BARRIE-VESPRA ANNEXATION ACT (CONTINUED)
The House resumed at 8 p.m.
House in committee of the whole.
BARRIE-VESPRA ANNEXATION ACT (CONTINUED)
Resuming consideration of Bill 142, An Act respecting the City of Barrie and the Township of Vespra.
On section 1:
Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Chairman --
Mr. Rotenberg: As I was saying.
Hon. Mr. Ashe: And in conclusion.
Mr. Breaugh: There is a lot of heckling and interjecting here. I am not sure I can get started right off the mark, but I will try.
I have followed the accounts of Bill 142 in Municipal World and I have found them interesting. As I pointed out last week, the administrator for Vespra township submitted an article in which he did a documentary of how this bill has proceeded to date. Then the minister replied to that article. I thought members would be interested in a couple of comments made by Julian Tofts clerk-administrator of the township of Vespra, in response to the minister's letter.
This is taking on connotations of the fullness of the debate and the remarkable ability on the part of a number of people to recognize that there is much more at stake here than one particular little portion of a rural township in Ontario, that there are very important principles at stake in the course of this debate. Therefore, it is subject to analysis that most other pieces of legislation do not get. This one, I believe, deserves that kind of analysis. It deserves a response that is full and complete by all the parties that are participants in the debate itself.
I found in much of what Mr. Tofts had to say a certain gratitude on the part of the council of Vespra that other rural municipalities in this province recognize the bill for what it is. It is a dangerous intrusion on the autonomy of municipalities: first, to carry on their own normal business; and second, to be able to proceed in a way that is unhindered by adjacent municipalities.
Is there a sale? I keep waiting for the gin to arrive, but so far it is still water.
Mr. Chairman: I guess the page wants you to continue.
Mr. Breaugh: Yes. This is an indication that we are ready for the night.
Mr. Stokes: It shows the pages are listening, anyway.
Mr. Breaugh: It does point out that many of our rural municipalities -- all of them, I am sure, that are adjacent to an urban centre -- recognize that this same approach can be and probably will be used on them. They are recognizing that this is not just a subtle intrusion on their right to provide local government; it is a substantial change in lifestyle for the people in that rural municipality, almost all of whom moved there in the first place to get away from city life.
In many cases, they chose a rural municipality adjacent to an urban centre because it gave them a unique lifestyle. They could live in the country and work in the city or have access to city things such as shopping, entertainment, sports facilities, education and all that. It is a very important choice most of us in the Legislature would defend very proudly. We would say to be able to make that kind of choice is one of the great things about living in Ontario.
They have also recognized -- and this is what Mr. Tofts speaks to in his reply to the minister's letter -- that if there is a change in the rules, unfortunately, it has a ripple effect throughout the community in lifestyle and costs of living. For example, in a small rural municipality people very often have septic tanks. That dictates that one must have a lot of frontage and a fairly large piece of property to go along with it. Most of our rural municipalities recognize that it is possible to provide those amenities in those circumstances these days, but it is in conflict with the urban standard.
If one moves a rural area into a part of the city, because the people there have large frontages on their properties they will be penalized with frontage charges when a water and sewer system is put through. The frontage charges are designed by the urban centres to recover cost on a per foot basis of installing water and sewer services on what would be a normal urban frontage of about 45, 50 or 60 feet. A rural area, with its kind of housing approach, will have frontages of 150 or 200 feet, so there is a substantial financial impact in addition to all the others.
I want to quote a couple of concerns put by Mr. Tofts in the article in Municipal World:
"It concerns my council that in a democratic society a minister would even wish to suggest that such circumstances have occurred before, but assuming for a moment that Mr. Bennett is correct, when does inequity before justify inequity now?
"My council has to respectfully disagree with the minister's assertion that when the government is enacting legislation to change municipal boundaries, it is never done hastily and without careful consideration. In this particular instance, an effective date, January 1, 1984, originally appeared in the bill. It was quickly recognized that this date was so impractical that it had to be changed within a matter of weeks.
"In addition, however, in a situation where both the city and the province had officially recognized that Barrie did not need more developable land, Vespra council feels it was irresponsible, to put it mildly, to incorporate into the bill the fairly substantial area of environmentally sensitive land and prime agricultural land which were to some extent removed by the standing committee on general government following committee hearings."
How the change occurred is important to note. This is not a matter of going to an area and seeking a consensus on what must be done. This is a matter that was decided behind closed doors and put into a piece of legislation presented to the Legislature last December. It was changed somewhat as it went through the committee system, but it still retains some earmarks of a dangerous and not well-thought-out approach that has dramatic and far-ranging effects on life in rural Ontario.
Let me go on with one or two more sentences from Mr. Tofts's reply:
"What is even worse in council's view is that the government which included that land then seeks to claim its subsequent removal from the annexation area as a virtue and an example of democracy at work. In trying to justify the need for legislation, Mr. Bennett refers to a task force report, several municipal board hearings -- one lasting nine months -- several court cases, over $1 million in public funds and 10 years of deliberation. My council feels that kind of generalization is both dangerous and misleading. The task force report referred to by Mr. Bennett relates to a good deal more than just the Barrie-Vespra area and was not created specifically for this annexation.
8:10 p.m.
"In any event, as I have previously indicated, that report has already been described as irrelevant and obsolete in so far as it relates to future population growth for Barrie. The several Ontario Municipal Board hearings were only necessary to defend our position and those of the two other rural municipalities involved. Most of the court cases relating to the matter have resulted in government's intervention in the original Ontario Municipal Board hearing in 1976-77, and the township of Vespra had, to a large extent, not been an active party with regard thereto.
"There have been many references to the $1-million expenditure of public funds and Vespra township feels this is deplorable. Again, it has been stressed that this money was not spent at this township's initiation but as a direct result of the combined actions of the city and the province who made it necessary for the townships to defend themselves. In referring to the expenditure of money, it should always be remembered it is a great deal more difficult for the rural municipalities to find funding than it is for the province or larger urban municipalities.
"Finally, Mr. Bennett makes reference to the 10 years of deliberation. I stress again that Vespra township's only involvement has been to defend its position when required to do so. Also, there have been large time gaps, one as long as four years, when Vespra was not an active participant. Mr. Bennett is apparently alleging on behalf of the provincial government that if a rural township exercises its normal rights to defend itself and does so with relative success, it is the very time and money spent on that defence which apparently acts as the justification for the introduction of legislation. Perhaps my council can be forgiven for not being able to appreciate the logic of this argument."
I think what he is saying there in a nutshell is very simply that here is a rural township under attack once again for defending itself in the first instance. That is a remarkable attitude for a government to take. It essentially says if a rural township tries to defend itself before the Ontario Municipal Board or in the courts and it loses, everything is all right. But God forbid it should win once in a while. God forbid it should maintain its status quo. God forbid it should successfully defend itself, because in that instance the province will move in legislative ways to terminate whatever the problem was in the eyes of the province.
At the heart of it is a denial of the right of a municipality, however small, to use due process, if we might use those words, to defend itself. In essence, it says: "Perhaps you can use due process as long as you are not good at it, as long as you are inept, as long as you spend lots of money and do not win. But should you present to an Ontario Municipal Board hearing an argument that is fair, logical and rational, that provides your side of the argument, with a case that is appreciably stronger than somebody else's, you are going to get punished for it."
I find that a strange position for the province to take. It would have been one thing if it had said: "We are going to try to beef up that process. We are going to try to make that process work a little better and have the Ontario Municipal Board hearings scheduled on a more regular basis. We are going to take this through due process to the nth degree," or whatever.
I believe Mr. Tofts is right. He has struck upon the central theme and the central bit of concern the other rural municipalities have picked up on, that one no longer even has a right to defend oneself. All of that touted process laid out to establish a structure for hearing these problems and providing a recourse for municipalities when they get into boundary disputes is eventually set aside. Now there will always be present a constant, nagging fear in the minds of many rural councillors that if they do not toe the line, if they dare to be so uppity as to insist they have some legal rights, they will be punished for that.
I think that is the heart of the argument. Mr. Tofts has put it rather eloquently. Let me just conclude this with a couple of last lines from his letter:
"Council finds it regrettable that Mr. Bennett criticizes the question presented in the referendum to the people of Vespra as being simplistic in the extreme. This does, of course, place council in a 'Catch-22' situation. If they ask a question such as this, it is alleged to be overly simplistic. If they do not ask the question, they are alleged to be acting contrary to the wishes of their people. If they ask a more complex question, they are told they made it too complex for the people to understand.
"Council is in fact proud of the honest, simple, straightforward approach it has adopted with regard to the public and feels this is consistent with the grass-roots approach it pursued throughout this matter.
"Vespra council wishes to draw the attention of rural municipalities to the specific statement made by Mr. Bennett that a contiguous commercial area would form a part of the city of Barrie. In other words, the commercial area so essential to the lifeblood of Vespra township is going to become part of the city, come what may. In the same letter, Mr. Bennett said this legislation could hardly be undemocratic.
"Vespra township council feels that very little more needs to be said to demonstrate so totally the fundamental danger which is now only too apparent to rural municipalities -- 1984 had indeed arrived."
That does explain why this piece of legislation has hit a nerve in rural Ontario in a way I have never seen before. In its own succinct way, that letter puts its finger on the problem that smaller municipalities cannot win any more, even if they do successfully use a lawyer, even if they do successfully present a case to the Ontario Municipal Board and even if they do accurately reflect the wishes of their constituents. Despite all that, the end result will be a government that says: "We did not like the way the courts ruled on this. The courts ruled on technicalities. We do not like the rulings of the Ontario Municipal Board on this. It ruled on technicalities."
In other words, the government is saying: "Everybody else who has looked at this problem in whatever form was wrong and we are right. Not only are we right, we will use the power of a majority government to snuff out that dissent."
I always get nervous when a government is so unsure of itself that it fears dissent. I had always thought that in the western world one of the precious commodities we have is the right to dissent. It is not as though there is a revolution brewing in Vespra township. The people are marching up and down the road and they are marching in anger, but they are not carrying arms and they are not threatening, as farm survival groups have, to take on the establishment authorities. They are talking about their right in a democracy to say no. They are talking about their right to say, "I do not want this to happen," and they have exercised what we would consider to be due process.
I do not know all the people in Vespra township that well, but I would imagine it is not a common occurrence in Vespra township to be popping off to Toronto to attend such things as Ontario Municipal Board hearings or to be running off to court to defend a case. I would imagine the preference of the people there would be to stay at home and to run their farms, small businesses and council in peace. It is an intrusion to have to gather up the forces every now and again and whip off to something such as an OMB hearing. It is an intrusion to say they have to gather up some legal counsel and go to fight a legal battle.
I am sure the people on that township council did not run for public office to spend their time before committees of the Legislature or OMB hearings or court proceedings somewhere else. They simply wanted to serve their community. It is unique and true that when a council does something such as the little referendum, the minister then criticizes it for designing a referendum that is clear, simple and straightforward. I find that more than a little passing strange.
It is understandable that a government led by the member for Brampton (Mr. Davis) would not be given to straightforward questions or straightforward answers, that it would by its very nature follow the example of its leader and tend to make the simplest problem as complicated as possible. The language that would be used by such a government would be long, fluid, flowing and sometimes perhaps difficult to ascertain the meaning of exactly. I think, however, that it is unfair to criticize other people in a public and even in a private way for daring to ask a question that others would understand or daring to ask a question to which they can give a ready, informed and straightforward answer.
That is exactly what Vespra township did. It asked a straight question and got a straight answer. The truth is the government does not like the results and criticizes the council for the vehicle it used and its right to use that vehicle. The government criticized the council for defending itself.
8:20 p.m.
Why is the parliamentary assistant making an argument that these rural municipalities should just roll over and play dead every time somebody in their neighbourhood wants an annexation? Is the government saying they do not have a legitimate, democratic right to come before this Legislature and say, "That piece of legislation is not in the best interests of our constituents and we do not want it"?
Is he criticizing their right to ask tough questions about financing and the provision of services? Is he denying for a moment that they have identified all the areas where critical answers need to be given and none has been given?
Is he denying their right to defend the preservation of agricultural land? I hope not. Is he denying them their right to say: "This is a rural municipality and we want it to stay that way. That is our choice for our lifestyle. That is our choice for a township. That is our choice for the type of government we prefer and the level of services that we prefer"? Is he saying they do not have that right? I hope not.
I hope the parliamentary assistant will recognize what I have heard many ministers say on several occasions: "That is Ontario. Its diversity is its strength." One would never know that from the approach taken by the government in this legislation.
There are a couple of other things I want to get on the record.
An hon. member: Just a couple?
Mr. Breaugh: Just a few.
I mentioned a moment ago that the Premier has not given the straightforward, straight-ahead answers to questions. It is his speciality of the house to say in a somewhat confusing and circumlocutory way what it is he wants to say. He never gives a straight answer to a question. On one occasion, the Premier did attempt -- it probably means he did not write it -- to provide a fairly straightforward commitment to the township of Vespra and the then Reeve Buie.
"Thank you for your letter of November 25th in which you brought to my attention the desire of the township of Vespra to participate in negotiations with the city of Barrie relative to your annexation dispute."
That is strange. That letter was written December 8, 1980. There is recognition by the Premier of Ontario that the township of Vespra asked to participate in negotiations with the city of Barrie relative to the annexation dispute. It seems a clear recognition on the part of the Premier of the province that the township, contrary to what one might have been led to believe by other remarks made by the current Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (Mr. Bennett), the parliamentary assistant or the Solicitor General (Mr. G. W. Taylor), who is not here tonight, made an attempt to resolve this dispute. That township did not do anything --
Mr. Rotenberg: All they did was write a letter. They did not follow it up. They refused to come to a meeting after that.
Mr. Breaugh: The parliamentary assistant woke up for a minute. I will continue with the Premier's letter:
"From the tone of your letter, I presume that the township feels that the province is not taking cognizance of your concern. I can assure you that is not the case.
"The Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs has undertaken to participate in annexation negotiations where requested by both parties. They received a request from Innisfil and Barrie to participate in their discussions and have done so. The Honourable Thomas L. Wells assures me that he is very much aware that Barrie and Vespra have also an annexation issue and is prepared to establish a negotiation team for that purpose if requested by Barrie and Vespra.
"I have asked the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs to acquaint Barrie with your desire to commence negotiations. This has been done and I believe that the mayor of the city of Barrie has already been in touch with your officials with a view to arranging a meeting which will include ministry staff.
"I wish your council every success in the negotiations with the city of Barrie and look forward to a successful outcome."
If one were a little on the naive side, one would take the Premier of the day at his word. One would have to say that at the very least the Premier of Ontario recognized on December 8, 1980, that there was a dispute in place, that Vespra township had shown some initiative to try to resolve that dispute and had written to the Premier and asked for participation in some negotiating process which would resolve that dispute.
They have put on record for some time now their willingness to participate in a resolution of this. The parliamentary assistant in his wisdom shakes his head back and forth, which I assume means no. Is that right?
Mr. Rotenberg: That is right.
Mr. Breaugh: Does up and down mean yes?
Mr. Rotenberg: They refused to come to the table when they were invited.
Mr. Breaugh: They refused to come to the table when they were invited.
Mr. Rotenberg: They write pretty letters but they will not turn up.
Mr. Breaugh: They write pretty letters but they will not turn up. I could suggest the Premier on occasion writes pretty letters and does not turn up either. That might be the case.
Here is the documentation that the Premier was aware that the dispute was under way there and that the township of Vespra was prepared to work its way through this dispute. The interesting question is, having seen that initiative by the township of Vespra, what happened in the three interim years? Why was the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs at that time, and subsequently the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, unsuccessful in bringing together these people who had already indicated a willingness to negotiate?
The parliamentary assistant, in his infinite wisdom, said they did not want to. It seems to me the Premier was responding to a letter that asked for negotiations. I think the more likely version of the truth would be that the ministry, for reasons that escape me totally, did not want to pursue this very aggressively.
Mr. Rotenberg: That is certainly not true and the member knows it. The ministry wrote to them and they refused to come to the table. They did not come. They did not accept the invitation, and that is a fact.
Mr. Breaugh: There is an odd point in the debate --
Mr. Rotenberg: The member asks questions, but he does not want the answers.
Mr. Breaugh: No, I am happy to have the answers.
Mr. Rotenberg: The member has been talking for seven hours. He does not give a chance for answers. He is only interested in giving his version of what happened.
Mr. Breaugh: I have been lectured by better people than the parliamentary assistant, so I am hardly disturbed by this; but I want to respond a bit to it.
Mr. Rotenberg: The member can talk all night. He is going to talk until 10:30 anyway, but he might as well get some facts in here.
Mr. Breaugh: The parliamentary assistant says they did not answer letters. Where I come from, there are things called telephones. If people do not answer letters, one can pick up this little magic box and talk to them right on the phone. More than that, if one is really serious about getting a set of negotiations under way a technique is very often used that is rather radical from his point of view. One actually goes and looks people in the eye and says: "Listen, you wrote us a letter and said you wanted to begin these negotiations. Here we are. Let us negotiate."
Anybody in the Legislature who has ever done any kind of negotiating knows people do not negotiate by sending one another letters. The United Auto Workers and General Motors would never have a signed agreement if all they ever did was sit in their respective offices and write letters to one another. Nobody who has ever negotiated anything in his life would do so by correspondence.
Negotiating is not an exercise in correspondence. The parliamentary assistant knows that. He knows that if he wants to negotiate something, he may begin the process by putting in writing his willingness to begin the process; but he also knows that if all people ever do is write one another little notes or write letters back and forth, nothing will happen.
Mr. Rotenberg: All Vespra did was write one letter. When they were invited they would not come. It was Vespra that wrote one letter and did not come, not the other side.
Mr. Breaugh: The parliamentary assistant is breaking my heart with this tale of sadness. The tears are starting to flow from both my eyes. It is almost as if none of the ministry staff, the parliamentary assistant, the local member for Simcoe Centre, the Solicitor General, or the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing had ever negotiated anything in their lives. One cannot negotiate access to somebody's backyard by passing correspondence back and forth. If one wants to have that set of negotiations proceed, one has to go and talk to people. One has to sit down face to face.
Mr. Rotenberg: I have talked to Vespra. They do not want to negotiate.
Mr. Breaugh: I can understand why they would not want to negotiate with the parliamentary assistant. I would not want to negotiate with him either.
Mr. Rotenberg: That is the member's problem.
Mr. Breaugh: No, it is the parliamentary assistant's problem basically; it is my pleasure and his problem.
I think in some weird and wonderful way --
Mr. Chairman: This is a second reading debate. A lot of interjections are out of order, but carry on.
Mr. Breaugh: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You are a great help indeed.
Mr. Rotenberg: Is the member going to talk until 10:30, just so we will know?
Mr. Ruston: There are two speakers, one over there and one over here. The member for Wilson Heights (Mr. Rotenberg) thinks he is speaking too.
Mr. Chairman: The member for Oshawa has the floor.
8:30 p.m.
Mr. Breaugh: It is strange. The member for Wilson Heights could have used his ability to talk over a three-year period; he could have had the audacity to invite Barrie and Vespra together. He could have used his ability to open his mouth and let the words flow. He can do that but he did not. That is strange.
Mr. Rotenberg: How does the member know? The ministry did all kinds of things.
Mr. Breaugh: The parliamentary assistant is alleging that we do not know what went on. He is alleging that the ministry did all kinds of things. He is alleging that he personally did a whole lot of things. All I can say is that nowhere in the course of the hearings did the ministry ever say: "This is a list of the number of occasions when we invited both parties to a bargaining table. This is a list of the number of occasions we went there and asked them to participate in a negotiating process." I am not aware of any of this from the record.
The parliamentary assistant is alluding now that the KGB of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing somehow had operatives working in the Vespra area, inviting them down, spying on them and making presentations to them.
Mr. Rotenberg: Come on; stop that. KGB spies? What a lot of nonsense.
Mr. Breaugh: I am looking for it. They introduced the legislation in December. He has had committee hearings. He had an opportunity at the beginning of this debate in this session of the Legislature to put on the record the actions of his ministry to resolve this dispute in a nonlegislative way. To my knowledge, the sum total of his efforts in that regard is zip. He did not do it.
Mr. Rotenberg: They said they would not come. They would not talk to us. That is all. It is as simple as that. Vespra would not come and talk. The member was in the committee when we offered Vespra publicly to come and talk, and they would not come.
Mr. Breaugh: When I was a very small child my mother told me that was not an acceptable thing to do. I could not pick up my marbles and leave the backyard and say: "I will not play. You do not want to talk to me."
Mr. Rotenberg: That is what Vespra did. It is Vespra you are describing.
Mr. Breaugh: If the parliamentary assistant wants to resolve a dispute -- and they are supposedly the pros in the field in knowing how to handle these things -- he should have known that the onus was on him. There seems to have been an apparition last December that said all of a sudden: "The onus is on us to legislate this dispute. The onus is on us as a government to set aside any judgements by the Ontario Municipal Board, by a court and to put in legislative form, in secret, what we want to do and then we will give them an hour's notice and table it in the House." It seems to me he would have been well served had he had the audacity or the temerity to go to the area and negotiate there.
If no one in the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing knew how to negotiate, maybe he ought to have asked somebody in the Ministry of Labour. I know a couple of people there who are very good negotiators and mediators, and they understand the process. The process is not something of writing one another letters every now and then; the process is one of gathering around in a common place at a common time and forging a resolution to a problem. Vespra asked to do that.
The Premier says in his letter that they would be happy to accommodate them. Then for the next three years they did absolutely nothing. They have nothing on the record to establish that they did anything. We are supposed to accept some kind of innuendo that they did a lot of good work. I do not think they did anything in the interim.
Mr. Rotenberg: The member would not believe anything anyway. His mind is made up; it is closed. All he is doing is saying the same things for the fourth or fifth time to keep going.
An hon. member: Give us your evidence.
Mr. Breaugh: I am inviting the --
Mr. Rotenberg: The member should sit down and finish his remarks. We will go through clause by clause and he will get some answers.
Mr. Breaugh: I do not take direction from the parliamentary assistant particularly well, ever. I am certainly now going to take it --
Mr. Rotenberg: The member has been giving me directions for three or four hours now.
Mr. Breaugh: I will put on the record an invitation for the ministry to table now something it has withheld from us as a committee of the Legislature and withheld from us as members of the Legislature ever since it introduced the bill.
For example, in the standing orders something called a compendium is supposed to be introduced when a bill is put together. I have the compendium with me tonight, and if he wishes I can read it for him.
Mr. Boudria: Read it to us. It is important we know what is in there.
Interjections.
Mr. Breaugh: There are a lot of demands to hear me read the compendium, but nowhere in that compendium --
Mr. Rotenberg: Will you finish your filibuster?
Mr. Stokes: Keep quiet, you pipsqueak. You do not have the floor.
Mr. Rotenberg: Shut up, you pipsqueak.
Mr. Breaugh: Is that parliamentary, "Shut up, you pipsqueak"?
Mr. Chairman: Order.
Mr. Breaugh: Could I suggest you throw the bum out?
Mr. Rotenberg: Throw him out. Throw the guy next to you out. He is the bum.
An hon. member: "Shut up" is not parliamentary.
Mr. Breaugh: There are a lot of new parliamentary words getting on the record here tonight: "shut up," "pipsqueak," "bum." Get the list out; I do not think they are on the list.
Mr. Stokes: That is not one on the list; I know.
Mr. Rotenberg: You know better than that.
Mr. Breaugh: The Premier acknowledged that Vespra had agreed to and had asked for a set of negotiations. To my knowledge, there is no record of ongoing negotiations and there never was a serious attempt on the part of the ministry to bring the two parties together to arrive at a consensus.
I and many other members are aware that there are people working for many of the ministries who have negotiated all kinds of resolutions to problems. In the Ministry of Community and Social Services, in the Ministry of Education, in the Ministry of Labour, in the Ministry of the Environment and in all the other ministries there are people who are very skilled negotiators and mediators; there are people who know how to get divergent opinions together, so to speak.
I am at a loss to begin to understand why, after the letter of the Premier written in 1980, not much happened. The parliamentary assistant implied that a whole lot went on, but in the course of all the hearings there was not the slightest hint -- not from Barrie, not from Vespra, not even from the ministry -- that negotiations had even been attempted in any serious way by the ministry.
It is passing strange, quite frankly, that we are told here this evening by means of an interjection that a whole lot of negotiating went on, when in fact the minister did not say this when he introduced the legislation, and when through a whole set of committee hearings nobody -- no one from Vespra, no one from Barrie and no one from the ministry -- put on the table a list of occasions when ministry staff had gone up there.
The best recollection I have of anybody even vaguely implying he had attempted to resolve the dispute in a nonlegislative way is of some staff people who said they were aware of the problems from different perspectives and of a few staff people who said they had visited both municipalities and discussed it with them. But to my knowledge there were absolutely no solid efforts to negotiate an end to this dispute.
What is very strange is that between the time the Premier wrote this letter to Vespra and the time the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing introduced his legislation in this Legislature in December there seems to have been a kind of Never Never Land. There does not seem ever to have been a chronology of events presented either here in the House or in committee that would say they began in response to the Premier's letter and met on these occasions: "Here are the position papers that were presented from both sides of the argument" and "Here are the results of the discussions on those position papers."
I am aware that in 1981, for example, Barrie presented a position paper for negotiations with Vespra; I have a copy of it signed by Mayor Archer. I will read just a couple of bits at the end of it because I think they are important. It covers the purpose of negotiations and the new boundaries and working agreements. They are not very much like any of the boundaries we have seen, I must say.
It talks about a financial agreement: "As previously stated, the financial assistance to Vespra will have to come from the province." As a matter of fact, as I read the legislation, the province is not very willing to make and, to my knowledge, has not made much of an offer to provide that financial assistance.
He goes on to say in his letter: "However, we are willing to give support to the township in this regard if requested. We need to know the true extent of the loss of revenue to the township, which we understand is 17.5 per cent of taxes collected. A list of the assessment for all of the properties involved is desired for Barrie to understand the magnitude of the problem. Our staff can prepare this list if necessary."
In his conclusion he states: "Whereas annexation has been delayed over three years beyond the effective OMB date of January 1, 1978, Barrie is most anxious to resolve this issue, and we hope that our discussions will be mutually fruitful."
There we have on the record a request on the part of Vespra to negotiate a settlement of some kind and a request on the part of Barrie to do the same thing. It is questionable why nothing has proceeded from that point.
I also have here a letter of September 18, 1974, from the then clerk of Vespra township, Earl Richardson, which goes on to lay out some of their petitions.
8:40 p.m.
The purpose of this little exercise is to lay out the fact that position papers were put forward but no one used them very much. There were deliberations on the matter on the part of both councils; they have obviously corresponded and put some of their positions on record, but no one seems to have had the brains to make this thing work.
Why it would have to come down to a legislated solution in December 1983 is a good question. There appears to be something amiss here. There is something that remains unexplained and will remain a bit of a mystery to the Legislature as it tries to deal with this legislation.
I want to put on the record a little about the response to some of our earlier comments in the debate. I notice one of the things the mayor of Barrie had to say at the beginning of these comments was that this was all a lot of drivel. That is unfortunate. I hope he did not mean to imply that the contents of letters from one rural municipality after another in regard to the whole democratic process was drivel.
What he probably meant to say was that he did not like to hear it, that he was not happy with the contents or that he did not share the opinions. I hope neither he nor the mayor of any municipality in Ontario would say that what some other municipality had to say on a piece of legislation was not worth listening to, was drivel or was stuff that had no substance.
I must say I do not share that opinion by any stretch of the imagination. Of the 100 or so municipalities that took the time to pass resolutions registering their concerns about Bill 142 and why they were concerned about it, I did not read one that struck me as being something that was not carefully thought out and, I am sure, well debated at that municipal council.
In a democracy I hope one always retains the right to disagree, to come to a different conclusion, to use due process again at the Ontario Municipal Board, through the courts or whatever. A mark of a society that is democratic in nature is that it recognizes there are opposing opinions. The way to resolve opposing opinions is not to call one another names. The way to resolve that is to attempt to appreciate, if possible, what the other person is arguing, to accept those portions that one agrees with or to accept a good argument when one is given.
It seems to me that is at the heart of this piece of legislation. There is a refusal on the part of the province, and perhaps on the part of the city of Barrie, to accept a good argument. There is a refusal to accept decisions made by other quasi-judicial bodies such as the OMB. There is a refusal to accept that just because Vespra is smaller, it may not necessarily be wrong; that in fact, from an academic, moral and democratic point of view, it may be quite correct in its stance that it does not want this annexation.
Many of us have waited to see when we will be allowed to have shared with us, as members of the Ontario Legislature, the rationale behind that. As Julian Tofts said in his reply to the letter of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, the planning studies that were touted around the Georgian Bay task force were from a long time ago. This is an area of the province where some studies have been done, but I come from an area of the province where a study commissioned in the late 1960s, called the Oshawa and Area Planning and Development Study, cost just over $1 million. That was at the discussion stage.
To my knowledge, there has been nothing so specific done in this area. If there had been, perhaps the arguments made by Vespra township and others would not be quite such telling arguments, because that would be the framework on which one could say this is not an arbitrary decision on the part of the government of Ontario; not only does this reflect concerns that have been studied and examined by people who live in that area but also studies have been produced which essentially said yes or no.
Such studies would have shown the annexation of that area has much more to do with just grabbing assessment from one rural municipality and stuffing it into an urban municipality. They would have shown there is a planning rationale, a service rationale and a service area clearly defined. They also would have shown there is an area of environmentally sensitive land which must be protected and that a conscious decision was made as to which of the two municipalities could best offer that protection. They would have shown too that there is a major developer operating in the area, and that would be planned in conjunction with other major developers in the area.
One would have all those criteria laid down neatly, all those arguments that took place in a not very thorough manner during committee debate. All those arguments would have been addressed at some time or other in a planning study, a service report or in public meetings where the public has an opportunity to have its say. That is a better way to proceed.
In response to all the concerns put in writing by the township of Vespra and the city of Barrie in their position papers, the fair way to proceed would be to simply address those concerns and to say yes, there is a valid concern here or not a valid concern there, then to move gradually, slowly but surely and consistently to a position where they would have met the request made by the Premier that they proceed with a negotiated settlement of sorts.
To say at this late date that the only way to proceed is by legislation that does not reflect, as best I can determine it, the needs or the wants of either of the municipalities is crazy. It is not a coherent, logical way to proceed. Yet that is exactly what we are doing.
I will read a couple of parts of the letter sent by the reeve of Vespra township to the Solicitor General.
Mr. Stokes: Why do you not read the whole thing?
Mr. Breaugh: I could, sure. I am going to do this because I would prefer that the minister participate in the debate. He has shown great reluctance to do that and so, to assist him in representing his constituents, it is only fair that we put his letter on the record, because I think it is a useful observation on how the minister reflects the needs and wishes of his constituents.
Mr. Stokes: Is that the member for Simcoe Centre?
Mr. Breaugh: Yes.
Mr. Stokes: Let us hear it.
Mr. Breaugh: "Vespra council has noted the terms of the Barrie Examiner report on the annexation bill debate which took place on Monday and wishes to express extreme concern with regard to two of your comments.
"In the first instance, you describe the opposition's attack on the bill as a straight filibuster to impress the people from Vespra."
I am going to stop there for a minute, because those of us here who are parliamentarians, big fans of procedure, big fans of parliament per se, know that in a parliament one cannot filibuster. If we could, I would be in here tonight reading the phone book. If this were the American Senate, that is what I would do. I could read phone books, comic books, anything I want, but in a parliament one cannot do that. One must address oneself to an issue before the House, such as we are doing this evening. One can not, in the traditional southern American sense, filibuster. One at least has to allude vaguely to some subject matter before the Legislature.
"Most of the debate so far has been a report on the expression of opposition to this bill by the county of Simcoe and the 103 municipalities which, to use the words of the county resolution passed on May 15, 1984, feel that:
"Such legislation is dictatorial, undemocratic, contrary to the wishes of the people, contrary to the greatest common good, unjustified and recognized as being a dangerous and unprecedented threat to rural municipalities and to the county system. We are shocked that you would find it appropriate to describe the expression of those views in an allegedly democratic system as being a filibuster.
"The views of the elected representatives of nearly half a million people should and must be heard, even though there are some who would like to pretend that they do not exist.
"We have also noted the further repetition that the legislated annexation is for the good of the whole area. Let it be understood that neither we on council nor the people we represent in Vespra are so selfish as to be continuing to fight this legislation if, indeed, we could be satisfied that such a statement is correct and not as it seems to us, meaningless platitude.
"The fact is, Mr. Taylor, that the commercial development along Highway 26 and Highway 27 in Vespra is an example of one of the most economic methods in existence of allowing commercial development. When and if the city does encompass this additional area, it is going to have to finance the provision of water and sewer services, fire protection, policing, the acquisition of Ontario Hydro facilities and some form of cost-sharing agreement with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications for the highway.
"What in effect will be happening is that you will be bringing the cost home to the city, which, according to the statistics that are available, forms only approximately 40 per cent of the total users of the commercial area in question. The argument in response to this, of course, is that the city will be in receipt of urban taxes which it did not previously have. This, however, gives rise to the question of whether or not the additional receipts from the annexation area will be sufficient to offset the cost of urbanization faced by the city.
8:50 p.m.
"Only when this has been achieved and, indeed, when the city receives more in the way of additional taxes from the annexed area than the cost of urbanizing the area, will there be a material benefit to Barrie.
"Let us suppose, however, that the city manages to achieve this by increasing the taxes on the annexed area to the required extent. The inevitable effect will be that the increased cost will be passed down to the consumer and guess who will be paying more for their purchases? None other than the people from the whole area that this legislation, according to your statement, is supposed to benefit.
"The only other possible good that can be alleged to be achieved by Bill 142 is the matter of planning control over the land which is the subject of the bill. As you are well aware, the township has introduced policies in relation to the regional commercial area which contain as many controls as are normally exercised by urban municipalities" --
Mr. Nixon: Speak up. I am missing some of this good stuff.
Mr. Breaugh: I will go a bit slower.
Mr. Breaugh: "The only reason those policies have not been formally approved by the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing is because the very body which would otherwise have wished such control to be in place, namely the city of Barrie, has objected to them.
"Coupled with the planning controls argument was the theoretical policy of the government relating to the control of urban development in one municipality. Having established that the commercial development is there and is severely restricted by the official plans policies, what in material terms is to be gained by changing the existing circumstances and what price is the whole area going to have to pay for the realization of the provincial government's theoretical, idealistic and outdated policy in this regard? The fact of the matter is there are many instances in which commercial areas are shared by two municipalities to the detriment of no one.
"In the face of the foregoing, we challenge you to state, in simple terms, how this legislation is for the good of the whole area as opposed to the political benefit of a few. The legislation is opposed by the elected representatives of almost half a million people, and you as one of the promoters owe them and the people of the city of Barrie, who are going to have to face the resulting burden, a detailed explanation of the good you have referred to in an effort to justify this undemocratic legislation. Failing this, you and your colleagues should have the courage to admit your mistake and withdraw Bill 142 before history proves that piece of legislation to be an economic and political disaster.
"A copy of this letter is being sent to each of your Progressive Conservative colleagues in the Legislature and to the media." It is signed by Harry D. Adams, reeve of the township of Vespra.
The reeve has made his argument in a straightforward way. It is somewhat confusing to me as a member of the Legislature why the Solicitor General is so strongly connected and appears to be the only minister of the crown connected to this legislation. That is an unusual way for us to proceed. One does not expect the chief cop of Ontario to be settling boundary arguments. That is as close as we have ever come in our history to military intervention to resolve a boundary dispute.
If this were the Middle East, one might think it a common matter of the day, for it is the chief of military police or the armed services who heads the government's movement for intervention. The junta or central committee sends him on the road with his tanks and pistoleers to intervene and solve boundary disputes. But in Ontario, one does not normally associate the Solicitor General with boundary disputes and this kind of intervention.
One hopes there is no armed intervention, but it almost seems implied that the top gun in the province is carrying the payload for this matter on the part of the cabinet --
Mr. Boudria: Is the minister the top gun?
Mr. Breaugh: One is hard pressed to say. If the Solicitor General, for example, does not like what was said here in this debate, will the Ontario Provincial Police be on my tail down Highway 401 this evening? It is possible. It would not be the first time.
Will he order the OPP into the area to resolve the dispute if the legislation fails? In my community, it would not be the first time the Solicitor General called out the troops, so to speak. It was a different Solicitor General working for a Liberal government at the time.
Mr. O'Neil: Blame the feds.
Mr. Breaugh: Do not get too overjoyed. The member forgets. It was not that long -- well, it was that long ago.
Mr. Boudria: It has been 41 years.
Mr. Breaugh: There once was a Liberal government in Ontario. The last time they were in they called out the troops, the provincial police --
Mr. Nixon: Actually, it was the local member.
Mr. Breaugh: Yes, the member is right.
Mr. Nixon: And he was re-elected.
Mr. Breaugh: That was the last time we ever elected a Liberal to anything in Oshawa. We said: "That is it. If they get in trouble and call out the troops, too bad for those guys." There is now a Liberal out in the open in Oshawa, but it has been a long time. I do not want to divert myself from the bill in front of us this evening. I want to state my concern.
This is a release from the staff bureau here in Toronto which went into the Barrie Examiner. It says, "The delaying moves irk Taylor." I read that with some trepidation. I do not want to run afoul of the Solicitor General, but I do want to say if I am delaying the passage of this legislation somewhat, I am small bananas compared to the delaying moves that have been put on this legislation by the government of Ontario.
When the Premier himself writes to Vespra township and says, "Okay, boys, if you want to negotiate, we will negotiate," one would think that, as quickly as bunnies, entire ministries would fall out the back door at Queen's Park and rush to Vespra township to conduct those negotiations. It surprises me, quite frankly, that did not happen. The wishes of the Premier were not fulfilled. No negotiations took place. In the interim three years -- and perhaps for longer than that, who knows? -- nothing really happened. Nada; not a thing.
Now we are running the risk of irking the Solicitor General. I do not mind irking him once in a while. I do think it is odd that the Solicitor General has decided to intervene in this dispute in a way that is almost unseen. I believe he spoke a little in the second reading debate, but he did not participate in the public hearings nor has he in this debate so far, though he may when he gets his chance.
Mr. Stokes: If he gets his chance.
Mr. Breaugh: If he gets his chance.
It is an odd thing to have this bill in the hands of the Solicitor General. I am not too sure it is appropriate to have a dispute of this nature in the hands of the chief cop. I do not think that is where it belongs. It belongs with the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. We might even accept the poor substitute of his parliamentary assistant, because the minister is not here. We should all be grateful he is not here. It adds to the tenor of the debate when he is absent.
Mr. Boudria: Yes, it could be worse. The minister could be here.
Mr. Breaugh: The member is right. We should be grateful.
The other thing I thought was interesting was that there are replies here from the Minister of Energy (Mr. Andrewes) and the Minister of Education and Colleges and Universities (Miss Stephenson) on the same issue. One might ask why the Ministry of Energy gets involved in this dispute. There are a lot of players involved in this dispute whom one would not normally anticipate seeing there.
I think we just had the dancers walk in.
Mr. Stokes: Here comes Lucy-Goosey.
Mr. Breaugh: Certainly got the strut.
I think it is interesting that the Minister of Energy deems that this bill and this argument are somehow within his jurisdiction too. He wrote a letter to Reeve Adams. I will go through it very quickly.
"There remains a misunderstanding in some areas as to why the government is proceeding with this legislation." He is certainly given to understatement here. "Further, there have been challenges to the authority and precedent for doing so. As a member supporting the government, I would like to clear up this misunderstanding." Someone certainly should.
It continues, "In brief, the 'why' of the legislation relates to the long-standing government policies relating to the containment of urban uses in urban areas" -- I would have thought that would mean they would leave Barrie within the Barrie boundaries as it now is -- "and is entirely consistent with the decisions of the OMB as far back as the 1950s on the annexation of urban fringe areas to the urban core. The province generally is concerned about service costs being levered on to urban centres by uncontrolled urban kinds of development beyond their borders."
As a former schoolteacher, I would hate to have to parse that sentence, but I think what he means is they did not like urban sprawl, to use the trendy word of the day. It is a little difficult to make an argument that after the shopping centre, for example, which is a limited form of urban development in Vespra township --
Mr. Boudria: Earl has municipal experience. He should be able to solve this.
9 p.m.
Mr. Breaugh: Yes. I am sure J. Earl knows all about urban sprawl and various kinds of sprawl.
Let me continue with this letter because it is fascinating:
"The province is ultimately responsible for the design of municipal governments. Since Confederation the responsibility for municipal government has been lodged exclusively with the province. In that time literally hundreds of urban-rural adjustments have been made under the authority of the Legislature either by order of the OMB or special act. Many of these, like Barrie-Vespra, have involved the annexation of land that was already urban or about to become urban in character. Some of these adjustments proceeded with the agreement of the rural municipalities involved; others proceeded without their consent in the interests of the greatest common good. Without this flexibility to manage growth, Ontario would have experienced unlimited urban sprawl."
I am not really sure how accurate that statement is. I am not sure how many urban municipalities want to sprawl into rural Ontario. In the areas with which I have been associated there has been a peripheral problem, but I do not think anybody is seriously suggesting there are going to be shopping centres all over eastern Ontario, northern Ontario or western Ontario. For the most part in planning areas, there are continual disputes about the placement and development of shopping centres, but it really is not quite as the minister has stated.
Let me continue: "Annexation is not a new solution. What is new, unfortunately, is Vespra's refusal to negotiate in any forum." I find that really tough to understand in the light of the response of the Premier on December 8, 1980, to Vespra's request for negotiations. It does not say here Vespra is not happy now, nor that Vespra township picked up its marbles and stomped out the door. A minister of the crown refers here to "Vespra's refusal to negotiate in any forum, including the Legislature's standing committee on general government." I was there and I did not see much opportunity to negotiate in that standing committee.
"The township either cannot or will not see the need for any adjustment. Its position throughout has been that it is unwilling to tolerate any interference in its affairs from a neighbouring municipality or from the province. To have heeded Vespra's brief and not acted would have been to give up on provincial policy to pursue rational boundaries as conditions change. Even so, the minister and the government proceeded with the legislation with great reluctance." I did not notice that.
"Reaction of the province came after a task force report," which I must admit I have never seen -- what is referred to is the report of the Simcoe-Georgian Bay Area Task Force, but surely no one would pretend it had much to do with this proposed legislation -- "several OMB hearings and court cases and the expenditure of $1 million in public funds and some 10 years of deliberations."
Some members pointed out to me last week -- I think the member for Wilson Heights did so himself -- when I read the resolutions from the municipalities that there was some repetition. He seemed to imply that this somehow was a criticism of the validity of their statements on Bill 142. If he had had the temerity to be with us this evening, I wonder whether he would be saying the same things about the government's response to this bill because there seems to me to be an alarming repetition in the government's responses. It is alarming because the government never bothers to explain its reasons. It simply states the same words again, and some of them appear to me at least to be open to some judgement calls about just exactly what they mean.
Let me just conclude this letter: "There are those who remain convinced that the question of urban-rural adjustment is a matter for the courts or quasi-judicial adjudication. The government -- supported, by the way, by the select committee of the Legislature on the OMB in 1972 -- is of the view that the drawing of a municipal boundary is a political act. In these kinds of issues, it should be local politicians who shape our communities.
"This is the thrust of the new act. Legislation remains a possibility, of course, but one to be exercised only in the event of a local failure to find solutions.
"With kindest regards,
"Yours very truly, Philip Andrewes, Minister of Energy."
I read this letter and I found it confusing. On the one hand, I understand why the Minister of Energy is replying to this particular case. He is writing a letter to Vespra township because he comes from small-town Ontario. I am sure the Minister of Energy is aware that in his local area there have from time to time been arguments between and among municipalities that are adjacent to one another and they have to be resolved in some way. I find it really strange that he says in the concluding part of his letter, "In these kinds of issues, it should be local politicians who shape our communities." That is an interesting thought, but it did not happen here.
I would offer a further small point of argument. In my experience as someone who sat on planning committees a great deal, we always used to say, and be fairly careful about it, that these are in some sense political decisions which must be made. Ultimately, it is the elected politicians in the local municipality who make those decisions. But we also spent a great deal of time, money and effort to see it was not just an old, gut politics decision that was made. We also spent a great deal of time, effort and money to see that when decisions around things such as boundaries were made, some planning criteria were used and some service capacity analysed.
Things such as population projections were done. Demographics were brought into the picture. There were arguments about community interest. There were arguments about how big and how small certain kinds of communities should be and how, in general, they should fit into an official plan for a larger area. We were very cognizant of all those details before the political decision was made.
I do not have any problem with the right of the Minister of Energy to intervene with his two cents' worth here, but I have some difficulty with the gist of his argument. He argues, on one hand, the decision should be local, but on the other hand, he is supporting this legislation which is in no way local. If one put this legislation in front of the people in that area, generally one would not get them being supportive of this particular approach.
The local people in Barrie and in Vespra would take a different point of view. Much of what the Minister of Energy had to say seems to be contrary to the normal pattern of development of legislation of this nature. He again criticizes Vespra township. I do not understand why the whole government has to dump all over Vespra township. It is not that big. One or two of them could take on Vespra and perhaps do all right. I admit it could not just be the member for Wilson Heights. He would need a little help, but perhaps the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, if he fulfilled his role, and the Solicitor General could. The three of them ought to be enough. They do not need to bring the Minister of Energy into this debate.
Mr. Boudria: They could form a triumvirate.
Mr. Breaugh: That is true.
There are some difficulties. In reply to this letter, no one seems to explain this "greatest common good" stuff. That remains an unexplained item. It almost has an aura that Big Brother, the province of Ontario, the Big Blue Machine, knows all and will tell us what we need to know at some time in the future, but for now we are to take it as we are told and that is it. There is no recourse to it at all save and except the debate as it goes through the clause-by-clause stage.
I want to put on the record a response from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Colleges and Universities because, as most members will know, the Minister of Education is one of my favourite ministers of the crown. One thing I like about her is that one never has to guess about where she is coming from. She is like a freight train. If you are standing on the tracks and you are smart, you will get the hell out of the way, but if you are dumb and stand there, you will be a small damp spot on the railroad track when she is finished.
She is abrupt and perhaps a little discourteous to some of the members from time to time, but I like her style. There is no beating around the bush with that minister. If she is going to dig her teeth into an issue, one knows why and her position is certainly clear. It is probably wrong, but it is clear. She really lets one know. She has two speeds: fast and overdrive.
The Deputy Chairman: The honourable member is speaking to Bill 142 at this point. I wish he would get on with the bill.
Mr. Riddell: When she meets a railway engine, one has to admire her courage but not her judgement.
The Deputy Chairman: That has nothing to do with what the bill is all about. The chair is exercising great patience.
9:10 p.m.
Mr. Breaugh: The reason I introduced the Minister of Education into this debate is that the Minister of Education on her own initiative has replied to Reeve Harry Adams. Although normally the Minister of Education and the Minister for Colleges and Universities would not appear on the surface of it to have a whole lot to do with Bill 142, lo and behold, she herself has taken the initiative.
Mr. Chairman, you may have the gall to question her right to intervene and to comment on this; I would not dare.
I want to get this on the record, too.
Mr. Boudria: Does she come from the small town of York Mills?
Mr. Breaugh: I do not think she ever came from a small anything.
The Deputy Chairman: The member is speaking on Bill 142, I think.
Mr. Breaugh: Yes, I will get right to it. I want to read this.
"Thank you for your letter of March 2, 1984, regarding the Barrie-Vespra annexation bill, Bill 142." There we are, right on the money.
"There would appear to be some misunderstanding regarding the reason for the government's proceeding with this legislation. As a government member, I should like to clarify our position.
"The reason for the legislation relates to long-standing government policies relating to the containment of urban uses in urban areas and is entirely consistent with the decisions of the OMB as far back as the 1950s on the annexation of urban fringe areas to the urban core."
Mr. Wildman: Why did they not go to the Ontario Municipal Board on this?
Mr. Breaugh: They did.
"The province is concerned about service costs being levied on urban centres by uncontrolled development beyond their borders."
Mr. Charlton: Does this not sound familiar?
Mr. Breaugh: Yes, it does. It has a familiar ring to it.
"Since Confederation the responsibility for municipal government has rested exclusively with the province."
Mr. Boudria: I seem to have heard that somewhere before.
Mr. Breaugh: "Within that 117 years, literally hundreds of urban rural adjustments have been made under authority of the Legislature either by order of the OMB or by a special act.
Mr. Boudria: Who wrote this?
Mr. Breaugh: "Many of these, such as Barrie-Vespra, have involved the annexation of land that was already urban, or about to become urban in nature." I will not bother to correct the grammatical errors and the punctuation errors that are in here because it is from the Minister of Colleges and Universities, and that is a kind of dangerous thing to do.
Mr. Swart: She probably wrote it herself then.
Mr. Breaugh: We will try to find out who did write it.
"Some of these adjustments proceeded with the agreement of the rural municipalities involved; others proceeded without their consent in the interests of the greatest common good. Without this flexibility to manage growth, Ontario would have experienced unlimited urban sprawl.
"Annexation is not a new solution. What is new, unfortunately, is Vespra's refusal to negotiate in any forum, including the Legislature's standing committee on general government. The township either cannot or will not see the need for any adjustment. Its position throughout has been that it is unwilling to tolerate any interference in its affairs from a neighbouring municipality or from the province.
"To have heeded Vespra's brief and not acted would have been to deny provincial policy to pursue rational boundaries as conditions change. Even so, the minister and the government proceeded with the legislation with great reluctance." Again, I did not see it there either.
"The action of the province came after a task force report." I hope that is not the Simcoe-Georgian Bay Area Task Force report, which does not deal with Barrie-Vespra but deals with Georgian Bay development.
To continue:
"There have been several OMB hearings and court cases, the expenditure of $1 million in public funds and some 10 years of deliberations. There are those who remain convinced that the question of urban-rural adjustment is a matter for the courts or quasi-judicial adjudication.
"The government's position, which is supported by the select committee of the Legislature on the OMB, 1972, is that the drawing of a municipal boundary is a political act and that local politicians should shape our communities. This is the thrust of the new act. Legislation remains a possibility, of course, but one which should be exercised only in the event of failure to find a solution at the local level."
Mr. Charlton: Does the member think it was the Minister of Energy or the Minister of Education who wrote that letter?
Mr. Breaugh: That is a good question. There is some similarity, as the member has noticed, between two letters written by two entirely different ministers.
Mr. Wildman: Xerox must be doing well.
Mr. Breaugh: It is possible the Minister of Energy and the Minister of Education and Colleges and Universities had exactly the same thoughts on the matter at exactly the same time. It is conceivable the Minister of Energy and the Minister of Education and College and Universities have identical thoughts on the matter. It is conceivable they have identical thought patterns on the matter. It is conceivable they write in exactly the same way. All of that is possible.
I have to admit I find it a little unlikely. Their personalities appear to me to be a little different. The Minister of Education is quite calm, meek and mild, while the Minister of Energy gets hysterical in earnest and high.
Mr. Wildman: I think you have it backwards.
Mr. Breaugh: Well, maybe. No, I would never call the Minister of Education hysterical.
But it is odd that both of these ministers saw fit in the first place to intervene in the dispute. It is important that they are there as members of the cabinet, responding to what is really a plea for help on the part of Vespra and the people who live there. That they chose to respond in identical ways is mysterious, I suppose. Perhaps one letter was circulated among all the ministries. Maybe by the time we pick up this debate again tomorrow afternoon we will have more letters from other ministries.
The Deputy Chairman: Can I draw the honourable member to a point of order and just see if there is any way we can begin going point by point through the bill? In the preliminary remarks made by the three parties we have had an opportunity for each of the three parties to comment. Will the member be leading on now to the wrapup of the preliminary remarks that were agreed to so we can proceed with the bill? Am I dreaming? Am I hoping for too much?
Interjection.
The Deputy Chairman: Order.
Mr. Breaugh: The member for Wilson Heights keeps harassing me.
The Deputy Chairman: I know and I was going to call him to order, but I am trying to bring you to some order.
Mr. Breaugh: I am trying to help you out. You are not dreaming in Technicolor at all, Mr. Chairman. I am moving into the meat of the remarks I have to make on this bill. I think that might mean we are just over the peak a little bit and we are heading towards the wrapup. Have patience and we will get you there.
The Deputy Chairman: I understand there is an agreement from all parties that you should have preliminary remarks like this.
Mr. Wildman: That is right.
Mr. Breaugh: Yes, unanimous consent.
The Deputy Chairman: You are into your sixth hour.
Mr. Rotenberg: We voted for brief preliminary remarks. The member for Oshawa (Mr. Breaugh) mentioned that at the beginning. He agreed to brief remarks.
Mr. Breaugh: I want to sell you a used car later on, too. Come and see me.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: Just to conclude my remarks on this letter --
Mr. Rotenberg: You said at a quarter to six you were going to conclude.
Mr. Breaugh: Every time I say the word "conclude" the saliva flows down his jaw over there. It is disgusting. Use your tie and give it a little rub.
The Minister of Colleges and Universities has, as I know her, attempted to respond to this rural municipality, has attempted to provide her ministry with some input on the matter and has attempted to provide Vespra with a coherent reply. I find it unfortunate that it appears to be almost word for word the same as the reply given by the Minister of Energy. Since two ministers of the crown have taken the time to write this letter, I think it deserves a bit of a critique, so to speak, and I do have a couple of comments about it.
Mr. Wildman: This bill is the one that won J. Earl over.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: You do not want to let that kind of secret out.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: You see why it takes so long. I keep getting hassled and harassed.
Mr. Rotenberg: I left my seat for half an hour just to leave you alone, hoping you would wind up, but it did not help.
The Deputy Chairman: Order.
Mr. Breaugh: What do you want? Do you want a unanimous vote of confidence that you left your seat? We were all happy. We all smiled.
Mr. Stokes: Things were so peaceful in here.
Mr. Breaugh: Things were so peaceful in here. My speech was beginning to flow nicely.
The gist of the argument presented by both ministers is that there is some kind of government policy here about containment of urban uses in urban areas. One would have thought that if one were interested in the containment of urban uses, one would have said, I think logically, that one does not want to expand an urban area such as Barrie out to the next piece of urban development like the shopping centre. One would have tried to retain the city of Barrie inside the current boundaries of Barrie.
9:20 p.m.
That is the problem. This may appear to the Minister of Energy and the Minister of Education and Colleges and Universities to be some kind of containment exercise, when quite the opposite is true. If one looks at whatever map they are touting today as the map for the boundary changes, one sees, however they slice it up, Barrie is going to grow larger. Barrie is not going to be contained. Urban development is not going to be contained; it is going to be expanded. If the policy of the government is to contain urban development within urban areas, why is it expanding urban areas? It does not seem sensible. It seems incoherent.
In this letter, it says this is consistent with the Ontario Municipal Board's decisions. Yet I find the OMB has consistently ruled in favour of Vespra township. It says it goes as far back as the 1950s, on the annexation of urban fringe areas to the urban core. I am not sure Vespra township considers itself to be an urban fringe area; I thought it considered itself to be a rural township.
There are other things that need to be examined in this regard. The province is concerned about service costs being levied on urban centres by uncontrolled development beyond their borders. I want to point out that the aforementioned uncontrolled development here is one development controlled by Cadillac Fairview and represented by Fast Eddie Goodman himself.
That is hardly uncontrolled development. Surely it is controlled development -- controlled right within the Tory party in Ontario. Everything is happening exactly as the Tory party in Ontario wants it to happen. It has happened because of the actions of their prime movers and shakers.
Fast Eddie got what he wanted; there is no question about that. The government's friends at Cadillac Fairview got what they wanted; there is no question about that. There is every bit of control by the Tories in Ontario on that Cadillac Fairview development. They are totally in control of it all. One might even say they are the only ones in control.
There are other points I think worth mentioning as we go through here. Perhaps unwittingly, the minister says Vespra refused to negotiate in any form. I do not believe this to be the case. Simply, I believe it is factually incorrect.
Mr. Rotenberg: They did. The member would not believe anything if it were right in front of him.
Mr. Breaugh: It includes the standing committee on general government of this Legislature. When was there an opportunity to negotiate before the standing committee on general government? I sat through every session and there were some long evening sessions. I did not see one occasion when the chairman of the committee said: "Now it is time to negotiate. Let us call both parties in before the committee. Let us negotiate a solution."
I did not see any opportunity provided for that. I would like to know why two ministers of the crown are prepared to put in writing that Vespra refused to negotiate before the standing committee on general government when no opportunity was provided for Vespra, Barrie, Simcoe county or anybody else to negotiate.
Mr. Rotenberg: They were asked to come and negotiate. They said they would not.
Mr. Breaugh: This is interesting. In his interjections tonight, the parliamentary assistant is giving us more information about secret events than we have heard of in the course of the whole committee proceedings on this bill. We are not aware that Vespra, Simcoe county or anybody else was invited to come before the standing committee on general government to negotiate their settlement to the solution.
Mr. Rotenberg: Not there. They were invited at the committee to come and negotiate elsewhere. The member was there.
Mr. Breaugh: However, the letter from the minister says --
Mr. Stokes: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman: I have noticed on several occasions tonight that when the parliamentary assistant, the member for Wilson Heights, for whatever reason, chooses to interject -- and we all do from time to time -- the console operator turns on the microphone so he can pick up what is being said. It is not in keeping with the way in which we operate in this House. Perhaps you should check on that.
The Deputy Chairman: I would have to agree with the member for Lake Nipigon and make note of it. Not only that, I hope the member for Wilson Heights will stop interjecting.
Mr. Rotenberg: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman: I will agree that, for a change, the former Speaker, the member for Lake Nipigon, is right. I have no idea why my light was on.
Mr. Stokes: If the member agrees with me, I am going to review my position.
Mr. Rotenberg: He is absolutely right. If, as and when the member for Oshawa stops the filibuster, then we can get on with our business.
The Deputy Chairman: That was not much of a point of order.
Mr. Breaugh: That is the way to put him down, Mr. Chairman. Sock it to him.
In letters from two ministers of the cabinet there is something that is factually incorrect -- I believe that is the parliamentary way to express it -- and that is that there is not just an inference but a direct statement which says," What is new, unfortunately, is Vespra's refusal to negotiate in any forum, including the Legislature's standing committee on general government."
I was there every day that committee was in session. I saw no opportunity for Vespra or Barrie or the county of Simcoe to negotiate in front of the committee in that forum. I saw no invitation on the part of the parliamentary assistant, the minister, the Solicitor General or anyone else to create a situation where negotiations could proceed.
At the very best, what I might be able to recognize is that, almost as an aside, the parliamentary assistant said on occasion, "All they have to do is come on down and negotiate." In my parlance, that is like General Motors saying to the United Auto Workers, "All you have to do is come on down and we will negotiate."
Mr. Stokes: Sounds like The Price Is Right.
Mr. Rotenberg: You are not supposed to heckle, remember.
Mr. Stokes: I am just helping him.
Mr. Rotenberg: He does not need your help.
Mr. Breaugh: I am under siege here. It is a bitter attack.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: Now I am under siege by the acting Chairman.
Mr. Wildman: It is nice to have you back.
Mr. Breaugh: Now maybe we will get somewhere.
Mr. Stokes: Welcome back.
The Acting Chairman (Mr. Cureatz): What is the commercial? "I came back"?
Mr. Breaugh: You are going to regret that.
I am somewhat disturbed that two ministers of the crown have put together in their response to Vespra township, something which I believe to be, in parliamentary terms, factually incorrect. There is a more accurate way to describe it, Mr. Chairman, but you will not allow me to say it. However, there was no opportunity before that committee for any of the three parties to negotiate on any of the conditions that were there. The truth is, as the acting Chairman will know well, that in the parliamentary forum we have to deal with the legislation as it is presented to the parliament.
Interruption.
Mr. Breaugh: It seems I am being given the water treatment. This must be the Premier's version of the water bomber in southern Ontario. I know the strategy. Forget it. It ain't going to work.
Mr. Stokes: It is too weak. Whatever it is being spiked with, it is not worth it.
Mr. Breaugh: Now the holy water has arrived. Man, that's water.
The Acting Chairman: That is a different strategy.
Mr. Breaugh: Man, that is all right.
Mr. Stokes: That is what Sir John A. Macdonald used to say.
Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Chairman, this is awful. I want to point out that the one aspect of what both the ministers had to say I believe to be factually incorrect. There are opinions ventured in here. In the next line it says, "The township either cannot or will not see the need for any adjustment." That is the right of the township. There is nothing on the books that says the township has to agree with the government all the time. There is nothing on the books that says a township like Vespra has to do what the province wants it to do. I see it as quite to the contrary.
Since Ontario is the body that initiates legislation, I believe the province has its obligation right there to make sure there is a rationale provided. There are forums provided for negotiation. All that is the responsibility of the province. It is not the responsibility of Vespra township to plan and design Ontario. Nor is it an obligation on the part of Vespra to respond in a ready-aye-ready manner to whatever legislation the province might care to propose.
9:30 p.m.
I am not happy with the notion that both ministers in their letters said the position of the township of Vespra has been that it is unwilling to tolerate any interference in its affairs from a neighbouring municipality or from the province. I have to say that members of the committee dealt a great deal with people from Vespra township in the course of the committee hearings, and I would be reluctant to say I ever heard the township of Vespra talk about not tolerating any interference by anybody else.
It seemed to me they were a reasonable group of people who were simply stating their side of the argument, which I believe is fair game; they are allowed to do that. I think it is fair to categorize their response to the legislation as being one that was not happy. They did not like the legislation and they said so up front. They were not meek and mild about it, but neither were they obnoxious. To say they would not tolerate any interference in their affairs is a questionable statement for the ministers of the crown to make. I wonder if they would tolerate any interference in the operations of their ministries by other ministers.
For all the ministers involved there is an obligation to discharge their responsibilities, and for the council of the township of Vespra there is an obligation on its behalf to discharge its responsibilities and to represent its constituency. If that does not quite jibe with the plans of the Solicitor General, or if it does not quite match up with the legislated formula the government has presented in Bill 142, that is tough bananas.
Their job is different from my job, it is different from yours, Mr. Chairman, and it is certainly different from the job of any member of the cabinet. They are presenting a perspective that is unique to Vespra township. They are presenting a different perspective, and there is nothing wrong with that, in my view.
I want to reply briefly to a couple of other remarks that are included in here. The minister says: "To have heeded Vespra's brief and not acted would have been to deny provincial policy to pursue rational boundaries as conditions change." This one has me confused, and both ministers said it. I am not sure what brief from Vespra they are referring to. There have been several briefs put together by Vespra. I know the township council appeared before the committee and made its position known about the bill, but the statement is not clear. I would be interested in hearing from the Minister of Energy or the Minister of Education which of the briefs mentioned they are talking about here, because that certainly is not a clear and accurate way to proceed.
I would like to know the provincial policy that governs rational boundary changes as conditions change. I have been in municipal and provincial politics for a little better than a decade and I have never seen that laid out. I have seen all kinds of study papers and I have seen all kinds of positions put by various ministers of the crown, but I am not aware of any provincial policy in that regard.
I would be interested in seeing which little brochure or book has that all laid out. I am not sure the member for Carleton-Grenville (Mr. Sterling) is prepared to reveal that book yet. Maybe he is, but I have not seen it.
The implication is clear that somewhere there is written down a provincial policy to pursue rational boundaries as conditions change. I would be interested in seeing that. I would like to see a little flushing out of the guidelines, so to speak.
Mr. Nixon: Fleshing out.
Mr. Breaugh: No, not fleshing out. The member for Oriole (Mr. Williams) is not here tonight, but we cannot talk about that.
It says in here that the minister and the government proceeded with legislation with great reluctance. I was not aware of that either. I was not aware that the ministry had been considering legislation for some time. That is news to me. I am led to believe the participants were told about an hour before the legislation was introduced. Where is the reluctance here? When did that happen? How did that happen? I think we have a right to know if there was some process at work here we have not heard about yet. We do not know what the reluctance was. We do not know why they were reluctant, except perhaps to say at some time they would rather not legislate a solution.
Again both of them came down on the task force report, which to my knowledge does not exist, and the Ontario Municipal Board hearings, which to my knowledge ruled in favour of Vespra township as opposed to the province or Barrie. The court cases were aware of that. I am not aware of the total expenditure of the $1 million in public funds and some 10 years of deliberations. I do not know where the $1-million figure came from. I am aware that much of the litigation that was involved over a lengthy period of time probably was expensive, but it is odd that the exact cost of all these transactions and litigation would come to an exact $1 million.
Four ministers of the crown have used that number: the Minister of Energy, the Minister of Education, the Solicitor General and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. They have all said there is a $1-million expenditure without bothering to provide me or any other member of the Legislature with some accounting as to how they arrived at the $1-million total. It is passing strange that they conveniently came up with this $1 million, and no one has shown me the adding machine on which they arrived at that total. I find that strange as well.
Both ministers in their reply to Vespra township left a lot of questions unanswered. Much of what they had to say was probably written by someone else. I am sure both ministers wanted to reply to the township. I am sure the ministers wanted at some point to get their views on Bill 142 on the record for a variety of reasons.
As we mentioned earlier, perhaps it is because it has arrived here and deals with a part of rural Ontario dear to the hearts of many Tories. I am taken aback that ministers of the crown appear to be writing letters to municipalities and do not appear to be fully aware of all the facts in the situation. They appear to be putting forward to a rural municipality, opinions that are not based on fact and run contrary to what I know to be the facts and to facts presented before the general government committee.
It bothers me that people who are members of the cabinet and responsible to the Legislature seem to be operating in the dark. It leads me to believe that at least two, and maybe four, members of the cabinet do not appear to have a complete understanding and awareness of the history of this bill. Maybe they made a wrong decision when this bill went through cabinet. Maybe they did not know all the facts. Maybe someone sold them a wrong bill of goods. Maybe when this bill was presented to cabinet, the ministers in good faith made a wrong move. I would be prepared to say that is my version of what happened.
I do not get to sit behind the cabinet door, nor do I share in the political arguments that occur there, but they would not of their own volition put this kind of legislation in front of the House if they had thought through the situation. They would not have put in place a piece of legislation that more than 100 municipalities find so distasteful.
They would not of their own volition have done something that so grievously offended so many people, which caused them to come to Queen's Park and to public hearings in the Simcoe county building to say so, and to say nasty things about a Tory party I suspect many of them belong to. They are saying nasty things about a provincial government that I suspect many of them have worked very hard to get into public office and have managed to sustain for a number of years.
In many ways, there is a revolution brewing. There is something amiss in Tory Ontario that this bill has electrified. This bill has put the government of Ontario on notice that one cannot always stomp all over little people. Every once in a while one does have to have a slightly more sensitive response to legislative requirements than this bill has. One does have to give an accounting of why one is proceeding in that manner. This government has not done that.
9:40 p.m.
In many respects, this bill does not fulfil the criteria for good legislation. There is a problem; there is no question about it. As we go back over the history of the area, we know there have been intermittent attempts to resolve the problem. We know this bill by its very nature is quite likely to get challenged in other places. The Canadian people have a Charter of Rights these days. As individuals, people are a little more aware the government cannot just trample all over everybody any more. Whether it is the Big Blue Machine in Ontario or whether it is a large municipality adjacent to a rural municipality, there are certain rights that others have. This bill does not take any of those rights into account.
Part of what we discussed during the course of the hearings, and we will discuss as we go through clause-by-clause debate, was simply that this legislation is unnecessary. If the world revolved around this Legislature, this legislation might resolve this long-standing problem, in some people's view. In my view, it is not going to do that. In my view, this legislation is going to aggravate and agitate and not resolve the problem.
This legislation is going to be the centre of a continuing challenge around the attitude and techniques used by Ontario in dealing with its rural municipalities. The old pot is clearly on the stove and is starting to boil. The government may have thought it would have no problem railroading this legislation through the House. I hope members have in the back of their minds some redefined notion of how smoothly this railroad is going to run. Not too smoothly at all.
In December, this government introduced a piece of legislation and, had it got its way, it probably could have rolled through here in a couple of days, gone out to committee for a few days, taken a little waltz around the block, a little stamp of royal assent and away it would go. That is not going to happen. I think the government should be aware of that now. The government should now be aware there is no railroad running through here tonight. We may not have many tools with which we can defend or oppose pieces of legislation we think are right or wrong, but we do have a couple and we are going to exercise those.
The government of Ontario may eventually bring in the procedural affairs report. It may move the famed Rotenberg rule to see that votes are actually called when the government wants them called. That may happen. Even if all that happens, even if the opposition members totally collapse here -- and I do not suspect for a moment that will be the case -- I believe rural municipalities from one end of Ontario to the other are not just going to drop this matter. Through their municipal organizations, individually and collectively, they are going to proceed to point out to the government of Ontario that this bill is fundamentally flawed in nature and this bill is fundamentally wrong.
I suppose in the mind of the Solicitor General, if we did not have to bother with the legislative process, this bill would resolve the problem and he would come out as some kind of local hero, as having resolved at least for the majority of the people in his constituency a bit of a problem. I would dare to say, though, that the majority of people in his constituency do not see this as being a major problem any more, if they ever did. I do not believe they did in the first place. I believe he is whistling up a tree here. I think he is going to regret that at some time.
In my heart of hearts, I know Vespra is unlikely to give up. Having carried on this battle for a long time, it seems to me it will -- it has in the past and I would anticipate it will in the future -- carefully consider some options about legal redress that may even take on the Ontario Legislature. I say, more power to them. That is probably not an easy thing to do. It is something that will probably lead them to more expense, although we do not really know how much more. It is an avenue that has not been completely shut down and one I would encourage them to explore.
I know there are different points of view on this. There are some who would cut and run and take the best deal possible. But there are others who would say: "Wait a minute. It is not right. No matter how awkward or difficult it might be to proceed, we are going to take a look at what our other options might be."
I believe they have some options. I believe the new Canadian Charter of Rights addresses itself to this type of issue. I believe, although it has not been tested and the precedents have not been set, that it is probably worth doing and worth seeking a landmark decision. Many major things have occurred in the history of this country through landmark decisions involving small rural municipalities that sat back and said: "The government, provincial or federal, cannot do this to us. It is not right and we will not let it happen. We will fight back, we will go to court and see whether the legislation will stand up."
I believe the possibility of that happening to this legislation is pretty good. I believe there is an argument that anybody can muster around that, and I believe it probably should be done by Vespra, by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario or by some individual, which is another aspect of it.
Much has been centred around the debate by the council of Vespra. Those of us who sat through the hearings were impressed by the individual citizens of Vespra and by the citizens' groups from there. In my view, they did not just dig in their heels in blind opposition to something. They appeared before us with fairly thoughtful, rational arguments about why they were living in a place such as Vespra township, why it ought to remain the same, why certain annexed areas should not be joined to the city of Barrie and why there had been for a long time a lifestyle development, even a planning development, in terms of the provision of services, roads, schools and things of that nature that were suited to and suitable for that area.
I am sure many of the members of the Legislature were born in small towns and in rural areas of Ontario. We remember, and perhaps we do romanticize a bit, what it was like to grow up in small-town Ontario or rural Ontario. I think we remember enough of it to know that it is a worthwhile and a healthy background to come from. A worthwhile and healthy, in a funny, old-fashioned way, set of moralities evolved from life in rural Ontario and small-town Ontario. It is very basic to the tone and tenor of the province itself, and I think that is important.
I wanted to make these remarks and to point out that the opposition to the bill is very strong. The opposition still lives. There are occasions, as we go through it clause by clause, when I will want to point out that --
The Deputy Chairman: Are we going clause by clause now?
Mr. Breaugh: I am getting near to the point, sir.
The Deputy Chairman: Is there anything I can do to help the honourable member?
Mr. Breaugh: Yes. You can stop them from sending me glasses of water like the last load of dynamite that was sent over here. If any child were to get near that and start playing with matches, the whole Legislature would blow up. I think it must be from the Hooker Chemicals site. It has a lot of chemicals floating around in it.
I simply want to wind down my remarks by saying that --
Mr. Boudria: What is the rush?
Mr. Breaugh: There is a demand, I know.
I have tried to put on the record this evening a number of concerns I have about this bill and to say to members as sincerely as I can that this exercise has pointed out some flaws in the system. I dare say there are back-bench members on the government side and, indeed, perhaps even members of the cabinet, who would now like an opportunity to change their minds about this bill, because they recognize that what was proposed to them initially as something to clean up a local problem is not that at all.
9:50 p.m.
It goes far deeper than that. It is a problem for municipalities from one end of Ontario to the other. It points out to members that what can happen to Vespra township can happen to them. If they live near Ottawa, Kingston, Belleville, Windsor, Thunder Bay or any rural area that is adjacent to an urban area, this government may well take the same approach with them. If they do not toe the line, if they do not do what this government wants them to do, the government is not only likely to bring in legislation, but it also has a further precedent set right here in this Vespra bill. It has established the course it is going to proceed to legislate out of business any objections these rural municipalities might have. That is a wrong way to proceed.
I would not be an advocate of never providing an occasion when annexation could occur, but I thought last year we went to great pains to develop and put in place legislation which is essentially there to deal with boundary and annexation disputes. I read into the record this afternoon the comments of several people who are working with that legislation and attempting to say: "How can we continue to work with legislation covering boundary disputes when in another instance, in the instance of the township of Vespra, the government of Ontario said: 'Never mind the legislative approach to resolving a boundary dispute; put in place something that goes directly after a rural township adjacent to an urban one. Never mind that we have a process at work which is supposed to resolve this; set that aside and go directly into this kind of legislation'?" I believe that to be significantly wrong. It sets an unfortunate precedent for the government of Ontario in its dealings with smaller rural municipalities.
We have had an opportunity to make some opening remarks in this debate. When we get to third reading debate, if that occurs, I want to put a motion before the House that would give us a chance to have sober second thoughts about this. When we get to that stage of debate, I want to move what is traditionally called a hoist motion; that simply means the bill not be read then but be read six months hence. I believe that even members of the government party, either ordinary members or members of the cabinet, know deep down that is really what should happen; this bill should not have proceeded this far.
It might have been one thing for the province to put the legislation on its order paper and put everybody in the area on notice by saying: "Here is the kind of thing we might do. We are going to give you a year or two years to go off some place and resolve this long-standing dispute. If you do not do that, then you are going to be faced with this kind of legislated solution." It was mentioned on a number of occasions as we went through the public hearing stage that this would have been one way for the government to proceed.
The government probably should have done what I had inferred the Premier wanted done back in 1980 when he wrote to them. I thought the Premier wanted a settlement and he wanted a negotiated settlement. I would have assumed that all the fine staff people who are around here in the various ministries could have made that happen. For some reason, it did not happen. We do not know why.
We have never been given much of an accounting as to why the wishes of the Premier were ignored or not carried out by ministers of the crown and by civil servants. We have never had an explanation for that. I think we are due that. If and when we get to a debate on third reading and this little hoist motion is presented, frankly the government would be wise to back off on this.
I know the Chairman is anxious to get into clause-by-clause debate, but I do not think he should be so anxious. I want to point out that in my view, and in the view of a great many people inside the Legislature and in 103 rural municipalities, this is a wrong way to proceed. This is not a reasonable, cautious and careful process at work here. This is a dangerous kind of lurching about in the process.
Mr. Boudria: Could the member elaborate on that?
Mr. Breaugh: I will try.
The government of Ontario has put legislation in place and taken it through certain stages here; not only is it wrong but it is such an unfortunate way for it to proceed that it ought to call a halt to it. Perhaps the government of Ontario should not even wait for me to move my little hoist motion. It should say to itself, "We are coming up now on a summer recess. It would be an appropriate time" -- and it does not have to do very much, as a matter of fact -- "to simply leave that one on the order paper. We know there is going to be considerable opposition to this bill."
The government should have got that message by now. It should know this debate is not over by a long shot. It has to be taken through committee clause by clause. It has to be given third reading. That will take some time. They are going to have to listen to a lot of things they do not want to listen to, but they are going to hear them.
I have not seen any closure motions coming from over there. I have not seen the Rotenberg rule dressed up and put on display. In the absence of that, I do not think it is any secret that they are going to listen to a substantial and somewhat lengthy debate on this bill. A portion of that has already occurred.
I think the government would be wise to say in hard, practical, political terms that this bill, as it is now written, is not going to take effect on July 1. I think they ought to recognize that by now. It is not going to happen, folks. No matter what the government does, unless it chooses to set aside all the other legislative concerns it has, it is not going to happen. I think there are enough people who feel strongly about the bill for this debate to proceed for some time.
For the life of me, I do not understand the urgency. Why must it happen on July 1 this year? I recall that when the government presented the bill in December -- I do not know when it was written -- it said the starting date would be January. We said that was not going to happen. The government said of course it was not going to happen, so we changed that around. The government was reasonably flexible on a few things as we went through the public hearings.
It seems to me it would be to the government's decided advantage to get flexible now on the future passage of this bill. It seems to me there would be great advantage in the government saying: "We have a problem but we have had the problem for a long time. We have had it for a decade. It is not going to kill anybody if it takes a little longer to resolve this." What is important is that the resolution be acceptable to the people who are involved. Clearly, this bill is not acceptable.
I have said it before and I will say it again, I do not even think this bill in its current form, with the current set of circumstances, is or should be acceptable to people in the city of Barrie. I do not think it should be.
For example, the financial obligations on the part of the players ought to be nailed down prior to the passage of this legislation. I, for one, would have a slightly different perspective about it if the government could convince me that Vespra township had determined what its obligations were, what its needs were and that among Vespra, Barrie, the province and the county some general consensus was forming about the financial ramifications of it all.
I know differently. I know that has not happened. I know there has not even been much of an effort to try to make that happen. That is a shame, because to proceed with this legislation in its current form without at least some process at work, and there is no process at work, is dead wrong. For the life of me I do not understand why the government persists in saying, "We are just going to ramrod this thing through."
It is true the government has a majority over there. There is no arguing with that unfortunate reality of life. It is true that if it really wants to it can move motions of closure, or this, that and the other thing. It could probably make this thing jingle, but the government is going to have a tough time doing that by July 1.
That is going to cause several other ministers of the crown to set aside legislation they have said ought to be a priority and which I may think in personal terms has broader social implications than the resolution of this boundary dispute. I do not understand why the government is being so pigheaded as to persist with this.
Mr. Boudria: Is that parliamentary?
Mr. Breaugh: I have not been given an explanation by any of the ministers and I find that a bit aggravating.
Mr. Boudria: What did the pigs do that you have against them in this debate?
10 p.m.
Mr. Breaugh: That is not meant to be a slur on pigs. What I find somewhat arrogant about this, to be precise, is that the ministers opposite know that the members on this side of the House are not happy with this bill to a pretty substantial degree. Neither of the ministers involved has even deigned to provide us with a rationale whereby he feels he has to have this legislation by July 1 this year.
I do not think there is any rationale for it. I do not think there is a reason on God's green earth that this must happen by July 1 this year. I do not believe it is necessary. I do not believe the government needs this bill now. I do not believe anything bad will happen by simply leaving the bill in Orders and Notices and coming back to it in the fall, next year or in a couple of years.
As a matter of fact, it seems to me a fairly legitimate argument could be mustered around the point of view that we would like to have this matter resolved and the new boundaries in place, if there are to be new boundaries, for the next set of municipal elections. That is not a long way away, but it would allow whatever negotiations are needed to happen. It would allow the government to say, "If we cannot push this legislation through the House, maybe we should just let it alone."
What I am concerned about is that it strikes me there is a lot of macho foolishness about this, that someone feels his political career is hanging on the vine with Bill 142. I do not believe this should be the case. I believe the world would not fall apart and would not disintegrate totally if this bill did not proceed. I believe we could all forgive the parliamentary assistant, the Solicitor General and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. We could all say, "Here is a nihil obstat; you are forgiven, my son," and go home for the summer.
It would be about the most positive, straightforward, beneficial thing this Legislature could do, and I am at a loss to explain why we are not doing it. There is no good way to proceed with this that is not going to be seen by every municipal council in Ontario as being pigheaded, arbitrary and stupid in the extreme.
I do not think the government has even bothered to put on the record anywhere in the course of this debate anything other than that. The best we have received is a few smart-aleck remarks here and there from the member for Wilson Heights in his rather vain attempt to be humorous. We have not seen much attempt by any of the ministers of the crown even to address themselves to it. There has not even been a good fake effort put on by anybody in the course of the debate, and that is a shame.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: Just keep it secret, Norman. You do not want to spill the beans here.
No one has bothered even to come and do the decent thing. The decent thing, in my view, would have been to have the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing appear before the committee and say, "I do not have the time to sit with you folks through all these committee deliberations, but I wanted to arrive here this morning and tell you the government of Ontario has decided to -- "
Mr. Piché: You mean he should be here to listen to this? You've got to be kidding.
Mr. Boudria: You are right, René. You do not like him any more than we do.
Mr. Charlton: He is the one who caused this. Why should he not be here to hear it?
Mr. Breaugh: The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing should have appeared before the committee and said: "Here is what we are trying to do, this is the nature of the problem and these are all the meetings we have scheduled over the years. Some were successful and some were not."
But it seems to me the reason he did not appear before the standing committee on general government is that he was not able to do so. He was not able to appear before that committee and say, "Here are all the things my ministry has done over the years to try to resolve this particular dispute." I think the reason he did not appear is that the record would have fallen flat on its face. There has not been a consistent effort on the part of the ministry to resolve this dispute at all, and he knows it. That is the bottom line of this dispute.
Mr. Rotenberg: That is totally untrue and you know it.
Mr. Breaugh: The parliamentary assistant can whomp over there, he can shift around in his chair and he can say it is untrue, but he knows better than that.
Mr. Rotenberg: You are not right. You are still not telling the proper facts to this Legislature.
The Deputy Chairman: Order. Honourable member, this must be a point of order, I am sure.
Mr. Rotenberg: Mr. Chairman, on a point of order: The member for Oshawa is totally unfactual. The ministry has on many occasions attempted to have this matter resolved and to hold negotiations. The member for Oshawa knows that full well and is not giving the facts to this Legislature.
The Deputy Chairman: The honourable member is out of order. I also think the member for Oshawa is for another reason. When we are in committee like this, we like to go through the bill section by section.
Mr. Charlton: You stand by all agreements first.
The Deputy Chairman: I know.
Mr. Breaugh: I have listened to the member for Wilson Heights yap, yelp, squirm and squeeze around here. I still stick by the fact --
Mr. Rotenberg: The member for Oshawa is the one who is squirming and squeezing. He has been doing it for six hours.
The Deputy Chairman: Order.
Mr. Breaugh: To my knowledge, the ministry would be unable to put in front of this House now, as it was unable to do during the hearings held by the committee and as it was unable to put in the compendium of the bill, anything that could even be construed as a good, clean fake at trying to resolve these negotiations.
Mr. Rotenberg: We did not do a fake. We gave the member the true facts. He is the only one who is faking.
Mr. Breaugh: The member keeps yapping away and the invitation is to respond to him. I believe he has been given an unfortunate task here. He is trying to make a screwball plan look quasi-legitimate. He cannot do it and he knows it. The reason we are entertained with a little yelping banter back and forth is that he is feeling a little guilty about it. He knows he is trying to sell a piece of garbage here. He knows he is trying to sell an Edsel.
Mr. Rotenberg: Once in a while the member should try to get one or two facts straight.
The Deputy Chairman: The member for Wilson Heights is out of order and will control himself.
Mr. Rotenberg: Mr. Chairman, I apologize to you, sir. You are doing your best job. But when the member for Oshawa consistently and constantly says things that are not so and are totally unfactual, it is a little difficult to sit here and listen to that garbage coming from him.
The Deputy Chairman: Still, sit and listen.
Mr. Breaugh: Garbage? I do not mean to be provoked.
The Deputy Chairman: Maybe you could wrap it up and we could get on with the rest of the bill.
Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Chairman, there is something I would like to wrap up and it ain't the speech.
The member for Wilson Heights has intervened on several occasions now. He keeps yapping and yammering, but the truth is he cannot put on the table tonight the record of the government on this matter. He did not do it during the committee and he did not do it when he introduced the bill in the first place. The government's record on this matter stinks and he knows it. No matter how many times he yips and yaps about how wonderful things are --
The Deputy Chairman: Conclusion.
Mr. Rotenberg: When the member sits down, I will put anything he wants on the table.
The Deputy Chairman: Order.
Mr. Rotenberg: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman: Despite the fact that the member is in order and can filibuster for days if he wishes, there is something in the rules that indicates members should not be repetitious. This is about the fourth or fifth time the member has attempted to make the same point, which is untrue. I think you should call him to order on repetition.
The Deputy Chairman: I do not think you can say what you just said.
Mr. Rotenberg: I am sorry. I withdraw the word "untrue." It was not factual.
The Deputy Chairman: Thank you.
Mr. Breaugh: This is such a ferocious attack on a member.
Mr. Rotenberg: Poor baby.
Mr. Breaugh: The last time I was attacked this badly, I think I was about 10 years old. Somebody's chihuahua chased me about three feet. I turned around and gave the chihuahua what the member for Wilson Heights is begging for this evening, a good kick where all his knowledge is located. It would be a good idea if the whip took him out of here. He is being a little bothersome. That is why the whip gets paid a monumental amount of money, to drag him out.
At any rate, I believe the government of Ontario is unwilling to put its record on the table in this regard. It has had ample opportunity. This is the compendium that accompanies every piece of legislation. Nowhere does it have in it the track record of Ontario. It does not give a listing of when they had meetings. Come to think of it, there is a lot of material here members might be interested in.
Mr. Boudria: Yes, we are. Brief us on some of it.
Mr. Breaugh: Maybe I will get to it another day.
The government of Ontario never did make the effort the Premier said it was going to make. The government of Ontario never tried to do what the Minister of Energy said it wanted to do or what the Minister of Education said it wanted to do. The government never did get to the stage where it did much more than attempt to resolve this particular dispute by a token gesture. It never got past that stage. All of a sudden, after much stalling over many years --
Hon. Mr. Sterling: The member for Prescott-Russell (Mr. Boudria) asked him to elaborate and now he is leaving.
Mr. Breaugh: Does the minister want me to ask the member for Wilson Heights to elaborate? I do not think the member for Wilson Heights knows how to do that. He has not been to school long enough to know how to do that.
10:10 p.m.
I believe the government is somewhat embarrassed by what has transpired around this piece of legislation and its history. I believe it is somewhat ashamed of its history of dealing with this problem unsuccessfully over a fair amount of time. It has gone through times when it thought it was really important and had to crank it up and get a solution out. Then it sat back on its oars for a while and did absolutely nothing.
Then last December some local emergency of some unstated nature must have occurred because all of a sudden, just as we were relatively ready to recess the Legislature for the winter session, the legislation appeared as kind of, "It must happen." I do not know what it was that generated the creation of this law. Apparently Vespra and Barrie knew about it at approximately the same time. There seems to be some disagreement about exactly when both parties were informed of the matter, but it was roughly at the same time.
Then we proceeded through this rather unusual charade of public hearings around a bill that frankly did not make much sense at the time. Having gone through the debate on second reading and through the public hearing stage, it still does not make sense to me. I do not know at this moment why the government wants this legislation. It appears to be an incoherent response to what it has perceived for some time to be a problem around Barrie and Vespra. The best I can make of it is an unfortunate mishmash of someone trying to show some initiative to do something but not being too sure what should be done. I wish I could identify who it is who took that initiative, but I cannot.
I have attempted to ascertain the role of the various ministers involved and I cannot. All I know is that when I read the Barrie papers, it is not the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing responding; it is the Solicitor General. When I sat through the hearings in committee, it was not the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing who responded; it was his parliamentary assistant.
I have never seen a piece of legislation flow through here, though we do many bills where there has been controversy develop and where the debate has been somewhat long and a little acrimonious around the edges, in which the minister did not at some point intervene and say, "Wait a minute, I want to get in here and set the record straight on the matter," or "I want to call in the opposition critics or people who are directly affected by this bill and straighten things out." Clearly, something has gone awry, something does not quite jibe.
This bill is not necessary now. We all know that. We all know there is no urgency to pass this bill by the end of this session. It was a simple enough matter to change the starting date of the bill in committee, and it could be changed again. It would probably be a very wise move indeed to set this bill down and to look at it again at another time in another place. We all know it would be a wise move to talk about a two-year or three-year cooling off period. It would be a wise move to simply not proceed with the bill.
No one knows why we are here tonight debating this bill that the government clearly does not need in order to fulfil the aims of its budget or new social programs it wants to get in place before the summer recess. We know it is not part and parcel of the new plan of the Treasurer (Mr. Grossman) for Ontario; it is not going to resolve unemployment in Barrie or Vespra or anywhere else. That is not the nature of the bill, so the government cannot plead urgency.
I have not even heard from the parliamentary assistant, who is now absent, not even from that low a source, that there is any urgency to proceed with the bill now. Even the Solicitor General, who is sprawled all over the aisle, has not bothered to put on the record what the urgency is. He is trying to read the standing orders, which will be a new treat for him; it might even do him some good.
Mr. Laughren: I think he is reading Crime and Punishment.
Mr. Breaugh: I do not think he is reading anything that complicated.
No one has made an argument that this has to happen now, and I think the reason is just exactly that: no one can make that argument. There is no argument for saying we have to do this now. There is no urgency to it at all.
There is some sign language going on here in the Legislature tonight. I do not know how Hansard is going to record that sign language, but I think it is an unparliamentary sign. I do not know whether you can make a ruling on that, Mr. Chairman, but at some point you probably should.
Mr. Wildman: The Prime Minister has set a precedent for it.
Mr. Breaugh: Oh, the Prime Minister of Canada uses that sign.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: Is he getting ready for the Liberal leadership this weekend? Toning up on Liberalese? I do not know how to do that kind of sign.
At any rate, it has been an interesting exercise as we go through all the ramifications of this bill. It has been interesting to see that what appeared at first blush to be a simple little boundary dispute is much more than that. The players around Ontario know that and have voiced their opinion on that matter. They have picked up on a number of aspects of this legislation which has ramifications for people other than --
Mr. Piché: Mr. Chairman, will you ask him to conclude? This is getting ridiculous. You have the power. You are in the opposition. You can do a few things. Tell him to conclude.
The Acting Chairman (Mr. Eakins): The member will please carry on.
Mr. Breaugh: It is nice to see the chair represents the rights of all members on freedom of speech and does not succumb to the threats of the member for Cochrane North (Mr. Piché). That is refreshing. Now, if the threat came from the member for Mississauga East (Mr. Gregory), I would say we had better be careful. That guy is mean.
Hon. Mr. Gregory: The member is getting boring.
Mr. Breaugh: At least I am only getting boring; the member for Mississauga East has been boring since birth.
Hon. Mr. Gregory: I do not believe that. I cannot believe the member said that.
Mr. Robinson: The member for Mississauga East was not boring at birth.
Mr. Breaugh: He was not boring at birth? When did it happen?
The Acting Chairman: The member will confine his remarks to the bill.
Mr. Piché: The member has not done that for the last three or four hours.
Mr. Breaugh: I am just trying to match the minister for mediocre speeches. Why does he not get his staff to write something and maybe he could try to read it again tonight?
Mr. Piché: The member talks and says nothing. This is an abuse of the legislative privilege.
Mr. Breaugh: The member for Cochrane North is being downright abusive here.
The Acting Chairman: Order.
Mr. Breaugh: There seems to be total confusion in the government back benches as we wind down this evening.
What I want to say is very simply that it is an interesting exercise when people become aware of their rights; but, more than that, rural municipalities in Ontario have done this Legislature a great service. They have pointed out, intentionally or otherwise, that the government of Ontario is establishing a most unfortunate precedent.
For years, we have gone by a variety of techniques for resolving disputes like this, utilizing things such as the Ontario Municipal Board and the courts themselves to design new legislation to deal with boundary disputes. Yet, in the final analysis, in this bill, the government of Ontario sets aside all those considerations.
It is almost as if the government has decided that in this instance, in this one case, the government of Ontario does not care about law and order in Ontario. It does not want to obey its own laws; it does not want due process to take place here. It is almost as if it has said in Bill 142 it does not care what the law says. It does not care what the practice has been in municipal governments. It does not care what the courts have to say. It does not care about the legal rights of either Vespra or Barrie or anybody else for that matter.
Mr. Charlton: Does that mean the Solicitor General is a vigilante?
10:20 p.m.
Mr. Breaugh: It makes the Solicitor General virtually a vigilante, because it says, Solicitor General or not, whenever he decides the current laws are not operating the way he personally likes them, he will change them.
It would have been more straightforward if we had said, "Here is a bill whereby the local member takes the bull by the horns and straightens out a local problem on his terms." I do not think that will happen. In my view this bill is not going to resolve anybody's problems. All it will do is create new problems for people in Barrie and Vespra, and create an unfortunate precedent other municipalities across Ontario are now aware of.
I do not believe the government will shut up rural or urban municipalities by threatening them or writing them a letter that does not give them much of an answer but which says, "We are doing this for the good of the people." They know better than that. They are people who practise the arts and skills of politics; they can smell it when they see it, so to speak.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: I cannot fill in all the blanks. It would be unparliamentary.
They know if this government had a track record on this matter that it was not ashamed of, it would be trotting that out day by day, ad nauseam. If in the last 10 years the government of Ontario had done what it should have done, it would be flooding this Legislature with descriptions of all the wonderful meetings that happened, of all the civil servants who tried to resolve the dispute and of all the proposals made.
In our own legislative offices the government pours out tons of paper every day on anything one cares to name. If it has done anything to attempt to resolve a problem, to hold a conference on an issue, to suggest new ideas or to propose draft legislation -- anything, anywhere -- this government tells people about it. My office is overflowing with papers about things it has done on a variety of topics.
To get back to the basic question of whether this government in the course of the last decade has attempted to intervene in a meaningful way to negotiate a just and fair solution to the problems between Barrie and Vespra, if it had a track record it was not ashamed of it would be in our hands tonight. We do not have it. It would have been in this compendium on day one when the bill was introduced. The members know that.
If the government had a record it was not ashamed of, it would dress it up, put frills around the edges, call it part of the bicentennial project and hire a couple of consultants. It would be bound with beautifully coloured pictures of the Premier on one end and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing on the other. They would have had it in our hot little hands long ago. The government did not do that. In the course of this debate, we have never yet been given the rationale for the bill. That is a shame.
When we deal with the clause-by-clause debate on the bill, we will see it is sadly lacking in content. No attempt was made to get consensus. When the committee went through its deliberations on amendments to the bill in committee, there was not much of a good fake at presenting to the committee an attempt to get consensus. There was an attempt in that portion of the debate to clean it up so it did not look so silly. There were some amendments. We tried in two days of debate to make sure there was not too much silliness presented to the Legislature in the redrafting of Bill 142.
We acknowledge there were some problems that did not get resolved, such as problems of a definition of exactly where the boundary is. I suppose a lay person might have thought that of all things, in a bill that is about a boundary dispute, a government would be meticulous about drafting an exact statement, an exact definition, of where the boundary is. It was to our dismay as we went through the committee that we discovered that had not been done. In fact, a rough guess was presented to the committee. It appears that rough guess was subsequently adjusted by the minister on his own, even though the committee had a whack at that on a previous occasion. It appears it may be adjusted again, even at this late date.
Inconceivable as it might seem to outsiders, here we are dealing with an annexation bill, a boundary bill, and at the time of presenting the legislation, the government did not have a good handle on where that boundary would be. Inconceivable as it might seem to an outsider, this government had not gone through an exhaustive process of consultation and negotiation with either one or both of these municipalities.
One would be able to justify, for example, a legislated solution to something like that if we use the parallel of labour legislation here. We will occasionally get a situation in labour negotiations where it seems that despite the best efforts of both parties to bargain and perhaps the efforts of a mediator and maybe even the efforts of an arbitrator, they cannot come to a solution. Then one might point to all the things one had tried to do and simply say: "We have tried to do all of those things. We have not been able to get a negotiated settlement to this dispute, so we have to go to something that of its nature is arbitrary and unfair. There is no other way to proceed and we must proceed."
In my mind, that argument does not apply to Bill 142. The background work has not been done. The government cannot make a believable argument that all other avenues have been explored and exhausted. That is not possible with this bill. It cannot make the argument that there is an urgency about resolving this dispute. I know of no such argument. I have dealt with this bill for a little over six months and no one has made an argument that there is an urgency about it. No one made it in committee. No one made it here. No one made it up in Simcoe county.
I do not know where the impetus is for carrying on this debate. Whether the implementation date is July 1, or next January or the following July, appears to me not to be of major consequence. After all, the starting date was changed in committee from January to July almost on a whim. So there appears not to be a rational argument for keeping the bill in its present form. There appears to me, as one member of the Legislature, not to be a rational argument for proceeding with this legislation at all.
In the last press report I read, the consensus from the administration in Barrie is that there are not going to be any new services in Vespra. The lifestyle is not going to change. Not much is going to happen except that an assessment change will occur.
When we get right down to it, this whole legislation hinges on that assessment. This whole legislation hinges on money going to the city of Barrie, in this instance, and being taken away from the township of Vespra. That is what it is all about. If that is the case, would it not have been a nice bicentennial project to go up there and give Barrie a cheque for something. Give them X number of dollars. Tell them we appreciate that they can use the money like --
Ms. Copps: For the local member's resignation.
Mr. Breaugh: Sure.
The Deputy Chairman: Time.
Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Chairman, if you would like, I could sit down and conclude my remarks at a later date.
On motion by Hon. Mr. Gregory, the committee of the whole House reported progress.
The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.