Legislative Assembly of Ontario

REPORT, STANDING COMMITTEE ON PROCEDURAL AFFAIRS (CONTINUED)

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The House resumed at 8 p.m.

REPORT, STANDING COMMITTEE ON PROCEDURAL AFFAIRS (CONTINUED)

Resuming the adjourned debate on the motion for adoption of the fifth report of the standing committee on procedural affairs on agencies, boards and commissions.

Mr. Kerr: I would like to comment briefly on the fifth report on agencies, boards and commissions. Honourable members will see, if they have a copy of it in front of them, that it refers to the Ontario Board of Censors, the Ontario Police Commission, the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority and the Ontario Energy Board.

This is, in my opinion, a good report. There are in it some very meaty recommendations, some of which have been adopted or will be adopted by those ministers who have responsibility for the agencies or commissions.

In reviewing the agencies considered by the committee, the committee found that the Board of Censors was, to say the least, rather interesting.

Mr. Nixon: I hear you went down and watched some of the movies.

Mr. Kerr: Yes. The committee visited the offices and facilities of the theatres branch of the censor board in Leaside. We met and talked with members of the board and viewed some of the films that were required for showing. We also viewed some of the films that were rejected by the censor board and some of those which ultimately were shown in a restricted category after having had some portions censored.

For example, we saw The Tin Drum, which, as members know, is a rather controversial movie, particularly the part which had been deleted. The censored clip was the subject of a great deal of controversy.

I think the committee left those offices with a much better idea of the board's task and responsibility and the difficulty it has in making some of its decisions.

We concluded there was a lot of garbage coming into Ontario under the guise of entertainment. It is important some method of classification or censoring is carried out in Ontario by a board of this kind to siphon off the garbage I have talked about.

The members will note from the report the three main criteria used by the board in censoring motion pictures: One is excessive violence, the second is sexual exploitation of children and the third is excessive ill-treatment of animals in motion pictures.

There are five recommendations in the report. One is to change the name of the board. I am sure this will be referred to later by my colleague who will be speaking specifically about the Ontario Board of Censors. It is requested there be some relation to community standards in imposing any type of classification or censorship, that people who are appointed to the board reflect a cross-section of the population of our province, and that there be a better definition of the word "obscene" or "obscenity."

Also, there is the last recommendation that "the Attorney General of Ontario increase his efforts to enforce the 'obscenity' provisions of the Criminal Code." We felt as a committee that by doing this it would take a certain amount of heat off the censor board. Obscenity can be in various forms. If the existing provisions of the Criminal Code in relation to obscenity were enforced when there is cruelty, undue exploitation of children, excessive sex or what have you in motion pictures, a certain precedent would be established by which the board could judge censorship in the future.

It could set criteria for classification in a way the members of the board could refer to some decision or precedent of the courts rather than put up with the criticism that in some way they are being unfairly hard on good motion pictures which may be classified as some form of culture.

In dealing with the Ontario Police Commission, the members will note most of the recommendations deal with training, standards and complaint procedures. These are most appropriate areas and need consideration. There has been substantial discussion and debate about complaint procedures, about citizens' complaints. We now have some legislation dealing with complaint procedures, particularly in relation to the Metropolitan Board of Commissioners of Police. We think these are pertinent recommendations, requiring consideration, and which need to be made.

8:10 p.m.

Regarding the complaint procedure, we have come up with a rather simple solution. There is such a thing as the Ontario Police Commission. It has been established for a number of years. We think it is an independent body, an unbiased body, a body made up of a certain amount of expertise, people with background, training and education. We make the suggestion, on page 15 of the report, that the citizen complaint process consist of two steps. In the first instance a complaint may be lodged with the local chief of police or local police governing body. Any appeal therefrom would lie directly to the Ontario Police Commission.

We do not have to establish anything new. We do not have to hire 10, 15 or 20 citizens to set up a commission to deal with complaints against police. We suggest that what exists at the present time should be made use of and ultimately the Ontario Police Commission be given the authority to make the final decision.

On the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority, which is another rather important body, particularly to those of us who live in southwestern Ontario and southern Ontario and the Metropolitan Toronto area, we have a number of recommendations. We recognize the need for better service, expanded service. We deal with the question of rights of way, the difficulties the ministry has had with Canadian National Railways in respect to rights of way, the contracts that have been entered into between the province and the CNR, and the unreasonableness of the CNR in respect to the use of the rights of way.

Happily, since this report was published, we have had an announcement by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications regarding a new long-term program and plans over a 10- or 15-year period for the expansion of TATOA, the expansion of rapid transit and for the twinning of rail lines to Hamilton and to Oshawa. This answers many of the recommendations in our report, particularly with respect to the extension of rail commuter service to Oshawa in the east and to Hamilton-Stoney Creek.

It is almost psychic the way we came up with this recommendation. It is quite possible that the minister, on receiving a draft copy of this report, brought in his general recommendations for improved services on GO Transit in the province. In that respect, the committee has done its work very well; it has been made very worth while.

But seriously, by the twinning of the most used lines in the most populated area in the south Lakeshore corridor, by using our own rights of way or hydro rights of way with a different form or type of transportation, there is no question that we overcome the difficulty we are having in making contracts with some other government agency or tribunal in respect to the use of their rights of way. That has been a major problem and a major stumbling block with the ministry.

The Ontario Energy Board: The committee dealt extensively with the operation of the board. In my opinion, and I think members will agree, the most important recommendation in that report is the one which recommends that the Ontario Energy Board have the power to order the final rate structure of Ontario Hydro in respect to applications for rate increases by Hydro.

As members know, at the present time, after lengthy hearings, the board can just recommend. This year, however, because of our restraint program and the restraint environment generally, the Ontario Energy Board recommendation was for the most part accepted by Hydro in setting its rates rather than the figure or percentage for which the corporation had asked. With gas companies and other utilities, the decision of the energy board is final and has to be followed by private utilities, Therefore, rather than having some form of charade, we consider the same should apply to Ontario Hydro. I am sure this will be a subject of some debate a little later.

Another point raised by our committee in this report deals with the question of uninterrupted service in the event of a gas company ceasing its operations. In a number of situations, some small independent gas companies, particularly in eastern Ontario, have for various reasons gone under. Thus, despite the fact that customers have paid their bills up to date, the companies have ceased to operate because of various problems with the utility, thereby denying service to these customers. We suggest that the Ontario Energy Board or the Ministry of Energy step in to ensure that there is uninterrupted service in the event of a gas company ceasing its operations in that way.

Also, we recommend on page 30 that if somebody has not paid his bill and there is some question of whether or not there had been proper notice, then hydro service or gas service to a customer, particularly if it is used for heating a home, should never be cut off on Saturday or Sunday. On those days he cannot complain and even the emergency number you call really is not in operation.

For the most part the utility does not have the power to turn on the fuel over the weekend. If there are any problems, the utility should make sure the customer is aware that he has had whatever final notice exists, and any cessation of service should be done some time between Monday and Friday. There would then be an opportunity for that person to pay whatever arrears happen to be owing so he will not freeze over the weekend.

That is all I really have to say about the report. I think it is a good report. It contains recommendations that should be considered by the Legislature if they have not been considered already by the various ministries. I commend the report to the members and urge its adoption.

Mr. Epp: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to speak to this report, the fifth report of the committee studying agencies.

I want to draw attention particularly to the fact that John Eichmanis, who did a lot of work on this report and is a tremendous source of information and knowledge, is in the Speaker's gallery tonight. The gallery is almost full; I can see that. I want to compliment him publicly on the good work he is doing for the committee on not only this report but a number of other things.

The chairman, who has just spoken, also is doing a very admirable job, as is the clerk of the committee. We are very pleased to have got another report out.

The only frustrating part is that there are over 300 agencies, boards and commissions. One is added almost every week, according to the government, because they keep on adding more of them. I do not think any have been sunsetted; there is a recommendation that one be sunsetted.

I think we have too many boards, commissions and agencies in the province. In the future the committee will have to take a closer look at the ramifications of there being so many places to which the government can appoint people by way of patronage so that their members can come to Toronto and collect their per diem rates.

8:20 p.m.

I do not want to detract from the fact that some of them are doing excellent work. But I think there are many other agencies which, if they were sunsetted, nobody outside the membership would notice it. Some of them meet only once a year; some even less frequently. I think the only people who know they are meeting are the membership and the Treasury. The people of Ontario would benefit by having some of those commissions, agencies and boards sunsetted.

To return to the report in front of us, some of the recommendations relate to the Ontario Board of Censors. As the chairman and first speaker has indicated, a number of categories govern the operations of the censor board.

Members will perhaps be surprised to hear that the board meets in an old truck depot in Leaside, behind the railway tracks. One would hardly know they were there, or that is the place the clipping and censoring goes on, or that the censoring is not as extensive as many people believe it is.

Nevertheless, the reforms that have been instituted in the last year or two have improved matters. The chairman and vice-chairman are civil servants and permanent employees, and there are about 13 part-time employees. The long-term aim is to have 25 people who will be helping on a part-time basis with the evaluation of films.

I am pleased that the Solicitor General (Mr. G. W. Taylor) is here today. Some of the recommendations in this report with respect to the Ontario Police Commission relate to his ministry and I wish to speak about that.

The members of the committee were able to see some of the excerpts that had been clipped from various films and I must say I was aghast. I thought people would have to be insane to put such things in films. I sympathize with the board and do not for a moment envy them their task. We should be pleased to have citizens who are prepared to view these films day after day.

There are differences of opinion about censorship, but I am one person who believes we should have some form of it. So I had no difficulty in supporting the report as presented. The films being censored represent about four per cent of the total number of films that enter the province. If we were all able to see some of the things that are cut from this four per cent, I think it would be easier for us to understand the work the censors are doing.

Some people who are critical of the censors' work have probably never seen what this work consists of. Philosophically, there may be some difficulty with censorship but it is easier to understand the problems of the censor board when you see the kind of work they are doing.

Regarding the recommendations, one of the changes the chairman has indicated is a name change from the Ontario Board of Censors to the Ontario Classification and Censorship Board. I do not think this was intended to be the forerunner to eventually getting rid of censorship. Rather, it was an indication that classification represents a much greater amount of their work than actual censorship. As I indicated, only about four per cent of their work is in censorship as opposed to a great deal of work with respect to classification.

I want to refer to page 7 of the report where we also speak about the Criminal Code and the definition of "obscene." We indicate in the report that as it is defined now, "obscene" is "the undue exploitation of sex or of sex and crime, horror, cruelty and violence."

There is a recommendation in the report that this definition should be clarified because it seems that horror, cruelty, crime and violence might not be regarded as obscene if they are taken in isolation from sex. In other words, one almost has sex and then crime, horror, cruelty and violence associated with it. We believe that "obscene" should also reflect cruelty in isolation, violence in isolation, or crime in isolation as opposed to only in relation to sex.

The second recommendation with respect to the second study of an agency, board or commission has to do with the Ontario Police Commission. We had the opportunity of visiting its facilities, which are I think more than adequate. It is doing a relatively good job in the province. There is, however, a considerable amount of room for improvement. Where the procedural affairs committee noted improvements should be made, we made some recommendations.

I do not want to touch on all the recommendations but there are some we should highlight. In addition to that, I want to touch on one or two areas that are not in the report but are related to the OPC and to other police commissions in the province. I know the Solicitor General would be interested in noting that, as far as police commissions in the province are concerned, the majority of commission members are still appointed by the province. The Solicitor General probably has the opportunity of recommending these appointments.

Our experience in Waterloo region has taught us that is not a very good policy. Those of us who come from the Waterloo region have had a difficult time in the last few years because of the operations of the police commission. That is no reflection on any particular commission. The present commissioners in the Waterloo region are doing an excellent job in trying to deal with a very difficult problem.

Nevertheless, the composition of that commission could be improved with the appointment of the majority of members by a public body or by the regional council itself. As members know, currently three of those people on the police commission are appointed by the province -- one is a judge, although that is not mandatory -- and two are appointed by council, for a total of five.

The council believes, and I think a large segment of the public believes, that the majority of members on the commission should be appointed by regional council. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. In this case, the province is paying the least amount of money. Most of it comes from the local council, from the local citizens through property taxes, yet the province wants to have the upper hand in appointing three members rather than two.

8:30 p.m.

While we are speaking about that, I also feel very strongly that judges should not be on a police commission. I believe that represents a potential conflict of interest for judges. I am surprised the judges do not take themselves off these police commissions. I am sure they are trying to do a good job, and I am sure most of them do a good job, but I think it represents a potential conflict of interest with the police.

One day the police officers are in court as witnesses and giving testimony. The next day the commission is deciding how much their salaries should be, or whether it should take some disciplinary action because they have beards or something of that nature. I am not saying they should not take disciplinary action when they are not exercising their responsibilities under the regulations. All I am saying is that it represents a potential conflict of interest and personally I am surprised that, if the government does not have the will power to make that decision, the judges themselves do not graciously and effectively take themselves off police commissions.

An hon. member: They get paid for it.

Mr. Epp: I do not think they get paid extra. I think they did at one time, but I do not think they do now.

There is another point I want to raise that has to do with private security forces in Ontario. There is some interesting material out, which I happened to see today, saying there are about 13,000 private security guards and so forth in the province with the majority, or about three quarters of them, being in Metropolitan Toronto. These people do not have the training, and often do not have the experience or the proper education, to do their work. These people too, although some of them are trained and some are educated and well versed in the law, have access to confidential data.

I wish the Solicitor General, since he is in the audience, would take a serious look at that problem. I intend to raise it on future occasions because it represents a potential problem for the citizens of the province. With the access they have to information and with the perception in the public mind that they are law enforcement people, I think there is a serious opportunity for abuse. It is my feeling that the Solicitor General should do a serious study into that particular aspect.

I intend, as I said, to take it up on future occasions during estimates with his ministry. I presume that would fall under his ministry, although it may also fall under the Attorney General (Mr. McMurtry). I would think -- the minister is nodding his head -- it would fall exclusively under the Ministry of the Solicitor General. Since he is a very accessible minister of the crown, I am sure he would be glad to look into this.

I see the Acting Speaker is there. You have lost a little hair very quickly.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Barlow): Those of us from Waterloo must stick together.

Mr. Epp: That is right. You will appreciate my comments about the situation in Waterloo region, Mr. Speaker, because of your firsthand knowledge of the situation there or, if not firsthand, certainly a close second, like mine.

The other aspect of this report I want to speak about is police pursuit. As the members know, we have had a number of experiences in the province where the police, for one reason or another, have pursued a car. Only a few months ago, in my own region there were two people killed because somebody who was on drugs was being pursued by a police officer. He did not stop, went through a light, killed two people and that case is before the courts. As reported in the paper, that is the way it occurred. We know of other occasions where the police have pursued some people at high speeds, at great risk to the public and to anybody who is within a few hundred yards of the pursued and pursuing vehicles.

Greater instruction has to be given to and care taken by police forces in order that this be minimized or eliminated. I am not quite sure how it can be completely eliminated, but I find it difficult to understand how all these situations would have developed if greater care had been exercised. I hope the Solicitor General, in co-operation with the Attorney General, will look at this matter. It has been raised here on a number of occasions.

I want to look briefly at the report on the third agency that was studied, the Ontario Energy Board. On page 23 of the report, there is this definition of the function of the energy board and what it is supposed to do: "The board is given power to approve and fix rates and charges for the sale, transmission, distribution and storage of gas. Moreover, it can grant leave to construct transmission pipelines, production lines, distribution lines and stations, and can grant authority to expropriate land for pipelines and stations."

One thing the board can do is order a particular utility to charge only certain rates. But with respect to Ontario Hydro it cannot order the utility to charge certain rates, it can only make a recommendation. What the procedural affairs committee has done in its first recommendation, and I think this has significance, is it has said, "The Ontario Energy Board Act be amended to provide that the board have power to issue orders with respect to Ontario Hydro rate increases."

As we know, Ontario Hydro runs roughshod over the public. It tries to charge as much as it can. It has an excess of 40 per cent of the power actually required to meet the needs of the whole province and for export purposes, yet when it wants an increase it gets what it wants almost every time.

I sometimes think it uses the old ploy that if it wants eight per cent, it asks for 16; if it wants 16 per cent, it asks for 32; and if it wants 32 per cent, it asks for 64. It uses the old ploy of exaggerating its needs and then ends up with what it wants anyway. This government falls into the trap every time and gives Ontario Hydro exactly what it wants; not what it has asked for but what it wants.

Our committee felt strongly that the energy board should be able to exercise greater powers over Ontario Hydro. It should be able to firm up those increases and to order the increases kept at a particular margin or amount, as opposed to merely giving a recommendation.

I know a number of other people want to speak to this report. I am pleased to have been able to draw the members' attention to a few of the matters and I look forward to hearing their comments.

Mr. Charlton: Mr. Speaker, I too am pleased to speak on this report from the procedural affairs committee. This is our fifth report on agencies, boards and commissions. Like the others, I will start at the beginning with the Ontario Board of Censors, since that is the one I really want to speak on anyway.

Mr. Nixon: Did you go down there for the special show'?

Mr. Charlton: Yes, I went along with members from your own party.

8:40 p.m.

At any rate, members will notice that at the back of the report, on page 43, there is a dissenting opinion on the recommendations on the Ontario Board of Censors, and I would like to take a few minutes to talk about the recommendations the committee made and the reasons for the dissent.

The member for Waterloo North (Mr. Epp) mentioned in his comments, and correctly so, that the board is censoring only four per cent of the films it views. When we went to the board, our committee was taken into a screening room to view what they call out-takes, the footage that was clipped from the four per cent of films they censor. If I recall correctly -- I may be out one or two -- it included clips from only seven films in one year.

One of the recommendations of the committee deals with the federal Criminal Code and its definition of "obscene." One of the complaints around the question of censorship and one of the more emotional issues around which the supporters of film censorship profess the need for censorship is the question of violence, violent sex and specifically the exploitation of children in films.

Mr. Speaker, I ask you, how does clipping a piece of celluloid protect or stop the exploitation of children in films? It does not allow anybody to view the act, but it certainly does not stop the exploitation.

We attempted to deal with that exploitation and with the exploitation of violence and crime in our recommendation dealing with the federal Criminal Code and the definition of obscenity. The reality is that the only way we can effectively deal with the kinds of stupid, inhuman smut the censor board is at present clipping in that four per cent of the films it censors, is to deal with the legal question of obscenity so that we can not only eliminate this kind of material from our theatres but also, at least within our own borders and our own jurisdiction, Canada, ensure that the exploitation of the children or the actors and actresses is stopped.

It is not just the clipping of the celluloid; the act itself they are clipping is an exploitative act. It certainly is exploitative to use a young child in a sex film or in a sex and violence film but it is more of an offence and more of a disgustingly immoral act on the part of our society to allow the child to be used in that role, and our law does not deal with that question, at least not effectively, at this point.

The reality is that if we had dealt firmly and reasonably with the question of obscenity under the Criminal Code of Canada, the seven films, the four per cent that the board censored, would never have been allowed into this country in the first place. For example, one of the seven films clipped, we were told by officials at the censor board, was a film made by Americans in Mexico. It was about a kidnapping and the death of the kidnapped victim in a very gory fashion. The victim was cut to pieces.

What we were told by the censor board officials was that not only was that film very gory, but it was very real. Charges were pending because they believed an actual murder had occurred in the making of that film. If we had dealt effectively with the obscenity definition in the Criminal Code of Canada, the Ontario censor board would never have had to deal with that film in the first place. They should not have had to deal with it because it should never have been considered for viewing anywhere in this country.

What it really boils down to is that our approach to censorship in Ontario is an avoidance of the real problem, the way things are allowed to be got away with in the film industry. It is a very small percentage of the industry -- I am not trying to condemn the entire industry -- a very small percentage of really strange and sick people who create the kinds of films our censor board is now censoring. There is no need for it at all, because we should be dealing with the real problem, the problem of the sickness that created the film in the first place, and the problem of our laws that allowed that kind of exploitation to occur.

The reality is that if we dealt effectively with the Criminal Code of Canada and the definitions we talked about in this report, there would be no need for censorship in the province, which brings me back to our dissent, which basically recommended exactly what the censor board is doing with all the rest of the films, the 96 per cent it does not censor, which is to classify those films.

Our dissent goes a little further than the classification system that is being used at present, not necessarily in its strictness, but in terms of the information the classification system would provide to the viewers of films so that they would have a better idea of why they are rated in a particular category. If it is a violent film, that should be carefully set out for the viewer; if it is a sex film, that should be carefully set out.

We have all seen the newspaper advertising, and the television advertising for that matter, for films. On many occasions, the advertising by which a particular film is represented is very misleading. Quite often films that would not normally be classed as sex films are portrayed in the electronic media as very provocative and sexual in nature. That is a good selling point for the advertiser, but it misleads the public and misleads them quite badly on occasion.

The classification system should be administered in a much more careful way, not only in classifying the film but in ensuring that the advertising that represents a film publicly is an accurate reflection of the content of the film, and that the classification, as I suggested, contains a fuller description of why that film is classified in the way it is.

It is our opinion that if we went that route and dealt firmly with the questions around the Criminal Code and the exclusions that should be very heavily put in place there, we would have absolutely no need for censorship in this province. Then there would be no further questions about the moral judgement of a member on the Ontario censor board.

We would have no more fiascos like the one three or four years ago, which caused a major public debate and which not only created a huge furore here but also sent Ontarians scurrying across the closest border, whether it happened to be Michigan, New York or Quebec, to see the film they could not see at home, which is just as ludicrous as the kinds of discussions we are having about the seven films that were cut -- films that never should have been considered for public display in this province. The chairman of the committee, who saw that film of out-takes, will agree that any one of those films would have been classified as obscene under any decent definition of obscenity and that there would have been no question at all in terms of censorship.

8:50 p.m.

It is our opinion that that route is the sane and logical approach, not only to deal with the question of obscenity but also to try to get at the root of the problem, at least in the Canadian film industry, to ensure that the kind of exploitation we are now clipping out of films is clipped out of the production studios altogether, at least in this country. We cannot preclude that kind of film-making in the United States, in Mexico or anywhere else, but we can certainly ensure that it does not happen here and that our women and our children are not exploited in the way those films represented and with the kinds of exploitation with which they were degraded.

The Ontario Police Commission was the second agency we reviewed. I will not go through all the recommendations we made on the commission, but there were several. The first was that the OPC should make its inspections of the province's local police forces and the Ontario Provincial Police mandatory on an annual basis and that any recommendations resulting from such inspections should be made public.

It was our opinion in the procedural affairs committee that the operations of the municipal and regional police forces across the province and of the OPP are, by and large, good operations, and that the policemen of this province are good, honest citizens who in many cases take upon themselves risks that no other citizens take.

On the other hand, we all know, whether it be here in Metropolitan Toronto, in the OPP or in one of our own local police forces, that from time to time there are problems. We read about those smears on our law enforcement officers because the media tend to play them up with much bigger headlines, much bigger stories and a lot more pictures than the commendations that the good officers get. I guess that is true with every kind of news we read about.

It was our feeling that if the Ontario Police Commission were doing regular, ongoing inspections of the police forces in this province, and if it were finding problems and making those problems public, it would go a long way to eliminating the kind of semi-mistrust that exists in terms of some of the stories that have come out about different activities by some of our police forces. It would also go a long way to eliminating those few real problems that do exist, simply because there would be an independent body, unaffected by local circumstance and local reputation, going in and looking at the operations of a particular police force.

It was also our feeling -- and this was the second recommendation related to the police commission -- that it was very necessary that we should set up a system of training of all police officers in the province and that training should be compulsory. Acquiring that training and passing the course should be compulsory before officers are hired on a permanent basis. That is not to say the officers cannot be hired as probationary employees and put into training, but the passing of the course should be a compulsory requirement before they become full-fledged constables out there on their own, with guns on their hips, billy sticks and the ability to do damage and cause the problems that most do not, but a few have.

The reason for this recommendation was some of the comments we got from the authorities at the Ontario Police Commission when they talked to us about some of the serious problems in some of the more remote and smaller rural communities in Ontario where there are only two, three or perhaps half a dozen police officers who had virtually no training at all. Those who had received training got most of it after the fact, and in some cases perhaps as long as 10, 12 or 15 years after they became police officers.

First of all, it was our feeling that by creating a compulsory and very tight course -- we talk in one of our other recommendations about a university accreditation system in that course; we are talking about a very high-calibre course -- by setting up a good course and creating a compulsory system, we could eliminate the rest of the minor problems. Nothing is ever going to reach perfection, but it might eliminate those few bad apples who seem to get through the system now and who sometimes cause the reputations of one or the other of our police forces in this province to suffer considerably.

We also dealt with the question of citizen complaint procedures, and I think there was a fairly strong feeling on the committee that it was a very necessary area to consider.

We have the act in place here in Metro. The procedure we have suggested for the rest of the province is not necessarily identical to the Metro model, but we feel it is very necessary that a formal police complaint procedure be set up in every jurisdiction in this province, everywhere where there is a police force or a police commission. That citizen complaint procedure should be advertised publicly on a fairly regular basis so that people in the community will know to whom they have to go and where they can find that person or persons.

We also recommended that the Ontario Police Commission be the final body of appeal on citizens' complaints, because they are an independent body and out of the local circumstance and whatever conflicts of interest there may be in an investigation of a complaint in the local circumstance. We felt they should be not only the final body, but the only body as well; a second-step appeal after going to the local police commission or the local chief if there happens to be no local police commission.

In my opinion, those were the major recommendations on the police commission. There are several others which I will not take the time of the House to go through right now, because I know other members wish to speak this evening.

I will move on to the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority. Most of the discussion we had about that authority revolved around GO Transit. We did not particularly get into policy discussion in terms of new areas of endeavour, with the exception of the extension of some of the existing services to a number of communities. I think they were the basic and most useful recommendations we made, although I guess we could point the minister to the recommendation regarding a rate structure that more closely reflected the 65-35 ratio.

9 p.m.

In relation to the recommendation which the chairman very rightly pointed out that this committee had made, I suppose while the minister is here in the House that we would like to thank him in some way for his quickness in responding to the recommendation that full services be extended to Hamilton and Oshawa. We are not all totally happy with the time frames that are involved, but certainly the commitment is there on the part of the Minister of Transportation and Communications (Mr. Snow) to have those services in place eventually.

Personally, since the relationship between GO Transit, the Canadian National Railways and the Canadian Pacific Railway did not seem capable of facilitating track time in the case of Oshawa and Hamilton, I am glad the minister has taken the approach he has taken to ensure that service will go in even though CNR did not appear capable of accommodating the needs.

A number of members have commented positively and negatively about the proposals which the minister announced several weeks ago. As I suggested, there are some of us who are a little unhappy about the time frames involved, simply because it is our view that we already have a serious problem in place on Highway 401 between Oshawa and Toronto and on the Queen Elizabeth Way between Hamilton and Toronto.

There are those of us who would like very much to be able to use the convenience of GO Transit to get from the city of Hamilton to the city of Toronto and our duties here at the Legislature. It would be much more convenient than driving our cars. The minister well knows that the GO service that exists now on the buses is no more efficient than my car, and in many cases is less efficient, because those poor buses have to sit out in the same traffic jams that I have to sit out in. In addition to that, there are loading and unloading times, getting to the bus terminals and getting to the Legislature after arriving in Toronto.

We certainly would like to see the minister's proposals put in place as quickly as possible and if there are any ways of speeding up the timetable which the minister has suggested, we certainly would not be averse to that, although I repeat that we are very happy to see the commitment to serve the needs that already exist for public transit between Hamilton and Toronto and between Oshawa and Toronto.

There are other commuter transit problems in the Toronto region which still have to be dealt with, and I am sure the minister will take note of the other recommendations we have made here about Barrie, Uxbridge and other places.

I will move on to the Ontario Energy Board and I will be brief in my comments as well. Again. I am not going to go through all the recommendations that are here. The honourable members can look through the recommendations and assess them as they will.

There are a couple of recommendations, though, that I think are very key and very important, one being the recommendation to which the member for Waterloo North (Mr. Epp) spoke. This was the question of giving the Ontario Energy Board the power under the Ontario Energy Board Act to issue orders and to set rates for Ontario Hydro, a power it does not now have. It has that power for Union Gas and for Consumers' Gas but it does not have that power for Ontario Hydro.

The Minister of Energy (Mr. Welch) is not with us tonight, Mr. Speaker, but I am sure you will bring this to his attention for me. It was the unanimous feeling of the committee, the government members of the committee, Liberal members and members of this party -- the member for Oshawa (Mr. Breaugh) and myself -- that it was absolutely necessary and essential that this recommendation be carried through.

The chairman, who is now sitting with the Minister of Transportation and Communications, will concur that this was probably the single most talked about recommendation that the committee made in this entire report and it was probably the most firmly felt conviction by the entire committee. The recommendation is that the Ontario Energy Board has to be given the authority to set, to roll back, to control the rates of Ontario Hydro, which it does not now have the power to do.

All it can do now is to say to the Minister of Energy: "We do not think they really need that much. Maybe you could have a look at it." That is not good enough. If they are competent to control Union Gas, Consumers' Gas and those other private sector companies they deal with, certainly they should be competent as a public regulatory body to regulate fully another public crown corporation.

Regarding the Ontario Energy Board, that was the only recommendation I particularly wanted to deal with because it is the most important recommendation we made about the Ontario Energy Board. There are a number of other comments in our report -- and I will not get into all of them again -- about recommendations from the previous report of the procedural affairs committee on agencies, boards and commissions where it deals with ministerial responses to our recommendations from that previous report.

One that I want to raise is the recommendation about the Ontario Racing Commission. It was from our fourth report. They had recommended that the Ontario Racing Commission institute a thorough and complete check of all job applicants who will have direct access to horses and drivers prior to a race before issuing a licence to the applicant. This has to do with trainers, grooms and so on who work around the racetrack.

The background behind this recommendation dealt with the problem they have had around racetracks with gamblers and criminals getting involved and administering drugs to horses, getting involved in illegal betting practices and so on and so forth. In fact, in some cases there has been plain out-and-out stealing of money.

At any rate, we recommended that the commission set up and do a very thorough check of all job applicants before they are allowed to take a job. The situation they have is that somebody comes in and applies for a job, they hire him and they do a check which takes two or three weeks. By the time they find out this guy is a rotten apple, he has already taken off with a whole case of apples and is long since gone. We recommend a prejudgement system.

The minister indicated that while the procedures currently in use are satisfactory, the Ontario Racing Commission will pursue the matter further. I cannot accept those comments from the minister, because it was the racing commission that brought the problem to our attention in the first place.

How can the minister tell us, the procedural affairs committee, that the present procedure is satisfactory when the racing commission itself does not believe the present system is satisfactory or else it would never have raised the problem with us?

"In light of the recommendations of the committee, however, the commission has requested the administration to explore methods by which licensing information and its authenticity can be verified on a more expedient basis." That is where we get to the real crux of the problem: time.

9:10 p.m.

If the Ontario Racing Commission needs a better system of identifying problem people and verifying that information, it is the responsibility of this government to see that it has the funding to run its operation properly. We have thousands of Ontario citizens going to racetracks regularly in this province, wagering their money, and in many cases their hard-earned money, but we do not have an adequate system in place to prevent known criminal elements from doing that.

Certainly there is never going to be an effective way of eliminating the new or first- time criminal. We are not going to be able to identify him. We understand that. But we do not even have a system in place that can prevent known criminals from infiltrating racetracks, here one day and over there the next day, ripping off substantial sums of money from both the government -- because it gets a substantial tax rake from the commission -- and the commission itself as well as the people who frequent the racetracks. Some of the scams pulled off in the past have been fairly substantial.

What I am saying is that the answer we have gotten from the minister is totally inadequate. If the racing commission is going to continue to operate and run races where betting occurs, and if the government of this province is going to continue to make very substantial sums of money from that practice, then this government has a responsibility to provide it with whatever facilities it needs to eliminate at least the known criminal elements from an ability to exploit on a short-term and quick basis the operations of racetracks, horses, jockeys and so on.

That was the one recommendation from our last report which I wanted to raise because I felt the minister's response was totally and completely inadequate.

I will wrap up by saying that, on the whole, it is my feeling the recommendations we have made in this committee report are very good and worth while, with the exception I mentioned at the outset, that of the recommendations on the Ontario Board of Censors.

I commend these recommendations to the members of the House and to the ministers affected. I will await the response of the ministers to those recommendations.

Hon. Mr. Snow: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a few comments this evening on the report of May 11, 1982, from the standing committee on procedural affairs. I wish to deal basically with the comments and recommendations in the report dealing with the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority and the recommendations regarding GO Transit.

When I look at this report and review it. I think the report was being written at approximately the time my officials, myself and the government were giving serious consideration to a number of matters relating to GO Transit. If I did not know better, I would almost think my colleague the chairman of the committee must have had some inside information and read his horoscope properly that morning, because most of the recommendations made here are almost totally parallel to concerns which I had and which we have since dealt with.

The first recommendation relates to the ministry or the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority reopening negotiations with the Canadian National Railway. That is a little easier said than done. We have a 10-year contract, our second 10-year contract as a matter of fact, with CNR. I have to agree with the comment of the committee that the rights of way of the CNR -- and I would perhaps even have to go beyond that to include the Canadian Pacific Railway as well -- have, in one way or another, been paid by the public over the years. I am not saying that TATOA or any transit authority should have the right to use those rights of way without some consideration being given to the railroads. That would not be right. But in the negotiations we have had over the years, it has seemed that the negotiations were somewhat one-sided, because the railways do have a monopoly over those rights of way.

We were not in a strong bargaining position, although we did bargain very strenuously. That went on for some time. We certainly ended up with a much better arrangement than we started out with, or than what was asked by the railroads. The first contract with the CNR, which was entered into in 1967 at a time when the CNR wanted very badly to get out of rail commuter service, was a better contract financially than the most recent one. Once we were into the service for 10 years we were somewhat of a captive customer. But, with all due respect, we did have tough negotiations with the railroad. Finally, I was involved myself with the presidents of the CNR and CPR in both agreements. Although the agreements are not everything they perhaps should be, and I feel we are paying very well for the services we get. I do think we ended up with a fairly good agreement.

One of the comments was that TATOA made sure its services, particularly bus services serving the inter-regional routes, did not parallel, interfere with or duplicate the routes of municipalities. This is one thing we have been very careful to do. We worked on it very closely. In fact, with the change in the TATOA legislation of a year or so ago, the ministry is now responsible for the planning and co-ordinating of GO Transit inter-regional services. TATOA is mainly the operator of those services, and the ministry very carefully co-ordinates services.

We subsidize both the municipal services and inter-regional services. Therefore, we want to make sure there are no duplications. I can name many instances, in Mississauga and Brampton, where changes have been made to the services so that there would be no duplication. On the routes we have in Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill and Newmarket, TATOA, the ministry and local transit authorities work very closely together in co-ordinating those services.

I was interested in the comment regarding fares where the committee recommends that the authority should implement a fare rate that would come closer to the 65-35 ratio. Over the years we have been trying very hard to get to that cost-revenue ratio, but each year, when we seem to get a little closer, inflation takes over, the price of fuel skyrockets, and the national energy policy gets involved. What we gained on the cost-revenue ratio slips through our fingers and we are still below that ratio. But that is the ratio that has been set by the Management Board of Cabinet. With the present controlled prices, I am afraid if we keep our fare increase next year to something in the neighbourhood of five per cent, or slightly above, so that it meets the guidelines of the government, which I assure members it will, we are not going to get closer to that cost-revenue ratio in that particular year.

9:20 p.m.

The fourth recommendation is that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications should initiate the extension of commuter services to Oshawa in the east and to Hamilton in the west. A few weeks ago after completing all of our studies I was able to make the announcement that we are planning to do exactly that.

In the very near future I hope to be able to announce the next steps in the implementation of that program: The establishment of the technical liaison committees with the municipalities and the local transit authorities, and the appointment of the necessary consultants in order to get ahead with the design on those two phases. In the not too distant future we hope to start actual construction on those extensions.

The last recommendation relates to the GO rail service to Barrie and Uxbridge. On September 7, we implemented new GO rail services to Bradford on the Barrie line, to Stouffville --

Mr. Nixon: We're listening, we're listening.

Hon. Mr. Snow: It doesn't sound like it.

Mr. Conway: Some of us remember late Tuesday night.

Hon. Mr. Snow: Late Tuesday night?

Mr. Conway: If you don't remember, we might imagine why.

Mr. Kerr: It was Lorne Henderson's birthday party, remember?

Hon. Mr. Snow: He was a year older on Tuesday night. Unfortunately, we never have a party on my birthday because it is on July 12 and the House has never sat on the 12th.

Mr. Nixon: The glorious 12th. Now we know why it is called the glorious 12th.

Hon. Mr. Ashe: You nearly made it last time, Jim.

Hon. Mr. Snow: Yes, we almost made it last time. I thought we were going to.

As I mentioned, these two recommendations were implemented on September 7.

I would like to congratulate the committee on its excellent recommendations, all of which I have been able to accept. They have been implemented or are in the process of being implemented. We thank the chairman and the members of the committee for their input and recommendations regarding the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority.

Mr. Nixon: Mr. Speaker, I, too, want to congratulate the committee on its report. It is a very useful one. I even like the minority report on film censorship, although I see that the members of the New Democratic Party who were speaking to it are no longer present.

Mr. Breaugh: The member's eyes have gone as well as his mind.

Mr. Nixon: The member did not speak to this.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Allen): Rather belatedly, I recognize the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk.

Mr. Nixon: Oh. Okay, fine. Thank you.

I understand the procedural affairs committee attended the censor board and had the opportunity to see all the parts of the censored movies that were clipped out and strung together for this special movie. For many years the censor board and the minister responsible for it have denied this movie ever existed.

I know, Mr. Speaker, with your special background, that you will be as shocked about this as I am. This sort of thing comes into the province, is subject to censorship and then is left around to prove to the members of the procedural affairs committee what a good job the censor board is doing.

I personally would like to see the procedural affairs committee stick to their knitting. By that I mean I wish they would deal with procedural affairs matters and use their undoubted persuasive powers to see that the House responds to their recommendations.

While I have already said that I agree with the Minister of Transportation and Communications (Mr. Snow) in commending the committee for this excellent report -- a lot of good work and good writing has gone into it -- still the House has not really had the benefit of the recommendations from the committee on procedural affairs.

I have often felt we should never have done away with the privileges and elections committee which by tradition was always a part of any democratic House in the British tradition. It was not often a busy committee, but it was one to which many matters which arose in the House could be referred that could not be dealt with by the House as a whole.

Controverted elections were obviously in the grand tradition of what the committee dealt with. With your erudition, Mr. Speaker, I am sure you are aware that in the early years of our history after each election those committees would spend many months pondering over the evidence in controverted elections. We do not have that much any more and our elections are well administered with few, if any, questions about the validity of the elections as they occur.

When it comes to the rules of this House, in my view this is a matter which does require more direct and continuing attention. There is no way we will ever have a set of rules that suits everyone. Also, the requirements of the House change as the months and years go by. It is now a main responsibility of the procedural affairs committee at least to see that recommendations are before the House which the House can deal with if it chooses.

We should not dilute the importance of the procedural matters the committee has as its prime function by giving it the duty to deal with all the agencies, boards and commissions that are part of the government of Ontario. I feel that quite strongly and thought I should say so.

I must agree with those members who put in a minority report indicating we could do without a board of censorship if the board only had a classification function. As far as I am concerned, I am not even sure the classification function is imperative, although I bow to the wisdom of those who have had an opportunity to view the censored films in this regard.

I have always felt the Criminal Code of Canada is such that, if there is some pornographic movie, the police have the responsibility to charge the operator, close it down and let the courts decide what is proper. In that connection, there are obviously difficulties but, in my view, it would be a better way to proceed. I have a great antipathy to any government deciding through any board of censors what people will see or read as long as the Criminal Code of the nation is not transgressed.

I was interested in the argument made by the member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Charlton) about the inadequacies of the Criminal Code. The committee itself points out that in its view the definition of obscenity is not clear enough. Also, the involvement of children in these matters is not properly proscribed by the Criminal Code, although I recall reading probably less than a year ago that the Minister of Justice had brought forward certain amendments which would have expanded that definition in a way similar to that which had been recommended by the committee itself.

I want to commend the committee for its diligence in pursuing this matter. I feel its recommendations are very useful.

I briefly want to say something about the Ontario Police Commission. I feel the government of Ontario through the police commission might take significant steps in urging municipalities to employ more people as police officers representing minorities of all kinds, but particularly visible minorities. I do not live in the city of Toronto but I keep up with events here as reported as closely as I can --

9:30 p.m.

Mr. Conway: You don't chat with Uncle Phil?

Mr. Nixon: I notice Uncle Phil going downtown in his limousine, as I drive my Citation up University Avenue, since my honourable friend has raised the matter.

I, for one, have a great deal of confidence in the chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Police Commissioners. But we are talking about the Ontario Police Commission, and the leadership it might very well give to all municipalities, including Toronto, in employing a higher proportion of minorities as police officers. Certainly, the goal ought to be to achieve at least a similar mix in the police force to that which the community itself has as its population changes.

Metropolitan Toronto has to be one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, and I personally believe this is a tremendous advantage to us. I find the city an extremely vibrant one with many things to recommend it to visitors from around the world. All of us are proud of what has been accomplished here. One of the nagging things, as far as I am concerned, is the continuing reports of the inadequacies in the Toronto and metropolitan forces to meet the needs of a community that has changed so dramatically in the last decade, and continues to change in its ethnic and cultural makeup.

I would like to take time to cite chapter and verse, but I have referred in the House before to the events surrounding the killing of a resident of Toronto, Mr. Johnson. When was that, three years ago? Was the member for Burlington South (Mr. Kerr) Solicitor General then? It happened right after he was Solicitor General. I believe the account I read was in a magazine, Toronto Life, which, frankly, I recommend to all honourable members if they want to keep up with interesting things in this city.

Mr. Conway: Even Larry Grossman's career, I hear.

Mr. Nixon: Yes, there is an article about the Minister of Health's digestive problems, but I do not want to digress.

Since the Minister of Transportation and Communications (Mr. Snow) is present, I would mention there is an article this month saying the Spadina Expressway must be built. I thought perhaps he would like to read that since his predecessor was the person who undertook to sign the agreement with Toronto to build the Spadina Expressway.

Back to the point: I really regret very much having gone on a digression myself, because the article in Toronto Life about the circumstances pertaining to the death of Mr. Johnson at the hands of two police officers is enough to indicate that there ought to have been a much more substantial review of minority representation in the police force. If so many people in this city, blacks, and many others groups I hasten to say, not only feel they do not have confidence in the police force, but really have an antipathy which, for most of us, is strange and alien, that is an indication of how out of touch the police authorities are, in certain circumstances, with some representatives of our people.

The last point I want to mention, and I regret passing over Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority -- but I hesitate to pass over that with the minister himself here. I have always been impressed, even, with GO Transit, that tremendous idea that came forward in the election of 1967 as a political front and that has grown into something useful. I remember the day after the late, lamented Premier Robarts announced it. There were billboards all over this province recommending the government of Ontario transportation facility, GO Transit. Boy, I am telling you, that was one tough election; however, that is another diversion.

We have been paying enormous subsidies amounting to $3 per ticket for everybody who has ridden it since that time, so there is quite a commitment in dollars from those of us who work our fingers to the bone in the farming lands of this province and have little or no opportunity to ride those doubledecker cars that the minister is so proud of. Every time anybody buys a ticket for that, the taxpayers in general are kicking in about $3 so they can ride in comfort while we are trapped driving a plough back and forth across the cornfields this time of year.

Well, I guess I do not object; because for many years the farmers have helped the urban dwellers, and we will continue to do so. Fortunately, the government of Canada is giving us excellent train service from Brantford on the occasions when we want to come in to the provincial capital by rail.

The energy board is the last point I want to mention briefly. The recommendation there is an excellent one. I am very impressed indeed, particularly that the government representatives on the procedural affairs committee have called for the energy board to be given the power not to recommend but to impose a rate structure for Ontario Hydro. What could be fairer and more just than that, since poor Darcy McKeough, chairman of Union Gas, has to come to the energy board and with supplication --

Hon. Mr. Snow: Cap in hand.

Mr. Nixon: Cap in hand, the very phrase -- argue for a rate structure that will enable the company to pay him his small salary, and the other members and stockholders of Union Gas, which has a monopoly in my part of the country and which has just put in for a very large, additional rate increase.

In this connection I was interested that in this most recent rate increase they are asking for a basic improvement in their profit position, which really astounds me. I would think the government of Ontario would appear before the energy board to oppose such a situation.

But when Hydro appears before the energy board, it comes with its panoply of lawyers paid for on the basis of power at cost. My good friend, a friend of all of us, Pierre Genest, who has to be one of the smartest lawyers anywhere but who does not work for peanuts, comes floating in to the hearings with the most powerful arguments in favour of extremely high increases in hydro rates. The Ontario Energy Board has to hire somebody who is out, cap in hand again, looking for a brief. Bob Macaulay, I think, appeared in that connection on one occasion.

In some respects it really is the battle of the Titans. The information and the briefs are exchanged, and the energy board makes a finding. But unlike poor Darcy McKeough, who has to take the energy board as his command and must do business after that point at the rate dictated to him, as he very properly should in the case of a monopoly, Ontario Hydro listens to it, goes back home and cogitates; the chairman has lunch with the Premier (Mr. Davis), and then they decide what the rate is going to be. Sometimes it is a little higher than the energy board recommendation, sometimes it is a little lower; but it is never the same, because Ontario Hydro would never deign to give any public indication that the energy board was correct in its findings.

I was interested that in the resources development committee on Tuesday night, both the chairman and president of Ontario Hydro were present to respond to questions and comments from the members of the Legislature. This point was made there very effectively by my colleague the member for Halton-Burlington (Mr. J. A. Reed), and the chairman of Hydro was very proud of the fact that they did not have to follow the direction or the imposition of an order from the energy board at all. The justification, of course, was in the Ontario Energy Corporation Act, where the power is given to the board of Ontario Hydro to set the rate without any dictation from outside.

So the recommendation of this committee, once again supported and perhaps even initiated by the Conservative members on the committee, certainly ought to be read and followed by the members of the ministry. If some of them are here -- I guess there are two or three of them -- I hope they will take the message back to their colleagues and see that the government acts accordingly.

Actually, I am not holding my breath in this connection, because I do not think they are going to. The former Solicitor General, the member for Burlington South, just hit his fist on his desk, as he was wont to in previous years, when he said in one of the greatest speeches I ever heard in this House, "As long as I am minister, the polluter will pay." He hit his desk and almost split the top.

9:40 p.m.

I can only assume, since he is paying such careful attention and hit his desk with his fist again, that although he did not interject in words his meaning is clear: as a senior Conservative, one highly respected by his colleagues at the present time, he is going to take his undoubted position of importance and use it to persuade his colleagues to bring Ontario Hydro under the direction and control of the Ontario Energy Board without any further embarrassing delay.

Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, I want to make some general remarks before I get into the main part of the report and say that the House some time ago decided that a committee of the Legislature should take on this review responsibility.

I would concur with the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk that it is a bit unusual to have a procedural affairs committee do such a review. None the less, the House decided it should do it and to date it has reported to the House on 34 agencies, which is a rather small percentage of the 100 or so that are out there. However, the committee is at the point where it has had an opportunity to review at least most types of agencies that are functioning in Ontario, and has been able to present to the House committee reports and reviews on a good cross-section of them.

The standing committee on procedural affairs has done something unique in this Legislature. It has been able in many ways to set aside a lot of the partisan nature of the process. I think members from all three parties who have served on this committee have had an opportunity to do something which was useful and which called upon them to be good members of the Legislature rather than just good members of a political party.

I for one advocate more such opportunities for this Legislature to provide situations where a member can go and do a job, which is what has been asked of the procedural affairs committee on those occasions when it has reviewed an agency.

Although I sense it is diminishing somewhat in the last little while, in the main the members of the committee from all parties have done just that. They have said, "Here is an agency and we would really like to find out what this agency does and whether it does it effectively, and we would like to bring to that review" -- I suppose it is inevitable -- "a little political perspective." But in the main they have stuck to the task at hand and there was very little of government members defending the faith. Generally, they were prepared to take a look at the operation of the agency and that is what it is all about.

In my view, that is in no small part due to the work of John Eichmanis and the people who have researched and co-ordinated the review of the agency. It helps to begin the process of reviewing an agency with a report which commands a little respect from all members of the committee. John has managed to do that for us for a number of years. As a research officer of this Legislature he has developed reports on a wide variety of agencies and has put those in front of the committee and we have all seen them as fair. They point out areas where there have been problems, do not cover up anything and are not particularly negative but try to give the committee, as a starting point, a balanced perspective on the work of that agency.

I would like to see more committee work along this line, where members go in with a clearly defined task and attempt to do something like a review of the workings of an agency, with a research person to assist in carrying out that job by generating a sort of framework. It is not all-inclusive by any means, but it does give us a bit of scope and some kind of context in which to conduct the review.

I have served on this committee since its inception and have always felt it a little ironical that I am not terribly happy having the procedural affairs committee do that sort of work. Nonetheless, I have to admit that for practical purposes this committee on five separate occasions, and there are more to come, has managed to go through this reviewing process in a way that struck me as both useful to the members of the committee, to this Legislature as a whole and, in fact, though I rue it somewhat, to the government of Ontario, because it provides the kind of public examination that we have not had at all in Ontario before the work of this committee. Until this committee began its review of agencies, the only review, if there was any at all, was done internally and privately by the government.

So the work of the committee has been useful, and I am pleased to see there have been some cabinet ministers in attendance tonight when we were debating the report. This is a good sign, because one of the things that strikes me as being useful is that, in addition to reviewing a certain set of agencies at any given time, the committee has endeavoured to keep track of what has happened to previous recommendations.

Although there is no startling change in the work of the agencies out there, I feel reasonably confident that in a number of ways, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely, the agencies are responding to the concept that a legislative committee may review the work they do. We have attempted to keep track of what has happened to the last recommendations about the racing commission or whoever, and there is some tracking of the system. So there is not just a criticism of whether an agency does a job or does not do a job and then it is put away on the shelf and nothing about it ever sees the light of day again.

There has been some consistency. There has been a response in most instances from all of the ministries that are related to any of the agencies we have ever reviewed, and the presence of ministers of the crown in here tonight, some of whom will participate in the debate, is a good sign. If I have a mild criticism to offer of the process it is that this ought to be heightened, there ought to be more of a direct response from the agencies and ministries responsible. I am happy to say that there is a response, that we are not just making recommendations that are lost forever, that there is a bit of continuity there; and that is a good sign.

I want to speak very briefly to the agencies that are covered in this review, because in this one in particular I thought the committee had an opportunity to review a smaller number of agencies but to do so in somewhat more depth than has been possible previously.

The first one is the Ontario Board of Censors. There were some divisions of opinion in the committee, which did split roughly along party lines but not exactly. I sensed that there was a bit of consensus developing there, even among people we spoke with at the censor board, that the vast majority of their time and really the main direction of their task is not censorship at all but classification. I believe there is a rational argument for having a group of people inform the public, by developing a classification system, just exactly what kind of movie they might see.

As the committee went through its deliberations on this one we also became aware of all sorts of little ironies. I guess the prime one is that, for purposes of the public showing of a motion picture, the Ontario Board of Censors is in that business hot and heavy and is sometimes the centre of great controversy as it attempts to determine what is acceptable to the public and what is not; yet while all of this controversy rages about the public showing of any movie, that same movie can be shown uncut to what I would call a public gathering. That is to say, if we rent a hall and get a copy of this film, we can get a licence to show it, but we could not show it in a motion picture theatre that charged admission.

More than that, these days if anybody had sufficient money and the proper equipment, we could probably drop in to any one of the little stores on Yonge Street and in any community in Ontario and get the same thing on a video cassette, all of which falls outside the purview of the censor board.

More than that, any member on his way home tonight could stop in to a corner milk store and buy a magazine that is just as pornographic and just as obscene as anything that anybody could put on film. So there is an irony at work here. The view of the censor board as being something that protects the morality of the people of Ontario has been a little overshadowed by modern technology.

Whereas 20 years ago I suppose the only place a dirty movie could be seen was at the movie theatre, now one can buy the book at a corner milk store, get a video cassette at another shop around the corner, or stay in any of the downtown hotels and see films which would probably not be allowed in a movie theatre. In a real sense, the concept of a censor board is a little archaic. It does not quite cover the field as it once did.

9:50 p.m.

More important, I believe the purpose of the board as a classification system is useful. One of the members of the committee said he stumbled into some kind of R-rated film, but it is difficult to conceive how one could stumble into an R-rated film. It is noted on the advertising and supposedly people selling tickets at the box office will stop children from going in. It may not work all the time, but it is supposed to. Only about four per cent of their time, they say, is spent on actual censorship.

One of the things we noted in the report, and which becomes more and more obvious as our culture changes, is it is now tough to define obscenity in a traditional sense. The motion pictures being produced now often lend themselves more to violence than sexual obscenity. The definition of obscenity is changing. The mores of our society are changing. It is tough to say, as perhaps one once could, that a little group of four or six people or, as is being proposed, a larger group of 25 or 30 people can sit down and adequately represent what this society thinks is okay for public viewing and what it thinks is not.

I put in a dissenting opinion on this matter along with the member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Charlton). We have a bit of a problem here. All of us were impressed by a couple of things we saw at the censor board, one of which was a group of people trying to do what is more and more becoming an impossible job -- judging the mores of our society. They admitted that was less and less of what they do. The vast majority of their work, 96 per cent, was not that at all but was classifying films.

We thought, and I believe, the concept of censorship as it is expressed by the Ontario Board of Censors is one which is no longer really relevant to Canadian society. It does not stop the showing of dirty movies. If that is the purpose of the exercise, they have been out-leaked, so to speak, by technology. If it is to stop the putting together of offensive materials, there is a bit of a problem with that as well.

If I might go to the parts of the committee report I think are sensible, and in a sense all of it goes to what the problems really are and all of it is fairly common sense stuff, I think we discovered that the concept of what is obscene in the Criminal Code of Canada is wrong. It needs to be viewed in a slightly different light taking into account that there is a great deal of abuse of children and women, and an abuse of violence as a technique for movie-making. All that stuff is a matter which ought to be considered in the Criminal Code itself.

I am an advocate of the concept that it is my right in a free society to censor. I censor by not paying to go see a movie or purchase a book. That is the only kind of censorship I find supportable. Anything which pretends to say a small group of people, or for that matter even a large group, has an ability to make that judgement for me is quite wrong and is not a supportable notion.

I find my version of what is obscene -- if I can use that old-fashioned word -- has changed substantially. Some of the things we saw when we went to visit the people at the censor board, the out-takes as they are called, I found to be a little nauseous and rank. Most were things I would not pay to see.

I would appreciate it if the censor board or classification board told me that kind of stuff was in the film so I would not waste my money on it, but I do not think I can support the notion that there is a group of people, whether they get paid by this government or not, who sit up there clipping little parts out of films. That is a waste of time and money. I do not think it accomplishes the original purpose.

It might have been possible 20 years ago to do that, but it is defeated by the technology of video cassettes or by the widespread distribution of what most members would call pornographic literature in stores all over. I believe there is an overwhelming argument to be made for saying one retains this group of people or this concept as a classification system. I think that is useful.

There is also something else to be considered. As long as the province uses this concept to censor films only and nothing else, I think what it is doing -- provided that the changes in the Criminal Code occur that I hope will occur -- is protecting those people who make money by exploiting women or children or violence or anything else. As long as the film board clips out portions of motion pictures which are obscene by that slightly broader definition in the Criminal Code I referred to earlier, it is protecting those people from prosecution.

I would much prefer to see the province take on the kind of thing that is done in Manitoba, for example. Their concept of a classification system is basically classification according to who might be interested in this kind of movie. They point out areas in the motion pictures that might be offensive to people and red-flag those areas where they think violation of the Criminal Code is involved.

I believe people who are making a fast buck from exploiting women or kids or violence in motion pictures ought to be held culpable and prosecuted under the Criminal Code of Canada. I do not want to see them protected by any censor board. If they are breaking the law, then I think it is a fairly simple thing. We have a justice system to deal with that. If they are not breaking the law, they should leave it alone.

The role of a censor in a modern society is mine alone. It is not shared by anybody else. It is my judgement and my dollar which goes into that kind of entertainment and, to paraphrase a popular slogan in the government of Ontario, I am my own censor board. Nobody else can be, nobody else should be, and although I have changing ideas of what I am prepared to put my entertainment dollar into -- I have changed some of my thoughts about that -- I cannot sustain this concept of a group of people, small or large, clipping little parts out of movies or deciding that some are obscene and cannot be shown in Ontario unless they want to show it in a setting other than the traditional motion picture theatre.

This is what I find particularly offensive. If I can get this into a little more artsy forum, what is obscene is okay. If I rent a room at the Art Gallery of Ontario and invite selected friends to see a motion picture like Pretty Baby or the Tin Drum or whatever, that is okay, but the rest of the public cannot do that. That suggests to me that the government is perpetuating a kind of two-level system: those who are somehow more intellectual than others and who can handle the stuff and the population at large, who cannot.

I had some difficulties with the recommendations which the committee made surrounding the work of the censor board. By and large, I do not have a number of problems there because much of what they proposed was fairly sensible and goes in part measure; it just does not go far enough. I believe we have to change our attitudes and we have to change the work which is carried on by the censor board.

I want to say one other thing which is not a major piece of business and I admit it. In general, I was pleased with the censor board's discussions with the committee, but I do want to put on the record one little objection. When we talked to people at the board, I was impressed that there was a group of people who were trying to do a job. I am always impressed by people who are diligent in their work and believe in what they do. That part of it was okay.

The part that I object to and want to put on the record is the bit about seeing the out-takes. I was not terribly impressed with the out-takes. As artistic work, they are the pits. What did strike me after the kind of initial shock of some of the things I saw had worn off, was very simply that the censor board had used a very neat little gimmick on the committee, designed very carefully to shock the committee and I suppose to make members on the committee who might have been a little uncertain about the work of the censor board say, "We really need to have a censor board because we cannot have that kind of awful outlandish stuff on the screens in Ontario." In a sense, I feel the committee was exploited slightly. I know other members on the committee were a little more taken aback by what they saw than I was, but I did feel that was a little unfair shot at work.

By and large, that is most of what I have to say about the work of the censor board. In summary, I do not think they are bad people. They are trying to do an impossible job and a job which does not need to be done any more. The committee did suggest a number of ways in which that could change. I am suggesting in my dissenting opinion that it ought to change even further.

10 p.m.

I want to say a few words about the review of the Ontario Police Commission. This is a good example of an agency that has not been the subject of a great deal of controversy. But in a number of ways, day-by-day issues in the Legislature are directly affected by the work of the police commission, and a number of things that have been said in here about high-speed chases and the use of firearms by police officers are matters that are affected by the work of this agency.

I think the members were impressed that there is a group of people who are trying to do a difficult job. We were impressed by the hardware that is located in their headquarters and by the sophistication of police work in Ontario these days. I know that when I went over there I tried to find my file on the police computer, and they must have mislaid it that day, because it was not there. But there is an ability now for police forces in Ontario through some of the work carried out in the offices of the police commission --

Hon. Mr. Ashe: Yours is in the heavy security section.

Mr. Breaugh: That was where we were supposed to be. We were supposed to be in the heart centre of security in Ontario, and they had obviously done a little work on my file over there. But we were impressed with a group of people who are attempting to do a very important job and were doing it fairly well.

We also found some flaws that I think are rather serious, particularly in the training of police officers. Ontario has a rather unusual system in that it provides for a wide variety of police officers at work. We have police officers who are extremely well-trained individuals using high technology and very sophisticated techniques; those kinds of police officers are present in Ontario.

We also have the possibility, and it is in use now, of having almost totally untrained personnel walking the streets as police officers. We tried to point out that there are some basics that are assumed for some forces, and we think those basics ought to be applied to all police officers.

I will go quickly through some of these recommendations, because I think they are important. We wanted to make the inspection process a normal, annual, public thing so that if the police commission regularly inspects police forces around Ontario -- and they really go all the way from being two and three-person operations to the size of the Ontario Provincial Police -- we should be trying to develop an expertise, a set of guidelines, a set of training rules that apply to a police officer from one end of Ontario to another, mostly on the basis, I think, that organized crime does not play by the rule that it must only function in areas where our police officers are reasonably well trained.

It seems quite logical, and in fact it does seem to be happening, that organized crime is interested in getting away from those areas of Ontario where there is high police surveillance and high technology and is beginning to function now in areas of Ontario where the qualifications are a bit less, the staffing is a bit less and the technology is nonexistent. We tried to point that out.

If in Ontario we expect a plumber or an electrician to go through a training course and get a licence, how is it rational that we do not expect a police officer to do that before he or she begins his job? So if it is rational for automobile drivers, for plumbers, for carpenters, for any of the skilled trades, for many of the unskilled trades and for salespeople that we demand some kind of certificate before they start doing the job but we do not do that for police officers, is it not a logical thing that first we would train the officer and then we would put him to work?

That, unfortunately, is not the case, and one of our recommendations is that we do just that, recognizing that there are going to be some local options, so to speak, in there.

In other areas where we tried to encourage some kind of upgrading of training it was simply to recognize that at the various police colleges and at post-secondary institutions we should bring all of that training together and allow those credits to be commonly registered, so to speak, with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities.

There were a couple of specific things. We wanted them to make sure that before police officers hit the streets with firearms on their hips they know how to use them. Oddly enough, although we would probably prosecute a plumber who goes in to do a job without a proper ticket, we allow police officers to carry weapons in Ontario without necessarily having had any training in the use of firearms. There has been enough controversy around that problem to indicate, and the committee did, that it is time to train them in the use of firearms before we turn them loose on the street.

The same thing is true of police pursuits. There have been enough rather sad events occurring around the whole issue of police pursuits to indicate clearly that a police officer in a cruiser can be a dangerous weapon if he or she does not really understand how to function in a high-speed pursuit. Some of our forces around Ontario have recognized that as a problem and provide training to their officers on that. We were trying to identify those areas where there was an obvious need for training and to see that the training occurs before the officer hits the streets.

We went through some of the processes of police complaints. They have been covered fairly thoroughly in previous debates; so I will not spend a lot of time on them. We found the consensus was that not many people in Ontario feel comfortable with the idea of complaining about the actions of a police officer. That is a tragedy. Several attempts have been made to rectify it.

I think it is still a bit much to ask people who feel they have been mistreated by the police to (a) go to the police station and (b) deal with all the police officers there in registering complaints. There are techniques we have proposed from time to time that would get us around that problem and provide the balance we want. We do not want police officers crucified for doing their job, but I think it is absolutely essential in a free society to have a technique developed that allows a citizen to register a legitimate complaint with someone other than a police officer.

Attempts are being made to work that out. The committee went through the process of outlining what we thought complaint processes could be, even to the point of getting, if we can, police forces to identify to the population at large how to go about laying a complaint against a police officer. The bottom line is that a police officer who does not behave properly in carrying out his or her duty is a police officer who makes the whole police force suspect in the minds of that community. It does not take a whole lot of them. It only takes one police officer acting improperly to ruin the reputation of an entire force. That is something we would regret.

We went also through some things from the side of an operating police officer in dealing with their complaints. There ought to be some fairness in that process as well. We made a recommendation that parallels things that are done with grievances in the Ministry of Labour. In one of our recommendations, we suggested panels consisting of three people to hear these appeals. Our recommendation was that such a panel should consist of the Ontario Police Commission vice-chairman, a representative of the chiefs of police and somebody who perhaps will raise an eyebrow or two, a representative of the ordinary police officers.

The point has to be made that police forces are not military operations. In many ways they are variations on that theme, and there ought to be some fairness. The same kind of fairness we are arguing for in terms of dealing with citizens' complaints also should be applied whenever a complaint is made that affects a police officer and his or her career.

One of the things that pleased me somewhat was that when we moved on to the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority, members of all three parties got a good glimpse of the ongoing problems of the government of Ontario in dealing with the federal government of Canada. One thing that is useful in this kind of review is to have members of the opposition see some of the problems the government has from time to time.

As we went through this, it was my impression that we sympathized with the Minister of Transportation and Communications. I think we said fairly frankly in here that there have been some practices developed at the federal level that do not do anybody any good. They may be nice juicy contracts for the Canadian National Railways, but they are a perversion of the political process. There are facilities put together with public tax dollars now being used in almost a punitive way against a facility run by the government of Ontario.

In many regards, when we went through the recommendations on extensions of the GO train and things like that, we were reflecting as individual members the needs we saw in our own communities. As the minister said in his earlier remarks, I do not think they are very different from the designs the ministry has.

If this review served a purpose, perhaps it was a good testing ground for the ministry to try on for size on all three political parties what it had in mind, what its problems were and for the committee to say, "We think there is a need to deal with that huge commutershed from Oshawa to Hamilton and provide them with a proper transportation system." In his earlier remarks the minister responded to that -- perhaps not the exactly the way everybody would have liked him to respond, but at least he has responded.

10:10 p.m.

I think it is useful for the members of this Legislature to deal with something like the transit authority in a legislative committee which can also serve as a vehicle for the ministry to air its problems. I think the ministry should be fairly pleased that it went in front of the committee and got what I think was a fair hearing. I do not think it should be hesitant to do so again, or that other ministries should be hesitant, when their agencies are called up, to go in and in a very straightforward way lay the specifics of their problems before the procedural affairs committee or any other committee.

It would be great for all our committees if people representing the ministries and agencies stopped pretending there was nothing wrong with anything anywhere and went before a legislative committee, as the Toronto Area Transit Operating Authority did, and in this instance put a straightforward case that said: "There are things we want to do and are prevented from doing because of the nature of the agreement. There are problems with the fare structure and all kinds of problems."

This committee, in its review of TATOA, tried to identify those problems and to make recommendations which I think will be of assistance to the minister, not only as his reactions so far have indicated but also in future considerations he may have.

The final agency we looked at was the Ontario Energy Board. For me at least, this was a fascinating study of a board that has been the centre of some controversy. The first recommendation reflects an easily found consensus in the committee, that it is time to stop the pretence that the Ontario Energy Board takes a look at what Ontario Hydro wants this year, reviews the request and reports on it; it does not have control over hydro costs in the way it does over the cost of natural gas, for example.

I think the first recommendation is just plain common sense. I was quite pleased to see that even members of the government party, this time around anyway, said it is just common sense to have the Ontario Energy Board Act amended to provide that the board has the power to issue orders with respect to Ontario Hydro rate increases. It is common sense, and it is beyond me why it took so long to get around to this three-party consensus on it.

We went through some things which I admit I am a little uncomfortable with but which the majority of the committee thought should be recommended. I do not deny there is an argument to be made for an automatic pass-through system for gas rate increases that result solely from an increase in the city-gate price of natural gas. The committee went to some length to detail the argument that it is a little silly to go to the expense of hearings and gathering research on something one knows is inevitable.

I want to put on the record that I am a bit uneasy about any kind of automatic pass-through, particularly when the principle does not apply to the population at large. In an era when governments have found that the trendy thing to do is to put together some kind of restraint package or control program, the consumers do not have an opportunity to control their costs. I think it is unfair and in that sense I disagree slightly with the recommendation of the committee about the automatic pass-through.

We went into an interesting problem that we have seen in a number of agencies, that agencies of the crown often go to great expense to provide a service that is substantially of interest to a group of folks running an energy corporation making a lot of money. Thus we find in the Ontario Energy Board, for example, the unusual phenomenon that they go through a great deal of research, a hearing process and the writing of reports but that they lose money in the process.

I guess it is almost a rabid free-enterprise concept that has been recommended here, that it recover its costs for the purpose of conducting those hearings. If it is a rabid free-enterprise thought, it is one I do not have a lot of problem with, because it strikes me that the energy board is dealing with corporations that can afford to pay the costs, the actual costs, of those hearings. I do not have any real problem with that.

We went into a couple of other areas where there was a little bit of controversy, but when one is dealing with corporations or utilities that are providing a service and they really have a monopoly, I think there is an obligation to deal with matters like uninterrupted service to make sure that it happens.

We went into one other thing, which in a perverted way I am told is now resolved. It is the little problem that a number of us brought up during the course of the committee hearings, that if a body like Consumer's Gas is given a monopoly to provide a service, then it ought to lose a little bit of its rights to do what other businesses might do.

For example, if such a body cuts off the gas on a weekend, or whenever, and the people call members of the Legislature or the gas company itself, there ought to be a means of rectifying what might be an obvious error. We told the Ontario Energy Board that we have run into some problems with that in many of our constituencies.

I am now told, I think by a letter from the Ontario Energy Board which I saw somewhere this morning, that they had gone into this with all the providers of service and that all of them claim that no matter when the gas is cut off, and it does not matter whether it is after normal office hours, there will be someone available who can correct an obvious error.

I think it is important when they are providing that kind of essential service to a community that they react in a responsible way, and I think that during the committee hearings we went to great lengths to try to establish that.

We are not trying to cover up for deadbeats here, but a number of us had found people who, for some reason, had not been given proper notice and had their gas cut off during the evening or on a weekend. Try though we might, we could not find anybody who had the authority to provide a restart of that service.

In a sense, at least on paper, the energy board now is prepared to assure us that this is no longer the case and that each of those corporations will provide a technique whereby the service can be restored.

At the end of the report it goes on through some of the recommendations from previous reports. I want to reiterate very quickly that this is a technique which I think is extremely valuable. I have been here long enough now to have participated in a number of debates where committees reported to the Legislature, a debate ensued, we all agreed it was a good idea arid then nobody ever did anything about it.

One of the things the procedural affairs committee has attempted to do is to make sure that does not happen with these recommendations.

There is before the House tonight a report which I recommend to all members. I think the process is useful, and I believe the recommendations in this report, with the exceptions noted in our dissenting opinions, are matters that would be good advice for the ministers in charge and for the Legislature as a whole.

The Deputy Speaker: The Solicitor General.

Hon. G. W. Taylor: Merci. Thank you.

Mr. Conway: Roy McMurtry's lap dog. We hear rumours.

Hon. G. W. Taylor: Well, we know our positions over here, unlike the member's party. We have great difficulty with his front bench. Who is the leader? They have leaders, ex-leaders, would-be leaders, pretenders-to-be-leaders. It is quite an ambition. We watch that front row.

Mr. Conway: Don't embarrass Norm Sterling. You will embarrass him if you keep that up.

Hon. G. W. Taylor: I do not want to be provoked, but the member had the first one.

At this very late hour and about this report that has been brought forward by the standing committee on procedural affairs, there are some comments I want to make regarding the matters that come under the jurisdiction of the Solicitor General, one in particular being the Ontario Police Commission, which the committee dealt with.

I might add that my name appears at the front of the report, but I was not there when the deliberations and recommendations were made. I was on the committee during parts of the hearing; however, I did not partake in the recommendations. I must say, though, I could not disagree with most of the recommendations contained in the report. I might add that, as Solicitor General, I have filed a reply to the recommendations about the Ontario Police Commission.

By and large, the recommendations were well thought out and well presented but, as I mentioned in my letter, the committee did not come to a final decision on one of the thorniest ones, that very controversial subject of whether the recommendations of the Ontario Police Commission should be implemented and whether there should be legislation saying they must be implemented by the force the commission is investigating or reporting on and making those determinations about.

10:20 p.m.

Recommendation 1 says, "The Ontario Police Commission make its inspections of the province's local police forces and the Ontario Provincial Police mandatory on an annual basis, and that any recommendations that result from such inspections be made public."

My comment on that is that the Ontario Police Commission now has a policy of conducting an annual inspection of all 127 municipal police forces in the province. There is currently a provision in the Police Act for inspection of the Ontario Provincial Police by the commission, and a limited inspection of some particular aspect of the OPP's activities might be possible. It is a large force. It has some activities that could be successfully reviewed and inspected by the Ontario Police Commission.

It is something I am prepared to consider and discuss with both the commissioner and the Ontario Provincial Police and the chairman of the Ontario Police Commission. Even if it is just a limited inspection, it might necessarily involve hiring further staff to conduct the inspections of a force of this size, particularly in some of the areas it must review. However, it does not present a total impossibility.

One of the items mentioned this evening, and one we are trying to come to a conclusion on, is the training of police officers. I can deal with one or two recommendations in one discussion, in that, through the committees and the Council of Regents for the community colleges, we have come to a conclusion that there will be a set, standard course for those individuals taking the law and security program.

We have not come to the firm conclusion that this is a prerequisite before entering the service of the police and policing in Ontario, but it is now a standard course and certain subjects will be covered and reviewed. Each individual taking that course throughout the community colleges in Ontario can get some background for his future service in the performance of police duties.

We do not have it down that it is a matter of fact and a prerequisite to becoming a police officer that one should go through the Ontario Police College at Aylmer. That will come, we hope, with the completion of the review of the Ontario Police Act in that those parties who are reviewing it -- the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the police governing authorities, the different police associations and the different municipalities represented on that committee -- may make a recommendation to the effect that one attends the Ontario Police College at Aylmer before one goes into the service of the public as a police officer.

One small mention was made that not all officers have received training in the use of firearms in Ontario, nor do they maintain a knowledge of the use of firearms. That is just one of the areas, but we are creating refresher courses throughout Ontario in all areas of policing and through the sub-units of policing, such as the C. O. Bick Police College in Toronto and the --

Mr. Boudria: Does that include crisis intervention?

Hon. G. W. Taylor: Yes, it does. The Ontario Provincial Police college at Brampton has some advanced courses, refresher courses and specific courses, some of which are advanced as to their earlier training and some of which are more specific to the training the police forces may be carrying out in the jurisdiction that is more common to them, such as C. O. Bick, which is the Metropolitan Toronto Police college and which would concentrate more on Metropolitan issues than some other colleges.

The advanced training in policing is coming up and I recognize that, as does the Ontario Police Commission. It is making great strides in assuring, under the guidance of Mr. Shawn MacGrath and the new director at the Ontario Police College, Doug Drinkwatter, that education in policing is at the highest level and improving all the time.

Police pursuits were mentioned. I recognize that is a controversial subject. There is no denying that some of those police pursuits end in cruel situations for individuals in that there are lives lost, there are injuries and there is property damage resulting from some of them. But I have great difficulty in seeing, as some might suggest, that pursuits should be totally removed from the activities carried on by the police.

Through the Ontario Police College and the research of the Ontario Police Commission, we have reviewed all the guidelines and practices of other police forces throughout North America. As a result of that review, we have put together guidelines for police use, and they have been issued to all police forces in Ontario -- guidelines that should be used when a pursuit is commenced or to determine when it should cease.

No matter how one divides up, cuts up or presents these guidelines to the police officer, it becomes a judgement call for the individual police officer in the individual circumstances the police officer is in at a particular time. That police officer must make a judgement call as to when he should commence or discontinue a pursuit.

As a concomitant of that, there is and has been instituted at the police college, not a pursuit course, as some might want to label it, but a driver training course. Just in the past few weeks I was able to attend at Aylmer and open the initial course on driver training there.

The driver training course has been instituted because it has been recognized that, during the initial stages of a police officer's career, there is a high incidence of accidents involving motor vehicles. I guess they assume that when they receive a driver's certificate they can take charge of an automobile and drive in all types of situations. When they get professional instruction from the instructors at the police college, the latter do point out situations.

While one recognizes that police officers spend many hours behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, and while one recognizes that damage to motor vehicles and to other people has the sad effect of loss of life and injury, one also has to recognize that police officers must carry out their work in the greatest amount of safety.

They are put through mockup situations in an area that has been prepared at an old air force base. They do practice runs on an airport strip that has been laid out in configurations so it resembles a municipality, and situations are set up that would commonly occur in driving an automobile in a municipality -- not in a pursuit situation, but in a common, normal driving situation. They are put through these simulations so they can better prepare themselves for situations and thus not be problems to other drivers on the road.

One has to recognize that officers while driving are also performing many functions as police officers, such as watching for criminal activities, watching for breaches of traffic violations, etc. So there is a heavy onus put on police officers.

As to the citizen complaint process, recommendation 9, members are probably aware that there is an experimental situation in Metropolitan Toronto. That is being regarded as a pilot project. Should the results prove satisfactory, it could possibly apply throughout Ontario, if such a recommendation were made and if the government were to recognize that the application was satisfactory for the province.

I recognize, Mr. Speaker, that the time is fast evaporating, if it has not evaporated.

The Deputy Speaker: Let us call it evaporated.

Hon. G. W. Taylor: I will conclude my remarks and I will ask if the debate on this matter might be adjourned.

The Deputy Speaker: It is our understanding that there are other speakers on this report.

On motion by Hon. G. W. Taylor, the debate was adjourned.

The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.