THRONE SPEECH DEBATE (CONTINUED)
The House resumed at 8:01 p.m.
THRONE SPEECH DEBATE (CONTINUED)
Resuming the adjourned debate on the amendment to the amendment to the motion for an address in reply to the speech of the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor at the opening of the session.
Mr. Andrewes: Mr. Speaker, now that everybody is through clamoring and haranguing me, I would like to say a word of welcome to the Scout troops who are in the gallery. It is always a privilege to share this Legislature's lawmaking processes with the young people of the province. I certainly welcome them, and I am glad to see them here tonight.
I would also like to say a word of appreciation to the member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Stokes), who is not with us this evening, for his contribution to the filibuster this afternoon. It is a privilege for me, as a member of this government, to rise in the House and make some brief comments with respect to the speech delivered by His Honour, the Lieutenant Governor.
Those members whose eager ears and attentiveness brought them clamoring into the chamber about a year ago, in the early stages of the first session of the 32nd Parliament, were not surprised when addressing this chamber for the first time that I drew members' attention to that great constituency of Lincoln lying south of Lake Ontario, amidships of one's voyage through the Niagara Peninsula.
Mr. Cassidy: Did Stephen Leacock write that speech?
Mr. Andrewes: I actually wrote it myself. I drew attention to that great constituency by describing it as a veritable Eden complete with the symbolic apple. The agricultural heritage of the Niagara Peninsula, upon which so many Ontarians depend, with products of the soil, the hoof, the tree, the vine and, yes, the wine press, notarizes the Lincoln riding. It focuses the rest of Ontario's attention on the abundance of goodness nurtured by the skill and stewardship of those wise and judicious constituents of Lincoln.
Mr. J. A. Reed: The member did not write that.
Mr. Andrewes: There is more. It is against this background that I wish to address myself to the concerns of agriculture as they relate to matters of rising energy costs and the production and distribution of food products.
In response to this concern, the government of Ontario convened, in June 1980, the energy and agricultural policy committee. Following an extensive review of the concerns and directions of the agricultural industry, the report of that committee, which was tabled in this House during the last session of Parliament, mapped out a strategy for the efficient use of existing forms of energy. As well, it addressed itself to fuel substitution by the production of energy alternatives from agricultural crops and residues.
Through efficient use of existing forms of energy, significant savings can be made by the farm operator in the production of food. Careful selection of farm machinery to suit the size of operation, the type of crop, the nature of the soil itself, together with stringent food land guidelines in order that the most productive farm land is managed to yield its greatest productivity, are key strategies set forth in the report of the policy committee.
I am sorry to see the member for Essex South (Mr. Mancini) is not here, because he would no doubt have some great interest in what I have to say with respect to the greenhouse industry.
Following on the heels of the energy and agriculture policy report came the report of the special greenhouse advisory committee which was established by the Minister of Agriculture and Food and the Minister of Energy in March 1981 -- how could we forget that great month -- to identify ways to assist greenhouse operators to improve energy efficiency and to utilize alternative sources of energy. This report represents the committee's recommendations and supporting documentation for a broad range of initiatives to assist the greenhouse industry to realize these objectives.
Conservation technologies are identified in this report and the government is currently awaiting input from industry to prioritize initiatives in order to complement energy conservation programs in other sectors of the economy.
I think it would be helpful to touch briefly on some of the other energy conservation initiatives by which this government has demonstrated its leadership in order to meet the ambitious goals of self-sufficiency established by the government in 1980. By way of an amendment to the Power Corporation Act, the government put into place the residential energy advisory program which allows Ontario Hydro and municipal utilities to establish an energy audit system for home owners whereby --
Mr. J. A. Reed: It is a great method of selling electricity but it won't wash in terms of conservation.
Mr. Andrewes: Julian, just listen to this stuff -- whereby trained personnel of Ontario Hydro or the utilities, at the request of the home owner, will identify areas in the home where more efficient use of energy can be achieved. As well, a low-interest loan of up to $2,000 is made available to the home owner to undertake the recommendations of the energy auditor.
Other programs undertaken co-operatively by the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs and the Ministry of Energy encouraged the retrofit of older buildings, both privately and publicly owned, in order to lower the energy consumption and reduce the operating costs.
A recent publication of the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs identifies planning techniques by which municipalities can achieve greater efficiency in the use of energy through the careful design of subdivisions and new housing developments.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade continues to make great strides through the energy bus program in identifying significant savings in industrial complexes across the province.
Incentives to encourage industry to change from oil to other less costly forms of energy have assisted in making Ontario's manufacturing sector more efficient.
Research and demonstration programs highlighting the innovative use of alternative forms of energy provide industry and home owners with working examples of how they can save dollars and contribute significantly to the self-sufficiency goals of this province.
Mr. J. A. Reed: This province has no self- sufficiency goals and you know it.
Mr. Andrewes: I am going to ignore the interjections of the former Energy critic of the Liberal Party.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Cousens): Please do.
8:10 p.m.
Mr. Andrewes: Significant to this discussion, more than 40 per cent of the fossil fuel energy consumed in Ontario is used in the transportation sector. It is in this area where significant gains can be made in reducing the nation's dependency on imported oil.
Mr. J. A. Reed: Yes, and what about other renewable energy forms?
Mr. Andrewes: The transportation energy management program, jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, offers training and educational programs to equip drivers, both in the private and commercial sectors, to use our energy resources more efficiently.
Through the elimination of sales tax on conversion and new production line units and the elimination of road taxes on fuel, we are well on our way to achieving our goals in the use of alternative fuels for transportation.
Mr. J. A. Reed: You didn't even take the sales tax off stove pipes.
Mr. Andrewes: Propane and compressed natural gas present realistic opportunities to commercial operators to convert vehicles from gasoline to alternative fuels that are readily available. I would be remiss if I talked about our government's ambitious energy programs without mentioning that this province's public utility, Ontario Hydro, will remain a cornerstone of our economy and the implement of this government's energy initiatives.
In 1963, this government of wisdom and leadership authorized Ontario Hydro to move into the nuclear age, having maximized the major hydraulic resources in the province. This decision was made when most other jurisdictions were increasing their dependency on fossil fuels as a form of generating electrical energy.
Mr. J. A. Reed: You haven't even developed half the hydraulic resources in Ontario.
Mr. Andrewes: Yet even the staunchest critic of this decision today must admit that the marriage of the Candu reactor and the indigenous uranium resources of Ontario was a wise and prudent decision -- members from the north will all agree -- for which this government and its leaders must be congratulated.
In 1973, when the industrialized nations of the world were struck down by dramatic increases in oil prices as a result of an effective cartel operated by the oil producing export countries, Ontario was well on its way to establishing an infrastructure that currently supplies one third of the electrical energy consumed in the province. Current construction programs will more than triple the electrical output of nuclear reactors and will supply about half Ontario's energy requirements by 1990.
What if this government had followed the advice offered by the opposition in 1963? What would have happened? It would have meant that today this province would have built its electrical dependency on declining supplies of fossil fuels, suffering the vagaries of world oil prices which we have seen increase more than eightfold in real terms in the last decade. I say that in the light of what appears to be a current world oil glut, but I think most educated people would agree --
Mr. J. A. Reed: Ontario suffered the worst of all.
The Acting Speaker: Order. The member will withhold his interjections and allow the member for Lincoln to have the floor.
Mr. J. A. Reed: On a point of privilege, Mr. Speaker: It is very difficult to sit here and be accused, as the former Energy critic of the official opposition, of advocating the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity in Ontario. There has been no single person in the province who has been more opposed to that --
The Acting Speaker: Order. That is beyond the point of privilege. The member will have an opportunity to speak in rotation. At present, the member for Lincoln has the floor. I ask the member for Halton-Burlington to withhold his interjections and put them together in the form of a speech.
Mr. Andrewes: Mr. Speaker, I will continue and try not to be quite so provocative. I want to tell the member for Halton-Burlington that, with respect, I am talking about 1963 when that prudent decision was made. I do not think the member was a participant in the debate in this House at that time. However, I will continue.
This government recognizes the demand for electrical energy can only be met by having in place an infrastructure that will meet the needs of home owners and commercial users across the province. Ontario Hydro currently has two proposals before public forums that would extend the power corridor both east and west to meet the developing needs of these areas. Every effort will be made to address the concerns of agriculture, of the environment and of our historical and cultural fabric in the construction and placement of these power corridors.
The electrical initiatives of this province have become the envy of many jurisdictions around the world. It is for this reason that an interministerial committee responsible for the province's participation in the World's Fair to open in Knoxville, Tennessee, in May of this year chose to portray the electrical initiatives in Ontario's contribution to that Canadian exhibit.
It has been my privilege to serve as chairman of that interministerial committee. I am delighted to invite all members of this Legislature to visit Knoxville during the months of May through October to grasp the significance of the credibility of Ontario's programs in terms of both the rest of Canada and the world.
What of the future? Currently, as I mentioned earlier, over 40 per cent of the province's oil consumption is utilized in the transportation industry. I have also mentioned the goals of this government in substituting other forms of fuel in the transportation sector. But our ultimate goal would be to replace current transportation fuels with a clean, available indigenous source. We see that source as taking the form of hydrogen produced from the electrolysis of water. Research is currently under way in Ontario through the Institute for Hydrogen and Electrochemical Systems headed by Dr. David Scott and the Urban Transportation Development Corp. to develop an onboard method of transporting hydrogen fuel.
The province's electrical generating capacity can be maximized by the production of hydrogen. Hydrogen's use as a transportation fuel, or in the upgrading of existing reserves of fossil fuel in this country, or as a substitute for natural gas in the production of ammonia-type fertilizers for agriculture, has enormous potential to bring this province into the next decade free of any dependence on the rest of the world for a supply of energy.
The challenges of meeting our self-sufficiency goals in energy are themselves formidable. The public perception of the import of these goals is weakened in the face of declining world oil prices, but make no mistake about it, what happened to the industrialized world in 1973 could happen again at any time. The major oil supplies of the world are in the hands of some of the most unstable governments which would be prepared at any time to pounce should we let down our guard. This government remains committed to its goals. Its policies and direction complement this commitment.
8:20 p.m.
Mr. J. A. Reed: Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to be able to rise in this House and speak to this speech from the throne. I had a great deal of difficulty containing myself when I heard the member for Lincoln delivering government propaganda, obviously written by the government caucus speakers' service, telling us --
Interjections.
Mr. J. A. Reed: I was trying to go easy on the member for Lincoln, but if he wrote that garbage then he really does not know what he is talking about. Let us at least blame their speakers' service.
I would like to address a few of the comments made by the member for Lincoln. He talked about a clean transportation fuel and he spent a great deal of time saying that one of the most significant areas for saving energy and becoming self-sufficient in energy was in the transportation sector, which accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the energy utilized in this province.
Mr. Andrewes: Forty, I said.
Mr. J. A. Reed: Forty per cent, that is fine. Then he went on to tell us that the future lay in the production of hydrogen and the application of hydrogen as a transportation fuel. Let me point out a couple of things. Let us set the record straight in the beginning. I am very encouraged by the prospects for the proper utilization of hydrogen, not only in Ontario but on a world basis. I see the first use for hydrogen is for aircraft because it has some very distinct advantages.
But let me point out that the conversion of hydrogen in terms of British thermal units for use in the general transportation sector cannot compete with other forms of clean energy. The honourable member, if he is up on energy, should know that hydrogen conversion is the least efficient of all the conversions. If one uses electricity to convert to hydrogen, one better be using it for a very high end use. That is why air transport is going to be the first use for hydrogen and not ground transport.
Let me tell the members that in 1978, on this side of the House, we asked the government once again, for the third time, to open up the prospect of producing alcohol fuels using Ontario resources. The government went back and announced, three times I believe, that $150,000 was finally being spent on a study for a methanol plant in Edwardsburgh in eastern Ontario.
We were told so many times in this Legislature that our program of converting Ontario resources to the alcohol fuels that are clean and can be used in the transportation sector efficiently just was not on; it would not work. Let me tell the members something. Today I read in Canadian Renewable Energy News, printed in Ottawa, that a deal has been finalized between the federal government and Quebec to build and operate the initial methanol plant using cellulosic waste, using forest waste, for transportation fuel.
Ontario has blown it again. It has missed the golden opportunity and is going to be trying to jump on the train after the caboose has left the station. It has done it time and time again. Sooner or later, the government will come full circle and in two, three or four years' time there will be a grand announcement that we will be back into the alcohol fuel business for transportation.
The 1980s are the biggest challenge we have ever faced in this province. Our economy is in desperate trouble. The government has so far done nothing but blame the federal government for these ills. Yet we know the resources, and the prospect for resource development in this province, are still unequal. Last year we spent $11 billion bringing energy into our province. That $11 billion is gone forever. The government still continues to blame the feds. In 1978 we pointed out to this government that the resources are here in Ontario, available to the government to develop and exploit, and that the $650 million blown on 25 per cent of Suncor could have produced 7,000 permanent jobs in northern Ontario.
I was in the town of Hearst last November, and the only industry that was turning wheels on an active basis in Hearst was an energy industry. The lumber industry was shut down. That great company, Levesque Lumber (Hearst) Ltd., was shut down. The member who represents that riding is here tonight and he should be ashamed at the way his government has performed in northern Ontario. I saw the one company that was a bright light, and it was an energy company.
Time and time again we have tried to impress on this Legislature that the great opportunity, the $11-billion windfall that is waiting for this province in terms of its employment and economic spinoff is in fact in energy.
The member for Lincoln can talk all he likes about the great initiatives that he says his government has undertaken in the form of energy. The initiatives amount to virtually nothing. He even went so far in his misguided statement as to say that Ontario, and I guess I have to paraphrase it, had exhausted all of its major water power potential. The member ought to know there is more water power potential still available to Ontario than is harnessed at the present time.
The ministry that he purports to represent knows that now and has finally, after five years of persuasion and arm twisting, put in a couple of demonstration units in the Ministry of Natural Resources. After five years of castigation and persuasion on the part of the opposition they have finally come up with some lease agreements that will allow for the redevelopment of small hydraulic power in Ontario.
I would like to tell those members on the opposite side a little bit about hydraulic power and what is happening. The member for Lincoln particularly should realize that China is fast becoming the most energy self-sufficient country in terms of electricity in the world. This year, Communist China, of all places, has 90,000 hydraulic power units in place and operating. Last year they installed 11,000 units and next year they will be installing 15,000 more units.
Can members imagine the energy security that provides to a nation? Here we are in Ontario, the most vulnerable electric power producers in spite of the fact that we have a successful electric generating utility. We have it all confined in the large megawatt farms. If one of those farms goes out for one reason or another, Ontario will suddenly become desperately short of power.
I relate that to the Chinese experience and I relate that to the potential in Ontario for diversifying electric power generation, which this government denied for years and only now is paying a little lip-service to because the Energy critic on the opposite side of the House persisted over all this time.
Mr. Wildman: Doesn't your arm get sore when you pat yourself on the back like that?
Mr. J. A. Reed: I am not very prone to blowing my own horn but the obvious takes a long time to be assessed by this government.
8:30 p.m.
I would like to talk a little bit about one of the great political and economic blunders of the government of Ontario. That, of course, is that exorbitant purchase, at the worst possible economic time in this province, of 25 per cent of that oil company known as Suncor. As the months and the days go on, the situation gets worse and worse. That such an incredibly bad judgement call could have been made must be a total embarrassment to that side of the House.
By the time the $650 million now committed on the surface is paid for with interest, if we are capable of paying for it, it will cost this government and the people of Ontario more than $2 billion. Two billion dollars for what?
Can anybody tell us why we are going to spend more than $2 billion to purchase 25 per cent of Suncor? We have been trying to figure it out for months, and we cannot figure out why this money has been spent.
Will it create one new job in Ontario? The Premier (Mr. Davis) says, "No, it will not." Any new industry in Ontario? The Premier says, "No, it will not." We asked, "Why did you buy it?" He said, "Well, it will give us a window on the oil industry." Isn't that wonderful? A window on the oil industry.
A telephone call to Ottawa, to Petro-Canada, is substantially cheaper than $650 million plus interest. It really is.
This is the time when all of the potential sits in northern Ontario, and if I were a member from northern Ontario at this time, I would be ashamed to sit on the government side of the House because of all of the potential that is totally wasted.
The economic recovery of northern Ontario could have been launched for $650 million. In northern Ontario today, towns and villages are dying, especially the one-industry towns that depend on exporting lumber to the United States. The markets are not there.
Northern Ontario members know very well that the markets are not there. They do know that there is one feeble bright light, not assisted in any way by the provincial government. Called Bio-Shell, it represents the utilization of forest wastes, the stuff that so many people say has a negative value in the province but we know now has a very positive value. That one, little, private enterprise bright light is shining there. Yet the government continues to ignore the potential. It is disgraceful. When the next election comes along, the depressed people in northern Ontario are going to remember how they have been treated.
I told the Minister of Energy (Mr. Welch) some time ago that the 1980s are a time for a Minister of Energy in particular to be creative, to be innovative and to go where no one has gone before. It is a time to try new ventures. It is a time to move into new fields. It is a time to set up pilot experiments with new technology.
The minister knew he would not be criticized by this critic for trying things, even if they did not work as well as he expected or wanted them to work. He had that commitment time and time again from this critic, but he chose not to take advantage of it. He chose not to move into new areas. Now we have the federal and the Quebec governments' announcement that they are going into the methanol business with a pilot plant. Ontario will be left picking up the rear as it has done so many times before. It is one more missed opportunity.
I cannot let the moment go by without mentioning the electric power utility that was talked about by the member for Lincoln. Ontario Hydro has been a great asset to Ontario. It has been of great benefit.
When we look back into history at rural electrification and at the uses to which electricity has been put, we cannot help but marvel at that wonder started by Sir Adam Beck, who was inspired by a Kitchener farmer, called Kilowatt Abe, who had a one-kilowatt generating plant running. Adam Beck saw it and thought what a wonderful thing it would be if everybody could benefit from electric power.
The member for Lincoln chuckles over that little anecdote, but it happens to be true. If he will study his history before he stands up in the Legislature the next time, he will know something whereof he speaks.
The fact is that politics has interfered in that great utility and we have got to a point where decisions have been made that have been erroneous and are costing the electric power consumers of Ontario unconscionable amounts of money.
The member for Lincoln talks about the incredible building program that is going on at present. I ask him to consider that the building program is now 50 per cent greater than it should be, and the only reason it is continuing is that the lead times are so great and the judgement calls were so bad in 1975 and 1976, when Hydro and the government were warned about the slowdown in growth, that Hydro and the government feel compelled to continue for fear of losing face. Now, in desperation, they are talking about the prospects of building a cable under Lake Erie and selling power to General Public Utilities.
The power we are producing is too expensive for us to export. We cannot compete with Hydro-Québec and its ability to sell power from its LG-2 development to the United States. The reason for that is that we did not continue to develop our hydraulic resources. Instead, we were told that nuclear power would do everything for us that could be done. How wrong we were.
I have no quarrel with nuclear technology. I do not use the arguments that some of my friends in other parties have used in the past about nuclear power. But if I were making judgement calls about the kinds of electric power facilities I would be developing, I think I would at least look at economics as a base. The utility is no longer in a position even to look at the economics.
It is a sad fact that the judgement call made to go ahead with massive nuclear development was not an economic judgement call. It was a political judgement call, and it continues to be. The deeper we get into it and the more waste there is in the system, the more the government has to keep shoring itself up to keep from looking so terrible in terms of this judgement call.
Mr. Wildman: That's not what Ernie Massicotte says in Elliot Lake.
Mr. J. A. Reed: I will just tell the Socialist member who made that comment that I have no quarrel with nuclear power, but I say it has to be put in its place in terms of the economics of electric power production, and it has not and is not being put in its place. I am sorry to see that, because I think nuclear power has an excellent future in this province.
One of the things that concerns me so greatly is that if we continue to overbuild our nuclear program in the way we are doing, we will create a bubble that will ultimately collapse and all of the talent and the expertise that is in the nuclear industry at present will disappear. Can the government not understand that? Obviously not.
Mr. Kerr: Export, export, export.
Mr. J. A. Reed: I hear the member for Burlington South giving his last hurrah, talking about the export of electric power. I ask the member to write a few numbers down and tell those of us on this side of the House how nuclear power, at the incredible cost that Darlington is costing, can ever compete with the hydraulic power that will be sold out of Hydro-Québec.
The member for Burlington South can talk exports until he is blue in the face but, since he knows very well that when it costs at least $3,500 or $4,000 a kilowatt to put the Darlington nuclear plant in, I would ask him to use a little judgement, because he is a tiny bit off base.
8:40 p.m.
I have had the honour of being appointed Natural Resources critic under my new and great leader, the member for London Centre (Mr. Peterson), a man whom I believe will become the next Premier of Ontario. He and I believe that natural resources are the linchpin of the economic recovery of this province. There are so many opportunities waiting in the development of natural resources that they are hard to count. I will try to recount a few of the major ones tonight.
In the forest industry today, we waste upwards of 50 per cent of what we harvest; I am not counting the undesirable species but just the cut timber that is left in the bush, the tops, the limbs and what is loosely known as the slash, the mill waste that is lying beside the mill and so on. That accounts for at least 50 per cent of our forest industry. It is a resource that at this point is virtually unutilized in this province. We consider it a waste.
Yet there are a couple of bright spots. The Great Lakes Paper Co. has discovered recently that the use of hog fuel to generate electric power for use in its system can be a great financial asset. I have been told that the paper industry has the potential to be totally self-sufficient using that kind of fuel. Yet I see no encouragement by the government to continue that process.
I have been speaking with some industries about an element called cogeneration, where an industry could generate 24 hours a day and feed power into the Ontario grid during its off hours. We still have not been able to arrive at prices that are acceptable to those people who would produce power on a cogeneration base.
As I said earlier, there is one industry that has developed a process for pelletizing mill waste. They have been so successful that they are committed to 10 plants by 1985. Yet we know that the construction of 10 plants on that base will not put a significant dent in the opportunity that awaits us there. Instead, we see the federal-Quebec methanol agreement, which should have been made by an adventurous Minister of Energy in Ontario.
Resources, especially forest resources, should not be considered finite; they should be considered renewable. We have always referred to them as renewable resources, but the House should know that in Ontario, because of mismanagement, our forests are actually rapidly becoming finite.
I ask the government to let us know where we are going to get an abundance of timber within the next 20 years. That is the period when my children will be grown up and in the work force. Where are we going to get that abundance of timber when we run out?
Since 1971, we have had about seven million acres of land in northern Ontario lying bare and unregenerated because of a government that did not know how to manage the forest resource. The irony is that about one third of the cuttable part of that is unregenerated because there is that slash, the timber lying on top of the ground, which has not been harvested or utilized.
We have incredible opportunities awaiting us, opportunities missed by a government that has been concerned only with the rape of the resource industry and not with the proper management of the resource industry.
Maybe it has not always been politically popular to properly manage and commit moneys to the reforestation of this province, but our children and grandchildren are going to wonder who the lunatics were who were governing this province for 38 or 40 years who could not see fit properly to replant the province.
I refer back to the promise made in 1977 in the now infamous Brampton charter, which said there would be two trees for one. Every year since then we have had a new 160,000 acres of land in northern Ontario left bare and unregenerated by an uncaring government which is sensitive only to re-election and not in command of where it is going or taking the province.
We have an alternative and a great new leader. I will give notice to this government that in the next election, whether it be 1984 or 1985 --
Mr. Andrewes: In 1986.
Mr. J. A. Reed: Or 1986; I hear the member for Lincoln saying 1986. It is possible that in desperation the government might try to hang on that extra year but, whenever it happens, we are ready; and I hope the devastation will not have been too great by the time we take over the reins of government.
Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Speaker, there are a number of comments I want to make in my first speech to the Legislature since I resumed my role as the member for Ottawa Centre.
I hate to disappoint the member for Algoma-Manitoulin (Mr. Lane), because I think he might know what to expect. Normally in a throne speech debate, I would be expected to call down the Conservatives for failing to come to grips with Ontario's problems and to speak out for the needs of my constituents, the people of Ottawa Centre.
I want to break with that tradition and pattern today to speak about a problem which I believe is of overwhelming importance, not just for my constituents but for everyone in Ontario. The problem is the impact of technological change and what that change may do to our province over the course of the next couple of decades.
I want to make a specific proposal today which I hope will be considered seriously and urgently by all members in the Legislature and particularly by the Premier (Mr. Davis) and the government. Since the member for Sault Ste. Marie (Mr. Ramsay) is the only minister in the House right now, I hope he will take this proposal back to the Premier and the government, particularly since he is the Minister of Labour.
I believe it is time for this Legislature to establish a select committee on the social and economic impact of technological change, a select committee that would have a high profile, a decent budget and a mandate to chart a direction and to recommend policies for Ontario to respond to the revolutionary impact of technological change based on microelectronics.
The model I have in mind is the select committee on economic and cultural nationalism, which this Legislature established back in 1971. I want to devote the rest of this speech to explaining why we need a new select committee, what kinds of problems we are facing with technological change and what kinds of policies seem to me to make sense for Ontario.
I do not pretend to have the final word, because the longer I have thought about what is happening to us now and the more I have read and reflected in the past few months, the more I have realized that we in this Legislature, and I mean all of us, simply do not have the answers to ensure that Ontario is protected against the risks of technological change and to ensure that the benefits of technological change are fairly shared among all of our citizens. I am not even sure we even have the right questions. That is one of the reasons we have to become sensitized to what is happening to the point where we can start to provide some leadership to our province from this Legislature.
8:50 p.m.
Let me start by asking what is happening. One way to find what is happening is to look at the latest figures from Statistics Canada. Unemployment in Ontario is at a post-war record. Our unemployment rate has not been higher since the Great Depression. And this is not just a one-shot thing. In every economic cycle since the late 1960s we have wound up with a higher rate of unemployment than the last round.
Not only that, but our government seems to have given up the fight for full employment and has run out of ideas about how to get Canadians and Ontarians back to work. I would say that applies to both levels of government.
Late in March I got a leaflet at my home in Ottawa from the Ottawa Centre Provincial Liberal Association which said, "Help support the realistic alternative." At the same time, my community newspaper had an advertisement, saying: "Did you go Liberal in 1980? There is an alternative. Join us, the Progressive Conservative Party." I am confused by that. I believe we represent the alternative.
The fact is that Canadians and Ontarians need to go back to work. They are not doing it, and we have to look at the fundamental reasons why.
The throne speech said recovery was just around the corner, but the assurances we have been getting like that are getting more and more empty the longer they come up. When interest rates, inflation and unemployment are all at or near record levels something is pretty seriously wrong. Every week we get news of new layoffs, new shutdowns and new bankruptcies.
What is so scary is that we are in this situation just at the time we are embarked on a new wave of technological change whose impact may be as great as the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was spread over a century and a half, and this new microelectronic revolution is being spread over only a decade and a half.
Some members probably know about the development of computers during the Second World War and how they have advanced since then. They probably recall those gloomy forecasts about the impact of automation which were made back in the 1950s and 1960s. Those results never quite seem to have come to pass. In fact, there has been a tendency to assume that because those IBM monsters did not throw everyone out of work we would somehow cope with what was coming next.
On the basis of what I have learned in the past few weeks, I am not so sure. We may be okay in Ottawa-Carleton, because the Ottawa Valley has become the hottest centre for high technology in Canada, particularly with new, big, growing Canadian-owned firms like Mitel, Gandalf and Nabu. But the impact of microelectronics and all the technology it is spawning, and the speed with which these developments are starting to spread, are devastating.
The revolution is just beginning to take off. We have been gathering speed slowly through the course of the 1970s, but now we are in a period of exponential growth. Some estimates are that by the end of the decade there will be an industry that has a hundred times the computer power in operation that there is today.
Let me take members back to 1971, the year a number of us were first elected to the Ontario Legislature. That was also the first year that Intel in California developed a microprocessor, the computer on a chip, which forms the basis of the new technological revolution.
Last year, I brought a small computer home to see what it would do. I wanted to learn a bit about programming and to play with it a bit after I stepped down as leader. It is so small it fits in a briefcase, yet that little computer can run rings around the most powerful computer IBM could supply 25 years ago.
A few weeks ago I added a printer to that home machine. Hours after it was home, my 14-year-old son Matthew had the machine cranking out my correspondence just as if he had been a secretary with 14 years of experience. His father is a bit slower at these things, but the speech I am holding in my hand right now was written and edited last night on this machine at home. For about $2,000, it allows me or anybody else to do at home something that used to require an office, a secretary and all of the other trappings of a large corporation.
That is but one example, and we are just at the beginning. In a few years, the computer has been transformed. It used to be a big, powerful, centralized technology that would only work in large government departments or large corporations like General Motors, Chrysler, International Harvester, Massey-Ferguson and all those other corporate dinosaurs. Now the computer fits in your pocket, in your microwave oven, in your electric drill, in your typewriter, in your phone, in your machine tool, and it may take your job.
Last year, the Ontario Task Force on Microelectronics estimated that between now and 1990 there will be a one-thousandfold increase in distributed computing power per Ontario household, up to about a million bits per household. One assumes that applies to industry as well.
To give a comparison, right now the average home may have a calculator, a digital watch, a musical calculator or maybe a couple of toys for the kids and, in rare instances, a computer or a Speak and Spell -- just a few thousand bits of computing power. That will rise to a million bits by the end of just a decade. One assumes that will happen in industry too.
One has to ask what the effects will be. One of the background papers for the microelectronics task force gave some estimates. It was pretty sanguine. It said the impact on employment in Ontario would be minimal. I find that kind of optimism hard to share. A lot of the people who have examined the impact of microelectronics are downright pessimistic.
Barrie Sherman and Dave Clive Jenkins, who are trade union spokesmen in Britain, say the new chip technologies are going to cut employment by almost one quarter in Britain by the turn of the century. If one transposes that to Ontario, that would mean we would lose a million jobs from what we have today.
The President of France commissioned an authoritative report, which estimates that employment in banking and insurance will be cut by 30 per cent in that country. If one applies that to Ontario, that would be a cut of 76,000 jobs here.
We have seen the growth of those without jobs as a reality in big corporations now for 20 years in Canada and the United States. Almost all our increases in employment have come from small and medium-sized firms. But what we are now seeing are cuts, and those cuts are coming on a massive scale. Bell Telephone has cut back its operators in Ontario and Quebec from 13,600 in 1969 to 7,400 in 1979 with the introduction of new digital technology, and it is not finished yet.
General Electric and Philips are talking about cutting their work forces by half on a world scale. In the past decade, Western Electric in the United States has done just that and has reduced its work force in telecommunications from 39,000 to 17,000.
In Belleville, in eastern Ontario, AEL Microtel has moved from conventional switching to digital switching equipment. In the course of four or five years, it has gone from 1,000 jobs to 600, and I believe production has actually increased.
In Germany, Siemens has done a study which estimates that office employment can be cut by 40 per cent with the new technology. Bringing that back to Ontario, it would mean 309,000 jobs lost in this province for people in clerical work.
The word processors that are now being delivered every day in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Red Lake can double or even treble the output of the average typist.
In Washington, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that new chip technologies may reduce semi-skilled jobs in the automobile industry, which is already having its problems, by a further 20 per cent. Again that would mean 18,000 to 20,000 jobs here in Ontario.
In Germany, one engineer with a computerized plotter can turn out the same amount of work as two junior engineers and 15 technical draughtsmen. One asks, "What does that mean for one million Ontarians who are now in management and professional jobs?" That equipment is being sold in this province right now for $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000. I have seen it in operation. It is quite wonderful what it can do, except when one thinks about what happens to the people whose jobs are displaced and who will buy the products or the goods that will be designed and built by robots or computers.
9 p.m.
The comparisons and the estimates go on and on. On the positive side, there is an estimate that the high-tech industries will create 100,000 jobs in Canada over the next decade and most of those jobs will be in Ontario. Some of the people in Ottawa-Carleton expect all of that growth will be in the Ottawa Valley.
It is a fact that economies of scale are no longer such a big factor in industry with microtechnology and therefore this new technology could help Canadian industries solve the problems of short production runs and frequent design changes and help us to compete against the big markets of Japan, the United States and the European Common Market. Computers and microprocessors can take over work which is dreary or which is dangerous and that could be a blessing if the people who were displaced could move to other jobs. I repeat, that could be a blessing if the people who are displaced can move to other jobs.
The plain fact is no one knows what the net impact on jobs will be from this new technological wave of change. There is no authoritative estimate in the Ontario Task Force on Microelectronics. The Science Council of Canada does not know and the Institute for Research on Public Policy does not know. Of all of the people I have talked to or whose writings I have read, nobody really knows for sure exactly what is happening. That is scary, because there is a lot of evidence which says we know the kind of job reductions that can take place because of the new technology and we are not sure where the new jobs are going to come from.
There is a lot of evidence as well that indicates in the period of recession we are in right now, rather than try and expand and build new products that will create new dynamism in the economy, what is happening is that we are getting products that replace products that are currently on the market. The experts call it capital deepening rather than capital broadening. What that means is we are doing what we are doing already, but doing it with fewer people and with more capital equipment based on microtechnology.
For the past half century we have seen a pattern of growth by which manufacturing employment or its share in the economy fell but that was offset by service jobs that were continually on the increase. The situation we face now is that process seems to have come to an end. No more jobs will disappear from the primary sectors of agriculture and mining and so on because we are down to rock bottom in those sectors already.
But in manufacturing, jobs are threatened by robots, by numerically controlled machine tools and by other forms of new technology, as well as by US and by offshore competition -- not to forget the many people who nominally work in manufacturing but who are in fact manipulating information, providing clerical support and that kind of thing for the blue-collar worker on the production line; their jobs, as well, are threatened by new white-collar technology.
Can the service sector take up the slack this time? The answer is, not this time. The service sector is undercapitalized. The average worker has two or three thousand dollars of capital behind him. He has a desk, a typewriter, a Dictaphone, some paper clips and a telephone and that is about it. Therefore, it is a ripe field for microtechnology investments. There have been such low increases in productivity in the service sector that there is a tremendous potential for new technologies to change the way people work.
What about governments? Can governments take up the slack? The fact is that governments have been busily trying to get away from being the employer of last resort. Governments have been cutting back programs and letting staff go. There have been 5,000 employees cut from the Ontario government service over the course of the last three or four years.
Then where will the new jobs come from? That is one of the questions I believe the select committee which should be set up in this Legislature could be looking at, because right now I do not know and there are a lot of people who do not know either.
There is a good deal of evidence that the impact of microtechnology may be greatest in the areas where workers are the least protected. After all, unionized workers have at least some means -- and I stress only some means -- of getting co-operation from their employers in anticipating and in adapting to technological change. Some means that 99 per cent of the contracts which are in force in the country right now do not have a clause which permits the unions to reopen a contract to bargain over a major element in technological change. In other words, very few unions are in a position to resist if managements come in and try to change the rules of the game between the opening of a contract and its ending.
The hardest hit workers are likely to be in the service industries, people in shops and banks and offices. People in shops hardly have unions, apart from the supermarkets. People in banks hardly have unions and efforts to unionize there have met with constant resistance and all sorts of management tricks and tactics. Something like one office worker in six is organized and 85 per cent of workers in offices are not.
In the main, that means the people who will be hit by the technological changes taking place will be the people who work in shops, banks, offices and services. That means women who already are underpaid, under-rated and under-unionized in our economy. The people who will be equally hit will be those workers who do not now have jobs. There are 390,000 workers currently unemployed. There are workers who lack skills. There are 150,000 workers who have simply given up and dropped out of the labour market for a while because no jobs are available. Most of all, there are those young workers fresh on the job market who already make up half the unemployment list in Ontario.
Because one does not see the changes of technology dramatically, one sees them differently. It is when 1,000 workers are laid off because a company has to cut back production and only 850 are taken back a month and a half later. It is when 10 or 15 retirees leave a plant after 30 years of faithful service and one or two technicians are taken on to replace them so that two jobs are created where 10 disappeared.
It is attrition because young workers traditionally change jobs or perhaps decide to go and study and then go back to work. It is because somebody did not work out, is dismissed and is not replaced. It is that kind of gradual erosion that is taking place.
Young workers coming on to the job market today find the doors are closed. The opportunities to get experience are more and more limited. They find themselves more and more unskilled in an economy where one is either very skilled and very much in demand or else one is very unskilled and has great difficulty in getting any kind of a job at all. My sister's company in Ottawa is actively recruiting programmers and people like that in England because it cannot get them here.
Mr. Wildman: This government is not doing a thing about it.
Mr. Cassidy: Exactly. I met somebody today in this Legislature who came to see what was happening in the Ontario Legislature. He graduated from university two years ago. I said, "What have you been doing since then?" I hate to say it but he has been unemployed for the last two years. He is a university graduate and he is only one of hundreds of thousands in Ontario who already face that. The new technologies which will compound the problems have hardly yet begun to hit.
The next question is: Can we stop what is happening? Can we stand in the way of progress? Can we, like King Canute, take our sword out and get the sea to roll back and leave Ontario unscathed? The answer is maybe, but not for long. In the microelectronics industry, to have even two years' lead in a particular product or technology is to have a big jump on the competition. There is extraordinary pressure to create new products and perfect old ones.
The computer is only 25 or 30 years old. It is now into the fifth or sixth major generation. As I have said before, the computer that used to fill a room the size of this legislative chamber will now fit into a briefcase or something smaller and they are working on making it smaller still.
The costs of microcircuits keep dropping by about 30 per cent per year. The silicon chips on which microprocessors are based had about 70,000 transistors on them last year. There are eight or 10 transistors in a radio. In three years, there will be up to one million circuits, and in 10 years there will be up to 10 million circuits, all on a chip about the size of a baby's thumbnail. That is what we are facing.
That means the brain power which has traditionally been the contribution people make is now being matched by computers and by computerized communication which can quite literally take skills from people and do it for them, replicating it indefinitely. This can provide robots that will work for $6 an hour, day in and day out, when it costs $10 or $15 to have a worker do the job. A robot can be put into a factory at a cost little more than the cost of a luxury automobile.
Two hundred years ago, the industrial revolution brought steam and water power to do the jobs which heretofore had relied almost entirely on human or animal muscle. Every kind of manufacturing was affected and before long transportation was revolutionized by the train and the steamship.
9:10 p.m.
That is the kind of change we face now. But it is not brawn that is being beefed up or replaced by machines; it is brain power. The reason microtechnology is so different and unpredictable from anything we have seen over the course of the last 30 or 50 years is because it cuts across every existing technology and threatens or promises to change that technology.
If I can make a comparison: television, for example, is a radical technology that has changed our lives in many ways. Yet television has had very little impact on the way people actually do their jobs in factories, which stayed very much the same from the invention of the fractional horsepower electric motor up until a few years ago with the introduction of new kinds of technologies.
A technological drive is pushing industry here and around the world to think up new uses for microtechnology and to make them a reality. With those new uses -- robots, numerically controlled machine tools, automatic warehouses, word processors or electronic mail which could reduce the need for mailmen by half in the course of a few years -- jobs are on the line because major industries will undergo radical change and in some cases will disappear entirely.
There are not just new types of machines which will sit in factories or offices, there are new kinds and forms of communications which we have never known before. The Saskatchewan government with Northern Telecom Canada Ltd. is building a system of fibre optics communications which will give a rural, isolated household more communication power, in terms of TV and other forms of information, than anybody can get in the biggest cities of our country or our continent today.
In Ottawa, Mitel has an electronic mail system which links its offices and factories in five continents of the world, allowing an executive to communicate with another executive literally overnight or in a matter of seconds.
If I can give an example that came to me the other day -- I hope members do not take it up -- one could go down to the Eaton Centre this evening before Eaton's closes at 9:30 p.m. and be measured for a custom-made suit. The measurements could be transmitted electronically to Singapore and one of the famous Singapore tailors could make a suit in 24 hours, put it on a plane and three days later, at noon on Saturday, one would be able to go to Eaton's and pick up a suit that had been custom-made half a world away. Those kinds of things are now possible.
If we try to ignore these changes in the competitive world, we risk seeing our economy driven to the ground by a flood of microtechnologically efficient imports. That may, in fact, be happening already if one looks at the deepening of and the expansion of the manufactured-goods trade imbalance in this province and country.
The question we have to face, therefore, is not how to stop technological change, but how to shape that change in order to benefit people in Ontario. That is the question that was not addressed in the throne speech and that we ought to address in this Legislature. I might say it was mentioned in the 1980 throne speech that set up the task force on microelectronics. I will come to that a bit later. That thrust was a temporary one which seems to have come to fruition when, in fact, it should have been continued.
We face choices about the future in this province, and I want to talk a bit about those choices. The choice that we seem to have made right now is to drift into the future, to react to what happens and to hope that we can muddle through somehow.
To be fair to the government, it is proceeding with the microelectronics technology centre in Ottawa, which I welcomed, and with the five or six other research and development centres in other parts of the province, including centres that will be devoted to robotics and to computer-assisted design and manufacturing. But this effort is small. Each centre will have maybe a dozen or two dozen researchers and scientists. The centres are scattered across the province. They will take time to mature; it will be several years before those centres begin to be useful. It does not speak to the basic need for policy and for legislation that will help Ontario benefit rather than suffer from technological change.
Our choice right now is to continue to drift or to develop a policy. Our choice is to leave the design of the new technology exclusively in the hands of engineers and of entrepreneurs, in many cases in the hands of businesses and entrepreneurs and engineers working outside Canada. Or we can try to make the new technology fit the needs of our workers, of our citizens and of our industries here in Ontario. We could just hope for the best or we can -- and I believe we should -- start now to prepare our workers, our managers and our students for the kind of work place and the kind of society we want for the 1990s.
I am not kidding when I say we should talk about the kind of society we want a decade hence. So much has been attained through the new technology in so little time that we genuinely have an opportunity to create a more desirable future rather than simply letting the future happen to us. Usually these changes take place over a matter of generations. We cannot get a handle on it. I am not sure we can get a handle on it right now, but the changes are occurring over a period of time in which we can plan what to do, in which we can intervene and do it, and in which we can actually see the results.
What depressed me -- and I was depressed when I came back into this House from the March break -- was to realize that with the Davis government we seem to be firmly heading away from where we could and should go in dealing with technological change. I asked myself over the last week or so as I was preparing this speech if this government had any kind of broader purpose to offer to Ontario -- or perhaps I might say that the federal Liberal government has to offer in Canada.
The Constitution is out of the way. Twill be on Parliament Hill Saturday when the Queen finally brings it home. We welcome it and will put it into a little vat somewhere on the grounds of Parliament Hill. If we were in Britain right now we could at least unite temporarily behind the armada that is sailing for the Falkland Islands. But here in this province is it going to be simply that the Tories will keep holding on to power for dear life as long as they can? Is that to be the agenda for the rest of the people of the province?
Can we not find a way to exploit the new technology to give people more input into local government and know what is going on? They can see it in their homes; they can interact with it in their homes. Can we find means to provide more independence for our senior citizens so that they can live more independently and yet still get together with other people in the community rather than being moved into a nursing home?
Can we create new ways of bringing people together, in apartments, in neighbourhoods where they are now faceless communities and face-to-face communication is a rarity? I fear as I read my Ottawa Citizen and the Toronto Star and all the Lifestyle features there, the agenda for the 1980s might simply be looking out for number one, to be a survivor, to find some way to muddle through the decade and to prepare for the 1990s.
One of the advantages of the new technology is that there are strong positive potentials to it. It can liberate managers and workers from a lot of drudgery and routine. It can cut out backbreaking work and give ordinary workers enormous responsibilities. It can mean that productivity is a matter of how the brainpower and the machinery is used rather than how many times we can put a widget into a machine tool or how many times we can do some mindless task which people have had to do since the industrial revolution.
The new technology can bring up-to-date information and feedback straight to the work place so that workers can actually supervise their own work. They can do their own quality control; they can know hour by hour whether the goods they are producing are up to standard or not. The new technology can allow workers to monitor occupational health and safety themselves rather than having to depend on the boss. That is pretty positive.
That kind of desirable development has to be chosen because the alternative is already here as well; that is the kind of Big Brother technology that makes work a prison. I think of the computerized means by which postal clerks who sit at the coding machines now are monitored every hour, every minute, almost every second during which they produce. It is the same with the supermarket cashiers, the typists and telephone operators who are measured on every word, on every keystroke and every second they spend on the job. I would hate to have to work under those circumstances and conditions. That is something that exists right now here in Ontario.
Which choice should we make? There is no question in my mind. It is not just because workers are happier if they are given responsibility and autonomy, it is also because the kinds of shocks we are going to face demand that our industry and our society be flexible and able to react to unpredictable change.
9:20 p.m.
Some members may have read about that poor couple from British Columbia who, along with their children, decided to get away from and avoid the dangers of nuclear war, so they moved to the Falkland Islands a year and a half ago. Now look at what they face with it being occupied by 8,000 or 9,000 Argentinian troops.
Who would have predicted that the price of oil would quadruple or quintuple over the course of the last four or five years because of what has happened in the Middle East? Who would have predicted -- certainly this government did not predict -- that the bottom would start to fall out of the oil market just after Ontario had bought into the top of the market and taken 25 per cent of Suncor? What is going to happen next? What is going to be a winner or a loser? Nobody knows about that.
Is air travel going to continue or will we all meet in teleconference meeting rooms and never stir from our office at the corner of King and Bay because it is too expensive to travel. One cannot even bet on which industry will be the winner because we are in such a state of flux right now.
Under the circumstances, one cannot simply have an engineer design a machine which is perfect for all eventualities and will never break down, and then give out a little manual and tell the worker that this is what he has to do. There must be a worker who can respond to the crises. There must be an organization that can respond to the crises as well, and for that one cannot have an autocratic, from the top down kind of organization. One must have an organization where values and attitudes change, where information is shared and, dare I say it, where power is going to be shared as well.
We are not going to survive in the 1980s or the 1990s if management wants to continue to call all the shots and continues to treat workers as though they are fresh off the boat, as though they are fresh off the farm, as though this is 1900 and as though workers have nothing to contribute except their muscle.
I am afraid, as we move on in the 1980s -- and we are well into the 1980s right now -- the signals coming from the Ontario government are all too clear and they are very depressing. Instead of being open to what may happen and building towards the potential of what we could achieve in this province -- and we have potential in this province; I have spent most of my life in Ontario and I believe in the province, I know we have the potential; I just wish we knew how to achieve it -- rather than moving in that direction, our human resources are being run down.
They are being run down in the wave of shutdowns and layoffs now taking place in Ontario. They are being run down by the way workers are being told they are going to have to accept takebacks and wage cuts if they are going to have a job at all, and that is the way it is going to be. They are being run down when the governor of the Bank of Canada takes a huge pay increase and the doctors in this province take a huge pay increase while workers, who have not had a real increase in their wages over the course of the last seven or eight years overall, are told they are being unpatriotic if they try to get something that will allow them to pay the interest on their mortgage.
The severance pay that we in this party fought for and got from the government is so inadequate it is far cheaper for a business to lay off a worker when times are tough than it is to scrap a piece of machinery. When a piece of machinery is scrapped, whatever value is left has to be written off and is deducted as a direct charge from profits. When a worker is laid off or fired, however, the chances are that he or she can be scrapped at virtually no cost to the company.
When machines have a higher value than people, and when that situation is tolerated by the government, it is small wonder that many industries refuse to take responsibility for their human resources; that they refuse to take responsibility for training and for upgrading their workers. It is small wonder when they feel no pressure from government, even though we are entering an era in which workers will need to be continually retrained if they are to work effectively. It is not just a matter of going on to the job at the age of 18 or 21 and being trained for life; one is going to have to be trained every five or 10 years if one is going to continue to have a job in the kind of technological revolutionary phase we have entered and are going to be embarking on.
Ontario has a responsibility to show leadership. It is interesting to me, if I can give a small example, that the province has been researching the electronic office of the future for the past few years for application within the civil service. What is disturbing to me, and I hope the minister takes this back to his colleagues, is that the government is making decisions which will affect its workers in fundamental ways right down to whether or not they have their jobs. Yet it has still to ask the Ontario Public Service Employees Union which represents those workers to join in the research to make sure the workers' interests are satisfactorily defended and represented.
Human resources are being run down. In real terms, education has been cut back at every level these past few years. The province acts as though the skills the worker has when he starts his career are all he will need for a lifetime. Now continuing education is being cut back, first in the community colleges and now through the school system. The Ontario Association for Continuing Education is being forced to send begging letters so it can keep up its standards rather than being able to provide an educational network and climate which people can plug into across the province.
Engineering faculties are threatened with losing their accreditation and the Ministry of Education just washes its hands of it, as the Minister of Education (Miss Stephenson) did today. Government spending may possibly benefit from some of those cuts but it is a short-term benefit because what we are really spending when we save those government dollars are our human resources in Ontario and those, in the end, are the most important resources we have.
Where should we be going? As a Socialist, I have some firm ideas, but I recognize those ideas and others are to be tested and debated and that we should try with that debate to find a consensus and to involve as many elements in our province as possible. In the situation we are facing at present there is a fundamental issue. It is the issue of power, of who will control the new technology and who will get the benefits.
One of the reasons I believe the Legislature should be involved through a select committee is because we are politicians and one of our jobs as politicians is to decide how power and collective resources will be shared or, if we have not quite made it to government and are sitting in opposition, to seek to contribute to the discussion of those issues and seek to influence those decisions.
The situation we now face is that business stands to benefit from the introduction of the new technology but the workers stand to lose. One cannot build a consensus on what is to be done as long as that fundamental inequity continues to exist. I want to repeat that. One cannot build a consensus on what is to be done to respond to the new technology in Ontario as long as that fundamental inequity between business and labour, between management and workers, continues to exist.
One cannot have co-operation as long as there is a confrontation in which one side is content to be superior and insists on maintaining a superiority indefinitely into the future. The balance has to be evened up. A climate of co-operation and trust has to be created. That is going to take some time but it has to be done if we are to respond effectively to the technological challenge. That is one of the choices we face.
To bring an end to confrontation and to create a positive climate can be done only by government. That means that over the next two or three years it can be done only if there is a will to lead from the present Conservative government.
I suspect that will not be easy for the Conservatives. Anti-labour and anti-worker sentiment has been on the increase as part of the political swing to the right in North America, more pronounced in the United States than here but none the less prevalent here too. When productivity falters, it has been a lot easier for management and for management's friends in government to blame the workers than it has been to look in the mirror and see whether they themselves are to blame.
9:30 p.m.
Every now and then we have a Conservative back-bencher who blurts out what his colleagues secretly feel about workers and unions. That attitude simply has to change. The same thing goes for management. Surely there is enough experience by now to demonstrate that we cannot build productivity and adapt to change if management acts unilaterally, particularly with today's breed of worker, today's climate and the kind of education people had in the 1960s under the Premier's Department of Education, the kind of education people have had for the last 20 or 30 years.
We cannot simply tell a worker unilaterally, "Here is what you have to do," and expect him or her to say, "Aye, aye, sir," and jump to attention. That kind of unilateral decision-making and autocratic style breeds resentment, fosters nonco-operation and hurts productivity, and we cannot afford it in this province any more.
There has to be co-operation with labour, and that has to start with an acceptance of the legitimacy of labour and the right of workers to have unions, which is commonplace in Europe but has yet to occur in this province.
Why do we have a strike record that is not particularly good in Ontario? A lot of it is because managements are constantly out to try to beat down and destroy the labour unions if they get a chance. We saw it at Fleck and at Radio Shack. I do not need to go on; that is always there.
Mr. Di Santo: And Irwin Toy.
Mr. Cassidy: My friend the member for Downsview reminds me of Irwin Toy.
As long as the unions have evidence, and there certainly is evidence, that management is out to destroy them, as long as they have evidence of the nonco-operation on the implementation of the health and safety bill, Bill 80, and the reluctance of management to set up health and safety committees, the unions simply cannot afford to let their guard down to the point where they can come together with government or management in joint programs to manage technological change.
If the unions are threatened, they will be in their shell; they will defend what they have. They cannot move forward in co-operation if they are convinced they may be knifed in the back the first time management gets a chance.
On a broader level, an act of acceptance of unions means eliminating the legislative barriers to the unionization of office workers and other unorganized sectors of the economy, particularly those workers who are strongly threatened. Once again, to do otherwise is to invite continued confrontation with organized workers.
The Speaker comes from a riding with a lot of organized workers. How would the workers in his riding feel if the government told them that their union was welcome to continue to exist but down the line the jobs they have may well go to a bunch of workers who do not have a union and against whom every obstacle is going to be placed in order that they not have a union?
Must unions and workers change as well? The answer is probably yes. That is a bit difficult for me to say, but I think there is probably room for change on all sides of the business-government- labour triangle. The fact is that the work place is already changing, and the unions are changing as well.
The average education of workers in the United States is now grade 12, and we are probably not far behind in Ontario. As new technology creates jobs that provide for more responsibility and autonomy, at least for some, the workers will be looking for more say in their unions as well as in their work place. Those few unions that still take orders from the big cheese in Washington and are not prepared to give autonomy to the Canadian section had better watch out, because that situation will explode sooner or later.
Dare I say that when the select committee on technological change I proposed gets under way, it should look into the concept of industrial democracy and how that should apply in Ontario? Industrial democracy is an idea that has worried unions almost as much as management. There is a feeling that workers are always called upon to share responsibility when times are bad but they are shown the door once profits start to roll in again.
Once again, if trust is to exist, then a change that allows workers to participate in decisions about the work place has to be permanent and must not be revoked on a whim or because the bottom line begins to look a bit rosier.
In the past month, I have had a chance to talk with a large number of people in Ontario who are involved with the quality of working life programs. I would like to say, since the minister is here, that some of the experiments in which the Ontario Quality of Working Life Centre is involved are very exciting.
I think of the units at Ford in Oakville where production-line workers take time off to troubleshoot dealer complaints as far afield as Florida or California. That is one heck of a way of finding out what went wrong on the line. If the worker knows it himself, he will fix it a lot better than if some big cheese from management comes down once a week and tells you what you have to do.
There is another project which the Quality of Working Life Centre does not happen to be involved with but which is also exciting. There is a meat-packing plant, Miracle Food Mart up in Rexdale, where there are no foremen and where the proportion of supervisors, assistants and management of any kind to workers is cut to about one quarter of the usual level in a comparable plant. There are other places like that too.
I say to the minister I think the Quality of Working Life Centre is like a candle under a bushel, because people are not much aware of what it is doing but some of the implications of its work may be revolutionary.
The idea that workers in our democratic society who can speak up -- unless they are civil servants -- who can vote, can own property, can run a Legion hall, can run a small business or can run for Parliament, should be treated as children and told what to do once they clock into work just does not make good sense any more, if it ever did. When workers can do all those things outside their job, surely it makes compelling sense to draw on those same talents during the 40 hours a week they spend working for pay.
If the minister wants some proof of that, I suggest that he look at how Japan handles its human resources compared to how we do it here in Ontario. The kind of work place we still have in Ontario breeds alienation.
If we want commitment -- and, by God, I think we probably need it if we are going to survive as an industrial economy -- and if we want involvement on the part of workers, then workers have to get something pretty substantial in return. What that means is that management has to be prepared to share its power to make decisions. That means a fundamental change in traditional doctrines of management rights. It is such a fundamental change that it will only be achieved if government helps to show why it is time to bring democracy to the work place.
This February, the Ontario New Democratic Party adopted a policy that favours industrial democracy and worker involvement in decisions that affect the work place. It was not without difficulty that we came to that position. But nowadays major Ontario unions like the United Steelworkers, the United Auto Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union have shown leadership in supporting the government's creation of a Quality of Working Life Centre. So the attitudes are changing even though the unions know the risks and the dangers.
What concerns me, though, is that technology seems to be changing 10 times as fast as the attitudes of management, labour and government. I do not know whether the change in attitudes can be speeded up. People are human after all. But I cannot help feeling that leadership in creating a legislative framework for technological change would help.
I might add that if this government wants business and labour to co-operate more effectively, it has to encourage them to share information more freely. That is essential if workers are to participate in decisions. Ontario would have a lot more credibility in this regard if it stopped trying to sabotage freedom of information legislation in Parliament and stopped trying to pigeon-hole freedom of legislation information here in the Ontario Legislature seven years after the promise that it would bring it in.
If I can talk specifically about the legislative change that we need, we are living in turbulent times; the sudden emergence of microelectronics processing will make things even more confusing. I have argued so far that if Ontario is to withstand the challenge of changing technology, we have to have a new kind of worker, a new kind of work place and a new kind of management that no longer holds that management rights are sacred.
I have argued that change had better begin pretty fast, because the pace of technological change is just beginning to take off. But just what do we know about the impact on workers? The answer is, "Not a lot" Industry is not required to keep records on workers who are displaced by technological change and seldom does. Jobs disappear by attrition. One cannot see them going away until one starts to count.
Right now, Ontario has 398,000 workers who are officially unemployed and a further 150,000 who are hidden unemployed. We do not know how many of those workers will get back on the job if the economy turns around and how many are victims of technological change. We do not know whether women and youth are as threatened as they seem. Will we need to create new jobs, and how many? Will our industry be so productive or so noncompetitive that there is no way it will create the jobs it will need? In that case, what are the alternatives to work and unemployment, and how can we ensure that every Ontarian gets a fair share of the benefits from industries that have become superproductive because of new technology?
9:40 p.m.
I repeat, as a Socialist, that if 10 per cent of the industry can produce all the products we need in this province, then Socialists are needed. People need to know a way of fairly distributing that enormous potential rather than leaving it in the hands of a few entrepreneurs and maybe of a few workers.
I do not pretend to have the answers to all these questions. I know we should be asking them, though, and at least we should be starting to get the facts. Unless we assume there is no problem -- and I cannot believe that is the case -- it is urgent to get started on legislative measures that will protect and reassure workers and give workers the means and the right to participate in decisions that relate to technological change.
I want to give an agenda which I would suggest should be not the concluding point but the point from which we should begin.
First, there must be a commitment by Ontario to use every means within its power to ensure full employment in the province. That is one of the reasons labour is sceptical about the good faith of this government. Even if the economic situation in Britain, the European Economic Community or the United States is such that we could not have every worker in the province employed today, a full employment policy would try to get jobs for as many people as possible and that would mean the government is seen to have that as a number one priority.
Our party has talked about that on a number of occasions over the course of the past few years. That has to be a priority so workers know they are not being left on the scrap heap because governments have gotten together with business and decided their needs will come at the rear end.
Notice: The notice of a planned technological change should be given at the earliest possible date -- at a minimum, six months in the case of major changes. Technological change should be designed to include not only new machinery but also the introduction of new processes and work methods. People who have looked at this say, "We have to have a better definition for what technological change actually means; otherwise, management will always say we did not know that was technological change."
OC Transpo in Ottawa right now has just gone through a very dispiriting situation under the Canada Labour Code. Under the code, their workers were allowed to negotiate technological change. They signed a contract a year ago and a week later learned that management intended a major change in terms of the way they worked and in terms of computerized monitoring of the buses to find out where they were every minute or every minute and a half.
The workers wanted to be consulted. They wound up before the Canada Labour Relations Board and said: "We have the right to bargain this. Would you please give us the right, because that should be our right according to the code?" Now they have been refused by the Canada Labour Relations Board, which is not prepared to give it to them.
The notice has to be adequate. We have to have an adequate definition of technological change, and there has to be a commitment to err on the side of the workers in that definition, if anything, and not on the side of management.
Consultation: Workers should have the right to be fully informed about technological change and to be consulted about its application in the work place.
Bargaining: Unions should have the right to bargain all planned technological changes, with matters that cannot be settled going to arbitration.
Perhaps I could explain what that means. Arbitration takes time; it is a bit quixotic at times. One does not know what is going to come out of it, so it is dangerous for both sides. I think that is the only way that can be done if the union is going to bargain for technological change.
There should be the right to bargain, and management should know that if it cannot reach an agreement it is going to be held up on a technological change it presumably wants to bring in because it will save money or increase productivity.
That is a way of ensuring the workers are protected. It is a way of ensuring the benefits from that technological change will be shared with the workers rather than simply being kept entirely in the hands of management.
Workers should have the right to reopen their contract in the case of major change.
Job protection: Workers affected by technological change should have the right to severance pay. It does not exist in this province right now except in rare cases. They should have the right to preferred hiring elsewhere in the company. It does not exist now, as the Inco workers found when they tried to get jobs in Thompson, Manitoba. They learned they had no rights once they were 25 miles outside Sudbury.
Workers should have access to retraining either for new work within the company or for new work outside. That is not a right now; it is a grace and favour kind of thing. What the government promised in the throne speech was that they would provide more counselling services so that workers would have a better idea of just how unlucky they were to be in a plant that was shutting down or in a job affected by technological change.
As we have said before, companies that seek to shut down all or a major part of a plant should be required to justify publicly their decision both to the union and to the community. Time and financing should be available to any group that is prepared to take over the operation and to maintain the jobs.
Once again, we have to err on the side of keeping jobs, because we know jobs are being destroyed by new technology. It is a lot harder to know where the new jobs are going to come from, and the new jobs may not even be created in Ontario, in Canada or on this continent.
Pensions: The pension rights of all workers must be protected and must be portable without the present restrictions of 10 years' service and age 45. I would go beyond that and suggest that a select committee should look at the Canada pension plan and at who suffers from technological change.
If a worker over 55 is affected by technological change, does it make sense to leave that worker for 10 years on a combination of a low-wage or a no-wage job or unemployment insurance and all kinds of indignities while he fights with younger workers to have a job?
Perhaps we could extend CPP benefits at the age of 55 to a worker in that situation, recognizing the difficulty of retraining, which is evident in the failure to retrain over the last 30 or 40 years, and saying we will do it better for younger workers. At any rate, workers' pension rights must be protected and must be portable.
Participation: I am now moving into the area that management may not like, but I believe they have to accept it, and the government has to help them accept it.
Workers affected by technological change should have the right to participate in evaluating technological change, such as the new word processors in offices of the future for the government, in selecting technological change, in adapting their work place to technological change and in implementing technological change. Otherwise, the change will be seen by most workers as being done to them rather than being done with them. An atmosphere of confrontation will take place. The workers will not work well with the new equipment. The gains or productivity that management hopes for will not be achieved. We will be uncompetitive, and the benefits that could accrue to society will be not achieved.
Not only that, but on a broader basis I suggest the government should enunciate as a matter of policy that workers in general should have the general right to participate in decisions that affect their work place and its day-to-day operation.
Once again, I think a select committee should look at that, because even in an industry where the technological change is several years down the line, we have to start adapting now if we are going to work smarter later.
Perhaps in nonunionized firms there should be an obligatory worker-management consultation committee with the right to meet and to consult on a regular basis. Even though not organized, the workers should have the right to elect by secret ballot their own representatives. If that happened to lead to an encouragement of unionization, then so be it. I do not think it is a bad thing so far as workers and the kind of partnership that we should have in Ontario industry are concerned.
The general rights should be put down in legislation. In Norway in 1976 they put into legislation the desirable characteristics of a job to encourage autonomy and the right for workers to make their own decisions, to enable them to see as a whole what a job is all about rather than just seeing one little fraction of what a job is, to be able to participate and to be able to be seen as a person rather than as a cog in a machine.
There are a number of other things; I do not have them in front of me. Perhaps we should put that into legislation in Ontario. Perhaps the select committee should look at that as something that would be desirable. If that meant we in this province became leaders in applying new principles to the work place, that would be a damned good thing, because we have a lot to learn in North America about how co-operation should work in the work place. If Ontario could be a leader in that regard, I think everybody in this province would benefit.
9:50 p.m.
Union recognition: Because it is vital to have worker participation in meeting the challenge of technological change, workers should be encouraged to form their own unions and legislative obstacles should be removed.
Management rights: As I have said before, it should be recognized by legislation that management must share its control over the enterprise if workers are to co-operate in adapting to technological change. We have a preamble to the Labour Relations Act which gives the reasons this province endorses the right of workers to have their own unions. Perhaps some other preamble or some other statement of policy is required.
We take rights away from management by making them pay taxes, by making them pay unemployment insurance benefits, by making them conform to the Workmen's Compensation Board, to hours of work, overtime provisions, holiday pay provisions, safe working provisions, health and safety and so on. It is no big deal to take it further and say the idea that everything else that is not specified in legislation or in the contract is a right of a worker; that is 19th century. We are moving into the 21st century. We have to change that idea and say that those determinations about where a firm goes and what is done have to be shared.
Continuous learning: On-the-job learning should be recognized as an integral part of every job in order that Ontario can meet the demands of technological change without making workers redundant.
Heather Menzies, a friend of mine in Ottawa, has written a book, Women and the Chip. The minister may be familiar with it. She writes about one place where 130 clerical jobs were eliminated because of technological change; 110 technical jobs were created. The net loss was 20, which did not seem quite so bad at first, until you realized that of the 130 workers displaced only two were able to retrain and take the new jobs that were being created.
What kind of work place are we going to have in the future? Will workers be cogs in a machine and if they do not happen to fit they are thrown on the scrap heap? It is like saying if you have a transmission gear for a Ford you cannot put it into a Chevrolet. If workers are treated in that way we will have a situation where we will be scouring the world for skilled workers while our own workers draw the dole or line up in soup kitchen lines in downtown Toronto and in downtown Ottawa.
We have to have continuous learning in the work place and outside the work place, a levy grant system, paid educational leave for workers so they can learn what workers need to know among other things, and so they can protect workers' interests in finding out and participating in decisions about the work place.
It is no surprise that some of this program is familiar; New Democrats have been arguing for it for years. Trade unions have been trying to bargain it for years too, but have usually met entrenched resistance from management. As far as the government is concerned, the record is not much better. There are only four jurisdictions in Canada that give workers the right to bargain over technological change during the life of a contract. They are the federal government, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia.
Even though we are probably affected by technological change more than any other province, Ontario does not allow workers to bargain for technological change unless their contract is up for renewal. Do we just sit back and wait for three years until something happens or do we begin to look for action now? I cannot accept that we have to wait until 1985, because microelectronic technology is posing such a critical problem to our economy. No one knows how great a problem it is. It is also creating opportunities which are very exciting, but which may well be more limited.
Let me return to my original argument. Is the problem as I have stated it? Do we run devastating risks in terms of future employment in Ontario? There is very strong evidence that we do. Has any party or any body developed a policy which will resolve the problem? Judging by the unemployment figures and by what seems to lie ahead, certainly not in Ontario, and once again I am prepared to say mea culpa as far as the NDP is concerned. I happen to think our industrial policy is headed in the right direction, but we need to come to grips with just what is happening in the work place and the kinds of policies that should be directed to resolving the problems. I have suggested some answers, but I do not pretend that those are the only answers or all the answers we need to find out.
I would add for the benefit of the minister -- I might say this is a means of getting compliance; and, let us face it, there may have to be compliance in the beginning -- that every year Ontario gives out billions of dollars in tax handouts and tax expenditures to business, as does the federal government, through accelerated depreciation, exemption from sales tax on production machinery, grants, funds from the Board of Industrial Leadership and Development and those kinds of things. We do that in every way we can, and more and more ways seem to have been created in the last few years to put government money in the hands of private business -- some of them justified, some not.
I want to suggest that the select committee should look very seriously at whether the way the work place works is not so important and the need for change so urgent that we should make all those government handouts and tax expenditures conditional on management and labour making progress towards a form of industrial democracy where the decisions are shared rather than being imposed by management. If those people in management are not prepared to change, then let them have it their way if they want to, but do not let them expect to get the kinds of benefits, tax expenditures and tax concessions they have had in the past.
We should look seriously at that. I do not know whether it would be effective, but it is one measure and we have to find things that work because the pace of change is just coming so fast.
I think the proposals I have made are good ones. They have a lot of support from the labour movement and from my party. But there is not enough time to wait for a New Democratic Party government in 1985 to start implementing these proposals.
The task force on microelectronics, which was set up in 1980, was intended to study the actual and potential social impact of the microelectronics technology. It had a sense of the crisis we are facing. I want to come to that, because I want to conclude now by talking about why we should set up a select committee and get it working by this summer.
Although the task force was more optimistic about job creation than I am, it said very bluntly, and I quote:
"There is no doubt that technological change leads to job displacement and the obsolescence of hard-won skills. The challenge is to ensure that the technology does not simply eliminate jobs in Canada and create new jobs elsewhere. Without awareness, followed by planning and co-operation, the results could be disastrous."
The situation right now is that we do not have awareness, we do not have planning, we do not have co-operation and we run a risk that the results will be disastrous.
The task force argued for the co-operative management of change, and because it had focused on the needs of the Ontario microelectronics industry, particularly the creation of the technology centre in Ottawa, it called for a second task force that would look at the social impact of microtechnology at work, on education and in the home.
It also called for co-operative programs between government, labour and industry to plan for the introduction of technological change, to monitor the impact of the new technology on health and safety and to help cushion workers displaced by the introduction of new technologies.
They were headed in the right direction. It was a very slim report they came in with, but they said: "Do not stop now. You have to do more." It is sad to say the government sat on the report for seven months before it even released it. Since that time there has been no evidence that the government has really absorbed those parts of the task force report that I have quoted. A second task force has not been announced. Measures to involve labour have not been taken. Meanwhile, the new technology is spreading at an incredible rate.
It is time to get the process of planning and joint action under way. I do not think another task force is the appropriate vehicle, perhaps because the last one was so low profile. We need an arena where ideas can be exchanged and debated. We need a body that will help to educate the public to the impact of new technology on Ontario. We need a means to generate some of the questions in the area of social impact, for example, which I have barely touched on in this speech because, as I said, as politicians we do not have the answers and may not yet even have the questions.
We need a body that is capable of making the political judgement about how measures in use in other countries, such as the job protection programs in western Europe, could be adapted to Ontario. That is why I think the select committee is the appropriate vehicle to assess the impact of technological change in Ontario. The committee can serve as a forum to generate attention, ideas and policy for dealing with the technological revolution Ontario is facing. It can help the three major parties develop an awareness of the most central economic and social issue of the 1980s. It can help build a consensus for new policies to respond to technological change within the Legislature, within the government and within the province as a whole.
10 p.m.
I see this select committee being given the same kind of prestige and resources that were provided to the select committee on economic and cultural nationalism 10 years ago. The present Minister of Industry and Trade (Mr. Walker) was a member of that committee, as was the House leader of the New Democratic Party.
The committee should travel the province, receive briefs, commission research and coordinate its work with government departments which are starting to look at technological change, like that office of the future group in the Management Board of Cabinet. It should try to serve as a catalyst and stimulate the changes in attitudes that will be needed in Ontario.
In stimulating the changes in attitudes that will be needed in Ontario, since the Minister of Labour (Mr. Ramsay) is still here, I say that his government as a whole, and perhaps all of us opposition politicians too, have to try to serve in that role. That is one of the reasons I intend to devote some more time to what is happening in terms of technological policy and what is changing in the province because I think it is urgent and important, not just for the people getting jobs in my riding of Ottawa Centre, but for the people across the province who may be getting or may be losing jobs because of new technology.
The microprocessor that allows my kid to work like a professional secretary can just as well destroy skills and jobs that took decades to acquire. The only way to imagine what its impact may be is to look at how the steam engine changed industry or to look at how the automobile has changed our cities in the last 60 or 70 years.
When one is faced with change on that scale, one either plans for it or chaos results. That is a process in which I believe this Legislature must be involved. That is why I am proposing we establish a select committee. It is a process which, if we get involved in it, might even make this Legislature relevant to Ontario's future.
Believe me, from the perspective of a few months on the back benches, there are serious dangers this Legislature will become totally irrelevant to what is happening in the province. The select committee of this Legislature is an idea all of us in Ontario need. I hope it will be accepted by the government and implemented at the earliest possible date.
Mr. Runciman: Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the throne speech debate today and to outline to the House some of the issues I believe are of great importance to those I represent in the riding of Leeds. We are into the fourth week of debate and several respected members have described their considerable concerns about Canada's economic drift --
Mr. Conway: George Fulford had pink pills for pale people. What is your prescription?
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Wrye): Carry on.
Mr. Piché: Don't listen to him; go ahead
Mr. Conway: At least the member for Lanark knows who Fulford is.
Hon. Mr. Wiseman: I know that fellow well.
Mr. Runciman: In any event, as I said, several members have described their considerable concerns about Canada's economic drift, aggravated as it is by policies that are driving investment dollars south of the border in the billions, policies that make Canadian business hesitate to invest, policies that make developers delay badly needed housing projects, and policies that encourage our young people to seek the greener pastures of the western provinces and the United States. Young Canadians are leaving --
Mr. Boudria: It sounds like the policies of your government.
Mr. Runciman: Just listen, fellows. Young Canadians are leaving Ontario in increasing numbers and they represent a resource we can ill afford to lose, a resource I have oft-times heard referred to as our greatest resource. That is a sentiment I share.
Accordingly, as a representative of a constituency in eastern Ontario particularly hard hit and increasingly threatened by this adverse climate created by the Liberal government in Ottawa, I would like to suggest the Ontario government must play, and is expected to play, an increasing role in ameliorating the extraordinary problems which plague my region's economy, as a typical case.
Mr. Samis: It sounds like government intervention.
Mr. Runciman: That's where you are from. Listen to this.
To the province's credit, many Ontario regions have shown considerable resistance to the current economic downturn. I wish I could say that eastern Ontario was one of them. It is not. Indeed, most members will agree that constituencies which lie along the St. Lawrence River experience severe and unique economic pressures.
Employment statistics show a disturbing trend in our area of the province. Latest figures indicate a decline of almost 20,000 jobs between last summer and this spring --
Mr. Mancini: What's your government doing about that?
Mr. Runciman: I will get to that.
This is a particularly depressing situation in an area not noted for its great abundance of job opportunities at the best of times.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: And consistent Tory representation.
Mr. Runciman: My riding of Leeds is but one small segment of eastern Ontario but it is typical of the region outside the bigger centres. While it is primarily rural in character and structure the impact of the statistics is no less severe. It is causing an increasing exodus of young people from the farms and villages of the region, for there are fewer and fewer job opportunities or other incentives to keep them there.
Farming, into which many of our young people would have entered automatically years ago, no longer is open to them. This is because of the huge costs involved, not only in land but in the cost and scarcity of milk quotas, egg quotas, poultry quotas and other controls. A young fellow cannot begin to think of setting up a small cheese plant, neither could a group of young farmers; control of milk supplies would prevent it. The controlled marketing system may be good for those who are in it but it has also taken away a great deal of incentive for those on the outside wanting to get in.
Mr. Mancini: That's it, you're all finished in the farm community.
Mr. Runciman: That member had better go and speak to Mr. Whelan, his buddy out in Ottawa.
Mr. Mancini: He supports marketing boards; he's for the people.
Mr. Runciman: Yes, that is for sure.
Mr. Conway: Is there any truth to the rumour you are going to try for a federal candidacy? Yes or no?
Mr. Runciman: A dairy farm with a quota today represents a whopping investment. One cannot start with a few cows and work up any more. The young farmer is expected to start at the top. Since this is a fact of life in rural areas now, should we not be looking for alternatives in regions such as Leeds?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Hear, hear. Especially in representation.
Mr. Runciman: Mr. Speaker, can you do anything to control those characters?
The Acting Speaker: Order. The member for Leeds has the floor. The member for Renfrew North will restrain himself.
Mr. Runciman: I appreciate that.
Mr. Conway: I just wanted the member for Leeds to pronounce himself on the federal candidacy.
Mr. Runciman: What I have to suggest may not be news but it is reality. Special assistance is needed, especially in the rural areas. In fact, it is my belief that limited government funding, having restraints in mind, could produce rich dividends. It would help create an industrial and business development commission for the rural municipalities in Leeds. I feel sure this would be of immeasurable benefit to this hard-pressed section of eastern Ontario. While we have self-help in mind it will need financial encouragement to get off the ground.
I will shortly be presenting to the government a proposal to provide short-term funding assistance for a Leeds economic development commission and I strongly urge that it receive favourable consideration. We in Leeds have long taken a back seat as we witnessed millions of government dollars pouring into large urban centres in eastern Ontario -- and I did not mention Cornwall. Millions of government dollars pour into large urban centres in eastern Ontario while the smaller rural municipalities receive what to them is perceived as token attention.
A lot of small villages in my riding -- and this applies to most of rural eastern Ontario -- are experiencing a slow death. Their populations are shrinking as young people leave to find work; their schools and many small businesses are closing or facing closure due to this decrease in population. In my opinion, it is fast approaching a crisis situation and for a minimal cash outlay the province can start a rescue mission, one that will help people to help themselves. To do otherwise is to turn our backs on an opportunity to halt a dry rot that is besetting our rural villages, an opportunity and a need that begs for recognition.
Still concerned about my own area, but concerned also --
Mr. Mancini: Fermé la bouche.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Remo, those lessons are paying off.
Mr. Piché: Remo, translate that into Italian.
10:10 p.m.
Mr. Runciman: Still concerned about my own area, but concerned also in the broader sense with the entire province, I would consider the industrial health of this province a priority at this time too. I would like to touch on the loss of competitive edge within our own country and in international trade; international, of course, translating into trade with the United States.
My concern has to do with the cost of energy as related to two or three points. First, there is the oil pricing agreement between the federal and Alberta governments and the problems it has caused many of us, from consumers paying constantly increasing costs to heat homes and to run cars, to the petrochemical industries.
Chemical exporters, some in my own area, have been asking our government to help them deal with some of the problems the agreement has created. In my view, the province, in order to protect the interests of these companies, should look at the possibility of interceding with the federal government to have the agreement modified in order to link the price of oil in Canada to the US price.
Indexation should not be limited to international pricing alone. This type of linkage to US pricing is critical for Ontario industry in order to balance off some of its inherent disadvantages compared to its US competitors.
I submit that Ontario's business and industry no longer enjoys the edge it once did due to a combination of factors, not the least of which was the cost of all forms of energy. Remember when Ontario boasted the lowest cost electrical energy in North America? In more recent years, remember when Canada's huge reserves of natural gas were going to give us a competitive edge? We were going to heat our homes and run our factories on natural gas more economically than any other country. I would like to think that we can once again give our industry that competitive edge. We still have the quality of workmanship to compare with any of our competitors but we need that something extra that other governments attempt to give to their industry.
This may be of interest to my friends over on the left. Another issue of concern to me and to my constituents is that of arbitration practices. It is important that we move towards the provision of fairer arbitration settlements for employees in the municipal sector, particularly those who come under the Police Act, the Fire Departments Act and the Hospital Labour Disputes Arbitration Act. Because of the services provided by employees in this area, strikes and lockouts are prohibited as tactics to be used in solving labour disputes.
The items of legislation I have mentioned require binding arbitration once it becomes apparent that conventional bargaining is going nowhere. However, the ways in which arbitration is approached in existing legislation varies quite substantially. Each act has its own strengths and weaknesses and I believe it is now time for this government to act in order to eliminate these weaknesses and to provide for greater consistency in the area of arbitration.
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario has an obvious interest in this matter and I believe that a proposal prepared for AMO and the municipal police authorities has some merit and should be given consideration when changes to our existing legislation are contemplated. Anyone who has been involved in the process will know that at best, arbitration is a poor substitute for good collective bargaining. However, negotiators on both sides often find it easier to force arbitration in order to avoid taking the responsibility for any aspect of the agreement.
I would, therefore, support the proposal in the AMO report that before binding arbitration is imposed, an intermediate stage of compulsory mediation should be inserted in order to provide an incentive for more serious bargaining.
Mr. Mancini: You want the police to strike. That's it.
Mr. Runciman: No, no. Then, if a dispute does go to arbitration, the AMO report proposes that criteria for arbitrators be established by statute.
Mr. Laughren: Have you talked to the Minister of Labour about this?
Mr. Mancini: One more level of bureaucracy.
The Deputy Speaker: The member for Leeds has the floor.
Mr. Runciman: This would result in more serious bargaining which would, in the long run, benefit the municipality concerned, its residents and the people of Ontario.
I have one point coming up that is very near and dear to the heart of the member for Essex South (Mr. Mancini), so I am sure he is going to pay rapt attention to what I have to say.
I would like to spend a moment or two on an issue I feel is very close to the hearts of the average citizens in this province. It has to do with the forced use of metric.
Last week, I noted with no small measure of satisfaction that my views on the subject are shared with the same fervour by thousands of Canadians.
Mr. Haggerty: You should talk to your boss over there, the Premier (Mr. Davis).
The Deputy Speaker: Carry on.
Mr. Runciman: I intend to. I was gratified and encouraged to see that this federal madness, this mandatory madness, this irresponsible and blatant disregard for small business and ordinary people, this imposition by threat of fines and jail, this forced use of the metric system has been challenged by those of us who cherish our freedom and our basic right to choose. We do not appreciate having no voice in such arbitrary government action, especially when that action represents broken promises and no one seems ready to do anything about it.
In my view --
The Deputy Speaker: Order, please. A point of privilege from the member for Essex South.
Mr. Mancini: I feel it is very important at this time to inform the House that the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations (Mr. Elgie) for the province was on the radio in the Windsor area and stated emphatically that Ontario had no intention whatsoever of slowing up the metric process and that the government was going to let things proceed as they were. I think the --
The Deputy Speaker: Order, please. That was not a point of privilege. The member for Leeds.
Mr. Runciman: The minister is welcome to his point of view.
In my view, metric measurement, enforced under penalty of law, aided by countless enforcers -- the metric Gestapo is the way I like to refer to them -- is a horrifying shock to a great many Canadians. I do not want any government telling the people who built this country that they must use metric or go to jail. I do not want the government telling me to think, shop and talk in metric unless that is my free wish and it is not.
Mr. Cassidy: If you were an Ontario civil servant you would get fired for saying that.
Mr. Laughren: Are you ever lucky you're not a civil servant. If the Minister of Natural Resources (Mr. Pope) gets word of this you'll be fired. You'll lose your seat if he gets word of this.
Mr. Runciman: Mr. Speaker, I just have to wonder if the constituents of these gentlemen opposite could be made aware of their position when we are dealing with the forced use of metric. If they knew the way these so-called gentlemen are acting here this evening, I think the members would be facing a lot of heat.
It frightens me to think that so many of us can sit quietly, unanimous in our silent disregard for our older citizens, the people who built this country we enjoy, the Earl McEwans. These older people have come to me in their sadness wondering what is happening to their beloved country. One elderly woman said this to me about metric, "I wish they had waited until I was dead." What an awful commentary.
Members have heard of future shock. Well, these older people, and some not so old, are suffering from metric shock. They are frustrated by the metric system and they do not know where to turn for help. I think the Ontario government has a role to play in helping them and in helping people in small businesses. Let us listen to the majority of our people, those who do not want to be forced to use metric, and let us urge the federal government to call a halt to further metrication.
Mr. Laughren: What a hypocrite you are. Your whole government supports it and you stand up --
Mr. Runciman: No, our government does not support the forced use of metric measurement.
A few weeks ago the member for Essex South took me to task for getting involved in the forced use of metric. He said it was a federal matter and I should not be poking my nose into it. Well, saying it is a federal problem has been a very convenient out for a great many provincial politicians across this country. But the truth is something else again.
We would not be in this metric mess if provincial governments had not gone along for the ride -- if provincial governments had expended the time and energy to examine critically the veracity of the federal government's claims of trade advantage.
10:20 p.m.
Mr. Laughren: Where is the Premier? The Premier supports the metric system. What are you talking about?
Mr. McClellan: He invented the metric system.
Mr. Runciman: I would like to know where the New Democratic Party stands on the issue of forced use of metric. Where does the NDP stand on freedom of choice in this country? They do not know their position.
We would not be in this metric mess if provincial governments had not gone along for the ride, if they had expended the time and energy to examine critically the veracity of the federal government's claims of trade advantage, inevitability, a US-Britain switchover and, most important, their false commitment to a voluntary program.
Mr. Laughren: Don't be such a hypocrite.
Mr. Runciman: I am not a hypocrite. The member may be, but I am not. I was saying this four years ago. Regrettably, provincial governments chose not to take that course and instead jumped right into the spider's web of federal government policy.
Mr. Martel: That's because of that dumb Joe Clark.
Mr. Runciman: There was a remark thrown across the floor about Joe Clark. When the federal Progressive Conservatives took power, they rescinded the order in council that made the metric system mandatory. When the Liberals assumed power again, they came right back in with that order in council making metric mandatory. Do not say that Joe Clark did not do the proper thing, because he did.
Political parties of every stripe failed even to adequately approach representing the interests of their constituents. Some of the fellows across the floor were around here; I think most of them were. In 1978, there was a debate in this House --
Mr. Ruston: Larry Grossman brought in the law about metric in Ontario.
Mr. Runciman: We want to see how much those chaps care about this.
With few exceptions, the debate consisted mainly of jocular and sometimes inane comments. The biggest point of concern seemed to be whether the Argos would perform better on a metric field. When we consider the impact of forced metric on all our lives, on our culture and heritage, on our economy and on our freedoms as Canadians, this House and all parties in it have little to be proud of when the record is reviewed.
But it is not too late to change that. Too often governments commit themselves to policies and programs that quickly prove to be in error but, for reasons known best to them and their bureaucrats, they continue to forge ahead unwilling to admit a mistake has been made. There is no doubt in my mind that a dreadful, costly mistake has been made with the forced use of metric, and I implore the government and this House to take action to neutralize this federal government assault on our freedoms.
At the provincial level, I believe we should initially indicate quite clearly to the federal government that Ontario does not support the forced use of metric measurement and urge a return to the voluntary program as originally promised. If that fails to have an impact on our friends in Ottawa, the province can move on its own to pressure the federal government into action.
One of the options available is legislation requiring advertising and signs to have both measurements, perhaps with imperial being dominant. We could also convert selected provincial statutes back to imperial. The Highway Traffic Act would have the most immediate impact. We could put the province back on to standard paper and on and on; there are all kinds of options.
Make no mistake about it, we at the provincial level have the jurisdictional powers to force the federal government's hand on the enforced use of metric. The question is, do we have the desire? Listening to that group over there, it is quite obvious they do not. I am trying to do something about it. What are they doing besides sitting there and acting like a bunch of yahoos? Not a heck of a lot.
If the federal government is unwilling to withdraw the mandatory provisions of metric law, I urge this government and this House to take whatever actions are necessary to frustrate the federal effort.
Mr. Martel: Why don't you get serious and talk about something with substance?
Mr. Runciman: Let us muster the intestinal fortitude required and give the people of this province and this country a clear indication that this government and this Legislature are willing to listen to the people they represent.
Mr. Martel: Talk about jobs instead of nonsense. Why don't you talk about jobs?
The Deputy Speaker: Order, please. I know this is a very controversial matter, but the member for Leeds has the floor. Will you please give him the opportunity of continuing with his speech? And that includes the member for Sudbury East (Mr. Martel).
Mr. Martel: If he wants to talk about something, tell him to talk about jobs for people. This crap is not worth taking the time of the House for.
Mr. Runciman: Mr. Speaker, I only have a few minutes. I am going to change topics. We know where those guys stand.
As a voice crying in the wilderness, I would like to address again an issue which I feel is of urgent and humanitarian purpose. I think this is a very serious matter and, if the members opposite would have the decency to listen and hear a few words, they would realize how serious this is.
The Deputy Speaker: I agree. Let us restrain ourselves for four minutes.
Mr. Runciman: Mr. Speaker, terminally ill cancer patients in this country are forbidden the use of heroin as a painkiller during their last stages of life. I would like to see the law changed to permit its therapeutic use.
I first raised this issue in the House almost one year ago, and since that time I have been frustrated by the lack of interest of both the provincial and federal governments and the Canadian Cancer Society.
The same old worn-out excuses have been trotted out time and time again, while people dying of cancer have been denied the opportunity to live their last days in a dignified and pain-free manner.
The medical establishment is divided on the relative merits of heroin versus morphine as effective painkillers.
Mr. Martel: Are you paid to say this?
Mr. Runciman: Yes, that is right. My friend and I should talk about that outside.
In tests conducted by the Vince Lombardi Cancer Research Institute of Georgetown University in the United States, the patients rated heroin as being two and a half times more effective than morphine in relieving their pain.
Frankly, I do not really care whether it is more convenient for the medical profession to use one or the other. The point is, if heroin relieves pain for some patients, then it should be made available to them. I fail to see any problems that may arise if this happens that are not surmountable.
In the United States, there is a proposed amendment to the Controlled Substances Act that would permit heroin to be used on cancer patients under very strict and exacting conditions. It is receiving widespread support that cuts across all political and ideological lines.
This is not a political issue, and it is not even a medical issue. It is a humanitarian concern for the quality of the life we live. How can we sit back and judge the merits of heroin when we have no concept of the pain and suffering that goes on without the kind of pain relief that is surely the right of every patient and every person in our society?
My inquiries last year into the matter resulted in lengthy written replies from the federal and provincial ministers of health, the federal Minister of Justice and the vice-president of the Canadian Cancer Society. All the letters were of a negative nature, but perhaps most distressing was the fact that several paragraphs in each letter were identical, word for word. That has to make me wonder just how closely they studied the issue.
I call upon our new Minister of Health (Mr. Grossman) and the Minister of National Health and Welfare to take a fresh look at this situation -- and I emphasize "a fresh look" -- and give doctors and patients the opportunity to explore all avenues to relieve pain. Heroin has proved its worth in this regard; 37 countries throughout the world already allow it to be used for this purpose. It is high time that Canada and Ontario joined the ranks of those willing to make the last days of life tolerable for cancer patients.
Mr. Speaker, I do not have much time. I commend the government's efforts to attract tourists in the face of some very stiff competition from New York state and Quebec. But more needs to be done to attract a greater share of these tourism dollars to eastern Ontario.
The natural beauty of Leeds and some first-rate resort facilities, once discovered, often bring vacationers back to eastern Ontario. But the major problem remains. Other than the beautiful Thousand Islands and the Rideau lakes, there is no major drawing card, no specific attractions.
I have made a proposal to the government that could eliminate that deficiency. Perhaps most members are aware that until the 1950s Brockville was a major Canadian rail centre. At one time it had more than 1,000 people working on three railways, the Canadian National Railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the old Brockville to Westport. The oldest railway tunnel in all of Canada runs right under the city from north to south, indeed, right under the city hall. It is an ideal location for developing a first-class railway museum.
Ever since Pierre Berton, who by the way has expressed an interest in this project, wrote The Last Spike, the public's interest in and attachment to the railway has been growing by leaps and bounds. This sentiment is not limited to Canadians. Europeans and Americans have also found a rekindled affection for railways and the romanticism and pioneering spirit they have come to represent.
I brought this proposal forward last summer. Several meetings have been held with the CPR and municipal and provincial officials. A few weeks ago, with the assistance of the province, economic assessment experts from California spent two days in Brockville reviewing the proposal. The CPR has been extremely cooperative, especially in terms of their offer to reinstall trackage and supply vintage railway equipment.
This development, taking place on a staged basis over a number of years, ultimately envisages a train run of approximately three miles starting at the riverfront, going through the tunnel, with station stops at the city's 55-acre recreation area and the provincial-municipal conservation area.
The Deputy Speaker: Order, please. I wonder if at this time the honourable member would like to adjourn the debate.
On motion by Mr. Runciman, the debate was adjourned.
The House adjourned at 10:31 p.m.