Contents
3 February 1993
Draft reports
Appointments review
Vicki Van Wagner
William J. Corcoran
Betty Wu-Lawrence
Subcommittee report
Appointments review
John Douglas McCamus
STANDING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
*Chair / Président: Runciman, Robert W. (Leeds-Grenville PC)
*Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: McLean, Allan K. (Simcoe East/-Est PC)
*Bradley, James J. (St Catharines L)
Carter, Jenny (Peterborough ND)
*Cleary, John C. (Cornwall L)
Ferguson, Will, (Kitchener ND)
*Frankford, Robert (Scarborough East/-Est ND)
*Grandmaître, Bernard (Ottawa East/-Est L)
*Marchese, Rosario (Fort York ND)
Stockwell, Chris (Etobicoke West/-Ouest PC)
Waters, Daniel (Muskoka-Georgian Bay ND)
Wiseman, Jim (Durham West/-Ouest ND)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present/ Membres remplaçants présents:
Abel, Donald (Wentworth North/-Nord ND) for Mr Ferguson
Duignan, Noel (Halton North/-Nord ND) for Mr Waters
Murdoch, Bill (Grey PC) for Mr Stockwell
Rizzo, Tony (Oakwood ND) for Mr Wiseman
Clerks pro tem / Greffières par intérim: Freedman, Lisa; Manikel, Tannis
Staff / Personnel: Pond, David, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1011 in committee room 2.
DRAFT REPORTS
The Chair (Mr Robert W. Runciman): Are we all set to get under way? We'll call the meeting to order.
The first matter on the agenda this morning is the review of draft reports, and I'll ask researcher David to take us through this.
Mr David Pond: You should have in your packages the revised draft report on the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario and the draft report on the Ontario Board of Parole, and the most recent item you should have in front of you, which I distributed this morning, was a short memo that I suggested yesterday I do: a summary of the testimony of Dale Martin and the Sewell commission where it was relevant to the recommendations in the committee's draft report on the OMB.
If nobody objects, I'll start with the one I have on top, which is the revised draft report on the liquor licence board. The only change to the draft report which the committee suggested at the last meeting, which was before Christmas, is indicated in shaded ink on the bottom of page 15 and the top of page 16, which deals with a recommendation Mr Rizzo proposed and the committee formally approved by motion: that applicants for a liquor licence should first have to apply to the local municipal council and that they would have a right of appeal from the local municipal council to the board; that would require a change to the governing statute. That's the only change to the draft report in the LLBO.
The Chair: Any questions on that?
Mr Pond: There are a couple of other items I have to mention.
On page 12, one of the previously approved recommendations of the committee, recommendation 3: "The government should strive to develop new rules and standards which would eliminate sexism in advertising. In so doing it should draw on the expertise and experience of the LLBO."
It's my information that this recommendation has already been implemented by the government in that the LLBO, at the request of the minister, has drawn up draft regulations which have been circulated to the industry for comment. The industry's comments are supposed to be back in with the ministry by March, I believe, and at that point the ministry will take over and draft new regulations. In effect, recommendation 3 has been implemented by the government, so we can do one of two things: eliminate that completely, or just make a note to the effect that the government has moved ahead on this issue and the committee applauds the initiative and we will await the final results.
Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): I recommend the latter, Mr Chair.
The Chair: Any difference of opinion? It's accepted.
Mr Pond: The only other matter with regard to the LLBO, as I note here on the covering page, is that at the last meeting, after the committee had gone through the draft report, Mr Stockwell asked for some information on how the issue of sexism in liquor advertising was tackled in other jurisdictions. As I indicated on the covering page here at the bottom of the page, a lot of other jurisdictions have tackled this issue. Most of those jurisdictions which have tackled the issue simply eliminate advertising in toto -- they just get rid of the advertising -- and a small number of jurisdictions have voluntary codes of ethics. That's just for the record. He's not here today, but he asked that we look that up before we formally dispose of this report.
The Chair: Anything else? Move on, then.
Mr Pond: The draft report on the Ontario Board of Parole: Again, this was considered at the committee's meeting of November 25. The only change is indicated once again in shaded ink on page 18. This was a recommendation by Mr Runciman with regard to the release into the community of offenders on temporary absence passes. If you recall, the committee suggested recommendation 6 and 7.
Recommendation 6: "The Ministry of Correctional Services should consider introducing a policy whereby victims who so wish are informed when offenders are released into the community on temporary absence passes, especially in sexual assault cases."
After the committee discussed that draft recommendation, I believe Mr Waters pointed out that it would require another recommendation to implement it, namely recommendation 7: "The Ministry of the Attorney General should ensure that information on offenders and their victims is readily shared with the Ministry of Correctional Services so that the latter can implement a proactive victims' rights policy."
According to Mr Waters, there was a lack of communication or sharing of information between the respective ministries. In order to implement recommendation 6, the committee was going to have to direct the Attorney General ministry to share its information about offenders and their disposition with the Correctional Services bureaucracy.
Mr Allan K. McLean (Simcoe East): Agreed.
The Chair: Anything else on that, David?
Mr Pond: No. As I mentioned at the outset, I have prepared for you a brief memo on the Ontario Municipal Board. I don't know if you want to address that at this time, since this is sort of a late addition to the agenda. It wasn't something you were warned about last week when the agenda was set up. Nevertheless, you should have in front of you a very brief memo indicating where Mr Martin, in his testimony before the committee on the OMB, and where the Sewell commission in its report touch on the recommendations in the committee's draft report on the OMB.
If you recall, I guess it was early last December, the committee decided that before it would finalize its report on the OMB, it would get the views of Mr Martin, and the Sewell commission in the form of Mr Sewell, and then come back to the draft report. In any case, what you have before you is simply the eight recommendations in the draft report which have already been approved by the committee, and underneath it a brief summary of where the two witnesses we've had stand on those recommendations. I can take you through this if you like.
The Chair: Let's do that.
Mr Pond: Draft recommendation 1: "The Attorney General should consider removing assessment and minor variance appeals from the jurisdiction of the OMB."
In other words, the intent here is that one way for the government to address the backlog problem for the OMB is to reduce the OMB's jurisdiction. Mr Martin, if you recall, in his testimony before the committee said, "Yes, that's probably a good idea." The Sewell commission, however, most definitively said, "We don't think the jurisdiction of the OMB should be altered; there are other ways of addressing the backlog problem," some of which Mr Sewell indicated when he was here yesterday.
Mr Bernard Grandmaître (Ottawa East): But at the same time, John Sewell mentioned yesterday that we shouldn't increase the number of members of the OMB, yet when you look at the assessment situation in the province of Ontario, Ottawa-Carleton, also Metro, which has turned down MVA, they're going to be overworked with appeals and it's going to create a backlog. I'm very concerned that if we don't separate assessment from the OMB, these people will be overworked and that will create a backlog.
The Chair: Mr Marchese?
Mr Marchese: I don't remember; I may have been talking to somebody else during the moment Mr Sewell spoke on that. But if we're going to have provincial policy guidelines in the area of planning, why couldn't we remove assessment and minor variance, given that they will be able to have this grand scheme of guidelines with which municipalities would have to abide? It would seem to me that it would conform with this recommendation based on that. Did I hear anything different?
Mr Pond: No, you're quite right. Mr Sewell indicated, and the report certainly indicates, that if the government adopted the package of recommendations -- you mentioned one. Another one, to be fair, is the adoption of alternative dispute recommendation techniques at levels before you get to the OMB. His argument is that you will essentially reduce the backlog that way and you don't need to alter the jurisdiction of the OMB.
Mr Marchese: David, I'm not arguing with you, obviously, but rather with whether or not we should do this. Even though you might have an alternative dispute mechanism, you'll still need that mechanism to deal with so many other issues and not necessarily with just minor variance or assessment. We could still proceed with that recommendation, let us say, and still keep in place what Mr Sewell was saying with the dispute mechanism to do so many other things.
The Chair: What you're saying is that you still support our original recommendations?
Mr Marchese: It would seem to me that I could live with that.
The Chair: All we're saying here is that the Attorney General "should consider."
Mr Marchese: Yes.
The Chair: Okay. We're in agreement on that one.
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Mr Pond: Okay, draft recommendation 2: "The Minister of Municipal Affairs should ask the provincial facilitator" -- namely Mr Martin -- "to consider whether alternative dispute resolution and mediation techniques could be applied to some stages of the approvals process to accelerate the completion of significant development projects."
Again, this is another recommendation which has already been implemented. This is his job, essentially, and he's been doing it for some time. He went into this in some detail when he was before the committee. Similarly, the Sewell commission recommended that the province, as well as the OMB, adopt a number of so-called ADR techniques. What we could probably do here is rewrite that paragraph to indicate the committee's support for these efforts to introduce ADR and mediation techniques, as it does seem that the recommendation's been overtaken by time, so to speak.
Mr Grandmaître: Great.
The Chair: I think there should be a rider attached to that that there should be some follow-up with respect to how effective these changes are and how speedily they're occurring.
Mr Marchese: Actually, Mr Chair, I support that. We should be talking about what mechanisms are in place or would be in place to measure the effectiveness of that, so we could clearly see what criteria they use to measure it and then follow up on that so we know how it's going. I support that.
Mr Pond: Actually, that's in the draft report.
Draft recommendation 3: "The Minister of Municipal Affairs should consider some sort of penalty or disincentive for municipalities which fail to update their official plans expeditiously as a means of reducing appeals to the OMB."
Mr Martin didn't address this one at all. The Sewell commission doesn't address this proposal, but what it does do -- and Mr Sewell made this point -- is require all so-called upper-tier municipalities to adopt an official plan right away. It would require all lower-tier municipalities to have official plans which conform to the upper-tier official plans. A number of other measures would require municipalities to regularly update their official plans. Essentially, he's circumventing the problem identified by this recommendation by recommending that municipalities be required to have official plans, whether they want to or not, and have them updated regularly and in light of public opinion.
Mr Grandmaître: Mr Sewell also criticized municipalities for bringing too many amendments to their official plans, yet he's saying that every municipality should have an official plan and that it should be reviewed regularly. But at the same time he's accusing them of changing their minds, let's say, too often.
Mr Marchese: Of those that do have them.
Mr Pond: That's right, he does say that.
Mr Grandmaître: Asking municipalities in this province to have an official plan is a great thing, but now that the province is showing more and more interest in municipal official planning and also giving the ministry and the minister more powers on those official plans, how can these official plans be reviewed regularly? And I mean every five years: This is what the Ministry of Municipal Affairs is saying now, that they should be reviewed every five years. Some municipalities work on their official plan for maybe two years or three years, and when they send in their official plan, their revised official plan, there are 100, maybe 200 amendments with the official plan, and it's not even approved yet.
I've worked with AMO on this thing, asking municipalities to be more realistic in their official plan approach. I don't think there is a municipality that brings in a new official plan without 50, 75, 100, 200 amendments, so it's not really reflecting the needs of today and the needs of the next five years. This is what really gets me. I think municipalities should review their official plan every five years, but without the amendments. Why would you bring in an official plan with 150 amendments, an official plan that hasn't been approved? Do you follow me?
The Chair: I just don't understand why they would bring in the plan with amendments, rather than bringing in an amended plan.
Mr Grandmaître: Because they're supposed to revise or review their official plan every five years, and they start working on a new, revised official plan about two years after. So it gives them three years to prepare a new official plan. But while they're working on it, you and every developer in the province of Ontario are asking for zoning changes and so on and so forth, so they include these amendments along with the official plan.
Mr Pond: That's exactly what happens.
Mr Grandmaître: So why ask municipalities to revise their official plan and file 200 amendments along with it?
Mr Marchese: Let me ask you a question. Did not Mr Sewell say it would be easier in the future for those municipalities that did not have one to in fact have one, and that it would be less complicated in the future with these official plans than it has been in the past because of his recommendations? Therefore, you would not be facing the kinds of things you're talking about.
Mr Pond: That's the intent of it, yes. That's the intent of what he's saying.
Mr Grandmaître: I know this is what he's trying to do. What I'm objecting to is municipalities bringing in the new official plan -- which is not approved yet; they're asking for approval -- but along with this official plan there may be 150 or 200 amendments. What's the good of working on an official plan for three years --
Mr Marchese: But once we have this in place -- and I'm hoping and assuming that will be the case -- those official plans will be a lot speedier and less complicated than in the past. My hope would be that those municipalities not make these changes now until they have a sense of what new changes are likely to be implemented in the very near future.
Mr Grandmaître: If those amendments are not part of the new official plan, then you'll be stalling developments in those municipalities, because developers are waiting for amendments to their zoning bylaws and so on: sewer, water. This is what I'm getting at.
Mr Marchese: I agree.
The Chair: How do you see us tying this in? We're dealing with the OMB. How would you tie this in to recommendations that affect the OMB?
Mr Grandmaître: Personally, Mr Chair, I think it's unreasonable and very costly for a municipality to revise its official plan every five years. Maybe it should be every seven years, because it's very, very costly.
The Chair: Theoretically, isn't an official plan supposed to be a 20-year plan?
Mr Grandmaître: It's supposed to reflect a 20-year plan: Regional governments are being asked to create an official plan which will reflect what the region should be for the next 20 years. To make those municipal official plans compatible with regional official plans is impossible, if you're asked to revise your official plan every five years.
The Chair: I understand what you're saying, but I'm trying to tie it in with our recommendations related to the workload of the Ontario Municipal Board. How would that impact on the workload?
Mr Marchese: Workload, or how it relates specifically to penalty or disincentives for failing to update their plans, right?
The Chair: This is a means, as we've concluded in here, of reducing appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board.
Mr Grandmaître: By accepting those 200 amendments, you're not reducing the workload of the OMB.
Mr Marchese: From what I heard -- and perhaps, David, you might be helpful -- from what Mr Sewell was saying, he seemed very confident that would happen.
Mr Pond: He is, definitely.
Mr Marchese: But it seemed all the members were too, in terms of what he was saying, and that if we implement a lot of those changes, this would be facilitated to a great extent.
Mr Pond: There'd be less appeals of official plan amendments to the board; that's the theory, yes.
The other thing I should mention to complete the picture is that the Sewell report also recommends that the province have the power to move in and take over the planning powers of a municipality which doesn't regulate development adequately in terms of the objectives of the new Planning Act. So if you've got a planning process in a municipality which, in the judgement of the minister, is totally at the mercy of developers, to give you just one example, the ministry would have the power to move in and take over the planning powers of that municipality. If a municipality fails to introduce or update the official plan in light of the new standards, the ministry would have the power to move in and write the official plan for that municipality.
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Mr Grandmaître: Not only that; slow down unconditional and conditional grants to those municipalities that haven't updated their official plan. That's very serious.
Mr Pond: Yes, that's the other point, which I forgot. The grant structure would be revised.
Mr Marchese: But Bernard, what is your suggestion to those communities that would not move ahead to have an official plan?
Mr Grandmaître: I agree with Mr Sewell that every municipality should have an official plan, but I think it unrealistic to ask municipalities to update them every five years.
Mr Bill Murdoch (Grey): It takes five years to make a plan.
The Chair: We'll move on to Mr Cleary, but I'm just trying to tie in Mr Grandmaître's concern. What if we revised this to read something to the effect of "fail to update their official plan"? Are you suggesting an amendment or completely eliminating this? We're saying "fail to update their plans expeditiously." Did you want to amend that to include --
Mr Grandmaître: I'd say put seven years instead of every five. John wants to say something.
Mr John C. Cleary (Cornwall): I would just say that this planning has been a disaster in the last many, many years, going back into the early --
The Chair: The last eight, I guess.
Mr Cleary: And in the early 1970s, when the government forced every municipality to come into the planning area. That was a real disaster and cost the province and municipalities a pile of money. I've been involved in a lot of official plans, and I cannot see how you can recognize a five-year period, because sometimes that runs into three municipal councils before you get a plan off for approval, and I know about these amendments and everything. I don't know what the answer is, but the longer time frame we have, I think, the better.
Mr Robert Frankford (Scarborough East): I feel quite happy with this as written. It doesn't say exactly what sort of penalty or disincentive there should be. I find it difficult to imagine --
Mr Grandmaître: It's been mentioned before by the ministry. If they don't comply, their unconditional and conditional grants could be affected.
Mr Frankford: Okay. I'm really not that familiar with this field as to what mechanisms there could be, but my experience in Scarborough is that we are constantly faced with disputes going to the OMB in relation to the plan, and I think this would be an effective recommendation. I really am not sure if we should be discussing the choice between seven-year revisions and five-year revisions. The rather open-ended nature of this recommendation is fine with me.
The Chair: The bottom line here, as Mr Frankford's suggesting -- and I tend to agree -- is that what we're really trying to achieve here is to reduce the appeals to the OMB. I don't know whether or not it's appropriate for us to get into talking about -- even though we have some experience and expertise in this area, it's something we really haven't discussed thoroughly. I wonder if it's appropriate for us to be putting a time line on it as the ideal, rather than just simply saying, as this wording indicates, "expeditiously," and letting the so-called expertise define what that means.
Mr McLean: I guess the bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we put in; it's up to the ministry whether it wants to have a look at it or not. If you start putting in specifics, it won't matter: They will do what they want to do. I think what Bob is saying is that it's a recommendation that they do something, and we might as well leave it at that.
Mr Marchese: I think it's important for us to write what we feel is appropriate, although in the end of course ministers may do what they want.
Two points on this, first in terms of the seven years: My concern is that the longer time you give, making it more elastic, the more municipalities will take advantage of the seven-year time frame. I mean if you can do it in five, you'll do it in five; if you're told you can do it in seven, you'll do it in seven. So you delay your official plan, always, by the time frame you're given. That's my concern about stretching the time.
But coming more directly to the point, I agree with Mr Runciman and Bob Frankford on this, that this issue is not connected to a time frame so much as whether we agree that there should be penalties or disincentives in order to get municipalities to have this official plan and, if they fail to do so, what those disincentives or penalties should be. That's really the issue, and I prefer to stick to that than to refocus the agenda on five or seven years.
Mr Murdoch: I think you're sort of picking on municipalities, saying, "If they get seven years, they'll take seven years; if we give them five, they'll take five." They want an official plan as much as anybody else does, because they're the guys --
Mr Marchese: No.
Mr Murdoch: Sure they do. I was there. I know damn well they do, and don't tell me they don't. That really makes me mad when you start saying: "Oh, municipalities don't know what to do. We, as Big Brother, have got to come down with a hammer and tell them they've got to do stuff." I totally disagree with that.
Mr Noel Duignan (Halton North): In some cases that's needed, Bill, because sometimes they don't do it.
Mr Murdoch: Who the hell are you to say that you should tell the municipalities what to do?
Mr Duignan: Why the hell should the local taxpayers put up with incompetence at the local municipal level? They need some direction.
Mr Murdoch: So municipalities are incompetent? There you are, coming right from the government.
Mr Duignan: Exactly. You go to my local municipality and it's totally incompetent.
Mr Murdoch: Good. The government now says municipalities are incompetent and that it isn't. I guess that's why that big shuffle today, because they weren't incompetent, for God's sake. Anyway, that's what I want to say, that I get sick and tired of these guys running down the municipalities.
Mr Duignan: Talk to the people in my local municipality.
The Chair: Mr Murdoch has the floor. You had enough opportunity.
Mr Murdoch: I don't think there should be any penalty at all. You start saying "penalties." What are they going to do? Spank you if you aren't good, or make you sit in the corner? Give me a break. They should sit down and deal with it like people and not turn around and say --
The Chair: Mr Murdoch, we're dealing with the specific recommendation 3. Are you supporting it or not supporting it?
Mr Murdoch: No, I wouldn't support that.
The Chair: You're not supporting it. Okay.
Mr Marchese: Mr Chair, if you recall, yesterday a large percentage was presented to us of municipalities that don't have an official plan: Either a third or half of municipalities don't have an official plan.
Mr Murdoch: Do you know why?
Mr Marchese: But it's important to note that, otherwise you create the impression that somehow that isn't an issue out there. If a large number of them don't have an official plan, it's a problem we have to deal with. Anyway, Mr Chair, that's it.
Mr Murdoch: And I'll agree with you that there is a large number, but it's not their fault. It's the fault of the government down here. They set all these guidelines and time frames that you have to do this and you have to do that. These are elected people you're dealing with.
Mr Marchese: Bill, it's got nothing to do with that.
Mr Murdoch: Sure, it is; I've been there.
Mr Duignan: To stop developers doing what they please and manipulating local councils is why, Bill.
Mr Murdoch: Would you like my time? Why don't you say it when you have a chance to, and let the other people speak? But of course you want to run the whole show. Fine.
I'm just telling you, that's why there are a lot of problems, because the problems are here. You want to know about Grey county? You had your superministers come up there and say, "You must have a plan and we'll pay half." Now, all of a sudden, "No, we don't have any more money; we won't pay for it." So what the hell are they supposed to do up there and think about that? They were forced into doing a new plan right now, immediately, it had to be done, it was top priority, "But we'll pay half for you." Two big ministers, Grier and Cooke both, said, "We'll pay," and now they won't.
The Chair: We're not going to solve the problems of the world here this morning.
Mr Murdoch: That's for sure.
The Chair: What do you want to do with this recommendation? If there's a division on it, maybe we should simply leave it here for now until we finalize this and make a note that there's a division of opinion on whether we should incorporate this in the report, rather than making a final decision on it now, just so we can move through these things.
Mr Marchese: Mr Chair, is it useful to suggest that we support the direction of the Sewell commission report, or is that contrary to what Bill is supporting?
Mr Murdoch: It's contrary for me to say I support that report.
Mr Grandmaître: The Sewell commission does not directly discuss this proposal.
Mr Marchese: It does offer a number of proposals.
Mr Grandmaître: However, the commission does offer a number of proposals. Also, I want to remind you what Mr Sewell told us yesterday, that two thirds of our municipal governments don't have a plan.
Mr Marchese: It was two thirds, then. It's not even half; it's two thirds.
Mr Grandmaître: Two thirds don't have a plan. So you're putting these municipalities, maybe 600 municipalities, right against the wall. They say: "Get a plan. Get a consultant and get a plan."
The Chair: I'm trying to get this report through. Is there a majority opinion here that we should just pull this recommendation?
Mr Murdoch: I would go for that.
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The Chair: I'm looking for some kind of sense out of this. Mr Frankford, would you like to say something?
Mr Frankford: I think we are trying to make recommendations to improve the efficiency of the OMB and this seems to be a very reasonable recommendation to add to what we're saying.
Mr Grandmaître: Personally, I don't.
Mr Marchese: I would like --
The Chair: Mr Grandmaître and then Mr Marchese.
Mr Grandmaître: I don't think that two thirds of our municipalities should be penalized because they don't have the money to update their official plans and don't have the money to have a full-time planner on their staff. I don't think they should be penalized.
The Chair: I just want to say that traditionally, historically, with agency reports from this committee, they've been unanimous recommendations going forward. I'd just like us all to keep that in mind. There are some times that we're not going to be able to agree on things, but I think it has much more impact in terms of the ministry or agency we're dealing with if it's a unanimous recommendation. What am I hearing, that we have a goodly number who would like to simply pull this and make no reference to this?
Mr Murdoch: That's what I would recommend.
Mr Marchese: I would have preferred that we support the direction of the Sewell commission, but if we can't get support --
Mr Murdoch: I couldn't do that.
Mr Grandmaître: We haven't seen the formal recommendation from Sewell.
Mr Murdoch: It's pretty hard to do that.
Mr Marchese: No, supporting the direction where the Sewell commission is going.
Mr Murdoch: To the bottom of the sea.
Mr Grandmaître: No. I'd rather have a road map with a final destination on it.
Mr Murdoch: I would too.
Mr Marchese: That's okay, Bernard, the minister will do what he wants.
The Chair: Let's move on to the next one that's perhaps a little less contentious.
Mr Grandmaître: What have we resolved on this one?
The Chair: We're pulling it.
Mr Grandmaître: Pulling it? Thank you.
Mr Pond: Okay, draft recommendation 4: "The Attorney General consider changing the term of OMB members to an initial five-year appointment, with the possibility of a reappointment to a second term of three years."
Neither Dale Martin nor the Sewell commission talk at all about the length of term of OMB members.
The issue here was, as you recall, that historically, appointments to the OMB were at pleasure of the Lieutenant Governor in Council, which meant essentially for the rest of your career. The Peterson government introduced the standard three-year term. The committee heard on a number of occasions from OMB members that this was a contentious issue within the board because some members were there for life, essentially, and some members were there for only three years. This is the compromise recommendation the committee came up with, the five-year term and then the possibility of a reappointment.
The Chair: Any comments?
Mr Marchese: We support that, Mr Chair.
Mr Grandmaître: I like it.
The Chair: Everyone agrees with this? Okay.
Mr Grandmaître: Bill just told me he will support it too.
The Chair: He's already got his application in. Draft recommendation 5.
Mr Pond: Intervenor funding: Both Mr Martin and the Sewell commission agreed that intervenor funding should be extended to the OMB, and if you recall, the Sewell commission in its chapter on this has a long list of criteria which should be introduced to enable the OMB to implement this recommendation. It's not very controversial, except I guess with you.
Mr Murdoch: This is intervenor funding for whom?
Mr Grandmaître: Not individuals, not private --
The Chair: No, that was pretty well discussed yesterday with Mr Sewell.
Mr Marchese: It would be useful to hear the other members on this. I personally support intervenor funding and support as well the number of checks and balances that were considered or are being considered by the Sewell commission. With those considerations, I feel that intervenor funding is useful.
The OMB would create a panel within it to review the individual cases, but I don't have with me all the kinds of criteria -- there are about eight of them -- in terms of considerations that I think are appropriate. My sense is that if the others agree, I would prefer to support that and support the direction of the Sewell commission in that respect than to suggest, "The Attorney General give prompt and careful consideration to the advantages and disadvantages," which really doesn't say much, except that.
The Chair: Except take a look at it.
Mr Marchese: Except take a look at it and tell us what's good and bad about it. But what do the other members feel about that?
Mr Murdoch: I don't like intervenor funding at all. If somebody wants to fight something, that's their business. I don't think the government should be giving other people money to fight things at OMB. For example, in Meaford they had a dump site and it cost the town of Meaford and the township of St Vincent more money at the hearing then for the damned intervenor funding because the OMB put the cost back on to the municipalities because this group could have intervenor funding. So I don't agree with that.
The Chair: David can correct me, but I think we had this division of opinion when we originally discussed that. That's why we came up with this recommendation, which isn't coming down on either side of the fence. It's just saying take a look at it.
Mr Grandmaître: Take a look at it.
Mr Marchese: Do you support that, Bernard? Take a look at it?
Mr Grandmaître: Yes.
Mr Murdoch: That's all it says. Weren't you supporting this?
The Chair: No, he wanted it to be quite --
Mr Marchese: I think we should support intervenor funding. I think a lot of individuals --
Mr Murdoch: How can we afford it? Everybody's running all over the country. Everybody's appealing everything.
The Chair: We have a recommendation which I think arose out of considerable discussion already on this matter. Do we support the recommendation or do we want to change it? I am open to an amendment, but I get the sense that everyone can agree with this, whether we're totally happy with it or not.
Mr Marchese: It's such a weak recommendation. But you like it?
Mr Grandmaître: I like the words "careful consideration."
Mr Marchese: All right. I prefer to leave it then.
The Chair: Draft recommendation 6.
Mr Pond: "OMB members should always strive to be as courteous and friendly as possible to the parties appearing before them, and in particular to private citizens and community groups who appear without a lawyer."
This arose out of testimony from community groups which appeared before the committee to argue that in specific cases, in their experience, OMB members had been less than fully courteous to them, especially when they appeared without a lawyer.
Mr Murdoch: You'll never enforce this one.
Mr Marchese: Shall we build in the monitoring mechanism for this?
The Chair: Let's have one at a time. Mr Marchese.
Mr Marchese: I'm just joking, Mr Chair. I'm proposing that we build in a monitoring mechanism to make sure this happens. I support the recommendation.
Mr Murdoch: Maybe there should be something in there, like we would fine them if they didn't do it right. This would give the government of the day a heavy hand on these guys. When they don't do it, there'll be a penalty. You'll sit in the corner.
Mr Marchese: Penalties and disincentives.
Mr Murdoch: Yes, the same as you want to do with the municipalities. Let's do it to the OMB guys.
Mr Marchese: I think Bill supports the recommendation.
The Chair: I guess everybody agrees with the intent of this. Okay, draft recommendation 7.
Mr Pond: "Training programs for OMB members should include material on the ecosystems approach to urban planning."
Dale Martin didn't actually speak to this recommendation, but he did speak to the next one, which is closely related, and the Sewell commission did agree with this recommendation.
Mr Marchese: We support it.
Mr Murdoch: Training programs?
Mr Pond: Actually, to be fair, Mr Murdoch, that phrase "training programs" came out of the testimony of the OMB itself in which it indicated to the committee it was introducing formal training programs for new members.
Mr Murdoch: It wouldn't hurt to train them that there's more than just Toronto, too, that there is a rural Ontario out there. You could add that. There is more than just planning in Toronto.
Mr Marchese: You're so specific.
Mr Murdoch: No sense beating around the bush, is there?
Mr Marchese: Why are you so unfriendly to Toronto anyway?
Mr Murdoch: You should come up and live in Grey for a while and see what you do up there.
Mr Marchese: I'm not coming now, Bill.
The Chair: Number 8, I gather, is along the same lines.
Mr Pond: Yes. "The government should appoint some members to the OMB who have a background in ecological theory and its application to planning issues."
Mr Martin did specifically say he agreed with this recommendation, and as I note here, the Sewell commission recommends that in making appointments to the OMB, the government should take into consideration whether prospective appointees have an understanding and sensitivity to environmental issues.
The Chair: Is there anything else we want to incorporate in this report before David finalizes the thing and brings it back to us? Anything else that might have arisen out of Mr Martin's and Mr Sewell's appearances?
Mr Marchese: Just as a question, I found Mr Sewell's comments yesterday very informative. My hope is that our government will proceed with that report as expeditiously as possible. If other members felt the same, it would be useful to have a recommendation that spoke to that, and in that way.
Mr Murdoch: You certainly won't get a recommendation out of here. I hope they scrap it.
Mr Grandmaître: Mr Sewell is on the right track, but I did point out to him yesterday that this is not the first time we've looked at the Planning Act in the last 15 years. I think this is the fourth or maybe fifth study or review, and before approving anything I'd like to see the final report, but I think he's on the right track. We have to speed up the planning and development process.
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Mr Murdoch: I have no problem with reviewing planning but I think he's on the wrong track. He's all urbanized. It kills rural Ontario is what it does and if it proceeds with that, you're going to have a revolt. There's no doubt about it. Rural Ontario will never accept that. You might as well accept that right now. If you want to force it through, which you can, then fine, you'll live with the consequences.
The Chair: The fact is, not speaking from personal perspective, that I represent a riding that's a mix of small urban and rural and there is a lot of concern about these recommendations, perhaps a lot of misunderstanding out there -- I'm not sure -- which Mr Sewell is going to hear now as he has his draft report out there. He's going to get feedback from small municipalities and rural areas, but I think it would possibly be premature to say something at this stage because I think there is an awful lot of concern out there.
Mr Murdoch: He's already had the chance for his people and obviously hasn't listened with the draft report, so I don't have a lot of enthusiasm that he's going to change his report. He's been around the circuit already a couple of times and now he's going for the third time. Maybe he'll listen the third time. With some people it takes a little longer to sink in and maybe it will.
Mr Grandmaître: We're going to send him a personal note.
Mr Murdoch: Mr Chairman, perhaps you'd give Mr Duignan a chance to speak, because he seems to be chipping in over there and they don't let him speak, so maybe he can have a turn.
Mr Duignan: I'll have my chance, Bill, don't worry about it.
Mr Murdoch: We're a little worried. You seem to always want to take my time.
Mr Duignan: There's no need to worry about it, Bill.
Mr McLean: My turn.
The Chair: You're too late.
The next matter we have to deal with is to try to provide some direction for David to prepare some draft reports on Science North and the conservation authority. We'll deal initially with Science North. Does anyone want to say anything at this point about the Science North review, any recommendations we might want to put forward as a result of that review process? Mr Marchese, didn't you have your hand up?
Mr Marchese: I was going to recommend putting David Pond on the spot. If he could be helpful to us in possibly identifying some of the questions that had been raised, he may trigger in all of us some memory of what we might recommend. I only have positive feedback, personally, of the experience and it's very difficult to think about what else they could have done.
The Chair: I enjoyed the experience too. There were a couple of things I felt perhaps we should look at. As I understood it, the Provincial Auditor has never been in there to do an audit and I think it would be helpful if we recommended that the auditor take a look at the operation. Specifically, I would like to see him take a look at the mine operation. There was some talk about whether you can present that experience at the one site, this mining experience, and they said that they can't duplicate it, that it wouldn't be the same sort of thing.
I'm sure if the auditor were taking a look at the total operation, and he also took a look at the viability or feasibility of continuing with the mine operation -- just taking a look at that total operation, a cost-benefit analysis, what have you, so that we could, either through our committee or through public accounts, once we received that report, take another look at the situation.
Mr Marchese: Actually, that was the only thing I could remember that for me was questionable in terms of whether they should proceed with it. Based on the number of dollars it requires to update it and bring it up to standard, I wasn't sure whether it would be economically feasible or, in the end, if it wasn't to be recoverable or cost-neutral, why do it, except to give the few that go the experience of seeing it? It was my sense that perhaps it might be useful to look at the effectiveness of putting money into the mine operation, maybe do a cost analysis, which they may have done a couple of years ago, but timely to review again. That I would support.
The Chair: The other thing I was concerned about was their marketing and the development of the movie -- what was it called?
Mr Pond: Shooting Star.
The Chair: As you recall, I raised the question of Shooting Star. I wasn't personally terribly impressed with Shooting Star, because it's aimed at a younger audience, but even, I thought, in terms of its educational impact -- although they say if you go back two or three times, you see different things -- I wasn't impressed and I think it's perhaps too narrowly focused. I believe that when they're doing things like this -- and they indicated that in the future they're going to do it -- they should be developing something that's much more marketable in terms of attracting dollars back into the facility. They're having extreme difficulty in marketing the Shooting Star effort elsewhere because of its focus on one particular geographic area, if you will. There are a whole lot of other services they could provide. They seem to have really de-emphasized that. It's not even mentioned in their own budget, and they admit that.
I asked them if the act was a detriment in terms of the fact that all the revenues have to go back into exhibits. Any revenues derived from the sale of services or products have to go back into exhibits. I wondered if that was a disincentive. They indicated that in their view it wasn't, but for some reason they simply haven't put much, if any, attention into that whole possible revenue area. I think we should make some reference to their doing much more in that area and that when they're developing new products that be a very significant part of the development process: "We can sell this beyond this one tiny market."
Mr Frankford: I'm at somewhat of a disadvantage because, as you recall, I didn't actually make the visit. I don't even know if it's there or not, but if I could perhaps relate it to another mine museum that I visited last summer in British Columbia, I found that one quite interesting for what it told about the social history of the area. This was an area where there had been Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and they brought out quite a lot of that. Maybe it's there, but I think that in their content they might consider something of that. I think it would add to what is shown in relation to Sudbury. It might also be a draw for people from elsewhere.
Mr Pond: They did say in their own operating plan, which was submitted to the committee, that one of the weaknesses in the current exhibit at the Big Nickel Mine was that they didn't do that. They got the big dollars from the province. That's what they would add to it, the sociocultural dimensions of mining in northern Ontario.
The Chair: I remember there were some questions raised about the purchase of the rink as well.
Mr Pond: Yes, that was one issue I was going to --
The Chair: What did they pay, $2.5 million for it originally? It cost the municipality $500,000 or something like that.
Mr McLean: I think, Mr Chairman, your first thought with regard to an audit would be appropriate, as it's never been audited. There's no doubt the city is sure benefiting by it, but it's the taxpayer who's going to be picking up the cost, and what's the cost going to be?
The other aspect that I would like to have looked at is that it appears to be turning it into an educational centre, more so, I thought, than an overview for the residents of all Ontario. School children are probably 80% of the people who are going through there. I think it is very educational; I'm not taking that away. What I've seen certainly is great, but we appear to be hiring professors to deal with the things that are there, and there are even those charts on the floor to look at further development of that type of education centre. I have some concerns there and I think an audit would probably bring out some of them.
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Mr Marchese: Just two points, one on the Shooting Star. I think, because we were there and there were children, it had more of an influence on me in terms of the effectiveness of the film. Perhaps if the children hadn't been there I might have had a different reaction, but seeing children reach out as the three-dimensional items just came in front of your eyes had an effect on me.
The point is that yes, it could be perhaps much more educational, or even more marketable to other audiences, but I think this has been a success for the number of people who visit, the number of children who want to go, or schools that want to go, from within the area, Metro and the greater Toronto area. It seems to me it has had quite an effect on the number of people who have gone to see it. So I'm not sure that perhaps it doesn't have the value it has had, based on attendance.
On the other matter of the arena, I do want to say that it was important for Science North to have it. I think you will have noticed when we went to the board meeting downstairs that their board meeting was very, very small, very tight. So that is a problem, and the number of people we saw around the boardroom having tiny little offices -- I don't know if you had an opportunity to look at those offices, but they were extremely tight. So some of them have crammed space, and some of the other staff were in another little area compartmentalized by divisions. I think it's just an impossible way to work for an operation of that size. Science North does bring revenue to the north, I think, so the more efficient you make it, the better it is for Sudbury and the surrounding regions. I think that has had tremendous advantages for Science North and Sudburians.
Mr Murdoch: You started talking about the arena and then you got into the cramped space. How does the arena tie into that?
Mr Marchese: The arena is used for the expansion of those spaces so that the majority of people, the board and those offices and all the other staff who are at the basement level, could move themselves into the arena, leaving that space which they presently occupy for exhibition space and other uses.
Mr Murdoch: So they're not using the arena as a hockey arena, like what it was for.
Mr Marchese: No, it would not be a hockey arena any more.
Mr Murdoch: You didn't finish and I didn't understand.
Mr Marchese: No, that's mostly the purpose that I can recall.
Mr Murdoch: That's why they bought the arena, is it?
Mr Marchese: Yes.
Mr Murdoch: It's not kept as an ice --
Mr Marchese: No, the city's building another arena and other facilities in another spot.
Mr Murdoch: So they just bought a building, you might say, because it wasn't really called that, to build more office space.
Mr Marchese: Yes.
The Chair: That was my understanding.
Mr Grandmaître: I agree with most of what Mr Marchese just pointed out. I realize that these people need a better working area, but my problem is, at what cost, because 75% of the cost of an arena is underground. That's the refrigeration, compressors and miles and miles of pipes, and they will convert this into office space. I find this very, very costly. Some 75% of the cost of any arena is underground, and these people will not be using those services, the infrastructure in the arena. Wouldn't it be cheaper to go outside and rent or put on an addition?
Mr Marchese: It's right next door.
Mr Grandmaître: I know it's next door. If you had a mine next door, you wouldn't automatically say, "Hey, this is the best place because it's next door."
Mr Marchese: You don't want staff to be halfway out of town. Staff is located right there, which means they can walk from the arena, which is basically now connected, so you go from one facility to the other. Would you want to waste all that time to have them located somewhere else in terms of staff time, travel time?
The Chair: I just want to interject here that this was a concern that was expressed at the meeting and some questions were asked. We're looking for recommendations from David, and I'm sure if we have the auditor go in there and look at the situation, he's going to review the minutes of this meeting as well and will know that's certainly one of the concerns and take a look at all of those matters and justify the decision or not justify the decision, I guess. But it's a concern and I think it's a valid one, not just because certain people are raising it here, but we didn't hear enough about it and what it's going to cost in terms of renovation of the rink to provide suitable office space, for example.
That could be a significant figure, especially given the times of constraint facing the government. A lot of private sector people are putting up with pretty tightly cramped office quarters in this day and age, and very few are looking at expansion when they're losing money. So those arguments can be made as well, and I don't want to get into that. I'll try to abbreviate this so we can complete our business. My only point is that the concern has been noted and hopefully the auditor will take it into account.
Mr Murdoch: I just want to ask, was it a fairly new arena or an older one?
Mr Pond: It's an old arena.
Mr Marchese: It's been there for a while.
Mr Pond: It was functional up to a couple of years ago.
Mr Marchese: Yes.
Mr Murdoch: I just wondered, because a lot of old arenas, they condemn them. I don't know what they paid. Maybe they got it for $1.
Mr Pond: No, no.
Mr Marchese: No, it was --
Mr Murdoch: Oh, well, I guess you're going to get into that, Bob. You sort of summed it up there.
The Chair: I don't think we're qualified to assess the wisdom or lack of wisdom of the decision. Hopefully, somebody else can do that for us.
I think David can review both the Hansard of today and when they appeared before us and come up with something.
The next one -- I wasn't party to this discussion; Mr McLean was in the chair -- is in respect to the conservation authority. Do you have any comments for David in respect to the conservation authority?
Mr McLean: I'd like David to give us his comments with regard to what he felt was the outcome of that meeting with the chairman and conservation people.
Mr Pond: I was afraid you were going to say that. One of the issues that came up was that all of the municipal members on the authority were municipal politicians, and it's at the discretion of the council to decide whether its representatives are going to be themselves, essentially, or people they nominate. A couple of members -- Mr Sterling, for example -- felt that what you had here was therefore sort of a subcommittee of the municipality, essentially, or an extension of the region, raising the question of, if the municipal councils are going to do this, why have the conservation authority? I think he just threw that out.
Another issue was the question of restructuring the conservation authorities in the area. As you remember, the Burgar report and then the Ballinger review of the Burgar report suggested that some of these conservation authorities be amalgamated. They had had discussions in the early 1990s about this one being amalgamated with adjacent ones. A couple of proposals had been floated in 1990; nothing had come to fruition. So I think, again, Mr Sterling was sort of posing the question that perhaps we should be looking at comparing the costs of this particular conservation authority, its size, its bureaucracy, with the adjacent ones and revisiting the issue of consolidating some of them.
The counterpoint to that position is that if you consolidated conservation authorities, the relative impact of any single municipality on the new authority would be smaller. Because the authority would be larger, some of the municipalities won't be able to have a representative on the board if you're not going to have a gargantuan, unwieldy board. So the pros and cons of that issue were thrashed out to a certain extent.
The representatives of the authority complained about a lack of money for doing some of the things they wanted to do. I pointed out to you in the briefing, and I think Mr Marchese pointed out during the hearing, that this particular authority had emerged relatively unscathed from the provincial cutbacks. Its provincial grant is going up. While other authorities' grants are going down, the witnesses still took the position that maybe they should get more money from the province.
Mr Marchese: They talked about inflation and said --
Mr Pond: A very serious problem, yes indeed.
Mr Marchese: -- that we haven't been keeping up with inflation, and I was saying that we have, more than inflation, relative to so many others who weren't getting that.
Mr McLean: If I could just mention, Mr Chairman, I think that authority is one of the better-run authorities in the province. They are within a region. When I look at the members who are appointed, I don't know how they could appoint any others unless they appointed outside people, and that is what the province does. They have three there appointed from the province.
I just happen to believe, looking at the maps they showed, the area it's in, that it's a well-run authority. I haven't anything detrimental to say about the operation of it. They're unhappy because they're not getting grants. Well, that's a sign of the times. They're all unhappy because they're not getting enough money.
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Mr Cleary: I happen to have been a member of an authority for 13 or 14 years. Back when I was first appointed, you had a resource manager sent in by the province and he directed the operation of the authority. But times have changed and different retired people from municipal councils or whatever it might have been were appointed on the authority. They went there and they weren't accomplishing a lot. I know what these guys were thinking to send their municipal people there, not only to watch the operation but to get things done. Speaking for myself, I don't have any difficulty with the makeup of that authority.
Mr Murdoch: I didn't sit in with that authority, but I was chairman of an authority for five years, so I know quite a bit about the operation of conservation authorities, and I sat on the Association of Conservation Authorities of Ontario. I think their biggest problem is less money from the government. The government definitely is cutting back, there's no doubt, and it's still demanding that the authorities have the same responsibilities. What's happening is that they're going to have to pick the money up from the municipalities. It's really starting to download. I think you're going to see the ACAO really start to lobby with the government to say, "If you want us to do the same things, we can't do them."
You also mentioned the Ballinger report. I think it should be set aside and buried where it is right now and left alone, because it was one of the things that caused more trouble with conservation authorities than any report I've ever seen. It's gone. Let it die and don't bring it back. Now, that's not to say that some authorities can't amalgamate, but if they want to do it on their own, that's what they should be encouraged to do so it's done properly. If they had done what Ballinger wanted them to do, we'd be in big trouble today.
Mr Marchese: There weren't any recommendations that come to mind in terms of what I would propose except one that I'm remembering, and that is that they only raised about 6% of their budget through a number of different ways, and I suspect that is a very low figure for most conservation authorities. My understanding is that most conservation authorities raise more money than that, and I would be interested in knowing whether that is the case. If that is so, what could this authority do in order to raise more money by itself, for itself?
The Chair: I'd like to say something just as a personal opinion in respect to conservation authorities. I think they should be looking at perhaps more innovative ways of cutting down on their expenses, and one of them that I've discussed with my own area conservation authority is the idea of looking at some of the parklands and leasing them out. You can lease them out, in the sense that they're leased, for example, to the Lions Club, and you do it on condition that they maintain it to certain levels that fall within the guidelines of a conservation authority, so you're getting that property utilized for the reasons for which it was originally purchased and developed but the costs are all passed on to a local service club, another organization or what have you. I don't know how feasible that is in a lot of instances, but I think it's one of those little innovative avenues they should be looking at and talking to various organizations about.
Mr Marchese: They're doing that, I think.
The Chair: I'm not aware of that; they're not doing it in my area.
Mr Marchese: Isn't that the case?
Mr McLean: They are doing some of that in the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority. Where they had campgrounds or where they had just recreational areas, that's been turned over to a Lions Club or to that community.
The Chair: I think they should all be encouraged to take a look at that.
Mr McLean: They've done that because of the cost structure.
Mr Marchese: That's in keeping with my concern or suggestion as well.
Mr McLean: Getting to the percentage that was raised, 6%, that would be a type of funding that would come from doing a raffle, that type of thing, to raise money for a specific centre. We have the Tiffin Conservation Centre, which is classified as an educational area. They have a raffle every year. So 6% of the funds is a large amount to raise of the total budget through those types of things.
Mr Marchese: I understand.
Mr McLean: That's what I think you're referring to, isn't it?
Mr Marchese: Yes, it's fees and a whole other variety of --
Mr McLean: Not fees for entrance, gate fees or all that. I think that 6% was probably from other than that.
Mr Marchese: We can enlist the support of David. David, I'm sorry; do you recall -- there were three or four things that conservation authorities do to raise money. Do you recall what they were?
Mr Pond: For example, recreational user fees, the sale of their publications and maps, the maple syrup sales. Help me out here.
Mr Marchese: That's right.
Mr Murdoch: Foundations.
Mr Pond: You might want to mention that now.
Mr Murdoch: I want to get into this foundation. I want you to know something about it and maybe you can help me out then.
Mr McLean: Raffles.
Mr Murdoch: But they do get it from the municipalities too, their money, don't forget.
Mr Marchese: Of course.
Mr Murdoch: But you're talking about extra ways?
Mr Marchese: Yes, this is the extra. This is what David was just talking about, and my feeling is that a lot of other conservation authorities do all of this and more. The point is, is that so, and if it is, what could this conservation authority do to increase its self-generated dollars?
Mr Murdoch: I wasn't there when this conservation authority was interviewed, but does it have a foundation? That's where you get tax-deductible -- it's actually a group set up outside --
Mr Marchese: They didn't speak about that, I don't think.
Mr Murdoch: A lot of them do, and the one that I represented was Grey Sauble in our area. They have applied to the Attorney General to do this. Now we've been informed it's illegal, and the government of the day -- and maybe you can help me out with Howard, because I've been trying to get him to do something about it -- will not allow Grey Sauble to set up a foundation, although Nottawasaga and Saugeen, both sides, have it. They collect a lot of money for it, because what they do, if it's a certain project that has to be done, that foundation goes out to people and they say: "We're going to buy this wetland. If you'll donate money to this foundation, you'll get a tax receipt." That foundation raises the money for that specific purpose and then gives it to the conservation authority.
Mr Marchese: I understand.
Mr Murdoch: Now we're being told by the ministry of the day that these are all illegal and they're going to cut them all off.
Mr Marchese: Bill, there might be some criteria. I'm not familiar with it, but surely you must have been --
Mr Murdoch: I talked to the person.
Mr McLean: Marion Boyd.
Mr Murdoch: Who?
Mr McLean: Marion Boyd, the new Attorney General. She'll straighten it all out.
Mr Murdoch: Oh, okay. I talked to the bureaucrat who was looking after that. I said, "Explain to me why Grey Sauble can't have one, if Nottawasaga and Saugeen both can. Both sides, and they're working quite well and they're raising money." He said, "They're illegal too" -- that was his answer -- "and we're going to cut them all out." But that's one way they raise a lot of money and that's what they're going to need with the restraint on money now. We know the government doesn't have a lot of money, so it can't afford all these projects. So that means it's local-driven. It's an excellent way of doing it, but we're having problems, so maybe you can help us out.
Mr Marchese: I'm not sure what the problems are, Bill. It's hard for me to comment on it without understanding.
Mr Murdoch: No, no, I don't want you to comment now. I'm just saying, if you can do anything to help us out, it's much appreciated.
The Chair: I think David has an indication. Obviously, we're not going to have an extensive report or extensive recommendations in this area, but he has some idea. We'll have something back.
Mr Pond: Sure, yes.
The Chair: It's not on the agenda, but I just wonder if you want to briefly discuss, so David has some idea where we're heading -- and I must admit I don't have my head around this either; maybe none of you do -- the Metropolitan Toronto Police Services Board. We've been looking at this for some time and I'm sure it's one of those areas where we're going to have some division of opinion and recommendations, and we may not be able to come to any agreement, consensus, in respect to this because it's such a controversial matter. Do you want to talk 15 or 20 minutes just to discuss this area and the sorts of things we're looking at? Mr McLean, do you want to lead off?
Mr McLean: Yes. I think it's going to be difficult to come to a conclusion on this, and I have a feeling that with the different points of view that have been raised and with regard to the problems that appear to be, on the surface, in the Metropolitan Toronto Police Services Board, I don't know what recommendations we can make, because it doesn't matter what I would like to see; somebody will want to see something different.
The issue that has been raised with regard to the minorities is a major one and I really have a problem coming to terms with what type of recommendations we can make. Are we going to make some recommendations that the police services board change its membership? Are we going to make some recommendations that there be more Metro councillors on the police services board? Are we going to make some recommendations with regard to the criteria used to determine whether there should be more minorities hired, recommendations of that type? It's a difficult area, and I would like to listen to some of the other observations.
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Mr Marchese: I think Allan is absolutely correct. We won't have unanimity on the whole issue of the gathering of statistics and to what purposes they would be used, including the composition of the board and how they should be elected or nominated. I think there will be division on that, clearly.
I don't support the whole idea of having all Metro councillors as one of the suggestions Gordon Chong mentioned. I think that would be wrong and unacceptable to many people. Having our nominations keeps balance and provincial interest. They're all community people for the most part, but a lot of people disagreed with that. They think they should all come from the Metropolitan board so as to reflect their own purposes and politics, so I have a difficulty with that.
In terms of how the commission dealt with the Metro police services board, I had some strong disagreement with that. The elastic language about when the police services board is "flagrant" in its decision-making process -- flagrant and another word that I can't recall. They're very elastic words. It allows the police board to literally do whatever it wants and the commission will simply -- "repeated offences" or something to that effect. What is "repeated"? Well, two or three more times, so if you do it once and each time it's a different thing, you look at each different thing for its own merits, but that wouldn't be classified as repeated. It would be a different thing happening only once. I'm concerned about that and what the commission does or did with respect to, I think, some of the offences that have occurred. I think Allan is right: We probably wouldn't come to some unanimity on what to do.
Mr McLean: Mr Chair, if I could clarify what I'd said in the one instance where the biggest disagreement may be, I'm a firm believer in statistics to show where crimes and problems are happening, which groups it's happening most with, because, I'll tell you, I firmly believe that if there's one specific group creating more crime than others, then we should be zeroing in and hiring more officers from that group to police that group rather than overall policemen.
Mr Marchese: But why aren't they doing that now, Allan? They know. Why aren't they doing it if that's the issue?
Mr McLean: That's right.
The Chair: How can they justify --
Mr McLean: But nobody wants to get the statistics out.
Mr Marchese: They know, Bill.
Mr Murdoch: I know that.
The Chair: What I'd like to personally see done, and we may not be able to come up with a report or recommendations in this matter, but I wouldn't mind seeing David prepare a list of highlights of concerns, areas like the statistics question, the question Mr Lymer raised about the board and the chairman not doing enough to get out and understand the public mood and the police mood. He was talking about going to substations, talking to officers on the beat and that sort of thing; that they're only talking to higher-level officers and they're not getting a complete understanding of the mindset of the cop on the beat; those kinds of things I would like to see David bring back to us.
I'm not optimistic we're going to reach any kind of wording that we can all live with, but since we've devoted as much time as we have to this, I think we should at least ask him to do that and have a full and thorough discussion of it. If nothing else, we can supply the board with a copy of Hansard, so they'll know the views on a variety of issues of all of us. They're going to appreciate we're coming from some ideological positions on many of these things, but at least it'll be on the record. We'll say, "We couldn't come to consensus, and this is essentially a consensus committee, but here are at least some of the views of members on a variety of issues affecting your operations."
Mr Frankford: I just wanted to follow up on the statistics question and reiterate the point I made in the committee, that I think one should have lots and lots of statistics and why it is just race, whatever that means. It seems very limiting in the determinants of crime and it could correlate with all sorts of things -- certainly place of residence, level of education, sex, income level, many, many things, some of which are --
The Chair: No one objects to those.
Mr Frankford: No, but I would just like to make sure that is not forgotten. Concentrating on race, as I say, whatever that means, pushes things in a certain direction. You can't change your race; you can change your education and your income.
The Chair: There are arguments on all sides of this issue.
Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): The issue that flows from what you said, Mr Chair, is the issue of dealing with -- and I approach this with trepidation -- whether the police board is going to be a full-time board then. That's what Mr Lymer suggested, that they should be out in the neighbourhood and so on all the time, and so the issue comes out. It's like the board of education. Someone decided a long time ago -- probably the past Minister of Education was around at that time -- that boards were going to be full-time, and they were going to pay them lots of money and have lots of staff for them, whereas in your area and my area of the province, the board is very part-time and the trustees don't have any staff.
So there is that, but the question starts arising that in Metropolitan Toronto, if indeed they're to do the job as Mr Lymer has suggested -- perhaps David would look at the virtues and lack of virtues, or the need or lack of need of having a board which is in effect full-time.
The Chair: I'll show my bias on this: the fact that Susan Eng receives about $100,000 a year, has a car and driver and an office and is in effect a full-time appointee. I think something that has bothered me, and I'm sure it's bothered Mr Lymer, is the fact that she's been on that board for over three years now and has not been out in a police cruiser, and she's there on a full-time basis.
When you're being critical of the cops on the beat but you've never really had even the most limited exposure to the kinds of challenges they face, I personally have a lot of difficulty with that, as does Mr Lymer and his association. I didn't infer from what he was saying that the board should be a full-time board. I think it was more of an implied criticism of some of the most vocal critics of the police who perhaps are not getting all of the messages that are out there.
Mr Bradley: I couldn't fairly attribute that to Mr Lymer. I just thought, flowing from that, one looks at: If this is such an important board, should it in fact be full-time? Should everybody be paid and should this be kind of a full-time job for people or not? My bias is probably similar to the bias outside of Metropolitan Toronto, and that is that they should be part-time people.
However, one of the issues that David may wish to look at is whether there is any evidence to suggest that a full-time board would be any better than the present board in terms of being able to do some of the things that Mr Lymer suggested. My personal guess is that you don't need it, but there seemed to be a suggestion in Metropolitan Toronto that it's a very important position.
The Chair: Mr Marchese and then Mr Frankford.
Mr Frankford: Could I just ask a question?
The Chair: Okay. Sure.
Mr Frankford: Previously, was there ex officio a judge on the board?
Mr Pond: A judge was an actual member before 1990, and then the Police Services Act took the judge off.
Mr Frankford: And that judge would devote himself full-time to the board?
Mr Pond: No, part-time. Mr Bradley's right. The historical trend in Ontario is part-time members of police services boards, yes.
Mr Frankford: But this was not a judge who sort of took time off judging to be --
Mr Pond: No. In fact, Mr Lymer pointed out that in the past there have been some problems with conflict of interest, where judges in their judging capacity were hearing cases which originated in arbitration cases, which originated in the police force that they were on the board to oversee.
Ms Eng did say in her first appearance before the committee -- I think it was her first -- that something the committee might want to look at is precisely this issue, that she felt it necessary to be a full-time chair to do her job, but that was not the case for other police services boards elsewhere. So I think she sort of hinted that maybe one of the recommendations we make is that the act should be changed to reflect that.
Mr McLean: You can't change the act for all of Ontario and make every chair full-time.
Mr Pond: No.
Mr Murdoch: Just Toronto.
Mr Pond: No. Just her, that just her position would be the only full-time one formally. She's turned it into a full-time position, in effect.
Mr Marchese: Mr Chair, I think Mr Bradley was on the right track with what I was thinking as well. Just out of fairness to the board members, they're part-time. So I felt it was a bit unfair for Mr Lymer to level that criticism in the way that I thought I heard it. Yes, it would be wonderful if people could get around more, but for part-time people, I just don't know how much they can do beyond the regular meetings they attend and beyond the extra responsibilities that I think they carry.
I was a trustee with a library board for two years and initially they said, "Oh, there'll only be three meetings of the board and perhaps a few other meetings." Well, you go to the board meeting, then you go to two other subcommittees that you're part of, and then you've got to go and visit the other libraries, and there are parties that you should attend because you need to know the people, and it turns out to be quite a job. That was not paid. There was no remuneration for that, nor would it have made it any easier if I got $8,000, because the work is still the same.
Mr McLean: Would it help if you were elected?
Mr Marchese: This is a library board trustee, not a trustee with -- oh, helped me? Well, I'm not sure about that. Actually, I don't know if that was the case.
So that was the point about the unfairness of the remark. Part-time people can't do what sometimes is expected, and I understand the frustration. It's because he disagrees with the views that obviously are expressed or levelled against him that somehow he says this is what they should do. I understand that, but I'm not convinced, Jim, that by having David look at the merits of full-time or part-time we will deal with this issue in terms of what you might be looking for, because I don't even know that even if they were full-time, it would change anything in this particular respect.
I think a lot of people attack us as politicians provincially for not getting around in our communities, and presumably we're full-time. The same criticism can be applied to councillors and everybody else in terms of their ability or inability to get down to the roots and understand the community.
In any case, I also think of Mark -- I forget his last name --
The Chair: Wainberg.
Mr Marchese: -- Wainberg, who held different opinions and on the other side, saying that, quite the contrary, the chair and all the other board members are all the same. In fact, they vote the same, and they're all -- I don't know if he used the word "incompetent" or "useless" --
Mr Bradley: What you call the Waffle wing.
Mr Marchese: So you get two extreme points of view, one person saying, "They're not doing their job," and Mr Lymer saying, "God, we're frightened of these people in terms of the decisions they're making, because they're not reflecting the force."
What I do agree with, in terms of what the Chair proposed, was that David put together a whole list of concerns, because I think that would reflect the discussion of the different points of view and, if nothing else, it would be useful to have on record in that way.
The Chair: Are you all in agreement with that? Yes.
I think that does it for this morning. We'll break and reconvene at 2 o'clock for appointment reviews.
The committee recessed at 1133.
AFTERNOON SITTING
The committee resumed at 1408.
APPOINTMENTS REVIEW
Consideration of intended appointments.
The Chair: Please, if I can get the members' attention, we'll call the committee to order and get under way with the appointment reviews.
VICKI VAN WAGNER
The Chair: Our first witness this afternoon is Vicki Van Wagner, who is an intended appointee as a member of the Midwifery Transitional Council. Vicki, are you present? Would you like to come forward please and have a seat. Welcome to the committee. I'm sure you've been advised that this is a 30-minute review with 10 minutes to each party. You were selected for review by the official opposition and Mr Grandmaître's going to begin the questioning.
Mr Grandmaître: This has been a long battle for you. I was going through your CV and I think we can go back 15 or maybe 18 years that you've been fighting for this advantage, if I can call it that. Tell me what it really means to you and to your council.
Ms Vicki Van Wagner: I think one of the most important things about midwifery becoming a legally recognized profession is that in the past midwifery has only been accessible to a small number of women, those who could afford to pay midwives privately and those people who knew about midwifery as an alternative to the formal system. With midwifery becoming a part of the formal system, it means that women of any income level and not just the people who have friends who know midwives will be able to work with midwives.
Mr Grandmaître: Now you're going to tell me that there won't be any problems between doctors and nurses and you people, you're all going to be on side and it's going to be a big family.
Ms Van Wagner: Do you really want me to say anything like that? I think there's an incredible amount of progress that's been made between the health professions over the years I've worked on the issue. As you probably know, I have worked on the liaison committee to the Interim Regulatory Council on Midwifery, which is the precursor to the transitional council. In my role on the liaison committee I've met with quite a few of the other groups: the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Ontario Medical Association, the College of Nurses of Ontario and the Ontario Nurses' Association. There is a lot of cooperation.
Just for example, at the meeting we had with the College of Physicians and Surgeons recently, it looked at all of our standards of practice and said, "I wish all the family physicians had such a good set of standards." There is a lot of potential for some really good cooperation, especially when you look at midwifery in other jurisdictions in Canada where it's quite a few years back from where we are. There is a lot more cooperation than there is in other places, so I am pretty optimistic about it.
That doesn't mean there won't be some struggles that we still have to go through. For example, there are nurses working on the labour floor who are feeling threatened about the possibility of midwives replacing them. I think it's really important that we make it very clear that midwives are playing a very different role than they do in some other countries they are familiar with.
In Britain, for example, midwives staff the labour floor like our current obstetrical nurses do. That will not be what happens in Ontario. Midwives will be care givers who have hospital privileges and will admit women rather than staffing the labour floor. Those nurses will still need to be doing their jobs taking care of and monitoring the women who have physicians as primary care givers. Midwives will be quite separate from that. I think there are some areas of misunderstanding that still need to be cleared up so that we can do even better with the other professions.
Mr Grandmaître: With the transitions that are going on within the Ministry of Health, and also our hospitals, do you think more nurses will join your forces and become midwives?
Ms Van Wagner: Yes, definitely. Currently of the membership of the Association of Ontario Midwives, which has almost all the practising midwives in the province as members, one third are nurses. I expect a sizeable proportion of the applicants to the midwifery school will be people with a background in nursing or in another related profession. The school has a commitment to giving advanced standing to those people, so I do think there will continue to be a strong relationship between the two professions.
Mr Grandmaître: Let's talk about money. As you know, nurses do make reasonable salaries. You people won't be making as much as an RN, if I'm correct.
Ms Van Wagner: I don't know why you would think that. In fact the Task Force on the Implementation of Midwifery in Ontario suggested that if midwives were salaried their salaries should fall between that of a senior salaried nurse and a family physician. That's because the level of responsibility a midwife takes as the primary care giver, as well as the sort of level of education and the working conditions of midwives who work on call, rather than nurses who work on shifts, adds to the responsibility that a midwife would take. Now that has not been determined yet, so your guess is as good as mine, but that was the recommendation of the task force in its 1987 report.
Mr Bradley: I have some questions. That leads me to the question of liability. It is alleged that it is difficult today to get people to go into -- since I cannot pronounce obstetrician very well; I did it -- to become an obstetrician, and the real reason is liability. They're afraid now of liability because there have been some suits. There is a pronounced effort these days to maintain life in children who are born, the premature children particularly. What provisions will there be or how will liability work for midwives?
Ms Van Wagner: What the interim regulatory council has recommended, and this will be passed on to the transition council, is that every midwife have her own independent liability insurance. That means that each midwife would carry insurance herself rather than through an employer. That's very important if midwives are going to work in a number of settings. The definition of "midwifery" internationally and in Ontario is that the midwives work in a variety of places, not just in the hospital. It could be a birth centre or a home birth. So if midwives are going to be covered in all those places, they need their own liability insurance.
The Association of Ontario Midwives has negotiated with a private insurance company to provide us with malpractice insurance already, previous to regulation, and because of that we don't think there'll be any problem after regulation. The insurance companies see this as a market that's opening that they haven't had access to before.
Midwives have grown up in a climate where malpractice has been an issue, and I think in a sense physicians may be a little spoiled. They have their own self-insurance scheme that's given them very low rates to pay for insurance, and as they've gone up in the past five years, there have been a lot of complaints from physicians about that. We've sort of begun practising knowing that that's reality, so midwives are already paying the same rates as family physicians for malpractice insurance and expect to have to do that in the future. I don't see that as a big issue. I think that's already sort of been settled.
Mr Bradley: I was concerned about that for your sake, because I know you're not working in a particular setting where you can have one set of coverage. The coverage has to move with you.
Ms Van Wagner: Exactly.
Mr Bradley: It really suggests that you would have to have independent coverage, because some people might want to be born in a home. Interestingly enough, I myself was born in a house, not in a hospital.
Ms Van Wagner: I wonder if your midwife had malpractice insurance.
Mr Bradley: There are some people on the government side who think malpractice took place. We won't get into that one; we'll all get into trouble.
I had a constituent come to my office, and she was from Britain. She said if she came over to Canada as a nurse and wanted to become a nurse, it was relatively routine to become a nurse, but she couldn't become a midwife, and "Why not?" First of all, is this correct and, if it is, what is the reason for that?
Ms Van Wagner: Up until now, she could become a midwife simply by starting a practice. That probably wasn't satisfactory to her. She probably wanted legal recognition. So I guess the question's about the future.
Even now, all of us who are practising, because proclamation hasn't happened yet -- which is a big concern, to get that to happen as quickly as possible -- are practising still without legal recognition. A lot of the midwives from other countries have not been very happy about that and haven't wanted to practise. But in the future one of the biggest jobs the transition council will face is the issue of the registration of people who present their credentials as equivalent to Ontario's.
It's a big challenge because Ontario is one of the first places in the world that has chosen to have a baccalaureate-level program for midwifery. Midwifery in most other places is in a hospital-based school, very similar to the way nursing programs used to be in Ontario. To look at curriculums from all around the world and determine what's equivalent not only to the midwifery training but also to the baccalaureate level will require a lot of work, but that is one of the jobs of the transition council, to proceed with that.
Interjection.
The Chair: I'm sorry, we don't have time. Mr McLean.
Mr McLean: In 1991 the government unveiled an intern education program for women already in. How is that program working?
Ms Van Wagner: The final month of the theoretical intensive -- it starts with a theoretical intensive, divided into three different months -- is just about complete. It's divided into three parts: There's the theoretical, then a clinical component and then a component which is an integration into the health care system. Almost all the midwives in the province have gone through the theoretical, which involved three written examinations, an oral examination, a review of cases and a research project, both a written and oral presentation -- quite gruelling for one month.
Mr McLean: How many would there be now who've gone through this?
Ms Van Wagner: There are about 75 currently practising midwives who are in that program.
Mr McLean: Across the province?
Ms Van Wagner: Across the province. After we go through that theoretical part, then we move on to a clinical component. The faculty who are running the program are four midwives from European countries and New Zealand. They will be following us to our practices, watching ante-natal visits, post-natal visits, births themselves. Also, a big part of the clinical review is a review of the charts and records kept by the midwives. After that, the final component involves going into the hospital, spending a few days on the labour floor, following an obstetrician around for a day, following a family practice doctor around for a day and a few other things, community health centre, public health unit.
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Mr McLean: How many midwives are licensed to practise in Ontario now?
Ms Van Wagner: No one's licensed to practise as a midwife. As to people who hold licences from other countries, there are probably 2,000 to 3,000 midwives from other countries. Many of them wouldn't have practised for many years, and so their credentials, even in their own country, would be seen to be out of date.
Mr McLean: The minister predicted that as a result of these initiatives, fully licensed midwives will be practising in the province by the summer of 1993.
Ms Van Wagner: As to the summer of 1993, I'm not sure. There isn't a concrete idea about when people will graduate from that program yet. I think it may well take to the fall of 1993, but it's a one-year program, so it has to be over by October 1, 1993. That would give 75 midwives if everyone passed.
Mr McLean: The fees indicate the cost is between $550 and $100. What do you estimate is going to be the cost per midwife per birth?
Ms Van Wagner: The issue of cost and midwifery is a complex one. Midwives spend a lot more time with women in labour than physicians currently do. That's sort of the essence of what midwifery is: spending time with the woman in labour and assisting with human help instead of drugs or technology. That's the basis of midwifery. So midwifery is fairly costly in terms of the actual hours of time that the midwife spends.
However, I think the very important thing is that midwives have demonstrated all over the world that rates of intervention in the birth process are lowered. You may pay a midwife a bit more money than you'd pay the current nurse-physician team to be there at the labour, but if that means the woman avoids a Caesarean section twice as often as in the other system, the health care system will be saved quite a lot of money. So there are a number of things you have to take into account when you're talking about the cost of that particular health service.
Mr McLean: I thought there was going to be a saving, but the more I read about it, the more doubts I have about it, because there's also talk now about allowing midwives to practise in hospitals. There have been recommendations that midwives be allowed to practise in hospitals. Is that not going to be more of a burden, a cost? I thought the midwives were going to follow them through and have the child at home. I'm seeing now that they're going to follow it through and the child is still going to end up being born at the hospital.
Ms Van Wagner: Right now, even our current client group that chooses midwives chooses to go to the hospital about half the time, so there is a group of people who will choose midwives, who want to give birth at home or in a birth centre, and the cost savings are obvious on that level.
In the hospital, though, midwives are used in many countries to reduce the hospital stay. Right now a lot of women who want to have a hospital birth will come to us and they'll say, "I want to go into the hospital at the last possible minute, but I'd like to be near all that technology when I'm actually having my baby." But if everything's fine, they want to leave at the first possible minute. So rather than people spending six days in the hospital, women can sometimes spend six hours in the hospital, and that will be a cost saving even for hospital births.
I think it's the rate of intervention that is the biggest cost saving. As you know, in the province there's a big move to try to reduce the rate of Caesarean sections. If you look at a country like Holland, where 50% of women are cared for by midwives, they have a Caesarean section rate of 6%, with a better perinatal mortality rate than we have in Canada. In Ontario, I know it's 20.3% Caesarean sections. I think if you look at midwifery as a way to reduce surgery and the use of pharmacologic agents in childbirth, you're going to see a big saving. Epidural anaesthesia costs a lot.
Mr McLean: In your opinion, what would be the average billing that a midwife would make to the ministry for the services she plans on providing for that midwifery?
Ms Van Wagner: It's the understanding of the Association of Ontario Midwives that there won't be direct billing of the ministry and that it won't be fee-for-service. Midwives are quite willing to work within a salary system or a capitation system, which would be a much more controllable expense for the health care system than the current fee-for-service system.
The Chair: Any further questions? Mr Frankford.
Mr Frankford: Welcome. I've worked with midwives in my training in England, and of course that was the British model of salaried or labour floor nurses, if you like. That's one model.
I think the payment system is fundamental in many ways. I agree with you that it's highly unlikely we're going to get new fee-for-service arrangements and you mentioned salary or capitation. It's interesting that you mentioned capitation. I don't know if you read this from the Task Force on the Implementation of Midwifery in Ontario, page 99: There is a suggestion about a capitation arrangement. Do you have any thoughts on that or could you elaborate?
Ms Van Wagner: Yes. I think even if you have a salary system, you have to have some form of capitation because you have to expect that a midwife will do a certain number of births per year in order to earn that salary. In essence, it always has to be connected to capitation if you have a community-based midwife who is being paid to provide midwifery care.
There's been a lot of discussion in the association of midwives about what a reasonable workload is, how that is different in different geographical areas and how that's different depending on the client population. So there are a lot of different variables that are involved.
Midwives have, outside of the regulated system, been working on a fee per course of care, so that in essence is a kind of capitation. We're very comfortable with that.
Obviously, there are some advantages to a salary system. Midwives are almost exclusively women and the idea of having a kind of benefit arrangement -- things like maternity leaves are fairly close to midwives' hearts and so far we've had to work without any of those kinds of arrangements. There are pros and cons on both sides and we're in discussions with the Ministry of Health about what the best system would be.
Mr Frankford: Could you elaborate for me, and perhaps for my colleagues, what your interpretation of "capitation" means here. My interpretation is a per capita arrangement of payment for a gross population, overall, pregnant or not, maybe even male and female, and that the per capita allowance per individual is your revenues. Is that what you're saying?
Ms Van Wagner: I think there are two different ways to look at it for midwifery. One is that midwives could fit into something like the currently existing health service organization or currently existing community health centre, and the way midwifery is paid would be evaluated in accordance with the way moneys are given to those organizations. There's also the possibility of a group practice of midwives being paid for the number of pregnant women they take care of, and in that sense it's less population based than it is based on pregnant women themselves.
Mr Frankford: With the HSOs -- and I must admit I made the submission. Since at the present time, in theory there is a capitation rate for obstetricians, my feeling is that could be changed. Instead of being a physician rate it could be a service rate, so that would give you an obstetrics budget which could easily be allocated to midwives.
Ms Van Wagner: One of our priorities in the association of midwives is that there would be a funding system that makes it possible for midwives to work in a whole variety of arrangements. You could have a midwifery unit in a hospital, if the hospital wants a midwifery unit, and especially in a small community where a small hospital may be one of the main places that health care is delivered. In a place like Toronto, you could have midwives with a group of family practitioners who are fee-for-service practitioners, a group of family practitioners who are in an HSO or in a community health centre. It has to work in all of those places.
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Mr Frankford: Can I ask you about how you see the practicality or the problems involved in hospital privileges? Should there be legislation? Will it be just straightforward or are you going to get particular rules for particular places, as I think in practice is the situation with physicians now, that one is not automatically guaranteed privileges?
Ms Van Wagner: Yes. Right now the interim regulatory council has been talking with the Ontario Hospital Association, and we are hoping that the way for hospital privileges for midwives will be very much smoothed through the Ontario Hospital Association putting out some guidelines that would make it fairly uniform for the process that a midwife would have to go to, to get credentialed within the hospital. There's no question that different hospitals work slightly differently. Already, midwives in the community know that if you work with family physicians or obstetricians at Toronto General, you may have a slightly different set of rules that you work by than if you work at Toronto East General, for example, and that's just life in the health care system.
But the OHA and, as we said, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, really like the clarity of the regulations and the standards that have already been set by the interim regulatory council, so I think it's going to be fairly smooth. One of the things that I understand is currently being talked about in the ministry is a revision of the current Public Hospitals Act to allow midwives to practise as soon as they are registered in the province, even before the complete amendment of the Public Hospitals Act, because that's been delayed; that might take up to two years.
One of our big concerns about everything, funding, hospital privileges, proclamation is that there really is a necessity for a number of different initiatives in the ministry to come together at the same time. You don't want to have registered midwives who don't have hospital privileges, or who don't have funding for their services. You don't want people to graduate from the pre-registration program and not be able to be registered. Next fall, there's a number of initiatives that have to come together to make all the changes make sense.
Mr Frankford: Would you say that you might have to be accountable to the chief of medical staff or the chief of obstetrics, and how do you feel about that?
Ms Van Wagner: Eventually, when there are enough midwives, we would hope there would be a department of midwifery within the hospital. However, in the meantime, we expect that we would need to report to the chief of the department of obstetrics. The medical people and the Ontario Hospital Association feel quite comfortable with that.
Mr Frankford: Do you envision there being criteria for midwifery as to when you have to refer?
Ms Van Wagner: Yes. We already have a set of standards. Because midwives go for practice, in the act it's very clearly laid out as normal pregnancy and childbirth. There's no question that referral is a big part of a midwife's job, so that's already laid out to quite a detailed extent in the standards. It's called the mandatory consultation and transfer of care document from the interim regulatory council. That document lays it out quite specifically.
But as I said, a certain obstetrician in a certain hospital may want to discuss with a midwife conditions in that particular hospital that might be slightly different than that. That's the reality for family practice physicians right now. If you work at Women's College, the rules are slightly different than at Toronto General. That's the way it'll be for us too. We know that.
The Chair: That's it. No more questions? That concludes your appearance, Ms Van Wagner. Thank you very much and we wish you well.
Ms Van Wagner: Thank you.
WILLIAM J. CORCORAN
The Chair: Our next witness is William Corcoran, who is the intended appointee as vice-chair of the Ontario Public Service Pension Board. Mr Corcoran, welcome to the committee, sir.
Mr William J. Corcoran: Thank you.
The Chair: This is a half-hour review. I didn't afford Ms Van Wagner the opportunity, and I apologize for that, but I'll afford to you, if you wish, a quick opening comment, a minute or two or three. Or shall we get right into questions?
Mr Corcoran: I'll be delighted to answer whatever you wish.
The Chair: All right. You were selected for review by the Conservative Party, so I'll ask Mr McLean to begin the questioning.
Mr McLean: Why did you apply for this position?
Mr Corcoran: I've had this position for three years, Mr McLean. I was appointed by the previous government three years ago, and I've enjoyed it immensely. I like it.
Mr McLean: Is there any pay in it?
Mr Corcoran: Yes, there is.
Mr McLean: How much do you make?
Mr Corcoran: I have made $250 a meeting for the last three years, and now I will make $35,000 a year.
Mr McLean: Plus expenses.
Mr Corcoran: No. No expenses.
Mr McLean: And you have another job besides this?
Mr Corcoran: Yes, I do.
Mr McLean: Is that full-time?
Mr Corcoran: It's full-time except for what I'm doing here. I also have other responsibilities, but yes, it is a full-time job.
Mr McLean: And this is a part-time job?
Mr Corcoran: Yes, this is a part-time job.
Mr McLean: Okay. There are 91,000 people on pension in the province of Ontario. Are we going to run out of funds? In what year?
Mr Marchese: He was specific about that.
Mr Grandmaître: You'd have to declare a conflict of interest.
Mr Corcoran: Let me explain to you how we organize this thing and how we do it, because I think that will have to answer. This fund was set up three years ago, and it's now slightly over $10 billion. There are five members of the investment department, all members of the board, and we do not invest any of the money; we hire people to invest it for us. We have nine different investment counsel, two in Europe and seven here, and we tell them how we would like them to invest the money.
Now, what we were told when we assumed these responsibilities, the first thing was to get a 4.5% real return. What that means is to get 4.5% after inflation, which in these days would be 6.5%. Then the second thing is, because you're never absolutely sure which asset's going to go up or which asset's going to go down, to balance the thing out, we say it's going to be 60% debt obligations and 40% equities, which would include real estate.
We took over this responsibility three years ago. To answer your question, we said to ourselves, "We have to make every dollar," and we watch this thing like a hawk. We are trying to get 4.5% real and we are trying to save every dollar and make every dollar. So for the first year, we only bought short-term instruments, because they were yielding 12% and it was a terrible year in the bond market and a terrible year in the stock market. If you had a typical investment fund that year, they ranged anywhere from making nothing to losing 10%.
The Caisse de dépôt et placement, with $37 billion, made less than 1% in 1990; that was our first year. We made 11.6%. So we said, "We are going to make haste very slowly" to get to a stage where we have 60%, 40% equity. Our sense was that we were in quite tricky times -- this was back in 1990 -- so we hired seven counsellors and we told them: "Be very, very conservative. We don't necessarily want you to be the first or anything, but you watch this money. This is the pensioners' money, and we don't want you taking crazy risks."
The net effect of that, three years after the fact, is that in our portfolio we have no real estate. Real estate was the greatest investment you could make from 1945 to 1988. This is a long-term fund and there will be a time to buy real estate, but our sense of the matter is that it isn't the time yet.
Mr McLean: You have money invested in pretty near every country, haven't you? You've got Swiss francs, Belgian francs, Netherland guilders, Italian lire, Danish kroner, Norwegian kroner, Swedish kronor.
Mr Corcoran: Yes.
Mr McLean: You invested in every country, except US dollars.
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Mr Corcoran: Oh yes, we have. US stocks have made about 14% in the last three years; they've been the place to be. Canadian stocks have lost 2%, and Europeans have been up and down. In the judgement of our investment people, who have the right to buy US-Canadian stocks and US-Canadian bonds, we have 6.5% or 7% US stocks, 2.25% Canadian stocks.
So two things in the last three years you haven't done well on: Real estate we don't have, and Canadian stocks you haven't done well on; we have 2.25%. We're break-even in the European, and we only have less than 1% in that. We're well up in our bonds and we're well up in the American stocks.
Mr McLean: Whenever I read about the market in the financial pages, they indicate that over the past about three years they've been 11% on average. That hasn't been the case with your investments, from what you're telling me.
Mr Corcoran: No, we've done better than that. We've made 11.6%, 14%, and this year I think it's 12%.
Mr McLean: The Public Service Superannuation Act, the teachers' pensions: There was an awful cry a while ago that "We're going to run out of money." What year is that going to happen, or is the government going to have to bail them out?
Mr Corcoran: Well, it depends on two things. We have a deficiency in the fund of $2.5 billion. That's not the investment; that's what the pensioners get against an actuarial calculation.
Mr McLean: What's the unfunded liability?
Mr Corcoran: That's what I mean: $2.5 billion. Now, to the extent that you improve investments, you can bring that down; that goes up and down depending on exactly what the pensioners are going to get. So the question of running out of money -- well, all we can do is to do the very best we can, and what has happened in the last few years in this fund has been good.
Mr McLean: I know you're going to do the best you can, but are you going to run out of money?
Mr Corcoran: No, we're not going to run out of money.
Mr McLean: Okay. So the government's going to pick up any unfunded liability that may arise?
Mr Corcoran: That's the legal department.
Mr McLean: What does the public service pension board mainly deal with? How it's invested? I think there are other things you deal with, such as different criteria laid out for collecting pensions. What is your main issue? When you meet -- how many times a year, I don't know -- what is the main thing on your agenda?
Mr Corcoran: The investment area, of which I'm the chairman, meets every month. The board I think meets four to five times a year. What do we talk about? Well, there are other committees of the board. One of the things that was a problem in 1990 is that an enormous number of people's inquiries weren't being properly answered. The administration has improved that very dramatically, and the response time is moving up. So they've spent a lot of time on that one.
Mr McLean: Who meets once a month?
Mr Corcoran: The investment.
Mr McLean: And who meets five times a year?
Mr Corcoran: The full board. But other committees would meet, in addition to the full board.
Mr McLean: How many times?
Mr Corcoran: Well, nothing meets as much as the investment committee, because that's ongoing.
Mr McLean: Would they meet weekly?
Mr Corcoran: Oh, no. They would meet two or three times other than the full board.
Mr McLean: So you have about 18 meetings a year. Then you would be getting paid just about as much as Armstrong: $1,000 a day.
Mr Corcoran: No, no.
Mr McLean: Well, pretty close to it.
Mr Corcoran: I've met Mr Armstrong. No, no. Between meetings, if you have the responsibility on the investment side, you are in constant touch with the chairman and --
Mr McLean: How much does the chairman make in a year?
Mr Corcoran: How much does he make? I'm not exactly sure. I think it's somewhere in the order of -- well, I don't exactly know.
Mr McLean: It must be $100,000.
Mr Corcoran: It's more than that.
Mr McLean: Wasn't John Kruger the chairman of that pension board for a while?
Mr Corcoran: Don't hold me to it, but I think it's $120,000. But I don't know.
Mr McLean: Yes, I would think so. Not a bad hourly wage. Better than we get.
The Chair: Mr Frankford.
Mr Frankford: You're aware of the proposal for an Ontario investment fund.
Mr Corcoran: Yes, I am.
Mr Frankford: Without asking you to say what this fund is going to be, yours and similar funds have significant pools of capital.
Mr Corcoran: Yes.
Mr Frankford: How do you feel about investing in ourselves?
Mr Corcoran: On a very fundamental basis, these pensions come from the productivity of this province. To answer Mr McLean, nobody's going to have any money unless we have some business in this province, so let's start at square one.
As I understand it, Mr Chee has been working on the investment fund. He's modified it slightly, and in the last proposal I heard -- and I'm out of date on this, Mr Frankford -- the money required had been downgraded from $2 billion to $500 million, and the approach was to be on a joint approach in that the fund would put up so much money and other people in the venture -- business -- would put up so much money, which I think is a good approach. But I haven't seen the final analysis and we haven't been approached.
Mr Frankford: So you wouldn't exclude the possibility of some investment in it?
Mr Corcoran: No. My responsibility is to make sure the pensioners do well, okay? We're not Santa Claus but, at the same time, do I think what's going along there -- the last time I listened to Felix, I thought this looked okay. It's getting more sensible, it's getting up there.
Mr Frankford: I look at your list of actual investments in the portfolio and I just wonder about any guidelines you have as to where to invest. I note a particular investment in tobacco stocks. I see you've got Philip Morris, you've got Imasco, you've got BAT. I would say that's very controversial. Do we not in fact have a stake in that? Isn't there a real conflict? You represent pensioners from the Ministry of Health; the Ministry of Health is actively working to stop tobacco consumption. Shouldn't there be a guideline just to exclude such investment entirely?
Mr Corcoran: We have not made that guideline with the people who are investing the money; we have not, to date. Your point is we should, I take it?
Mr Frankford: Yes.
Mr Corcoran: I'm not saying yes or no. I've said we haven't. I've heard your question.
The Chair: Mr Marchese.
Mr Marchese: Just to follow up on the previous question regarding the Ontario investment fund, some critics say: "The public pension funds in Ontario are well managed and currently generate high rates of return. The government should not tinker with a policy that works."
Other critics might say: "The money in a pension plan constitutes the deferred wages of the contributors. It is their money, not the government's." "The public pension funds are already invested in part in the kind of companies the discussion paper argues need to be targeted," and other suggestions or criticisms from people in the private sector.
How do you respond to some of those criticisms?
Mr Corcoran: I sort of get a kick out of some of those criticisms, to be perfectly frank. My business is the money business: I look at it very carefully. Some of the people who seem to be terribly critical of this fund don't seem to be making much money themselves. You know where the thrust of the whole thing's coming from, and I'm sort of supportive of that thrust. You go back to this fundamental: Nobody gets a pension unless there's some business conducted in this province, so let's not jump up and down and say it's goofy.
On the other hand, any trustee of a pension plan has as his fundamental responsibility the assets of the pensioners. You can see from my reply -- if there's something that looks sensible and it looks like it can be a satisfactory return for the pensioners and it's to do with Ontario, okay. In the realm of the critics, and you've read all the critics and that kind of stuff, I'm much closer to the not-so-critical.
Mr Marchese: Okay, Mr Corcoran -- do I have another minute or two?
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The Chair: Yes. You have time, there's no problem.
Mr Marchese: I wanted to ask you about who is involved in making the decisions around what investments are made. Is there a small group of people? Is it a few? Ten? Who's involved in making those major decisions?
Mr Corcoran: There are five on the investment committee and those five have to enunciate a policy. As I mentioned, we have hired nine investment counsellors who carry out the policy, and we say to them, "Here's what we wish you to do," and then we monitor what they do. These are very capable people, but you have to say what it is you wish them to do.
Mr Marchese: All right. So it's five people who direct these nine people you hire across the world to invest all this for you.
Mr Corcoran: Yes.
Mr Marchese: In what way do you communicate to the 90,000 members you have about what investment decisions you are proposing? Do they have a say? Do they ever have a say? How do you consult them? Do you consult them?
Mr Corcoran: No, we don't consult them, but I would think the proper way is that they should have representatives on the board. It's their money; they should be there and they should see what is happening, and they should be convinced that this is being done in the interests of their members. We send out an annual report and we send out -- and I would think as it grows we will enlarge the description of what we're doing -- but I think the best way is to have representatives of the various groups we represent -- you know who they are -- right on the board.
Mr Marchese: And we don't have them.
Mr McLean: Some.
Mr Corcoran: Well, there are some, but there's a new board sort of coming along now and we haven't had a union representative, we haven't had -- but that's by far the best way and they understand it.
Mr Marchese: So what are some of the barriers to making that happen?
Mr Corcoran: It's just a matter of appointing these people.
Mr Marchese: Have you proposed that, or has this committee that makes the investment proposals proposed enlarging the board to make sure we have the kind of representation you speak of?
Mr Corcoran: No. The board is appointed by the government, and the representation on the board is now in the process of being changed.
Mr Marchese: I understand that.
Mr Corcoran: The government, I think, is probably looking very closely at what kind of people they want to have on the board, because in the final analysis --
Mr Marchese: I understand that too. But have the five of you, given that you think it's a good idea to make sure we get the kind of representation you speak of, thought about recommending this to the government, to the minister?
Mr Corcoran: I guess I have and the rest of the five haven't. There's the chairman, Mr Somerville, and myself. It's Mr Somerville who's been in contact, and I'm sure he's made these kinds of comments before.
Mr Marchese: Thank you.
Mr Corcoran: You see, the representative, Harriet Dekoven -- she is a civil servant -- has been on the board and she is a very clever woman. She was representing one part, and now her representation's going to be taken by somebody else. But you could be absolutely sure on all the meetings, because she was the one person who really represented these people whose money it is. You pay a hell of a lot of attention to Harriet, because she has to go back and tell other people what these birds are doing, and that kind of stuff.
The Chair: Are there any additional questions?
Mr Bradley: The Ontario investment fund has been mentioned over many months -- some rather interesting comments from those who are recoiling at the very thought of it. What views would you have on the Ontario investment fund?
Mr Corcoran: The Ontario investment fund? As I think I mentioned, there have been a lot of people commenting on it, and my view is not: "Throw this thing out. It's terrible. I never want to hear about it." There are some people saying that.
Mr Bradley: Yes, I have heard that.
Mr Corcoran: I'm a little back here and saying, "Look, we have the fundamental responsibility to the pensioners, and these are their assets and we're not going to do something we don't think is going to be profitable." But in that regard, if something were put together -- as I indicated to the member, what I hear most recently with the amendments is that it's getting pretty close to practical stuff, the kind of partnership with people who are in this business and are moneymakers and this kind of stuff. I think that may make some degree of sense. But I haven't got a final proposal in to which I can say yes or no or "I can buy it" or "I can't buy it."
Mr Bradley: We often hear doomsday stories about pension plans and the future for the young people coming through our society today because we have an aging population, not a very high birth rate in the province and many people retiring much earlier than they would ever have contemplated in the past. There's been a concern expressed, validly or not, about the Canada pension plan.
You're knowledgeable in the field. Do you have any views about the Canada pension plan and its potential for continuing to provide benefits to people across the country, and specifically in Ontario, in light of the present level of contributions that are made by those in the workforce?
Mr Corcoran: I don't know if the Canada pension plan moneys are put aside like these moneys. My suspicion is that it's an item of the federal government where it goes in and it comes out but it's not --
Mr Bradley: On paper; in other words, it's a paper exchange.
Mr Corcoran: Yes. You don't have assets.
Mr Bradley: You hear of the federal government borrowing from the Canada pension plan to do various things. At least we've heard that in the past. I guess there is a concern out there among a lot of people. I used to listen to certain people who are expert in the field make these doomsday predictions and, as an expert in the field, I assure you that no one else will understand what they are talking about when they're doing that.
Mr Corcoran: Yes, that is absolutely correct.
Mr Bradley: Do you follow the doomsday scenario?
Mr Corcoran: No.
Mr Bradley: Do you think not that all will be well but that the chances are that we're not going to be facing some crisis in 15 or 20 years?
Mr Corcoran: To the degree that this fund has been successful, and in the last three years it really has been very successful, it's because of the appreciation that we're coming into a very difficult time which is proving quite difficult economically. You're seeing companies and you're seeing various individuals being replaced, and this society is going through a hell of a change; not this society necessarily, but American society and Japanese and German and French. It's a hell of a change. I'm sort of optimistic. We're going to get through this thing somehow.
Mr Grandmaître: In spite of Bob Rae?
Mr Bradley: Let's not be partisan in this committee; I'm opposed to partisanship.
Mr Corcoran: But, you know, there's a book a week pointing that out, and it's not merely Ontario or Canada, but it's the US, Japan. They've got a lot of problems.
Mr Grandmaître: What are your thoughts on the Ontario investment fund?
Mr Corcoran: Pardon?
Mr Grandmaître: On the OIF, the Ontario investment fund, what are your thoughts?
Mr Bradley: Any further thoughts, in other words.
Mr Grandmaître: Yes. Any further thoughts?
Mr Corcoran: We were talking about the doomsday stuff and all that kind of stuff, and what's happening is that some of the older --
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Mr Bradley: We've asked this question three times because we get asked it about seven times a week.
Mr Corcoran: Yes. Many of the new businesses that are replacing the old businesses that are falling apart are the kinds of businesses that the Ontario investment fund indicates it would invest in. There's an economist called Nuala Beck who is keeping track of, "Here's a declining industry; here's a growing industry." I think she was in the Globe and Mail today and she pointed out, "Okay, it seems steel is going down but communications is going up."
If the thing is put together intelligently, where it's a partnership with professional investors who are investing money and their money and they're going to take a risk on it and they'll lose real money, okay, it may not be so bad.
Mr Grandmaître: I know what Mr Laughren is saying, that this will be a voluntary system, but some people have resented Mr Laughren's approach.
Mr Bradley: All good union people.
Mr Grandmaître: All good union people, and I can't figure that one out, but they're very concerned about the government's vision of the financial future of this province. This is why some unions are very reluctant. I don't know how many people right now have responded positively to Mr Laughren. I haven't heard of anybody yet. Have you?
Mr Marchese: I think there are a few, Ben.
Mr Grandmaître: Have you heard of anybody?
Mr Corcoran: I just don't know. We haven't been asked ourselves. We had initial discussions. I just don't know.
The Chair: That's it. I gather there are no further questions, Mr Corcoran. Thank you for appearing before the committee today.
BETTY WU-LAWRENCE
The Chair: The next witness is Betty Wu-Lawrence, who is an intended appointee as a member of the Midwifery Transitional Council. Welcome to the committee.
Ms Betty Wu-Lawrence: Good afternoon.
The Chair: You were selected for review by the government party. Mr Frankford will begin the questioning.
Mr Frankford: Welcome. I guess you were here when the other --
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Yes, I was.
Mr Frankford: Can you say what sort of perspective you would add?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: The perspective of participating in the transitional council?
Mr Frankford: Yes.
Ms Wu-Lawrence: I'd like to explain that mainly because, first of all, I'm a parent and I had very positive experiences in delivering my children. I remember it couldn't have been possible without the help of two especially capable trained paraprofessionals. I'd like to see this service available to the public.
I have been a public health nurse. I have provided pre-natal and post-natal care to women, I visited them in the home and I have seen the need for such midwifery services to these women. Now I'm working as a community health officer. I had the opportunity to liaise with community groups, and I'm sure I can provide that service of encouraging sharing of resources and also making the service accessible to the public and vice versa.
Being Chinese myself, I was raised in a culture which is very much familiar with the concept of midwifery practice. As president of the Chinese Canadian Nurses Association, often I discuss with my members that they think it's very good for the public to advocate for midwifery service. A lot of my members like to make this service available to the public. For all those reasons, I'm very excited to be able to participate in the transitional council.
Mr Frankford: Among the Chinese nurses, is there a significant number of people who are trained overseas?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Yes, after their basic nursing training in Hong Kong, a lot of them personally chose to go through the maternity training process and a lot of them practised as midwives in Hong Kong before they came here. But unfortunately, with the process not available for them to practise here, a lot of them are not doing that now.
Mr Frankford: Have you had thoughts on how you would bring them into qualification here?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Surely. I think I would like to participate, first of all, in making available to the general public that such a process is available. Then I would translate that process to my Chinese nursing members, and also get feedback from them how they could practise efficiently to provide that service to the public as a whole.
Mr Frankford: I know you're in the east end. Have you had any thoughts as to where it would be implemented? Are you thinking of hospital, home, free-standing facility? Have you gone into that in any depth?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: I think the choice would be to make it possible for the consumers to choose where is most comfortable for them to get that kind of service. I can envisage the starting point will be a community health centre to initiate that kind of service, in partnership with other professionals, then in negotiation and also collaboration with the consumers to decide which other facilities they would start with. Traditionally, a lot of the Chinese had their children in their homes, just the fact that culturally it was a peasant -- we're very familiar with that.
Mr Frankford: Have you had any thoughts about the payment mechanism: salary, fee-for-service, capitation?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: No, that's the least of my worries, because I think to make the experience a healthy experience for both the service provider and the consumers is the primary goal. How the fee is being provided, I've seen a lot of my Chinese nurse members who were providing these informal education services to their friends, to the neighbours; none of them got any remuneration with financial --
Mr Frankford: Is there a lot of midwifery going on in the east end informally, would you say?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Yes, definitely, because we more or less can anticipate, due to the language barriers, and also the lack of time available from obstetricians because the case load is so heavy, and where do these women get information? Basically, some people who they recognize were trained where they come from, Hong Kong or their home country -- to get that information because if I'm delivering a child, I want to make sure I know everything. Otherwise, I couldn't go to sleep.
The Chair: Mr Marchese, no further questions?
Mr Marchese: No.
The Chair: Mr Grandmaître?
Mr Grandmaître: No. Good luck to you.
The Chair: Mr McLean?
Mr McLean: I have some questions I'd like to ask. It has to do with the announcement that was made by the ministers, Richard Allen and Frances Lankin, with regard to the offer of a bachelor's degree program in midwifery. Can I have your views on that? They indicate that they want to start in September. About four different universities are going to offer those programs. Could you enlighten me on how that's going to work?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: The baccalaureate program?
Mr McLean: The program to upgrade. They figure there's going to be 26 students who will be accepted for the first year of the program. The curriculum will include basic sciences, social sciences, health sciences and women's studies, and these people are going to have a bachelor's degree program in midwifery.
Ms Wu-Lawrence: I think the bottom line for such training is safety to the consumers and the second point is access. I haven't been involved in developing the curriculum, but my goal in my participation in the transitional council, no matter what the curriculum is, is to ensure -- the professional wants to advocate for safety for the community, and also access to the skill, providing choice, providing negotiation to which agency or facility the client chooses. So the curriculum, at this moment, as I understand it, will require baccalaureate training. I think more education will facilitate a professional to work with the client. I always liked education. To me, I've committed to lifetime education and I believe women like that. I think the community, as a whole, will benefit from it.
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Mr McLean: Do you think those people who would go through that program should be a nurse first?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: No. I don't think that much is compulsory. But within the curriculum of training, the students should be given skill in understanding the basic training which a nurse usually receives and providing that.
Mr McLean: Are you a nurse yourself?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Yes.
Mr McLean: My understanding is that you don't have to be a nurse to go through and graduate to be a licensed midwife, but the Ontario Nurses' Association argues that the act should be amended to require midwives to be nurses and regulated by the College of Nurses. Do you not agree with that?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: I have not been involved with such a controversy. I respect the research the interim council has done. I still need to listen to both sides and support the work of the rest of the transitional council members.
Mr McLean: So your opinion is that in order to be a midwife, you don't have to be a nurse or go through that --
Ms Wu-Lawrence: At this time, I still need to hear thoroughly the Ontario Nurses' Association's argument. At this point, I really don't have that strong a position. My motive, more basically, is to see this baby of midwifery service delivered with your help.
Mr McLean: That's right. Midwives, in my estimation -- it was supposed to be that most of the work would be done at home and most of the babies would be born at home, but to me, that now does not appear to be the major thrust of what this council would be doing.
Ms Wu-Lawrence: It depends on where the comfort level of the client is. If the client thinks the facilities in the home could not provide her that, I don't think the professional should force her opinion and say, "It's better for you to have the child in the home." As we know, a lot of women I visit do not have a lot of luxury in their homes. As you know, in the east end, the east Toronto community, a lot of Chinese families may have only a bachelor apartment, and if, for the interests of the baby in the first two days, she requests, "I need a place, with your help, to deliver the child in other facilities," maybe we need to advocate that, yes.
Mr McLean: Do you think there should be a midwife profession whereby they would be regulated by the province and licensed by the province in order to carry out their duties as a midwife?
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Yes. If we want to ensure the safety of such service to the public, and I'm sure the government could provide that safety. I trust that, and I think the community has such faith in the government to do that.
The Chair: Thank you very much. That concludes the questions. We thank you for taking the time out to be here today and we wish you well.
Ms Wu-Lawrence: Thank you for the experience.
SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT
The Chair: We're going to deal now, members, with the subcommittee report which you have in front of you. If you look at your agenda, it indicates we still have John McCamus, but he indicated to the clerk's office that he wouldn't be here until around 3:45. That's why we've built that recess into the agenda.
One thing we can deal with right now is the report of the subcommittee, which met Monday and dealt with two matters, the letter from the Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations, which was an indication of a willingness to appear before us as a committee, and was really in response to Dr Chong's appearance before us and the fact that there was some concern that he was here representing the committee. He made it clear for me that he was not, that he was here on a personal basis. So the subcommittee felt that was not necessary at this point in time.
The second part of the agenda is really the selections made by all three parties for review February 16 and 17.
The other, final, matter was that we may be sitting again -- in fact, I gather we are sitting again -- in March for two days, dealing with reviews, and if the House doesn't go back in April, we may again be sitting for a couple of days in April, because the House leaders have agreed to us sitting two days per month to do appointment reviews. We'll deal with that when we know when the House is returning.
Mr Murdoch: You don't think the House will be back in April, Mr Chairman? Are you saying that?
The Chair: No, the Chairman isn't saying that. I'm just saying the place is rife with rumours.
Do we have any problem with this report?
Mr McLean: The only thing I have a concern about is the dates of March 9 and 10 at the bottom of the third page. Perhaps the week of the 22nd, if the House doesn't come back, would be an appropriate time to meet, and if the House does come back, we'll find that we will be here anyway and we would be meeting in March, or the first week of March would be more -- I know there are no committees meeting in the first week of March, right?
Mr Grandmaître: We won't be here. The Liberals won't be here.
The Chair: There are caucus meetings going on.
Mr McLean: Okay. We could have gone for March 22 and 23, or March 23 and 24.
The Chair: Do you want to move an amendment to that? I don't think that will create any problems.
Mr Marchese: Could I ask why? Why not leave it?
Mr McLean: Because I won't be here, for one reason. If you want to accommodate me, fine. If you don't want to, that's fine. It doesn't matter to me. But I'm suggesting that for the other week, if the House comes back, that's fine, we're here, and if it doesn't come back, then we meet for two days to deal with it, the week of the 20th.
The Chair: Can we have a motion to amend this? We required a motion to adopt it initially, moved by Mr Marchese. We have a motion to amend it by Mr McLean in respect to the dates. Are we in favour of the motion, as amended?
All in favour of the original motion, as amended? It is adopted too. Agreed.
Let's break and be back here ready to start at 3:45.
The committee recessed at 1518 and resumed at 1545.
JOHN DOUGLAS MCCAMUS
The Chair: I call the meeting to order. Our witness has arrived. Mr McCamus is appearing today as the intended appointee as chair of the Ontario Law Reform Commission. Welcome to the committee. This is a half-hour review, 10 minutes for each party. I just wondered, Mr McCamus, if you'd like to say anything briefly before we get into questions and answers.
Mr John Douglas McCamus: I could speak for a moment or so, if that would be helpful.
The Chair: Just a minute or two; that's about all we can afford, really.
Mr McCamus: I'll just say it's a great pleasure to have been nominated for this post. I've had a connection with and an interest in the work of the law reform commission for a very long time now and I'm quite thrilled and honoured to be put forward for this appointment. I'd be happy to deal with any questions that might arise.
The Chair: Mr McLean, would you like to begin?
Mr McLean: Rosalie Abella, your predecessor as chair, was full-time. You're going to be a part-time chair?
Mr McCamus: Yes, sir.
Mr McLean: Do you feel the day is coming when this commission should be done away with?
Mr McCamus: No I don't; not at all. The original vision of the commission was that it would have a continuing, and presumably endless, mandate for constant scrutiny and assessment of the effectiveness of the existing legal system, and to conduct, where the commission felt necessary, studies that might lead to reform of particular laws. I think the mandate has been effectively exercised thus far. There simply seems no end in sight of the good work to be done, although, to be sure, the law reform business is now much more busy and complicated by the fact that there are a number of other agencies that have an interest in specific topics of law reform. Notwithstanding the growth of that phenomenon, I think there's a great deal of work for the law reform commission to continue doing.
Mr McLean: Does the law reform commission deal with lawyers who use accounts of their clients with regard to -- we've had some cases lately with regard to lawyers who have been spending money that's not theirs. Do you people make any recommendations on that? Is that part of your mandate?
Mr McCamus: No, it's not. That's really the mandate of the self-regulating body of the profession itself, the Law Society of Upper Canada. The law society develops rules to deal with those problems. They investigate complaints, and discipline and disbar lawyers who are in breach of those rules and so on. The law reform commission is really a study group, a law reform group that conducts studies with a view to reforming the law in some particular area which appears to be in some difficulty.
Mr McLean: Okay, what is the area that you would like to see looked at?
Mr McCamus: We have currently a number of projects under way which I'm very interested in. I could mention a few of those or more, if it would be helpful.
Mr McLean: Not too long; I only have 10 minutes.
Mr McCamus: I'm sorry; I'll try not to be too worried about this. One of the strengths of the commission is to look at areas of the law that would be essentially of interest only to the legal profession itself and therefore probably not of great interest to a ministry, such as the law of contracts, the law of torts. We currently have a large study on the law of property, which is still quite medieval in its nature, and we hope to suggest fruitful reforms of the law of real property, if I can put it that way.
We have also a project on charities. The law of charities is rather ancient and somewhat arcane. The nature of charities has come up for some discussion in public forums in recent years. This is a comprehensive study of the law relating to the establishment and regulation of charitable institutions.
We currently have a study on the coroner's inquest, the statutory framework under which it's conducted, the procedures it uses and so on. That, again, is a topic of some interest publicly, one that we hope to make useful recommendations on.
We have a number of other current studies on aspects of testing various kinds of --
Mr McLean: Can I stop you there?
Mr McCamus: Sure.
Mr McLean: As a specific instance, there is the Stephenson case that we've heard about on the radio and TV this morning with regard to the $300,000 or something spent on legal fees. Could that be part of your recommendations? Would you look at those types of things to see that there should be some consideration given to those people? I know in some cases they don't need lawyers, but in this instance they hired them and they find now that they're not going to recover $350,000. Would that be something?
Mr McCamus: Procedural questions such as who should have standing at coroners' inquests, what orders can be made with respect to costs, all those procedural questions will be part of that study.
Mr McLean: Right. You've been a regular member since 1990. How many times would you have met in a year?
Mr McCamus: Typically, one meeting a month, and normally that meeting would only be for a day, although there would be considerable preparation prior to that meeting.
Mr McLean: It would be here in Toronto?
Mr McCamus: It would be here in Toronto, and there'd be other kinds of conference calls and smaller meetings over the phone during the year.
Mr McLean: How much more often would the chair meet than the normal members?
Mr McCamus: I'm sorry?
Mr McLean: Would the chairman meet more often than the regular members or would the whole board meet at once?
Mr McCamus: The entire commission would have formal meetings, in my experience of it, once a month. It's normally scheduled for two days and the attempt has been in recent years to get all of the meeting done by starting early and carrying on late.
Mr McLean: How many meetings do you think you'll have as chair in a year?
Mr McCamus: I expect we'll continue to meet on that pattern of one meeting per month of either one or two days in length.
Mr McLean: You'll be making more than Tim Armstrong per day. He's getting $1,000 a day. You're getting $30,000 a year, and you're only going to meet 12 times.
Mr McCamus: Oh, I'll spend a lot of time with the work for the law reform commission, I can assure you. The meetings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the work that needs to be done establishing studies, monitoring studies, reading over the work, interviewing people, meeting with public interest groups and others that have suggestions to make. My worry is not that I won't be putting in enough time; my worry is that it's too big a job for the amount of time I've been spending.
Mr McLean: My understanding is that it's under review. There is some indication that in 1993 or 1994, the amount of honorarium that part-time members and the chairman get will likely be reduced. Would you agree with that? The part-time members get $26,000 a year.
Mr McCamus: Yes. It is likely to be transformed into a per diem amount. The hope is that if that is done, the number of days per year will be such that the annual payout to individual commissioners will be significantly reduced.
Mr McLean: Are all members of the board lawyers?
Mr McCamus: No.
Mr McLean: There are professors?
Mr McCamus: Some of the professors are also lawyers, but one of the professors is a political scientist.
Mr McLean: There can't be many who are not lawyers. I've only seen about one, I think.
Mr McCamus: That's right. There are four commissioners at the present time, one of whom is a political scientist, not a lawyer.
Mr McLean: Thank you. I wish you well.
Mr McCamus: Thank you very much.
The Chair: Mr McLean, could I use a couple of minutes of your time?
Mr McLean: Yes.
The Chair: I'm just curious, professor. I see in your CV that in 1969 you were in London. I just wonder if that's coincidental. I think the current Premier was in London at that date as well. Did you strike up an acquaintance with him?
Mr McCamus: No, I didn't know he was there and didn't meet him.
The Chair: With respect to the law reform commission, your experience in law seems to be confined to academia. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I'm looking at your CV and that's all it indicates, which is certainly quite a respectable and impressive record as well. But I'm wondering how many other members of the law reform commission have had their experience in the profession limited to academia. Are there people who have have been out in the field, if you will?
Mr McCamus: That's an interesting question. Typically, in the past, there has been one academic member of the commission, if I can put it that way. The most recent appointments have included two other law professors, and there's a fifth appointment yet to be made. I expect that appointment will probably be of someone who has a greater depth of experience in practice, whether as a judge or as a practitioner. But historically I would guess that the number of academics have been one or two; the number of people who, most of their career, have been in full-time university work has been one or two. Now it's at three law professors and one political scientist.
The Chair: Your CV leaves a hole from 1987 to 1993. I gather you are currently teaching at Osgoode.
Mr McCamus: It's not intentional: There's probably a hyphen there somewhere that indicates I'm continuing in my full-time position at Osgoode Hall Law School, essentially from 20 years ago until today, with a few breaks here and there. But yes, since 1987 I've certainly been there full time.
The Chair: Mr Marchese.
Mr Marchese: In response to the question Mr McLean asked about whether or not you felt the commission should be abolished, you said no. There were some complaints perhaps in terms of how representative it might be or how well connected you are to some of the groups that are complaining, and you talked about agencies. How well connected are you to the legal field outside the people you work with and to the broader community in terms of how you handle the issues you do research on?
Mr McCamus: First of all, I'm not sure I understand or perhaps agree with the opening premise of the question. I'm not sure there are complaints about the way in which the law reform commission has discharged its responsibilities in the recent or distant past.
With respect to the second half of the question, how wide a network I have, the extent to which I have a network depends in part on a 20-year career within the profession; to be sure, almost exclusively within the academic branch of the profession. But during that time I have served as dean of the law school which I serve now as a member of faculty, and during that experience of course developed extensive contacts within the profession, particularly within alumni groups but with the governing body of the profession and other groups. I hope to be able to exploit those connections during my work with the law reform commission. My participation in other forms of outreach or consultations, to be sure, are much more limited. It's an area in which I hope to take some advice and do well.
Mr Marchese: I didn't mean to assume that perhaps you didn't have a network, given your long experience. But as you do your research, do you consult people in the legal profession -- I suppose that's the question I wanted to ask -- and beyond the legal profession? Do you consult other interested parties as you do that research?
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Mr McCamus: Of course. Of course the commission has to and does. To be sure, it's an area where we think we can probably strengthen our performance, and that's one of my concerns. But with a typical project, for example, the commission at an early stage establishes an advisory committee. That advisory committee will consist of people from the profession who have an interest in the field -- it may include a judge who happens to be expert in the area -- and representatives of groups that have some interest in whatever question may be before the commission. So through advisory committees in particular, the commission has attempted to consult as broadly as seems appropriate with respect to particular projects.
Now, we are currently considering and have been considering for some time whether or not other means of consultation ought to be developed: perhaps the distribution to the public of discussion drafts of material or whatever. That is a live item on the agenda. In answer to the question, we have consulted in the past. Do we think we can improve? I think the answer to that is yes.
Mr Marchese: Tell me, how is your research used and by whom?
Mr McCamus: Our research is targeted particularly at the Ministry of the Attorney General. The commission was established by the Ministry of the Attorney General. It's meant to provide a service principally to the Attorney General of Ontario by studying and making recommendations, particularly recommendations for the enactment of new statutes or modification of existing statutes.
But the work of the commission, I'm very proud to say, appears to have had a much broader influence than that. Law commission studies have been frequently cited in judicial opinions around the common-law world. The reports of the Ontario commission are frequently relied upon in the reports of law reform bodies in other jurisdictions in the common-law world. One of the reasons I'm so very proud to be put forward for this position is the tremendous reputation the Ontario commission has throughout law reform and professional circles generally throughout the Commonwealth.
Mr Marchese: To what extent has this government -- or previous governments, for that matter -- implemented the recommendations you've made? How often do they implement them? How do they use them, if they use them?
Mr McCamus: It's certainly a fair question. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have our last annual report with me. It would be an obvious thing to bring. I don't know whether it's been sent over to the committee; we can certainly make copies available. In the last few pages of the report, we have a list of all our reports right from the beginning of the establishment of the commission, together with a notation of any statutory changes that have resulted from those reports. It's not a 100% record, of course, but it's quite a creditable record in the sense that there are a great many reforms that have resulted from the recommendations of the Ontario Law Reform Commission.
Again, in terms of my own personal view of the matter, I'm hopeful that we can improve that record. I would very much like to have discussions with the Attorney General to see if there are things the commission might do that would facilitate an even better record of implementation of our recommendations.
Mr Marchese: You talked about the work you're doing at the moment on law of property and law of charities and said that these two are archaic. Can you give some examples of law of charities and the other one, in terms of what is archaic that we should be looking at?
Mr McCamus: The director of research on both of those projects would be the best person to answer such questions. There are various rules of property law that I would be awfully hard put to explain to you at the moment, which most lawyers are unaware of but which create few problems in practice for people because standard form documents are drafted so as to avoid these difficulties. They create problems for actual people only when the documents haven't been properly drafted to avoid various arcane principles of medieval land law. Again, a full explanation of a particular rule might take some period of time, and many lawyers would not be able to explain it to you.
The law of charities similarly developed some centuries ago. We now have several draft chapters of this study in hand. I'm not sure we'll find as many problems in charities law as we're finding in property law, but the law of charities was developed a few centuries ago. People, people outside the commission, have asked questions about whether or not we have the proper definition of the notion of charity, the relationship between notions of religious activity and other forms of charitable activity etc. We have a regulatory scheme in place for these things. There have been some questions about the adequacy of that regulatory scheme in the light of recent developments and so on.
I hope that at considerable length -- not too uninteresting a length, I hope -- the ultimate reports on property law and charities law will give you several illustrations of unnecessarily complex doctrines of law drawn from medieval sources that are still applicable in Ontario.
The Chair: Mr Frankford.
Mr Frankford: I notice in the research document that among your round table discussion topics has been the role of legal clinics. Can you give briefly some idea of what you or the commission are thinking about legal clinics?
Mr McCamus: There is no current project on legal clinics as a phenomenon -- their funding, their role or whatever -- and I don't expect that to materialize as a topic, although it may well, in the months to come. The previous chair of the commission, Madam Justice Abella, thought it might be useful to convene a series of round table discussions with a view to attempting to explore whether there might be a need for a project in one area or another, or simply topics of interest that might be referred to other bodies, other ministries of the government or the law society or whatever. This round table on clinics was one of those exercises. My understanding is that there was no feeling that came out of that round table that there was an appropriate topic for the law reform commission to do a study on. So the short answer is that there's nothing planned on that at the moment.
Mr Frankford: Do they seem to indicate any feeling that access to legal services is something that should be addressed?
Mr McCamus: I think many members of the commission would feel that if one were to identify a short list of important topics in the legal sphere, access to justice is an obvious one. Just what approach to that problem the law reform commission itself ought to take is a more difficult question. The law society has an interest in it; the clinics themselves have an interest; the clinic funding committee of the ministry is obviously very much involved in ongoing monitoring and supervision of the clinics. So off the top of my head, I'm just not sure what role there is in either the specific area of clinics or in the area of access more generally for a law reform commission study, but I think it is an area where we're likely to take advice and see whether or not there isn't some feeling that a study could usefully be done on some aspect of what is really a collection of problems.
The Chair: Before we move on to Mr Bradley, I just want to point out to members that on page 2 of Mr Pond's report there is some detail with respect to the number of reports that have been produced and the number of those reports that have been adopted over the years of the life of the board.
Mr Bradley: My first question relates to the Canadian Law Reform Commission. Refresh my memory: Did the federal government announce that it was disbanding the Law Reform Commission of Canada?
Mr McCamus: Yes indeed, and it has disbanded the commission.
Mr Bradley: How will they possibly survive without a law reform commission at the federal level? If they play such a significant role, in your opinion, how will the government survive in terms of its legal policy? I recognize that they don't do exactly the same kind of work that you do, but what will they do now to get their advice?
Mr McCamus: I think it's a significant problem. I'm sure the decision is regretted by many, not just the members of the Canada Law Reform Commission itself. But I guess the answer to that question is that they will have to make do as best they can through their internal policy units in the Department of Justice and elsewhere. They will no doubt retain consultants from time to time. But I know the question of how to fill the gap left by the death of the federal law reform commission is a very serious one among many people in Ottawa, both inside and outside the government.
Mr Bradley: Recognizing, as a layperson, that federal law and provincial law overlap but are different jurisdictions, do you anticipate that as a result of the absence of a federal law reform commission the workload of the Ontario Law Reform Commission might be extended to any extent?
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Mr McCamus: The Ontario commission has traditionally taken a careful view of the constitutional limitations of provincial vires and has contained its work within that limitation. It is an interesting question whether the disappearance of the federal law reform commission means that there is some room for greater provincial scrutiny, for example, of the administration of criminal justice, which, although technically federal, is financially provincial. Whether or not there is some room for the provincial commission to be helpful to the province by studying such matters or not is an interesting question and one really for the Attorney General, to some extent. I'm sure the commission would be very happy to study any area where the minister takes the view that it would be helpful to have studies done. Certainly, I don't think there's any reason in law why the commission couldn't undertake studies that overlapped the boundary between federal and provincial jurisdiction.
Mr Bradley: A number of questions came forward about access of average people to your studies in terms of the consultation with those people. As political representatives, one of the complaints we get often is that the legislative branch of government and the judicial branch do not consult or do not reflect the viewpoint of whatever the average citizen is. I don't know what we say an average citizen is, but a person who perhaps is not a member of the legal profession and not a member of government in any way. There's great frustration out there that their views are not being reflected in government legislation or in fact in court decisions.
What does your commission intend to do to endeavour to tap into those people? I'm not saying that your reports eventually may mirror exactly what those people are saying, but there is a feeling that there is an élite who think X and that there is a great mass of other people who simply don't buy what the élite is saying. How do we reconcile that?
Mr McCamus: Again, I think a lot turns on the particular kind of work the law reform commission is doing on a particular project. I take the point as a serious one and one I want to respond to, but without being defensive about it, much of the work of the law reform commission would focus on highly complicated and technical aspects of what lawyers often refer to as "lawyer's law," things that by and large only lawyers are likely to understand or be interested in.
The details of the law of estates administration, for example, is the subject of an extensive report just published within the past year or so. It's impenetrable for a layperson to read such a document, although it's a topic which is very important for laypeople. There may be one or two questions buried in there where we should have done a better job of consulting the public; I'm quick to concede that as well. But a very large percentage of the work of the law reform commission would be relating to technical matters on which it's hard enough to get lawyers to take an interest and inform themselves on and reach an opinion on, to say nothing of the difficulty in attempting to prepare the public for a consultation on such points.
But as the commission moves off more technical studies of that kind into subjects of broader interest -- and it has done so to some extent -- it seems to me, and I think it's the point of your question, that the commission has the same obligation that others have in the public sector to consult broadly, to make its tentative ideas well known and to take advice from the public on what it is they have in mind. Certainly that's one of my priorities, should I be appointed chair: to increase our capacity to identify situations when that should be done and to do it effectively. Again, to some extent, we've done it through this advisory committee mechanism that I referred to earlier. There are probably other and perhaps better ways of doing that on particular topics.
Mr Bradley: If you were in an American setting, you might wish to plead the fifth amendment, or whatever amendment you wish, on the next one, but I was asked to ask this. Some of my friends in the legal profession, when appointments are made from government, contend -- accurately or not, I cannot judge -- that the Osgoode Hall Law School is rife with leftist opinion and leftists. How would you comment on that, so I can mail this back to them and assure them that indeed that is not the case?
Mr McCamus: Well, you explained part of the answer to the question when you said that it's members of the profession that have made this allegation. I think it's quite true. I think one of great virtues of Osgoode Hall Law School -- there's a risk of becoming tiresome on this topic -- as the nation's leading law school, if you'll forgive me, is that it does have a great diversity of viewpoints on the faculty. It's probably true. We have a more vigorous left-wing unit than any other law school in the country. But it's only one of several voices on the law school faculty; again, it's a valuable voice, but it's competing for air time with a whole range of other viewpoints at the law school. I make no apology for the richness of our program.
Mr Bradley: Were that the case, they were not successful, in any event, because these people appear to be somewhat to the right of virtually everybody I know.
Mr Duignan: Including yourself.
The Chair: Mr Grandmaître.
Mr Bradley: Here's a real lawyer now.
Mr Grandmaître: Going back to the number of reports that you've filed in the last, what, 18 years, since the --
Mr McCamus: Well, it goes back to 1965.
Mr Grandmaître: Yes, 1964, 1965. We're talking about 108 reports; 75 of those reports have been wholly or partially adopted by the provincial government. In one of your latest reports, back in October 1992, when you were reviewing the powers of the Ontario Film Review Board, your recommendation was that the board no longer be empowered to censor films. Can you explain this recommendation?
Mr McCamus: I can at least attempt to do so. First of all, let me draw your attention to and emphasize the fact that this was one of several recommendations made in this report. That may be the most controversial recommendation in the report, but it was one of several recommendations, which included better labelling of material, better control of the manner in which material is displayed in shops of one sort or another, all with a view to better controlling phenomena that are unattractive in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons.
But on the question of censorship, the commission was persuaded of the following propositions. First of all, we were persuaded through our consultations with industry representatives and others that the concept of control through censorship is illusory. In fact, the technology has escaped us, and it is impossible to control the distribution of this material. It creates an illusion to think that we can, through censorship, prohibit the dissemination of this kind of material within the province.
It was felt as well that it was unattractive to have a parallel system, parallel to the criminal law, in which people were exercising a discretion, essentially unreviewable, to control what is shown, in particular contexts at least; and that a better solution, one which provided adequate protection to the public, was through more effective grading and labelling of material. Some of that labelling would indicate that the material should not be shown at all.
Mr Grandmaître: Who should be empowered, if not the Ontario Film Review Board, to censor these unwanted films?
Mr McCamus: Well, "censor" in the sense of snipping portions out of the films? It was the commission's view that that is not a useful exercise. But certainly, to the extent that material offends the criminal law, its display in a public place in Ontario would constitute an offence.
Mr Grandmaître: One last question, Mr Chair. With all these reports -- you're averaging, what, 18 a year, I think, since 1964 -- what will your responsibility as chair be towards finalizing the implementation? Before the report is filed with the Attorney General, what role do you play in these reports, in the conclusion of these reports and the recommendations in these reports?
Mr McCamus: All of the material, although prepared under the supervision of the chair, ultimately surfaces before the commission in a full meeting for review and for the formulation of recommendations, and the commission itself is very much involved in determining what those recommendations will be. They're voted on, the chair's vote counts in all of that, like the vote of anyone else around the table, so there's very active involvement.
The commission is not simply a rubber-stamping exercise for some study unit out there somewhere. It's very actively involved in formulating the research proposals in the first place. Then the chair and the staff monitor the preparation of the research papers that ultimately go before the commission, but then the commission itself debates and votes on each and every yrecommendation that comes forward with the commission's approval.
Mr Grandmaître: When do you find time to vote on these recommendations?
The Chair: We'll have to talk about that at some other point. Mr McCamus, thank you very much for being here today. We've exhausted our time with regard to your review. We wish you well.
Mr McCamus: Thank you very much.
The Chair: One final matter of business for the members of the committee: We require a motion of concurrence with respect to the intended appointees we've reviewed today. So moved by Mr Marchese.
Any discussion on the motion to concur? Seeing none, all in favour? Opposed? Carried.
The committee adjourned at 1622.