PUBLIC APPOINTMENTS SECRETARIAT
MINISTRY OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
GRAND RIVER CONSERVATION AUTHORITY
CONTENTS
Thursday 13 February 1992
Appointments review process
Public Appointments Secretariat
Carol Phillips, director, public appointments, Premier's office
Ministry of the Attorney General
John M. Johnson, Assistant Deputy Attorney General, civil law section
Wilfrid Peters, counsel, crown law office - civil
Paul LaFleur
Agency Review
Grand River Conservation Authority
Archie MacRobbie, chairmen
Mac Coutts, former general manager
Allan R. Holmes, chief administrative officer
Ronald D. Fox, secretary-treasurer and director of administration
STANDING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
Chair / Président(e): Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président(e): McLean, Allan K. (Simcoe East/-Est PC)
Carter, Jenny (Peterborough ND)
Elston, Murray J. (Bruce L)
Frankford, Robert (Scarborough East/-Est ND)
Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East/-Est L)
Hayes, Pat (Essex-Kent ND)
Jackson, Cameron (Burlington South/-Sud PC)
McGuinty, Dalton (Ottawa South/-Sud L)
Marchese, Rosario (Fort York ND)
Waters, Daniel (Muskoka-Georgian Bay/Muskoka-Baie-Georgienne ND)
Wiseman, Jim (Durham West/-Ouest ND)
Substitution(s)/Membre(s) remplaçant(s):
Akande, Zanana L. (St Andrew-St Patrick ND) for Mr Waters
Brown, Michael A. (Algoma-Manitoulin L) for Mr Elston
Daigeler, Hans (Nepean L) for Mr Grandmaître
Duignan, Noel (Halton North/-Nord ND) for Mr Waters
Fletcher, Derek (Guelph ND) for Mr Wiseman
Klopp, Paul (Huron ND) for Mr Hayes
Mammoliti, George (Yorkview ND) for Ms Carter
Poole, Dianne (Eglinton L) for Mr McGuinty
Clerk pro tem / Greffier ou Greffière par intérim : Carrozza, Franco
Staff / Personnel: Pond, David, Research Officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1009 in committee room 2.
APPOINTMENTS REVIEW PROCESS
Consideration of the appointments review process.
PUBLIC APPOINTMENTS SECRETARIAT
The Chair: Can we come to order, please. We are little bit behind schedule. The first witness this morning is Carol Phillips, who is the director of the public appointments in the Premier's office. Welcome again to the committee. As the members are aware, we circulated a questionnaire and Ms Phillips and her staff were kind enough to provide answers to a variety of questions and concerns the members have had over the course of the past year. We felt it was appropriate to invite Ms Phillips here today to discuss the operation of the committee, where she sees it going, where she thinks changes could occur and also to get feedback from the committee and perhaps questions on both sides. We are looking forward to an interesting hour with you, Ms Phillips. Would you like to say something to start off?
Ms Phillips: I do want to thank the committee for the opportunity of coming before you again. I think it is important that we continue to monitor the appointments process we have in place in the province, and where there may be concerns or suggestions for change or whatever, that we try to work those out together. I have a number of staff here also from the secretariat today, so if there are any of those questions you want to have expanded on in terms of answers or other questions you have about the secretariat, we will be only too pleased to answer those. We pride ourselves on our openness and accessibility. We will be be willing to answer any and all of those questions.
As a point of reference when I am talking about the staff, Nancy Pearson and myself are political, working out of the Premier's office; the other staff are civil service staff, maintaining the records and providing that important support function the civil service does in the government. May I, however, take this opportunity to say that if there are myths out there about the inefficiency of civil servants, those certainly are myths that are not proven by the people I work with and the service they provide.
Mr Jackson: Is that the difference between two and seven? They are quite capable; I know that.
Ms Phillips: Heather did not need many people to help her.
The Chair: Who would like to begin this morning? Mr Marchese, did you indicate so?
Mr Marchese: No. I thought perhaps the other members might want to start.
Mr McLean: Everybody is shy this morning. I am never too shy to ask a couple of questions. The first question I would like to ask is a matter of information I would like to get. There has been a lot of advertising across the province; large advertisements in the newspapers. I would really be interested to know what the cost of the advertising is. I know we have them available in all the libraries in Ontario. I would be curious to know what the cost of the newspaper advertisements is.
Ms Phillips: In the Premier's statement in December, he committed to an ad on the appointments process. We held back on that ad because the response to the book itself was quite overwhelming and we wanted to be ready for the response to the ad. We were right to do so. The ad went into 43 dailies, French weeklies, monthlies, semimonthlies and native newspapers, and it is going into 168 ethnic newspapers in 36 languages, that group that was recommended to us by Management Board. The total cost of the ad was $125,000. Of that, $74,000 is the offset for the ethnic ads. There is a fund that government has long had for making sure that the ethnic communities are properly advised of the government initiatives.
Mr McLean: What is the budget of the secretariat? This is a new secretariat that has been established.
Ms Phillips: Yes.
Mr McLean: There are five or six civil servants now. Were they hired through applications, or how were they hired?
Ms Phillips: They were hired through the Human Resources Secretariat hiring through the competitive process, as civil service persons are hired. The 1991-92 budget of the secretariat, and it was a startup budget, was $1.456 million. That included $348,000 in startup expenses, including the computer hardware that went in. The 1992-93 budget is $1.1 million and that is frozen at that level. Management Board and the government then want to do a review of the secretariat and the appointments process and come back to it at that point in time. That is our budget.
Mr McLean: I have one further area for a question, if I have a bit of time, Mr Chairman. I want to speak with regard to the way the letters are sent out and the advertising is done. I would like specifically to speak about the police services board. The letters go to the member, to city council, to the police services board. They are asked for input and they are asked for names.
In the case of the city of Orillia, that was done. There were names recommended by the city, by the police services board, and I do not know whether I sent any names or not. I do not usually, but I may have. I do not think so. Then other people, of course, apply directly.
The individual who was chosen there was not recommended by anybody. I have lived in the community for a long time and I had never met this person. She said she was involved in the community. She was here for an interview and it was the first time I had ever seen her. So I am surprised, when the people are supposed to have been involved in the community, why you would not take a recommendation from the police services board or from the city council. This was an individual who was appointed, in my estimation, because of her political affiliation. The question is, is that a fair process to put the city and the police services board through, and then choose somebody nobody knows, not even the police services board?
Ms Phillips: I cannot speak to the individual specifically. I was not necessarily here for the hearing on that, so I apologize, because I do not know how it went. I would assume, though, in spite of the fact that you had not known her -- and I know Orillia is not as big as Metropolitan Toronto, and you have been in politics a long time, so you would make the assumption that you would have known the person -- that she was found to be qualified and, hopefully, a good representative of the public on that police services board.
I am sorry you did not take the opportunity to make proposals. We solicit quite broadly for every one of these appointments, including Orillia. One of the things we are finding, however, and hopefully we will overcome, is that there is a little bit of cynicism out there generally about how serious we are in soliciting those names. In fact, names often are not sent forward and we end up having to go out and search names ourselves simply because no names come in when we go through that process.
The police services boards are a good example of that. In a number of the smaller towns around Ontario we had trouble finding people for those police services boards, and that is a real shame. It meant that the pool of people we were choosing from was smaller than we hope it will be in the future.
Mr McLean: I can assure you that the pool sent in from Orillia was rather large. I did not send them in myself, but I have people I know of send them in. I am not taking anything away from the candidate who was chosen. I think she will do a super job; I think she will be an asset to the commission. The fact is, it was the process I was getting at. When the city police services board submitted names, none of those people was even looked at, apparently, and that is what made me ask these questions. Is that process really fair for those people, to go through all that work in council and in the police services board, and it is being ignored?
Ms Phillips: I assure you the people were all looked at.
Mr McLean: That is it for now.
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Mr Daigeler: I was surprised to hear you say you have not received that many applications on the police services boards, which seems to be in contradiction of what Mr Mackenzie wrote on January 20 to one of my constituents, where he says, "Further, this letter expresses some of the limitations involved in the selection process; that is, due to the high volume of applications, we cannot conduct personal interviews," and so on. Frankly, my experience is just the opposite. I have had quite a few people who have seen the ad come to my office. They were making applications, taking the government at its word, thinking this whole process is meaningful, and then they never heard anything. They are very disappointed and upset.
So I would like to get a sense of how many applications are you receiving based on the ad. Frankly, it is my impression -- perhaps all the people in Nepean just want to serve everywhere -- that you are receiving a tremendous number of applications, and therefore I am not surprised that you cannot handle them. I am just wondering whether it is the right thing to do, to place ads all over the place inviting people to submit their applications, and they take it seriously, send in all their CVs and everything else, and then they never hear anything about it.
Ms Phillips: Let's make a distinction between the police services boards and the other agencies, simply because of the new legislation coming in on police services boards. As of January 1, we had a lot of new communities that needed police services boards and needed people sitting on those police services boards. The experience did vary; it depended on the community. From Nepean and the Ottawa area we get a large number of applications generally, not just for police services boards.
Mr Daigeler: That would be my impression, yes.
Ms Phillips: The Ministry of the Solicitor General and police services boards outside Metropolitan Toronto are the minister's prerogative, as opposed to the Premier's prerogative, but the Solicitor General's ministry would have responded to those individuals. You drew to our attention, I believe, on a couple of occasions, including a question in the House, a couple of your constituents who in fact did not receive responses. We straight away contacted those people to make sure they understood that was the exception and to make sure they were certainly responded to.
We have a lot of response to the Ottawa area because the CBC news at 6 o'clock decided on one occasion to highlight the book on agencies, boards and commissions, unbeknown to us, and that did elicit a lot of interest. The other thing -- and hopefully we have been able to clarify this in our advertising -- was that a very widely read columnist in the Ottawa Citizen wrote a column with a very bold headline saying, "Want a Job? Call Carol," and included our phone number and our fax number. You can imagine the response we got in the middle of a recession. It was not very fair.
Mr Daigeler: How many did you get? I get lots of calls too.
Ms Phillips: We got hundreds and hundreds, and they are still coming in. I think somebody must have posted it in one of the unemployment centres or something. That is unfair to the public to raise those expectations, because we are talking here about public service, not jobs.
Mr Daigeler: But the government placed an ad saying, "If you are interested, apply." So what is unfair?
Ms Phillips: The ad we placed, as opposed to the columnist, talked about public service on agencies, boards and commissions and clarified that there were a number of agencies, boards and commissions in this province. However, these were public service appointments to boards, not jobs. The response to that ad has been very enthusiastic, and people fully understand we are not talking jobs here.
Mr Marchese: Ms Phillips, I can tell you I do not envy your job, and I recognize the paradoxical nature of your job as well, by the way, and the conflicting nature of it, because you will never be able to satisfy anybody. You will be attacked by those who feel you might have chosen a few who happened to have an affiliation, you will be attacked by many who know us who feel they are not getting access to those jobs and you will attacked by the many applicants who apply and will not be able to have access to them because they cannot all get the positions. So I do not envy you at all.
I will not comment on the past practices in terms of what other governments have done in their selection processes; they might want to reflect themselves on what processes they had. Could you speak to the process of opening up access to different people who otherwise would never have known about these appointments, access to the different target communities that we feel are important to be a part of this process? Hopefully, we are hiring many more of them. Could you comment on all those aspects that I feel are very important?
Ms Phillips: In fact, the experience of opening up the process has been quite rewarding, simply because what we find when we make the process accessible is that there are people all over this province who want to put their names forward from communities which in the past were excluded from public appointments, from being able to serve. We have had a very enthusiastic reaction to the accessibility. Some people just send an application form in with the simple words: "Thank you. I always wanted to know how many agencies there were and how they worked."
Besides the public libraries and the bookstores, which sold out of this book on numerous occasions, the book itself has gone out to many community organizations. Many community centres have phoned in for new copies because people have walked away with the ones that were there -- so that they could share them with their friends, I guess.
We have started keeping figures, because I think it is important that when we are talking about the success that we have out there, we do not continue to talk in generalities and self-congratulations in a general way. Of the full-time appointments that we have made until now, approximately 50% of them are women and approximately 20% of them are visible minorities. Right now, we are in the process of putting together a system where we can track those successes far more clearly. In the part-time appointments, the numbers are approximately the same, although in the area of visible minorities we are talking 11% or 12%, so we are a little less successful in undoing some of the past inequity in those areas.
Mr Marchese: In the last year or so, have there been things about this job that you have learned that you feel need to be improved, either the selection process or how we advertise or how members come here prepared or not? Are there things that you feel we need to address that this committee should know about?
Ms Phillips: The system certainly is not perfect, by any means. It will, as all systems do, need to change. One of the areas that has already started to be addressed by some of the members here today is that we want to make sure that we clearly respond to people so that the expectations that they have are not being unfairly dealt with, so that they understand very clearly what the process is, and they get a response when they take the time to write their wishes to us.
In terms of the standing committee itself, though, the second area of concern I have, which I hope we can address here today, is the time when the House is not in session and this committee therefore does not meet as regularly, as all standing committees do not. There are times when in fact we have appointees and the clock just ticks on the standing order for the 30 days, because you have, as a result of the schedule, not been afforded the opportunity to meet and review, or you have appointed somebody you want to review and there is no time to review that person within the standing orders.
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The second area is that if you take a look at the numbers there, you are reviewing approximately 10% of new appointees. Only you can decide as a committee whether or not you are satisfied with the number of appointees you have the opportunity to review. But I hope you revisit that: 10% may be a good sampling or it may not be. That will have to be something you decide.
Mr Marchese: A matter of conflict of interest was raised yesterday in our discussion as we interviewed one person. Perhaps other members might get to that later on. Can you comment on your role in identifying conflict, your role in advising the member or this committee about possible conflict? Do you have such a role, or is this something that we need to deal with as a committee?
Ms Phillips: We attempt very clearly to make sure in the public appointments secretariat that the intended appointees who go forward do not have a conflict with the board business that they are going forward to perform. However, if the committee identifies something that is a possible conflict -- that usually happens ahead of time, hopefully -- then it becomes a responsibility in the day-to-day business of the agency itself; it becomes a responsibility of the chair.
Conflict itself however, as you know as MPPs, is primarily a matter of personal responsibility and integrity. There may be, for any given member at any given time, an item of business that arises in which he or she may have a conflict. So we really do depend a lot as well on the integrity of the appointees themselves to declare that conflict, to clearly recognize one that may occur, and to have understood the directions given by the chair and the agency.
Mr Jackson: Carol, it is good to see you before us at the microphone. I know you have been able to participate in a lot of our deliberations daily, so you have been present when a couple of these issues have been raised. That is helpful to the committee and to this particular portion of our getting together.
Let me start with a statement. I am one of those who is not having great difficulty about making sure that our boards and commissions better reflect the changing nature of our communities; I am not one who has difficulty with that at all. However, when I see that that is a policy statement, and therefore should be a guideline, I tend to say to myself, as is the case that I raised yesterday with the police services board, that in fact we are seeing much more of a political approach than we had hoped for. I am not saying that a political approach is going to be avoided. I have been around this building since 1970 and I have seen all types of it, whether it is Ian Deans getting an appointment from two different governments and two different parliaments or whatever, or Mr Brandt going on a commission, or Mr Martel. It is a political process.
However, here I want to get into some concerns I have, and I want to share them with you directly. Concern has been raised about this issue of people writing in and letting you know that they would like to serve. Now, there has been a lot of controversy about the police services board appointments, and mine has been no exception. We have a letter to Mr Andrew Mackenzie -- and you obviously must have known -- back on April 5, 1991, from Mr Paul LaFleur. That is fine. He submitted his name and he was on a list.
The Chair: Mr Jackson, I want to interrupt you at this point just to make sure that both you and the witness are aware -- I am sure the witness is -- of the standing order that we cannot get into specifics about an individual appointee. We are restricted by that standing order. In reviewing an intended appointee, we cannot call a witness other than the intended appointee, so if you are going to discuss the question of conflict, I would rather you do it, if you have to do it, in terms of generalities and not deal with specifics.
Mr Jackson: All right. I am not even at the conflict point yet, Mr Chairman, but thank you for the guidance.
The Chair: You raised a name, and that is out of order.
Mr Jackson: The point I am trying to get at here is that when an inquiry was made to your office -- which you have said is a political operating out of the Premier's office, as distinct from the civil service section -- you advised that there were very few applications for that police services board. When I contacted Mr Mackenzie yesterday, he indicated to me that there were 15 to 20 applications. Given the fact that I am aware that at least two of those 20 applications were from visible minorities, I am a little bit surprised to find out that we have an appointment that does not necessarily conform to that.
Can I ask you why Mr Mackenzie would be aware that there were 15 to 20 applications for the police services board, and your office -- and the person I talked to indicated they had had a conversation with you in particular -- had subsequently sent them out application forms, but you had indicated, "It's not our fault if not everybody applies and we didn't get any applications." I am wondering why there would be this apparent breakdown between your office and Mr Mackenzie's office on something as substantive as how many applications for a specific position had been received, either by Mr Mackenzie or by your office.
Ms Phillips: I have to admit that I do not remember a conversation on this specific item, but it is entirely possible, since we get a number of inquiries from MPP offices and we attempt to clear up every question that there may be about appointments. We are usually successful in doing so.
These are ministerial appointments. Until January, there was an advisory committee in the Solicitor General's office that screened all of the applicants, and all of the applicants came forward. The role I would perform in those Solicitor General appointments would be ensuring that there were not an inordinate number of any overall group coming forward in terms of appointees. So the question I would automatically ask on a police services board like that is, what is the composition of the board as a whole? Then I would pursue it from there.
Mr Jackson: That was my concern, because we have no visible minorities on our police services board. We would like to. The fact that we have been encouraging them in our community, that they are on file but have been passed over, is of concern to us.
It puts me in the uncomfortable position when asked "What is it I am doing wrong?" of having to say: "Well, if you've got any part of your background where you've been involved with a trade union, if you've ever grieved, put it in your application; it will help. If you can see your way clear to go out and join the NDP, it will help your application." I do not appreciate being put in that kind of position in order to promote applications which I see are not getting -- I would not know this if I had not talked to Mr Mackenzie yesterday to see the large number of applications on file for the police services board in Halton.
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Ms Phillips: I think that generality is unfair to the appointees who are on police services boards. The fact that they are a New Democrat --
Mr Jackson: No, it was on the appointments before this table. Four out of the five appointments yesterday were card-carrying NDPers, and we did not object to that. We simply acknowledged it. I said this is an intensely political process. I am simply saying that I am a little concerned when we are trying so hard in our community to get visible-minority representation on our police services board. Chief Harding and our group are doing an outstanding job in this province, yet our board does not reflect that.
Ms Phillips: I hope we are going to be able to work with you to in the future ensure that that board is more reflective. At the time of this selection, I am supposing that the Solicitor General and his staff made the decision that this was the person, for a variety of reasons, they wanted to go forward with. I do not mean that by way of an excuse. I agree with you: The boards, including the board in your area, have to be more reflective of the community.
Mr Jackson: My only point in raising it was that there is apparently, on the face of it, a breakdown between the Solicitor General's office and your office, and I understand that your office is to be guiding, supervising and overseeing to ensure that these kinds of appointments are being promoted. That was my understanding.
Ms Phillips: We certainly are, and I would challenge you to --
Mr Jackson: I will tell you the name of the police officer who called you in the last three weeks and --
Ms Phillips: A police officer called us?
Mr Jackson: Yes, with respect to --
Ms Phillips: That I would remember.
Mr Jackson: Well, we will talk about that.
Ms Phillips: I do not mind having this discussion with you at all, and at any time.
Mr Jackson: I am serious. We have got two new appointments coming up, and we are anxious to get a visible minority on the board.
Ms Phillips: But I would challenge you to compare the representativeness of the members of police services boards now across this province. You may find individual exceptions, and they are bound to be there because we are not perfect, as those who went before us were not.
Mr Jackson: If I may, Mr Chairman, I have one brief question generally to deal with the issue of conflict, in spite of the fact that Ms Phillips was present yesterday when this discussion came up. I guess the committee has a general question about --
Ms Phillips: I am sorry, I was not present.
Mr Jackson: You were here yesterday.
Ms Phillips: Yes, but I was not here for this, no.
Mr Jackson: You were here when we discussed the appointment for the purposes of the vote, as I recall.
Ms Phillips: No, I was not. I was here for when Mr Herrndorf was called before you, and then I returned for when Mr Bullen was here, and those were the two I was here for.
Mr Jackson: The question has been raised as to who identifies conflict of interest, because your guidelines do not necessarily address this in any detail; no formal process exists. At what point do you determine that there is a potential conflict of interest in an application? Have you rejected an application for any board or commission simply because, in your opinion, there was a prima facie case of conflict of interest that was apparent?
Ms Phillips: Yes, we have.
Mr Jackson: What is the process you would follow? Because in a general case we were discussing yesterday, this was identified by several parties, but nobody seems to be in a position to arbitrate, rule or guide the applicant, the board on which he or she will serve, or this committee, which processes or reviews the application. Can you help us understand that?
Ms Phillips: On conflict questions, in our interview process, especially for quasi-judicial or police boards or commissions that make quasi-judicial decisions, we very often ask the persons themselves if there is anything that they think in their experience could possibly be a conflict. We ask them that directly. We take a look at their background as presented to us on their résumé, and also make our own determination as to whether or not there could be a conflict.
I think it goes without saying that putting forward an applicant who could potentially have a conflict would be an embarrassment for us, so for us as well it is an important consideration. However, if there is a question, what we will often do is to ask the legal counsel in that ministry what they think in terms of a possible conflict situation, and we have done that before. Before the appointee comes to this committee, we have taken as many steps as we possibly can.
Mr Jackson: In the general question I am raising --
The Chair: Could you make this one brief, Mr Jackson? There are still others with questions.
Mr Jackson: Yes. The hypothetical scenario is, where the applicant comes before this committee and openly admits that he feels it may be a conflict of interest and that is his own legal opinion, and we have been advised that the ministry did not entertain the legal question, what does that say to this committee when we raise matters that emanate from the applicant that there may be a conflict of interest? Speak to us about what position that puts us in as a committee charged with responsibilities -- whatever they are. I assume they are to review the appropriateness of the appointment, because we seem to be the only authority putting a stamp of approval on it, but in fact you are saying there should be a process to ensure that it has gotten the government stamp of approval before it comes to us. I mean, this appointment has the Premier's signature on it, this hypothetical one.
Ms Phillips: I think that, first of all, it would be a highly unusual situation where an appointee himself would declare to this committee that he had a potential conflict.
Mr Jackson: Hansard would be great reading for you.
Ms Phillips: There are more occasions than the hypothetical occasion you are talking about?
Mr Jackson: The hypothetical occasion occurred yesterday.
Ms Phillips: Yes. I think it would be highly unusual, first of all. I also put to you that some appointees could be wrong in terms of that conflict question as well, and that while that does not mean you should not consider their opinion -- among lawyers you certainly get a variety of opinions on any given question -- while you should consider their opinion, they could be wrong. But if you do not think they are wrong, then I think you as a committee have got to discuss that possibility.
Mr Jackson: My last question then is, by your own presentation to this committee, we find ourselves in this hypothetical scenario as follows. We are told that a matter, when raised, should be checked by the legal department of the appropriate ministry. The deputant comes forward and says, "I think there might be." We can listen to or reject that opinion, but in fairness to the applicant, he has at least indicated that there might be. So morally he really is off the hook. He is not trying to hide it. It is his opinion.
We are bound by the guidelines of this committee that we cannot extend the review of a given applicant beyond a 24-hour period. We are unable to bring in this legal opinion from the appropriate ministry to give us the assurances. Certainly on a recorded vote I am left with no opinion to cover myself to vote against an application, simply because the ministry did not come forward with the legal opinion when this committee, in all fairness, would like to have the matter clarified. You see the situation, this hypothetical situation we find ourselves put in.
Ms Phillips: Yes.
Mr Jackson: It flows from the rules and guidelines we must follow as a committee. All parties were in agreement in this hypothetical case that we should hear that legal opinion, which you say is available as part of your process, that it just has not been shared with this committee.
Ms Phillips: I think we also have to understand that the appointee will then go forward to a board which will have a chair. If that chair has any doubt whatsoever about that appointee being in a conflict position and he or she contacts us, we do have the power to revoke orders in council as well, if that is the case. Hopefully it would be the exception.
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Mr McGuinty: Ms Phillips, you will know that I have been critical of the process here and the limitations it imposes on us as members of the committee. I am going to be frank with you. I think this is a wonderful, masterful exercise in public relations. You have to have some grudging respect for the architecture, the structure that has gone into this.
You have prepared a guide, you have a budget of -- I guess we are up to $3 million by the end of 1992-93. We have distributed this widely throughout the province. We have given the impression that there are many jobs available. Notwithstanding what you said earlier, people who come into my office believe there are jobs, but a great many of those in fact do not pay. At the same time, we have given the impression that appointments are subject to review by an all-party committee which purports to carry some kind of authority in terms of reviewing that appointment.
The problems we have at this committee are those I am going to speak to right now. You have heard them before, but I want to put them to you again and I want to get your response to them.
First of all, we simply cannot deal with the number of appointments that are being made in this province on an annual basis. To date we have only dealt with one tenth.
Second, if we do not deal with an appointment we have chosen within the allotted time, there is deemed concurrence, rather than some kind of provision which would allow us to deal with it at a later date.
Third, the time available for interviews is very short. We simply cannot fully explore all the issues which ought to be explored if we are going to do as the Premier said, and I am going to quote from his statement of December 10, 1990, in the House, "We're going to ensure a fairer selection of the best possible candidates." He used the word "best."
Fourth, we cannot in this committee obtain extrinsic evidence. That means we cannot hear from potential fellow workers, we cannot hear from people who have worked with these candidates in the past, we cannot deal with letters of reference; in other words, we cannot do a decent job of finding out what this person is all about and whether in fact he or she is the best possible candidate. So I cannot vote in favour of any of these appointments as a general rule -- there have been a few exceptions -- because I do not know who they have been up against. We are not provided with that list and we are not provided with the credentials of the others these people have been up against.
The next problem we have is that of course there are more NDP members sitting on this committee than there are of the other two parties combined, and as might be expected, if we think there have been some 90 appointments that have been dealt with by this committee, there is a potential there of 540 votes being cast by the government members. Do you know how many of those 540 votes have ever voted against an appointee? Zero, and I would be astonished if we ever have a government member vote against appointment.
Sixth, we have no right of veto. Even if the government members decided in their heart of hearts that this was not the best possible candidate for the job, our committee is powerless under the terms of its mandate to stop that from going through. Unless the Premier decides to agree with us, it is going to go through, and he has never made any kind of commitment to go along with what this committee does in terms of rejecting an appointment.
I wonder if the advertising you are sending out, Ms Phillips, says: "Don't worry, folks. There's only a one out of 10 chance you're going to get called for review. Even if you do get called for review, nobody is ever going to vote against you on the government side. We've got the numbers."
First of all, do you acknowledge those as being real problems, and what are you prepared to do to address them?
Mr Marchese: Dalton, I presume you want to return to the old system where someone close to the Premier would make the selection process and that would solve all the problems.
Mr McGuinty: Mr Chair, I have addressed my question to the witness.
Mr Marchese: I understand that.
Mr McGuinty: I wonder if the witness might be permitted to answer.
Mr Marchese: I am just reminding you of the old practices in your government, Mr McGuinty.
The Vice-Chair: Would the witness please address the question.
Ms Phillips: Mr McGuinty, I hope you understand that I am going to assume that some of your questions were rhetorical. However, I think that overall, what we are attempting to achieve is not a perfect human resources system, and we do not claim that. This is still a small-p political system in which the government maintains the right to govern. We have said very clearly we want a more open, more fair, more accessible system, but in the final analysis you are right: The decision will be made by the government of the day.
I hope one day that we will have the chance -- I am torn on this. I hope the appointees we continue to put forward are members of the public that we are proud to put forward and that we are confident will do a good job on agencies, boards or commissions. But should that day come when this whole committee has very clear concerns about any individual appointee and this committee as a whole says that it has a problem with that appointee, I think you know that in the realm of politics, the Premier would be in a very difficult position in disagreeing with this committee.
Mr McGuinty: Are we after the best? I am going to use the Premier's words. Are we after the best possible candidates?
Ms Phillips: Yes, we are.
Mr McGuinty: Then why are you not prepared to share with us information that would allow us to decide whether in fact we have before us -- the people who sit in that chair -- the best possible candidate? Do we have to take your word that they are the best possible candidate?
Ms Phillips: In a group of Ontarians who put their faith in us by putting their names forward for consideration, those we choose not to go forward with may be good, well-meaning, talented people we have to say, "No, not this time" to. I do not think that you would expect us -- or I hope you would not -- to have their names put forward as the ones who were rejected. Some of them are just, in that situation, not the best candidate. That does not mean they are not good, well-meaning Ontarians.
Mr McGuinty: So you are restricting under yourself, under your secretariat, the decision-making power with respect to who is the best possible candidate. Then why do we have this committee?
Ms Phillips: You have this committee to make sure that the people we put forward are qualified and can withstand your scrutiny. When we say to people on the telephone, "You understand that you may have the chance to be called before this committee," I assure you every one of them expects they are going to be the one to be called, and they have to think very hard about whether or not they want to go through that process. Most of them welcome it, because whether they are New Democrats or whether they are Liberals or whether they are trade unionists, who I would say in the past have mainly been excluded from appointments other than the traditional labour appointments, or whether they are visible minorities, who it is assumed are put forward for crass numbers reasons other than their qualifications, they hope they will get the chance to sit here before you and say, "I want to speak to my qualifications so you know I am qualified and willing to serve and have a lot of talents to offer."
Mr McGuinty: I have no doubt whatsoever about the sincerity of the people who appear before us and of their earnest desire to serve to the best of their ability in whatever position the secretariat has chosen for them. My concern is with the process, which we are being told is to ensure, first of all, that we get the best possible candidate. That, you should recognize, means a purely subjective test. What is the best? It is purely subjective.
Ms Phillips: It is always subjective.
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Mr McGuinty: The Premier did not say that. It does not say in the advertisement it is going to have to be an appointment which is considered the best by the government of the day: "If you think the way we do, then you have a better chance of getting that appointment." It does not say that in the ads.
What has been the cost to date to fill those 900 jobs the secretariat has filled?
Ms Phillips: I am not sure I can answer that thoroughly. I have shared with you the budget. You can draw what conclusions you wish as to how valuable the process has been. In the final analysis, I guess the people of Ontario will decide whether or not they are happy with the system itself.
To speak to the subjective-versus-objective issue, however, as a trade unionist myself who spent a lot of years at grievance hearings fighting job-posting grievances: If you, sir, can invent a totally objective way of promoting the best people, you should leave this place, because there is a world out there waiting for that totally objective system. We only claim to make it more open and more fair than it has been in the past, and I would put our system up against previous governments' systems any time in moving towards that eventual objective.
Mr McGuinty: I guess it would be fair to say that you have spent in excess of $1 million to fill 900 jobs?
Ms Phillips: Democracy does not come cheap.
Mr McGuinty: Do you know what those 900 jobs would pay?
Ms Phillips: Those 900 appointments?
Mr McGuinty: Yes. How many of them would be paying and how many would be non-paying?
Ms Phillips: I can, if you want, do some of that breakdown for you; however, not here and now, simply because I would be merely guessing, and I do not think that is fair to your question.
Mr McGuinty: All right. I would appreciate it if you would get that information. My concern, you see, Ms Phillips, as you may gather, is simply that from an economic perspective, if you spend $1 million in order to fill a number of jobs, it is my belief that when you total up the salaries, they are paid very little. A lot of those jobs, and I use the term loosely, are in fact positions which call for community service. That $1 million, which will total $3 million by the end of 1992-93, is not really justifiable economically. Rather, it gives the impression that there is openness, that there is fairness, and that we are getting the best possible candidates for the job, when, as I have indicated, in light of the tools we have been given to do this job on this committee, I do not really understand why I am here, what I am doing. I feel that I am party to a fraud that is being perpetrated on the Ontario public.
Ms Phillips: I cannot help you out on that. But I can tell you that the chairs of agencies, boards and commissions that I have spoken to have said that the appointees that they have these days are making a very valuable contribution in a different sort of way, because so many more of them understand how they got there, what the expectations of them are ahead of time in terms of the number of meetings to attend. In the past, when we simply had riding presidents who were given appointments to agencies they had neither any interest in nor any desire to participate in, and therefore did not turn up, it was not a very good way of serving the public.
I think the question you are asking, however, is in terms of value for money. If you believe that agencies and public members on the boards of those agencies are important, then I think you have to assume that interested, active people who have thought out that position will make a much better contribution to the proper, efficient running of that agency than those whose names appear.
The Chair: We have to, in the interest of fairness, move on here. We have three other members who would like to ask questions and we are running out of time.
Mr Klopp: Very quickly, a point and then a question.
The police services board has come up a number of times. I come from a rural area where we did not have police commissions and it was a whole new ball of wax. For us to start this new system was just an added, whole great weight. I can say that in my area we did have a lot of problems getting people to apply, out of cynicism, out of feeling, well, it is a joke. But I also know that in about four of my towns people did send their names in. There was not this feeling that they are phoning up the member of Parliament and asking him, "Look, I want to get on," or "I don't want to get on." I think the system is going to be far more fair and open.
I remember one councillor making the statement, "Oh, they're government appointments so they're just going to do what the government wants." I found that quite amusing, because I come from a small area and everybody knows how everybody votes and how much money you make and how much money you spend and how many whatever. I looked with the goodness of my heart, because I see not one person I did not know -- I know who they are. Talking about politics, it finally got out of the system, and they live in the community and I think they are going to listen to their fellow neighbours and make a whole lot better thing on those boards. So I think the system will in time be very open and very much better, and I appreciate the system.
The question I get a lot of times from rural Ontario: We sometimes ask farmers to be on farmers' commissions, on a board or something. That is how it has been; now with this open system, they can write in letters. Will this system allow, say, a farmer to get on another board, other than just directly on to a farm board? He could maybe get on to something else?
Ms Phillips: That is part of what we have been trying to address in the agency, boards and commissions, and that is to get away from the traditional composition of any given agency, board and commission so we can hopefully broadly represent the interests. There is absolutely no reason why we should not have an agricultural representative, for example, on the board of Ontario Hydro and we are working on that now. There is no reason why an agricultural representative does not have things to say about any area of any agency whatsoever. That perspective, that rural perspective, that agricultural-farming perspective as well, just needs to be brought to a lot of these boards that were considered urban boards before, big city boards.
The Chair: Mr McLean, do you have a question?
Mr McLean: Yes, I have. If we want to find out who to write to, who is the head of the secretariat?
Ms Phillips: I am.
Mr McLean: I thought it was a non-political body.
Ms Phillips: I explained to you at the outset that I am the political person, as is Nancy Pearson. If what you require is information that is of a recordkeeping nature, etc, we have a manager, Marilyn Sharma, from the civil service. Any of those types of questions will be answered by any of the civil servants in there.
However, I would assume that on some of the things we would be speaking about you may want to speak to a political person. If I am wrong in doing that, you can speak to anybody you want to. As a matter of fact, one of the things that has surprised me is that we do have a walk-in reception area, but I have never had an MPP, and that goes for my own party as well, walk in that door.
Mr McLean: Where is it?
Ms Phillips: It is in the Macdonald Block.
Mr McLean: And what is the room number?
Ms Phillips: It is M2-70. It is the old wedding registry area.
Mr McLean: I just have one final one that is really an observation, Ms Phillips, on the first question I had. The fact is, some members that had applied for the police commission position received a letter after the appointment had been made thanking them for their application and that their letter would still be looked at. So perhaps you could let them know -- I mean, they should have the letter before the appointment is made.
Ms Phillips: Mr McLean, believe me, after the number of comments I have heard here today about police services boards, one of the first meetings I will want to hold is with the people in that ministry and ask them how we might improve this system.
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The Chair: I have a couple of questions for you, Ms Phillips. Mr Jackson raised an issue with respect to an appointee we deliberated on yesterday, but because of some concerns that were expressed, we deferred a decision until later today, and we have asked some officials from the Ministry of the Attorney General, who are going to be appearing after you. We have a problem, of course, as I mentioned during Mr Jackson's questions, by the restrictions placed upon us by your government. In fact, the standing order indicates that in reviewing an intended appointee, the committee shall not call as a witness any person other than the intended appointee. So when we are talking about these types of questions, we cannot deal with specifics and specific intended appointees with anyone other than the individual who is the intended appointee.
I am wondering what the rationale is of the men or women who draft this kind of legislation and incorporate this kind of restriction on the committee. What is the rationale? Why do you feel that this committee should not have the flexibility to call other witnesses who may have something to contribute in a very significant way in respect of whether or not this individual is qualified, whether he or she may have a conflict -- a host of questions that should be of concern to you, not just to this committee.
Ms Phillips: I cannot speak to what the system will eventually evolve into, but the original intention was to have the specific appointee come before the committee and speak to their qualifications, if the committee desired that. What we wanted to avoid was the situation where the committee may call witnesses who may cast aspersion as to some aspect of that person's moral fibre, etc.
We in no way meant to restrict the type of information or the type of advice you are talking about. Possibly we assumed those kind of questions would be able to be accommodated through the researcher within that period of time, without public deliberations. We do not want to get into a situation where appointees feel compelled to bring legal counsel. We are not interested in the Senate hearings situation they have in the United States. Perhaps if we reviewed Supreme Court judges as they do in the United States that may be something that we get to, or if we reviewed other people at that level. But for the most part, the people we are dealing with here are members of the public putting their names forward for public appointments.
The Chair: The reality is that the government has a majority on this committee. In respect to the need for calling witnesses, obviously they can always exercise their majority vote if indeed they do not feel, for whatever reason, it is appropriate to call a witness. But I think in situations that can arise like the one yesterday, where all three parties agree it would be helpful to the process to be able to call independent witnesses in, or someone who may have information, it would be very helpful, not just to us but the government as well, in respect to that potential appointee. I have extreme difficulty with the way the committee has been handcuffed in that respect. I hope it is something that you will take back to whomever makes these kinds of decisions for the government.
The other area I wanted to mention is with respect to people being reappointed. I have some concern about that. We had Ms Susan Eng before us a few weeks ago. The only reason we had her before us was because this committee, as part of its other responsibilities, is doing a review of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Services Board. During the course of those discussions, Ms Eng indicated that she has been reappointed, or there is an indication from your office or the Premier's office that she is going to be reappointed. Those are the kinds of appointments I think this Legislature should have some input into, because there is indeed a specific example of a very controversial appointee. There are a lot of views with respect to Ms Eng as to whether she is doing a good job or whether she is doing a destructive job. You can take either side of that coin, but I think those are the kinds of appointments or reappointments that we should have an opportunity to have input into as a committee.
Ms Phillips: In speaking to that, I guess the way we look at it is that those people we are reappointing were not our appointees in the first place, in the first parts of government. Susan Eng, for example, was not our appointee.
The Chair: I understand that.
Ms Phillips: The fact that she is chair of the board was as a result of an election, not because we appointed her to be chair of the board.
Mr Jackson: You had better read Hansard again. She was asked that question. Check Hansard.
Ms Phillips: We did not appoint her as chair of the board.
Mr Jackson: She was asked by your office to run for chair. That is in Hansard.
The Chair: I think we all appreciate the politics of that matter.
Ms Phillips: However, with the people you are asking to review, we are in a difficult situation as government because they were not our appointees in the first place. We are reappointing another government's appointee. We could be accused, I think, of some crass political shenanigans if we were -- what position does that put us in, to defend another government's appointee? However, by the time we get further into our term, you will have had the opportunity to review all our appointees, because they are appointees.
The Chair: I do not think in terms of being accused of crass political opportunism or whatever, because you do not make the decisions for those reviews. It is this all-party committee that makes the decision as to whether or not it wants to review an individual appointee or, if we had the opportunity, a reappointee. It is not the government that is making those selections; it is this committee, So I think you do not have to concern yourself about that. Those were the two concerns I wanted to get on the record.
We will take another five minutes or so. Ms Akande, you have not had a chance yet.
Ms Akande: I was interested in going back to the democratization of the process, the opening up of the process. It is expensive, and you have already mentioned that. I am interested in knowing what was there before for you to build on.
Ms Phillips: Obviously, there was no secretariat prior to the secretariat.
Ms Akande: What was there?
Ms Phillips: From the description that I have had and my own personal experience, Heather Peterson was the political person who met with the Premier, David Peterson, and between the two of them they decided on who the appointees would be. She was also the sole outreach person for candidates who were coming forward. Prior to that, I can only speak to some of the historical versions, which may not be true; I guess the party that was there can correct me if I was wrong. Apparently those deliberations were held in the Park Plaza Hotel over breakfast in terms of making the selections there.
The Chair: Just a rumour.
Ms Akande: So if there was no secretariat there was no review committee.
Ms Phillips: That is correct.
Ms Akande: I see. Then how were appointees reviewed?
Ms Phillips: Appointees were not reviewed.
Ms Akande: Without question.
Ms Phillips: Yes.
Ms Akande: Could you tell me then, what did the boards look like in terms of the ethnic composition?
Ms Phillips: We are still trying to determine that. We have a full-time person now who is trying to get a snapshot of exactly what the boards look like now. I can tell you, however, that when we reviewed the boards to try and determine what our target group would be, how broad our target group would be in terms of new appointments, almost without exception the boards were dominated by white male appointees. Not "almost without" -- without exception.
Ms Akande: So the boards have changed. Has the competence level of the boards changed?
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Ms Phillips: I believe the competence level of the boards -- I do not want to cast aspersions at all on the previous appointees. I have had no complaints whatsoever about the way the boards are now operating at the agencies.
Ms Akande: Now you have boards that are more representative of the population. Both women and ethic groups are on them and they are performing well.
Ms Phillips: They are performing well.
Ms Akande: They are performing well. What are the roles of some of these boards? Just pick a board, any board.
Ms Phillips: We have, as an example, the Social Assistance Review Board --
Ms Akande: That one I know.
Ms Phillips: That one you know the Human Rights Commission as a board; we have the Commercial Registration Appeal Tribunal, for an example; the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board; the police boards that are called a fair bit here.
Ms Akande: So in other words, if I can just sum up, we have spent about $1.4 million the first year?
Ms Phillips: Right.
Ms Akande: And $1.1 million the second, and we have achieved boards that are more reflective of the population they serve, that are equally competent, that know their roles and that everyone has a chance to be part of. I think it is worth the money.
Ms Phillips: Thank you.
The Chair: Mr McGuinty for about two or three minutes; then we are going to have to wrap up.
Mr McGuinty: Ms Phillips, you will know that it is my opinion that nothing has changed; only the impression the government is sending out has changed. I believe the emperor is not wearing any clothes. I want to give a constructive comment and not be seen as purely critical.
Mr Macaulay prepared a very comprehensive report in 1989. You will probably be familiar with that. He suggested that the best thing we could do would be to take this appointments process out of the hands of politicians, all politicians, that a separate agency of some kind be set up that is independent of the government, independent of the government of the day, of the various whims of the various governments, and that this body be used to ensure that the agencies, boards and commissions which are funded by the taxpayers of this province are filled with competent, capable, dedicated people. Have you considered that?
Of course the downside of that is that you cannot appoint people who think like the government of the day happens to think. But if we are truly to be fair, open and impartial, why would we not go that way?
Ms Phillips: Mr Macaulay made a number of interesting proposals, some of which we have already incorporated in our new process. The proposal you are talking about ran to quasi-judicial bodies. What he wanted to do was to make those bodies more judicial. I put it to you, Mr McGuinty, that if you are worried about the cost of the secretariat, I would have nightmares about the costs of a quasi-judicial selection committee of judges and lawyers who decided who was going to go in and for how long, and in fact took away the subordinate court role of those quasi-judicial bodies and made them into formal court roles, which is essentially what Mr Macaulay wanted.
We in fact took a look at the 1986 all-party unanimous report to the Legislature on appointments and incorporated almost every single one of those, which your government chose not to. In incorporating every single one of those we did leave out the right to veto, and we admit that, but I think we have gone a long way towards doing it.
As to your assertion that nothing has changed, there is one area we are quite proud of. In the last meeting I had with the body known as Chairs of Agencies, which no previous government had ever met with before, the Chairs of Agencies told me that the role we play in providing them with packages when they need candidates for their boards is invaluable and a role they have never had before. They traded stories among themselves -- the Environmental Assessment Board chair, for example, and a number of the other chairs -- about how amazed they were that when they called up and said, "You keep bothering me about the fact that I've got no native people on my board; I need people with legal training," within 24 to 48 hours we in fact can give them a package of 10 to 12 native lawyers of either gender who have put their names forward and offered to serve this province.
I challenge and will continue to challenge your premise that nothing has changed, because if what you are talking about is entirely depoliticizing the process, I do not know if that will ever happen. It may one day. We do not claim it has happened yet; all we claim is that it is more open.
Mr McGuinty: Are you prepared to do that?
Ms Phillips: I am not an elected person; I am merely a political adviser. The politicians are going to decide whether or not they want to give up this right they have had for a lot of years.
Mr McGuinty: What is your thinking on that concept that we entirely remove this appointment process from the politicians?
Ms Phillips: My thinking on it is that if agencies continue to be vehicles by which government policy is carried out outside of ministries, it would be very difficult to comprehend that being possible. If agencies themselves turn into having different roles, then it may be possible. In the present roles of agencies, boards and commissions, I do not see that it could work.
The Chair: Thank you. We have gone a little bit over what we had originally scheduled in terms of time. We appreciate your cooperation, Ms Phillips, and the responses.
Ms Phillips: If there are other questions as well, we are there every day.
The Chair: Yes, I appreciate that. I am sure that at some juncture in the next little while we will be making a report which will deal with concerns and recommendations and how the committee feels the process can be improved upon. Once again, thank you very much.
At this juncture we were supposed to have representatives from the Ministry of the Attorney General to deal with this whole question of conflict, especially as it relates to police services boards. They assured us that they would be here at 11:30 and we do not see anyone here. I am not sure what the committee wishes to do at this juncture.
Mr Marchese: Can we delay that, Mr Chair? Obviously the person might be available to come --
The Chair: My concern is that it upsets the whole agenda again today, because if we break now for five or 10 minutes you know what it is like getting a quorum again, getting started so shortly before noon hour. It is going to impede our ability to ask questions with respect to this issue in terms of time as well.
Mr McLean: Can we not deal with Grand River, the briefing on that?
The Chair: We can deal with the briefing. Are you suggesting that be in a closed session?
Mr McLean: I do not think it is necessary, is it?
The Chair: I do not think we even need the briefing session on it. It is up to the members, whether they feel it is important to have this briefing session on the authority we are going to be dealing with this afternoon. How do you feel? We have all the material. It is just a question of doing something unprecedented, and that is reading the material.
Mr Marchese: There is a picture on the one; there are pictures.
Mr McLean: Are we going to deal with the appointment, then? If they are not here we do not have much choice, do we?
Mr Jackson: Are they not coming?
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The Chair: They are not here and we indicated 11:30, so I am going to suggest, if they are not in sight -- we will try to work this out in the next half-hour and see if we cannot squeeze them in. The trouble is that we have time pressures on us this afternoon and a lot of the members have to catch flights, etc. It is going to make it difficult. Mr Jackson.
Mr Jackson: Are we not on the agenda? On the agenda we were to get an in camera briefing. Are we not going to get that?
The Chair: We have decided we do not require it.
Mr Jackson: I apologize; I just stepped out. What is the final word on the Attorney General's office coming forward?
Mr Marchese: They are not here.
The Chair: They did not show up.
Mr Frankford: Who were those two men?
Mr Marchese: Maybe they were part of --
The Chair: No, they were not. The clerk inquired and they were not representatives of the AG's office.
Mr Jackson: It is 11:30 and they said they would be here by 11:30. They are a no-show.
Mr McLean: Let's deal with the appointment and get it over with. There is no point sitting around.
The Chair: That may pose some problems as well, because of questions about the timing of the decision. If it looks like we are going to have a division on this in a negative sense, I think it is only fair --
Mr Jackson: Is this in camera?
The Chair: No, it will be open.
Are they here? Fine.
I should advise members again of the limitations placed upon us by the standing order, that we cannot get into specifics about the appointee we were interviewing yesterday. We have to talk in broader terms about the whole question of conflict, and perhaps how it applies to police services boards, those kinds of questions, but not about the individual.
MINISTRY OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
The Chair: Welcome to the committee, gentlemen. We know this is short notice and we appreciate your being here today. Perhaps you could introduce yourselves and tell us your responsibilities within the ministry, for the purposes of Hansard.
Mr Johnson: My name is John M. Johnson. I am Assistant Deputy Attorney General for the civil law division.
Mr Peters: My name is Wilfrid Peters. I am counsel in the crown law office-civil, at the Ministry of the Attorney General.
The Chair: I do not know if you gentlemen have an appreciation of what you are here for today.
Mr Johnson: Not really.
The Chair: We have some restrictions and you have some restrictions as witnesses placed upon you by the standing order under which this committee operates. Some concerns arose in respect to conflict during an interview process with a specific witness to a police services board yesterday. We cannot get into that specific situation, and neither can you, as a result of the standing order. But we want to deal with the whole broad question, I think. The members may want to expand on the question of conflict, perceived conflict, especially as it relates to police services boards.
Perhaps we can simply open this up for some questions by members. We are going to be looking at an adjournment at 12 o'clock because we have a subcommittee meeting, so we will try to give as many members as possible an opportunity to have input.
Mr Jackson: Gentlemen, thank you for coming on such short notice to the committee. I believe many members of this committee have a working knowledge of how police services boards operate, as well as how courtroom procedures operate through the Attorney General's office. The area of concern I have is to engage in a discussion about the nature of the practice of both and how there may be a case for conflict between the two. That is the general area of inquiry I wish to make. I can speak in specifics about what I think it is, but I would rather you generally get us into the subject so we can begin building on some of your legal foundations.
"Conflict" for this would mean to profit by or to influence outcomes in the judiciary, meaning the processes that occur at court -- not necessarily the judge's ruling; I am talking about the adversarial nature of a crown attorney and a defence attorney and their unique roles as they interrelate with police officers, who are required to perform their duties, without undue pressure.
Mr Johnson: Are you referring to the possibility of those kinds of lawyers being on these boards? Is that what you are getting at?
Mr Jackson: Yes. The hypothetical case is of an appointee to a police commission who practises criminal law as a defence attorney in the jurisdiction, where his role is one in which he must take apart the workup and the effort of the police in order to arrive at a conviction and to make a fair presentation in court of the facts as they have secured them. That is the hypothetical scenario we are talking about.
Mr Johnson: We are talking about a municipal police services board?
Mr Jackson: That is correct.
Mr Johnson: I guess half an hour ago we had a hint it may relate to boards under the Police Act, but that is about the best we have had to go on. I do not claim familiarity with how these particular boards work. I presume they are somewhat similar to what I used to call police commissions.
Mr Jackson: Yes.
The Chair: I should interject here for the information of members. Under Bill 107, 1990, which is An Act to Revise the Police Act and amend the Law Relating to Police Services, the only restriction placed on service on a board indicated, "No judge or justice of the peace shall be appointed as a member of a board." It does not place any additional restrictions on, for example, individuals engaged in criminal law, defence lawyers. Those kinds of individuals are not restricted by the act. I think that is the broad general question, whether that sort of thing could give rise to conflicts.
Mr Johnson: As I understand, you are looking at situations where the Lieutenant Governor in Council appoints some but not all members of these boards?
The Chair: That is right.
Mr Johnson: Off the top, I do not see a conflict of interest in the sense of a personal interest conflicting with a duty. You may have a different question of, I suppose, appearance in the broadest sense, but presumably a person who practises criminal defence law is as interested in law and order and the proper workings of a police force as any other citizen. I would not want to assume that that person is adverse to the police as a function. His or her job in a trial, of course is, yes, to show that the police evidence is ill-founded, inadequate or whatever. That can include very vigorous cross-examination of a particular police officer, but I would not have taken it the further step.
Mr Jackson: The further step that has been suggested is that the unique position of a commissioner is that he has special access to information about the efficacy of certain investigative procedures, to know the detailed manner in which certain tests are performed, to know of the relative reliability or lack of reliability of the various deputants, who are in this instance the police officers who work under this commissioner.
Also there is the message that if I were a criminal in the community I certainly would want someone handling me who is the boss of the police. Therefore I might in fact profit from the fact that it would be seen as a real drawing card to my practice of criminal law, because I would have that kind of access to information about procedures and what types of tests are routinely done by the local police.
I could even extend that one further -- this is now a third scenario I am painting for you -- to where I am in a position to actually suggest we budget for these kinds of tests because we feel they are appropriate or inappropriate; I would be shared the information by the chief of police in making a budget presentation that we feel that this will increase our ability to come to a greater conviction rate or whatever.
Those are three scenarios I wanted to very quickly sketch out for you which have been suggested. I would like you to perhaps explore that a little more openly with us. I realize these require some thought. There may even be case law behind some of these questions that may exist somewhere in Canada.
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Mr Johnson: I am not trying to duck but, to be clear, we have come in pretty cold. I have not gone into what police boards do; I have a general idea. I hear what you are saying. I think those are serious points, yet there are other people from the community appointed to these boards, are there not? Are we talking about police secrets, as it were, being shared with the police services board? I do not know the answer to that at the moment. I would have to look further.
Mr Jackson: I would not style it as "police secrets." I toured my police station some five and a half years ago, and I have been introduced to the changes in technology and the budgeted requirements to assist the police services board to do its job, to come to a greater rate of moving from simply charging to making sure we get a conviction.
I have an awareness of the adversarial nature of our judicial system. The defence attorney is in a very unique position. I do not condemn it. It is unique to our code, which separates us from the French civil code approach. Ours is uniquely adversarial and it requires this individual to specifically take apart all of the activities leading up to -- I might even go so far as to ask, what would be the public appearance of a dressing down in a courtroom, which is rather routine, and then on a technicality some criminal goes free?
As lawyers, you understand the importance of how that relates to the question of our judicial system, and it is required in order to have those rights. But what is that message to our community when a police commissioner has directly contributed to that outcome? Would it not really rather confuse a community about who is minding the responsibilities of the police? Is it sufficiently separate as a board, as is required by our law -- are they sufficiently separate, the process of an independent police commission and the judicial process of defending criminals and defending the state, which is the crown's responsibility? I see a direct conflict. I make no bones about that.
Mr Peters: It seems to me that the day-to-day general running of the police force would be up to the police chief, not up to the police services board. I also would have thought that whereas commissioners might have a general overview of what their police force is doing, they would not have any intimate knowledge of a particular file or a particular investigation and in that respect I would have thought that there would not be a conflict.
Indeed I would be concerned if, for example, a particular member of a board, who is also at the defence bar, could have access to the actual investigation of one of his or her clients. I would suspect that is not the case, at least I would have thought so. I could be completely wrong, because I do not know exactly how the boards function. But I would have thought that a member would not be able to access the criminal investigation of a particular matter.
Mr Jackson: Well, they are able to.
The Chair: Mr Jackson, I am sorry. We have to be fair --
Mr Jackson: All right, but they clearly do have access, because it is the right of the criminal to be defended. They must have that information.
The Chair: Ms Akande, please go ahead.
Ms Akande: All right. Excuse me, Mr Jackson. I have some concerns. One is that we have asked these gentlemen to come as authorities and they were not quite clear on the topic about which we were going to ask them and therefore have not had time to look into the boards and what exactly their job is. Of course, if we are going to use this information on which to base our own decisions, it makes it difficult for them as well as for us.
Nevertheless, one of the things about which I am concerned if we travel on that hypothetical line is about using conflict of interest so narrowly as to prevent anyone who has any relevant experience, interest or focus from serving, in any way, on a committee or board that could use that experience to advantage. Could you speak to that? I mean, in relation to the example just given to us by Mr Jackson, how narrowly would you want to cut the experience of people who served on that board?
Mr Jackson: It is a subjective question.
Ms Akande: Of course.
Mr Johnson: It is ultimately a judgement call for this committee. In the somewhat narrow sense of what is a conflict of interest, I am not persuaded you have such a problem here. You may nevertheless decide that the appearance is such that you would not want to make this kind of appointment. I do not know. Again, from a very quick glance at what the boards appear responsible for, I do not see a basis for the members of the boards getting into the kind of detail that would assist a criminal defence lawyer. I may be biased a little; I was a defence lawyer myself for a few years, many years ago.
Ms Akande: You are in conflict of interest.
Mr Johnson: I may well be. I would have considered, first, that I had as deep an interest as anybody else in proper policing and law and order and, second, that I might be able to bring some insights. I am a member of -- I do not know, it looks like a five-person board or thereabouts, so it is not as though I have exclusive power.
Where I am a little hesitant is in how these boards act on the ground and how deeply they get into what police departments do, but as I quickly glance over their powers, it talks about "generally determine objectives and priorities." It talks, I would say, in a policy and guideline sense, not in how you handle a particular murder investigation.
Mr Jackson: They are on discipline boards.
Mr Johnson: Pardon me?
Mr Jackson: They are on discipline boards -- boards of hearing, boards of review.
Mr Johnson: Again, I am afraid I have not had a chance to look at that aspect. Let's talk about that for a moment. What is wrong with that? I am sure you can find examples of defence lawyers who hate police, but I do not think that necessarily follows. Certainly I would try to destroy their evidence in court, but I have no dislike for them.
Mr Frankford: Thank you for being here. I have not paid attention to all of it, but I think the interesting question is in a broader sense, about what is conflict of interest. Presumably there are very blatant examples where somebody is responsible to two obligations; let's just use it very broadly. Those things conflict so that one cannot make an honest vote because of obligations. Can you make some very general observations about conflict of interest? Is it a definable legal term or is it something which is described and has to be taken in a more non-legal sense?
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Mr Peters: Essentially, a conflict of interest, as I understand the term as it is used in the legal sense, is where a person has a personal interest which can or does conflict with his or her duty. For example, if we take what we are discussing here, if a member of the board could in some way tailor an investigation to his or her advantage so that when he or she defends the client he or she has an unfair advantage by gaining knowledge of what went on behind the scenes, that would clearly be a conflict. Often people think of conflict of interest only in a pecuniary sense, but it does not need to be restricted to pecuniary matters.
If you have a duty to perform, you should be in a position to perform that duty without fear of favour, without being influenced by any personal gain, whether it is monetary or otherwise, and there should be the perception that you can do that. In other words, you should never be placed in a position where anybody looking at it objectively could ask, "Did he or she act in the public interest" -- if it is a public duty -- "or was he or she acting in his or her own interest?" In that sense, if you have that situation and it is difficult or you cannot objectively separate the two, as to what would motivate the person, you may well have an appearance of conflict and not an actual conflict, because of course conflict of interest is divided into actual conflict and appearance of conflict.
I do not know if what I have said clarifies it at all for you.
Mr Frankford: One could imagine that virtually any board or commission might at some stage get into some real estate decisions about its office or whatever, and perchance might mean that this affected the housing values of a member of the board. That is a pecuniary conflict. From our position, interviewing potential employees, we cannot predict all such situations.
Mr Peters: Usually in a situation like that, if that sort of situation arose -- suppose a board was going to select an area in the city to build a new police building and a member of that board had property in the area. Clearly that person would have a conflict if the police building is going to enhance the value of the property in the area. What you do in a situation like that, it seems to me, is that the person should declare his or her conflict and decline and refrain from participating in the decision and decline to influence the decision of the rest of the members. Those sorts of things can be guarded against by annotation in the minutes, the person being excluded from the discussion and that sort of thing. But I am not sure you would exclude a person from a board because he has a lot of real estate, let's say, in a particular community.
Mr Frankford: But the principle of declaring a conflict when a situation arises is well established in governments and public bodies of all varieties, is it not?
Mr Peters: Yes, and there are means of dealing with those sort of situations when they do arise. Most boards and commissions, and indeed boards of directors, civil servants and everybody -- the members of the Legislature -- have their rules they abide by, and if you are going to get into one of these situations you do something about it. But you are not precluded at the outset simply because you may have a conflict of interest, because everybody can at some time in his or her life find himself or herself in a position of conflict.
Mr Frankford: We had another situation where we were hearing from someone who was a tentative appointee. In this case it was to a hospital board, and he was on the board of a community health centre. The question was asked by one of the members of the committee whether there was a conflict there. The applicant said he was not sure and he would be prepared to forgo one appointment if there was. This really passed without comment. I was just wondering in retrospect how one would look into that situation, why it would be a conflict or why it would not be a conflict. It may be unfair to present this to you out of the blue, but do you have any particular thoughts on that?
Mr Johnson: You have to have the information of how the two bodies function and see if there is some way in which they have, I guess, conflicting interests. Another thing you have to keep in mind too is, is it something that could come up occasionally or is it something that is so likely to come up that the person might not be able to render full service? If you are going to have a continuing conflict, it is not an appointment you want to make because that person is not going to be able to do the full duty he was appointed to do.
Mr Jackson: Can I have a supplementary?
The Chair: Sure.
Mr Jackson: Just on the nature of that continuing conflict, I may have not expressed myself carefully. There is a difference between, for example, Mr Duignan yesterday declaring a conflict of interest on this appointment and stepping back and not feeling he should vote; that cuts across all grounds -- or real estate or being related or having received a political donation, or having him as your lawyer. I can understand that. What I am talking about is the unique work required of you to assume this public responsibility on a board and that your private life role conflicts with those objectives.
The police and the responsibilities of the code of conduct for police and for police services boards and community standards is thrown into the courtroom and is tested on a daily basis.
The Chair: Can you sum up?
Mr Jackson: I am summing up right now. My fear is that somehow the judicial process may be compromised here, and this is why I referred to a body of law which is just now growing. The nature of the appointment in fact begs this question.
For example, early release and bail: As a police commissioner, you are charged with the responsibility of safety and making sure there is no discrimination, etc. Yet you are supposed to go before a judge or a justice of the peace and you are supposed to argue like hell that your client, who has been charged, is able to go back out into the community under limited conditions, while within the police board mandate you are required to uphold certain levels and standards of public safety and to be sensitive to those issues.
In my view, that is a compromising of the process, because to what extent is the crown attorney reacting and to what extent are the police officers reacting and to what extent is the community reacting? The issue of bail release or the terms of early release and the fighting, the advocacy that is associated with that, is an issue of great concern in the community.
The Chair: I am going to have to interject here and ask for a response. Mr Brown has a question still.
Mr Jackson: I apologize, I did not know there were other speakers, Mr Chairman.
The Chair: Do you have a response, Mr Johnson?
Mr Johnson: I guess on the one hand I certainly understand what you are saying. On the other hand, I think there is a difference between a particular instruction from a particular client to apply to a judge for this or that and what I do as a member with other members on a board of police commissioners. I do not think it is proper to impute the view you express in court for a client as your view; it is your client's view. I know it gets a little shadowy, but the other thing is too that if I am a person who does that periodically, it is not apparent to me that I might not have some useful insight to bring to the board of commissioners, which will have people from other backgrounds.
Mr Jackson: It is an unusual justification -- a very unusual one. I tied it to the --
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The Chair: I do not want to get into this. We can have this debate going on all day. These gentlemen are here to respond to questions. Mr Brown?
Mr Brown: I will say that I have some concerns with this whole issue. I certainly think all members of the Legislature do in the broad sense, the sense of conflict of interest generally. There have been discussions around here for many years about what the appropriate statute and guidelines are for members themselves, so I am not surprised that we are debating this as it affects police services boards.
If my memory serves, judges used to serve on police commissions, in the not too distant past, for some of the same reasons I suspect you are giving me for why a criminal lawyer might be allowed to be involved here. On the other hand, there was a decision made by the Legislature when Bill 107 was adopted that judges would now be excluded specifically, as would justices of the peace. They stopped that, for whatever reason, and I do not think we should debate it now. The Legislature stopped that. They did not say all officers of the court.
I am having real difficulty trying to sort this one out in my own head and would be more comfortable maybe having this discussion again, Mr Chair, when these gentlemen have had a chance to look at the act a little bit more carefully. I am concerned with not just police boards but all agencies and commissions. I am not sure what the guidelines are for them. I am not sure how conflict is defined and whether it even is defined in Bill 107. As we go across the whole spectrum, it may be different for one group as opposed to another -- although I would wonder why, but it could be. I guess I am just really expressing concerns and wondering if you share some of those.
Mr Johnson: To a degree, although I think unless conflict of interest is particularly defined in a statute, and I cannot offhand think of a statute that does except for the Public Service Act regulation, conflict of interest is really -- I could not define it better than Mr Peters did.
Mr Brown: So you are saying it is kind of a common-law concept of conflict. Okay.
Mr Johnson: It is this concept that in doing your public duty there is a question of whether you are in fact serving a personal interest, and you do not want that question to be raised.
I have noted this section too that says no judge or justice of the peace shall sit. It is hard to tell if the Legislature turned its mind to criminal defence lawyers at that time, but presumably it thought this was the only category that had to be excluded. It seems to me that on a police board you might get such a wide array of people, and I am not sure that a criminal defence lawyer is inherently in a more difficult position than any of these other people. They may have savoury or unsavoury acquaintances; who knows? As long as the board is not getting into the workings of the department -- and that is something I am afraid I cannot help you with, certainly at the moment. I do not see it in the act.
Mr Brown: Just one --
The Chair: One quick one, because we are well over time right now and we have a subcommittee meeting.
Mr Brown: I am concerned that the way conflict of interest works, the onus is on the person with the conflict to declare that conflict, and after you go by that stage, it is often questioned what happens. Who is it that says, "Hey, you're in conflict"? Often it has to be a person who has harm come to him, or it is perceived that there is some dastardly thing that has happened to him or he has lost a fair opportunity because of this conflict. We were just told before that in this case, in a case where we might have conflict, the chair of the police services board may be the one to go to the Solicitor General and say, "Look, we've got a problem down here." Then we get into how they decide. I guess all I am saying is that I am uncomfortable and maybe the committee should explore it in some more depth.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Johnson and Mr Peters. We appreciate your being here on such short notice, with very little background information to work on. It is a problem the committee is faced with in terms of our standing orders and having to make these decisions within very strict time limitations. That is what precipitated this urgent request. Once again, thank you very much. We appreciate it.
PAUL LAFLEUR
Mr Jackson: Mr Chair, could you call the vote and dispense with this matter for the day? Then it will not arise again.
The Chair: Mr Marchese moves concurrence with respect to Mr LaFleur's appointment.
Mr Jackson: I call for a recorded vote.
The committee divided on Mr Marchese's motion, which was agreed to on the following vote:
Ayes -- 5
Akande, Frankford, Klopp, Mammoliti, Marchese.
Nays -- 2
Jackson, McLean.
The Chair: We will adjourn and resume at 2 o'clock.
The committee recessed at 1207.
AFTERNOON SITTING
AGENCY REVIEW
The committee resumed at 1410.
Consideration of the operations of certain agencies, boards and commissions.
GRAND RIVER CONSERVATION AUTHORITY
The Vice-Chair: This afternoon we are dealing with the Grand River Conservation Authority, and we have several people from the authority. Perhaps you would take a seat at the front and indicate to us who you are and the position you hold, so that Hansard will be able to pick up and we will have it on Hansard who your guests are, Mr MacRobbie.
Mr MacRobbie: I would like to thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to be here today. It is indeed a pleasure and an honour on behalf of the Grand River Conservation Authority to be here this afternoon.
I would like to introduce some of the gentlemen with me. Allan Holmes is the chief administrative officer and started with the authority on December 2, 1991. We have Ronald Fox; he is the secretary-treasurer. We have Mac Coutts, who has been with them since about 1952, so he is an old hand at it, but give him another month and he says he is going to hang up his hooks too. He has been the general manager since 1966, the amalgamation of the authority and the commission.
We have a slide presentation to show you. Do you want us to just go right through it and if there are any questions --
The Vice-Chair: If you have any opening remarks, make them and then we will see the slide presentation and then we will have questions after that.
Mr MacRobbie: Okay. Without any further ado, I will ask Mr Coutts to do the slide presentation.
Mr Coutts: Mr Chairman, would you like questions during the slides, or would you prefer that I carry right through?
The Vice-Chair: I think you can show us the slides and comment on the way through and our members will jot down notes, if they can see to do that, and we will ask you questions afterwards. Is that agreeable? Carry on.
Mr Coutts: Obviously the symbol in front of us is the logo for the Grand River Conservation Authority, which was established in 1966. I would like to take the liberty of giving a little bit of history, just a little introduction. The Grand River watershed is located in the Ontario peninsula, southern Ontario. It is one of the largest watersheds in the middle of Ontario.
Closer, we have here the urban municipalities within the watershed. There were actually 71 before amalgamation, and there are too many to be effective on the map. I would like to draw your attention to this system. We have the main Grand down through the middle of the watershed, which is Dundalk, Fergus, Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Brantford and so on. The main tributaries are the Speed and the Eramosa on the right, the Conestogo on your left coming down, and the Nith also on your left in the lower left corner. That is the main system: 2,600 square miles of watershed. This watershed is unique in that it is the first area in which municipalities realized they had to group together as a unit in order to manage the flows in the river.
This goes back into the mid-1930s, when the chambers of commerce within the city of Brantford initiated meetings with the other damaged centres, the cities upstream. That led to the formation of the Grand River Conservation Commission in 1938. A little later another organization, the Grand Valley Conservation Authority, was formed in 1948, and it was made up of all the municipalities within the basin, whereas the commission was only the eight urban municipalities in the the middle of the watershed. The five counties with four regional governments and one restructured county are the essential area of the watershed. The counties are Grey, Dufferin, Wellington and Perth, and you have Brant down here further south, and the regions of Waterloo, Halton, Hamilton-Wentworth and Haldimand-Norfolk.
When the authorities were put together in 1966 there were 71 municipalities in total and 82 members, and that is horrendous in order to get meetings of any consequence. But when they were put together in 1966 to form the current authority, a totally different arrangement was set up for the appointment of members. Instead of members being appointed by each municipality, we developed, under the act, groups of rural municipalities.
If we look at the upper part of the watershed, the yellow, it is an amalgamation of seven townships. That was set up for the purpose of one appointee instead of one for each municipality. That is what was carried through. There is group 1, yellow; to the left, in the brown, is group 2. To the extreme west, mauve, is group 3. If we move over to the centre, there is a yellow block, group 4, and the blue is group 5. Each one of those has one or two members, depending on population. Then there are the regions. That is the big region of Waterloo in the middle, orange, and it has 16 members. The restructured county of Oxford, green, in the lower left, has one. Halton, way over to the right, the small blue part, has one. Hamilton-Wentworth, light blue, has two, and Haldimand-Norfolk has two. The cities of Guelph and Brantford each have three. The town of Paris has one. The last group, which really is within the county of Brant, has two representatives. This means that we went from 82 members down to, at that time, 46. Currently we have 41 in 1992. This graph was made up last year, at which time we had 42 members; now we are down to 41.
Very quickly to organization: Here is the executive committee, appointed each year, elected from the membership at the annual meeting. There are two standing committees, administration, finance and personnel, and audit. There are four advisory committees set up on program functions, which is water management, community relations, land use and conservation areas, and responsible to that group, which is really an executive committee, is the chief administrative officer. Going to the next slide, you will see the CAO on the left. They we have a staff organization from that. There are four basic divisions -- again, program line functions -- land, water, policy and planning, and administration. Information is also administered directly by the CAO's office.
Our mandate comes directly from the Conservation Authorities Act. I am sure most of you are familiar with section 20. Unless there is a comment, I will not take time to read it except to comment that it is a very broad mandate which allows the authority, within the interest and needs of the municipalities within the watershed, to virtually undertake any worthwhile and legitimate conservation project.
From that we have our vision statement. The vision statement of the Grand River authority is one of "a healthy and sustaining relationship between the natural environment of the Grand River watershed and the demands on this environment by all forms of life."
From that we developed the mission statement, which says, "The mission of the authority is to conserve the natural processes and resources that support a safe and healthy environment for future generations in the watershed." The goals are somewhat obscured there but they are essentially that our particular mandate is to protect life and property, and generally integrate planning and measures to improve and manage lands, waters and wildlife, with tree planting mixed in.
From the statement we have, since 1983 -- the report was prepared at that time and updated starting three years ago -- to develop a revised resource management plan for the watershed on the objectives as recently set out. This plan is basically a framework which will be used by resource agencies of the province, municipalities, developers, as well as the authority, as a guide for the management of those resources within that basin.
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Funding: We have sources of funding basically at three levels. If you just note the right-hand side -- we will take 1991 -- the very bottom of the graph is white and that represents the municipal levies. A portion of the budget is funded through municipal levies. The middle section is revenues from our own resources, and that is conservation areas, rental of land etc, and government grants on the top. You will note very quickly that they are about equal, and that is the fact. For every dollar the province puts in, we have the capability of spending three. In other words, the province gets two-to-one value for the money that is put into this operation.
Moving to the functions and some of the projects and programs of the authority, as implied earlier, we have the unique history of 50 years of influence in this basin. This was all started because of high flows back as early as 1912, and that was of course the flooding and the damage centres within the basin.
Coupled with that at about the same time were the droughts. In the early 1930s the river almost ran dry. I think many of you realize that the cities of Brantford and Cayuga take their municipal water supply from that river system. As I suggested earlier, that is when this group of urban municipalities in the basin got together and decided they had to do something collectively that they could not do individually, and that would be to harness this river.
That led to the formation of the Grand River Conservation Commission in 1938. There is the system again. I am sorry I do not have a pointer, but if you look across the top, you see the Shand dam, the Luther dam, and then down a little bit further you see the Guelph dam and the Conestogo. If you were able, in theory, to run a line right across underneath those, you would see that the reservoirs control the upper part of the basin and that is a source of water for the use of the municipalities downstream all summer long. Just to illustrate the dams rather quickly, that is the Shand, built in 1942; Luther, at the very top, was 1952; the Conestogo was 1958, and the last one in that series was the Guelph dam, 1975.
A lot of our work and effort goes into and much of the responsibility is for the operating of those dams summer and winter as a measure for flood control in augmenting the flows in the river for municipal water supply etc. We do that, first, by bringing in, of course, the weather data -- it is a weather service we have -- and that tells us what could happen within the basin. Coupled with that, we have monitoring systems. We have access to 30 stream gauges that monitor directly to central control, as well as rain gauges. These are monitored directly into the main office and central control. The data is put directly into the computer forecast model, which allows us to forecast the levels downstream of the major centres. For example, at Cambridge we can give a 24-hour advisory of a pending flood, or we are accurate to nine hours for a flood warning. One of the major activities of the authority is the flood watch, flood warning and inspection of the centres.
How do we do that? That is by the operation and manipulation of the reservoirs that we showed you. If you note, this time of year we are down at the bottom of the pool. The flood storage is right down. We are waiting for the runoffs in the spring. Then any time from now on, mainly in the latter part of February, March and April, we have to fill the reservoirs so that we have water to let out during the summer to keep the river flowing, for many reasons.
That is symbolic of the methods of operating, and you can guess very quickly that it is a judgement call as to when you have those reservoirs filled. If I might digress, what happened in 1974 with the big flood was that the reservoirs were essentially filled in mid-May. By the time the flood came down, we did not have that much control.
Very significant, which I have mentioned several times already, is the flow in the river as a result of the reservoirs. If I may just take a minute, if you look at the right-hand side of most of those five graphs, the darker shading is the percentage of flow in the river at those particular locations, as we saw the augmentation from the reservoir. The top one is Grand Valley, the small village, and in midsummer 93% of the water in that stream is from the Luther reservoir; Kitchener, 44%; Cambridge, 37%. In Brantford, about 23% of the water is from those reservoirs. Then off to the side, 32% is from the Guelph dam.
That is the reservoir operation. Following 1974, it was obvious the reservoirs could not protect the damage centres, and we entered into a long and fairly extensive dike-building program in Cambridge. We have spent $21 million or thereabouts in Cambridge on dikes and walls to this point in time. In another year or two we should be finished. We have spent not quite as much money in Brantford, $16 million in diking that entire city. Those are two examples. At several other damage points, such as Kitchener, Bridgeport and Caledonia, we have similar dikes.
We have mentioned that the mandate is the protection of life and limb and property. Erosion is as one of those responsibilities. This is a slump in Brantford, which happened in 1986. There is a long-term project of acquiring and removing the buildings from the slope area. To date, we have spent about $1.8 million on that particular project.
An important function the authority has taken over was given to it by the province, and that is the regulation of the floodplain through the use of regulations. This is one of the main responsibilities that is ongoing by the authority. First, floodline mapping of the river system and streams designates the area that belongs to the river -- in other words, the floodplain -- and that is the area you see between the water and the buildings. That stretch of land, as we say, belongs to the river because it floods periodically. By so doing, protecting that and the buildings, it means that as time goes on, we will not have to spend millions of dollars in protecting those buildings from flooding, hopefully.
That is the basic input of the flood regulation. I will mention a little more a little later, because it is fundamental to the basic planning. In official plans and zoning bylaws those reaches are excluded from development.
Likewise, we protect under regulation the wetlands within the province, in cooperation with the Ministry of Natural Resources. The province does have a wetlands policy, and the authority augments it and by regulation can protect the wetlands from development.
We have been planting trees for over 50 years in this basin, not only on the lands owned by the authority back at the time the dams were built. Just this past year, the 15 millionth tree was planted at the main office. That is since 1966. I am a little bit older than that, so I want to tell you that we have planted over 25,000 trees in the time I have been involved with the authority. It is one of the most popular programs we have, planting trees on private land, and we have been doing that since 1953. There is a very popular program that is being phased out now because there is so much commercial tree space, but we planted trees for municipalities back when the pine was designated as the tree of the province.
We own 45,000 acres of land, and it is separated into different categories. The main acreage is for the flood control areas, and I will not go into that in detail, but it is used for many purposes, not only for flood control but for floodplains, conservation areas, wetlands, forestry and recreation.
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We have two examples of recreation and this is the acquisition of some of the natural areas. Pinehurst, which is 250 acres, was developed back in the late 1950s and 1960s as a recreation area for all outdoor uses.
Likewise, the lands acquired adjacent to the flood control works, the reservoirs: a complementary use is for recreation. This is the Guelph area, and we have over 4,000 acres there, part of which was used for the Boy Scout jamboree in 1985. It is an extensive area, very popular for camping and so on.
We use the term "lands for learning," and this is in cooperation with school boards, but we have our own interpretative programs, particularly evenings and weekends, when schools are not using the facilities.
Official plan review is a function designated to the authorities from Natural Resources, and this is where we comment on all the particular issues, official plans, zones etc. It is important to designate the floodplains relating to the official plans or zoning of subdivisions, wetlands, severe slopes or any of the areas that should not be used or allowed to be developed. That is the kind of imput the authority has with the municipalities and provincial agencies. It takes a lot of time. If you notice, we have had well over 2,000 severances alone in 1990.
Putting it all together, it is small watershed studies -- this is an example, Laurel Creek in the city of Waterloo. The red is the builtup old city, if we can call it that, the city of Waterloo. Of course, the blue stretch would be the small river system and Laurel Creek. The orange is the area in between development and the farm land. I call it the fringe area, ripe for development.
We are spending $1.7 million in study and cooperation with the city of Waterloo. We have the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of the Environment involved in the steering committee, but the main thrust is to baseline the planning to set out the streams, the land that belongs to the streams, the wetlands, the streams that would be suitable for a cold-water fishery, a warm-water fishery, areas that should be retained for allowing water to seep into the ground and the like, all put in one package so that when it comes to amending the official plan, the city of Waterloo may have set out the parameters for future development to be used by the city, developers, and agencies.
The agriculture program is the joint program that is contracted to the authority from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food and MOE. We have, under agreement with the Ministry of the Environment, a five-year program, currently in its second year, in which we have three staff, two paid by MOE and one partially by the authority, for extension work with land owners and farmers to encourage them to undertake improved farm management, soil management practices etc. This is the type of equipment the authority has and lends out to farmers interested in practising the kind of tillage to reduce erosion and improve water quality. This is an example of what happens.
Nature centres: We have four strategically located within the basin, and it is in cooperation with school boards. They contract for the use of the facilities and our interpreters. This is ongoing and nearly all the school boards within the authority have some kind of contract with one or the other of the major centres.
To wrap it up, the whole idea is that the authority, as a partnership with municipalities and the province, has the responsibility and obligation of making sure that the parameters for development are such that we can retain the integrity of those natural systems and at the same time allow for development.
The Vice-Chair: Is there anything further in your opening remarks or statement, or are you ready for questions?
Mr MacRobbie: We are ready for questions.
The Vice-Chair: We have about an hour and a half, so it is roughly 30 minutes each. We will keep track of the time.
Ms Poole: I understand there was a memorandum in November 1991 that went out from the Ministry of Natural Resources that indicated it expected all conservation authorities to return 5% of the current, already approved provincial grant. This was to be the conservation authority's contribution to the provincial restraint program. How did this affect your particular authority and did you have advance notice that this was actually coming?
Mr MacRobbie: No, we had no advance notice. We received a letter that stated $133,274, which was the clawback procedure. It came at the end of October, which left us two months in the year to try to justify since our year-end is on a calendar year and the provincial government's year-end is on March 31. It made us scramble a little bit to organize. I think there were a couple of programs we deleted at that time. If I miss any answers, I wish these other gentlemen would step in and fill them out.
Ms Poole: In October 1991 the Association of Conservation Authorities of Ontario sent a letter to the minister, Bud Wildman, in which it stated a policy that had been in effect since, I gather, 1985 where the conservation authorities would not be subject to any provincial restraint program. I have that letter with me.
I would like to quote from the 1985 policy as espoused by Mary Mogford, then Deputy Minister of Natural Resources: "I would like to confirm that in future the provincial transfer payments to conservation authorities will not be altered as a result of any general constraint that is applied to this ministry. The only condition that I would add to this commitment is that if the government applies the constraint to the allocation of all ministries including all local government transfer payments, the funding to conservation authorities will be affected as well." Was your conservation authority aware of this letter that went out from your association?
Mr MacRobbie: What was the date on the letter?
Ms Poole: It was October 21, 1991, from Mr Rheal Proulx, the chair of the Association of Conservation Authorities of Ontario. This letter was written from him to the minister. In this letter Mr Proulx quoted, from Mary Mogford, the former deputy minister's confirmation that they would not be subject to constraint. I wondered if you were aware of this particular stand taken by the association and whether there has been anything that has resulted from that.
Mr MacRobbie: As far as the letter back in 1985 is concerned, that was before my time on the authority. I will maybe let Mr Coutts answer that one.
Mr Coutts: At that time we were aware of Mary Mogford's, but in so far as the letter you are referring to is concerned, I believe the authority would be copied with that letter. We would learn it after the fact.
Ms Poole: I wondered if the association had actually informed you whether it had had any reply from the minister in this regard. Obviously the association was concerned about the possibility of the authorities being hauled into the restraint and constraint program without any prior consultation and without any opportunity to have set their budgets in accordance with it. I wondered if you knew, just to the best of your knowledge, whether there was any reply, because I am not cognizant whether the minister ever replied to the association.
Mr MacRobbie: To my knowledge, I do not think so. We heard rumblings of the cutbacks at our conference at the end of September, but nothing was concrete. Then all of a sudden a letter pops on our desk and it is $133,000.
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Ms Poole: A bit of a shock.
Mr MacRobbie: Had it come four or six months earlier, it could certainly have been easier to adjust to it than it was at the last two months of our fiscal year.
Mr Fletcher: Archie, it is good to see you again. You have been in a lot of -- how can I put it? I do not want to say "trouble" because it has not been trouble -- controversy over the years with the GRCA anyway. I know in 1989 you had a problem with the city of Guelph. There was a big row over the levy that was going to be put on. What was the purpose of the levy at the time and how did you resolve that issue?
Mr MacRobbie: That was the normal levy they would pay in any particular given year. The levy is struck by discounted, equalized assessment plus population.
Mr Fletcher: Was the city not a little upset that it was so high for the city of Guelph?
Mr MacRobbie: I believe the year you are speaking of was one year when it was going to be nearly 12% and then it ended up at 5.1%.
Mr Fletcher: That was after the government kicked in some money.
Mr MacRobbie: Yes, it kicked in $237,000 on the day of our annual meeting.
Mr Fletcher: How come the levy was going to be so high?
Mr MacRobbie: The main reason was we had a lot of projects on the go and people wanted them done. That was the main source of it.
Mr Fletcher: This is more of a local question. What input did you have into the new dump site?
Mr MacRobbie: The new landfill site?
Mr Fletcher: Yes, the new one that is a proposed site right now.
Mr MacRobbie: There were ongoing discussions between the authority, the city of Guelph and the county of Wellington in so far as the site selection was concerned.
Mr Fletcher: As an authority, are you satisfied with the site selection as it stands now?
Mr MacRobbie: It is on until some time in March for comments to come in. They are all being reviewed now and we will come out with some type of report when all those comments are --
Mr Fletcher: Is the authority itself going to be involved? Also, are you in favour of the proposed site or do you have objections to that proposed site right now? I know it is in the watershed; I know it is in the wetlands.
Mr MacRobbie: We will be responding to that. It is not in wetlands; it is close to wetlands.
Mr Daigeler: I would like to pursue the point Mrs Poole just made a little bit. I am the member for Nepean, which is in the Ottawa area. The Rideau Valley Conservation Authority actually met with the MPPs in the Ottawa area on that letter Mrs Poole was referring to. The conversation authority was very upset. They really felt they had been very hard done by. They asked us to intervene with the minister, to indicate they felt very unfairly treated compared to other transfer agencies. They also felt they were not given enough latitude to deal with these constraints internally, even if they were there. Apparently there were some stipulations as to how these cuts ought to take place. I actually wrote to the minister on that. I have not received an answer yet. I am expecting it still.
Frankly, from your answer, I did not get a sense that the matter was as urgent as with the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority. I would like to hear a little bit from across the province, how certain decisions are affecting people. Are you just being polite here or do you share the basic perspective of the conservation authority in my area? I must say they were very upset. They felt that the conservation authorities were being dealt with much more harshly than any of the other transfer agencies. They realize that times are tough and perhaps cutbacks have to take place, but they also felt that they were not consulted at all at the end of the budget year and also that really they were not given the flexibility to integrate those cutbacks into their own operation. I just wonder whether you can comment on that.
Mr MacRobbie: Just a quick comment and I will let Mr Fox finish it off: We have a large agricultural area and we have grown to live with that. When you go to town with your bushel of wheat, today you might get $2 and tomorrow you might only get $1.95, so we have grown to live with that.
Mr Fox: To compare our situation with the Rideau, as you saw by the chart, we generate substantial revenues on our own, from our own assets, so to speak. I am not sure the Rideau has as many revenue-producing areas. It has not been in operation as long as we have. We have had a few more opportunities to readjust our budget within our own self-generated revenues, which may not have been available to the Rideau. The loss of grants is a serious matter no matter when it happens, but by being able to adjust between our own self-generated revenues and government grants, we were able to end the year without going into a deficit position. But it certainly created a hardship for us.
Mr Daigeler: Did you have to cut back on the staff?
Mr Fox: We have been cutting overhead over the past two or three years in anticipation of what is going on in the economy. We did not have a massive layoff, but we have terminated some contract employees whom we are not renewing.
Mr Daigeler: Perhaps I have missed this in the presentation, but you mentioned self-generating revenue, which is always interesting to hear. Can you tell me a little bit more about this? What is it that brings you so much revenue?
Mr Fox: Through our land base, we have 12 active conservation areas some of which are comparable to provincial parks. We operate them as economically as we can and generate in excess of $2 million in user fees. We also found it necessary to initiate a fee for solicitors' inquiries to help pay our office overhead costs when we are circulated by solicitors wanting to know whether the property they are dealing with is in the floodplain, so to speak.
We have 750 cottage lots on the Shand and Bellwood reservoirs which generate revenue back to the taxpayers for their investment in those assets. We have put hydro-generating units in the three dams -- Guelph, Shand and Conestogo -- which, when the capital is paid for, will generate profits back to the taxpayer and help carry our overhead. We are very concerned about that overhead and are doing everything we can to try to carry that overhead from our own assets as much as possible.
Mr Jackson: Archie, it is good to see you again.
Mr MacRobbie: It has been a day or two.
Mr Jackson: It has been quite a few days, actually.
As a former member of the Ontario floodplain commission, I had the privilege of being given a tour of your watershed and having my awareness enlightened. I appreciated that and have come to respect the kind of work you are doing. I respect the work you are doing because in my opinion it is one of the authorities that is very close to the core mandate for conservation authorities. You are to be commended for that. We can think of a lot of authorities that are in the business of wave-action pools, and I wonder if they are really operating on behalf of the Ministry of Tourism and whether they are really fulfilling the original mandate conservation authorities were assigned.
It is on that point, though, that I wish to discuss some of your revenues, because on the one hand it inhibits you. You are not expanding your revenue base because you are not getting into these wonder parks and water parks and so on and whatnot. I wanted you to respond to that concept because you see what your neighbours are doing.
Then I want to discuss with you another aspect; that is, whether there are any provincial parks in your jurisdiction and whether the province has approached you about taking those parks over, because that is occurring in my watershed. I would like to pursue that if it is affecting you as well. Those are the two areas I would like to pursue if we can in the time I have been allotted.
Interjections.
Mr Jackson: You do not have to fight over the question, but make sure you get to the microphone.
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Mr Coutts: I can answer the one on the parks if you wish. There is one small provincial park within the Grand watershed, and that is Rock Point on Lake Erie. Only recently -- recently being the last two or three years -- we have cooperated with the park authorities in some of the work that is done. To my knowledge we have not been approached yet to take it over. I think that was your question.
Mr Jackson: Yes. The other question was about any sense of frustration. You are speaking for the board in terms of those kinds of decisions. I am sure staff would give us a response, but would you like to comment on this whole concept of expanding the mandate of the authority to generate revenues, which seems to be the vogue for certain conservation authorities in this province? I am not aware that you are doing it.
Mr MacRobbie: On generating revenue?
Mr Jackson: You are not running a ski-run like my conservation authority is or a water slide like my neighbouring municipality is running. We are not planting as many trees because we have to make sure the ski equipment is working and stuff like that.
Mr MacRobbie: I guess we tried to get a golf course, but that did not go through.
Mr Jackson: Well, see?
Mr MacRobbie: Land for the Chicopee Ski Club in Kitchener is owned by the authority. We lease the land out to them and they pay for all the equipment, the taxes. We probably have no expense there at all.
Mr Jackson: But you are just leasing the land out to them.
Mr MacRobbie: We are leasing the land.
Mr Jackson: That is understandable.
Mr MacRobbie: We are not in the recreational business other than where we have recreational facilities now. We keep on expanding them a little and we try to make them more effective and efficient, but we are not in the process of -- there is nothing on the books, anyway, to start up anything new.
Mr Jackson: Although this may be a hypothetical question, the Bronte Creek Provincial Park is being offered to our local conservation authority because it is losing money. With our conservation authority, the Halton Region Conservation Authority, some of its operations lose money and others do not. It is a concern to both Noel and me that stewardship of this park would move from one money-losing entity to another money-losing entity. Are you aware that Rock Point is losing money to the province? If the province were to approach you, as it is approaching other conservation authorities, what would you believe your response might be at that time? Perhaps you could speak to that question.
Mr MacRobbie: I cannot speak to whether they are making money or losing money. I do not know. I would think, and this is just off the top of my head right now, that if the province were to approach us, I am sure we would be open to negotiations and would probably work out something.
Mr Jackson: Technically you would be the closest thing to the province's and the Ministry of Natural Resources' mandate. You would be the closest entity with a mandate that was even remotely similar in terms of being responsible for the stewardship of that land. There is no other jurisdiction to which the province --
Mr MacRobbie: Other than the municipality, I guess.
Mr Jackson: You could offer it to a municipality, okay. I will yield in case there are other questions.
Mr Klopp: I am filling in on the committee today, but I am kind of glad I am here. A little bit about my background: I am from the riding of Huron and I have been involved in three watersheds: Saugeen, Maitland and Ausable. I did not realize Saugeen was part of Huron until I got elected. If you look back on my record, my short time on council, I was one who kind of disagreed sometimes with -- especially with Ausable; that was my main group. But at the same time I was a staunch supporter of them. I felt it was maybe politicians creating some of the problem. I could feel the frustrations we felt that maybe governments were ignoring our conservation authorities. I felt we should try to do something about it. Heaven forbid, here I am now.
I still believe in that. I still believe we have to come a long way and to recognize that MNR is part of conservation authorities, not some little brother. I think this government is working towards that goal. Of course, at a time when things are a little tougher, it is harder to do.
One of the strong feelings on that has been that conservation authorities can move quicker and smarter. That was brought out by the fact that last year, as you pointed out, your organization already felt the economic environment was getting tougher. You recognized it a few years sooner. It took a little longer for the bigger system of government to recognize that. You brought that about last fall. Our conservation authorities did a heck of an excellent job in pulling together and recognizing they could be part of the solution last fall.
However, I remember reading stuff about your authority -- I guess that is why it has come up here a little bit -- talking about how moneys were spent or not spent. It bothers me because then it takes away from all the things I have been trying to promote about conservation authorities. For example, the Expositor talked about an audit; heaven forbid, audits, and maybe the papers misinterpret things. But it paints my conservation authorities with a bad brush when they hear that some part of another conservation authority, for whatever reasons, may be spending money, some people think, unwisely.
One of the specific issues -- it really bothers me because it does affect my conservation authority -- was with regard to your authority and the mileage and paying people to drive their cars. I understand that was in an audit. What have you done to correct that situation, if indeed it was even a situation that was there, to help show the credibility of my organizations?
Mr MacRobbie: That is still under advisement at the present time. Any vehicles that came up for renewal were never replaced during the last year and a half. The vehicles are part of a compensation package, so that would have to be rectified when it gets cleared up. Maybe Ron can speak to that better than I can.
Mr Fox: Your question had to do with the number of vehicles that were assigned to staff?
Mr Klopp: In particular the audit, and I will rephrase it maybe a little bit better here; the audit showed that a number of the staff were able to charge mileage on their own personal vehicles. It was figured out in the audit that you could save $13,000 if the workers had their own cars and just charged mileage versus the authority buying the cars. They seemed to show some very big numbers, a $13,000 difference.
Mr Fox: On the face of it, that figure is probably not too far off. But as Archie pointed out, in those cases of employees being supplied with a company car, it was part of the compensation package. If you took the car away, you would probably pay the $13,000 to them in salary, plus you would still have to pay them mileage for whatever mileage they drove on business. The end result would probably not change the bottom line. If it is the current vogue to change the policy -- the executive is reviewing that. Currently they have put a freeze on issuing cars as part of a compensation package.
Mr Jackson: Plus there was a tax memo from the federal government to that effect, as I recall. It would be interesting to know if that was in the report.
Mr McLean: I have a couple of questions. I would like a little information with regard to the Burgar report, and I would like some background from you with regard to the Ballinger study that was done. I would like your opinion with regard to amalgamations that were proposed. What is your authority's position on that?
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Mr Coutts: I can start off if you wish. When it comes to amalgamations, there really was no suggestion that the Grand River Conservation Authority would be involved in amalgamations. Then stepping back and looking at the 38 in the province, I think I can express the opinion that we think it would be good if they were put together so that they would be more viable, by going from, say, 38 to 19, which I think is recommended in the report. This would provide viable authorities that would be better able to carry out some of the functions they are supposed to be doing. I think it is very obvious that a number of small authorities do not have the financial base to really look after even the floodplain policies.
Mr McLean: Anything further on the amalgamations, other than the fact you agree with them?
Mr MacRobbie: We supported both those reports and we ourselves are in the process of trying to reduce our membership of 41, as was pointed out in the presentation. We would like to get it down to somewhere between 22 and 26.
Mr McLean: The conservation authorities of Ontario, the executive committee, what is its recommendation with regard to this? Do they agree with you or do they not agree with you with regard to amalgamation?
Mr MacRobbie: I think in general the Association of Conservation Authorities of Ontario, ACAO, agrees with amalgamation.
Mr McLean: Mr Powell?
Mr MacRobbie: Yes.
Mr McLean: Would you agree that most of the authorities across the province, the smaller ones, the majority of the authorities, would not be in agreement with you?
Mr MacRobbie: Yes, I think there are a number of small ones that want their own little autonomy. As Mac mentioned, they do not have the resources to really proceed and carry out the mandate they should. It will come to a point where I think they will have to amalgamate if the province keeps on reducing the funding for floodplain mapping and those sorts of things. It will come to a fact where they will probably have to amalgamate.
Mr McLean: In essence what you are saying is that there should be regional government right across the province because most of them are not big enough. These municipal councils or counties are not big enough to operate on their own so they all should be big; is that what you are saying?
Mr MacRobbie: Not really: I am just talking about authorities; I am not talking about municipal councils.
Mr McLean: That is fine, but I know lots of authorities that are fairly large in acreage and large in size that are very much opposed to amalgamation. It is all right for the larger authorities to say, "You should be amalgamated because you haven't got the funding," but I do not think that in essence is really true.
The other area I would like to pursue for just a short period of time is, what percentage of funding are you getting from the province now? Would it be 60%? I know you showed us the draft, but I wonder about the percentage of funding.
Mr MacRobbie: We showed you the draft, and the total funding from the province is about one third of our total budget. One third is levied and the other third is revenues raised. I think Ron can answer that better. It varies on various programs.
Mr Fox: Is your question in relation to the grant rate as opposed to the overall grant? Currently in 1991 we are eligible for a 55% grant on administration and water and also a supplementary grant of a further 6%. It is proposed in 1992 that the supplementary grant would be abolished for our authority and we would drop to a 50% grant on everything.
Mr McLean: The other question I have, which the manager would probably be able to answer is, what was your staff complement in 1980 and what is your staff complement today in 1992?
Mr Holmes: I will have to rely on Mr Coutts to respond to that, since I do not have those figures.
Mr McLean: I do not have them either. That is why I asked.
Mr Fox: I can make a guess. We have about 150 full-time employees and that would not have changed very much from 1982 to 1991. We had actually reduced from 1982 through till, I guess, 1990 or 1989. In 1990 and 1991 we have been deleting certain positions and cutting back on our overhead, two or three here, middle management, just to try to be as lean as possible and try to control our overhead costs in relation to the funds that are available.
Mr McLean: Okay. The other question I have is, what is the difference in your administration funding in 1982 and 1992 and your capital funding from 1982 to 1992?
Mr Fox: The capital program has been declining and our administrative grants have hardly kept up with inflation, I would say.
Mr McLean: But roughly how much have your administration costs increased from 1982 to 1992?
Mr Fox: They have probably gone up by about 50%. They have gone up roughly equivalent to inflation, I would say.
Mr McLean: What is your administration cost today?
Mr Fox: Our total administration cost is about $3.5 million.
Mr McLean: I will pass for now, Mr Chair, and come back later.
Mr Fox: That is out of a budget of $20 million.
Mr Marchese: As Mr Jackson did, I want to acknowledge the role that the conservation authority plays in conservation and the environment, so I hope the questions I ask will not appear to be detracting from that important role you are playing.
I have several questions about accountability. Given the membership of the authority, obviously the majority of the members are municipal appointees. There are only a few provincial ones, two or three as I understand it, so municipalities have direct contact and accountability through the members and the provincial government, through that mechanism, has very little accountability. How would you describe the accountability mechanism that the conservation authority has with the provincial government? Is there a mechanism? If there is not, what kinds of mechanisms are there? What would you recommend if there is not one in place?
Mr MacRobbie: I will speak to the appointees and let the ACAO speak to the other. We had an orientation meeting for new appointees last Tuesday afternoon. Out of a membership of 41, I think there are 15 new ones. That has been our practice when new members are appointed to the authority. We have an orientation meeting for them and they get all the bylaws, the rules and procedures and the budget book.
Mr Jackson: And the park pass?
Mr Marchese: Which we all used to get 10 years ago, is that right?
Mr MacRobbie: Yes, that is true.
Mr Jackson: That is the first thing they asked for.
Mr MacRobbie: In talking to the provincial appointees in the past, I am not aware of any, or there was very little dialogue between the appointees and the province. In discussion with the appointed members last Tuesday -- there are three of them this turn -- they indicated to me that they are going to be in consultation with the deputy minister twice or at least once a year. I feel that is probably a step in the right direction if we are going to have provincial appointees.
Mr Holmes: I believe the record of the Grand River Conservation Authority with its membership and its municipalities, with which we share the funding for the services, has to be maintained, and every effort is made to have a relationship there. Although we have a very large membership, the term "accountability" is difficult in that we are currently operating on an executive committee structure. I am aware that the authority executive is recommending there be some emphasis made on the reduction of the numbers to improve the term "accountability" of its membership.
Mr Marchese: Just to amplify on that, I think it is useful that the members who are appointed by the provincial government meet with the deputy from time to time, obviously as a way of communicating what is happening. If there is no other communication, that is very useful. But is there something else the authority would recommend in terms of how it communicates with the provincial government, or municipal governments for that matter? What kinds of communication systems do you have with municipal governments or provincial governments?
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Mr Holmes: I believe that traditionally the authority has had an excellent relationship with the Ministry of Natural Resources in particular, and so there is excellent communication there. From my brief association with the authority, although I have been very familiar with it for some time, there is excellent communication between the ministry, particularly the district office and the ministry representatives as well as the other ministries of the government with which we share services. There is an excellent communication there, I believe.
Mr Coutts: Perhaps I can add to that. The direct communication between the authority and the ministry is via its regional office. We communicate directly with the regional office as far as projects and funding and anything that is related to the day-to-day operation is concerned; that is to the regional office, and of course where it is appropriate to the front office.
When the authority was put together in 1966 the province appointed eight members. The reason they were appointed was not for communication but to make sure they were members at large so that they would have the view of looking at the total watershed, not just the parochial view of members from a particular municipality. Over a number of years that has been the role, as perceived locally, by a number of the members. They are just part of a corporation and communication has been directly through the staff organization, as I just mentioned, or through the chair to the organization or to the main office.
Mr Marchese: Can I ask how much time we have?
The Chair: The only constraint we are really under is members' schedules and I am sure the witnesses have some schedules they want to adhere to as well, but there is quite a bit of flexibility. Go ahead.
Mr Marchese: Let me move on. I would like to have pursued that issue a little more, but I need to move on because I want to ask other questions about the mission statement. I know the audit that was done talked about the mission statement or lack of mission statement and goals and not having them. It was said that it produces not so very good results, obviously. Have you as a conservation authority dealt with the issue of a mission statement, goals, timetables, deadlines, where there are goals? Have you done that in the last year? What progress have you made?
Mr MacRobbie: We put our mission statement, the final approval, together about a year and a half ago. What the mission statement showed, I think we have been following very well. The project you may be speaking of is time controls. When we start one there is usually a deadline for it and we try to have it completed by that deadline. That is maybe not answering what you wanted to hear.
Mr Marchese: Yes, in terms of having a project and you put a deadline to it, but in terms of the mission statement and the role statements, have you put anything in place that speaks to having a mission statement? Have you put anything in place that evaluates the programs you have in place now or will be putting in place?
Mr Coutts: I will respond to the first part of that. As part of the information package I believe you got an outline -- I merely referred to it in the presentation -- and that is the outline as we saw it with a mission statement, putting flesh on the bones of the objectives. That is the plan. The second part of your question, whether we have an evaluation in place, that is one of the issues that is part of that plan. I am going to suggest that Al carry on because he has a very definite objective for this year, I believe, in the evaluation process.
Mr Holmes: I assume you are referring to the development of a performance evaluation system for a program.
Mr Marchese: That is right.
Mr Holmes: Having been there only a short time, I believe there is a system of evaluation, but it will be my endeavour of course to put in place a more extensive evaluation program. I might add that the actual measurement of accomplishments of some of the programs carried on by the authority is difficult in light of all the other provincial requirements and regulations, particularly in the environmental area. To measure accomplishment of capital works today is very complicated. But on the development of watershed plans, I think we can develop time frames for that work within the accepted budget. There will be every effort to have some visible measure of that, although I think there is a measurement in place for the executive committee.
Mr Duignan: It is nice to see you here. My riding is on one of those lines that has three conservation authorities within the boundaries. I used to live in Brantford and used to enjoy going to a number of the conservation areas. I do that now again but this time I have a pass to do it with.
I want to focus a little on the audit report on management practices of the conservation authority. It has been about a year or a year and a half since that particular audit was done and completed. I am going to focus on the internal controls listed in that audit, particularly around revenue and accounts receivable. In that report the auditors noted some significant weaknesses in the handling of controls of cash and movable assets. At that time they recommended that "controls be established to eliminate the above weaknesses and these controls should be documented in the form of policies and procedural guidelines. Measures should be taken to ensure that these policies are enforced." What progress has the authority made to date on that recommendation?
Mr Holmes: It is probably appropriate if I ask our director of administration to respond to that, because I believe action has been taken.
Mr Fox: One of the major criticisms was that we did not have a written policy. The audit did not say that we had a major problem, because we do not have a major problem as far as loss of cash and things like that are concerned. In so far as accounts receivable are concerned, we do not have a bad record. One of the criticisms was that we did not have a nice written policy. Auditors think like auditors. Everything needs to be documented and ticked off in little boxes. That is where the weaknesses showed up. It was not that we were losing money or that there was any major problem.
Mr Duignan: This talks about the control of how it is done. That is what I am talking about.
Mr Fox: We have initiated a manual, a nice big thick manual with all the procedures which are duly approved by our executive. We have changed a number of those and are still working on refining it.
Mr Duignan: What areas have you changed?
Mr Fox: We have cash-handling procedures whereby the gatekeepers sign out cash from the superintendent, and when the superintendent gets it back they sign it back. It is a tick, check system. We have initiated that type of procedure so that there is a written record. As an example, we were checking all the park revenues, but the person who checked them did not initial that he had checked them. We do not think like auditors, unfortunately; we just try to get the job done. Now we make sure that the person who checks it initials it, so when the auditor comes he knows that has been done. That was where we were most criticized, on that end, rather than actually having a sloppy operation.
Mr Duignan: For example, the auditors found that receipts were not always issued for cash and cheques and that there was multiple access to where you kept the deposits. Has that all been changed?
Mr Fox: Yes, we have revised that. We have a receiving voucher now, so when a cheque comes into the office somebody makes out a receiving voucher. It is recorded and traced until it goes in the bank. Again, it is a a written procedure for how things happen. Yes, we have a procedure now.
Mr Duignan: So the whole area of how cash and cheques are handled has been tightened up and there is now a procedure in place.
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Mr Fox: We are getting the manual developed.
Mr Duignan: The manual is not developed yet.
Mr Fox: We still have some work to do on it, but we did the things that were the most effective first. As you can appreciate, there is a cost effect. To have a perfect system would be onerous and very costly. With the cutback in staff, how far you can go is limited. I think a reasonable person will appreciate that you cannot spend dollars to look for pennies. You could get to that level if you carried it right to the nth degree.
We rely on our external auditors, Ernst and Young. They do an audit. They have just finished the audit and have no criticism of our systems, as far as our control procedure is concerned. We rely on them probably as much as we do the provincial auditors, because they are familiar with our operation. They had no criticism of our procedures.
Mr Duignan: On personnel regulations it found: "The manual does include policies on petty cash and purchasing. However, we found that these policies are not comprehensive. Many standard internal controls are not specified." That too has been --
Mr Fox: Yes, we have made changes there.
Mr Duignan: Okay, what is left to be done?
Mr Fox: We have to review our purchasing policy this year. We have a difficult operation to handle in that we cover 2,400 square miles. The optimum would be to have a central purchasing system where everything is purchased centrally, but when you have units that are 100 kilometres away that becomes onerous and not very cost-effective. We are trying to go as far as we can to a central control and still be reasonably cost-effective.
Mr Duignan: I am glad to see that controls and procedures have begun to be put in place and will watch with interest how that develops over the coming year.
Mr Holmes: In light of the question, the follow-up audit has indicated that the concerns expressed in the audit of a year and a half ago have been taken and are in place. I think that is best to be stated for the record. I am aware of why you asked the question.
Mr McLean: How many government appointments are there on the conservation authority now?
Mr MacRobbie: Three. As Mac indicated earlier, at one time it was eight, then it got down to six, then it got down to four and now it is down to three.
Mr McLean: The chairman is an appointed position by the government now?
Mr MacRobbie: No, elected by the members.
Mr McLean: Elected by the members?
Mr MacRobbie: Yes, at the annual meeting.
Mr McLean: How much do the members get as a per diem? So much per meeting?
Mr MacRobbie: It is $58.50 a meeting now.
Mr McLean: What is the chairman's salary now? It was $35,000. Is it still about that?
Mr MacRobbie: It is still the same.
Mr McLean: That is a good position to be working for.
Interjection: It is a busy one.
Mr McLean: In 1991 the levies were down by about $250,000, what you were levying your municipalities. They were lower than they were in 1990. Is that right?
Mr Fox: No.
Mr McLean: Your total levies for 1991 are H. The total levies for 1990 are I. When you look at the bottom figure, you have about $250,000 less for 1991 than you have for 1990. No, I have that reversed. H is higher; that is right. What is happening in 1992?
Mr Fox: We are going to a zero per cent increase. That is our objective. The general meeting will be on the 22nd.
The Chair: Mr Marchese, you had some more questions?
Mr Marchese: Actually, I will ask one more question. I have a few more, but I am just going to ask one more. What is the relationship between the executive and the entire authority? Do the members of the entire board have a great say in the decisions that are made, or would you say that the executive makes most of the major decisions and basically hands them to the board and the board does not have much of a say? How would you describe the role of the two or the relationship between the two bodies?
Mr MacRobbie: The executive makes the majority of the decisions. The executive is made up of a chairman, a vice-chairman and 10 members, and they meet the second Friday and the fourth Friday of each month. The general membership meets about four times a year, sometimes only three because there is not enough business to call the membership in. We have the four advisory boards. Those four advisory boards probably meet an average of four to five times a year. The chairman of an advisory board has to be a member of the executive, so he gives his report to the executive. It gets approved that way.
If we were to reduce the membership, it would be to my liking to do away with the executive committee, still have a chairman and a vice-chairman and have three standing committees: administration, finance and personnel; water management, and land management. Those standing committees would meet once a month and the whole board would meet once a month. We would have more people involved with the decision-making process than we have now. When you get 41 members around there, three times a year, it takes them a long time -- mind you, they sit on one of the advisory boards as well -- to ever get the nuts and bolts and the makeup of the authority.
Mr Marchese: Sure, but I would think that if you do not move to such a structure many of the members might feel left out of the decision-making process, obviously. Do you not agree with that?
Mr MacRobbie: Yes. Any major projects are always approved by the general membership.
The Chair: I had a question of curiosity when Mr McLean raised the question of salary for the chair. How do you arrive at that? Has there been a study done on conservation authorities across the province with comparable responsibilities? It strikes me as on the high side, but then I am looking at the conservation authority in my own region. I do not think the chair in that area, of the Cataraqui Region Conservation Authority, would be on a salary. It would simply be a higher-level per diem than a regular member. It strikes me as a little on the high side. Maybe I am wrong and you have taken a look at comparable authorities. I would like to hear your views.
Mr MacRobbie: I guess I had better answer that one.
Mr McLean: Maybe you had better not.
Mr MacRobbie: It might be better not to, yes.
The Chair: It might be better if someone else answered it. I am not sure.
Mr MacRobbie: I will let somebody answer it then.
Mr Coutts: I will take a crack at it, Mr Chairman, and I think Mr McLean sort of hinted at that some time ago.
When the authority was formed in 1966 the chair was appointed by the province, and from that time on he was paid a salary that was agreed to by the authority and the province of the day. I cannot tell you what that amount was off the top, but it has been adjusted over the 25 years pretty much on the same basis as other salaries. That is one answer. The second answer is that the chair of the day, up to the last two or three years, spent a good part of his time relating to authority business. That is probably the other part of that.
The Chair: Is this unique to your authority, that the chair is on a salary rather than a per diem?
Mr Coutts: Can you answer that, Ron? There are two or three chairs, are there not, who are salaried?
Mr Fox: Yes, I think Metro has a substantial stipend for its chairman.
The Chair: That is not surprising.
Mr Fox: I think there are only two or three who would probably be on a salary.
Mr McLean: The Rideau in Ottawa?
Mr Fox: I am not sure about that.
Mr Holmes: It may not be appropriate for me to respond to that. Not necessarily in defence, but having been involved in municipal government for close to 30 years, I think it would be fairly representative of the pay for the heads of councils or bodies of this nature. In a brief time, I have become familiar with the great amount of work that is the responsibility of the chairman of the Grand River Conservation Authority, particularly dealing with the hearings, which are every second Friday.
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Mr MacRobbie: It is true of the Ontario Municipal Board as well.
The Chair: Did you have another question, Mr McLean?
Mr McLean: I am just curious. What would the difference be between the chairman's salary and the CEO's salary?
Mr MacRobbie: Two hundred per cent.
Mr McLean: I think Allan had better defend them on that one.
Mr Holmes: It is certainly not 200%, but it is considerably more than the chairman's, and I think it is quite consistent with other CEOs of authorities in the province.
Ms Poole: From what we have heard today, it appears that because of your management practices you have been able to weather this 5% cut and you have built up your infrastructure to make sure that you did. For instance, you mentioned that you had been watching your staff levels for the last couple of years as we went into a recession, so you really did not have to cut a lot other than some contracts because you have been doing it for the last couple of years on an ongoing basis. In your conversations with management from other conservation authorities who perhaps did not take these precautions, how are they managing? How have they dealt with this 5% cut instituted by the government? Do you have any information on what type of programs they are cutting back on?
Mr MacRobbie: I do not, unless Mac does.
Mr Coutts: I think Ron is the best person to answer that.
Mr Fox: The smaller authorities in particular are more dependent on provincial grants. In other words, they seldom do a project unless there is a matching grant. Our authority has been a little more aggressive, and due to the urgency of some of the problems in our watershed, we felt it was necessary that whether we got a grant or not we still had to do them. We have always spent ahead of the level of provincial funding. We have not curtailed our program to whether grants were available or not. That gave us a little more latitude in what we might be able to do. For a small authority, if you take a block of grant out, then the only thing that is left there is the municipal levy, which is pretty difficult to adjust.
I think that is really the difference. We have a little more aggressive program than some of the smaller authorities, and the younger ones too that have not had the years to build up an asset base. As we pointed out, we have 45,000 acres of land. We try very hard to make that pay for itself and generate revenues back to the taxpayer. We are always looking for opportunities to generate as much revenue as we possibly can from the assets we have and operate more like a corporation than just a government agency.
Ms Poole: In other words, because you have built up your asset base over the decades and because you have generated a large proportion of revenues compared to some of the smaller and younger authorities, you have been able to weather the storm, but they may have much greater difficulties.
Mr Fox: We have more opportunity to cut programs, because we can cut our own programs and not just those that are supported by government grants. I think that is the point I am trying to make. We have a little more selection as to what we can cut back on.
Ms Poole: You have more flexibility.
Mr Fox: Right.
Mr Klopp: With regard to Ms Poole's remarks, I live in three areas that had this. It was told to you and I understand to all the groups. MNR said, "We're going to have restraint problems." Earlier on it was not quite like a bombshell, although it was damned difficult. Our three, which are moderate in size compared to yours, weathered the storm also, which I think was a good plus for their organizations. I think that should be made clear. I believe for a lot of them it was because of their ability to move in and out. It is too bad bigger government did not see the recession coming sooner. Anyway, I just want to let that be known, that they did weather the storm.
The Chair: Nothing further? We appreciate your coming down here today and responding to the questions of members of the committee as fully as you possibly could.
Members of the committee, I will leave it up to you. As your agendas indicate, we could spend some time briefly discussing the appearance of the conservation authority in camera. How do you feel about going until 4 o'clock? Do any of you have any difficulty with that? All right. We are going to move in camera and ask Hansard to depart the scene.
The committee continued in closed session at 1536.