CONTENTS
Wednesday 5 December 1990
Organization
Adjournment
STANDING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
Chair: Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC)
Vice-Chair: McLean, Allan K. (Simcoe East PC)
Bradley, James J. (St. Catharines L)
Frankford, Robert (Scarborough East NDP)
Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East L)
Haslam, Karen (Perth NDP)
Hayes, Pat (Essex-Kent NDP)
McGuinty, Dalton (Ottawa South L)
Silipo, Tony (Dovercourt NDP)
Stockwell, Chris (Etobicoke West PC)
Waters, Daniel (Muskoka-Georgian Bay NDP)
Wiseman, Jim (Durham West NDP)
Substitution: Ramsay, David (Timiskaming L) for Mr Bradley
Clerk: Arnott, Douglas
Staff: Pond, David, Research Officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1009 in room 228.
ORGANIZATION
Clerk of the Committee: Honourable members, it is my duty to call upon you to elect a Chairman.
Mr Silipo: I would like to nominate Mr Runciman.
Clerk of the Committee: Are there any further nominations? There being none, I declare nominations closed and Mr Runciman elected Chair of the committee.
The Chair: Are you not going to ask me if I accept the nomination? I accept. Thank you very much for that vote of confidence. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my nominator. I very much appreciate it.
The next order of business as indicated on the agenda before you is the election of a Vice-Chairman. I will open that up for nominations. Do we have a nomination for Vice-Chairman of the committee?
Mr Waters: I would like to nominate Al McLean.
Mr Grandmaître: Mr McLean will do a great job.
The Chair: Are there any further nominations? Nominations are closed. I congratulate Mr McLean, the Vice-Chairman of the committee.
The next order of business is the appointment of the subcommittee. There is a motion attached. I believe all three caucuses have discussed this and have nominees to serve on the subcommittee. Perhaps we can just go around the table to make sure we are clear on who the nominees for the various parties are going to be.
Mr Silipo: I will be representing the government.
The Chair: The Liberal Party nominee?
Mr Grandmaître: I will be the representative on that.
The Chair: Mr Stockwell will be representing the Conservative Party. Can we have a motion to that effect?
Ms Haslam moves that a subcommittee on committee business be appointed to meet from time to time at the call of the Chair or at the request of any member thereof to consider and report to the committee on the business of the committee; that substitution be permitted on the subcommittee; that the presence of all members on the subcommittee is necessary to constitute a meeting; and that the subcommittee be composed of the following members: Mr Runciman, Mr Silipo, Mr Grandmaître, Mr Stockwell.
Motion agreed to.
The Chair: That completes the formal part of the agenda. Perhaps we can talk about how we are going to conduct committee business and what we might do in the next couple of weeks before the House rises for the Christmas break. One of the things I have discussed briefly with the clerk is the question of how the committee should be conducting its business. Its mandate is something the former committee was taking a serious look at. In fact, it incorporated some moneys in the budget for this fiscal year for travel, which would fall in line with questions surrounding how this committee should conduct its business in the future. Perhaps the clerk would like to elaborate on that.
Clerk of the Committee: Yesterday I distributed to members a number of background papers, prepared either by the research officer or commissioned by the previous committee, from a lawyer who served with Robert Macaulay in producing his report reviewing agencies, which you will receive soon, called Directions. Martin Campbell, the lawyer, proposed a number of alternative approaches to the committee's usual process of selecting somewhere between six or seven and nine agencies, boards and commissions to review at a set time as a set.
Members may want to review that memorandum over the course of the next couple of weeks, as the committee may have other invited witnesses to acquaint them with the broad area of agencies, boards and commissions and the work of the committee in the past. to see if there are other approaches they may wish to take to the review.
The Chair: Doug, perhaps you could discuss this with the members of the committee. I think you had made the suggestion to me that perhaps next week, if the time frame is suitable, we have several witnesses appear before us, perhaps representatives of Management Board who conduct similar reviews, and perhaps the lawyer Doug mentioned, who has made a presentation and served on the Macaulay commission, to talk about the sorts of things the government is doing through Management Board so that we are not overlapping in conducting the same kinds of investigations of the ABCs. Also, the gentleman who served on the Macaulay commission may like to appear before us to tell how he thinks we as a committee could perhaps be much more effective in serving the taxpayers of this province.
That is a suggestion as an agenda for our meeting next Wednesday. We could spend that time discussing in the committee how it has worked in the past and how we might like to see it work in the future.
Mr McLean: I wonder if the clerk could indicate to us the amount of budget we have left until the end of March.
Clerk of the Committee: Actually, that budget was for the committee of the last Parliament. This committee will have to adopt a budget.
Mr McLean: Have you done any work on preparing a new budget?
Clerk of the Committee: I certainly will be taking direction from the subcommittee on committee business and the committee as a whole in preparing that to present to the committee as soon as possible.
Mr McLean: I would suggest that we do have the people in from Management Board to give us a kind of overview, but if this committee is going to be pretty well together for four years, then I would also suggest that we may be taking a look at how some other areas deal with the boards, agencies and commissions.
The Chair: Another role I have just heard some speculation on -- nothing confirmed at this point -- is that one of the commitments made by the government during the election campaign was to have a review process put in place to review government appointments and that that might be a role that would fall within the mandate of this committee. We are going to have to wait, I gather, until the government indicates the direction it is going to take. Certainly there is nothing that precludes us, if at some point during our deliberations on the future role of this committee we think that is an appropriate function for it, from making that kind of recommendation in a report to the Legislature. Shall we leave it that we will request the clerk to arrange the appropriate witnesses for next week?
Mr Silipo: I wanted to have a bit more clarification on that, because it seemed to me that it might be more appropriate to actually have the subcommittee meet in the intervening time to talk further about it. If the intent of the people we would be calling next week is to give us an overview on how the committee has functioned in the past, elaborating on some of the information Mr Arnott provided, which I thought was quite useful, not only would there not be any problem from our end but I think it would be quite useful. But I would not want us at this point to start going too far down the line in terms of looking at other alternatives before we have a sense of how the committee has worked in the past and also before we have a sense of the other item you mentioned, which is the possible role this committee might have in the process of appointments. I gather there are discussions going on now between the Premier's office and the leaders of the two opposition parties on that and that at some point something may come to us from that.
I wonder if you or the clerk could comment further on the nature of the people who would be calling. My tendency at this point would be to say that if it is to give us some more information about the workings of the committee, that would be useful, but it might also be useful for the subcommittee to meet in the meantime and flesh that out a little more, if necessary.
The Chair: I agree. In fact, I was going to suggest that the subcommittee meet either -- it is getting a little tough on timing right now -- Monday or Tuesday of next week for a brief meeting to discuss how we see things developing, and have the clerk there in terms of the kinds of witnesses we might have, tentatively in any event, prepared to sit down with us next Wednesday.
Mr Wiseman: Is it appropriate to ask for a copy of the budget from the last committee and where that money was spent, so we can have a sense of what we are dealing with? Personally, I have no idea of what we are dealing with in terms of money and budgets and where it is spent and so on.
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
The Chair: We will have that circulated to all members. Perhaps it might be appropriate to ask our researcher to make a few comments about his role and certain things in the past.
Mr Pond: As the clerk mentioned, the standard practice in the past has been for members of the committee to choose six or seven or, as the clerk mentioned, up to nine agencies, boards and commissions and then to come to the committee and boil the list down to, say -- we had six in the last session. The clerk is the expert on this, but I will continue. Then what happens is that the clerk sends out quite a detailed questionnaire to that agency asking for just about every conceivable piece of information about how that agency operates, its budget, its management practices, how it is scheduled by Management Board in the Management Board of Cabinet directives and so on.
I go to the legislative library and I do independent research with the librarians on that agency. We get a pile of paper back and then what happens usually is that I will draft a briefing note on that agency for the members. The briefing note consists of two parts. One is a factual narrative on how that agency operates circa 1990, which we will then circulate to that agency to make sure it is factually correct. The second part of the briefing note will be confidential. It will go only to members and will be a more critical scrutiny of how that agency operates, some of the problems it has had in the past and, if members so desire, a list of possible questions they might want to ask the witnesses when they come. Then the witnesses from that agency will come before the committee and members will have the opportunity to ask questions.
On occasion, I guess I should add, we have called upon independent witnesses to come and talk about a particular agency. Although that has not been the usual practice, it has happened on occasion. Also on occasion, the committee has directed the clerk and the research officer to visit the head office of that agency to check out its operation essentially. That is the standard practice this committee has followed, I would say -- a bit of a generalization -- throughout the 1980s. That is the basis on which we have generated reports.
The clerk mentioned the Macaulay report. Perhaps I should expand on that. Mr Macaulay, as you know, is a very experienced administrative law lawyer in Ontario. He served in the cabinets of the Frost and Robarts governments, and in 1988 the Peterson government commissioned Mr Macaulay to exhaustively survey how agencies operated in Ontario and make some recommendations. Hence this massive report that the clerk showed you. I should add that Mr Macaulay concentrated on regulatory agencies, but he did have something to say about just about every conceivable agency in Ontario.
Martin Campbell is a counsel to Mr Macaulay. He appeared before this committee twice and before the standing committee on administration of justice once to discuss Mr Macaulay's approach to agencies. Not to poach upon future witnesses -- very briefly, Mr Campbell feels that in future, instead of the committee selecting six or eight agencies at a go for scrutiny, the committee's time could be better used if it took one aspect of all agencies' operations -- for example, how they handled their own staff or how they handled complaints from the public, or if they hold hearings, how they hold hearings, some aspect of the way all agencies operate -- and focus on that, instead of hitting upon specific agencies. I think his feeling is that if the committee did that it would send a stronger message to all agencies in Ontario about how they should operate in the future.
He had some other recommendations, but I think that was the gist of what he told this committee in May when he appeared before it in the last Parliament.
The Chair: Are there any questions at this stage? Is there anything further we should be discussing today that a member wants to raise? Okay, what we will try to do early on, through Doug, our clerk, is arrange a subcommittee meeting, perhaps for Monday afternoon. We can all get together perhaps in one of the lobbies off the assembly and --
Mr McGuinty: When will we be meeting post-Christmas? I am just wondering what the schedule will be at that time. Has that been set?
The Chair: No, that is something we are going to have to discuss and see what sort of business we will be dealing with. I would suspect that we will be sitting for some period of time. That is the discussion that is going to be left to the House leaders, but we will have to make a proposal and submit a budget for approval by the Board of Internal Economy, etc. At some stage in the next couple of weeks we are going to have to arrive at some sort of recommendation and the schedule, of course, during the period the House is not sitting.
Mr McLean: Most committees sit for a maximum usually of three weeks. Some may be longer, but most of them are going three weeks during the recess. But that can change.
The Chair: Is there anything else?
Mr Grandmaître: Did you say Monday afternoon?
The Chair: I was going to suggest Monday afternoon; it gives us a bit of time before Wednesday. After routine business we could meet in the back room off the opposition lobby --
Ms Haslam: I am just checking on the next meeting of this committee as a whole. It will remain next Wednesday at this time?
The Chair: Yes. Okay, that is it. The meeting is adjourned.
The committee adjourned at 1025.