentation. I have quite a few questions. I was reading a Toronto Sun article today where M. Leach was reported to have said that his opponents have failed so far to convince him to change his plans. M. Leach says he's willing to consider altering parts of Bill 103 but not its substance. I'm not quite sure what he's thinking about by way of alteration. But he proceeds to say: "`All I've heard is this is a bad thing to do,' Leach said. `But nobody has given me any evidence it's bad.'"

Could you comment on that statement that M. Leach made?

Mr Lang: Specifically, to use an example, if we fill classrooms with students and provide a teacher and we do the same thing across the province with hundreds and hundreds of teachers teaching the same curriculum, the same content, surely that's redundant, and it's a similar redundancy that's provided in various municipal governments, where the same services are being provided to various people in different locations etc. We could avoid the redundancy in education by having one teacher broadcast it by video to all of the students. Obviously there's a social cost there of something lost, something slips through the cracks.

We know already that a 40-student classroom is less effective than a 30-student classroom as far as reaching the students and effecting what our initial goal was in the first place. It's very similar with municipal governments in that to create an effective democracy, a participative democracy, it has to be close to the people. To get the neighbours to volunteer to help support, to get the burden off the government and back to the individuals, to the neighbourhoods where it belongs, you have to have a level of government that is in your neighbourhood, not located somewhere far off and away.

Mr Marchese: Sure. On the issue of evidence, we have looked at the fact that a number of professors have done several studies to show that amalgamating cities or towns is not necessarily cost-effective. That was one of the few things that Mr Leach and Mr Harris talked about in very beginning: "If we amalgamate, we'll save money." That was the most important thing that they talked about. Professor Kitchen, Professor Sancton and others have done studies in Canada, and I suspect outside of Canada, to show there is no evidence that you save money.

Do you think the burden should be on individuals like you to prove that somehow that is not the case or do you think the burden should be on the minister to prove through research that he might have gathered, wherever he might have found it, that that is the case?

Mr Lang: I definitely believe it's the minister's responsibility to prove that there will be significant cost savings, and "significant" meaning outweighing the social costs, the other side of the coin, the things that get damaged in the process. The amusing thing is that it is the general public that is doing the research and finding the reasons why this won't work, why it will end up costing us money. Every study done shows that when you level the playing field across amalgamation in municipalities, it always goes to the highest level of pay, the highest size of organization, and therefore the highest cost. Everything actually goes up, so those cost-savings and rationalizations don't actually occur.

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I have to go back to its being a larger issue, one of downloading. Even in that issue they talk about saving money for the taxpayers etc, but I have a document in front of me which you'll receive at the end of the day which identifies the costs and actually suggests an average 10% increase per taxpayer in Metro, which is unheard of, and that's from downloading social welfare, which we can't afford to do.

Mr Marchese: Yes, that's the other part of all of this. Some people are speaking strictly to Bill 103 without talking about the downloading of other essential services to the municipal taxpayer and the implication of both and how they're inevitably interlocked. But I have another question that I wanted your feedback on.

Part of what has irritated me a great deal as someone living in Toronto, right downtown here, in the riding I represent, is that the people outside of the area of Metropolitan Toronto have gotten democracy and a facilitator to help them amalgamate, if that's what they want to do. In Metropolitan Toronto this government has decided against democracy and has ruled in favour of autocracy and has decided that that kind of omnipotence was what was needed here in Metropolitan Toronto. How do you feel about getting different treatment here in Metro than the rest of the folks outside?

Mr Lang: First of all, I feel grateful that we get different treatment in Metro because we tend to benefit more often than not. I do not like the absence of democracy. The only democracy evidenced in this whole process so far is this committee, and I liken it to walking a dog where the dog's name is Democracy and it's just for exercise.

I don't believe that this committee is really mandated to make legitimate recommendations and, I'm sorry, but I believe this is a fait accompli. As Mr Leach has said, unless new evidence proves that this is the wrong thing to do, then he won't change his path. New evidence requires refuting old evidence. Unfortunately, there's no old evidence. That's the initial problem. If he had presented evidence to us, we could refute it for him, but he hasn't. He's failed to do that off the mark.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Lang, for your patience in waiting to make your presentation this evening.

DOUG HUM

The Chair: Would Doug Hum please come forward? Good evening, Mr Hum.

Mr Doug Hum: I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to speak on this matter, as there are many speakers, and I feel it's a privilege to address the committee on this issue. But before I start, as a Chinese Canadian and on the eve of our lunar new year, I'd like to wish everyone a happy lunar new year. [Remarks in Cantonese.] That's in Cantonese what I said in English.

I am a long-time resident of downtown Toronto and I've lived in the city for most of my life, except for two years in New York City and that was in lower Manhattan in New York's Chinatown. The atmosphere on the streets of New York that I knew then as a 10-year-old, and this was around 1950, was very similar to the atmosphere currently on our streets in downtown Toronto today. One could walk around at almost any time during the day and feel reasonably safe. I returned to New York City for a visit in the mid-1960s and was confronted by changes that saw that city's newspaper headlines screaming the latest fire bombs and race riots. I have not revisited New York City since.

This is where I fear that Bill 103 may take us -- the Americanization of our municipality and all that that implies; its impact on our communities, our way of life, our people, our families, our children, and ultimately, our children's children. This bill, as I understand it, is only the precursor of other legislation that will follow.

Bill 103 will lay the foundation that polarizes and divides our communities and sets us one against another. It lays the foundations for class warfare, suspicion, distrust and even hatred. It sets homeowners against social housing tenants. It sets property taxpayers against welfare recipients. There will be homeowners who resent their property taxes being collected to support social housing. There will property taxpayers who will resent their taxes being collected to support welfare recipients. Homeowners will then call for their taxes to be spent on law enforcement to keep welfare recipients and the poor in their place and to build places of incarceration.

What is being proposed is totally foreign to our way of life as Canadians and will fundamentally change our communities, our quality of life, and the way we regard one another. The bill fuels the atmosphere of laissez-faire and the rule of survival of the strongest, the meanest, and the most ruthless. It lays the foundation for a community where, when one is weak and unable to compete, they will be disregarded and swept aside.

This malaise in our community will lead to more victims of spousal abuse and more neglect of children. There are already people dying on our streets. The homeless number in the thousands. The bill will create more desperation, and desperate people will do desperate things.

Bill 103 is destructive to democracy and democratic participation and will diminish citizen involvement and people participation. It is undemocratic, I believe, to appoint unelected trustees to exercise autocratic control over my elected representatives at both city and Metro councils. This is placing excessive and potentially abusive and dictatorial powers in the hands of a few unelected, appointed individuals. This is contrary to the basic principles of my country, of universal suffrage, and of basic human rights and common decency.

I understand that the city of North Bay, with a population of 55,000, will be provided with a 10-member city council, which works out to one elected representative for every 5,500 persons. On the other hand, the new Toronto city council will have one councillor for every 50,000 persons. You're removing accessibility to those who are supposed to be elected to deal with our concerns and our views.

Bill 103 will be a barrier to those who may not be well off or wealthy to run for office. Running for mayor and the new council will require great financial means or financial backing. Thus it becomes democracy for the wealthy and suppression for the poor.

The proposed municipal governance structure of Bill 103 diminishes local input into local decision-making. Councillors in the amalgamated city will be unable to grasp sufficient understanding of local issues from other parts of the region that they do not represent to make informed decisions. Decisions will be made by councillors with less understanding and awareness of local conditions and needs in other parts of the region.

Although proposed appointed local area committees are to be established to address local needs, I fear they will become enclaves to represent the wishes of only the well-off and the wealthy. Many poor people are stressed to the limit and will be in no position to participate. Bill 103 builds a governance structure that is unfair and diminishes democracy.

Throughout the 1995 provincial election, I never understood that amalgamation and the dissolution of our six cities in Metro was an issue. I never understood that the citizens of Metro Toronto gave the new government of Ontario a mandate to diminish democracy and to subjugate our local councils to appointed officials.

As I understand it when I read through the newspaper, this bill is going to proceed and we're going to have a unified city regardless of the exercise we're going through, regardless of what people have to say. So you are leaving people with no alternative but to take to the streets as they did on October 25 and 26. The spirit of democracy does not end with legislation. That struggle, as in 1837, will continue through to 1997, and the struggle for democracy, as it did on Yonge Street long ago and right through to Tiananmen Square, will go on regardless of whatever decision this government makes. Thank you.

Mrs Munro: Thank you very much, Mr Hum, for appearing here this evening. There are a couple of issues you've raised that I would just like to ask you to further clarify for us.

We always talk about there being only one taxpayer, and on page 2 you've made the suggestion that you see the question of social services being something that people might resent if it's on their property tax. I just wondered why you see that as a difference, if there is only one taxpayer; the change in people's attitudes. If they are paying for it one way or the other, why would their attitude change?

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Mr Hum: Our property tax system of support is regressive. It is uneven and doesn't fall fairly on all, and it isn't paid in a way that each individual is able to pay. There may be homeowners who are property-rich and liquid-asset-poor. You're putting them in excessive difficulties.

The population in Metro is aging and on fixed incomes. By transferring and downloading the programs that have been suggested, the needs in Metro and the risk factors in Metro are growing, and they can only grow because of the demographics. This puts excessive stress on property taxpayers basically to support social programs. It's not fair. The income tax structure is far more fair because it's based on ability to pay and not on what you own.

Mrs Munro: If I have another moment, just a second quick question. On page 3 you talk about the councillors in the amalgamated city. I just wondered, if we look at the idea of the community council where you have six or seven elected members to respond to local needs, if you could comment on that in terms of the way in which those committees would be able to respond to community needs.

Mr Hum: I'm not clear on how exactly they are to be structured, but I guess citizens are appointed to it. Is that right?

Mrs Munro: No. These are the people you've elected.

Mr Hum: If you deal with it that way -- unfortunately, I haven't really assessed that in those terms, but the concern here is that final decisions are brought before a council of the whole, and as I pointed out, a councillor in one region will not have all the total information and understand everything in another region.

Mrs Munro: I appreciate that, and that's why I asked you this question.

The Chair: Mrs Munro, I'm sorry. You've come to the end of your time. Thank you, Mr Hum, for coming forward this evening to make your presentation.

AINE SUTTLE

The Chair: Would Aine Suttle please come forward. Good evening and welcome to the committee. You have 10 minutes this evening to make your presentation.

Ms Aine Suttle: Thanks for the opportunity to speak to you today. To let you know, I am absolutely opposed to this bill to amalgamate the seven local governments in Metro into one megacity. I'm an immigrant to Canada. I moved from the Republic of Ireland in 1969 with a friend. We came via New York City, which absolutely terrified me. I felt completely unsafe and I couldn't get out of there quickly enough. Subsequent visits haven't changed my mind.

I flew to Toronto within a day and I was amazed at the contrast. The customs staff were so friendly and welcoming. I took a bus downtown and ended up in Nathan Phillips Square. It was wonderful. I couldn't figure out why there was music and lots of people there on a Tuesday. I didn't then understand the significance of the fact that I'd arrived on July 1. My friend was exhausted, so I went looking for accommodation. We ended up being adopted by a student who put us up on our first night in Canada.

My original plan had been to move to Montreal because the word in Ireland was that Toronto was a pretty dull place. Nothing could have been further from the truth, from my perspective. I felt I'd hit heaven. I had a job within a week and I settled down. I never intended to stay here. I just wanted to see a bit of the world, but years went by and I never moved anywhere. I had no reason. Life was quite wonderful here.

I was a pretty passive citizen for most of my years here. I didn't feel I had any need to become involved politically. It wasn't until my son was 18 months old that I felt the need to become more active. In 1986 he was diagnosed as having a high lead level. There were no signs or symptoms of it, and I only found out because the Toronto public health department was testing children in my neighbourhood of south Riverdale for lead. It was an incredible shock, as I felt I had been a very attentive mother. As I learned more about the lead pollution in my neighbourhood, I became very angry and realized that I couldn't sit back passively any more. It was a major learning experience. Through it I learned a lot about the political process and how capable and caring each level of government is or is not.

The city of Toronto was terrific. Their concern for the health of our children was real and it resulted in action. I found when I made my very first deputation ever before a city committee that the members actually listened. They asked questions that made it clear they had taken in what I was saying. That experience was not unusual, I was to discover.

My experience with Metro was not quite so pleasant. I ended up interacting with Metro on the issue of the Commissioners Street incinerator. It was very clear that this facility posed a threat to the health of people in Riverdale and beyond, but it took years before we were able to persuade them to close it down. Almost as soon as they did, they proposed increasing incineration at the Ashbridges Bay main sewage treatment plant. We've been saying no to incineration to Metro now for at least 11 years, and they still don't seem to get the message.

My son's lead problem brought me into contact with the provincial level of government also. When I got involved, Riverdale had been lobbying the provincial government for 16 years to remove the contaminated soil from people's gardens, which was a threat particularly to our children's health. It was with no success. Then the Liberal government got into power and suddenly we had a Minister of the Environment, Jim Bradley, who listened. Within two years we had real action; the soil was removed. It was dramatic how quickly things changed.

I've thought about the differences in the way politicians and bureaucrats interact with the public at the different levels of government. It's interesting that the staff at the city level of government are far more open than those at the higher levels. They tend to give straight answers to questions. They seem to have a more confident and positive relationship with the politicians, which results in clearer communication all around. Real negotiation takes place, whereas the higher up you go, the less likely, I have found, that you can get any information from staff or politicians.

I believe this has to do with the party politics at the higher levels. When the government changes, there almost seems to be a need to change things dramatically, almost for the sake of change rather than because it's needed. Bureaucrats have to be very careful what they say if they're to survive and be promoted. This doesn't make for open communications. At the lower levels, there is more stability. A change in politicians doesn't have as dramatic an effect. There always seems to be a better balance between the political left and right.

I was speaking with my mother recently, who still lives in Ireland. There they have proportional representation, which has resulted in coalition governments over the past decade or so. It's very difficult there for any one party to get a majority. She feels it's a much more stable system. As she put it, because the different parties have to govern together, they keep each other honest. All parties have equal access to information, and that filters down to the general public also.

Since the present government was elected, I feel that the province has been turned upside down. We're not being governed; we're being abused. It's terrifying. The only positive thing that I can see coming out of all this chaos is that it's pushing people like myself to question the basis on which our government is built. I certainly had no idea that any provincial government could do what this government has done. I didn't realize the power that was vested in this level. We have no checks and balances; you've taken them away. I'm no historian, but I'm unaware of any other previous provincial government ever taking advantage of its power in the way this one has.

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You can dissolve our local government, but you shouldn't. You can create a mega, monster Metro government, but you shouldn't. You will be destroying democracy in Metro and wherever else you amalgamate.

The lower levels of government are the humane ones. Politicians at the city level actually deal on a one-to-one basis with citizens. We get to know each other as people. I've only recently started to visit the provincial Legislature. I can't believe how dangerous it is just to get here. I don't drive, so I always come on foot. I can't believe that after almost 200 years one has to dodge traffic crossing the street anywhere south of Grosvenor. There are no lights or crosswalk. It's clear that physical access for the general public hasn't ever been a priority.

In contrast, I love to visit Toronto city hall. When my son was younger, I often had to bring him with me when I was making deputations or attending meetings. One time he left his father's scissors, which had been borrowed without permission, behind in a meeting room. The next day I went to the lost and found to see if they had turned up. I told the staff person what had happened. He looked but couldn't find them. Then he asked me to wait. He went off and brought back a pair of city-issue scissors, which looked just the same. He didn't ask for any money; he was just a human being reacting to another human being. I guess you could call that inefficient, but I call it warmth.

I usually drop in to say hello to the staff in my local councillor's office just because I enjoy their company, and we've gotten to know each other. At Metro I can't do that. There's a guard at the door and somebody has to come out to verify that I'm a legitimate constituent or something. It seems that the higher levels of government are afraid of people, and to tell you the truth, these days the provincial government has good reason to be afraid. Somebody is going to blow one of these days.

You have the power to do anything you like, but if you really want to change things you have to engage people in a process that truly respects their opinions. Ram change through and it will not last. We will do everything we can to undermine it. We have given you the privilege of governing us for five years. Respect it.

We're holding a referendum on the issue of amalgamation. We're doing so under the rules that you developed. We're asking that you respect the results of that referendum and act in accordance with our wishes.

The Chair: Thank you, Aine, for coming forward and making your presentation this evening. You have effectively used the 10-minute period. I appreciate you making your presentation.

ANGELA REBEIRO

The Chair: Would Angela Rebeiro please come forward. Good evening. Welcome to the committee. You have 10 minutes this evening to make your presentation. If there's some time left at the end, I'll ask the Liberal caucus to ask some questions.

Ms Angela Rebeiro: Fair enough. My appearance before this committee tonight is to address part III, "The Transitional Year," of Bill 103, now commonly known as the amalgamation bill, and in particular the sections dealing with the board of trustees and the transition team.

Notwithstanding the pronouncements of our elected officials not to pay heed to the results of a referendum which may be against this bill or to any criticism of this bill, I nevertheless continue to believe that Canada and Ontario are still a democracy. As an interested citizen and partner in this country and province, my input and that of hundreds of other citizens of this province is important to ensure that some semblance of our democratic principles remains intact. I am forced to use the phrase "some semblance" to refer to what's left of democracy in Ontario after reading certain sections of this bill, already referred to above.

What strikes me most about this bill is its cynicism and how one elected body of people, the provincial government of Ontario, has turned inward on another elected body of people and its citizens. At the end of the reading it is rather difficult not to draw the conclusion that the action and activity announced in this bill is more about political cleansing than cutting costs and doing away with waste and duplication.

The powers awarded to the board of trustee and to the transition team are truly awesome, especially when under clauses 12(1) and 18(1), "The decisions of the board of trustees" and "the transition team...are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court," yet under clause 25(1), "The minister may apply to the Ontario Court (General Division) for an order requiring any person or anybody to comply with any provision of,

"(a) this act;

"(b) a regulation made under this act;

"(c) a decision of the board of trustees or of the transition team under this act."

In both cases, the board of trustees and the transition team are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council, which means that the Lieutenant Governor is charged with accepting the recommendations of the government. Nowhere in this document could I find any reference to including non-political citizens to the board of trustees or the transition team.

Two years ago the citizens of Metropolitan Toronto elected individuals of their choosing to represent them in local government decisions, and under our current democratic principles we can vote them out of office if we believe they have behaved inappropriately in carrying out the spirit of our agreement made at the polls on voting day and following weeks of debate on issues pertinent to our communities.

On December 17, 1996, we woke up to find that we were now to be governed by a board of trustees and that our elected officials and ourselves would have our daily lives managed by a transition team which reports to the board of trustees, making us three steps removed from our daily business. There is something almost coup-like about a group of people without accountability to the citizens of these now ousted municipalities being appointed to govern, and that our elected officials and their employees are now in the employ of an unknown body of non-elected officials who are not in any way charged to meet the citizens of the municipalities or to allow them to witness their decisions about expenditures or other matters affecting their lives for the next year and perhaps well beyond January 1998.

In addition, under clause 2(5b) the assets of each municipality are seized and become the property of the new municipality, without any input from the citizens of the municipality who have acquired these assets in the many ways that a city, a province, a region is built. Had time permitted, it would have been worth checking to find out the assets in each municipality that may have been raised through hours and hours of volunteer work or fund-raising drives which have included partnerships with one's municipality and local business to acquire these enhancements for our respective cities. All these refinements of our society, and even the unwanted warts, now become the property of another municipality at the stroke of an individual's pen.

Furthermore, under part III, "The Transitional Year," clause 9, section 10 and clause 16, section 12, "the minister may" -- and the emphasis is mine -- "by order, dissolve the board of trustees" and "the transition team" after January 31, 1998. So even if we are privileged to elect a new municipality of 2.3 million citizens -- the population of four Atlantic provinces -- we may well end up with a non-elected group of people, whose numbers are yet to be identified, continuing to oversee our decisions, or worse still, we may still not be able to make any decisions at all, all the while picking up the tab for the salaries of 42 newly elected members and two sets of overseers and their employees as outlined in the bill.

These sections of the bill are an offence not only to the elected representatives of each municipality, but they also harshly assume that the citizens of these municipalities are not responsible and will not ensure that their elected officials will not run off with the bank now being seized by virtue of this act.

What is particularly cynical yet curious about clause 11, item 3, is that while the power of our democratically elected municipal officials is limited in how money is spent or bylaws are made or broken in the next year, this section states, "Capital expenditures shall not be less than in 1996, unless the reduction was provided for in an earlier budget." Yet in the same section, item 2, "In the case of a local board, total operating expenditures shall not be greater than they were in 1996."

What is one to make of this? On the one hand the provincial government seems to fear that the democratically elected city officials and their citizens will run off and have a spending spree, I guess on social improvements, but on the other hand they are not allowed to reduce expenditures on buildings and furnishings without the approval of the non-elected body. How does one interpret this discrepancy?

More than all of that, what is truly frightening and awesome, given that we consider ourselves to be still living in a democracy, is that our legal rights to challenge have been taken away under clauses 12(1) and 18(1), as noted above. This also suggests an infallibility and righteousness in our provincial politicians, enough to send one scurrying to a bank to withdraw one's money or at least to stop spending it on anything but necessities, because if this bill passes into law as is, then we're in a downward spiral away from democracy. This and similar clauses in the bill treat the citizens of the municipalities with unwarranted contempt and leave one wondering why. Why is this necessary if the government is so convinced of its rightness in what it's doing?

In the meantime, under clause 17, the transition team is empowered to hire staff. In section 5 of this clause: "The council of the new city shall be deemed to have taken, on January 1, 1998, all steps that may be required to make the person the effective holder of his or her office." As I read clauses 16 and 17 of this bill, I interpret the points here to mean -- and I'd like to be corrected -- that the newly elected council doesn't even have the privilege of hiring its own staff for the new municipality but may well be saddled with politically paid appointees hired under the umbrella of the board of trustees and the transition team.

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The larger difficulty with this unfortunate bill is that it has overshadowed the real discussion which should be taking place, and that is whether or not amalgamation of these municipalities is good for the greater Toronto area and/or how best to implement it in the interests of all of its citizens.

It is unfortunate that the government did not choose to offer a referendum on the announcement of the bill and to follow that up with real discussion and community meetings, to explain to citizens what one would like to believe are the government's best intentions and not what most people now perceive, that this is a government avenging itself on people not disposed to workfare programs and other disagreements with this current provincial government.

This bill empowers a board of trustees and a transition team, both of which exclude any input from the very taxpayers the government claims to be working to support with bigger tax breaks. It is interesting to note too how opposition to this bill jumped following a week of announcements that the government will offload or download, as you wish, a number of services on to the broader tax base of 2.3 million without any consultation.

We like to blame business for a lot of our ills these days, but it struck me when the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto came out against this offloading of social responsibilities on to the new municipality that the government itself may not be sure, or doesn't really care, whether this move is in the interests of the citizens of Toronto, because what's more at stake here is a 30% personal income tax break, even if we end up spending twice as much on user fees, which we undoubtedly will, amalgamation or not.

Further, it seems to me that we have put in place a rather dangerous set of precedents in this bill. Why, for example, would the national government not wake up one morning and decide that it is in the best interests of Canada to do away with an Ontario-Quebec border and merge them into one province in order to overcome the Quebec separation problem, which would then give the combined provinces more English-language citizens? In fact, why not abolish the duplication and waste of 10 provinces and have only the national government, and by order in council we could bring in President Bill Clinton to serve as a transition team?

Nothing is sci-fi any more, is it? As the municipalities exist at the pleasure of the province -- this is a question from me to those who know best -- do the provinces also exist at the pleasure of the national government? Let's hope not.

Finally, my recommendations are these: that the bill be amended to exclude clauses 12(1) and 18(1); that the government work towards a transparent process which allows the public to be the overseers of the changes in their lives; that this be done by including on the transition team ordinary citizens and currently elected municipal politicians who are paid no more than an honorarium for their time and input; that the public have periodic and regular access to the transition team through regular public consultations; that the public be assured that on January 1, 1998, both the board of trustees and the transition team will be disbanded and that the new municipality will immediately be empowered to act on behalf of the citizens which elected them; and further, that all staff hired by the trustees or transition team become staff of the new municipality at its pleasure.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Rebeiro. You've gone a little bit beyond the allotted time. Thank you for coming forward and making your presentation today.

KAY GARDNER

The Chair: Kay Gardner, please. Good evening and welcome to the committee.

Ms Kay Gardner: Mr Chairman and members of the committee, before I begin my presentation, I just want to tell you that I do have a stammer, so if I get stuck, please bear with me.

I have examined the megacity proposal every which way -- under a microscope, using police dogs that sniff out drugs, with a divining rod, and I've even consulted with the spirit world -- but the answer is always the same: Megacity spells disaster for the city of Toronto.

Megacity means mega-taxes and mega-cuts in services for the city of Toronto. Megacity would immediately mean substantial increases in property taxes. The city's staff have conducted a meticulous study of the impact megacity would have on property taxes. They have concluded that in the first year taxes across the Metro area will increase by an average of 13%, and this does not include the increases that will be caused by the market value assessment system the province intends to enact. The 13% average tax increase in 1998 will be significantly increased in many cases because of the market value factor.

Here are the estimated average tax increases predicted by the city tax authorities for 1998. Actually, today we have some indication that they will be larger than this: per household $350; per business $7,923; and per industry $4,152.

These are the same estimates used by George Fierheller, president of the board of trade, when he sounded the alarm about the economic ruination of Metro Toronto if it becomes a megacity. Mr Fierheller said that Metro's property tax base will continue to erode as businesses and even homeowners take flight to the suburbs. "What all this means is the tax-driven exodus of business and industry to the 905 area and elsewhere will accelerate," Mr Fierheller said.

He is right. If we drive out businesses, Toronto will go to wrack and ruin. When in Toronto recently at our invitation, Wendell Cox, an American authority on cities, had this to say:

"The three US megacities with over two million population have faced particularly intractable problems. Two (New York and Los Angeles) are contending with advancing secession movements -- sparked by the belief that remote city halls were ignoring local neighbourhood needs. The third megacity (Chicago) has lost almost one million residents, who seceded.

"So far as the `efficiency' principle is concerned, the US experience points to substantially higher costs for cities in the population range over one million. These are typically in the 20% to 40% range and can exceed 100% in the case of amalgamated municipalities. For residents and businesses of these larger cities, cost premiums mean higher property taxes and/or lower service levels," Cox said.

Cox concluded, "There appears to be no valid reason why GTA cities should not remain well within the efficient urban population range (above 100,000 and below 1,000,000) a range providing for high-quality services with lower tax burdens."

Mr Chairman and members of the committee, as you know, David Crombie, the government's own megacity consultant, has denounced the downloading of welfare costs on to the municipalities as "absolutely the wrong thing to do." He also urged the province to heed the advice of the board of trade and the United Appeal, which jointly condemned the plan.

The province has made much of the fact that it would pay all school costs for the megacity, but what they have not told us is that taxpayers would be worse off than they are now.

We'd be worse off because the province would compel the megacity to pay for half instead of one fifth of the cost of welfare, pay the cost of social housing, the cost of child welfare, the police, the TTC subways, buses and ferries, day care, long-term care, health, libraries, sewers and water, highways, a share of the GO train costs and more. The cost of this downloading amounts to $500 million more than we would save in school costs, which means inevitably higher taxes and cuts in service.

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No wonder Metro Chairman Alan Tonks said: "The magnitude of the impact is so huge, this is a high-stakes, high-risk process. This impact is just not sustainable."

The truth is that if Toronto becomes a megacity, it may well meet the same fate as the United States three crime-ridden, broken-down megacities: Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Downtown Toronto could become a hollow shell.

The government has made two points regarding the financial outcome of amalgamation. They said at first that we could save hundreds of millions of dollars by having one municipality instead of six separate municipalities. But they have not, so far, done one serious impact study. It did commission one quick, superficial study which has been thoroughly discredited. The government is selling us a pig in a poke for $500 million.

The government is saying it will be revenue-neutral, but they have offered no estimated costs to prove that. How can this megacity proposal be revenue-neutral when it increases the municipalities' costs by at least $500 million?

Homeowners, tenants and owners of businesses should be reminded that the government also intends to implement a market value tax assessment system, this in spite of the fact that the city of Toronto has resoundingly rejected the market value system, not once but twice.

This downloading must be paid for by property taxes and/or cuts in services to the residents of the city of Toronto, and I believe both.

Take one small item: for instance, libraries. In 1977 provincial grant to libraries was $5.2 million, with the city of Toronto receiving $1.3 million. Under the megacity, municipalities will have to pay the total library costs. This could lead to user fees and cuts in many services now offered by our fine libraries.

Finally, a megacity council would be remote from the people and therefore local democracy would wither.

For four years Toronto city council has held the line on property taxes -- no increases in four years because of our stringent budget cuts. My constituents will revolt against mega-tax increases.

I have represented the residents of ward 15, which takes in north Toronto and upper Forest Hill, for 12 years. It is their interests that I am here to protect tonight.

I would just like to add a couple of words that I have not included in my written submission. I came here tonight in sorrow and in pity because there are so many things that our city needs, although Fortune magazine has named us the most enviable place in the world to live.

At city council on Monday and Tuesday we spent about three hours debating the plight of our young people, that so many of our young people are hanging out on the streets, are squeegee kids and have no jobs. We were trying to solve that job problem for our young people. We at the city of Toronto do not have the means to do this. We need your help. We need the help of Ottawa.

We are going to lose a generation of young people because not only do we have a great many young people who are unskilled, who have no jobs, but we have a great many young people who have one and two degrees and no jobs. We have so many homeless young people. We have more and more people going to food banks. As fewer and fewer people are donating these days, it is harder to get free food. We need your help.

We should be here discussing with you how to solve these problems in a city that works; we should not be here trying to save a city that works. We have these problems of homelessness, of hunger, of people freezing in our streets, yet we are the envy of the world. Why are we here trying to destroy the city that works instead of trying to solve these problems? We need your help to solve those problems.

We should not be spending five weeks in trying to defend the city that Fortune magazine says works. We should be spending these five weeks in talking to you about how we might erase the blight we have in this wonderful city of ours. We need your help. Why don't you give us this help?

The Chair: Ms Gardner, I'm sorry to interrupt but we've gone well beyond the 10 minutes. Thank you for your presentation.

LOIS CORBETT

The Chair: Would Lois Corbett please come forward. Good evening, Ms Corbett.

Ms Lois Corbett: Thank you, Mr Chairman and members of the committee, for this opportunity to present some concerns I have about the bill you have in front of you. I'll try to keep an eye on the clock, because I don't have a prepared text. I can sometimes take a breath and talk for 10 minutes and not actually breathe in.

My name is Lois Corbett. I live in the St Lawrence Market area of Toronto, which is in Councillor Kyle Rae's city of Toronto ward and Councillor Olivia Chow's Metro ward. Minister Al Leach is my member of provincial Parliament, and my MP is Bill Graham. I vote at every opportunity. I read the newsletters from all my different levels of democratically elected representatives. I don't necessarily agree with each and every one of them. I think they're all uniquely different people working as hard as they can with different agendas to best represent my interests. But because I exercise my right to vote and pay attention to the political system, I believe that my elected representatives need to listen to me.

I also work both for the Toronto Environmental Alliance and for the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. I'll spend the bulk of my time talking about what I think are the major environmental implications of the bill you have in front of you.

I've spent the last 10 years working for and with beautiful people in beautiful cities all over the country, fighting to preserve and protect what I think Canadians, whether they're from Toronto, the Northwest Territories or St John's, Newfoundland, believe quite strongly in: the protection and preservation of the natural and human environments within which they live. I really can only talk about what I know.

I know we need several levels of government to deal with the important issue of environmental and human health protection. I know, much as I don't like them a lot of the time, that we need a federal government to enact national environmental standards so that every fish pond and every lake and every stream -- and every fish, whether it's in the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean -- can entertain a national standard of environmental protection so that people who live in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto or Saskatoon have their right to breathe the same quality of air; that it is not determined by where you live but because we have a democratically elected federal government that should act on behalf of its national citizenry to invoke national environmental standards.

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I also know we need the federal government to represent concerned Canadian citizens in the international forum when it comes to expressing Canadians' love for natural systems. I know we need a provincial government to deal with the day-to-day monitoring and research part of environmental protection -- environmental protection for human health's sake, for our own health's sake, but also for natural systems' sake. I know the Ontario government needs to be quite active in working with governments on the other side of the border in protecting the Great Lakes, for example. It's important that this one government realize that on behalf of its own citizens and on behalf of the nation, it has to work to reduce toxics both coming in from the United States and also generated here.

The Ontario level of government, the provincial level of government, is the best one to deal one-on-one with polluters, as they have sort of an intimate concern and interest in trying to keep industrial polluters in the province and contributing to the economy. They also have that direct one-on-one access to them so that we can draw up provincial plans for both pollution reduction and pollution prevention.

When it comes to the municipal level of government, what can they do to work to protect local environments? What municipal governments do, unlike the other two levels of government, is they actually do things. They set up compost programs. They set up waste reduction programs. The Ontario government suggests that as a society, people who live in Ontario, we have a goal of reducing our waste by 25%, but the Minister of Environment of Ontario doesn't tell every city or every person how to do that. Municipal councils listen to people in their neighbourhoods, ask them to come in and deliver programs so that people, ordinary citizens, your next-door neighbours, and each of you, no doubt, can actively participate in diverting more garbage from landfills and from incineration in the province. Only by the things that municipal councils do can we actually take that step forward and participate.

I can give you a couple of really concrete examples about that. For the last nine months I've been quite active with the provincial Ministry of Environment in the development of a smog management plan for Ontario. As you can imagine, industry is well represented, the environmental community is represented, and the human health community, public health system, is quite represented around the table. It takes us about two months' worth of meetings to come to a definition of what exactly are the particulates that are having an impact on our young people's ability to breathe; what is it exactly that's causing more and more of our children to have asthma in Toronto? A small committee at the Metro level of government or at the city level -- the city of Toronto or East York -- can actually get right down, talk to the fleet's manager at those cities, and say: "Let's start buying cleaner-fuelled vehicles. What would it take? What are the financing mechanisms we need in order to take that important step forward? Will it contribute to protecting local air quality? Is this a good step to take?" Buying cleaner-fuelled cars is what I call a "thing"; it's a thing that municipal councils can do.

The provincial level of government can orchestrate and bring people together to come up with a good definition of what needs to be acted on. Municipal governments can actually deliver programs to protect people's human health and natural environments. There's lots of stories like that.

I've worked in the past 10 years on national programs. At one time I served, believe it or not, on the advisory team for the green plan when Lucien Bouchard was the federal Minister of the Environment, way back then. I've worked with the provincial government and I've worked with all area municipalities within the GTA, whether it's been on waste, pesticides, air quality, PVCs, toxics in the Great Lakes. My experience has shown me that all levels of government, when it comes to environmental protection and protecting human health, have their own role to play.

Smaller governments, like smaller ecosystems, can do things. They can change more quickly, they can adapt more quickly, and they can respond to pressing changes in the environment. Larger governments, big megacity governments, will not be able to, one, deliver the programs we need in order to hold back the pollution and toxics that are affecting our lives, but also will not respond with the quickness and the adaptability and flexibility or diversity -- again mimicking a natural system -- that we need in order to deal with impending natural disasters like climate change.

My bottom line is that local government is in the best position to protect local environmental concerns, and green cities and locally protected small parts of the ecosystem ultimately add up to larger bodies that are protected. The realist in me wants to say, "I think you should fiddle around the edges of your transition team, of your transition process, and fix and put in provisions for environmental protection to make sure the environmental and human health impacts of what this bill is going to do are not forgotten in the tax fight and in the political fights that no doubt will result." But I think the fundamental message is: Small is better and small is beautiful.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Corbett. You've very effectively used up your allotted time. Thank you for coming forward and making your presentation this evening.

GLENN WEBSTER

The Chair: Would Glenn Webster please come forward. Good evening, Mr Webster. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Glenn Webster: Good evening. I'm glad of this opportunity to be able to speak to you. With respect, I'm addressing my remarks primarily to the nine government members, who I believe continue to need to be reminded of democracy and responsible governance. My colleagues from the opposition I believe do understand these principles, and I know they are working hard to try and enlighten the rest of you.

I only have 10 minutes -- I won't take 10 minutes -- so I can only deal with two topics, although if I had three or four hours I'd love to cover much more ground. I'm going to restrict my comments to (1) the lack of democratic process in the manner in which this legislation is being introduced and (2) the inadequacy of representation for the proposed new unicity.

In our parliamentary system, when a party seeks a mandate to form a government, it presents a platform to the electorate. Where was megacity on your platform? Where was the mega-dumping, the downloading of essential services from the province to the municipalities? I didn't see it. If you had any integrity, I think you'd call an election and seek a legitimate mandate from the people for these proposals.

In our parliamentary system, when a party gains power, it's not a licence to behave like a tinpot banana republic and abandon all consultation and become utterly totalitarian. When Bob Rae surprised himself by forming the government before this present one, he didn't nationalize the banks, he didn't double the welfare rate, he didn't give in to every union demand. I believe he attempted to act in a responsible manner and he didn't amaze us with some "common sense" or other revolution.

In our parliamentary system, again, we're used to consultation when major changes are proposed. Commissions and public hearings are an opportunity for concerned citizens -- or special interest groups, as the Premier uses that term -- to voice their concerns.

What did you give us? The Who Does What commission, or, more precisely, the behind-closed-doors commission. David Crombie himself is a decent and qualified person to comment on municipal matters, but the process itself was indecent, undemocratic, élitist, inappropriate.

What is ironic is that you ignored many of his proposals anyway. You picked only those that you'd already decided upon. I fear it's probably the same with this process. I hope you're not just pretending to listen to people like me. I fear, though, you have decided to go ahead with the legislation anyway, and in many ways it makes this process a sham.

Again, in a parliamentary democracy we're not used to having legislation proceeding with unseemly haste. We don't like to be bullied, railroaded, bulldozed. We don't appreciate having stuff rammed down our throats. Ordinary citizens like myself have day jobs. That's why there are a lot of spelling mistakes on this page. We need time to digest these proposals. You take advantage of this confusion. You hope people will say: "Well, what's the point? They've already made up their minds anyway." This is not a Common Sense Revolution, it's a confusion revolution, and as history shows us, most revolutions are confusions.

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A comment on the trustees: Notwithstanding the oft-quoted line that municipalities are creatures of the province, as they indeed are, Ontario towns have almost always enjoyed some form of autonomy, albeit somewhat tenuous at times, since before Confederation. In fact, since 1215 and Magna Carta, most places following British parliamentary democracy have devolved some degree of power to municipalities.

In the last municipal election I voted for a mayor, councillors and school board representatives. That's my democratic right through precedence or tradition. How dare you take that right away from me by appointing trustees to oversee these properly elected people? How demeaning to our city governments, how patronizing, how undemocratic.

Just think for a moment. Our Prime Minister, concerned about the actions of the Ontario government, mindful that they're about halfway into their term and fearful that they want to change the system so much that it's not going to be fixable by successive governments, decides on this basis to appoint federal trustees to oversee their actions. How would you like that?

I know that democracy is slow and cumbersome and there are exceptional circumstances when it has to be put on hold, such as times of war or major ecological disasters. Are we now at war?

On the governance of the proposed unicity, 44 councillors for more than 2 million people is not enough. If we believe in some sort of representation according to population, how can you justify Toronto getting 10 times fewer municipal reps than North Bay? How can a councillor really effectively deal with the nitty-gritty municipal matters for 53,000 people? With this logic, would cities of less than 53,000 people have just one councillor, or perhaps no councillors?

My 10 minutes doesn't allow me to address downloading, but I must simply register my protest at proposing to use a regressive poll type property tax to pay for services that should properly be paid for by progressive geared-to-income taxes. That's fundamental. This area needs masses more study, and we certainly would do well to look at how other municipalities in North America and Europe deal with this.

In summary, the government's whole style is hurried, confusing, anti-democratic, authoritarian and disrespectful to the electorate. I agree with Speaker Stockwell that, by extension, the government is contemptuous of the House and of the province, and you just don't get it, do you?

I look forward to joining the freedom march on February 15, when I shall proudly march with the city of York battalion down Yonge Street: no weapons, just banners and posters. I thank you for hearing me.

Mr Colle: Mr Webster, I think you've brought an interesting point to the debate here. You mention poll tax. As you know, the same minister tried to introduce a poll tax in Bill 26, and he said if there was a poll tax in the bill, the right to have a poll tax, he would resign. As you know, he was forced to amend the bill to exclude a specific poll tax. But I think what the minister has actually done, through the back door, is to introduce a poll tax, which is basically the downloading tax.

Mr Webster: I think that's an accurate description of what took place. That's the way the minister thinks.

Mr Colle: In essence, the people of Metropolitan Toronto will have to pay a new tax for social housing, welfare, child care and long-term care. They'll pay it more than anywhere else, because as you know, we have a disproportionate number of seniors; 89,000 children live in poverty. We also have social housing; up to 50% of the social housing in the GTA is in Metro. What we're really given with the megacity is a new mega-poll tax.

Mr Webster: Megacity, mega-dump, mega-taxes, and it doesn't take an economist or mathematician to figure that inevitably, from the best information we've got, without prejudice, property taxes will rise substantially.

The Chair: Thank you for coming forward this evening, Mr Webster.

FORREST LUNN

The Chair: Would Forrest Lunn please come forward. Good evening, Mr Lunn, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Forrest Lunn: Good evening and thank you for the opportunity to speak. I just want to say that unlike several of the people who have spoken before me, I'm a beginner at this kind of thing and the reason I've begun, belatedly, is because of Bill 103 and my very strong feelings of opposition to it. I believe that despite the reassurances of Al Leach, the Minister of Municipal Affairs, our quality of life would suffer if Bill 103 were to become law and a megacity called Toronto came into existence.

For one thing, if Bill 103 became law, the citizens of the new city would have approximately half the number of municipal councillors they have now. I didn't want to put it down on paper because I wasn't 100% sure of the figures, but I think it's a matter of 106 being reduced to 44. In other words, the members of the new city council would each be expected to look after the interests of approximately twice as many people as they do presently.

Moreover, as members of a megacity council they would have to balance, as do the present councillors, the interests of their own constituents against those of the residents of the other wards. But in the megacity the needs and interests of the whole population would be far more varied than they are in any of the present municipalities. If the megacity were to come into existence, the councillors serving the citizens of Toronto and the other municipalities would, by comparison to the present councillors, be distracted and overworked.

I will illustrate this point with a bit of autobiography. For the last three and a half years my wife and I have lived in the east end of Toronto just across the street from Monarch Park. The park is beautiful at all times of the year, but for the first two summers in the neighbourhood our nights were made miserable by the noise of pool-hoppers and partying adolescents. Occasionally we complained to the police, but at best this was a very short-term solution and the next night the noise would start again.

At the beginning of last summer, sceptically and as a last resort, I contacted our councillor, Steve Ellis. He listened sympathetically and said he would see what he could do. He spoke to the police and to the parks board. Within days a security patrol was visiting the park two or three times a night. The pool-hopping was dramatically reduced and the partying stopped entirely.

This incident had a powerful effect on me. It made me realize that sympathetic, responsive local government does improve our lives, and it made me realize that a local government structure that gives councillors enough time to listen to the ordinary problems of ordinary citizens is something worth fighting for. If my councillor had ignored me or made promises but failed to act, I would probably not be in this room this evening.

The reduced representation it would bring is only one of the many objections that can be made against the idea of municipal amalgamation. Another is that a megacity would inevitably be a cumbersome, unmanageable thing. The municipalities are simply too different from one another to be governed by a single body. A vast automobile-dependent domain whose centre is an isolated, enclosed shopping mall can be forcibly amalgamated with a much older, much more densely populated municipality, where everyone lives within walking distance of a shop-lined main street.

But is it possible to do this without damaging the precious and fragile sense of community that is characteristic of all the Metro municipalities? Is it possible to do this without alienating the citizenry, without making them feel that government is something that is imposed upon them from above, that they are powerless, that there is no point in complaining or suggesting, no point in participating?

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In making these points I am of course speaking intuitively. However, my attention has recently been drawn to two scholarly studies of the results of forced municipal amalgamation in Sweden. Both these studies confirm my intuitions. I can provide the references to anyone who is interested; in fact, I've got footnotes at the bottom of the page.

My next point is not about the merits of the megacity proposal itself; it is about a noteworthy and I think symptomatic difference between the people who oppose the idea and the people who support it. The opponents of the plan, whether they are journalists, politicians or just ordinary citizens, all have a great deal to say. They make dozens of different objections to amalgamation, all of them plausible, and as we have seen, they can find support for their position in the books and articles of experts and academics, books and articles written long before most Torontonians had heard the word "megacity." One of the most difficult parts of being against the plan in fact is keeping the various objections to it straight in one's mind and deciding which one to use at a particular point.

The proponents of the plan seem to have the opposite problem: They can't find anything to say in support of their position, not anything that makes much sense, at any rate. The members of the public who support the idea of the megacity remain almost completely silent, perhaps rousing themselves, when challenged, to say, "If it's good enough for Mike, it's good enough for me," or words to that effect. The cabinet ministers, the rest of the Conservative caucus, the few journalists who support the bill seem able to defend it only with cliché-ridden rhetoric or evasive mumblings.

As an example of these evasive mumblings, here is what Al Leach said in an interview with the East York Mirror when, after having said that "most of" the studies done in the past 30 years had recommended amalgamation, he was asked to name one study that had done so:

"We know...I know that the...I'm not sure whether we've got the quotes from the Robarts study and a number of others...they were...they backed off politically. I really believe that it's the right thing to do and I think the vast majority of people in the greater Toronto area think it's the right thing too."

I've made three points: first, that diminished representation would certainly lead to diminished quality of life; second, that because of the physical size, the large population and the diversity of the municipalities, a megacity would be an unmanageable monster whose residents would feel alienated from their government; and finally, that the opponents of the megacity are noticeably better at defending their position than the advocates of the idea are at defending theirs.

Moving on from my last point, I want to ask a question: In light of the fact that there are so many things to say against the megacity and so little to be said in its favour, is it possible that our government really does not care whether the megacity plan is in itself a good idea, possible that for it a megacity is just a means to some other end?

The government would deny this, of course, but perhaps that is only because they are afraid to tell the people what they really have up their sleeve. This is not an original suggestion. Many commentators have suggested that the government has an ulterior motive and they have come up with various theories as to what it might be.

Colin Vaughan, a Globe and Mail columnist, says that it is not so much that the government wants a megacity but that it thinks one large municipality with a tailor-made and compliant administrative structure will not be able to put up effective opposition to its other restructuring plans such as the downloading of social services and the reduction in the number of school boards.

John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto, thinks that the government, determined to eliminate the deficit and reduce income tax, is trying to steal the municipal reserve fund.

The president of the board of trade, in an interview with Michael Valpy, has said that he doesn't really believe amalgamation would save money but that the board of trade is still in favour of it because having only one government to deal with would make it easier for it to promote Toronto as a place to do business.

There's very likely a little truth in all these suggestions. After all, there's no reason to believe that this government must have only one ulterior motive for something it does. Still, all three suggestions are somewhat conjectural. Who is to say what these people are thinking? But two things are clear: First, whatever its ulterior motive is, the government will be able to achieve its ends more easily if it can drastically limit the power of Toronto and the other Metro municipalities; second, Bill 103 is carefully and cleverly written to give them that power.

Reading the bill, it is impossible not to wonder what the purpose of the elected council of the proposed city would be. Section 16 of the act stipulates that a so-called transition team will be formed to "establish the city's basic organizational structure." The team will simply be appointed by the government, presumably acting in secret. It would have the power to place restrictions on how much the new city could spend or raise. It could also order the privatization of municipal services. It would have no duty whatsoever to consult the public on these fundamental matters and it could not be held responsible for anything it does. Section 18 of the bill reads as follows, "The decisions of the transition team are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court."

On top of all this, the government has provided for the possibility that the so-called transition might go on forever. Section 12 reads, "On or after January 31, 1998 the minister may, by order, dissolve the transition team."

If this government, so lustful for power, gets away with taking control of the municipal government of the six municipalities, then municipal democracy in our region will be dead and municipal democracy everywhere in the province, and everywhere in Canada, will be at risk. But democracy is not yet dead in Toronto and the people, the citizenry, can still stop this government from destroying it. I believe they will.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Lunn, for your presentation. You've used your 10 minutes. Thank you for coming and making your presentation.

ANNE MORAIS

The Chair: Would Anne Morais please come forward. Good evening and welcome to the committee.

Ms Anne Morais: Thank you. My name is Anne Morais. I have lived in Toronto from my first day. I grew up in North York, completed three degrees at the university in Toronto and now I live and work in the city of Toronto. I pay my taxes, I support small theatre by attending pay-what-you-can Sundays, I pay loonies to squeegee kids who clean my window, I feel comfortable walking around downtown and I gloat to my non-Torontonian friends that we have a host of ethnic neighbourhoods with many wonderful restaurants.

I oppose Bill 103. I would like to talk about one point with respect to amalgamation: services. I will not talk about the effect of amalgamation on the downtown core and how it would hollow out all the businesses, culture and life because I understand that a provincial government is far more responsible for taking care of the province as a whole and not focusing on individual cities.

I will not talk about the loss of democracy by the appointment of the three trustees because my voice at this hearing is a demonstration of democratic principles. In addition, I will not carry on about how amalgamation will personally affect my life because sometimes personal concerns are less important than broad social concerns, similar to the fact, I am sure, that Minister Leach's support for this bill is not fuelled by his desire to pay back the Metro municipalities for the heartache they gave him when he was the commissioner of the TTC.

I plan to address the inevitable changes to services ushered in by privatization and the reduced number of trained personnel. Privatization and the contracting out of services are not new suggestions. As well, reducing the sum expertise of service providers, such as the civilianization of police services, outlined in the KPMG report, and the reduction of the number of full-time firefighters implied in Bill 84, are ideas on the table.

Privatization and the decrease of expertise will not only affect service administration but will also affect service performance, delivery and reliability. Two results are the increase of costs and the decrease in service value expressed in terms of safety. The increase of cost individuals will be forced to incur, either by instituting user fees or increasing the charges already in place, is not a far stretch from reality.

A clear example is what happened when Britain privatized their water supply. Not only did the quality of water diminish, but the supply was delayed and costs increased, leaving some people with no water.

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Cost and quality of service are two inherent competitors in the free market. A seven-year-old child who rides his bicycle past one block of shops in his neighbourhood realizes that the people working in the stores are there to make money. He also notices that two candy stores next to each other are going to compete for the same market by either lowering cost, which will inevitably be followed by a decrease in facility upkeep, quality of candy and presentation of products, or by charging a little more and providing quality service and candies.

If the child has only 10 cents and is limited by money, he'll purchase the cheaper candy. If the child fancies particular candies with particular flavours, he'll pay a little more for what he wants. Any seven-year-old interested in satisfying his craving for candy has a clear understanding of the free market.

Higher fees for service are bound to occur when services are privatized or, as in the experience of the child who only has 10 cents, the quality of service may decrease.

I understand there are arguments in favour of higher fees for service, such as forcing individuals to prioritize expenditures, which at the same time works to lower the deficit. For example, if garbage collection costs according to weight, then people will be more aware of what they throw out and possibly save more things. The effects of increasing costs for services need far more attention than this short piece. They need honest attention and investigation. What happens when people cannot afford particular services? Are they going to throw out less garbage, or are they going to drop their garbage at public parks, if there are any, or are they going to dump their garbage anywhere on the street, or are they going to keep it in their homes until they have enough money?

A second and possibly more grave result of privatization is the threat to safety. The reduction of trained staff also speaks to the issue of safety. Do private companies care about protecting and serving the citizens? Is their main responsibility to the people or to their shareholders? A clear example of the role of business versus the role of government was illustrated in the past few months by the events of the transport companies and the Honourable Minister of Transportation, Al Palladini. For clarity's sake I want to emphasize the following as an example as competing principles, not as an opportunity to criticize any governments, current or past.

Trucks were doing their job of delivering products from point A to point B. The trucks were in fine order because products arrived and the companies were making money. Once in a while a wheel flies off and kills innocent people. Outraged at the number of deaths due to flying truck parts, Minister Palladini makes an angered announcement to the trucking companies that they had better bring all their trucks up to standard, or else. Why was he or anyone so surprised that the trucks were not maintained to a proper standard?

It is the government's responsibility to make sure the trucks are safe by enforcing a standard by whatever means they feel necessary. It is not the company's responsibility to protect the community; it is the company's responsibility to function as an efficient, profit-oriented organization. The federal laws of this country, as well as the laws of each province and territory, dictate that directors must manage the business and affairs of their corporations with a proper business purpose. Both the provincial Business Corporations Act and the federal one hold directors liable to shareholders for decisions made for purposes other than the best interests of their shareholders. The community at large is not a shareholder in private corporations. As such, corporations are not permitted to act in the best interests of the community.

Plowman J. of the English Chancery Courts held that a corporation which had distributed sums of money to its employees had breached its shareholder obligations and that such a distribution, although motivated by fairness, was against corporate law and could not be allowed. The following is a quote from that judgement:

"The defendants were prompted by motives which, however laudable, and however enlightened from the point of view of industrial relations were such as the law does not recognize as a sufficient justification. Stripped of all its side issues, the essence of the matter is this, that the directors of the defendant company are proposing that a very large part of its funds should be given to its former employees in order to benefit those employees rather than the company, and that is an application of the company's funds which the law, as I understand it, will not allow."

If a company was not permitted to consider the interests of its employees, individuals with whom that company has intimate relations, individuals on whom that company relies, then prima facie a company cannot consider the interests of the community. It is the government's responsibility to protect the unprotected. If trucks are unsafe, then the government failed to protect its citizens. Firefighters serve community; police officers serve and protect. I do not want to live in a community in which police officers are obliged by law to serve and protect shareholders.

Issues of safety come up in many services. I do not need to expand on the effects of poorly trained firefighters or police officers or repair personnel or parks and rec staff and so on. Issues of safety must be recognized. The main motivation for private companies is profit and any other factor is secondary. On the other hand, it is the government's responsibility to protect, help and answer to its citizens.

This is a plea to balance the desire to cut costs with maintaining a life of quality. Thank you.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. We have a couple of moments here for questions from the NDP.

Mr Silipo: Ms Morais, thank you very much for your presentation. I don't think any other presenter, at least whom I've heard, has focused as much as you have on the question of services, particularly privatization and the impact that will come. Our sense is that one of the things, and I think this is what you're saying, that come out of the megacity is a lesser ability for citizens to actually have an impact, through their elected representatives, on the question of safety, on the question of services overall, because the quality can go nowhere but down as a result of what we're seeing in front of us. Is that a fair way to sum it up?

Ms Morais: Yes, definitely.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much.

HAMISH WILSON

The Vice-Chair: Next I'd like to have Hamish Wilson, please. Welcome.

Mr Hamish Wilson: Thank you. Good evening. To begin, I am not a member of the NDP, nor of the Liberals, and I certainly am not a PC nor a Harris Conservative.

There are many objectionable aspects of this bill, especially around process. This is a very hasty process. Perhaps that's part of the explode-and-conquer mentality. I am appalled at the placement of duly elected representatives under unelected, unaccountable trustees who would appear not to have any fixed limit on their mandates.

It is completely wrong to have a clause which tries to remove the actions of these trustees from limits of law. It is also grossly unfair to have one set of processes for other regions in Ontario and a lack of process in Toronto.

Other speakers have indicated the abusive and bullying nature of this regime, and I concur. What you are doing is the opposite of what you said you would do prior to the election, according to Paul Pagnuelo of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in Ontario.

You are misinforming the House and the public with propaganda. You have a majority in the House and you can and did vote down any rebuke.

This is an enlargement of a photograph in that particular flyer, and where is this picture of Toronto taken from? My sense is that it is a composite of at least three pictures patched together to seem like one: this one, that one and that one. I'd like to know for sure, for instance, that the houses actually are in Toronto. I'm not sure and I must admit I consider this image a lie, a subtle trick to imply urban friendliness, which the bill doesn't have. It's too bad we can't get honesty in this instance, and the overall effort costs a lot of money which could have been used for keep some women's shelters open. No, I don't trust you with education either.

It's not going to save money by itself. Professor Andrew Sancton from Western university and Wendell Cox, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan, have both indicated that amalgamations cost more, not less, and Mr Cox indicates there is less access to councillors as well. Sure, the Harris regime might dismiss these experts because they're paid for their services by the city of Toronto, the object of this hostile takeover, but even the chief author of the quickie KPMG report indicated that he couldn't provide examples of savings nor assurances of savings without reduced service levels. Please make yourself aware of the Cox and Sancton viewpoint. I just happen to have an extra copy of the Wendell Cox report in case anybody would like it here.

The overall impact of the mega-dump, beginning with Bill 103, is that it will worsen tax inequities between the more compact urban form and the sprawl of the 905 region. This will kill Metro Toronto as it worsens current tax imbalances.

If you want to save big money, consider the words of economist Pam Blais in a background paper to the Golden commission. She notes that "a conservative estimate would suggest that a total of about $700 million to $1 billion per year could be saved in the GTA by accommodating growth in more efficient urban patterns." You're doing the exact opposite again and committing the one level of taxpayer to more costs.

Suburbs are subsidized. Why don't you tackle the subsidies to the 905ers and get cars off welfare? A Globe editorial of January 12, 1996 indicates:

"The biggest red-ink-bleeding, cash-gobbling, robbing-empty-pocketed-Peter-to-pay-comfortable-Paul government program is the low-density urban form known as the suburb."

Cars are subsidized. I have enclosed figures from five North American studies that indicate an annual avoided cost of automobility per vehicle of between $1,000 and $4,600 per year. There are some big bucks to be saved by stopping the freer ride that cars get -- not that I'm saying they aren't expensive to operate and run, and not that there wasn't money in transit either.

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One of the major areas of avoiding costs is in climate change, what I would term a major atmospheric iceberg that is looming as part of the natural debt. Climate change can only get worse with the systemic trashing of compact urban form because of the reliance of the more suburban-built form on automobiles. The federal government, in its outlook for the first ministers' conference in December last year, was told by Natural Resources Canada, "Transportation is the largest contributor to emissions both in absolute and growth terms." Here is a little chart and its exponential growth -- it's this one right there -- going up, up, up, out of sight.

The accompanying chart, which is in the package, shows the exponential growth in the transportation sector while the Antarctic ice shelf is breaking up today. Systemic trashing of the more compact urban form will speed up climate change and bring on heat waves, tornadoes and windstorms, forest fires, pest outbreaks, extra freeze-thaw cycles and downpours. Ask the insurance industry about the realities and real costs of climate change, though, please. Don't take my word for it.

This brings up another area of process abuse and illegality. Matters which are to impact our environment should be posted on the environmental registry, as I understand it. This has not been done, and you're in contempt of another set of procedures and adding on to the natural debt.

If the objective of Bill 103 isn't a power grab, if it isn't to raid the reserve funds of municipalities, set the stage for privatization and ease the dumping of the debt and tax break down to the municipalities, if instead you actually want to save some money, which I agree with, here are some suggestions: Scrap the Red Hill expressway in Hamilton -- there's $100 million; institute some user-pay, or usury, as it might be termed, on the 401 and other existing highways, especially for trucks; look at the overall costs of automobility on the province, that is, total social costs of collisions, which the previous government estimated at about $9 billion per year; and invest in more benign alternatives, which for transit must include the examples of Curitiba in Brazil and not the Sheppard subway. Stop trashing compact urban form and stop subsidizing the suburbs.

I think I've forgotten a book I wanted to show you, but I'll just mention the title, Men Are Not Cost-Effective. Very interesting.

You want options to municipal governance? It's not perfect here but it's not as broken as you think it is. I agree with Morden Yolles -- he's a structural engineer -- that a structure with six supports is better than one. I would suggest that maybe we should concentrate on solving the problems with trucks on the highways first before trashing Toronto.

I'd like to take some time to play into the record some commentary I've been able to tape from a couple of meetings, if I may just set up my tape recorder very quickly.

Mrs Margaret Marland (Mississauga South): That's not appropriate. Madam Chair, it's personal presentations with a deputation. It's the same rules as in the chamber.

Mr Wilson: It's for information, ma'am.

The Vice-Chair: Yes, I just remind you that your time is being taken up by this.

Mr Wilson: Yes, I agree and I'm happy to have my time taken up by this.

Mrs Marland: I thought perhaps the deputant would like to read a paragraph that he missed in the reading of his brief. He wanted to have a complete record.

Mr Wilson: Yes, also, because there has been friction about some comments that have been made about East York and the intent to dispose of the city hall there, for instance --

Audio presentation.

Mrs Marland: On a point of order, Madam Chair: It is not permitted to have electrical devices in committees or in the chamber, and committees operate by the same rules as the House.

Mr Colle: Shhhh.

Mrs Marland: I'm making a point of order, Mr Colle.

Mr Colle: I'm trying to listen.

Mrs Marland: I'm sorry, we can't change the rules.

Mr John Hastings (Etobicoke-Rexdale): On a point of order, Madam Chair: This kind of situation ought to be ruled out of order. You wouldn't be able to use a tape recorder in the House; you can't use a cell phone in the House; you can't use a VCR in the House; you can't use a radio in the House. The same rules in the House apply to a committee of this Legislature.

The Vice-Chair: Mr Hastings --

Mr Hastings: Your ruling, please.

The Vice-Chair: There has been precedent.

Mr Hastings: What would the precedent be, then?

Mr Wilson: That was the most important segment. I apologize for transgressing any rules in the House.

Mr Silipo: You didn't.

Mr Wilson: It was because I feel, as Mr Prue has pointed out, that the land which the Memorial Gardens came from was from the Royal Canadian Legion. Now, if you want to disrespect the legion, that's your choice. I think what Mr Prue is up against, though, is a lot of misinformation.

I don't know if it would be fair to Mr Gilchrist to play a quote that I have here from a meeting, but I don't know that he's actually really listened to the message that's there. I understand Mr Prue has tried to confirm the record with Mr Gilchrist. I will not play this particular tape, because Mr Gilchrist wouldn't be here.

To conclude, or to go on a little bit further --

The Vice-Chair: No, I'm sorry, Mr Wilson. You have exceeded your time. Thank you very much.

Mr Wilson: I have exceeded my time now?

The Vice-Chair: Yes.

Mr Wilson: Thank you very much. I would suggest that you withdraw the bill.

PETER RUSSELL

The Vice-Chair: Mr Peter Russell? Good evening, Mr Russell.

Mr Peter Russell: Thank you. I wish to address the broad constitutional and democratic dimensions of Bill 103.

Now, from a narrow constitutional perspective, Bill 103 may not violate the formal law of the Constitution, but I want to remind you that there's much more to our Constitution than its formal legal text.

An important part of our constitutional system of government are the practices and principles of governance that have become a treasured part of our public heritage. That part of our constitutional process works through a social contract that functions over time whereby each generation inherits the practices and institutions of governance that have worked well, that have stood the test of time, that embody the wisdom of preceding generations. Each generation endeavours to improve on those institutions and practices before passing them on to succeeding generations. Such is the essence of a constitutional system that is both progressive and conservative.

A treasured part of the governmental inheritance of us, the people of Upper Canada, of Canada West, of Ontario and Toronto, is our success in operating a deeply democratic form of local government. It is indeed a governmental practice that has worked well, that has helped make our city of Toronto the envy of the world. It is something that, no doubt, can be improved, but only in a manner that enhances and enriches the democratic quality of local government, rather than diluting and subverting it, as I fear Bill 103 does, both in its objective and in the means adopted to achieve that objective.

The objective of the bill, which is to fold six cities of moderate size into one, will create a city which is at once both too large and too small. It will be too big to provide that sensitive and accessible management of local affairs that's been a hallmark of our urban democracy. The fact that Toronto, unlike the huge American cities to the south, is a liveable city whose neighbourhoods reflect and respond to the needs and preferences of its residents is no accident. It is primarily the result of a system of local government that is close to its residents and responsive to their interests and ideas.

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And yet while this new megacity will dilute our urban democracy, it will not provide a broad enough foundation for the effective planning and direction of economic development which is so badly needed in the huge urban sprawl that stretches from Burlington to Oshawa. For this coordinating and planning capacity a much bigger base than the proposed new city is needed, something at least as wide as the greater Toronto area. That has been the conclusion of all the committees and commissions that have studied this issue in the past.

So here in this megacity plan to be achieved through Bill 103 we have the worst of all possible worlds: a city too large to preserve and enhance our tradition of urban democracy yet too small to meet the planning and coordinating needs of the sprawling urbanopolis of which Toronto forms a part.

Nor is there any evidence that significant savings in costs or gains in efficiency will be achieved through this amalgamation plan. On the contrary, all the evidence and experience is that the most cost-effective units of urban government are cities of moderate size and that there are no economies of scale in cities beyond the million population level. So we are being asked to risk serious erosion of our strong and proven system of municipal democracy for a purpose which has simply not been made out. It is difficult to understand how the authors of this plan could conceive of it as an essential part of a commonsense revolution.

If the objective of this bill is unconvincing, the means by which the bill would achieve the objective are simply appalling. What bothers me most are the provisions for the transitional year, which, if we are to believe the bill, began back in December. During this year municipal democracy in Metropolitan Toronto is to be put in mothballs.

I refer in particular to the two teams of appointed officials, the board of trustees and the transition team, which, if this bill goes through as it is, will for a year govern Toronto fiscally and permanently mould its future. Both these bodies of appointed officials will be accountable, not to this Legislative Assembly, nor to the people, nor even to the courts, but only to the minister. That minister will, in effect, become the czar of Toronto.

I am particularly concerned about the transition team, which has received less attention in the media than the board of trustees. Among its awesome powers are, and I read from subsection 16(3) -- I'm sure you've had these sections read to you before, but I'll do it again. It will have the power to:

"(c) establish the new city's basic organizational structure;

"(d) hire...departments heads and other employees as the transition team considers necessary to ensure the good management of the new city...."

If the bill goes through and these clauses remain, it will mean that the council of the new city that is elected less than a year from now would be elected to run a city whose structure it has had no part in shaping and with personnel it has had no role in selecting.

I ask those who support the objective of the bill, and there are many on this committee who do, why is it necessary to drive it through with such an anti-democratic sledgehammer? Why? I can think of only one rationale for this machinery. The authors of this bill simply do not trust the people of Toronto and their elected officials to be partners in creating this new municipal structure. A government that so blatantly demonstrates its distrust of the people is in danger of the people withdrawing their trust in it.

In conclusion, I urge the government which is sponsoring this legislation to move more slowly and more carefully with such a big structural change. Unlike ordinary legislation, legislation such as this, once the changes it would effect are in place, is very difficult and very expensive to reverse. The transition costs of packing up seven municipal councils and replacing them with a new structure will be very great, amounting not just to tens but likely to hundreds of millions of dollars. That is why it is almost irresponsible for those who oppose the change to promise if elected to office that they will spend yet more millions putting back what has been taken apart.

Democratic government should only undertake structural change of this kind when it is acting on the basis of a broad consensus with a well-thought-out plan. That foundation is sorely lacking in this case. The government has a mandate neither from the people nor from the experts for its megacity plan. It is not an essential part of the agenda the government was elected to achieve. It is arbitrary and without a cogent rationale. It risks doing grievous harm to one of our finest traditions of governance. It will solve none of our practical problems and yet will be very difficult to reverse once it is in place.

I urge its supporters to reconsider, and to listen to the people in the forthcoming referendums. Of course, these referendums in a narrow legal sense cannot bind the government. However, I hope that those whom we have elected to govern Ontario for a few years will feel bound by a deeper constitutional obligation to respect the legacy of democratic municipal government that has taken generations to develop and that has served us so well, and not insist on restructuring it in haste and for no clear purpose, and in a manner that is so out of keeping with its democratic spirit.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you, Mr Russell. Government members, you have a minute. Mr Hardeman.

Mr Ernie Hardeman (Oxford): Thank you very much for your presentation. You mentioned in your comments your concerns not only with the trustees but more so with the implementation committee. Could you give us some advice or comments on, accepting that you disagree with this process, how you would envision the transition if you were to support the whole proposal.

Mr Russell: In the first place, I would do it in partnership with the councils that have been elected, that have the people who are far more knowledgeable than the people on this committee or the minister and his staff about municipal structures. It should be very much a partnership arrangement. You can only do that, of course, when there's a coincidence between the views and outlooks of the government of the province and the people who have been elected in the municipality to govern the municipality.

In other words, if you insist on forcing this down the throats of Torontonians and the people they've elected, you can't do it properly. That's why you first of all have to persuade the people this is the thing to do. You have to develop a mandate and then do it with the existing councils. That's the way to go.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Russell, for appearing tonight.

TRICIA POSTLE

The Vice-Chair: I'd like to call on Tricia Postle, please. Good evening. I just want to welcome you here and explain that you have 10 minutes in which to make your presentation.

Ms Tricia Postle: Thank you very much. Ladies, gentlemen and members of the committee, you've been exposed to so much of the folksy and anecdotal in support of this bill that I'm tempted to respond in kind.

Some friends and I got together at the start of the winter because we needed some sweaters. We decided we could save some money on wool if we knit one sweater for all seven of us, and so we did. It was the right decision. Our collective body warmth balances the heat loss from 12 arm holes and six neck holes. In really cold weather, we've discovered we stay warmer by pulling in a few of the arms, and we draw straws to see who uses their hands that day.

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Winters get colder every year. We're happy to combat urban alienation and the low thermostat in one practical act. One of us did lose her job waiting tables and we are still ungainly as a group, but on the whole we're proud to be taking measures against the tradition of individualism that so dominates western consciousness. Onward, 21st century.

Members of the committee, please forgive my use of simplistic metaphor. I admit that applying such to a complex situation is often misleading, and possibly ridiculous. Unfortunately, I have yet to hear anything less ridiculous in support of Bill 103.

Have we come to a point in Ontario politics where we move further from representational democracy and closer to autocracy, baited with the promise of a big reputation, just like New York City? I love New York City. I hope to spend some years living there at some point, but no thinking person could be blind to its problems. Is it appropriate to imitate the worst aspects of a great city? It's generally known that one of New York's greatest downfalls is insufficient local and responsive government, which has been one of Metro's great strengths.

I'm going to propose another metaphor. Our communities have grown organically over time. To suggest that we will attract more international business because of simpler bylaws is like suggesting that tourists would enjoy our trees more if we dug them up and simplified their root systems. To eradicate one form of governance and impose another in the style of a hostile corporate takeover seems to me the antithesis of conservative government. Have we come to a point where we dress our communities in the worst castoffs of dog-eat-dog philosophy? Even the notorious secret meetings with trustees haven't won over the business community.

I think we should beware of simple modes of thinking. I am glad that this committee exists. It does a little bit to dispel some of my suspicions about the government's motivation at this point, and I'd be gladder if every MPP in Ontario found a few books on urban planning and perused them during the next few weeks.

Thank you very much. Are there any questions?

Mr Colle: Sorry, I wasn't in the room when you spoke and I have to excuse myself, but maybe I can just ask you a question. What is your major concern in terms of the outcome of this bill? Let's say the megacity comes about. How is it going to affect your life as an ordinary citizen?

Ms Postle: I certainly excuse you for being out of the room as you've been in the room for so many of the political actions that I've been involved with in regard to this for the last little while.

The situation of Toronto, I fear, may become one in which we avoid having any births, marriages or deaths for the time that it takes the transition team to instate a new form of government. I'm worried about the situation in which the government will be uprooted and unable to govern essentially, to fulfil its functions. When we have the period of transition, I think it's going to be a very rocky road.

Mr Colle: In terms of the period of transition, Professor Peter Russell, who just left, I think reaffirms the fact that in essence what we're going to see -- we already are, in fact. Democracy is in mothballs right now for 2.5 million people and it will be in mothballs into the term of the new mega-government because, as you know, the crazy thing about this is that the transition team will hire the top bureaucrats. They will shape the structures of the new mega-government and they will report -- this is the astonishing thing -- as Professor Russell said, not to the Legislature, not to the courts -- so they're not even subject to judicial review -- and they won't report to the citizens of Toronto. For the next year or two or three --

Interjection: Ten.

Mr Colle: -- or whatever, this transition team has basically taken away the right of citizens to have a say in how the most critical decisions are made in their everyday life.

Ms Postle: If I could change only one aspect of this bill, I would change sections 12 and 18 that elevate the transition team and the trustees above judicial review.

Mr Colle: As someone said yesterday or the day before, "What's the motivation?" If this is about accountability -- in other words, we're trying to increase accountability, the minister says -- why would you then say in legislation that the transition team especially, which is more odious than the trusteeship, I think, is not accountable to the courts and is only accountable to one man? That is scary stuff. I think somebody just mentioned that.

That is the era, as Mrs Rebeiro said earlier, of the sort of futuristic world. I don't know if you're familiar with Judge Dredd and Mega-city. I think that's what we're getting into, one-man rule essentially, above the law, above the courts. Someone said earlier, and I'm going to ask you, how could this happen in Toronto? Why have we come to this point where a government thinks it can get away with this?

Ms Postle: It seems to me that the Harris administration has been very much influenced in its style by the popular media, by theories of advertising and by certain, I'd say, fairly slipshod philosophies of business that emphasize out-and-out competitive modes of interaction that aren't suited to the government of a city.

Mr Colle: But even business believes in competition, believes in a business plan. This government has produced no business plan. All they've produced is that phoney KPMG report which has been laughed right out of the province. That's all they have, that contemptuous $100,000 report that, as Paul Pagnuelo said, was written on Swiss cheese.

Thank you very much.

ALDO VIOLO

The Vice-Chair: I'd like to call on Aldo Violo, please. Good evening, Mr Violo, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Aldo Violo: Thank you. It was troubling following Tricia after that. I feel like I just followed a child in a dog show. She was quite eloquent and marvellous, may I say.

Mine is an overview about what is going on. I actually attempted to read Bill 103, and I say it's still not user-friendly. It's strictly exclusive language. It reminded me of our union contract with a company signed under duress. It took us another two years to find out point for point what everything meant. So out of the material that has been given to me in this short frame of time I have to amalgamate information which was suddenly dropped upon me in the last two days when they said, "You're up at 8:50 today." I tried to conclude whether I should fact you, number you to death, and I figured there are better people doing that, so this is my fear of what is going on.

What the government proposes: downloading costs to municipalities such as social assistance, long-term care, public health, housing, child care, hostels, land ambulances, TTC, GO Transit, ferries, libraries and assessment delivery. Immediately I read all this, I said to myself: "What does this mean? The municipalities with the strongest tax base can handle it; others don't? Will the poor have to move from the larger city to the burbs? Will suddenly municipalities fight among each other about money, whether they should have sewers, garbage or feed those on welfare?" I don't know.

The business occupancy tax which they want to abolish -- 75% of what big business pays. This is amazing. I don't clearly understand it.

Then there's this actual value assessment. Everyone keeps telling me there's this great fear that it'll be okay until the year 2005, but it will have actual market value before that, keeping everyone in a state of flux.

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Now comes the worry because of this megacity. They say that it's theoretical. The government proposes that all these theories are true, and yet we have so many facts about the megacities that exist, and not only reports: cities such as London, England, Chicago, plus many others.

In dealing with theory like the free trade, nobody really knew what was going to go on, but here we have prime examples of cities that are what Bill 103 says. This is quite scary because they seem to be ignoring the Golden and Crombie reports. Then there are two respected independent consultants who know and understand these initiatives and have been quoted that what the bill states is not true; it's quite the opposite effect. I ask the question: Why is the government rushing?

Mr Wendell Cox, the US municipal consultant, concluded that the theoretical savings would never be achieved. As one of the members stated, and he stole my hot line, it had so many holes that it was written on Swiss cheese. This is a respected consultant who deals with municipal affairs. Why are they not listening? If we have these examples, why are they ignoring them?

Then comes the next simplistic one: World organizations and groups have voted Toronto one of the best cities to work and, surprise, live in. What are we doing wrong? Why are we changing it? When the G-7 figures were here in Toronto, we got bombarded on a daily basis that we were a world-class city. Why do we need a megacity? What is the difference? Toronto works. Why change it?

Now, we could go to a major example: New York. It was tried. It went broke. It had to go to the citizens and their pension funds. Is this the example we want: poor services, bad roads, empty buildings, high levels of corruption and crime, areas too dangerous to enter just because you are who you are or not who you are? Strange role model.

Why is the government rushing Toronto's most important bill? Any management consultant would recognize this as a classic corporate takeover strategy: Change everything at once, confuse your enemy and do what you will. We're citizens. When did we turn into the enemy? Comments by the Premier clearly make me wonder, when he refers to our mayor as a CEO. I thought mayors were elected and CEOs ran companies.

I've generally stated my concerns about Bill 103, but this is the cart before the horse. The democratic process I think has already been stated in many ways, but I'd like to follow up. The government has shown total disregard for this public concern. As far as I understand it, an electoral majority is not a blank cheque. Two basic ideas of representative democracy which seem to be missing are: (1) The first obligation of those who win is to consider the whole of society and in particular the defeated minority; and (2) the elections are of a multitude of questions, local, province-wide and personal, so citizens should be part of the clarification of their opinions issue by issue. It's slow, it's painful, as most of you probably know, but it's democratic.

If politicians, as I stare at you, were as accountable as doctors, you'd be mired in malpractice suits. When laws or bills are put forward for the good of -- who? -- the dynamics of these policies do not show up on the bean count. The devastating effects to families, the people in poverty, hunger, homelessness, incomes, violence in the family, deaths, are not shown. Property is not affected; people are.

If one issue stands out in the history of Toronto that will have the most devastating effect, Bill 103 is it. Every citizen of southern Ontario will be affected by what happens. The democratic vote is now the most valuable issue facing the Toronto people in the surrounding cities. Let the citizens be accountable. Have a referendum, removing the burden from the politician. The citizens must themselves be represented by this vote because it is the most important; because it's too important to leave it to politicians.

I'd like to close in a philosophical view. The streets of this city are not like streets of all cities; they are sacred. It is in the streets that we meet the races face to face, which we don't encounter in our homes. We do not allow the world in our homes. The streets must stay at this Toronto level. This city makes us mix and mingle and move with a cosmopolitan ease that could not be found in a book or a controlled environment. Toronto is its city municipality and there has always been a wonderful balance in its social structure. The megacity will ghettoize it.

The US model, if taken upon, will be lost. Toronto will become a jungle, and I know very few people who want to live in a jungle.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. Mr Silipo, two minutes.

Mr Silipo: Mr Violo, you said elections are of a multitude of issues. That was one of the points that you made. But here I think the issue is even worse: I think it's the understanding of everybody who in any way paid attention to the issue of what Mike Harris was saying prior to the election about governance in Metropolitan Toronto that what he said was the opposite of what he's doing. So it's not even a case of this issue not being in people's minds. When the question was asked, whether it was through the Taxpayers Coalition questionnaire or in the debates, what Mike Harris said was that if he had to make some changes, what he would do is -- and I think he did say he would make some changes. But he said that the changes would be based on maintaining the local level of government, and then deal with changing the services around.

So there's even a concern here, I think legitimately, that in fact what Mike Harris is doing is the opposite of what he promised, and for that reason, he doesn't have the mandate to do what he's doing.

Mr Violo: Very true. In dealing with the multitude of issues, the one thing I most dislike is that in the past number of weeks -- when I talk to people, they all have an axe to grind. They all look at how it affects them. This is our trouble. When we always say, "I'm going to get a big tax break; it's not going to affect me," this is where our problem starts, and it stems from the same Mike Harris approach, which is basically "Take care of yourself."

Looking at what John Ralston Saul says, it's the big picture, for the good of all, even though it does not mean for you to gain somehow, but looking at the good of all, and it should be seen for the good of all. As I say, it is complicated and I don't dare address it. I am a person who understands all these mechanisms, but the results are always evident. They seem to be right on the street.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for appearing this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the hearings this evening.

SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT

The Chair: I'd ask the committee to have a look now at the report of the subcommittee.

Mrs Marland: I'll move that report, Madam Chair. No, I guess I can't.

Mr Silipo: I'll move this as a member of the subcommittee.

The Vice-Chair: Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favour? Carried.

We are adjourned until Monday at 9 am.

The committee adjourned at 2118.