MUNICIPALITY OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO AMENDMENT ACT (CONTINUED)
The House resumed at 8 p.m.
House in committee of the whole.
MUNICIPALITY OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO AMENDMENT ACT (CONTINUED)
Resuming consideration of Bill 127, An Act to amend the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Act.
On section 1:
The Deputy Chairman: We are dealing with a motion which is the amendment before you and which has been duly moved. I will read it in order to refresh our memories.
Mr. Grande moved that the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York be struck from section 1.
We are speaking to that amendment. I call upon the member for Port Arthur.
Mr. Foulds: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Before we rose at six o'clock I was speaking to the principle of the amendment before us.
To bring you up to date, before the House recessed we were debating the amendment you have just read. If you will check the Hansard, you will see that the chairman allowed enormous latitude, which my colleagues and I did not take advantage of. However, the member for Lakeshore (Mr. Kolyn) spoke widely to the principle of the bill and that is, of course, entirely justifiable, which is how the previous chairman easily saw it.
The Deputy Chairman: If the honourable member and I may have an understanding, I would appreciate most genuinely that we speak to the motion on the floor. If there are generalities I will be doing my best to bring you back to the motion.
Mr. Foulds: I will also advise the chairman to bring back whatever generalities may pass my lips and apply them to this particular amendment to this particular section of the bill.
You will note in looking at the amendment which is before you and before the rest of the members of this House that the first section of the bill deals with definition. It defines the terms under which the bill, and therefore part VII of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Act, will apply. In other words, it sets out the framework in which this legislation and the substantive clauses of the legislation must operate.
The reason that my colleague the member for Oakwood (Mr. Grande) wishes to have the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York struck from the bill, is to give at least those boards the local autonomy which they so richly deserve and which they have requested. It is also to ensure that local autonomy, a principle which members well recognize is the basic and guiding principle that the Conservative Party wraps itself in when it deems it necessary and repudiates when legislation such as this is brought forward.
It is important when we consider local autonomy to consider the kind of special situation that occurs within the jurisdiction of each board of education. I would submit that the jurisdiction of the Toronto Board of Education and the educational problems it faces are substantially different from the needs and particular kinds of education programs that one might need, for example, in the borough of Etobicoke or even in Scarborough West. I think the City of Toronto Board of Education has been enormously innovative and has set standards of pioneering in special education, in English as a second language and in neighbourhood schools that should be a model for other boards but should not necessarily be imposed on other boards.
I would also suggest that programs like those in the Etobicoke Board of Education -- which, as my colleague the member for Etobicoke (Mr. Philip) has indicated, has a waiting list of two years, I think it is, for admittance to special education classes -- are not standards that should be imposed on all of Metro Toronto. I am afraid that the definition section of this bill -- to be amended, I hope, by my colleague from Oakwood -- imposes a levelling down of educational standards in Metropolitan Toronto, and I would be loath to see that happen.
I have to ask why it is necessary to make one super board of education which has authority over all the subsidiary boards of education within the umbrella of the Metropolitan Toronto School Board. That is a serious mistake. The amendment my colleague offers is a genuine amendment in that it tries to allow the opting out from this iniquitous bill, particularly by that board of education which has very clearly indicated that it does not wish to be under the aegis of the bill. I would like to know why the minister felt it necessary to impose this bill, because this section is simply an attempt to level down education across the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Toronto.
It is important to realize that local autonomy is a very important principle. Even though as a northern member I sometimes feel anger and frustration at the dominance that Metropolitan Toronto has over the politics, economics and social life of Ontario, I recognize it as a reality. Unfortunately, this kind of bill tries to obliterate the creative differences that occur from board to board. I believe very much in those creative differences, and I very strongly urge you, Mr. Chairman, and through you the other members of the House, to give serious and full consideration to the amendment put forward by my colleague, because it has a couple of basic principles that are important to education and to legislation.
8:10 p.m.
The amendment recognizes the principle of local autonomy, it recognizes the principle of democracy, it recognizes education is something very special to a particular area and it recognizes local boards are the best vehicles to deliver that education to the pupils it is their responsibility to serve. Once one tries to amalgamate those local boards into a huge conglomerate, one loses something. One loses something that has to do with individuality, something that has to do with quality, and something that has to do with the special programs that have been devised by the Toronto Board of Education.
I have heard a lot of complaints from Tories, from the government and even from the member for Lakeshore, who said that those special programs, innovative programs and pioneer programs sometimes cost the taxpayers a little extra money.
Mr. Philip: They would rather put them in jail a few years later than deal with them where the problem is.
Mr. Foulds: Exactly. My colleague the member for Etobicoke interjects about the costs and I happen to know a little about the costs.
Mr. J. M. Johnson: Let him speak.
Mr. Philip: I already have spoken.
Mr. Foulds: You can speak many times. Let me tell my good friend something --
The Deputy Chairman: I ask the member for Port Arthur not to respond. You have been doing a wonderful job of sticking to the motion on the floor.
Mr. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, what is he drinking?
Mr. Foulds: Let me taste it and find out.
The Deputy Chairman: There are standards concerning things we do not allow. I would ask you to have that removed.
Mr. Foulds: I will ask one of the pages to take it out.
The Deputy Chairman: Would you please remove that liquid? I find that quite offensive to the House.
Mr. Foulds: It is simply Coca-Cola. Where was I?
The Deputy Chairman: I believe you were speaking to the motion on the floor and I ask you to speak to that.
Mr. Nixon: Don't pour it on a plant or it will kill it.
Mr. Foulds: Don't pour it on the varnish; it will take the varnish off. Who brought that to the Chairman's attention? Was that you?
Mr. Nixon: Me.
The Deputy Chairman: Speak to the amendment.
Mr. Foulds: Sorry, Mr. Chairman. We know that the cost of not delivering proper programs to children the way the Toronto Board of Education delivers them is enormous. We know, for example, that the cost of maintaining someone in a correctional institution in this province is between $21,000 and $42,000 a year depending on the type of institution.
We know that if one takes the commonly accepted definition of a learning disability, about 75 per cent of the people in correctional institutions in this province have a learning disability which was not attended to early enough in the education system the way the Toronto Board of Education is attending to special education for children with learning disabilities.
For all those reasons, I suggest to my colleagues in the House that the amendment put forward by my colleague the member for Oakwood is an amendment they should not only accept, but wholeheartedly support and vote for.
The Deputy Chairman: Does any other member wish to participate in this debate? I can see several members standing and I call upon the member for Downsview (Mr. Di Santo). Maybe the member was not here when I made the remark that we are speaking to the motion on the floor; that is, the boards of education amendment.
Mr. Philip: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman: I do not see a quorum.
The Deputy Chairman: There is a quorum present.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, if your remark to stick to the amendment was friendly advice I will accept it, but if it was an attempt to intimidate me I reject it.
Never since I was elected to this Legislature have I ever been put in a position where I could not express myself freely. In fact, I will speak to the amendment and I would like to --
The Deputy Chairman: May I just remind the honourable member, you can speak freely to the motion, which is an amendment. That is all I ask that you do. You have the freedom to carry on from there.
Mr. Di Santo: That is exactly what I will do. I will also ask the member for Wellington-Dufferin-Peel (Mr. J. M. Johnson) to pay attention, because even though this has nothing to do with pits and quarries it is very important for your constituents, even though he does not believe --
The Deputy Chairman: That is not speaking to the motion. You are starting off on another subject.
Mr. Grande: There was an interjection.
The Deputy Chairman: I will try to keep the interjectors quiet.
Mr. Grande: That's right; keep them quiet.
The Deputy Chairman: And you too.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, I like this type of dialogue with you because it broadens the discussion and every member in the House will benefit. I actually invite every member to participate, because it becomes a collective discussion. Those who do not feel like participating in this debate on this motion will benefit.
I know there are members who represent Metropolitan Toronto, like the Minister of Education (Miss Stephenson) and other members, who are afraid that the discussion on the amendment introduced by my colleague the member for Oakwood will -- the minister is paying immediate attention and I know that she should because we are discussing --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Tell me what it is you are going to say? You haven't said anything yet.
Mr. Di Santo: We are discussing the amendment. For us who represent the west side of North York, that is extremely important. In fact, we have been against your amalgamation because we do not want to be --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: There is no amalgamation in this bill.
Mr. Di Santo: Okay. Can the minister explain why --
Mr. Wildman: Just subjugation.
Mr. Di Santo: Yes. They want to co-opt the city of North York, the borough of Scarborough, the borough of York, the borough of East York and the city of Toronto under this cumbersome Tory umbrella which is the Metro board. We understand why. That is why I rise in support of the amendment introduced by the member for Oakwood.
Mr. Philip: Those candidates who opposed the bill had a resounding victory last night.
The Deputy Chairman: The member for Etobicoke, one of your compatriots, the member for Downsview, has the floor. Please respect his opportunity to speak to the House. He has the floor and we look forward to him speaking to the motion.
Mr. Di Santo: We have been fighting for many years to have boards of education and administrative bodies that would represent the interests and the needs of the local communities. We have been doing that, not because of an ideological choice, not because all at once we decided that it was a better choice, not only because the Tories wanted huge bodies under their control, we did that deliberately because we live in our communities and we know the educational needs of our communities.
Anywhere in the great riding of Downsview the people who live there are working people, unlike the people who live in the riding represented by the Minister of Education.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Everybody who lives in my riding is a working person.
The Deputy Chairman: There is no need for interjections. We are speaking to the amendment.
8:20 p.m.
Mr. Di Santo: I know that the Minister of Education is touchy; that is why she never comes west of Yonge Street, because she does not understand the people who live west of Yonge Street. She does not understand --
The Deputy Chairman: You are not speaking to the motion at this point.
Mr. Di Santo: I am speaking directly to the motion.
The Deputy Chairman: It is a motion. Speak to the motion.
Mr. Di Santo: I am saying that if the Minister of Education were one day to come to the riding of Downsview or anywhere west of Yonge Street she would realize that the needs of the people who live there are quite different from the needs of the people who live in her riding. There are no wealthy people in Downsview. There are working people, immigrants, South Americans who do not even speak English. If she comes -- and this is an open invitation to all the Tory members --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I have been there many times. I don't need an invitation from you.
Mr. Di Santo: If the minister has come to the west end of North York many times she must have been quite invisible, because no one noticed her presence.
The Deputy Chairman: Speaking to the motion, please.
Mr. Di Santo: Yes, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you, but the interjections --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I do not seek publicity; I seek information.
Mr. Grande: We are giving you some.
The Deputy Chairman: Please. The honourable member is speaking to the motion on the floor.
Mr. Di Santo: It is quite difficult for me to co-ordinate my ideas even though it is very clear to me and to the members of the New Democratic Party why this motion is important. I was trying to say that if the minister had any acquaintance at all with the people who live in my riding, she would have realized why last night in Downsview they elected five members of the NDP to the North York Board of Education: three of them, including my wife Maria Augimeri, as separate school representatives to the North York Board of Education, and two to the public school board.
It was a very clear victory. We swept every possible poll in Downsview. The Minister of Education is very well acquainted with my wife's opponent, who was the incumbent, a Tory member who shared the platform with the minister in support of Bill 127.
Mr. Wildman: Is that why he lost?
Mr. Di Santo: And he lost miserably.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Who was it? I don't even know who you are talking about.
Mr. Di Santo: Peter Carusi. You know him very well.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Peter Carusi is a separate school trustee.
Mr. Di Santo: Exactly. What are they? Second- class representatives?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: No, but he was not on the platform.
The Deputy Chairman: We are talking to the motion on the floor as it pertains to the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, on a point of clarification: Mr. Peter Carusi, who is -- or was -- a member of the separate school board for Metropolitan Toronto --
Mr. McClellan: Was. Past tense.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I said "was." He was not present on a platform with me on the occasion the honourable member is mentioning. He is a separate school trustee, and this bill does not apply to him.
The Deputy Chairman: So now if the honour- able member will continue to speak to the motion on the floor.
Mr. Di Santo: Before continuing on the motion, on the same point of privilege I must remind the Minister of Education that Mr. Peter Carusi was sharing the platform with the former chairman of the Board of Education for the City of North York, Mr. George McCleary, who has been replaced by the NDP candidate Errol Young.
The Deputy Chairman: I would ask you to tie your remarks in to the amendment on the floor.
Mr. Di Santo: Yes. Just to refresh the memory of the Chairman and all the members, we are discussing in this motion the reasons we are opposed to having one Metro board that deals with the problems of education in all the municipalities in Metropolitan Toronto, and for that reason I must say that the member for Oakwood moved that the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York be struck from section 1 of the bill.
From that I deduce that if the city of Toronto and the borough of York are not part of the Metropolitan Toronto School Board, then the other boards could have more autonomy to deal with their problems. That is the reason I dealt specifically with the borough of North York.
It is the same principle. If we really believed that educational problems in certain areas should be dealt with by boards of education that reflect the needs of those areas, then we would accept the principle that we should have not only a board of education for the city of Toronto and a board of education for the borough of York but also boards like those we now have for every other municipality.
I know the minister will not accept that, but if she had looked carefully at the results of yesterday's municipal elections in Metropolitan Toronto, she would have realized it was a referendum on Bill 127. In every meeting I attended, she lost the referendum.
The real reason my colleague moved that the city of Toronto and borough of York boards be recognized as special entities is that last year, when the Toronto Board of Education -- and I think the elections yesterday speak directly to this amendment -- set up a task force to study the feasibility of introducing heritage languages in the normal school hours, the Minister of Education was the first one to rise up and speak out against the task force even before it had reached any conclusions. When it came to the conclusion that it was not only feasible but also desirable that heritage languages be part of the normal curriculum --
The Deputy Chairman: I ask the member to come back to the motion on the floor.
Mr. Di Santo: I am talking about the Toronto Board of Education.
The Deputy Chairman: As to how it should be removed from the act.
Mr. Di Santo: I am explaining why it should be removed. You remember very well, Mr. Chairman, when the Minister of Education stood up and accused the board of wanting to balkanize the school system by introducing heritage languages as a part of the curriculum. Tony Silipo, who was the chairman of that task force, was re-elected yesterday with a great plurality.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Scarcely a great plurality.
The Deputy Chairman: Will the member please tie his remarks to the motion that is on the floor?
8:30 p.m.
Mr. Di Santo: That is the reason we want the Toronto Board of Education to be treated as an autonomous entity outside the Metropolitan Toronto board. We believe that experiment would have been accepted with an open mind if another person had been minister.
The minister knows very well that elsewhere in the world that process has been accepted with positive results for the educational system, for the children and for society at large. She knows what is happening in Florida, in southern California and in Massachusetts.
Closer to home, the minister knows that in Montreal there is a Talmud school, which is a trilingual school in English, Hebrew and French. What is important to notice is that the students who come out of that school and attend university having the three languages perform much better than other students.
In Manitoba and Alberta there are bilingual schools where 50 per cent English and 50 per cent Ukrainian are taught and the students in those schools are performing extremely well.
What is the reason, then, for the minister to be opposing the experiment undertaken by the Toronto Board of Education? I cannot understand any other reason but the political reasons that are behind the government and the way the government deals with that section of the population which usually does not follow the control of the Conservative Party.
From an educational or a social point of view, or considering the growth in our society and the enrichment of values of what we call a multicultural society, I cannot see any possible reason why the Minister of Education and the government would oppose a process that could be beneficial for everybody.
But there are political reasons. Even though the minister will deny it, I know the way they look at those people who would attend heritage languages classes integrated into the normal curriculum. The Minister of Education is more experienced with the children of the bourgeoisie of her riding who take immersion courses in French and who attend private schools. For them, there is no problem because they come from wealthy families. They can attend schools where --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Oh no they don't. You don't even know. Why don't you come over and visit my riding for a change? You don't even know where it is.
The Deputy Chairman: I ask the honourable member to tie his remarks to the amendment that is on the floor. I think it is getting a little bit off topic.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, I think it ties in directly to the motion.
The Deputy Chairman: Which is an amendment "that the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York be struck from section 1." That is what we are debating.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, I am explaining why they should be removed from the list in section 1, and I think that I am allowed to explain the reasons why --
The Deputy Chairman: As long as it is tied into that, we look forward to hearing from you.
Mr. Di Santo: The children of the bourgeoisie represented by the Minister of Education do not need these types of classes, because they attend schools where they have the kind of education that their parents want to give to them because they can afford it.
When you have children of working class families who cannot have special education because their parents do not have special means and cannot afford to send them to special teachers, then you need a local body that responds to those specific needs.
If you have a bureaucratic board like the Metro board, where the people are not elected directly by the voters and are not accountable directly to the voters but are elected by the elected members of the boards, most of whom are independent, we know what that means. In effect --
Mr. Wildman: That is independent spelled with a "c".
Mr. Di Santo: With a capital "C" also. They are Tory hacks who take orders from the minister and eventually share the platform with her in dictating the education policies to their constituents. If you have that type of bureaucratic organization, you cannot respond to the needs of the communities.
Everybody will understand that if we have a board of education in the city of Toronto, it is most likely the trustees sitting on that board will be more in contact with the local communities, if only because they must seek re-election. They must be in contact with reality, have some communication with their constituents and therefore be more accountable to them in a way that directly reflects their needs.
If this structure based on local autonomy disappears and is replaced by a larger Metro board --
Mr. McClellan: Look who's here; the Premier (Mr. Davis).
Mr. Bradley: He's going to announce the withdrawal of the bill.
The Deputy Chairman: Order.
Mr. McClellan: This is only the second time in eight years.
Mr. Di Santo: Somebody suggested the Premier wants to do what the Minister of Education should do, withdraw the bill. The Premier does not want to do that because it was a collective decision of the government.
The Deputy Chairman: Please speak to the motion on the floor.
Mr. Di Santo: Let me go back to this important amendment. We realize that if this amendment is accepted at least in a very minor way we could repair some of the harm that will be done if the bill is accepted as introduced by the Minister of Education. We could at least preserve in Metropolitan Toronto the Board of Education for the Borough of York and the Board of Education for the City of Toronto. As far as the city of Toronto is concerned, we could preserve some of the experiments we think have been very positive.
I have talked about the heritage languages program, the task force that was set up, the long process and the huge participation of the public in the hearings of the board of education which expressed not one view but the views of several groups and individuals who saw the program in a different way.
It was essentially a democratic process that took place at the local level, because we had a board of education made up of trustees who had a direct line to their constituents and could therefore understand their needs and give them a forum where they could express their opinions.
That will no longer happen if we have a Metro board. There will be a direct line, not between the trustees and the constituents, but between the Minister of Education and the members of the Metro board. Then there will be a magnification of a process that will be essentially against the interests of the people, especially the part of our population that is less able to express itself, less vocal and less able to exert pressure. Therefore, perhaps it will help the Conservative Party to preserve some positions of power in the education system in Metropolitan Toronto to the detriment of the general public.
8:40 p.m.
The process that was undertaken last year, which the Minister of Education opposed so vehemently, was very important, especially in the Toronto Board of Education. I think that was one of the main reasons she decided that should not happen any longer. We realize that was a crass political decision that had nothing to do with the educational needs of the children of Metropolitan Toronto but, rather, with the position and power of the Conservative Party.
We are in favour of this amendment, because what happened last spring in Toronto was so important and so essential for those of us who are not part of the Tory power structure in Ontario but who are part of the public whose needs are not always understood by the government. It was extremely important, because we have been fighting for many years to have heritage language programs.
I remember 10 years ago we had the problem of vocational schools in Toronto. I was quite new to this city. All at once, we realized there was a very large number of students of ethnic origin and children of Canadian workers who ended up in vocational schools.
I do not know whether it was by accident or design but all the vocational schools were located along the Bloor subway line where most of the immigrants lived at that time, and nowhere else. We had to fight to make the officials of the board of education understand that this was irresponsible.
Thousands of children were sent to vocational schools. They would stay there for years and at the end would come out without a diploma, without an education and without a skill. They would be lost to our society and relegated to menial jobs. In many cases they were not qualified for any kind of job.
At that time, a group of us in our community went to the Toronto Board of Education and, after a series of public meetings and discussions, we were able to rectify that situation. We were dealing with a body that was in direct contact with the needs of the local communities. They were accountable to us.
I remember with some pride the long meetings we had at the board of education building on College Street, sometimes until one or two o'clock in the morning because there was a problem of language.
As many Conservative members know, some of us speak with an accent and at that time our English was probably not understandable at all. We had a communication problem, but we were able to make them understand that vocational schools were not the solution to the problem of immigrant children in Metropolitan Toronto.
The Toronto Board of Education library has several studies on children in transitional classes, children of immigrants, how they performed in school, children with English as a second language and children with English as a first language but with immigrant backgrounds.
In the end, after two long years of discussions -- and I must say that at that time, fortunately, there was another Minister of Education who was more receptive to our requests -- we were able to change that situation. The Toronto Board of Education adopted a policy that responded much better to the needs of those children. After they had received their education in vocational schools, they were allowed to take academic degrees by going to universities or community colleges.
We were able to do that only because we were dealing with the Toronto Board of Education and the trustees who were directly accountable to the community, to the people they represented. If we had been dealing with Tory Metro board, we would have got nowhere. We would have been dealing at the Metro level with people who had been elected in Scarborough, East York or Etobicoke, who had no understanding of the problems and who had no need to justify themselves.
If you were a trustee elected in Etobicoke or Scarborough, you would not be accountable to the people who lived in the city of Toronto. You could not care less whether your decisions would be accepted by the constituents of the city of Toronto, because at the next election you would not face them. Your constituents would be in Scarborough, and their needs would be completely different from those of the people living in the city of Toronto.
I am sure everybody understands that a trustee sitting on the Metro board would be motivated quite differently from a trustee sitting on a local board.
Mr. Chairman, I think you understand why we would like to preserve the autonomy of the Toronto Board of Education. It is not only for the reasons that I mentioned, but also because we think everyone now accepts that huge, bureaucratic bodies are less effective, more expensive, costlier and do not deliver.
I am sure the minister will not accept this amendment, not because she is convinced that this is the wrong amendment but because it is against the political reasons that motivated Bill 127.
I think the minister is wrong. She was proved wrong yesterday in the elections in North York and the city of Toronto, where her bill has been rejected overwhelmingly, and she will be proved wrong again.
I should caution the minister that the present trend will not go on forever. Everything comes to an end -- even the Tory regime.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Wishful thinking, Odoardo.
Hon. Mr. Davis: You should live so long.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, you remember what the Premier did on the occasion of the by-election in York South. He thought he would get rid of Nunziata and preserve the seat for Gayle Christie. But the irony is that the voters got rid of Gayle Christie yesterday. Everything comes to an end.
8:50 p.m.
Mr. McClellan: And Nunziata.
Mr. Di Santo: And Nunziata.
Mr. Chairman: Order. I am sure the Premier was not being provocative. Please speak to the amendment.
Mr. Di Santo: The Premier is never provocative. But yesterday it was really rewarding in Downsview to see the results in wards two and five. My wife was a candidate against the Tory incumbent, Peter Carusi; and in many polls -- and I know the Premier has a large staff and can verify this -- the Tory candidate had zero votes.
Mr. Chairman: You are going to work this in to the amendment.
Mr. Di Santo: That was a referendum on Bill 127, period, because our position was quite straight.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: It was not. They are separate school board trustees, and that bill does not apply to them.
Mr. Di Santo: Perhaps the minister, who has a fixed idea about the second-class representatives on the board of education, wants to explain why it is that, if the representatives are co-opted on the Metro board, they are in any different position from any other trustee. Can she explain that? She cannot, of course. I know that.
I was saying that yesterday was a referendum on Bill 127. We went to the voters with this very straight position: You have NDP candidates; you do not have independents, both Liberals and Conservatives vote together and when they sit on the school board you really cannot determine whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, because all the Liberal candidates were in favour of Bill 127. I could quote the Liberal critic, the member for St. Catharines (Mr. Bradley). He reminded them that the Liberals should try to have a common position, not one position at Queen's Park and another position in North York.
So it was a referendum on Bill 127.
Mr. Roy: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman:
I want to say that it is one thing for the member for Downsview to savagely attack the Conservatives in every shape or form, whether they are trustees or not; but to go out and distort the position of the Liberal candidates is unforgivable, Mr. Chairman, and you should correct the record.
Mr. Di Santo: I want to thank my friend the member for Ottawa East, because in fact they were Liberal candidates. Thank you very much.
In fact, there were more than that. The former Liberal candidate in Downsview who ran against me was running the campaign for one of the candidates, who came last, and that was --
Mr. Roy: Again?
Mr. Di Santo: He came last. Yes.
Mr. Chairman: I remind the honourable member that the enemy is apparently over here, and you are speaking to the amendment.
Mr. Di Santo: This is only a friendly reminder to my friend the member for Ottawa East.
Mr. Roy: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, again to correct the record: I notice that the NDP have with some annoyance been making reference to my colleague the member for Yorkview (Mr. Spensieri), but the record should be very clear that my friend and colleague was instrumental in the election of three aldermen in the city of North York.
Mr. Breaugh: You mean to say that the Liberal Party was involved in municipal politics?
Mr. Roy: That's right, and we are not ashamed to say it. They were good candidates; he supported them and the record should show that.
Mr. Wildman: On the point of order, Mr. Chairman: Did you understand the member for Ottawa East to say the Liberal Party had introduced partisanship at the municipal level?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Chairman, that was part of it. The other part was, is this the same member for Yorkview who made certain commitments in this House and has yet to pay up on those commitments?
Mr. Roy: The payment is on its way. The defeated NDP candidate has the payment.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, I think the member for Ottawa East is right. The member for Yorkview --
Mr. Chairman: Speaking to the amendment; you are not helping matters much.
Mr. Di Santo: Mr. Chairman, I am speaking on the point of order.
Mr. Chairman: Nothing about the point of order; we are talking about the amendment to section 1. Speak to the amendment to section 1, please.
Mr. Di Santo: I only want to say that the member for Yorkview was instrumental in electing two or three candidates.
Mr. Roy: Three.
Mr. Di Santo: Three; with the help of such Liberals as the mayor of the city of North York, Mel Lastman, and Barbara Greene, Bob Yuill and other Conservatives, which means the coalition works very well.
Mr. Chairman: Speaking to the amendment.
Mr. Di Santo: The point I was trying to make on the motion introduced by the member for Oakwood which reads, "I move that the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York be struck from section 1." was that yesterday the election in North York was a referendum on Bill 127. The discussion on Bill 127 came up at every all-candidates meeting.
There was a clear position on our side. We said we opposed Bill 127 for the reasons we have expressed through our critic and the other members who have spoken in the debate in the House. All of the other candidates were in support of Bill 127, some of them because they were independent and Conservatives, some of them because they were independent and Liberals and disagreed with their critic at Queen's Park.
When the results came in they were a resounding defeat for the Minister of Education. We elected five people only in Downsview, all New Democrats. I thought after that experience the minister could have had a second thought and perhaps could have said, "Okay, this bill is not acceptable to the people of Metropolitan Toronto, let me withdraw it."
When I saw the Premier come into the chamber tonight, I thought perhaps he would have used his wisdom and said, "Okay, let's put an end to this charade and let us withdraw the bill because it is becoming a farce."
Hon. Miss Stephenson: You are making it a farce.
Mr. Breaugh: Are you announcing a cabinet shuffle?
Mr. Di Santo: The Minister of Education does not understand it is because of her position it has become a farce. All the groups that appeared before the committee spoke against it and if she had listened --
Mr. Wildman: It's hard to do a shuffle when your whole deck is broken.
Hon. Mr. Davis: How would you know?
Mr. Di Santo: Of course, there are groups inspired by the Conservative Party who came to support the position of the minister, but I am talking of the groups who reflect the interests of the real people, not the interests of the Conservative Party.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Are you suggesting trustees don't have the interests of the people at heart?
Mr. Grande: The board of trade.
Mr. Di Santo: The board of trade.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: You were talking about trustees as well.
Mr. Di Santo: As I said before, the Minister of Education does not understand the needs of some people we represent because she represents constituents who belong to the wealthy bourgeoisie who do not have the needs of the people who take English as a second language. In her riding people do not need to take English as a second language. They take immersion courses in French or send their children to private schools because they can afford it.
We are trying to make a contribution to the minister to make her understand that there are people who are different from most of her constituents. We are telling her, "Try to understand their needs because you are the Minister of Education." If she wants to create this cumbersome organization in Metropolitan Toronto those people will not be represented any longer because there will be no direct communication between the voter and the elected people.
9 p.m.
I know the minister will not accept our position, but it is our duty to try very hard to make her understand. You never know; it may be that at some point the other members of the cabinet, if not this minister, will understand they are fighting a battle that is lost because the people do not accept it. Perhaps the Premier can convince the minister to withdraw the bill.
Mr. Roy: Mr. Chairman, I want to join my colleague, the critic, the member for St. Catharines (Mr. Bradley), and other colleagues, at least on this side of the House, who have consistently and vehemently opposed the provisions in Bill 127.
Mr. Chairman: You are not being provocative?
Mr. Roy: No, I do not intend to be provocative at all. You know it is not my style. I just speak to the section itself and to the amendment as proposed. I intend to be as brief and as succinct as possible, especially when we are so honoured in this assembly on a -- is it a Tuesday evening? Yes, it must be a Tuesday evening; I am here. We are honoured to have the presence of Old Smoothie himself, the Premier of Ontario.
Hon. Mr. Davis: What is this "old" business?
Mr. Roy: You will excuse me; I do not want to insult the Premier. But I was just reading an article in Toronto Life. The title of the article is "Bothersome Bette." It starts by saying -- and I am just quoting; these are not my words --
Mr. Chairman: If they know about the amendment -- -
Mr. Roy: Yes, we will be talking about the amendment; I just want to reply to the Premier.
The article goes on to say, "Bette Stephenson: pugnacious, abrasive and partisan." That is what it says. I said: "Is this our Bette they are talking about?"
At the end of the article it says that in the days when things get really rough for this bill --
Mr. Chairman: The member for York Mills.
Mr. Roy: Yes, the member for York Mills.
Here is what it says: "Maybe Old Smoothie" -- the Premier -- "should save her from herself and order her to drop this political hot potato."
I was thinking the same thing as my colleague the member for Downsview, as the Premier walked into this assembly. I thought, "Oh, oh, here comes Old Smoothie himself." We are not used to having him here on a Tuesday evening at nine o'clock. The poker game must have broken up early this evening to bring the Premier in at this hour. So I thought it must have been something important.
Hon. Mr. Davis: Only cribbage, not poker.
Mr. Roy: In discussing this amendment to remove the boards of education of the city of Toronto and borough of York from section 1, I was thinking about what I was going to say and I thought that surely, with the Premier walking in at this late hour, he is coming in to say something to our dear friend Bette.
Mr. Chairman: The member for York Mills.
Mr. Roy: The member for York Mills.
I am prepared to sit down and yield the floor to the Premier if he wants to participate in the debate and tell us why it is that his government, through the minister, is consistently attempting to enact something that is against the public interest of the citizens of this great metropolitan area. Why is it that he is consistently opposed to local autonomy?
I have heard speeches from the Premier since 1971, when he talked about preservation of local autonomy. It is so important that he has even had the great Darcy McKeough back off sometimes from very important legislation on the basis of local autonomy.
If that is the principle of this long-standing Tory administration, what is it about this legislation --
Hon. Mr. Davis: You ought to look at the Liberal Party's literature back in the 1960's --
Mr. Roy: Our party's literature?
Hon. Mr. Davis: County school boards, regional government --
Mr. Roy: That is right. We are still fighting for local autonomy. Under our former leader, the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk (Mr. Nixon), we were fighting for local autonomy and under the present leader, in November 1982, we are still fighting for local autonomy. We are consistent.
On the hustings you are for local autonomy, but when it comes to action, you bring forward legislation like Bill 127. That is what you call local autonomy. Why would you want to undermine the process of local autonomy? Why do you stop listening to people?
What is it about the process that when people seem to object to your legislation -- I am talking now to the member for York Mills -- what is it about you that when people object to your legislation it makes you so abrasive and makes you react?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: You are talking to the principle.
Mr. Roy: The principle, it seems to me, is that we are all elected here to represent the people. When the people of an area consistently oppose, when the parents --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: There are 1.6 million in support and 600,000 opposed.
Mr. Roy: Why don't you go to the people with Bill 127 if you think it is such good legislation?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: We did. We did.
Mr. Roy: Let's have an election on it. There were school board elections just yesterday and one could hardly call the voting yesterday a referendum in support of Bill 127. You could not say that.
Mr. Chairman: And the amendment?
Mr. Roy: Yes, the amendment. I say to the minister, her candidate in the riding of York South blamed Bill 127 for the poor showing. Do you call that a referendum in favour of Bill 127? The evidence would seem to indicate, at least from the most recent results, that the people of this area are opposed to the bill. That is why we are in support of this amendment. That is why we feel the members of this assembly should respond to the needs and the wishes of people in this area. Why does this party, led by Old Smoothie --
Hon. Mr. Davis: What is that "old" business?
Mr. Roy: I am just quoting. I am not an expert on the English language.
Hon. Mr. Davis: Or in any language for that matter.
Mr. Roy: I just thought it was considered to be a compliment to be called an old smoothie in this particular context. If you want people to continue to suggest that you are, in fact, pretty smooth about the process, maybe some time along the way you are going to have to talk to the Minister of Education, this "pugnacious, abrasive and partisan" Minister of Education.
You may have to say to her: "Look, we have a little problem here with Bill 127. Maybe, Bette, you should look at the amendment proposed by our colleague opposite. Maybe we should change section 1 of this legislation. Maybe we should be listening to people in this area."
I have difficulty understanding why the Minister of Education is so aggressively trying to foist on people something that is against their wishes when in Ottawa she does exactly the opposite. They want her to change the system of education, the structuring of the boards of education in Ottawa to local autonomy. They are crying out there for change and yet the minister consistently refuses to act in that area.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Ottawa is next on the list.
Mr. Roy: We are going to get a French-language school board, are we?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: That is not all you are going to get.
Mr. Roy: That is what the people there are asking for. I am prepared to propose another amendment, except that this legislation does not apply to Ottawa-Carleton.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Exactly; not to any place other than Metropolitan Toronto.
Mr. Roy: One of the reasons we are proposing and supporting the amendment against the legislation -- I can only read the scuttlebutt, I do not know what is happening in Toronto unless I read Toronto Life, but it says here that the local Tories --
Hon. Mr. Timbrell: In other words, you don't know what is happening in Toronto.
9:10 p.m.
Mr. Roy: Does the Minister of Agriculture and Food want to put in a word here?
Hon. Mr. Timbrell: I already did. If you would just pay attention you would know I already did.
Mr. Roy: We do not hear from him very much these days. The Minister of Health (Mr. Grossman) is getting the best of him in the leadership campaign. The minister had better start counting his delegates again.
Mr. Chairman: Speak to the amendment.
Mr. Nixon: Wait until the word gets out that he is driving around in a used Chevy.
Mr. Roy: When the Premier laid down the law in that last cabinet meeting, the Minister of Agriculture and Food backed off but the Minister of Health kept right on campaigning.
Mr. Chairman: The member promised not to be provocative.
Mr. Roy: Okay, I will not be provocative.
Hon. Mr. Davis: Has the member for Ottawa East started his campaign yet?
Mr. Roy: My campaign? The Premier should know that the reason for my overwhelming success in Ottawa East is that I am campaigning all the time. I am working for the people all the time.
If the members want proof of that they should phone Omer in Brussels. They should give their Conservative candidate a call in Brussels. Omer will tell them how he nearly lost his deposit.
Hon. Mr. Davis: He is a lot better off --
Mr. Roy: The Premier is not kidding. I wonder who lost and who won that election.
Mr. Ruston: What about Morley Rosenberg?
Mr. Roy: Yes, what about Morley? Omer makes Morley look like a piker.
I was talking about why we are bringing forward this amendment.
Mr. Chairman: Never mind the interjections.
Mr. Roy: I want to say to the minister, and maybe the Premier will convey the message, but the article states, "Provincial Tories are said to be badly split over this bill." Is that true? Are they split over this bill?
That is why we are bringing forward the amendment so they do not split. It goes on to say, "The more enlightened cabinet ministers" --
Mr. Bradley: Are there any? Name them.
Mr. Roy: Let me name them: "such as Larry Grossman and Roy McMurtry" -- Roy "sub judice" McMurtry --
Mr. Bradley: Is this a proverb the member is telling us?
Mr. Roy: Yes. I am told that the local, enlightened Tories are in favour of this amendment. That is what it says here. It goes on to say: "and members Susan Fish" --
Mr. Chairman: Order. As much as I respect the honourable member we have to ask him from time to time to obey our standing orders and to refer to members by the respective ridings they represent.
Mr. Roy: Yes, The member for St. George; Susan Fish is her name anyway, Mr. Chairman. Then there is the member for High Park-Swansea (Mr. Shymko).
By the way, may I ask a question of the NDP?
Mr. Chairman: No.
Mr. Roy: What happened to Ed Ziemba?
Mr. Chairman: No.
Mr. Roy: Are they refusing to answer?
Mr. Chairman: Yes, the member has the floor.
Mr. Roy: Okay. The reason for proposing this amendment is to get these enlightened Tories to speak to the minister. The article says, "These members are apparently fed up." It does not mention the Minister of Agriculture and Food as being an enlightened minister for the area. It does not have that minister's name here at all. It says, "They are apparently fed up with being inundated with raging parents."
Hon. Mr. Davis: The pronunciation is inundated.
Mr. Roy: Sorry, I keep putting the accent on the wrong syllable. I am like Jean Chrétien. We have our problems. I will tell the Premier that he should not try to speak French. He will make Diefenbaker sound bilingual.
Speaking to the amendment, here we are with this legislation which is so offensive and so against their wishes. So I say to the Premier this evening, to Old Smoothie, that he should talk to Bette --
Mr. Chairman: The member for York Mills.
Mr. Roy: Yes, the member for York Mills. He should speak to her and see if he cannot pull one of his sleight-of-hand, old card tricks, quietly let it die and then just pretend. He has done it before with other legislation. He has backed off before on other legislation. Just recently, did he not sell a jet? He traded it. He traded a jet for water bombers. If he is not prepared to do that, he should at least listen to the amendments we are proposing and listen to the good sense of my colleagues, the critic and the members on this side of the House.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, I want to say it is a privilege to participate in a debate on a bill which raises so many important and fundamental questions in the area of education and, in more general terms, with respect to society and social organization at large.
Mr. Chairman: Wait a minute. We are talking to the amendment.
Mr. Allen: Yes, I am quite aware it is an amendment to the bill and I wanted to start with the bill before I got to the amendment. I am not going to dally with all the other provisions because we are going to come to them, of course, in the hours, days and weeks ahead as we go through amendment after amendment on this bill. But I do want to say that --
Mr. Chairman: I am sorry. I did not hear you but my understanding of your opening remarks was you wanted to discuss the bill before you discuss the amendment. We are not supposed to do that in committee of the whole House. The amendment is before the committee. We are supposed to discuss the motion presented by your own member for Oakwood.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, what I intended to say was I was referring to the bill, I was commenting that I was speaking to it, but that of course my remarks are going to direct themselves to the amendment offered by the member for Oakwood. The amendment strikes the central principle the bill offends and, therefore, I want to direct my remarks in that direction.
The members will excuse me if I do not engage in a good deal of repartee relating to the past history of this House. I have not as yet discovered my proper foils, my proper antagonists in one part or another of the House, and I trust my remarks will go relatively uninterrupted, but if they do not, that is all right with me.
May I also say that, coming as I do from the classroom, I am not quite used to the extreme degree of reiteration and repetition taking place in the debate, but I understand entirely its usefulness. It seems to me that is a very sound pedagogical principle to follow. It seems to me it is important to state what one is saying, to reiterate it, and then finally to repeat it at least once, if not several times, in order that the message may sink home.
Hon. Mr. Davis: That's not what some of your students tell me about your lectures.
Mr. Allen: I have a number of lectures I can deliver to the Premier from time to time if he will come to the House. I would be quite happy to have him as an audience. I am sure he is a good learner and I would be happy to address any of them to him.
Hon. Mr. Davis: I'm sure.
Mr. Philip: Unlike you, my colleague understands history.
Hon. Mr. Davis: Oh, I'm not sure about that.
Mr. Allen: I am aware there is a certain Tory mythology about the history of this province. It begins on a certain date which is not exactly the most appropriate one for most of the members of this province these days.
What I would like to say is that as I listen to the debate and to people's contributions to it and try to reach for some of the large principles that lie behind the amendment the member for Oakwood introduced, I am struck that those principles reach out into laws of nature and society, and that they relate to fundamental principles of our religious traditions. I want to allude briefly to those.
It seems to me this bill does offend the whole principle of autonomy and of localism in social life. I think it is impossible to read through the bill and not recognize the extent to which it does in fact trespass on local boards in the Toronto region, that it does give a kind of primacy to the Metro board in almost all important respects, that it does open up the whole Metropolitan Toronto education system to a good deal more manipulation through the ministry than would otherwise be the case. To me, that offends in general the whole principle that education ought to relate as much as possible to the interests of parents and to the interests of local communities and groups.
9:20 p.m.
The large principle that I see behind this relates back to theories and notions that lie behind the emergence of modern communication theory. The observation of the second law of thermodynamics relates not only to nature and natural systems but to social systems as well. It is not true only in nature that closed systems tend to run down, that their energy tends to be dispersed increasingly homogeneously throughout them; it is also true of social systems. When institutions become fastened too hard upon society, upon people and their energies, those energies also begin to run down.
So it seems to me it is vital for any bill addressing education, as it is vital for any bill addressing any large subject in our society, not to offend those sources of energy, not to abridge or qualify those sources of energy that lie within our society. Yet it seems to me that this, like the second law of thermodynamics, represents precisely that, because if there is one thing that the whole origin of life represents within the structure of nature, it is a kind of countercurrent, a harnessing of local energy, the --
Mr. Chairman: Order. As much as I respect the member for Hamilton West, and I have been listening with great interest for the last five minutes, I would now like him to centre, after the generalities, on the specifics of the amendment to section 1.
Mr. Philip: Didn't you follow that?
Mr. Chairman: Yes, I did follow it, and that is why I am bringing it to his attention.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, I am glad you drew it to my attention, because I want to reiterate the fact that any bill such as this, which offends local autonomy, also offends the very basic law that underlies processes of nature and society that are important for us to recognize; and it seems to me that if this House is not interested in those general principles, then it ought not even to be addressing this subject at all.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman: Surely the member is speaking to the amendment. We have surely all spoken now to one of the principles involved in the amendment to remove the city of Toronto; that is the question of local autonomy, and that is what he has been discussing throughout. Surely that is the whole point of one of the major arguments.
Mr. Chairman: I am sorry. It was not that obvious to me. I am glad you pointed it out.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, I am glad to know you are listening and following closely.
The second point I would like to make is to reiterate the principle that the member for Etobicoke described for us a little earlier, which this bill also offends, and that is the Catholic principle of subsidiary, which suggests that wherever possible --
Interjections.
Mr. Chairman: The member for Hamilton West has the floor. Would the Minister of Health (Mr. Grossman) try not to be so provocative?
Mr. Allen: The Catholic principle of subsidiary is very similar to the principle I was just announcing, which is that the smallest unit that can cope with the task at hand ought to be the one given the job. This principle, it seems to me, is entirely cognate with the one I have just been outlining.
Interestingly enough, it is not unlike a very fundamental principle of our Protestant heritage, which also stresses that voluntarism --
Mr. Nixon: Where is this in the bill?
Mr. Chairman: Not to mention the amendment.
Mr. Allen: -- voluntary organization lies at the root of organized society. If we take the structure of protestantism with its emphasis on congregationalism, we have an example of localism which is entirely relevant to this debate.
With respect to this amendment, I think it is extremely important to realize that a lot of the protest coming out of Toronto and other parts of the province rises out of these principles I have been enunciating. If I wanted to extend those principles and draw them also out of the Jewish tradition in this province, I could do that as well.
Mr. Philip: It is also incompatible with social Darwinism.
Mr. Allen: Somebody has suggested it is also incompatible with social Darwinism but I will not go into that.
Fundamental to any life in our educational system, as in our society at large, diversity is absolutely essential. That diversity is the root of the educational richness we have. It is necessary to innovation, and without that innovation, any kind of equality of education is pointless. Who needs equality of education unless we have diverse centres that are unequal in some sense but whose capacity is untrammelled so they can get on with the job of producing new ideas which can then be borrowed and used by others?
In the long run, the objective is equal access to the best that is available to us, but that equal access has to rest upon a system that is diverse and in which local autonomy, the local powers of school boards, is not harnessed. As the member for Port Arthur (Mr. Foulds) said, what we want is the richness and diversity of one school board complementing that of another and not have it subordinated or equalized in a homogeneous fashion as this bill would do.
Therefore, it seems to me it is entirely appropriate that we should have an amendment at hand which speaks directly to the role the Toronto board has played and the place it has at the moment within the larger educational structure of Toronto and Ontario. As speaker after speaker has tried to reiterate, it has been a very creative board. One example of a very interesting piece of innovation that board introduced to the province is heritage languages education. Our own school system in Hamilton eagerly grasped that opportunity and now has thousands of students enrolled in the heritage education program.
It is odd that the board which produced that very interesting piece of innovative language study and spread it abroad is now the one that is feared so much by so many neighbouring boards. They fear that perhaps its experiments will become too costly or too tumultuous for the system to absorb, or perhaps the ideas are too radical and costly for us to embrace and therefore it seems necessary to smother that kind of advance. It is alarming to me that the ministry and the minister herself have spoken of the boiling cauldron the heritage languages program would produce if it was introduced into the daily curriculum of the school system in Toronto or in the rest of the province.
Mr. Chairman: Therefore, it is necessary to bring in this amendment?
Mr. Allen: The heritage languages program is an example of the innovation that follows from autonomous action which can therefore provide a creative tension within the system that is only possible where there is the highest degree of autonomy in the educational structure. That is how I got to the heritage languages issue.
We will have an opportunity to debate in more detail the possibility of opening up the option of including that heritage languages system within the daily program of our school system. I hope my own board in Hamilton would want to take advantage of that.
9:30 p.m.
I want to say that if the minister proposes extending to regions like Hamilton the kind of structure that is apparently to be foisted upon Metropolitan Toronto's educational system, I am afraid we will find that the same explosive situation will occur in my own region that we find here.
I have received letter after letter and petition after petition with the names of hundreds of teachers. They, as well as the association of principals in Hamilton, all speak out against this legislation in the following terms. "This proposed legislation cripples the ability of local boards to respond to local needs and will mean the loss of key programs in some areas. It also reduces the accountability of local trustees to the taxpayers and employees. 'Blame Metro, not us' will be the motto" --
The Deputy Chairman: What you have said so far does not fully tie in to the motion on the floor, which is that the Board of Education for the City of Toronto and the Board of Education for the Borough of York be struck from section 1. That is what we are speaking to. Please tie that letter, or whatever it is, to the particular amendment that we are debating.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, if you raise the question, you prolong my remarks.
The Deputy Chairman: If your remarks are to the motion, you can speak forever.
Mr. Allen: If I must explain them, let me simply say I was arguing that if the principle of this bill were applied to my own Hamilton region there would, in fact, be the same kind of outburst from parents, teachers and principals.
The Deputy Chairman: I find it difficult to tie your remarks to the amendment.
Mr. Allen: What I am going on to say is that the fight over the issue of autonomy will be the one that will be addressed. Therefore this amendment, which speaks to the autonomy of the Toronto school board within the context of Metro Toronto, is precisely the issue that is at stake, and is the same as the one that will be contested in Hamilton if it should arise there.
The Deputy Chairman: The chair ties it specifically to the city of Toronto and the borough of York. What you are talking to is the city of Hamilton and I do not see how it ties into that.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, I find it difficult to understand your comments when that in fact is what I have been doing, as I just tried to explain. If someone else would like to undertake that task I will yield the floor.
Mr. Martel: Mr. Chairman, on a point of order: I find it passing strange that you and I just walked in two minutes ago while my colleague was talking -- I was listening on the box downstairs -- and without even knowing how he has tied that in, you occupy the chair and --
The Deputy Chairman: I challenged the honourable member because I was listening downstairs.
Mr. Martel: I listened to him downstairs too, and I immediately hear you say that he is not tying in the specific details. I am not sure how you can pick that up in full flight and come to that conclusion.
The Deputy Chairman: I tell the honourable member that I had the box on in my office downstairs. All I want to do is remind all honourable members that there is an amendment on the floor. Please tie remarks and debate to that amendment. That is all I ask. I now return the floor to the member for Hamilton West.
Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, I was reading a letter that I received from a teacher in Hamilton who puts quite succinctly his objections to the bill in question. It takes the same form as the objection of the member for Oakwood in his amendment. It concerns the fight over the issue of autonomy. That was what I was reading at that point.
In so far as autonomy is abridged in this bill, it reduces the accountability -- as the member said and as I was reading -- of local trustees to their taxpayers and employees. In the Toronto context, he says, "'Blame Metro, not us' will become the motto of the system."
"It will also put local boards into a straitjacket that will seriously diminish their ability to negotiate any items that have not been agreed to at the Metro level. In order to negotiate such items, they will require unanimous approval from each of the other boards and from the Metro board."
To him, to the other teachers and to the association of principals who have written to me, it offends their understanding of the way in which an educational system best operates; namely, deriving as much of its impetus and creativity from below as is possible.
Likewise, those who have been writing to newspapers on exactly that same question write such words as the following: "The suggestion that the six local boards would have complete freedom in negotiations once the Metro committee had negotiated a mere three items overlooks the fact that those three items are salaries, financial benefits and staffing formulas. Once those three areas are carved in stone in a Metro master agreement, there is little incentive or leeway for local boards to negotiate whatever remains."
The bill is an extremely problematic one for us. We have to react to it with something of the urgency that any attack upon a fundamental principle in our educational system warrants. It is for that reason that I rise to support my colleague from Oakwood in his amendment. I hope the amendment will be supported by this House and ultimately the bill defeated or withdrawn.
Mr. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, I am sure you are aware that the passage of the amendment negates the whole bill. It is designed exclusively to allow the minister to have her way with the Toronto Board of Education and I am very glad to support the amendment because I feel the bill, in that concept, is one which is insupportable.
I have watched the development of education policy in the Toronto board for a long time. The quality of its leadership in this connection has been variable. It is interesting that at this time when it appears that reform elements in education, many of them supported by the New Democratic Party, have taken a substantial role in the work of the board, it is only now that the Minister of Education finds it is absolutely insupportable as far as she is concerned that they be allowed to continue in their somewhat independent way.
I have been a bit concerned that NDP politics has been so involved and I have been concerned because it has been so successful in moving into the control of the Toronto board. The Liberal Party tried an involvement in municipal politics, including school boards, back in the late 1960s. We had the great, lamented Stephen Clarkson to point with pride to. You remember as a candidate for mayor he was supported by the three Toronto dailies and came in fourth out of three, or something like that; a great fellow. He never thought too much of me so I do not feel too sensitive about pointing out some of his lack of success.
As I say, having watched this over a number of years, I had a certain degree of sympathy with the minister when she found that here was an entity in education that was providing more leadership in development of quality of education and the involvement of the community than she had been able to achieve. It concerns me very much but that is a fact.
Until we have a chance to hear more formally from the honourable minister it is my view that most boards, under the leadership of this minister, have not been induced to provide the sort of leadership to develop quality in education that most of us would have hoped. More than anything else, I feel that under her leadership and that of her two predecessors -- two of them were sitting here just a few minutes ago -- the boards have become almost pawns in the hands of their administrative employees. Parents have sensed this in many communities across the province and in many respects have almost given up having any parental or community input into the development of education initiative.
Such is not the case in the city of Toronto, whether we can lay it to the credit of school board members because they are NDP, or simply because as citizens themselves they have been able to bring an interest to bear which has counteracted the smothering bureaucracy that has emanated from the minister's office and that of her predecessors.
Maybe she does not believe it, but I believe it. It is a shame we have to smother the initiatives that have come from the Toronto board by the passage of this bill. The passage of the amendment will extract Toronto from this smothering influence and kill the bill. It is on that basis that I support it.
9:40 p.m.
It is not my intention, Mr. Chairman, under your rigid control here tonight, to branch out into any great historical discussion, but the minister herself, looking back to the time when her kids were at school, at a time when perhaps we were not saddled with the sorts of boards of education which had the elaborate muffling of layers of administration --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I am not that old.
Mr. Nixon: Oh yes, she is. She was talking about being a Depression baby, for God's sake. As a matter of fact, last week we got the clear impression that she brought on the Depression single-handed.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: My last child left school last year.
Mr. Nixon: I, for one, am prepared to take her at her word in that connection.
She can surely remember when her own kids were in school and got a good education. They have gone on to be successful. They have gone on to enjoy positions of responsibility, even in the government. All of which is a good thing, a good thing indeed.
The Deputy Chairman: But it is deviating from the motion.
Mr. Nixon: Not very much.
The minister knows that with the imposition of larger school boards and with the positions that have emanated from her office and those of her last three predecessors, particularly going back to Mr. Robarts's successor, we have found that the role of the community, the parents and the school board, has been replaced by the role of highly paid, influential administrators, all of whom bow and respond to edicts from the centre rather than to the --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Ho, ho!
Mr. Nixon: Well, Duncan Green is an exception, and she had pretty well subverted him until recently.
I have been concerned with this ever since John Robarts stole a march on the then Minister of Education and announced the county boards while he was out of town over one weekend. That is going back into history, Mr. Chairman, to when you were still in grade 11, I believe.
But there is no doubt in my mind that one of the worst aspects of the leadership from this minister, and she has been minister for quite a while now, has been -- and I have to use the verb again -- to smother the natural feelings of the parents of the communities to feel involved in the development of new policies in education that would affect the education in their own communities.
I will tell her, if she will permit me just a brief reference, that the constituents in the riding of Brant-Oxford-Norfolk feel much too far removed from the development of education policy in our own communities. Many of them sit back with an attitude that we should certainly decry; the attitude is: "What can you do? The administrators control education. There is nothing you can do but write a nasty letter to the editor every now and then or send a copy of it to the minister and get one of her good responses."
The Toronto Board of Education has fought against that. It has fought against that over a number of years. The reason there have been so many people strongly opposing this bill and coming out in the rain in front of Queen's Park, and seeing that all of us as members of the Legislature are aware of their feelings, is that the Toronto Board of Education has not allowed that to happen.
The minister herself has got plenty of fight; there is no doubt about that. Here is one area that has resisted this smothering policy that has been a part of her leadership and the leadership of her predecessors going back to 1971 and before. We feel it in our part of Ontario, and it is undoubtedly felt in this part of Ontario. The bill itself is simply going to add another irresistible weapon to the minister in effecting this policy which we have regretted over so many years and so many elections.
I have no hesitation in supporting the amendment which will nullify the bill. When the Legislature moves to extract it from the bill, I hope the city of Toronto will go on with the sort of innovative leadership in educational matters which the NDP can take credit for but which really lies in the minds and hearts of parents and citizens who feel the community should control the future of their education and nobody else should.
Mr. McClellan: Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to participate in the debate on this first of a rather lengthy series of amendments which the New Democratic Party will be putting forward to Bill 127.
Mr. Nixon: Well, we are paid for full-time work.
Mr. McClellan: Yes, we are paid for full-time work, and opposition to Bill 127 is seen as a full-time job by some of us.
As my colleague the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk has rightly said, the amendment will remove the Board of Education for the City of Toronto from the ambit of the bill. The reason we are moving this amendment is very simple. It is because the Board of Education of the City of Toronto is adamantly opposed to Bill 127.
We know the Conservative Party and the cabinet are split. We know the members of the Conservative Party who represent ridings in the city of Toronto do not support Bill 127. Not one of them will speak in this House on the issue, but when they are back in their own communities they talk against Bill 127.
It is ironic we are debating this amendment to remove the Toronto Board of Education from the ambit of the bill on November 9, the day after the municipal elections. Was there a single trustee in the city of Toronto elected in support of Bill 127, a single trustee of any party, Liberal, Conservative or NDP? Of course not. Did anybody run on a platform supporting Bill 127 in the municipal elections held yesterday?
Was there one candidate of any party, Liberal, Conservative or NDP, who went to the electors in the city of Toronto on the basis of their platform of support for Bill 127? Not one single candidate, as I understand it.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Yes.
Mr. McClellan: Who?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Several.
Mr. Martel: Name them.
Mr. Boudria: Did they get elected?
Interjections.
Mr. McClellan: I will be pleased to yield my place to the minister --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: No. He said, were there any candidates?
Mr. Martel: Who were they?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I can't remember their names. I'll give you a list of their names.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Did they total more than 100?
The Deputy Chairman: The member for Bellwoods does have the floor and is speaking to the amendment.
Mr. McClellan: It is amazing; the minister insists there were such candidates, but there were not and there are no members of the Conservative Party from the city of Toronto who will stand up in this House and say they support Bill 127. I defy a single member of the Conservative caucus representing a riding in the city of Toronto to stand up in this House, say he supports Bill 127 and argue in support of that bill.
The member for High Park-Swansea (Mr. Shymko), the member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick (Mr. Grossman), the member for St. George (Ms. Fish), the member for St. David (Mrs. Scrivener) -- I invite any of them, each of them, all of them, singly, together, in chorus, in unison to stand up and speak. I do not hear anything. There seems to be silence.
Mr. Martel: Come on, Dennis.
hon. Mr. Timbrell: That's the way your whip talks: Speak, sit down, roll over.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Salivate.
Mr. McClellan: Play dead.
Interjections.
The Deputy Chairman: We are talking to an amendment and the member for Bellwoods is speaking to it. Do not allow these interjections to distract you from the important subject at hand.
9:50 p.m.
Mr. McClellan: Even prominent Conservative trustees --
Mr. Nixon: Who would they be?
Mr. McClellan: Like Nola Crewe, for example. Poor Nola Crewe. We should shed a tear for her. Nola Crewe was supposed to have been the next chairman of the Toronto Board of Education if things had gone well. If the so-called right-wing mood which supposedly was prevalent across our fair community had triumphed in the elections yesterday, and the numbers of Conservative trustees had been elected, the most likely candidate for chairman of the board of education would have been none other than Nola Crewe. But, alas, it was not to be.
In today's Toronto Star we have a picture of Mr. Muir tending his bloody nose. I will table this document, because I think it needs to be submitted as part of the record.
The Deputy Chairman: And to the amendment?
Mr. McClellan: Poor Miss Crewe, who, if it had not been for the hubbub about Bill 127, might well be facing the prospect of being chairman of the Toronto Board of Education. Instead, she is likely to be facing certain charges. And her colleague Mr. Muir, pictured in the Star today, suffered a bloody nose.
The Deputy Chairman: It is difficult to see how you are tying this into the amendment.
Mr. McClellan: I am trying to illustrate to you --
An hon. member: How strong feelings are.
Mr. McClellan: Yes, how strong feelings are in the Toronto Board of Education on all sides. Even Nola Crewe --
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Gentle Nola, she used to be known as.
The Deputy Chairman: I am trying to be gentle, but I am not being very successful in keeping us on the amendment as it pertains to Bill 127.
Mr. McClellan: Nola Crewe was a very prominent member of the Toronto Board of Education. She was so upset by everything that happened yesterday that she ran amok. Her colleague, who failed to win a seat for ward 8, according to the article, because of the feelings within the community about Bill 127 --
The Deputy Chairman: Is that in the article?
Mr. McClellan: I am coming to that. He claims that Nola Crewe walked up to him and kicked and punched him as he watched the television at the Ben Wicks tavern on Gerrard Street East.
The Deputy Chairman: The only concern I have is that it does not seem to pertain to the bill that is on the floor.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Chairman, on a point of order: That particular tavern is known as one of the places where this bill is debated on a nightly basis.
Mr. Breaugh: And this amendment came out of that.
The Deputy Chairman: I have not been there.
An hon. member: You cannot rule it out of order.
The Deputy Chairman: I ask the honourable member, in his diligence to cover the points to be made on this amendment, to please stick to it.
Mr. McClellan: Yes. I have some apprehension. If a supporter of the government party like Nola Crewe can run amok because of her feelings of rage and frustration, to say nothing of sheer displeasure, as a result of the elections yesterday and the terrible defeat brought about for the Conservative Party in Toronto because of the polarization that took place as a result of the Minister of Education's Bill 127, all I can say is that I hope Nola Crewe is kept away from the Minister of Education.
Mr. Bradley: I'd bet on Bette.
Mr. McClellan: I don't think we want to take any more bets with members of the Liberal caucus.
Mr. Martel: Spensieri won't pay his bills.
Hon. Mr. Grossman: Hasn't Spensieri paid his debts?
Mr. McClellan: I invite the member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick to speak on this bill, but of course he will not. None of the Toronto members will speak on the bill.
Hon. Mr. Grossman: You can never tell. Stick around, Ross.
Mr. McClellan: Despite the amendments that the minister has brought forward --
Hon. Mr. Timbrell: And fine amendments they are.
Mr. McClellan: If they are such fine amendments as the Minister of Agriculture and Food says, why do some of the Toronto members not get up and defend them? Why does not one Toronto member rise in his or her place?
Interjections.
The Deputy Chairman: Perhaps somebody else wants to contribute to the debate. There is a certain amount of repetition taking place in your speech, because that is the way you began.
Mr. McClellan: You are quite right. I will conclude.
The amendments to the local levy are a fraud; they simply postpone the freeze. The minister does not fool anybody by this kind of smokescreen. She has not assuaged any of the anger that Bill 127 has aroused within my community.
Subsection 7(3) of the bill --
Mr. Rotenberg: That's not in order right now. We're talking about section 1.
Mr. McClellan: I am talking about why the Toronto Board of Education is opposed to this bill, and the amendment would remove the Toronto Board of Education --
Mr. Rotenberg: They're opposed because they're NDPers and they don't understand it.
The Deputy Chairman: The member for Wilson Heights must realize that at this point the member for Bellwoods is speaking on the bill.
Mr. Rotenberg: But he's not on the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman: He is trying to bring it to the amendment. I know he is really making an effort, as I am.
Mr. McClellan: It is so difficult to speak tonight.
The first point is the local levy. The second point is the section of the bill that empowers the Metro board to make an agreement that would determine the method by which the number of teachers to be employed by a board is determined.
Again, that is the provision of the bill that would wipe out, for all practical purposes, the autonomy and integrity of a local board of education. If you cannot even decide the formula and the number of teachers to be employed in your school system, what is the point of even having a local board? It becomes a complete farce.
If this is imposed on the city of Toronto, for whatever reason -- and I cannot fathom the reason -- it will simply be a matter of time before it will be extended to other communities.
People who support this legislation are supporting the removal of the power and authority of a local board of education to determine, among other things, how many teachers will be employed in its school system. That will mean how large or how small classroom sizes will be, what will be the mix of teachers and ultimately what will be the allocation of teachers between the different programs.
I can tell the minister, the members of the government and members of her party that we do not intend to allow this legislation to pass. We will do everything in our power to stop it. That is not a threat; that is simply telling the minister what we are about here. I would not be honouring the trust given me by my constituents if I were to accede to the passage of this bill.
I have spoken many times over the years about the kinds of problems we have in the inner city of west end Toronto, where all the vocational schools are located with the two-year and four-year programs. I have spoken about the fact that our children are streamed, not into the academic five-year programs, but into the two-year, three-year and four-year programs.
Interjection.
Mr. McClellan: Pardon?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: She doesn't like to make those interjections loud enough to hear.
The Deputy Chairman: That was not a loud enough interjection to hear. Just carry on.
Mr. McClellan: Whether or not the Minister of Education understands it, it is a fact that in the west end of Toronto our children do not get streamed into university; they get streamed into two-year, three-year and four-year programs or they drop out.
For the past 15 years, people in the city of Toronto have been trying to change that situation. It has resulted in the kind of thing the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk (Mr. Nixon) was talking about, the emergence of a board of education that is interested in innovation and reform to try to address the particular problems of inner-city children.
We do not intend to permit the government to try to wipe that out, to turn back the clock, to destroy that attempt in the name of restraint, in the name of political partisanship, or whatever the motivation is. I cannot speculate on it. I can simply tell the minister that we will not sit here and allow this bill to pass.
The Deputy Chairman: Does any other honourable member wish to participate in this debate?
Mr. Bradley: Larry, we're waiting for you.
Mr. Boudria: Larry, it's your turn.
Mr. Martel: I move that we hear the minister.
The Deputy Chairman: That is not a motion. Do any other honourable members wish to comment upon this? Are there no other honourable members who wish to comment? Oh, we do have one.
10 p.m.
Mr. Bradley: Mr. Chairman, I have not spoken on the amendment yet.
The Deputy Chairman: The member for St. Catharines.
An hon. member: He already spoke on this.
Mr. Bradley: No, I spoke on the section, but not on the amendment.
Mr. Nixon: He can speak as many times as he wants, can't he?
The Deputy Chairman: I do not know where that thought came from.
Mr. Nixon: Did you hear what he said?
An hon. member: It's in the rules.
The Deputy Chairman: No. there is no such rule. The member for St. Catharines has the floor.
Mr. Nixon: I feel another speech coming on myself.
Mr. Bradley: Mr. Speaker, when there was a considerable amount of discussion earlier in the day on all the people and all the organizations that might be affected by this bill, I indicated why some of the boards of education would object to being included and why some of the teachers' federations would object to that.
I am now indicating with this specific amendment why I think the Toronto Board of Education and the York Board of Education might well wish to see this particular amendment pass in the House.
First of all, I think we have had a chance in this House over the supper hour to reflect upon the results of the election last night. I think that those of us who are from outside Metropolitan Toronto would want to know whether the results meant that the people specifically -- because we are speaking specifically to this amendment -- the people of either York or the people of Toronto had spoken clearly one way or the other on Bill 127.
When we look at the results, we find that rather than a referendum in favour of it, they were opposed. We were led to believe that while the politicians at the local level might be opposed to it, the people thought Bill 127 was the best thing since sliced bread.
We found out when the election took place -- and there was a significant turnout in this election -- that there was not a referendum in favour of Bill 127 in either Toronto or York and that there were a number of people elected, or re-elected with increased pluralities, who were adamantly opposed to this piece of legislation and to their inclusion in section 1 of the bill as defined by this amendment.
Therefore, it is cause for the government, if not for the minister or the other members of the government, to reflect upon this. We have had the Tuesday morning caucus, which I presume the Progressive Conservative Party had at the same time as the other parties. Tomorrow we have a meeting of the cabinet, a normal Wednesday meeting of the cabinet, and at that time members such as the Minister of Health and others from Metropolitan Toronto who have indicated privately, according to reliable sources, that they are opposed to this legislation or who, at best, are lukewarm about it, will have the opportunity to speak to the minister about why Toronto and York should not be included in section 1 of this bill.
I think particularly of the ministers who carry a considerable amount of weight within that cabinet, some of whom have aspirations to be the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party at some time in the future at the provincial level. Certainly they would want to reflect the viewpoint of their constituents, who are adamantly opposed to Bill 127.
If we look at York South, for instance, where the by-election took place on November 4, we find that the one candidate out of the three who supposedly was in favour of Bill 127 was soundly defeated. Someone could refresh me on the exact percentage, but I think she managed to get 17 per cent of the vote. She indicated that one of the things she felt her defeat could be attributed to was the introduction of Bill 127 and the defence of Bill 127 by the Minister of Education and others in the government. She felt that was an albatross she had to carry around her neck during the campaign.
It is unfortunate, having seen the results of that particular by-election in terms of the very low number of votes that were attained by the Conservative candidate, that members of the cabinet would not then prevail upon the Minister of Education to abandon this particular bill, not with a view to turning completely away from any kind of reform or changes at Metropolitan Toronto but with a view to beginning anew the process of consultation for those who are directly affected in order to allay some of the concerns that have been expressed about the intentions of the ministry in regard, for instance, to the surplus and deficit proposition in the bill, the negotiation process in the bill and, of course, the discretionary levy.
Looking at Toronto, one cannot find anyone on the Toronto Board of Education who is a proponent of Bill 127. If one were to say, "Well, it is just that radical gang down there who do not like the minister, and they are to be ignored, because common sense should prevail," one might think a little bit about that. But when one sees those who are not members of the so-called radical group on the Toronto Board of Education indicating their opposition before this municipal election, during the campaign and after the campaign, then it makes one think that perhaps this opposition is pretty genuine, based on genuine concerns about the consequences of the passage of this piece of legislation. Therefore, a very good case is made for the exemption of the Toronto Board of Education from this bill.
As my colleague the House leader of the Ontario Liberal Party has indicated, this really has the effect of nullifying the bill, of making the bill quite useless in respect of what it is attempting to achieve. So the passage of this amendment would have the effect of really putting the legislative skids under the particular piece of legislation we see before us.
There is a way of avoiding this, of course. That is for the minister to recognize the degree of opposition that is being expressed in this city by members of the board of education, by parent groups who are directly affected, by many members of the general public, by some editorialists, by some other writers and certainly by the various affiliates of the Ontario Teachers' Federation, who see some real problems arising in negotiations as a result of bringing together into one negotiating team all of the boards of education on a compulsory basis and of bringing the various affiliates of the federation, the panels, in one big nest to fight out this particular battle. It has worked in the past because we have had a voluntary aspect to it; it cannot work as well if there is compulsion.
Now, I want to be fair to the minister. I had the opportunity to speak initially on this section of the bill, before the placing of the amendment, so I want to leave the minister sufficient time this evening to reply. She has heard many of the arguments I made on this earlier in the day, and I would simply implore her to take into consideration all of the very valid arguments that have been advanced by the opposition today, by members of her caucus behind closed doors and by members of the cabinet in the secrecy of the cabinet room.
I now invite her to respond to the representations made by the opposition. I hope it will be in a very favourable manner, that she will make a dramatic announcement this evening -- with the galleries full -- that she is going to withdraw Bill 127 and please everyone.
Mr. Chairman: Are there any other members who wish to speak to the amendment?
Mr. Nixon: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman: You are not suggesting, of course, that after the minister speaks we would not have an opportunity.
Mr. Chairman: Not at all.
Mr. Nixon: All right.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, I was intrigued by the honourable member's last observation that the galleries were full. It is obvious that his vision is no better at distance than it is in examining the content of this bill, its implications and the motivation that directed it.
In 1953, it was the wisdom of the government of this province and of the members of the opposition at the time that there should be a restructuring in Metropolitan Toronto that would ensure a degree of equity and fairness for all of those who reside in that community.
10:10 p.m.
It had been proposed that there might be amalgamation. There was a hue and cry about that suggestion, since many of the local municipalities felt very strongly that their neighbourhood concept would be removed by amalgamation. Therefore, with the wisdom of the time, an interesting two-tiered structure of governance for both the municipality and the school boards was developed.
During the past almost 30 years this system has evolved in a very methodical and useful way in order to support the development of a city that is probably one of the most vibrant of its size in the world and a school system that is the envy of many jurisdictions in other parts of the country.
Mr. McClellan: This is right on the amendment.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: It is right on the amendment, because what I am telling the members of this House is that the city of Toronto is an integral part of Metropolitan Toronto and cannot be divorced from it in any structural arrangement that is proposed. To suggest that this could be done would be to negate the entire structure of the Metropolitan two-tiered governance at both the municipal and the school level.
Mr. Grande: John Robarts thought so.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: Therefore, it is, I think, ludicrous to suggest that a single board or two boards be removed from the ambit of this bill. The bill is designed to try to assist in the further evolution of the great good that has come from the two-tiered system of governance for schools in this area; and the great good has been particularly in the direction of the member for Oakwood's riding and those of some others in this House whose tax base has not been sufficient to improve the school system.
I have not heard any of these delightful members suggest that we eliminate the Metropolitan school board totally at this point and go back to the original arrangement of 1953. Even my predecessor, the Honourable John Robarts, did not make that suggestion without qualification and provisos. The member for Oakwood is very prone to reciting selective portions of certain reports that he suggests will support his point of view.
The Honourable John Robarts suggested very strongly that if there were a way to establish four, five or six relatively equal-sized boards as a result of boundary manipulation and if there were a way to deliver funds in an equitable fashion ensuring that there would be a reasonable distribution of those assessments accumulated within the city of Toronto, primarily by people who live outside Toronto, it might be wise to eliminate the Metro school board.
I have not heard any of the members suggest we should move in that direction, although it is, I believe, the understanding of certain aspirants to the York municipal council that they might seriously consider the possibility of amalgamating or dividing or moving borders in order to become part of Etobicoke or Toronto or North York.
That may be the direction in which one will move in the future. In the meantime it is absolutely essential that this two-tiered system of governance function effectively on behalf of all of the children of Metropolitan Toronto. That is the motivation for the introduction of the bill. This bill was not instigated within the Ministry of Education; it was developed in the minds of those who work diligently every day as trustees at the Metropolitan Toronto level to ensure that the structure of this governance system supports the children of all of Metropolitan Toronto. And I understand that motivation, because those people are involved daily in their area of responsibility in education, which is to ensure that programs are delivered to children throughout Metropolitan Toronto.
I would remind the members, particularly some of the newer members who do not understand, that the Metro system of governance has always, well not always, but certainly since 1969, given the Metro school board the right to determine the level of levy which should be established for all of Metropolitan Toronto.
It has also provided an additional discretionary levy for each of the boards so they might use it in ways they see as necessary for their own jurisdictions. The distribution of the total assessment is made, in fact, through the joint system at the Metropolitan Toronto School Board and has been for many years. That is not going to change.
Is that a reduction of autonomy? If it is, it is not a reduction that has apparently bothered the board of education for the city of Toronto for about 25 years.
Therefore, one has to be just a little doubtful about whether the idea of ensuring that there would be joint negotiation among all of the boards, with their elementary teachers and secondary teachers, would reduce the autonomy of any one of the boards in the areas in which it is suggested that negotiation should take place.
I feel very strongly that if we are to assist those worthy people who are elected to ensure that the system that has been developed by this Legislature for more than 25 years, and almost 30 years, for the governance of the school system in Metropolitan Toronto, and to try to ensure that equality of educational opportunity for the children will, in fact, take place, it is incumbent upon us also to ensure that all of the boards that make up Metropolitan Toronto be involved in the legislation. It would, therefore, be less than sensible to suggest there should be an elimination of any one of the boards from this piece of legislation.
Mr. Nixon: Would the minister just clarify her statement as to the fact that there would be no reduction in autonomy when it appears it would mean that, if the bill were to pass with the intentions the minister has previously expressed, the right of one school board to hire teachers at a certain level for service in that board would be moderated, at least, if not controlled by the Metropolitan board?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: No, Mr, Chairman. The joint negotiation that will take place related to the establishment of the allocation formula will ensure there is a reasonable distribution of teachers throughout all Metropolitan Toronto to all the boards based upon their specific needs and weighted by the priorities that each board establishes.
In addition to that, the amount that is available to the boards -- and for the first time -- we are stating in this legislation that discretionary levy may be used for the hiring of additional teachers.
That has not been a part of the practice. In fact, there was a gentlemen's agreement established by the boards in 1971 that they would not use the discretionary levy for that purpose. That gentlemen's agreement was fractured about two and a half years ago by one of the boards.
What happens now is that we are stating clearly that each board will have autonomy to add additional teachers to those they would acquire through the allocation formula that is negotiated with the teachers, to hire additional teachers and to use those teachers in the way they find most appropriate. So there is increased autonomy under this bill in terms of the intentions of the use of the discretionary levy; increased over what it was before.
Mr. Nixon: May I just pursue one more point? The minister has not made it entirely clear.
Suppose the Toronto Board of Education is not satisfied that the discretionary levies and the weighting feature, based on their stated requirement, is returning the teacher number and pupil-teacher ratio they have decided independently they want, they would not then have the power to say, "We independently are going to hire an additional group of teachers for this special project, or that special project," because it has not been approved by the school board.
10:20 p.m.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: No, it does not have to be approved by the school board, but they would not be able to do it beyond the extent of the yield of the discretionary levy.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Chairman, I just want to clarify the record. The minister said she was unaware of any members on this side who might be in favour of abolishing the Metro school board. This caucus is in favour --
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I did not say that. I said I have not heard that tonight.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Maybe not tonight. I will say it tonight. This caucus is in favour of abolishing the Metro school board.
Mr. Chairman: Did the member for Ottawa East want to say something
Mr. Roy: No, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have made my contribution.
10:52 p.m.
The committee divided on Mr. Grande's motion that paragraphs 1(1)(b)(b) 5 and 6 be deleted from the bill, which was negatived on the following vote:
Ayes 32; nays 55.
Mr. Chairman: I am wondering at this time, shall section 1 carry?
An hon. member: No.
On motion by Hon. Mr. Wells, the committee of the whole House reported progress.
The House adjourned at 10:55 p.m.