PRESERVATION OF AGRICULTURAL LANDS SOCIETY
CONTENTS
Tuesday 12 February 1991
Appointments review
Monica Townson
Fiona Nelson
Agency review
Ontario Municipal Board
Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society
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)
Substitutions:
Johnson, Paul R. (Prince Edward-Lennox-South Hastings NDP) for Mr Frankford
MacKinnon, Ellen (Lambton NDP) for Mr Silipo
Owens, Stephen (Scarborough Centre NDP) for Ms Haslam
Sola, John (Mississauga East L) for Mr McGuinty
Sutherland, Kimble (Oxford NDP) for Mr Waters
Clerk: Arnott, Douglas
Staff: Pond, David, Research Officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1007 in committee room 2.
APPOINTMENTS REVIEW
Resuming consideration of intended appointments.
The Chair: Come to order, please. The first item of business this morning is a one-hour review. As you know, under our process we set aside blocks of time, but because of the inability of some of the appointees to get here in the block, if you will, in terms of recommendations of the official opposition and the third party and the government, we have had to do some juggling.
MONICA TOWNSON
The Chair: The first witness to appear before us this morning is an intended appointee as the chair of the Fair Tax Commission, Monica Townson. Welcome to the committee. Would you like to make some opening comments before we get into some questions?
Ms Townson: I do not have very much to say other than I guess you have my CV in front of you. I think my qualifications and professional experience are a good preparation for this appointment and I would certainly welcome the opportunity to contribute to the process of establishing an equitable tax system in the province.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will open the questioning. Mr Grandmaître.
Mr Grandmaître: I think this is a great candidate because she has spent quite a bit of time in Ottawa, so she will be a great commissioner. I really do not have any specific questions to ask of Ms Townson.
The Chair: We can come back to you, Mr Grandmaître. You will have the block of time.
Mr Grandmaître: I want to ask the Chair a few questions, Mr Chairman, without interfering with Ms Townson's time. Is there a sunset review or a sunset clause attached to this commission?
The Chair: I am not sure but I will refer you to our researcher.
Mr Pond: I phoned the Treasury officials a couple of days ago to find out what the legal status of the Fair Tax Commission was, and I was told it had been created by the crown prerogative, the common law authority of the Lieutenant Governor in Council and not by statute. Therefore the commission, as I understand it, is outside of the Management Board of Cabinet guidelines, which means it is not subject to the sunset provisions in the Management Board of Cabinet guidelines. It is at the discretion of the Treasurer, who is the minister who signed the order in council.
Mr Grandmaître: So it is an ongoing commission?
Mr Pond: As I understand it.
Mr Grandmaître: For the time being. How did you find out about this commission, Ms Townson?
Ms Townson: It was announced in the speech from the throne, I believe, that the government intended to establish it, so that was how I heard of it.
Mr Grandmaître: Were you interviewed for this position?
Ms Townson: In what sense do you mean? I was approached to see if I would be interested.
Mr Grandmaître: Were you interviewed by the Treasurer himself?
Ms Townson: No, not personally. I have met him since, but the initial approach was from someone in his office.
Mr Grandmaître: Were you given any specific guidelines to follow?
Ms Townson: In terms of myself or my education or what?
Mr Grandmaître: What the commission was trying to accomplish, the ideals, the objectives.
Ms Townson: Yes, I certainly am aware of the general mandate of the commission, which is to look at the tax system in Ontario from a number of points of view and to establish ways in which it could be made more equitable, and also to provide ongoing advice to the Treasurer.
Mr Grandmaître: As you know, Ms Townson, the former government, when I was part of it, introduced a number of new taxes in the province of Ontario, such as the commercial concentration tax specifically in Metropolitan Toronto, and also a tire tax and the employer health tax. I am not asking you to commit yourself, but what did you think of these increases in taxation, especially the commercial concentration tax, and let's pick the tire tax and the employer health tax? What are your thoughts? I am not going to make any notes, I promise you.
Ms Townson: I do not know that I prepared to comment specifically on each of those taxes. What I am interested in, and what I think the mandate of the commission is, is to look at the whole ball of wax, so to speak, and see how particular tax initiatives like the ones you were mentioning fit into the whole picture, how they interact and how overall the tax system can be made more equitable. That is my understanding of what the commission is going to be looking at. That is certainly my interest too.
Mr Grandmaître: Good. I have noticed, going through your CV last night, that you have been very interested in women's issues. How do you think our tax system at the present time is affecting women in Ontario or in Canada?
Ms Townson: As a matter of fact, I am just working on a book that I am writing for the federal government.
Mr Grandmaître: Yes, I noticed that. Could we get a copy of it?
Ms Townson: I am only just working on it, but what I am looking at in that is the impact of the tax system on women. There are ways in which it can affect women indirectly, what is sometimes referred to as the systemic effect, and things like whether a tax break is given to families, for example.
They may have an impact on married women that is unintended, where there are programs for single parents, for example, deductions and so on. That may have an impact. Where there is a sales tax, that usually has more of an impact on those at the lower end of the income scale, and that is generally women too. There are a number of ways in which the tax system can affect women, and not all of them are intended. They are sort of unintended impacts sometimes. As I said, that is what I am working on right at this moment actually.
Mr Grandmaître: I wish you well.
Ms Townson: Thank you.
Mr McLean: Had your group met yet as a group when the announcement was made?
Ms Townson: No. We had a dinner but that was all.
Mr McLean: Looking over the numbers of people that are recommended here, there does not appear to be anybody from the health care delivery system, health care institutions, agricultural community, the export community or the manufacturing base industry. How are you going to deal with these areas that are not covered by people with backgrounds that have had some knowledge of that?
Ms Townson: One of the ways in which the commission would deal with that, as you have probably seen from the mandate, is to involve all sectors of the Ontario economy and society in making presentations and being involved and so on. Once the appointments of the commission members are confirmed, the commission will then meet, as I understand it, and at that time we will be able to flesh out our mandate. There would be nothing to prevent us from establishing groups or making some kind of formal input from those sectors you mentioned.
Mr McLean: The Treasurer has indicated on many occasions that for a lot of companies that do not pay tax, there should be an 8% minimum tax on all businesses. Do you agree with that statement?
Ms Townson: One of things we are asked to look at is the possibility of the corporate minimum tax. That will be one of the things we will be investigating. I think there will be research and there will be input from the business community to see whether or not that will be feasible.
Mr McLean: Would you believe that if a company made a gross income of $250,000 per year, a small business, it should not pay tax?
Ms Townson: I do not think you can answer that statement just categorically yes or no. I think you have to look at everything that is involved. Corporations should pay tax, in my view anyway.
Mr McLean: Regardless of what their income is?
Ms Townson: Normally the taxing of individuals and corporations is based on their ability to pay and it is usually graduated, and in taxation in business you would look at the circumstances too. If you are concerned about incentives for small business, for example, you might want to offset those with other incentives. But those are the kinds of things the commission would be looking at. At this point, I do not have any preconceived ideas on how this should be done. What I would like to do is wait and see what we turn up in terms of research and input from those communities as well.
Mr McLean: But really what I am hearing is that we are going to have all the farmers go out of business now, because they are broke as it is and they cannot afford to pay tax. The people who are growing the food for us will be out of business.
Ms Townson: I did not say anything like that, no. I said we were going to be looking at the whole spectrum of the economy and looking at the different sectors and so on. Hearing from those sectors, that whole public participation, I see as a very important part of this process.
Mr McLean: I would hope it would be part of it and taken into consideration when the tax law is changed. That is all I have for the present.
Mr Stockwell: Do you believe there is a need for restructuring of the existing tax-delivered assistance that would increase the fairness of the overall tax burden on low-income individuals and families?
Ms Townson: Tax-delivered? I am sorry, I did not catch that.
Mr Stockwell: Is there a need to restructure our existing tax-delivered assistance.
Ms Townson: You mean social assistance?
Mr Stockwell: Well, "What changes to or restructuring of existing tax-delivered assistance would increase the fairness of the overall tax burden on low-income individuals and families?" Do you believe that the tax system as it is today is slanted unfairly against low-income families?
Ms Townson: I think that is certainly a possibility, and it is a perception of many people that the tax system is unfair. What the commission will be trying to do will be to establish whether or not it is unfair.
Mr Stockwell: No, I understand what the commission will do. I am asking you, do you believe it is slanted unfairly?
Ms Townson: I said I think that is a possibility.
Mr Stockwell: So you do not have a preconceived --
Ms Townson: I do not have strong views on all of this. As I said to the previous questioner, what I would like to do is go into this with a relatively open mind and see what is turned up. I think the whole basis of the mandate of the commission is to look at a more equitable system.
Mr Stockwell: Did you read this information on the Fair Tax Commission put out by the provincial government? I assume you got that?
Ms Townson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: There does not seem to be any interpretation in here. I hear a little bit of interpretation from you and what I get from the government is very clear.
That leads into the second question. "What viable options does Ontario have for introducing wealth taxes to improve tax equity?" I ask you the question, do you believe wealth taxes would improve tax equity?
Ms Townson: They may or they may not, but I do not think you can answer these questions at this point. That is what the commission is charged with doing: looking at these questions and stating whether there is an option.
Mr Stockwell: But it is very clear under the specific issues to be examined by the commission, the specific issues mandated to your commission. Now you are telling me one thing and gee, the government is telling me something different.
Ms Townson: No, I do not think the government is telling you anything. I think the government is saying, are there options for introducing wealth taxes? That is something the commission is asked to look at.
Mr Stockwell: Yes, I agree, but --
Ms Townson: The commission might decide, no, there are not, but what we are asked to look at by the Treasurer is whether there are viable options for introducing that.
Mr Stockwell: It says "wealth taxes to improve tax equity," therefore assuming very clearly that there is not tax equity.
Ms Townson: Well, the commission would have to decide that once it starts going and once it starts receiving research and input from various communities and so on.
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Mr Stockwell: I do not understand the point you are making. It is very clear in the "Specific Issues to be Examined by the Commission" that the government has put out that, according to this phrase, there is not tax equity, and wealth taxes should be examined as a viable option to make a more equitable tax system. That is what they are saying, and you are telling me you do not necessarily believe that is in fact the case.
Ms Townson: No. I said we are asked to look at what viable options are there for introducing wealth tax. It may well be that the commission would decide there are no viable options, but it could be that it will decide there are. At this point obviously, the commission has not even met, nor have we started to look at research or have input from various communities or whatever. This is the list of things that the Treasurer wants us to look at.
Mr Stockwell: There is also, "(e) What type of corporate minimum tax would be most effective at improving the fairness of the tax system?" Do you agree with that statement?
Ms Townson: That is a question we are asked to look at.
Mr Stockwell: With all due respect, I can read this and what it says is, "What type of corporate minimum tax would be most effective at improving the fairness of the tax system?" That question is very leading, that is, what type of corporate minimum tax, of a number of them, would need to be implemented to create a fairer tax system? It is not assuming that they should not implement a minimum corporate tax. It is not saying, "Maybe we will; maybe we won't," but "Yes, we will, we are just determining which one would be the most fair."
Do you agree that in fact we need categorically a corporate minimum tax and that we will determine which will be the most fair so we can implement it to create a fairer tax system? Do you believe beyond a doubt we need a corporate minimum tax?
Ms Townson: I do not know at this point. That is why I want to get working on this commission, to establish whether or not that is feasible. This is the agenda for the commission and this is what we are asked to look at.
Mr Stockwell: And you do not see a certain slanted bias in the "Specific Issues to be Examined by the Commission"? You do not see that there is a slant or a certain bent to this that in fact creates the impression, at least the impression, that you are heading down a certain road?
Ms Townson: These are specific things we are asked to look at by the government. We can examine other things too. In fact, I think it says in here that, if there are other issues we feel we should be looking at, we can add those to the list.
Mr Stockwell: Do you have any political affiliation?
Ms Townson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: With what party?
Ms Townson: With the NDP.
Mr Stockwell: Are you a card-carrying member?
Ms Townson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: Did you work in the last campaign?
Ms Townson: No.
Mr Stockwell: Did you contribute in the last campaign?
Ms Townson: Financially, yes. But I have always kept my political affiliation separate from my professional life. I do not see that it has any bearing on it.
Mr Stockwell: You do not see that it has any bearing that you are a card-carrying member of the NDP who contributed in the last election and now you are chairman of the tax commission?
Ms Townson: No. My professional qualifications and experience, I think, speak for themselves.
Mr Stockwell: Thank you. No more questions.
Mr Johnson: A previous member mentioned a slant, and the only slant that I have seen at this meeting so far is what he has had to offer us, quite frankly.
Ms Townson, as I have reviewed your CV, it is most impressive: Economic Council of Canada, you were chief of public communications; Centre for the Study of Inflation and Productivity in Ottawa, senior economic adviser; Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, vice-president and director of research; Royal Bank of Canada, head office, economics department, economist/writer; Financial Times of Canada, Montreal economics editor. You have indeed kept any political affiliation outside of the framework of your business.
As well, I see that you have many publications and work in progress at this time and I just want to repeat that your CV is most impressive. You obviously have considerable experience and knowledge to bring to this committee. My question is simply this: How does your economic consulting background facilitate your ability to assess good public policy on taxation matters?
Ms Townson: A lot of the work I do is involved with public policy and that involves tax policy as well. Specifically in the tax area, as I mentioned earlier, I am currently working on a booklet for the federal government, through the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, on the impact of the tax system on women. I have also done work on the development of tax policy and so on. I am familiar with the whole process of public policymaking, as you will see from my CV there, through a whole broad range of areas. So I think I have some good background.
Mr Johnson: I would agree. I think you have an excellent background for the job you have and the task you have ahead. Thank you.
Mr Wiseman: I would like to pursue your CV as well. One of the comments here is, "Conducts research into economic and social policy, with special reference to income security and social programs, labour market issues, and status of women" and that some of your clients have included the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, federal government departments and so on. When you were doing this research, did you have an opportunity to also take a look at some other tax systems around the world? Was that part of the mandate there?
Ms Townson: That particular piece of research was not related to tax specifically; it was related to the economic situation of women, so tax was only a marginal issue in that case.
Mr Wiseman: Would this research give you a good background into sort of being able to compare what is happening in other jurisdictions to what is happening here?
Ms Townson: Yes. In fact, that particular piece of research involved the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, which in fact combines both eastern and western Europe, and North America. That was looking at policies in all of those of countries, and Canada and the US as well.
Mr Wiseman: Just to move down a little bit, "Editorial consultant." It seems that you have done some work for the C. D. Howe Institute. Is it possible for you to elaborate a little bit about what you did for the C. D. Howe Institute?
Ms Townson: Yes. Those that are listed as editorial consulting was working on studies that were produced by those organizations, including C. D. Howe and a number of corporate clients, where I was working with that material and trying to translate it into language that the general public could understand. It involved a knowledge of the technical aspects of their work and also the ability to communicate it to people who were not technical experts.
Mr Wiseman: Would you see that as being a very major part of your job as chairman?
Ms Townson: Yes, I do. I think this ability is important in this commission, because one of the things the commission is asked to do is to inform the general public about the tax system and how it works and to communicate those kind of things to the general public in a non-technical way and also to be a leader in forming a consensus among the various people who have input to the Fair Tax Commission, so I see those skills as important to the working of the commission.
Mr Wiseman: I have also seen that you have done freelance journalism for the Financial Post.
Ms Townson: Yes, I write regularly for the Financial Post, in fact a column twice a week on personal finance, which involves a lot of stuff to do with tax and with pensions and retirement and investment and that kind of thing. So I have quite an extensive knowledge of the tax system and of those kinds of issues.
Mr Wiseman: I also see that you worked for the Royal Bank of Canada at its head office and that you were responsible for communicating the bank's perspective on economic matters. Was this still in line with being able to communicate effectively with the jargon and translate it into readable and understandable --
Ms Townson: Yes, that is true. In fact, a lot of my career has been involved with that. As you know, I have a degree in economics, but a lot of my career has been spent in trying to take technical information that I am able to understand because of my background and communicate it to people who do not have the technical expertise but who need the information that is being generated. So I would see that skill as quite an important one in terms of the work of the commission.
Mr Wiseman: Do you feel comfortable chairing meetings and being part of meetings and organizations?
Ms Townson: Yes. I have had quite a bit of experience in that. As you will notice there, I was with the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women in Ottawa as vice-president and that involved a lot of chairing of meetings all over the country, as a matter of fact, so I am quite comfortable in doing that.
Mr Hayes: Ms Townson, your résumé also indicates that you are an "editorial consultant to public and private sectors." Can you explain to us or maybe elaborate a little bit on how you feel your experience here would really enhance your role in this commission?
Ms Townson: Yes. In a way that was part of my response to Mr Wiseman just now, in that the editorial consulting that I do involves, as I was saying, translation of technical information into language that people can understand. It also involves working with a number of different types of organizations from federal government departments to consulting firms like McKinsey to private clients like the Bank of Montreal and Shell Canada and so on. So I am used to working with people from the business community and from community-based organizations and so on. I think those skills and abilities will also be valuable in terms of working for the commission.
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Mr Johnson: This is more on a personal note, I guess. Just for my own curiosity, I wanted to know, I studied economics at the Labour College of Canada at the University of Ottawa, and Sidney Ingerman was my professor there. I wanted to know if you knew him.
Ms Townson: Yes.
Mr Sola: Ms Townson, I would like to ask you, when you were approached to accept this position, were you given a time frame that you were expected to sit on this commission? Would it be for the mandate of this government, a five-year time frame or would it be a one-year expectation from you? I think somebody with your impressive credentials must have been given some sort of sense of how much time she would have to dedicate to this commission.
Ms Townson: My understanding is that the mandate of the commission is for a period of three years. In terms of my own personal involvement, I do not know. This is clearly not a full-time appointment. I am told it is a few days a month, but I think that is going to vary according to the volume of work that is coming through the commission. There may be times when it is quite a strong commitment a month and there may be other times when it is only a day or two. I think on an ongoing basis that will vary.
Mr Sola: Okay. At the same time, I guess, comes the next question. I am not expecting you to divulge it, but was there any remuneration mentioned when you were approached?
Ms Townson: My understanding is that there will be the usual rate that is paid to members of commissions. I am a member of the Pension Commission of Ontario, as you will see from my CV, and there is a standard rate that is paid in Ontario to members of commissions like this, and I am told it will be the same kind of rate for this commission.
Mr Sola: Okay then, when you were approached, were you expected at the end of your term to come up with a broad overview, a broad set of recommendations, sort of à la Thomson report for the social services commission here in Ontario in the last session, or were you going to come up with a certain series of ad hoc recommendations in accordance with the questions posed on this sheet that we were given?
Ms Townson: I think it will be a kind of a combination of both, if you will. I understand the reason why this is not a royal commission is that there was a feeling that the government did not want to sort of go for years and years without anything and then at the end get this massive report. So I think the intention is, as I understand it, the commission will issue reports along the way, every few months, depending on what research it is generating and so on, and there will also be, as I understand it, a report with recommendations at the end of the period of time. But that would mean, as I said, there is nothing to prevent the commission from issuing reports in the interim and making recommendations which could be acted on if the Treasurer so wishes.
Mr Sola: But we can look to a recommendation at the end for a broad overhaul of the whole system?
Ms Townson: I would think so. I think at this point it would be premature to say exactly how that would work, but as I said, there is nothing to prevent the commission from issuing reports in the meantime. In fact, I think those are expected. So there might be one, for example, on one of these specific issues that we are asked to look at that might come out within the first year or even in a shorter period of time.
Mr Sola: In the introduction of this commission, it says, "Objectives of the Fair Tax Commission," and in the third paragraph it says one of the objectives is to "enhance the public's understanding of the tax system and thereby increase the system's sense of legitimacy." Is this not some sort of public relations on behalf of the government, this specific sentence?
Ms Townson: I would not see it as that, no. As I was answering a previous questioner over here, the columns I do in the Financial Post are specifically answering questions from readers and my experience has been that the average person does not understand the tax system. The way I interpret this part of the mandate here is that there is a need to communicate how the tax system works -- what is the impact of the tax system on the people, how the various types of taxes interact with each other and so on -- and my experience, as I said, has been that there is a real need for the public to understand just the mechanics of it. That is the way I would interpret that part of the mandate.
Mr Sola: I just thought of another thing. Since this is a provincial commission, will your recommendations be applicable to the federal scene as well?
Ms Townson: I think inevitably they will have to take into account the way that federal and provincial taxes interact and there may conceivably be some recommendations that would have an impact on the federal system. I do not think you can study the provincial system in isolation from the federal, so that will clearly have to be taken into account.
Mr Sola: I wish you well and I hope you have the same impact on the tax system that the Thomson commission had on our social services.
Mr Grandmaître: Ms Townson, you were saying you were expecting to sit twice a month?
Ms Townson: No, I did not say that.
Mr Grandmaître: Oh, I am sorry.
Ms Townson: I said it may be a few days a month, it may be more often than that. I think that is something the commission would have to work out once the appointments are confirmed. I guess at that point we will have to flesh out the mandate and decide just how often we need to meet and how we will meet and whether there will be hearings or just how, exactly, we will proceed from there.
Mr Grandmaître: That was my next question. Will you be travelling? It says in your objectives that you are expected, I think, to be meeting constituent groups across the province. Will this be a travelling commission?
Ms Townson: I would not expect it would be travelling all the time, no, but I do not think there is anything to prevent it from travelling. For example, if we wanted to hear from people in northern Ontario, there would be no reason why we could not go up there and hold hearings there. I think at this point the way in which we operate is not clearly established. That would be something for the commission as a whole to decide, probably in consultation with the Treasurer, once we get established and so on. But that input from the various communities, as I said earlier, I would regard as very important and if it means travelling, then I do not see anything to prevent us from doing that.
Mr McLean: Ms Townson, I would like to get some direction, just maybe as chairperson, where you going to head the committee, and I have a couple of questions, one with regard to income tax. As you know, a person on minimum wage pays over $300 taxes a year, and I would like to know if you think that is fair.
Ms Townson: I think one of the things the commission is asked to look at is the impact of the tax system on those at the lower end of the income scale, so that would be something we would be looking at.
Mr McLean: In your own personal opinion, do you think it is fair that a person at minimum wage should be paying income tax?
Ms Townson: In general terms, the impact of the tax system should be minimized on those who least can afford to pay and it should be a progressive system, but just exactly how you make it more equitable is what the commission is charged with looking at.
Mr McLean: A family of four living at the poverty line pay $909 a year income tax. How would you make that more fair?
Ms Townson: There have been things introduced at the federal level, like low-income tax credits and so on, but I cannot say how I would change the whole tax system to make it fair. That is what the commission is asked to look at. It is not my own views that are going to prevail, necessarily. The whole commission will be there looking at that, based on research and based on input from other people in the community.
Mr McLean: What is the salary base for the chair of a committee?
Ms Townson: The salary base? There is no salary. It is a per diem rate, as I understand it, and it is the same per diem rate that anybody on any other commission in Ontario will get.
Mr McLean: There are some in Ontario who are getting over $500 a day.
Ms Townson: I do not think it is that much.
Mr McLean: But you would have some idea of what the going rate is.
Ms Townson: On the pension commission -- as I said, I am a member of the pension commission -- the commissioners get $195 a day.
Mr McLean: I am sure the per diem for the chairman would be indicated to you when you accepted the nomination.
Ms Townson: The chair of the pension commission, I think, gets about $250 or $300 and I think this is probably in the same range.
Mr McLean: So was that not discussed when you were approached.
Ms Townson: Yes. We were told it would be the same rate as other commissions and I think that is the range.
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Mr Sutherland: From your experience, you said the column you write is based on letters you get and you have also done quite a bit of consulting for different companies. Have you noticed a growing sense of frustration with the taxation system in the type of letters you have been receiving and commenting on?
Ms Townson: Yes. Clearly, I think people feel it is very complicated and difficult to understand and in my experience they do not understand how it affects them personally. There is a lot of confusion. I think particularly since new reforms were introduced, it seems to have, for the average person, become even more confusing than it was before.
Mrs MacKinnon: Ms Townson, forgive me. I was a few minutes late coming in, and you may have answered this question; if you did, you will just have to bear with me. I cannot help but notice in your write-up here, your résumé, how much work you have done in regard to the women of the country, and I was just wondering how you feel your experience would work on this commission in regard to the issue surrounding women and fair taxation.
Ms Townson: As you will have seen from the mandate, one of the specific things the commission is asked to look at is the impact of the tax system on women, so that is part of the mandate. Personally, as I think I was saying before you arrived, I am currently working on a tax booklet for the federal government on the impact of the tax system on women, so that is an aspect of the tax system that I personally am concerned about. I am not sure if that answers your question or not.
Mrs MacKinnon: Do you see at some time perhaps, if you are appointed, publishing the same type of booklet provincially for taxes as they affect the women of the province?
Ms Townson: I think that would be a matter for the government to decide, but if there is a research commission for this Fair Tax Commission, as of course there will be, there would be nothing to prevent having a piece of research on that specific aspect, and that presumably would be published. There could be spinoffs from that I guess in terms of a book for general distribution, but that may not be a decision that the commission is to make; that might be a government decision.
The Chair: I would like to ask you a couple of questions as well. Do you have any concerns about the makeup of the committee? I heard concerns yesterday about the fact that there was one representative, I think, from out of the province. I know looking at it, there is no representative, for example, resident in eastern Ontario, only one from northern Ontario. I happen to represent the east. I guess I have some concern in respect to that.
Another element that you might wish to comment on is the fact that there apparently is only one individual with significant business background on the commission as well. I know we have heard comments in the recent past of concern about the competitive edge of Ontario business and industry and the fact that we may be finding ourselves in a situation where we are not going to have that competitive edge, and part of that is attributed to the tax burden within Canada and within Ontario. So I am just wondering if you think the voice or voices, if you will, on the committee perhaps are going to be strong enough in respect to some of those concerns being expressed, and also the regional representation on the committee.
I know you have not had an awful lot of time to reflect on these things, but maybe you do have some observations.
Ms Townson: I think there was a deliberate attempt to try and choose commission members who represented a wide range of constituencies. There is somebody there who represents large corporations, a former chief executive officer of General Electric, I believe. There is somebody there who represents small business. I think it is always difficult on a commission like this to choose the whole range of representation, both regional and sectoral and so on. What I would say is that where a particular interest is not represented as a commission member, there should be a specific effort by the commission to solicit views from that particular sector, even though that area or that sector is not represented by a commission member.
As I said earlier, what I regard as one of the most important things about this commission is that it will deliberately seek out input from various communities and various sectors and so on. That is a really important part of the mandate, as I see it.
It is not a commission that is going to go away and sort of shut itself up in a room and read all the books and study things without hearing from people in various communities. I think where there is a perceived lack of representation among the commission members themselves, those communities can be brought in through other ways, perhaps. Now you also asked me about the --
The Chair: The regional representation, because my own view, having spent 10 years in the Legislature and living in eastern Ontario in an essentially rural area, and talking to people, for example, in eastern Ontario and then talking to people in the Metro area, they certainly, dealing with many issues, have certainly quite different perspectives and quite different approaches. I see that in this commission something like eight of the appointees are --
Mr Bradley: Eight are from Toronto.
The Chair: Eight are from Toronto, so I think that has to have some impact on the way they are going to approach this in terms of the final decisions and recommendations that are made to cabinet.
Ms Townson: As I said, I think it will be important in those situations for the commission to specifically look for viewpoints from those communities, like the eastern Ontario ones that you mention that are not specifically represented by a commissioner. There would be nothing to prevent the commission, once it gets established and once it starts thinking about the way it is going to operate, from conceivably setting up sort of subcommittees or other groups or something like that where representatives of those communities like the ones you mentioned could be included. I think the commission has to pay particular attention to hearing the viewpoints of people from all over the province in the way that you mentioned.
The Chair: I am curious about your reaction. I know yesterday in the announcements of the transfer payments there was some report in the press that the Treasurer indicated there may clearly be a need for additional taxes in the upcoming budget because of the pressures of the economy in its current state. I am wondering how you would react as chair if, rather than simply additional taxes under the current tax structure, the government proceeded to introduce new taxes, a speculation tax, for example. How would you view that sort of an initiative? Would you view it as undermining your efforts if there were indeed new initiatives in the tax field while you are still out there trying to determine what is best and what is most appropriate for the people of Ontario?
Ms Townson: I do not know. I think it would be unlikely for the Treasurer to introduce some major new tax like that, having just appointed a commission to look at what taxes should be introduced. I would think it would be surprising if he then went ahead and introduced one without waiting for advice from the commission.
The Chair: You think it is highly unlikely.
Ms Townson: I think so, yes.
The Chair: Okay. I am glad to hear that. One other quick comment: I know this is maybe unfortunate because of our time limitations, but I notice in your CV that one of the speeches you gave in 1988 was entitled The Role of Government and the Private Sector in Creating Full Employment. I wonder if you could just sort of capsulize that, especially the role of government in creating what you -- I am not sure how you define full employment but try to relate it to your current responsibilities now in the taxing area.
Ms Townson: First of all, the speech that you refer to, I think, was one that I gave in Halifax, and it related to economic development in the Atlantic region, where, as I am sure you know, there are specific, very difficult problems that they have had to deal with in terms of declining industries and so on.
That particular conference at which I was invited to speak was looking at what government could do in the Atlantic region to create employment, whether or not reliance on programs like UI and so on had to be changed and that kind of thing. So the particular speech you refer to was addressing the specific problems of the Atlantic region. In terms of government policy generally in full employment and on, I think we have to look at the mandate of this commission as a long-term mandate.
Sure, the economy is in a recession at the moment and there are things that happen during a recession that make it very difficult to change policy, but this is a commission that is looking at the tax system generally, not just in terms of what is happening to the economy right now, but how it might be restructured over the longer term to provide a more equitable system that would at the same time generate the revenues that government needs. I think the commission's work has to be looked at on the longer-term basis rather than addressing particular problems that we might have right now because of the recession.
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Mr Grandmaître: On income tax, as you know, the federal government collects provincial income tax for us and our income tax is based on a percentage of the federal income tax. Do you not think that if the commission is to look at the global ball of taxation, and you are looking at a fairer way or more equitable way of taxing people, especially on income tax, this will necessarily mean that the federal legislation would have to be amended?
Ms Townson: Are you asking me that?
Mr Grandmaître: Yes. If we agree on this, if we agree that the federal taxation legislation or Income Tax Act will need an amendment or amendments or some modification, do you not think it makes it more difficult for you to reach that conclusion, that this is the way the income tax system in the province of Ontario should work when you know that the federal government has the upper hand on income tax?
Ms Townson: I think in making recommendations on how the tax system should be made more equitable, those kinds of things are clearly things that the commission would have to take into account, but that is not to say that it could not make recommendations --
Mr Grandmaître: Oh no.
Ms Townson: -- for change along those lines. After all, Quebec collects its own income tax. It may be that in the future other provinces will follow that route; I do not know, but I think --
Mr Grandmaître: It looks like everybody is going their own way anyhow.
Ms Townson: Who knows at this point? But I think the fact that the federal Income Tax Act would have to be changed is not something that should constrain the kind of advice that the commission might choose to give in the end, although it is clearly something that the commission would have to seriously take into account if it wanted to make that kind of recommendation for change.
Mr McLean: One question on an article here from the Hamilton Spectator of last November: It says that during the election the NDP promised a minimum corporate income tax, a speculation tax and an inheritance tax. since this is being studied now by the committee, Mr Rae denied that the government had backtracked on its election promises. How does that statement coincide with what your committee is going to --
Ms Townson: I am not here to speak for the government and its election promises. I know what we are asked to look at, and those are some of the things that we are asked to look at, corporate taxes, minimum corporate taxes, a wealth tax and so on. Those are on the agenda of items that the Treasurer is asking us to look at.
Mr McLean: Do you believe that of the 10 members, it is right that we should have one from another province on that committee?
Ms Townson: Who is from another province? I am not sure what you are talking about.
Mr McLean: There is one from Hull, Quebec. I am not sure which one it is now, but there is one of the 10.
Ms Townson: I am not aware that there is someone from another province.
Mr McLean: It does not matter whether you are aware of it or not. I asked you if it was fair and reasonable that there should be a member of that committee, one of the 10, from another province.
Ms Townson: I am not aware that there is someone from another province.
Mr McLean: If there was one, do you think it would be fair?
Ms Townson: That is a hypothetical question that I cannot answer. Besides which, I did not make the appointments.
Mr McLean: It is pretty hard to get an answer.
Mr Bradley: Just for clarification, there is a person who lists an address as Hull, Quebec. That is what the member is making reference to. It says 6-208 Des Trembles Boulevard, Hull, Quebec, and it is Susan Giampietri.
Ms Townson: As Mr Grandmaître will know, people who work in Ottawa sometimes live in Hull, but they consider themselves Ontarians.
Mr Bradley: They can get a rebate on the Ontario sales tax, however, and --
Mr Hayes: On a point of order, please, Mr Chair: It is related to this. The statement was made that if they are living in Hull, they should be paying their taxes in Ontario. We have checked this out and those type of people that work in Ontario and live in Hull do pay taxes in both places, we understand.
The Chair: Any additional questions for our witness? Nothing at all? Thank you very much, Ms Townson, for appearing before us and we wish you well.
FIONA NELSON
The Chair: We are a little ahead of schedule, which is good. Our next witness is present, Fiona Nelson. Ms Nelson, are you present?
Ms Nelson: Yes.
The Chair: I'm not sure.
Ms Nelson: Last time I looked.
The Chair: Last time you looked. Great. Would you like to come forward, please? Welcome to the committee. Would you like to make some brief opening comments before we open it up for questions?
Ms Nelson: It might be helpful, because I noticed in the material you got that the gremlins got into the fax machine and you did not get the second page of my résumé and I did have some with me. I might have enough. In the event that you obviously have not had a chance to get all the pearls on the second page, I could start by filling you in a bit, if that would be useful.
The Chair: The clerk can pick those up and we will circulate them so we will have that much more time for questions and responses.
Ms Nelson: All right.
The Chair: You were a selection for review by the third party, so we will begin the questioning with Mr McLean. In all these we have the 20-minute slots for each caucus.
Mr McLean: On the number of people that have been selected for the committee, there is nobody on the committee that has, from what I have observed, any background in health care delivery, health care institutions, agriculture community or export industry, resource-based industry or manufacturing-based industry. I am wondering if as a committee member, you would feel that with no background such as I have just mentioned, it would be a detriment to that committee.
Ms Nelson: It is interesting you would ask. I have been for many years a member of the Toronto Board of Health, I am on the liaison committee between the Premier's councils on the global economy and on health strategy. I have been active in health planning for many years and it is a matter of great interest to me. I have done a lot of work on both the economics of the health care system and on healthy populations.
I am also a farmer and am very interested in the farming community and in farm economics, both rural farming and urban agriculture. I have been an environmentalist for many years, and I have had a fair amount of study as the president of a national environmental organization in working with the United Nations on the Brundtland report. Those are areas of very keen interest and long-time study for me, so if that is a deficit on the part of the commission, I may help to fill it in a bit.
Mr McLean: It is nice to hear that. I am pleased to hear that, as a matter of fact; I really am.
Mr Stockwell: That is on page 2 on the résumé you just received.
Mr McLean: I did not see it. We did not have that page, I guess.
Ms Nelson: Yes. Technology lets us down now and then.
Mr McLean: That is right.
Ms Nelson: So the second page never arrived; sorry about that.
Mr McLean: I would like to the into the tax area a little bit. It has been indicated that there should be a minimum tax, that everybody should pay tax, minimum, whether it is a corporation or private or whatever. Do you believe that would be something that would be fair, that type of a tax?
Ms Nelson: I do not know yet. I know there is staff attached to the commission and I assume that the research they will turn up will help us to come to a conclusion one way or the other on that subject. I really am not at all sure at this stage whether that would be a useful thing or whether the mechanics of attempting to collect that would be a bigger burden than it was worth. I just do not know.
Mr McLean: If a corporation had a gross revenue of $250,000, do you feel that corporation should pay tax?
Ms Nelson: I think there are a few variables in that one that I do not know, so it would be very difficult for me to say what kind of business they were in and what other extenuating circumstances or externalities there were to take into account.
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Mr McLean: But the Treasurer very strongly indicated that all corporations and business should pay tax, and he was looking at an 8% minimum.
Ms Nelson: But my understanding is that the commission is at arm's length to the Treasurer, so presumably the Treasurer's opinion will be one of many we consider.
Mr McLean: I appreciate that. You said you are involved in urban agriculture.
Ms Nelson: Also rural. I have a farm as well.
Mr McLean: Where is your farm located?
Ms Nelson: Near Brighton.
Mr McLean: What type of a farm is it?
Ms Nelson: Minimal. It was worked-out corn land. My son is living there and he has been restoring the soil, because as you know if you grow corn for any length of time you ruin the soil. So he is restoring the soil and trying to get it back into shape. He has been growing clover and oats and plowing it in and he has sort of a small mixed farm. He sort of supports his family there at the moment. I do not know if we will get ever beyond that level.
Mr McLean: I do not suppose he would be paying income tax, would he?
Ms Nelson: I never asked him.
Mr McLean: It would be a good question. You have an in to find out about agriculture; I can see that.
Ms Nelson: Yes, I suppose that is true. I know I am pouring money into it like a bottomless pit.
Mr Stockwell: Then it is official; you are a farmer.
Mr McLean: I own a dairy farm, so I realize a little what farmers have to go through and it bothers me when I hear that the Treasurer wants to put a minimum 8% tax on them. I know many farmers who are going broke and out of business and I just hope you will look into that aspect and I am glad to hear that you are.
Ms Nelson: I have not noticed too many poor dairy farmers, however. I think quotas are worth quite a bit.
Mr McLean: The fact is that I have worked off the farm all of my life, so I pour my money into it too.
Ms Nelson: Yes, I am sure you do.
The Chair: Mr Stockwell, do you have any questions?
Mr Stockwell: Not at this point.
The Chair: All right. We will move on to the Liberal caucus. Any questions from the members of the Liberal caucus? Oh, I am sorry, it is the government caucus.
Mr Grandmaître: We did have an election, Mr Chairman.
The Chair: Mr Wiseman, do you have any questions?
Mr Wiseman: Yes. I would like to pursue some of the items in your curriculum, if you would not mind. I notice that you have been the chair of a number of committees. Could you perhaps give us a list of what those chairs were.
Ms Nelson: Oh my. How far back?
Mr Wiseman: Not terribly, because we have only got an hour.
Ms Nelson: I have chaired the Toronto board several times, most recently last year. I have not chaired too many things at the school board lately because in the last two or three years the provincial government has been keeping me fairly busy. I was chair of the education committee on the Premier's council on the global economy. I have also been doing a fair amount of work at the Ministry of Health on the AIDS advisory committee. I have been working a lot in AIDS.
I am on the Learning Programs Advisory Council of the Ministry of Education and I have been for several years, and I have also been quite active as president of the Ontario School Trustees' Council, and in provincial and federal education politics.
Most of the chairing and most of the work I have been doing has in fact been outside the school board. I have been active on a lot of environmental work, not particularly chairing things except for the environmental organization, the non-governmental voluntary organization that I have been working on with the United Nations. So I have been doing work that has not necessarily been called chairing. That is not very useful to you. Do you have a more specific question?
Mr Wiseman: I just want to pursue that for a moment. With your involvement with the educational system, as you know, the funding for education is a very serious question in a lot of people's minds. Since you have been involved with it from a taxation point of view, are there any areas that you would particularly like to examine as a committee or if you had input into those areas?
Ms Nelson: Certainly the significant off-loading from the federal government to the provincial, and the provincial to the local area, has produced a bit of a crunch, as you know, with property taxes. I am obviously most familiar with the city of Toronto, but because I have been working at the provincial level in the trustee organizations, I am aware that there have been problems all over the province, that the whole funding of education needs quite significant work. I think we need to do a fair amount of research and I am hoping the staff of the commission is going to be able to undertake that kind of research so we can look at a more appropriate way to fund some of these things that we think are absolutely essential.
For example, it has been very clear over the past few years that government policy has been moving towards the inclusion of significant portions of child care under the aegis of the school system. At the moment, there are legislative problems, clashes between various ministries, that I hope will be overcome. As well, the building of child care facilities at schools is a significant expense that has to be looked at, and the running of child care and the whole pay equity issue around child care workers are all drains on municipal taxes at the moment. These are all areas I hope we have a good look at.
Mr Hayes: Ms Nelson, I am pleased to see we do have someone on this tax commission who does have some experience in the agricultural and rural area. I think that would be a real asset. I see you are also a member of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
Ms Nelson: Yes.
Mr Hayes: Do you have any suggestions or ideas on some of the concerns dealing with farmers? One of the things I am sure members here are aware of is that they certainly have been losing money for years. You can certainly relate to that. Do you feel they have been treated fairly in the past as far as taxes are concerned?
Ms Nelson: I think there have been some ways in which we have been remarkably shortsighted. We have put a lot of money into subsidies for tile drainage, which of course is ruining the water table. I think we need to look at some of the ways in which we have inducements and encouragements as well as things that discourage people.
It is very clear that vast amounts of the wealth, if you like, of farmers is tied up in their land, yet if we allow that land to go for land speculation we are ruining the agricultural base of this province. At the moment, I think this whole province is addicted to California when we could be far more self-sufficient in food. It seems to me that our land use policy and agricultural policy and food policy need to be brought more closely into alignment. I am not sure if the tax policy is the way to do that, but it is certainly an area of interest to me and I would love to see us do some real research on how we protect the equity of farmers and at the same time do not allow all our best land to go under concrete. That is going to be a real toughy, and I suspect there is going to have to be some tax policy developed there. I do not know what it is going to be, though.
Mr Sola: In answer to Mr McLean's question, you said you were approaching the minimum tax with an open mind. For the record, because we asked that of the chair, would you indicate whether you have a political affiliation?
Ms Nelson: Oh, yes. I sort of assumed by now everyone knew what it was. I am a New Democrat.
Mr Sola: That is why I am saying for the record. It seems to me strange, because the same question was posed to Ms Townson and she answered as well that she was approaching the minimum tax with an open mind. Yet it has been NDP policy for ages, a recommendation that especially a minimum corporate tax be included in the taxation base. Now, if you are an active member of a party that has been proposing such a policy for a long time, can you really approach that question in an unbiased fashion?
Ms Nelson: Yes. The NDP is the New Democratic Party, not the new dictatorship party. We do not all have to toe a line. Party policy is developed by the membership, and it is not the same since the Regina Manifesto. There are a great many ways in which party policy is developed and altered. I have no idea whether that will show as the best way to go. Clearly you have to do a fair amount of research and development to find out what is the most appropriate thing.
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It is obvious in a flourishing society that if people are employed and are capable of doing it they should all pay tax, but there also have to be a variety of ways of protecting people. For example, right now the tremendous shortfall in revenues in the municipalities because of the decline in the economy means that a lot of businesses that might have paid a quite significant tax last year will not this year because they will not have a sufficient income to make that possible. I would not ever make a blanket statement like that without an enormous number of caveats to make sure that people are not being unjustly treated.
Mr Sola: But I find this statement a little hard to swallow when you are actively propagating a policy that specifically stated, "Yes, a minimum corporate tax." You cannot say that you have to approach that with caveats. You were not stating any caveats during this last campaign or, say, for the last 20 years -- I forget when it first popped up. If you are an active party member, and knowing your background I know you are a committed party member, I cannot accept that you would not accept the party policy as gospel.
Ms Nelson: I am not a fundamentalist. I think I can embrace this party because the vast majority of its policies are things I agree with. That does not mean I agree with the literal interpretation of every word in the party policy. Also, it is important to me to remember that the commission is at arm's length to the government, so whatever the party policy is may not necessarily be the recommendations of the commission when we are finished with our investigations. At the same time, the Treasurer may not accept what we come up with. I think there are an enormous number of steps before party policy comes into the commission or the commission's work bumps up against the party policy.
I have talked to Liberals and Conservatives who are not 100% wedded to all their party policy, but it is the best of a bad lot to some of them. I am not able to say that every word of the New Democratic Party's policy is something I recite before I go to bed every night and that I subscribe to. I do not know if that is reassuring to you or not, but that is certainly my position.
Mr Sola: I just hope your words do not come back to haunt you when your recommendations come up.
Ms Nelson: It would not be the first time.
Mr Stockwell: Did you approach the Treasurer or Treasury officials to be appointed or did they approach you?
Ms Nelson: They approached me. I was quite surprised.
Mr Stockwell: You were?
Ms Nelson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: So this is sort of hand-picked, in essence.
Ms Nelson: I think you would have to ask the Treasurer that. I do not know how they arrived at the list.
Mr Stockwell: Do you know the other members on the tax commission?
Ms Nelson: The only one I know is Mr Blundell, the past president of General Electric, because we were on the Premier's council together.
Mr Stockwell: So that is the only other member you know.
Ms Nelson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: The questions previous surrounded party affiliation, so I can assume that you worked or contributed this past election to the cause?
Ms Nelson: In the provincial election?
Mr Stockwell: Yes.
Ms Nelson: Oh, yes. I gave some money to a couple of candidates.
Mr Stockwell: Okay. The other questions I have revolve around your beliefs or agreements with the NDP and its ideas for minimum corporate tax and so on. What about wealth tax? Do you have any firm commitments or beliefs when it comes to wealth tax?
Ms Nelson: I am not an expert on taxation. The only belief I have around tax is that tax is intended to redistribute the wealth of society for the benefit of society, and how one does that I suspect has a lot to do with one's ideology. It would make sense to take money from people who have it rather than people who do not. That is the only comment I really have on that.
Mr Stockwell: Therefore, you really did not understand the NDP position on the minimum corporate tax and their tax position and so on previous to being approached to sit on this commission. Are you suggesting you did not understand it or that you understood it but did not agree, or what?
Ms Nelson: I would say I understood it, and to the extent that it was a political statement rather than a worked-out economic policy it made sense. As you know, any political platform is very bare bones; in fact, until one actually gets into the position of implementing it, it probably does not get past the bare-bones stage. So my assumption is that since this is called a Fair Tax Commission, it is going to look at the fairest way to provide equity in the province.
Mr Stockwell: "Fair" is a purely subjective word, would you not agree?
Ms Nelson: No, I think there are some fairly good definitions of "equity."
Mr Stockwell: Definitions of "fair"?
Ms Nelson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: I see. Have you read the tax commission outline issued by the ruling party? It says, "Specific Issues to be Examined by the Commission." I do not know if you received this.
Ms Nelson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: I asked this of the previous person that was in here, because I find them slightly slanted, slightly bent. It is assuming certain things that I thought you were going to go and find out. Maybe you can help me. "(a) What changes to or restructuring of the existing tax-delivered assistance would increase the fairness of the overall tax burden on low-income individuals and families?" It seems to me that they are making the assumption that it is unfair -- I guess "unfair" is the best word -- that "the existing tax-delivered assistance programs" are unfair on "the overall tax burden of low-income individuals and families." Would you agree with that?
Ms Nelson: I think so. It seems to me that the existence of food banks at the moment tells us that there is something very, very wrong with our distribution system in this society. I am particularly interested in the welfare of children, and it is interesting to me that in the past 10 years the largest group of the poor are children and single mothers. Clearly, we must do something about that, since in my opinion children are the responsibility of the society as a whole.
Mr Stockwell: I am not going to make the arguments. I just was curious if you were in agreement with that.
Ms Nelson: Yes, sure.
Mr Stockwell: Do you agree with, "What viable options does Ontario have for introducing a wealth tax to improve tax equity?" Do you agree that there is in fact a need to introduce some kind of option in wealth tax, because the present system is not equitable?
Ms Nelson: I think in that question the operative word is "viable." You have to find a mechanism, and I suspect that is going to be part of our job. We may have perceptions about certain things being fair or unfair and not be able to develop the mechanisms to do anything about it.
Mr Stockwell: I see what you are saying. You are suggesting that it may well in fact be unfair or inequitable, but there may not be a viable option out there for you to introduce that could --
Ms Nelson: Yes.
Mr Stockwell: But you substantially agree with that statement, though.
Ms Nelson: It is a question. My answer to the question is that I do not know yet.
Mr Stockwell: It is kind of an interesting question. It definitely is a question that is leading to a conclusion.
Ms Nelson: Sure.
Mr Stockwell: The conclusion is, if you take the last part of it, that we have to introduce wealth taxes to improve tax equity, and what we are looking for is not whether that is true but what viable option is available. Would you not agree?
Ms Nelson: Could be, yes. I think we have a lot of work to do on that one.
Mr Stockwell: Yes, so do I. "(e) What type of corporate minimum tax would be most effective in improving the fairness of the tax system by ensuring that all profitable corporations pay a fair share of the corporate tax burden?" After your answers to the previous question, you were uncertain that there was a need for corporate minimum tax, or in fact if it was fair or not. It could be instituted as fair.
Ms Nelson: But the question is what type?
Mr Stockwell: My question, then, is: Are we now examining what type of corporate minimum tax? Are we therefore making that assumption that it is not whether we need a minimum corporate tax, it is now just what type of corporate minimum tax we need?
Ms Nelson: I have heard people in other political situations claim that there is at the moment a minimum corporate tax. It does however have, to the view of the ordinary citizen, some rather interesting wiggles to it, and I suspect that the fact this question is here means we need to have a look at exactly what is there at the moment in the corporate tax system and how do we maybe take out some of the wiggles. I do not know. I have not seen the research yet.
Mr Stockwell: Okay, I understand. So you are not certain on (e), because you have not seen the research, and when you get the research you will have a more informed view. I can appreciate that.
Ms Nelson: I do not think they would have needed a commission if we already had our minds made up.
Mr Stockwell: Gee, yes. I would agree with you. Thanks for that.
Mr Grandmaître: We are trying to establish the time this commission should sit: two years, three years. What is your understanding? Will you be sitting for three years, two years?
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Ms Nelson: I would like to sit until the end of the commission's work, if I do not get hit by a bus first. I do not know how long it is going to take. I would love to do it in six months and get on with whatever comes out of the commission. My understanding from having been in local government for the past 21 years is that it is a mare's nest and it is probably going to take us a while to figure out just where we are.
Mr Grandmaître: Especially in education. They last for ever.
Ms Nelson: Well, all the taxes. Those of us who are concerned about the environment are extremely concerned about the fact that the public in general pays for environmental cleanup and certain people who made the mess can walk away from it. Presumably we need to do some work on the tax system to make sure that responsibility stays with the people who are causing the trouble. Certainly Mr Bradley will remember some arguments that were made at the environmental round table along these lines, so this is not a new idea. But to do that, you cannot just lay it on top of the existing structure. That is why I presume it is going to take us a while just to get the complete picture of what the tax structure is in this province before we know where we can do something.
Mr Grandmaître: Do you not agree with me that if you were to sit for two, three years people will lose interest? Not only will people lose interest, but you will lose interest when it drags on. I was going to use Meech Lake as an example.
Ms Nelson: But people did not actually lose interest in that, as I recollect.
Mr Grandmaître: They had three years and it was a mess. I just want to remind you that I do not think you people should wait three years before action is --
Ms Nelson: I quite agree. My hope is that during the life of the commission we will find ways of keeping public interest alive. Presumably the research and work we are doing, some of it will be publishable during the life of the commission, and that will help to keep things going. Also, we are not going to deal with the whole waterfront all the time. I presume we will deal with it in pieces after we get the whole picture. I do not know. I am not the chair, I am not the research staff or anybody else, but it would seem to me that when you are cleaning house, you do not disrupt every room in the house. You make yourself a work plan and you work from room to room, and I would assume that is the same way we would attack this.
Mr McLean: How many rooms in the house?
Ms Nelson: That is what we have to find out first, is it not?
Mr Grandmaître: Take stock.
Mr Stockwell: I just hope they do not find my room.
Ms Nelson: Your mother has not been in lately, is that it?
Mr Stockwell: Not for a long time.
Mr Bradley: I notice in your résumé that you are a very busy person, and I know of your active interest in a number of different fields. I will ask this on a personal basis: Do you feel, with the criteria set down for the commission, that it is going to leave you, with your busy schedule, sufficient time to be able to make the contribution you would like to make to the commission?
Ms Nelson: Actually, that has never been a serious problem. If you set priorities, you can usually get stuff done. I am assuming that the secretariat and the staff of the commission will be preparing material for us in such a way that it makes the job manageable. All the people on the commission, from reading their résumés, have a fair amount on their plate, so my assumption is that we will work at it, because it is important, as fast as we can.
The thing is, you can only proceed so fast before a certain amount of work has to be done to catch up with you, and if you are hearing from people, stuff has to be analysed, it has to be put together for you. So I presume there is going to be a fair amount of staff work and therefore the commission will slate its meetings in such a way as to not drive the staff around the bend.
By the same token, I think all of us, because we have a fair number of involvements, will be able to bring fairly useful perspectives to the work. I do not see that as a detriment. I also think anybody who has been in public life at all for any length of time has learned to make priority lists and do things that way. They do not last long if they do not.
Mr Bradley: There is a fear in parts of the province of Ontario, segments of the province of Ontario, where people believe the government has its mind made up and the commission is simply appointed to carry out what the government wants and to legitimize the taxation policies of the New Democratic Party. What would your reaction be to that? I have heard part of that. What would your reaction be to that kind of fear that is out there?
Ms Nelson: I think it is very natural. There is always fear of the unknown, and this party is in power for the first time in this province, so I suspect there is the fear and curiosity thing working quite strongly. But my recollection of various commissions, both at the provincial and federal level in the past, is that they have often contained surprises for the government that appointed them. I doubt if there would be a difference here.
Mr Bradley: Your views are well known on a number of subjects. You have never been one who would not express those views, and I say that in a positive sense rather than a negative sense. I hope you do not consider this an insulting question; I know you will not when you hear it. Do you believe that the views you hold are such that it is going to be difficult to come to any conclusions other than those you already have on taxation matters in the province?
Ms Nelson: The thing is that my views on taxation are those of a taxpayer, and so my assumption is that I will be getting a lot of information from the staff, from the hearings or submissions or however we collect our opinions and data, that will give me some idea perhaps how to carry out some of the ideas I hold near and dear. I may in fact have to change the odd one; it has been known to happen before. I mean, if you look at the title, it is "fair tax," and I must admit I am more of an expert on equity than I am on taxes. I will see what comes of that. I have nine other commissioners to persuade before anybody else of whatever position I hold, so I suspect the meetings are going to be very interesting.
Mr Bradley: When I look at the makeup, some may not take too much persuading but others will, and I know you approach things with an open mind. I have watched you in the field of education. I know you have approached things with an open mind and sometimes have been at variance with some others who, one would assume, would have similar views to yours. You have been at variance with those from time to time.
I have a question about -- because you have served on a number of agencies, boards and commissions over the years, some elected positions -- your view on the fact that 8 of the people out of the 10 either reside in Metropolitan Toronto or work in Metropolitan Toronto. I recognize that geography should not be the number one criterion, but do you see a danger there that perhaps the commission will not reflect as well as it might the full province of Ontario and may be seen as a Toronto tax commission?
Ms Nelson: Certainly there might be a danger of that, but the fact that there is a staff that is supposed to do research for us, the fact that we are supposed to design a tax policy for the province, the fact that we are going to certainly, in one way or another, be hearing from the province, would lead me to suspect that we would reflect the needs of the whole province. After all, since this province has a manufacturing base and a resource base and an agricultural base, and we have to figure out how best to make that work for the economy of the province, we have dearly got to hear from all those bases. And the resource base is largely in the north, the agricultural base is almost entirely outside of Metropolitan Toronto, and in fact a lot of the manufacturing is, so I do not see how we can possibly deal with a decent tax policy without looking at the whole province.
Mr Bradley: My final question is, knowing that you are always willing to express your views on these matters, how did you react to yesterday's transfer payments?
Ms Nelson: Not well.
Mr Bradley: I think you just got my vote on this.
Ms Nelson: I understand the constraints that were on the Treasurer, but every time we have heard the transfer news in the past 20 years, it has not been good news to the education sector, and you know, I am hopeful that the commission may set about to remedy some of that.
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Mr McLean: That is a subjective question I wanted to follow up on. You have been on the school board for many years and your party has promised 60% funding from the province. You are now on the tax commission. How do you deem to go about doing that?
Ms Nelson: Oh, I do not know. First, you have to decide 60% of what, and then you start talking about local autonomy. You know, those are huge questions. The fact that almost every school board in the province is over the ceilings that were set by the previous government means that they have had to raise local rates whether they had any local base or not. So going back to an earlier answer, I think to one of Mr Stockwell's questions, what one says in an election campaign is the bare bones and the doing of it is going to be quite interesting, and whether the tax commission can assist the government to meet that promise or not, I do not know. It is a massive question and it is a huge amount of money. If you look at the local contribution to education and the provincial contribution, you are talking about nearly $10 billion a year, and that is a big chunk of the provincial revenue, so we have to look very carefully at how we go about finding what the 60% is and also what the 100% is.
Mr McLean: There are 10 members appointed to this commission. Would you be disappointed if one of them was appointed from outside of Ontario?
Ms Nelson: It depends what you mean by outside of it. If they have some relationship to the province, then presumably they have something to offer.
Mr McLean: Well, not living in Ontario.
Ms Nelson: Are you referring to the person who lives in Hull?
Mr McLean: Who lives in Hull, the address is Hull.
Ms Nelson: Yes, I tend to think of Hull as being part of Ontario, actually, because that is where an enormous amount of the federal government stuff is.
Mr Bradley: That ought to hit the wires.
Ms Nelson: Yes, well, I do not think that is a biggie, really.
Mr McLean: You do not?
Ms Nelson: No.
Mr McLean: Do you think that out of 10 commissioners, they could not find 10 in the province of Ontario?
Ms Nelson: Well, I think it is awfully easy to get sidetracked on that kind of thing.
Mr McLean: It appears that the whole tax stance of the government is the inside track, from what I gather, because the promise of the 60% is so important that I cannot believe that nobody knows how it is going to solve that problem now that it is in power.
Ms Nelson: I doubt if that is unique to this government. I think there are all kinds of things that are dealt with in an election campaign that do come home to roost one way or another when people get into power, and they have to find ways of dealing with it or saying why they are not dealing with it, so I do not think it is going to go away.
Mr McLean: You would probably agree with me that that is the problem with politics and politicians today, the fact that they make these commitments and do not fulfil them.
Ms Nelson: Sometimes they do not fulfil them and sometimes they cannot fulfil them and sometimes information comes up that tells them it is better not to and to do something else. I would hate to think that people would go ahead and do something that they had promised to do on the basis of insufficient information and then when they got sufficient information did not change their minds.
Mr McLean: Mr Laughren made the statements very clearly of all these corporations that do not pay tax. He had them all listed, several of them. You are saying there is going to be a new tax system and they still may not have to pay tax.
Ms Nelson: I am not saying they still will not to have to pay tax. I am saying devising the mechanism may be rather an interesting exercise because I think if you are going to call something a Fair Tax Commission, you had better have the appearance, at least, of fairness, if not the structure of fairness. I think that is what we are supposed to be doing, in fact trying to make it fair, but that may be very difficult to do. I do not know.
Mr McLean: It would be better if we just called it a tax commission.
Ms Nelson: I think it is useful to have that word "fair" in there because it keeps reminding us what our job is.
Mr Grandmaître: Perception.
Mr Stockwell: I have listened to your answers and I think some of them are very good. In fact, being the open-minded, free-thinking individual that I am, I have even accepted some of these --
Mr Bradley: He says with a smile on his face.
Mr Stockwell: -- I even accepted some of these responses that have, I think, stretched my interpretation of where I felt you stood previous to coming into this room. But one I have great difficulty with is the 60% funding. Now, when did you become confused on what "60% of what" was? Because in my past readings in the newspapers and so on of your very eloquent and definitive position on that, you were very clear what 60% was: 60% of operating money. Now today, much to my surprise, we seem to have a definition difficulty.
Ms Nelson: Oh, well, I think that developed over the last 20 years, because the Minister of Education, when he brought down the ceilings in 1971, had a definition of what the ceilings applied to which was not the same as our definition, and in fact we had to do a lot of very frantic work to get him to see that things like special education and that sort of thing did not fall within the ceilings that were applied. Then the teachers' pension plan was added to the what and then capital expenditures were added to the what, so I am saying that over the years the what has expanded or contracted, so much so that the very first thing we have to do is say, "60% of what?"
Mr Stockwell: With all due respect, you never seemed to have a difficulty when the Liberals and Conservatives were in power excluding pensions and excluding capital programs and taking 60% of operating. Today, you seem to have difficulty determining --
Ms Nelson: No, I do not have any difficulty with that.
Mr Stockwell: Oh, then give me your interpretation of the 60%.
Ms Nelson: I am saying I think the commission is going to have to work very hard on that one. There has been a variety of changes over the years. Bill 30, which produced the extension of funding to the separate schools, has produced multimillion-dollar capital expenditures that no one envisioned. The extension of child care into the schools has produced capital expenditures that no one envisioned. All kinds of program changes in the curriculum area over the years have lowered the class sizes and expanded the size of the space. The Partners in Action program has made a requirement for much expanded libraries in the schools. That is both an operating and a capital expenditure. You cannot, however, separate the one from the other. And the business of superannuation and the pensions was quite recently added. So this never used to be part of our calculations; that was part of the provincial government's calculations. Now with the downloading of a lot of these things, it has become part of ours, so when you say "operating," unfortunately the contributions to superannuation, all those things, now are part of our annual expenditures and we need to clarify very clearly what the 60% is and what the 100% is.
If it were simply the regular operating year by year of the schools, the teachers' salaries, the books and that sort of thing, that is fine. If it includes all those other things, then we have a very different job on our hands.
The Chair: This is your last question.
Mr Stockwell: Last question. Maybe it is a two-parter, Mr Chairman. Gee, the next trustee I run into, I am going to mention that you are really not clear on what the 60% is, because they thought you were very clear and your board was clear and all the boards in Metropolitan Toronto were very clear. In fact, I am shocked to hear you are not.
Ms Nelson: My answer actually was that my intention was that the provincial government was not clear, because it is the one that keeps changing what the 100% is. We have no power to do that as creatures of the provincial government.
Mr Stockwell: Then the question stands, and may be in written form later, which you did not answer: What is your interpretation of the 60%? The final point is, do you not think, before your party made this promise last election, that it should have gotten the interpretation down?
Ms Nelson: I think when that party policy was developed, perhaps they did have it in mind and things changed over the past few years. I am not at all sure. It would seem to me that the Fair Tax Commission has an enormous job on its hands if it is going to make recommendations in this area in defining exactly what it is talking about. I think we have been given a mandate that is fairly open to do that, first to make our definitions and then to make our recommendations, so I think that is yet to come.
The Chair: Anything further? The two caucuses have some time left. I guess not. We thank you very much, Ms Nelson, for appearing before us and wish you good luck with your new responsibilities and with your farm cash flow problems.
Ms Nelson: Yes, that is an old trouble. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Members, that wraps it up for this morning. As you can see by your agenda, at 2 o'clock this afternoon we are going to be meeting with the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society and that is an interest group that has some contributions to make in respect of the Ontario Municipal Board.
The committee recessed at 1140.
AFTERNOON SITTING
The committee resumed at 1404.
AGENCY REVIEW
Resuming consideration of the operations of certain agencies, boards and commissions.
ONTARIO MUNICIPAL BOARD
The Chair: Can we come to order, please.
PRESERVATION OF AGRICULTURAL LANDS SOCIETY
The Chair: The first witness this afternoon is from the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society to discuss that organization's concerns in respect to the Ontario Municipal Board and offer observations and answer questions from the committee members. Representing the society is Gracia Janes. Mrs Janes, would you like to come forward, please. Welcome to the committee.
Mrs Janes: Thank you, I am honoured to be here.
The Chair: Is it your intention to have a brief opening statement?
Mrs Janes: Just a little bit to explain what PALS is so that you know.
The Chair: All right, fine. How long do you think it will be?
Mrs Janes: Two minutes for that, and then I would like to read through my brief to put the particular emphasis I may wish to put on it.
The Chair: You wish to read your complete brief into the record?
Mrs Janes: If you do not mind, yes. It should not take more than five minutes at the most.
The Chair: Fine. Please proceed.
Mrs Janes: I would like to explain that PALS is an urban group mainly. There are some farmers; our advisers are farmers. We represent close to 1,000 people across the country with the bulk of the membership being between here and Niagara, and we have been in operation informally since 1976 and formally since 1977 as an incorporated body.
The Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society thanks the committee for this opportunity to address the issue of possible changes to the composition and activities of the Ontario Municipal Board.
It is appropriate that our group should speak to this subject, since with the exception of municipalities and perhaps some individuals or Canadian Environmental Law Association lawyers, PALS has had more occasions than most groups to appear before panels of the board, to advise others in similar circumstances or to join with other groups as representatives before the board or joint boards.
Our experience has been varied. In subject matter we have dealt with such issues as severance appeals, zoning bylaws, official plan amendments, soil stripping, aggregate mining applications and other issues. A current appeal, as a member of the Ontario Toxic Waste Research Coalition, involves an appeal to a joint board re the Ontario Waste Management Corp siting of a toxic waste facility on prime farm lands in West Lincoln.
As an incorporated body, a non-profit, voluntary group with no paid staff,we have brought our concerns before the board in various ways. Depending on our resources, we have had a lawyer before the board for as long as a year in the case of the Niagara hearings and as little as a day or two during severance hearings.
During major hearings, we have presented substantial witnesses but have rarely had enough funds to pay more than a token honorarium. We have also used cross-examination of the proponents' witnesses. In some cases we have had to resort to presenting our case solely through cross-examination due to the lack of funds and time constraints. Most recently, we have used a layperson to present our case, acting in place of a lawyer.
The results of our endeavours have ranged from extremely successful to extraordinarily difficult and discouraging. We have been praised by the OMB as defending the land in the absence of any other body, including the provincial government, and we have been vilified as being close to contempt of the process. We have had the dubious distinction of being declared frivolous by the Minister of Municipal Affairs and denied a hearing. We were later vindicated by the Ombudsman, who agreed that the minister did not prove we were frivolous but merely argued the case for the municipality.
A unique but also dubious distinction of being assessed costs by the board was lifted from our record by cabinet. Our case was not only taken up successfully by our lawyer, who pointed to the expertise of our witnesses, but by many groups across the province, spearheaded by CELA. The principles expressed in this case led to a provincial study of the unique micro-climate of the Fonthill Kame.
We have been helped by board chairmen to bring out the arguments re the need to have consideration of Food Land Guidelines and we have been hindered by the allowance of harassment by opposition lawyers.
So you can see that we have had considerable experience, both positive and negative, before the board. I would note that our positive experiences have not all related to cases won and our negative experiences to those that we lost. It has been a mixed bag.
Thus, we bring today what we feel is as accurate an opinion as possible, hopefully untinged by either wins or losses at the board. With this in mind, we raise the following issues.
Intervenor funding: Our major obstacle, and obviously that of most volunteer non-profit groups and individuals, has been inadequate funding. It seems inequitable that there is the possibility of such funding for environmental assessment hearings and joint board hearings with an environmental component, yet hearings such as ours, which indeed have profound environmental implications and are fought for the public good, have no such mechanisms.
In most of the cases we pursue, the land base, a non-renewable resource, is potentially at risk for lack of an adequate defence. The opposite case is usually put forward by those who have considerable funds, often high-priced lawyers and sometimes a pecuniary interest. We would argue that fairness, environmental concern and equity should be pursued through intervenor funds.
The legislation governing the OMB should be amended so that funds could be available where the case is being made by groups or individuals who have no pecuniary interest and who are arguing for the public good. Of particular importance are cases of major public interest, where non-renewable resources or environments are involved. The role of the board as a public watchdog would thus be enhanced and the perception that the board exists to further the interests of politicians, via municipal councils, and developers would be dissipated.
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Board composition: In our experience, board members, perhaps due to the preponderance of lawyers, urban planners, architects and other urban professionals, have had various levels of expertise related to our major defence mechanisms for food lands, the Food Land Guidelines. We have actually had a chairman admit to being unrepentantly ignorant of the guidelines and, at the other extreme, those who measured every issue raised on this policy's merit, as was the case in our Niagara hearing. While in the absence of intervenor expertise a board may subpoena witnesses on its own, we have not seen this happen.
The issue of food lands is essentially an environmental one, which requires some considerable understanding and breadth of knowledge, and environmental commitment, regarding interrelated environmental matters: storm-water runoff on farm lands, the impacts of illegal uses and the impacts of mining on the ground water. We recommend that there be many board members with a diversity of environmental experience, voluntary, professional and academic, to deal with such issues. As well, all board members should be given relevant training.
Board behaviour -- Standard of conduct: The board is a people's board, a public watchdog. How it treats those of the public who come before it is very important. Once again, our experience has been varied.
When on our own, without a lawyer, we have experienced quite courteous treatment, particularly when attending sessions re scheduling or appeal matters in Toronto. However, on occasion when represented by legal counsel, the treatment was close to being cruel and unusual punishment. Our lawyer, we presume, was supposed to defend us but was loath to offend a board member. Our perception was not one of fairness or unbiased behaviour on behalf of a board member.
There should be a mechanism to address this issue. It is difficult enough to come before a board, even for those who have done it many times. One is always nervous before the battery of lawyers and planners. The board's professional manner is very important as far as the public perception of fairness goes. There should be no flashes of temper and unprofessional manner where the public case is being put forward to the best of the intervenor's ability, within often strained budgets and with voluntary witnesses.
To highlight the most unacceptable incident in my experience, I would relate that a very gentle archdeacon of the Anglican church, who had in the British system an additional task of being sheriff of an enormous jurisdiction, was heard to say: "This is not the Inquisition. Surely the board is here to inquire only." Ironically, this hearing culminated in costs being levied against PALS, as previously mentioned, a lifting by cabinet and eventually a review of the issue of costs by the board.
We would recommend a code of conduct and some separate avenue of appeal for injured parties that would be separate from the Attorney General. Most people do not realize they can even go to the Attorney General, but I think it has to be separate from that kind of formal process, quite distinct from the outcome of the case before the board. The knowledge that there is such an avenue for review, other than the Attorney General and perhaps board peers, would go some way to ameliorating these breaches in common civility.
Board decisions: A serious problem with board decisions, even on major land issues, is the lack of consistency, particularly in its interpretation of government policy. There is no firm avenue of precedents, no precedent-setting cases. This has led to a spotty track record in land preservation. While some board members, perhaps with less environmental concern or poor knowledge of the Food Land Guidelines, allowed the highest uses to be urban, others firmly defended food lands.
It has also allowed important decisions to fade as time passes. For example, a 1960s Niagara-on-the-Lake decision allowed the town to preserve a large area for farming. The board ruled that if this did not happen, St Catharines should have the land for urban uses. The land is now industrial and a more recent board decision in 1979-80 paid scant attention to the prior ruling. In turn, the farther away we get from that significant Niagara hearing, the more it fades from view. As well, even within a short period of time, in the same municipality decisions vary. While a municipality is expected to be consistent in its planning, the board is not expected to be consistent.
We realize that the adversarial nature of the process is partly to blame, impacted heavily by high-priced planners and lawyers. But, that aside, certain changes to the nature of the board decision should be made.
We recommend that the board be required to take past decisions into account. Also, certain environmentally positive landmark cases should be used as precedent-setting. As well, the board should be obliged to explore certain areas of inquiry related to the government policy, either through the appellant or through expert ministry witnesses called by the board. These should cover the basics of environmental land protection. To do otherwise is to make a decision in an environmental vacuum.
The adversarial nature of the hearing: The adversarial nature of the process is particularly detrimental at hearings of an environmental nature, where the opponents are arguing in the public good and have no pecuniary interest. These effects are intensified by the fact that the public usually has one lawyer or none, while the opposition often is represented by planners and lawyers, often bolstered by planners and lawyers from two levels of government. If there is a region involved, that is how it goes. In the Niagara urban boundary hearings, there were by some counts 35 lawyers and innumerable planners against one planner and one lawyer for PALS.
The board hearing is not a court hearing, yet the aggressive style of the lawyers very much resembles the prosecution found in court. Rather than attempt to lay all the environmental planning facts on the table for calm consideration and decision-making by the board, lawyers almost inevitably attempt to undermine the credibility of the witnesses.
The tactics of legal counsel weigh heavily on the voluntary sector intervenors. For example, in the major 1979-80 Niagara hearing into the urban boundaries in the tender fruit areas, our president, a qualified planner and scholar, who presented most of our evidence in chief, was not only faced by a seemingly never-ending barrage of lawyers but was also entrapped while under cross-examination by one particularly aggressive lawyer. This led to further bold personal attacks in the local St Catharines press and, I feel, to our president's subsequent physical collapse on the stand.
Although the board chairmen did not participate in the legal incident, they did not intervene and their attitude was evidenced in their decision. While all other participants were noted for evidence, our president was not. This was particularly ironic, since the OMB decision agreed with and highlighted the case he put forward in opposition, for the most part, to the region, the local municipalities and the developers. He advocated redirection of growth to the south, intensification and infilling, as well as urban cuts totalling half the area in dispute. Although we won much, this aggressively adversarial and often ad hominem climate took an enormous personal toll.
One further contributing factor to the adversarial mood of the OMB perhaps lies with the preponderance of lawyers on the board who are used to this system. Planners are also familiar with it. Consequently, we feel that there should be specific rules for lawyers that leave no room for entrapment or undermining of witnesses, which is enforceable by the board, perhaps reinforced by guidance of a procedural adviser, something like the parliamentarian.
Board members should be required to intervene to enforce these rules of conduct when witnesses are being harassed. The case should be heard solely on the facts being presented and whether they enhance the case being argued. In other words, the case before the board should not be prejudiced by the ad hominem argument. These rules of procedure would only be workable through board members who are, by rule, thoroughly environmentally as well as municipally knowledgeable, and should be bolstered by the availability of intervenor funding. They should be enhanced through the use of expert witnesses called from the appropriate ministry by the board for their own purposes.
Costs against intervenors: The imposition of such rules of conduct for lawyers, as well as review process for board behaviour, could have avoided the previously noted charging of costs against PALS. In the case in question, both the lawyer and the OMB chairman were extremely aggressive and would have benefited by such rules. While PALS realizes some validity in the arguments raised in the new guidelines on costs, our experience is that most of our opposition lawyers automatically ask for costs, whether aggrieved or not. They do this to help denigrate our case.
Additionally, the use of the guide of reasonability when measuring an intervenor's behaviour is subjective to the chairmen. Therefore, when the intervenor has presented a reasonable case in the public good and to protect the environment and with no pecuniary interest, there should be no allowance for the charging of costs against it.
Public access and participation: PALS agrees with the former chairman, Mr Kennedy, that the Ontario Municipal Board should be an instrument of the public. The public should have easy access and participate as fully as possible. In cases where they are arguing in the public interest without financial gain, the public should be on equal footing with high-priced professionals who argue on the behalf of developers having a financial interest or, as we have seen in land preservation cases, on behalf of municipal governments seeking growth or promoting development, which may be contrary to government policy or negatively impact the environment.
Hence, we reiterate our call for intervenor funding, environmentally conscious board members, an absence of threat of costs and a non-adversarial, non ad hominem examination of fact, policy and public need. Additionally, since most people work during the day, the Kennedy tradition of scheduling evening board meetings should be practised more widely. As well, the practice of municipal payment for OP amendments and zoning appeals should be continued.
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Other considerations re the mandate of the board: Finally we see room for an expanded role for the Ontario Municipal Board as it relates to the defence of the environment. First, the board should not look at each case in isolation and should determine a mechanism to consider the cumulative impacts of development. As well, it should proceed to look at the compliance of municipalities with provincial policies and acts such as the Food Land Guidelines and the Planning Act.
The OMB should be able to initiate its own review of municipal official plans instead of leaving the monitoring task to the voluntary sector. We note here two particular areas of concern. First and most important, we have had to monitor the lack of conformity of local plans with the upper-tier plans in Niagara. It has been 10 years since the regional plan was approved and Thorold is still not in conformity. As the Ministry of Municipal Affairs has mediated to no avail rather than advise the minister to act under the Planning Act, perusal by an independent body such as the board would be of considerable value. We note also that Peel and York do not have official plans as yet. The province, through the board, should be able to intervene and impose plans which carry the Food Land Guidelines and other provincial policies.
In conclusion:
1. Fairness in environmental concern and equity should be pursued through intervenor funding. The OMB act should be amended and funds should be available where the case has been made by the intervenors who have no pecuniary interest and where the argument is for the public good.
2. There should be many board members with a diversity of environmental experience, voluntary, professional and academic, and training should be mandatory.
3. There should be a board code of conduct and an avenue of appeal separate from the particular issues before the board.
4. The board should take past decisions into account and environmentally important landmark cases should be used as precedents.
5. The board should be obliged to fully explore areas of inquiry related to government policy either through the appellant or through expert ministry witnesses called by the board.
6. There should be specific rules of conduct for lawyers that leave no room for entrapment or harassment.
7. The board should be required to intervene and enforce these rules of conduct, reinforced by a procedural adviser if possible.
8. The costs should not be assessed where the intervenor has presented a case in the public good.
9. The board should consider the cumulative impacts of development.
10. Evening sittings should be encouraged.
11. The board should be able to initiate reviews of municipal official plans.
12. The province, through the board, should be able to intervene to impose official plans which carry out the Food Land Guidelines and other provincial policies.
13. Municipalities should continue to pay the cost of the official plan amendment application appeals.
The imposition of these recommendations would make the Ontario Municipal Board truly a valid part of the planning process and a vital avenue of appeal from political decisions that impact negatively on an increasingly threatened environment.
Mr Bradley: The witness did not mention that the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society -- she was being modest -- has done more to protect food land in Ontario than any other single group and continues to do so against some very difficult odds, as she has described, against moneyed interests and other circumstances, against powerful municipalities and so on, and has made many enemies over the years as a result. You can judge people by their friends and their enemies, and they have in many cases made all the right enemies. That is a subjective comment.
Mr Stockwell: I take it you are a friend.
Mr Bradley: I am, very much so. In fact, I even contribute to the walkathon each year.
Your presentation is interesting, because we had the OMB before us and you would be interested to know that some of the members of the committee directed questions to the OMB about this. I am particularly concerned about a couple of matters. My impression is that the Ontario Municipal Board is becoming, much less so than other boards, but it is becoming a haven for lawyers and experts and less a haven for, let's say, ordinary citizens of the province to make their case. You have made some suggestions on how that might be -- have you seen any significant changes since the beginning of your interventions to this point in time? Are we seeing some progress in that regard or has the progress been small?
Mrs Janes: It is hard to say, but I would say that the last few cases have been better. Then again, you see, I might attribute it to the fact that we went without a lawyer to our very last case; indeed, the chairmen were very aware of the Food Land Guidelines and argued it right down the line. They were almost like our lawyer, and that was excellent. One of them did happen to be one of the newest members; I think he was head of the planning for Waterloo region. So whether that is half and half -- I do not know where the other chairman was from.
But I do sense that there is a lot of lawyers. I looked at the last two annual reports from the Ontario Municipal Board, and I looked at the number of QCs, which tells you for sure they are lawyers, and there were about nine or 10 in each case, sometimes 11, and then they would retire. That does not say how many other lawyers are there who do not have the QC. That would be a third anyway.
Mr Bradley: We all know that makes a big difference in the quality of lawyer.
Mrs Janes: Yes, I have heard all about that. One of them got a QC during our major hearing. At any rate, that is a third, and then you could take it upwards from there with the other lawyers. Then you have planners, it seems a substantial number of planners, and I have heard there is one farmer.
I do think it is definitely heavily weighted to this system, which makes it, as you do it at pleasure or it had been at pleasure, I think, until more recently, something like the courts; you go on and you wait. It also sort of precludes the youth and it precludes innovation in some ways. The people, if they are getting there and decide they are going to go into it, it is sort of like a retirement sinecure. You are going to go there until you are finished working for ever, and you start when you are about 55 looking around.
Mr Bradley: It is like the Senate.
Mrs Janes: Like the Senate, right.
Mr Bradley: The next question I would deal with is again along the line of experts and lawyers. Not to pick on lawyers, but has it been your observation that some lawyers seem to be more successful before the board than others, either because they have developed a specific expertise or because they know people on the OMB?
Mr Grandmaître: Or because they are QCs.
Mrs Janes: Despite the standing when they all come in and all that, you sometimes sense there is a familiarity in the line of questioning between the lawyers and the chairs; I could not say which ones, but that has been my opinion.
But some lawyers do seem to have an advantage. One area where we find this is in the aggregate cases, with the mining in the kame. There is a particular lawyer who goes all of those hearings all across the province, and he is very highly paid and he is bolstered by the planners for the municipality or I guess an extra planner or two for the company. It just seems for that kind of hearing to be very overwhelming and rather intimidating, and he knows his way around and he seems to able to argue quite successfully. So I would say that some of them, yes, are very familiar with the procedure.
There are also some environmental lawyers who, if one had the money, are very familiar with the system and are able to argue in defence of the land or of the environment, but we can never afford them.
Mr Bradley: That brings me to the question about that situation, where the environment is involved. My personal observation would be that in years gone by the board has not been as sensitive to environmental considerations as it might be -- I will put that very politely -- and that members of the board have not had the background which would enable them to deal with environmental issues.
There is a problem, however, in determining what is an environmental issue and what is a planning issue. I know there can be an integration; I know there is a thin line. Let me express to you a worry that some people would have, that people will use environmental arguments to block strictly planning decisions. Let me give you an example. I do not want this to be the only example you will think of, but people do not want the psychiatric hospital in their neighbourhood because it is going to impact badly upon the environment when you have emissions from the hospital or something, when all of us know the real reason is that they do not want the psychiatric hospital in their neighbourhood. How do we differentiate? Should we go more to joint board hearings or consolidated board hearings on these matters?
Mrs Janes: I guess that is one option you could take. We have difficulty in convincing people -- I think we are getting somewhere now -- that land, the preservation of your land that provides your food is an environmental issue and therefore could go, perhaps, to a joint board with an environmental component.
On the other hand, I think there is another avenue. When you put your application in for appeal, part of the process as to whether you get funding is whether it is genuinely in the public good.
I am not as familiar, as you perhaps all know, with the cases -- in fact, I am on the other side often, because I am arguing for housing, say, and against the NIMBY. I know people do use those arguments, but in the cases I have been involved in it just has not gotten down to that level. Really, these are broad-based environmental concerns, not narrow, "I don't want that in my backyard" kind of housing issues.
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Mr Bradley: I am jumping from place to place. The Chairman will move to another person when he sees fit, so I will be happy to relinquish and come back to you.
Is it your observation that a lack of precise provincial policy with regard to agricultural land is a detriment when you are attempting to make cases before the board, or is the detriment in that the board cannot make the judgements it might because there is not a definite enough provincial plan for agricultural land?
Mrs Janes: Our experience is that they are not even aware of what is there sometimes, or that they have no respect for the food land policy. The name Food Land Guidelines is very deceptive. I think that is why some chairmen say: "Oh, well, you know, it's just Food Land Guidelines. It's not really policy." And unless we have somebody there from OMAF to say it is policy, then we are up the creek when we have a chairman who is of this mind.
It would be very helpful, and in fact we have been pressing for legislation to preserve food land, and we would like at least to have policy that equals the Aggregate Resources Act and the aggregate policy. Everything in the province is protected by policy, really strong policy, and aggregate has particularly -- you have to save your sand and gravel in Ontario; you do not necessarily have to save your food land.
The Food Land Guidelines seem to go along with their name. They have "you should" and "you could" and there is no "must" involved in it. That has played a part, I believe, because we get up and we are arguing against a gravel operation, and the chairman looks at the aggregates policy and says, "This is strong stuff," and it even has an act lying in the wings. But food land is just guidelines and there has not been any firm direction from the provincial agriculture ministry concerning some of the variations of the aggregate policy.
Under that policy, if somebody wants to mine they have to prove, in the case of food lands and particularly fruit lands, that they can rehabilitate it. But there is no real weight to that as to exactly what they have to do and that it absolutely must be rehabilitated to the type of fruit that was grown there before. There is just sort of the general idea that you should rehabilitate it to crops, and there does not seem to be any follow-up or real push to make the mining company follow through on the rehabilitation. It is beginning but it really is not there yet. There is nobody really pushing that.
Mr Bradley: The last issue I will touch on now before some other members may wish to intervene. It is the issue of awarding of costs or awarding of a penalty against one of the groups. You have the one specific case to which you made reference. We are not supposed to reveal what goes on in cabinet, but needless to say I was highly offended by the board's decision, when it came to cabinet, to make an award against you in that particular case of PALS. Do you feel intimidated as a group or have you felt in the past intimidated by the fact that you could have costs awarded against you?
Mrs Janes: Yes, and we have a long track record and are not easily intimidated. There are many groups out there who would be very intimidated. I have heard small groups in other towns say: "We could get costs. We could have a penalty. We can't afford that. How can we go about this so we don't incur costs?" It is very intimidating indeed.
If you could deal with the adversarial nature, if you could deal with some kind of rules, if there was a rule which said if you are acting in the public good, if it was well known, then I think people would be less intimidated. They would know that they could go there without this threat. I have always felt that the whole issue of frivolity -- vexatious behaviour, I guess, is part of that -- but the frivolity part: if you are allowed to get to the hearing, to the board, then obviously you are not frivolous. The case where the minister was able to step in and say we were frivolous and then was proven to be wrong is one thing, but to go there and at the end of the day when you have done your best --
In our case we presented five witnesses, the best agri-climatologist in Canada was our witness, and we presented something that is now being studied in relation to the kame, the environment of the kame and the growing of fruit in that area, yet we got assessed costs. This was just horrendous to us, it was devastating. But we could see it happening, we could see what was happening in front of us, that the lawyers were intimidating, they were digging for information on our witnesses, they were getting the chairman all upset, and he, being of a volatile nature, got more and more upset to the point where we were going at it. We knew something was coming and indeed this was it. But why should we be assessed costs when we were not frivolous? We had not been judged frivolous; we had been allowed to come to the board. I just find that really unacceptable.
Mr McLean: Thank you for coming. It was an excellent brief. You certainly put a lot of work into it.
Some of the questions I have are with regard to -- you indicate in the brief -- training should be mandatory. How long do think they should train, actually, before they are involved in a major case?
Mrs Janes: First, I want all three things to go together. I believe there should be training but I also believe the people you pick for the board should have environmental expertise. I really would like to see some of them have some voluntary expertise, some experience within the sector that does these things so they have some feel for it. But the environmental component, I think it would help if the people you were picking, a fair number of them, had some environmental knowledge and expertise on their own.
But the training period -- I know you are torn or you have been presented with perhaps two scenarios. One is the "at pleasure" and the other is a three-year term. I do not think three years is a good idea; at three years, you are just beginning to really get the hang of it. I would say five years of board and then a chance that you may renew or you may be off if you do not measure up. And then within that, I think a training component of a year would be plenty, in which you would not be making any decisions but you would be at hearings as part of that, and whoever was the chair would obviously be the one who was educated and would know the ropes.
Mr McLean: That sounds good to me. You would like to see a five-year appointment, with a review at the end of five years on whether they would continue or not. I think that appears reasonable.
Item 11 in your recommendation says, "The board should be able to initiate reviews of municipal official plans." How would that work when those people are supposed to be non-partisan? They are supposed to deal with an issue as it comes before them with regard to its own bylaws and official plan amendments. If they had the right to initiate reviews of municipal official plans, what --
Mrs Janes: I guess you have to take that back into the context. Perhaps in abbreviating we have not made it as clear, but what we are saying is that -- in our case in Thorold, where there is a regional plan and it is in place and there are obviously things going wrong; there is a municipality which has not, under the act, come into conformity with another plan and it has been going on for 10 years -- then I think at some point -- sure, the government could perhaps do it, but they have this body that is able to handle municipal affairs and knows their planning and could very well do it as an independent body. They would look at the whole issue in Niagara, particularly with reference to Thorold, and say where has it gone off the track. I suppose we could take it to court, but it would probably be difficult. We were going to, but we did not have somebody in that municipality so we could not do that.
Mr McLean: I really thought the board was supposed to be the body which ruled on decisions that came out of official plans and zoning bylaws, and if it was hearing a case it could perhaps indicate to the municipality that the zoning bylaw or the plan maybe should be amended to coincide with what the government was thinking, or Municipal Affairs. I cannot quite see where they should be initiating reviews.
Mrs Janes: I guess I am just suggesting a broadening of what they do, although they used to bring municipalities in to assist them. They used to do it. I am not sure whether they still can do this, but under the old laws -- they still do do it? -- okay. So if they can do that kind of thing, then I would think they could initiate a review.
Mr McLean: During the last three or four years, there have been six lawyers and four others appointed to the OMB, and the chairman, of course. I do not know how he got his appointment. I think he said he just kind of applied for it in the paper somehow, although I read in the weekend paper that maybe that really was not the way it happened.
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Mr Grandmaître: Which paper was that?
Mr McLean: In the Toronto Star. I agree with you that there are too many lawyers. I think we need more common sense and people who are involved with environmental issues and that type of thing who should be appointed to the board.
Mrs Janes: If I could just say, I did read that article and while I agreed with perhaps some of it, I really felt that he was coming down hard on the side of the lawyers and planners and the old boys' network.
Mr Grandmaître: Do you feel that more and more people are relying on the OMB? I can remember my old days, 15 years at the municipal level. The OMB back in the 1970s did have a role to play in planning like it has today, but very few people were using the OMB. Now I think people -- developers, planners -- are using the OMB door. Have you noticed this in the last five or six or seven years? More and more people do not argue with municipal official plans or regional official plans; they say: "I want this to go to the OMB and get it over with now because it's costing me $150,000 or $250,000 a year. So let's not fool around and let's get to the OMB."
Mrs Janes: Actually, there is a case just now that used my statement at a regional meeting in order to send a letter to the OMB asking that the case be moved forward, because I had made a statement which they misquoted. But my statement was: "In the absence of the region or the municipality objecting to development in the fruit lands of St Catharines, we would object. We would go to the OMB."
Well, they took that statement and they turned it around and said that we were going to object no matter what and therefore we had better go to the OMB right away, straight away, you know, the shortcut, despite the fact that they themselves had asked for the public meeting in St Catharines to be delayed until they got their case together. You know, it seemed to be as it suited them.
Mr Bradley: Out of context?
Mrs Janes: Yes. As it suited them they were going to use -- yes, they seem to know. They try and I am not sure they are going be successful but we had to be very quick on that one and send a letter right in to say our true intent and that we did not think they should break the rules. We thought there were some rules that would prevent that, but our head planner at the region says that they could do this. It was not illegal for them to proceed in this manner and they get to know how to do, how to make use, but I do not think the public really knows how to use the board any more than it did in the past.
I did notice in the review, I think it was in 1967 they had a review, and some of the people I know from Niagara were there making comments, similar comments, I would imagine to what I am making, so obviously they had some familiarity with the board at that time. So I do not think, as far as the public goes, that we use it any more that we used it in the old days, but I would say the developers are learning how.
Mr Grandmaître: Yes. Also, while you partly agree with me that --
Mrs Janes: Mostly.
Mr Grandmaître: Yes, using the OMB avenue. Having said that I am a former municipal politician, I have a tendency to blame not only municipal planners but municipal politicians for bad planning, because their official plan is supposed to be reviewed every five years. If it is reviewed every five years, well, then you would not have to go before the OMB.
Mr Bradley: You must be thinking of Grey county.
Mr Grandmaître: So do you not think that it is poor planning on the part of municipal planners? They say, "Well look, you know, let's put this through." They do have public meetings and the public is invited to comment on the plan, but I have noticed that municipal planners do have objectives and directives from council and they say: "This is what we want. Bad planning or good planning, this is what we want in our official plan," and go ahead and do it, against the Food Land Guidelines or --
Mrs Janes: Yes, I agree.
Mr Grandmaître: Would you agree with me?
Mrs Janes: I would agree again half. I think that five years is a bit unrealistic, because certainly in the region of Niagara, if you are dealing with a very large plan, to have to do it, it takes them five years to do the review, the way they are going. But with the smaller municipalities also, they do not have the staff to do this.
Mr Grandmaître: They do not have the expertise.
Mrs Janes: That is right. Now we do have variations within the region of Niagara. The larger municipalities with planning staff, such as St Catharines, now they have gone 10 years and there have been very few OMBs in St Catharines. They have stuck with their policy on agricultural lands. They have been very, very consistent and that has been due to planning expertise. But in the smaller municipalities, it is amazing, with lack of planning expertise and lack of staff and confusion and changeover -- there has been terrific changeover of staff in some of the smaller municipalities, I can name at least three. As a result, in one case I know of, there is the plan that is sitting there at the ministry and it is full of -- well, there will be people at the OMB just lining up to get there because the councils flip-flop back and forth, being advised one way and then another and they just have no direction. So unless somebody takes hold, there will be a lot of hearings coming out from that plan and heaven knows when it will ever get implemented.
Mr Grandmaître: Am I allowed one more question, or out of order?
The Chair: Fine, no problem. Go ahead.
Mr Grandmaître: No problem? I agree with you that -- in fact, the present chairman of the OMB appeared before us some weeks ago and promised us that more pre-hearings would take place, and I think this is great. By the way, in your paper, the former Minister of Municipal Affairs, who qualified --
Mr McLean: What is the name?
Mr Grandmaître: No. I can tell you I was not the Minister of Municipal Affairs at that time.
Mrs Janes: No, before you.
Mr Grandmaître: Yes, just before me. I think we all agree that the OMB should have the mechanism in place to have pre-hearings just in case these people are asked -- well, I should not say "just in case," but people do have to spend quite a bit of money to prepare their documentation and so on and so forth, and I do not think it is fair for them to reach the OMB, you know, after months and months of preparation and it say: "Well, look, we don't agree with you. It's frivolous. It's vexatious," or whatever. I think every case should have a pre-hearing so that the groups objecting or the objectors know exactly where they stand.
Mrs Janes: I think that would be fine as long as we had funding or some hope of funding, because it is very difficult. You know, it is the planners and it is all voluntary time and it is a very onerous task to prepare for a hearing, you are right. It may not cost us any money if we are doing it ourselves, but it certainly is time off our lives.
But I am really concerned that when you get into the case of pre-hearings -- and there is an article in one of the planning magazines by a lawyer, Mr Hodgins I think it is, that talks about what happens in pre-hearings, the scoping of issues, that kind of thing. You then get into a hearing and, because you have scoped, you miss out if something comes up and you really wish to go at it as it comes along during the hearing.
The other thing is that I have always felt a little uneasy about the stakeholder approach where you go in there and, you know, all the stakeholders are there and because you are leaving out a stakeholder who may live next door or be in that area, a farmer, say, and he wants to be part but he has been left out, therefore when you get to the hearing your voice perhaps is not going to be of any weight.
So I do have some concerns, but I agree that if one were funded and one had, was able to fund, the expertise that we need, with some kinds of rules about scoping so that we did not lose and we did not give away all our case ahead of time to some element of surprise.
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Mr Hayes: I just wanted to go back to Mr McLean's question there dealing with number 11. Can I get a clarification on this? Are you suggesting that they review and make recommendations to the municipal official plans, or are you saying here that maybe they should be familiarizing themselves with the official plans so they will know, have a better idea of planning in that municipality before they make decisions?
Mrs Janes: No, that is not what I mean, and again I apologize for the condensation of number 11. It was merely to do with where there are inequities, where there are gross, sort of non-conformance with the Planning Act, as in the case of Thorold, which is not in conformity with the region after 10 years, or in the case of the two counties where -- actually 11 and 12 go together -- they do not have a plan in place yet, even though it has been quite a while, that they be able to initiate a review, as directed by the minister.
We are not saying that they should suddenly say, "Oh." I mean, they could hint to the minister that there is this area of non-conformity in Thorold, or we could write as a group, say, write to the municipal board. I think we would be more inclined to write to the minister, though, and ask the minister to direct the OMB to look into this case and settle it.
Mr Hayes: I guess the other thing too, some of the problems that we have been faced with in a lot of municipalities dealing with preservation of agricultural land was the fact that I guess for too long we have gone by guidelines and suggestions rather than putting legislation in for protection of this. Then these things that we are able to, you know, make some of these preservation of agricultural lands -- for example, if we could get some strong legislation that says it is law, we would not be faced maybe with this kind of problem. There might be problems making it that way in the first place.
Mrs Janes: Yes. I think it does deserve the same kind of preservations attitude that we have towards sand and gravel. Let's put it that way. It just has always bothered me that we do not look at it that way and that we do not take leadership. Some people seem to think that you can do it from the municipal level up, and I guess in an ideal world, I as a voter can keep my municipal politicians under control until I am 90, but in the real world they seem to get their way, and I think there has to be leadership at the provincial level. You would not protect your water that way, by allowing the municipality -- you would not protect your air that way -- those things. And food and land, those are the same kinds of issues that go right down to the roots of it.
They are environmental necessities and we have to protect them for the sustainability of Ontario's food supply for the future, and therefore we have to do it with leadership, and it has not to date been handled in this manner. It has been handled in a lesser manner than sand and gravel.
Mr Hayes: I guess the other thing just on that issue, when you talk about preserving agricultural land, I am sure you are well aware that farmers are faced over the years with high interest rates and especially with low commodity prices, and you get speculators or developers or whatever coming in and offering them quite a substantial amount of money for their land. It is kind of hard for some of those people to refuse probably a significant sum of money when they are continually trying to farm and continually losing
Do you have any ideas that way? Because as far as I am concerned myself, I think we have to try to come to some kind of solution where we can make incentives for a farmer to continue farming. You know, it is just too attractive sometimes when you are continually losing money and then that big buck comes in there saying, "I'll buy that land off of you." It puts a lot of pressure on to the farmer.
Mrs Janes: Yes, we have been dealing with that particular issue for a long time and it has been where the pressure usually comes from, from the farmers in difficulty or some of them who are not in difficulty but who want to be more secure. Naturally it is their retirement money. We have given it a great deal of thought and we have come through a process where we at one point believed that the land should be in reserves, legislated like British Columbia, like Quebec, whatever we could get, and that would, you know, be it.
We based that partly on the fact that even when you live in a city, you have certain restrictions. You cannot just turn your house over to a McDonald's or whatever. There are freedoms and responsibilities and restrictions wherever you are. But having said that, we feel that those kinds of systems usually break down at the political level, and when a new government comes in, changes are made and then land goes out of the reserve and lesser land comes in or uses are allowed.
So we have decided -- and we have worked on this for two years now -- that the best way to preserve the land is to do it through a system that pays the farmers to be keepers of the land, to care for the land. That allows them to continue owning their land and yet they would not be allowed to develop the land, and this is the system of what we call easements, conservation easements.
We do believe that if we could -- through trust or through some other mechanism, land commission, whatever, private trust, public trust -- purchase easements from the farmers, particularly in Niagara where the pressures are so great and where the dollars are so great, they would then be able to use the money in this current crisis and perhaps over a period of 10 years, with a down payment and then paying through the next nine years, they would be able to put the money into farming until we can get some other mechanisms in place to help them with the farming that they are doing to make it more economically viable and at the same time save the land, because the easement would be placed on the land and there would be no development on that land for 99 years or 100 years or for ever, or perhaps 25 years with a review at that time. We feel that is going to be the only way we can take this pressure off, out of the political spectrum and into the future.
We know that when the grapes were pulled out, $180 million was turned over to the grape farmers and we received nothing in the way of land preservation in return, and we feel that we deserve to save a unique industry in an area that you cannot replace anywhere in Canada and in fact where the peaches are better than those in Georgia and where there is an area climatically favoured and in fact superior to California, where they are having terrible water problems and salt in the soil. At any rate, they are having real problems, and we have this unique thing and we feel that it is worth that kind of money.
In the rest of Ontario, we feel that at some point in time all the money that we are putting into these programs, it sometimes compensates farmers for poor farm practices. There should be some kind of mechanism where you can get into conservation agreements whereby the farmer does not have to farm the life out of his soil and farm every inch, and where wetlands can be put back and such. We think that somehow there has to be a way to have a conservation mode for our farm policies and our farm payments. But in the meantime, we feel Niagara is so special and that there is this precedent of the grape relief program, which was federal and provincial, that if we can somehow start there and preserve this unique resource, this is the way to do it; not by police powers, but by our saying as a community and as a society that we are going to share in the cost of preserving the land. The farmer does not have to do it all.
Mr McLean: And where is the money going to come from ?
Mrs Janes: Through public investment.
Mr Wiseman: I would like to compliment you on your presentation here this afternoon. It is a topic that I have to wrestle with in my riding and I would like to come at it from a couple of points. I think one of the things that we have to deal with -- in some of the comments that you are making -- is that we have a perception out there about private property: They own it, they can do what they want with it. I have seen this on more councils than I care to think about.
I would like to throw at you the notion that, sure, it is private property, but it is public heritage, and to maybe come at it from that point of view. From what you have been saying this afternoon, I take it that you would perhaps agree with that.
Mrs Janes: Yes, I agree with it, but I also know that in theory it all belongs to the crown. Even if I live in a city, you know, I am keeping the land for the future, shall we say. There are restrictions, as I have said before, and in the countryside this is also the case. The farmer's land can be zoned into agriculture for ever or reserved, but in practice everybody has this expectation and they have through history been allowed to develop, been allowed to have these rights of development and private -- it is not enshrined in law, certainly at the federal level. Real estate people would like it to be enshrined in law, but it is not, so I do agree with you that it is a public heritage.
But on the other hand, our experience is that the biggest pressure on farm land comes from farmers who cannot make a living or farmers who wish to make the dollar and sit under the palm trees. So we have to deal with the reality of it, and if that is the reality, then I think we all have a part to play there.
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Mr Wiseman: One of the rather frightening perceptual problems I see when dealing with this problem, with farm land, is that you will have a reporter standing in front of a large field who will make comments that, "This unproductive land is empty. There is nothing here," and out of this wilderness there will all of a sudden emerge some great productive establishment. Would you care to comment on that philosophical or attitudinal approach?
Mrs Janes: Even the Food Land Guidelines say that it does not matter if it is not being farmed, that it is the future capability of that land. That was recognized as far back as 1976, or was it 1974? But we have seen that pattern and it is rather a difficult one to overcome sometimes. In Niagara, it is usually where the corn grows. Then you get the empty fields or the grape trees going to pot and you see people saying that.
But I think we have sort of a silver lining here, that the public is far more aware of the need for sustainability. They really know that we need to preserve our environment, that it is for the future. I think the thinking now is more for the future. With the young people coming along, it is the future that counts. They do not seem to have these attitudes. I am not hearing it said as much now by people: "Oh well, it has just gone to seed. Why bother?" I am not hearing that the way I used to hear it. There is a much better attitude on the general public's part and they are also sharper, I think, because of the publicity we managed to get, and other groups. They know that the developer is out there to get what he wants and they suspect that no matter what he might be up to, he is in the wrong, so I think that is how to consider it.
Mr Wiseman: My last point is about official plans. From where I come from, an official plan is not worth the paper it is written on. It does not restrict anybody from redeveloping. I had at least three battles in my own mind prior to being elected that I fought where land was zoned either agriculture or open green space and was just flipped immediately without any concern. It contradicted all the town plans and all the official plans that had been written and it was just done. I am trying to grapple for some way we can put a little bit more teeth into official plans, so that in fact when you have prime agricultural land designated as such, it stays that way.
Mrs Janes: I guess that gets back to Mr Hayes's suggestion, that if you have some strong policy or legislation, if you have some provincial teeth, and then if your board chairmen are aware of the provincial teeth, and then if you have intervenor funding so that those other people can have a say on who might be arguing the case, and then if you have the awareness on the board's part of the issues through the environmental issues, more consciousness there, I think all the things I have said and that we have said in the brief would help alleviate that problem.
What you are facing is just what we have been facing. It is that the planners, the lawyers, the money and the pecuniary interest people can march into a hearing, and it does not matter what your plan is, they can win. It is very interesting. In the Niagara hearing that lasted a year, the main part of it in the north, we had to raise over $100,000 and then we did get some legal aid after that, do we prove sort of injury and such.
We stayed there for a year with one lawyer and all these lawyers, and the province came for possibly one and a half days with a court reporter and it did not defend its own guidelines. That is why we are cited in the decision as defending the land in the absence of anyone else including the province. Now we should not have had to do it and you should not have to do it. Nobody should have to do that in the future.
Mr Wiseman: Just one last comment: I would suspect very strongly that the local politicians would not allow me to pull down my house and put up a six-storey apartment building because it is not zoned for that.
Mrs Janes: That is true. We have to elect the right people too, but that is hard for us.
Mr Sola: I would like to refer back to your list of recommendations and hone in on recommendation 5 and ask for an elaboration because on first reading it says, "The board should be obliged to fully explore areas of an inquiry related to government policy." Somehow that seems to place the board, an appointed body, above an elected government, and also seems to suggest that the board may act as a body of opposition to the government. I am wondering if you can elaborate on that to clear it up.
Mrs Janes: No, I certainly did not mean it to mean that. What that means, if you relate back, is that we feel they often do not -- our opinion is, and maybe I should elaborate more, that in some hearings, unless we are able to bring our expert witnesses and get through the barrage of planners and lawyers to the Food Land Guidelines or through what other policy that might be in place to help, the board does not go out of its way to do this and sometimes if they do not really have a consciousness or awareness or understanding of the policy, it might not get touched upon.
I could see somebody coming as an individual without a lawyer or anything, and not touching on these issues, so there is absolutely no reference, and certainly the opposition is not going to mention any of these things. We feel that as well the ministry does not send people automatically to a hearing if they feel it should relate.
We have had one case, too, where we put an objection in, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food put an objection in and then it did not turn up. We were not assessed costs, but they did not turn up. There has to be some way to make sure that the government policy is referred to. I do not mean that they are an adversarial -- in fact they are supportive of government policy. They bring the government policy in and they use it, and it has to be there, either through expert witnesses or our expert witnesses.
Mr McLean: Just a couple of very short questions: I have observed in some cases in Simcoe county where there has been an individual who is interested in the preservation of agricultural land who would object to every application anybody would put in for rezoning and I find an OMB hearing on it, and a great cost to a lot of people involved. That certainly leaves some room for me to have some reservations with regards to perhaps what some of the people in the province feel towards preserving agricultural land. I happen to be a farmer, as you may be aware and I do believe that farmers, if you are going to have the conservation or preservation of agriculture land whereby you say that you cannot sell it -- in the United States they have that policy. They pay to keep the farmers on the land.
Mrs Janes: That is where we are coming from.
Mr McLean: Today they are trying to negotiate this GATT contract whereby they stop all the subsidies to farmers, so what are you going to do with the farmers in the United States and here, if you want to have the same policy here?
Mrs Janes: I think it depends on what you are calling subsidy. There would be, probably, some major case on this at some point in the future if we put it in. But if you are talking about paying for conservation practices that preserve land, it is a little better than talking about subsidies and such to increase your income. If everybody is on the same playing field -- because the Americans are certainly, definitely -- this is where part of our research comes from, a major part.
We had a fellow up from Maryland who ran their Carroll county program. He is a farmer, and they do pay the farmers to be stewards of the land and have these conservation easements. But related to your person who objects to everything, he would not be able to object if something wrong was not happening there. Depending on the strength of your plan in your municipality, he has every right, in the absence of political will, to take those cases to the OMB because it is the only place he can go.
Mr McLean: I guess the final point I want to make is the fact that we are not subsidizing the farmers in this province; we are subsidizing the consumer.
Mrs Janes: Yes.
Mr McLean: If you paid the farmers what it costs to produce, they would be happy.
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Mrs Janes: Absolutely. I sit on the subcommittee on sustainable agriculture of the Ontario Round Table on Environment and Economy, and this is a point I have just put in a memo to the group. We have a cheap food policy and so do the Americans. Perhaps some of the savings from land that is better cared for and those kinds of things might be passed on in a different way, and there would be a different way of helping the consumer. But I do think we are not like Europe, where they line up and have to pay the top price and such. I think we need to pay a true price.
Mr Stockwell: I have not run into the same situation Mr Wiseman has with respect to official plan amendments, where they simply re-do it like that. There is a whole entire process that takes place and public hearings and so on and so forth. I guess maybe it is your particular region that has adopted that, but I always thought it was provincial guidelines or rules that they in fact had to do that. The question I have, though, is, if your local council had not supported the development or rezoning, etc, would they have sent legal representation to the OMB, should the developer or whoever had gone on to the OMB?
Mrs Janes: I am not quite following your question. I am sorry.
Mr Stockwell: If there is some application in some region for change or development that you do not agree with fundamentally, and the local whatever, board, council, voted on it and they opposed it, it goes on to the OMB because somebody took it to the OMB. Would the local region or area they have sent legal representation to the OMB? You are talking about all these cases where you appear.
Mrs Janes: I have not heard any.
Mr Stockwell: You are appearing, and the local councils or the local regional councils do not send lawyers and planners?
Mrs Janes: In the larger hearing it is a matter of practicality and where they spend their time. We perceive that they tend to be spending more time on the side of the developers than they are --
Mr Stockwell: That is not the question, though.
Mrs Janes: But when they came to the larger hearing, there were certain parcels that we objected to. They were there and they were on our side, in other words, but they did not really speak to it to any great degree. Our lawyer pretty well carried the case.
Mr Stockwell: I see, but the ones you are having more difficulty with are the ones where the local council disagrees with you, and therefore you are going to have to go to the OMB and get your own lawyer and get your own planner and pay for them yourself.
Mrs Janes: Yes, this is where local councils are not following the Food Land Guidelines in some cases.
Mr Stockwell: Local councils make a decision on amendments and rezonings and changes, which is completely up to the local council. They are duly elected people.
Mrs Janes: Oh, absolutely.
Mr Stockwell: So really, when you get up there and you are dropping a lot of money, it is because the local electorate that has elected this council simply does not agree with the position you are espousing.
Mrs Janes: The electorate has nothing to do with it, actually. The reality of the case is that you are not going to do it through the ballot box on one issue. You could say to me, and I have had the head planner say to me, "When I get seven regional councillors who believe in the preservation of land as they did when the region was started, then I will start leading the way and talking preservation." Then it is up to me to get rid of the politicians on a one-issue and you really cannot do that. The only issue you can get them on is conflict of interest, and we have done that. But you cannot expect the electorate to be --
Mr Stockwell: I guess this cuts at the fibre of democracy. If these people are duly elected and this is the decision they make, then that is democracy.
Mrs Janes: But there has to be some leadership, there has to be provincial leadership, so that those municipal councils will, and this gets back to Mr Hayes's idea that if you have leadership and you have food land preservation either legislation or policy, then the municipalities will indeed stay in line a lot better than they do under the Food Land Guidelines. It is all interwoven; it really is.
Mr Johnson: I was not sure if I was going to be able to ask this question or not, because I was not sure where I came in the line-up, but anyway --
Mr McLean: Last.
Mr Johnson: Last, yes.
Mr McLean: Prince Edward-Lennox-South Hastings is always last.
Mr Grandmaître: You can appeal to the OMB, you know.
Mr Johnson: Mrs Janes, this was a very comprehensive and enlightening report you presented to us today and I am really glad I had the opportunity to be here and hear it. The Macaulay report warned against the tendency of administrative tribunals which were set up to offer cheap, expeditious and efficient justice to become judicialized, and I think that has happened to the Ontario Municipal Board. Something that you indicated was that the members of the board are mostly lawyers and as I looked at the list I have got here there are 30 people on the board and there are only two who would have any, if I might say, sincere interest in farm land because they are identified as farmers. The rest are lawyers or planners or some municipal people that may not have that real sincere interest.
I was a municipal councillor and I often heard people who would threaten to go to an Ontario Municipal Board hearing, or to take their issues to the Ontario Municipal Board hearing, and may or may not follow through with that threat, because of their concern.
I wanted to ask you specifically, and you may have answered this already, but I will ask this question: It has a little bit of a different slant to it. From your perspective or experience, have you found that wealthier private interests have used the Ontario Municipal Board to circumvent decisions of municipal government deliberately?
Mrs Janes: It is a little bit different than Mr Grandmaître's question. I would not go so far as to say they were subverting. They try to speed up the process and go around, yes, but I would not say that they have ever subverted.
There is one incident somebody brought to mind as we were going through this brief at our major hearing. Again, this means that they should have the education, experience, the commitment, all those things together, and the rules and be able to enforce them, because sometimes even the board, I believe, when you get a battery of lawyers, QCs, the whole bit, out in front of you, is pretty intimidating.
They can be confusing too, and then they back each other up. I think at one point a whole bunch of them sort of threatened that if the board did not do something or did do something, they would proceed to take them back to a position that they were at at the beginning of the hearing, and at the beginning of our hearing, our chairmen were taken -- we had to go to court because of the first decision in Niagara South, which was favourable to us, completely favourable. They threatened to take and they took to court the two chairmen and tried to prove that they were biased and that they were too much on our side. We won and we got costs, but it was intimidation, so sort of towards the end of the hearing, there was again this sort of threat.
I have seen it also with municipalities. I have seen developers come in -- in fact, right after that hearing was over, I believe, some of the developers were threatening St. Catharines that they would take them to court, to the OMB, if they did not go by their old plan of 1958 that said "industrial here." Some municipalities are easily threatened, and that is all I can say about it.
Mr Johnson: It seems evident too from your brief that in order to preserve our farm lands and agricultural lands, there is going to have to be some state or government intervention, and this undoubtedly would have to be through legislation and some long-term goals. I guess that this, depending on the exact legislation, could be a costly process. but that is not necessarily so and it depends on the terms of these goals.
Mrs Janes: Yes. It could, but the way we envision it, we envision everything as being just and fair to the farmers, maybe particularly, but we envision everybody working together. In the United States what they do is they float bonds. You pay so much money out for highways, for interchanges, for all these things. And sure, they are in the public good in one way or another, and they might, in the case of our Highway 406, save 10 minutes from a person's time. But they are worth a lot of money. We spend a lot of money and we could very well float a bond, get the public involved, public investment, public awareness.
That is what they do down there. They have referendums and then they get all involved and people vote to spend a certain amount of money; $100 million in the case of New Jersey, I believe, and Maryland is pretty high too.
It is a case of where your priorities are. It is not just the government saying, "I have got this much in my budget." It is looking in a visionary way to find how we can raise public awareness and bring it up even higher than it is and get everybody involved and, in the long run, your aim is good and I think you can do it.
1520
Mr Bradley: I am going to go back. There are a couple of issues you dealt with that I would like a little elaboration on. You have expressed a desire to see intervenor funding; you have expressed a concern about the awarding of costs against somebody -- I guess that is designated costs against somebody -- and you have talked about scoping, which you see as a problem.
I am going to put this scenario to you, that when the new government makes its decision regarding intervenor funding and award of costs and scoping, it will not be able to accept that we live in a perfect world and will have to make some tough decisions. The Minister of the Environment or the Minister of Agriculture and Food or the Minister of Municipal Affairs may have some ideas. By the time that the Chairman of Management Board and the Treasurer get hold of them, they will not be such good ideas.
I guess I am asking for your criteria. I noticed you made a positive comment about your suggestions to the board on awarding of costs. Under what conditions do you think costs could be awarded against somebody? There may be some conditions out there. Obviously I disagree with the board in the specific case you mentioned. Where would you say that it might be, however, possible for the board to award costs? Under what conditions would you say that might be possible?
Mrs Janes: I guess the obvious one would be if a developer came in and was in obvious contravention of the Food Land Guidelines or some legislation, if there would be such a thing, and the municipality was also against this, and that would be considered a frivolous case or vexatious case. But the point is that even there, if you go through a process where you decide whether it is frivolous, whether you have pre-hearing or you have a precondition, you would not get to a hearing, I would not imagine. Therefore there would not be the cost.
The other case would be behavioral, and I think that where behaviour is poor or simply dreadful towards persons on the opposition, perhaps one could do that. But I think that is again subjective. In the case where we were awarded, the chairman was obviously agitated and all worked up and was going to do it. It was actually a personal thing with him and one of our witnesses that was part of it.
I am just not sure there is any case for costs if you have this other procedure in place, where you make sure that the hearing does not go forward until such time as it is sure to be not frivolous.
Mr Bradley: Years before that regulatory change was made, when cases could go almost willy-nilly to the OMB, there may have been a case for it. You believe, however, that to put it in now, where there is a vetting of the cases going before the board or a vetting of the opposition, that in fact it may be unwise or dangerous to have any awarding of costs?
Mrs Janes: I would say that.
Mr Bradley: There is intervenor funding, as you know, at the present time for an appearance before the Environmental Assessment Board or the joint board, the consolidated hearings board; there is not before the Ontario Municipal Board. The Treasurer of Ontario will look at any proposal for that and in horror recoil at the potential costs for the province. How would you restrict the intervenor funding? What criteria would you establish for intervenor funding to avoid the encouragement of people who -- in the case Mr McLean mentions, I do not know whether the man has a valid case or not, but there are some people around the province who like to appear before various agencies, boards and commissions as long as it does not cost them anything. How do we avoid that without penalizing people who have a legitimate case?
Mrs Janes: I guess part of it is this preliminary thing, and whether the case is in the public good and without pecuniary interest. Those are the basic parameters. I do think if you have legislation or strong policy and you have a ministry willing to police it, if you have all those things in place, you will not have people coming before the board. In other words, if we had what we wanted in Niagara, we would not have to go to the Ontario Municipal Board. So you are going to cut down the number. All these things being in place cuts it down. But, barring that, if it takes 10 years to get there and you have this worry about these individuals, I think it is the preliminary part that will play the biggest role.
I think that there absolutely has to be funding where it is in the broader public good in the interim, where there is no government going to do this, and if there is no pecuniary interest, there has to be some mechanism. After all, there is for the Environmental Assessment Board. Maybe we will have to be switched out of mode into those hearings if we cannot get it, at least for our issue. I am not saying for all these other people, but I am saying for the issue of food land preservation we may have to be considered part of the environment, which we should be, and maybe that is the way to go.
Mr Bradley: The municipalities' concern, as you know from following municipal politics carefully, and the concern of some people who wish to have housing developments -- let's look at that now. Let's say there is a union that wishes to put up a housing development in the community and the people next door are going to object. We all know how the people next door will not object, that is, you pay them off. The other danger is that you pay them off by buying their property at an inflated price. The project could be held up, the prices could climb on a project which is geared to people who are of modest income, while someone is almost extorting money out of the -- in this case, the developer would be a non-profit organization.
How do we overcome that particular problem? That is a very difficult question, and perhaps unfair to put to you, but how do we overcome that problem? I know you have been involved in the farm land ones and you have been involved, in another sense, in defending low-cost housing developments within communities.
Mrs Janes: It is difficult.
Mr Bradley: I do not have the answer. That is why I am supported by you.
Mrs Janes: I really feel that there are inequities certainly in this whole thing of being able to hold up nonprofits where there is a need for them. I have spent four or five years now trying to overcome the not in my backyard, NIMBY. If you do not mind, I will decline to answer that question because it could go on for some time and I would not want to get off subject.
Mr Bradley: That is fair enough. I will ask you a question on precedents, because you mentioned precedents in your brief. The problem with precedents is there are good precedents and bad precedents, and it is hard to pick and choose. If you are going to go by precedent, what happens if the precedent is a bad one and so at the next hearing, a board person says, "There's the precedent on it, and I guess we're going to turn this land over to developers to develop because it's lying" -- the argument always is that it is just lying there, as Mr Wiseman says, not being used. Of course, somebody has purchased it and deliberately left it that way to be able to make that argument. But that argument is put forward in that specific case.
So is there not a danger in bad precedents as well as good precedents? Are you not in a better position to wait until -- for instance, there is a new government now that could make what you might consider to be better appointments to the OMB. Those people might make good decisions all along, and then you would not have to worry about those big bad precedents from the past.
Mrs Janes: Until the next government -- no, no. There never will be. But I thought of that actually, and that is why I put in the line on page 4, I think it was, that "environmentally positive landmark cases should be used as precedent-setting." I really was not thinking of detrimental ones being used. I think they would have to be, to the normal person, considered environmentally positive, progressive.
Mr Bradley: I have two more quick questions that deviate a bit from the OMB, but you are the only witness this afternoon and the Chairman is such a tolerant individual.
Mrs Janes: I am the only one. Is that why?
Mr Bradley: One is on whether you believe, as a person who has worked to preserve agricultural land in the province, that a land speculation tax would be helpful in preserving agricultural land.
Mrs Janes: If you had all the rest of this in place, you might not need it, but I think it could be made to work. I have not given it a great deal of thought, I have to admit. But I certainly think the threat of it would be helpful. Was it not Mr White as Treasurer who brought in a mechanism? In that case, I think he was looking at housing and the people making money on housing.
His philosophy as a good Conservative was that housing was a right and we needed to protect that right, and that people should not be making copious quantities by flipping homes and such. It seemed to work for the short period that it was in, as far as that went, but for land I do not think it would hurt to consider it further. I am not strong on it because really I have to admit I have not really thought about it the way I thought about the more positive -- I am always one not to think of punitive but of more positive approaches.
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Mr Bradley: That is true. My last question deals with the environmental bill of rights. There is a proposed environmental bill of rights at the present time and members of the agricultural community -- Mr Hayes may be familiar with this -- have expressed some concerns that an environmental bill of rights could be used against farmers. We are not talking now about farmers who are grossly violating the environmental laws of the province of Ontario; but we are talking about bird bangers, we are talking about odours and we are talking about dust that might be created from an operation. We are not talking bad management practices; we are talking normal farm practices.
When you talked about preserving, you have always said consistently that when you are going to preserve the land, you have to preserve the farmer. You have consistently put that position and not just the land. Would it be wise for the government to consider the possibility of wording the environmental bill of rights in such a way that it could not be used to interfere with normal farming practices?
Mrs Janes: I do not think it would hurt and I think it is somewhat like the bill. The farm practices bill talks about normal practices, but then you get into what is a normal practice, that kind of thing.
Mr Bradley: Sure. I understand that.
Mrs Janes: I think the farmers are perhaps overreacting because I do not believe that the environmental bill of rights is going to do any more than what we already have: a right as citizens to clean air and clean water under the federal acts and whatever provincial acts. It is not my perception that the environmental bill of rights is going after farmers or will be misused. I think it is more to do with industrial polluters or other polluters that people can then take perhaps through to court or whatever body is set up.
I do understand, though, where the farmers are coming from. I have read a bit about it and I believe that in Canada there have only been between six and eight cases where actually a farmer has ended up in court, one of them being the Saunders case. When they end up in court, they always lose, and I have said for about 20 years now where you allow development right up on top of urban people, where you do not have the distance factor, the separation, instead of having the urban people provide the buffer, it is the farm people that end up providing the buffer. Then you are going to end up some time in court or in some other avenue, and the farmer will lose. I know at our hearings also our board chairman wanted to put it on the deeds. They looked into that and they found out there was no point, because everybody has the right to clean air and clean water and you cannot legislate something like that.
So there are two things. One is I do not feel that this environmental bill of rights will be impacting the farmer the way the farmers perceive that it will, any more than they are already impacted through these others. The other is that definitely the emphasis, I believe, should be towards the other, the major polluters and such that people -- and in fact it has not been really ordinary people like ourselves, groups like ourselves, that have gone after farmers. In the case of Saunders, it was individuals who were wakened up by the bird bangers and those kinds of things, and then the ministry intervened.
I just do not see the environmental bill of rights being used in that way, but I did hear that there were not any farmers on the original committee that is looking at it. I think they should be there so that they can understand fully where the thinking is going and have their own input. I do not think those farmers want to pollute and do not think they are thinking that. They are thinking of the obstructionist kind of things like the bird bangers and the fact that those farmers lost two years of their income and went through a horrendous experience. It was extremely difficult for them for no real reason.
Mr Bradley: I would agree with that, and the last comment I would make to you is that I think you have made a valid point when you have said that, going back to the planning practices, what you have to do is not allow these continuous severances and the intervention of urban people into the midst of farm areas where they complain once they get in there, when they buy country estates and move next door to the farm and then start complaining. That is the concern that they have and I think everybody has. You have made that point over the years. Thank you very much for your answers.
Mr Hayes: I think that was a very good question that Mr Bradley raised there and I do respect your response on that. I will ask you a question and then tell you why I am going to, why I am asking. Does PALS get involved with many cases where a city is going to annex a rural area? The reason I am asking that question is that I know there are some city politicians, for example, who themselves would like to preserve that agricultural land out there, but if it becomes part of their city, the interest does not seem to be the same there. I am just wondering if you can comment on that.
Mrs Janes: We have peripherally been involved in a great deal of correspondence over the phone and such with other groups. I think at one point we gave advice on the Barrie case. Right now there is a case that could develop into that, I think, and that is up in Kanata where the hockey franchise is. We have class 1 and 2 land up there and there is a group that we have been dialoguing with who are trying to preserve that land. It looks very much as though that developer has managed to buy up a fair amount of land all around this 75 acres or whatever it is, 100 acres, it looks like about 750 around, and then it is far enough from the urban boundary that there could be up to 7,500 acres involved in the end, all because of a hockey franchise that we feel should not be on farm land.
The ministry, I gather, agrees with us so we have been dialoguing with these people about how they can fight their case right from the beginning actually. They felt extremely overwhelmed. They were threatened by the mayor, they were threatened by people. There are thousands of people want this hockey franchise and they do not maybe realize it could go somewhere else within the urban boundary, but some developer holds all this land and therefore it is going to be there if this case goes the other way. So we do try to help prevent those kinds of situations from coming up.
Mr Bradley: They already have an arena in Hamilton.
Mrs Janes: That is right, Jim, and that is where it should go.
The Chair: I am sure there are no members of this committee who hold season tickets, either.
Mrs Janes: Yet. The mayor is working very hard. Now he is no longer the mayor. I forgot, he stepped down. I hope I have not said anything libellous.
Mr Grandmaître: I would like to adjourn the committee.
The Chair: Mrs Janes, thank you very much. You have been one of the first witnesses. In fact in the history of this committee we have had very few client groups appearing and commenting on the agencies, boards and commissions under review by our committee. This is something relatively new and, if your testimony is any indication, we are certainly going to continue this practice. Most helpful, a most articulate witness, and I am sure that you have helped the committee's deliberations immensely, so thank you very much for appearing.
Before we break, I just want to remind the members of the subcommittee that we are going to be meeting for lunch tomorrow at noon hour. We will see you at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.
The committee adjourned at 1539.