REPORT, COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE HOUSE
The House resumed at 8 p.m.
REPORT, COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE HOUSE
Consideration of the report of the committee of the whole House on Bill 142, An Act respecting the City of Barrie and the Township of Vespra.
Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, on a point of order: We are here under closure notice on a very important debate and I am not sure I see a quorum in here.
Mr. Speaker ordered the bells to be rung.
8:07 p.m.
Mr. Speaker: We have a quorum. The report was presented. I am told the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk (Mr. Nixon) had the floor when we left for dinner.
Mr. Nixon: I am prepared to yield to my colleague the member for Waterloo North (Mr. Epp).
Mr. Epp: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to add a few more comments to this fairly lengthy debate on a very important municipal bill. I am sure all of us regret that it has been put forth. Nevertheless the government, in its ill-advised wisdom, has stood fast on it and at some time in the future it will have to bear the consequences of what the public thinks about this piece of legislation.
It is quite obvious that the amount of animosity that has been generated in the two areas is not all due to the government, but because Barrie wants to have a certain amount of land annexed from Vespra. The acrimony generated within the last year or so, however, is wholly the responsibility of the government. When we look back at what has gone before in the last 20 years or so, as was acknowledged by the minister yesterday in itemizing the number of negotiations that have been attempted, we have to look very closely at two basic factors.
First, when there was a justification for annexation of land by Barrie during the 1950s and early 1960s, Vespra, in its wisdom and its interests, and as far as the interests of Barrie were concerned, was prepared to acknowledge some of this annexation. The township came to an amiable agreement with Barrie to give up some of its land. This has to be kept in mind as the background. Vespra did give up land to the city of Barrie on two occasions because Barrie was able to present a good case on its behalf.
In the 1970s, when Barrie started to want to have more land for various reasons, the city did not come up with sufficiently good reasons, and Vespra opposed the annexation of further land. On one occasion, after the Ontario Municipal Board had allocated 320 acres to Barrie, Vespra was prepared to negotiate further on this matter, but Barrie did not show good faith in coming to the meeting table to discuss the annexation.
We find good faith was not shown by the city of Barrie in that instance. As a result, Vespra held up its hand and said: "Why do we have to negotiate any further? These people are not negotiating in good faith."
The provincial government came to the rescue of Barrie and said: "We are going to give you what you want. In fact, we will give you 4,500 acres. Then we will get the committee to trim it down a little." It was not with the concurrence of any of the opposition parties that Barrie is getting even 2,000 acres, because we were opposed to any acres going to Barrie without the consent of Vespra township.
The provincial government asked for the astronomical amount of 4,500 acres. It knew full well that Barrie would want less than that, but then the government would look good in the eyes of the people by saying, "We will give you even less than half of what we originally intended to give you." Thereby the province ended up giving 2,000 acres to the city of Barrie.
An interesting part of the debate yesterday on the motion to proceed through the closure guillotine was that the minister, in taking up about 20 minutes of the time of this House in itemizing the various times that the groups had met, did not give one reason the land should be annexed.
Can the members imagine a minister of the crown getting up on a very important bill, such as we had before us with Bill 142, and not once being able to give a single, solitary, good reason that land should be annexed? It is the first time in history that the government of this province, or the government of any province I know of in this country, has brought forth a bill with a guillotine motion to take land from one municipality to give to another. It is supposed to represent fairly all the municipalities of this province.
It is 90 per cent of that municipality's commercial-industrial assessment that is to be annexed. That is 40 to 45 per cent of its total assessment, yet not a single, solitary reason was given for that annexation. That is a terrible condemnation as far as the government is concerned. I do not blame it for not giving any reasons, because it did not have a single, solitary, good reason to annex the land.
If it had, Vespra, in all its reasonableness, its gentlemanliness and its ableness, would have been able to sit down and negotiate with Barrie and the surrounding area with respect to this annexation, but no good reasons were given by Barrie or the provincial government. That is why this case has faltered in the Legislature and before the people of that area.
The government has tried to put the case before the Legislature that it has tried to be sincere in negotiating with Vespra with respect to taking away this very important asset of 2,000 acres. The government was very insincere in negotiating, and the best example of that was that after it brought the bill forward, and after it had gone through the committee, it appointed the Solicitor General (Mr. G. W. Taylor).
It does not matter to me whether the Solicitor General has a lot of strengths and weaknesses with respect to his position as Solicitor General or whether he is the member for that area. That is unimportant as far as the issue is concerned. The fact is that the Solicitor General had clearly come down on the side of Barrie.
There was no doubt about it in the minds of the approximately 40 people at that meeting. There was no doubt in the minds of the people from Barrie, no doubt in the minds of the people from Vespra township and no doubt in the minds of the people from Simcoe county. From the warden right down to every other person who works on that council, there was no doubt where the Solicitor General stood.
If the government had been at all sincere about wanting to come to some accommodation between the people of Vespra and the people of Barrie or their representatives, surely it would not have appointed somebody to chair a meeting who had clearly shown his bias all along. I am not arguing with the fact that the Solicitor General as a local member or as any member of this Legislature has the right to do exactly that. I am saying that, if one is trying to be discreet and wants to accomplish something in negotiations, one does not appoint someone who has visibly and audibly shown exactly where he stands on the issue and who is not going to give a fair hearing to the people of Vespra, no matter what he says. Even if he were to try to do that -- and I hope he would -- it would not have been perceived that way by anyone.
In all the kinds of negotiations attempted, one can see clearly that the provincial government, in all its talking in the Legislature and all the press releases it has put out and so forth, did not try to play fairly with Vespra township on this issue. I am sure if some other municipality were involved, such as the city of Ottawa, it would not want the local member to chair a committee if he had clearly shown he was biased.
The other important thing here is that, in looking at this issue -- and it has fermented over a period of years -- the government says $1 million was expended in legal and planning consultative fees. It spent more than $1 million on the Robarts report of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto. More than $1 million was spent on the study of Ontario Royal Commission on Violence in the Communications Industry a few years ago, a commission chaired by the late Honourable Judy LaMarsh. More than $1 million has been spent on a number of other studies. Virtually nothing has been implemented from any of those studies. The reports are now gathering dust on the shelves.
The government does not particularly concern itself with the millions of dollars it spent on commissions when nothing happens. We can look more recently at the commission the former Judge Thom now chairs. This has gone on for over a year now. We spent more than $2 million and nothing much is happening. It is going to drag on another two or three years. The problems are real now and they should be dealt with now, yet the government does not come to the Legislature and say, "We have to do this because we spent $1 million; we have to try to get our money's worth out of it."
The government never worried about spending $46 million on Minaki Lodge. It never worries about wasting millions of dollars on advertising. Yet here is a situation where a particular small municipality is going to be raped of 2,000 acres of land and the government is concerned about $1 million.
I do not want to give the impression I am not concerned about $1 million that has been spent for legal fees and so forth. The fact is, the government has its priorities all mixed up. It is not concerned about the $1 million; it is really concerned about trying to wreak havoc in one township and leave it as a small entity. I am not sure it will survive as a viable township after all that very important assessment is taken away.
I can see Mr. Speaker is very embarrassed for the government on this thing. I know he is not a member of the government, but nevertheless, it has wreaked havoc with this small municipality. I am not sure it will be able to survive economically the taking away of 2,000 acres.
When one looks at the numbers, 104 municipalities have gone out of their way and passed resolutions in support of Vespra. Mr. Speaker, you have had some municipal experience, as a lot of us have. I am glad to see it. We know that when a resolution comes before council the easiest thing to do is to file it. It is so easy not to take a stand on it one way or another.
A resolution comes in from some municipality that asks for whatever it is asking for, it is filed and the clerk then sends a letter away officially notifying the municipality that sent out the resolution or motion that it has been filed. That is it and nothing further is said about it. But here is this resolution, a bill that has come before this Legislature. Here is an important piece of legislation.
8:20 p.m.
All these municipalities depend on the provincial government for unconditional grants. It is not beneath the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (Mr. Bennett) to shake his finger at these municipalities and say: "You opposed the provincial government on a piece of legislation. Just wait until next year when we are prepared to give out our grants. We are going to have a new formula for you as we did this year."
Despite the threatening comments the government can make from time to time, 104 municipalities felt strongly enough to oppose this bill. In addition to these 104 municipalities, two counties, Lambton and Simcoe -- it has been read into the file -- have passed resolutions opposing the guillotine motion. So we have a very ill-advised bill here, one the government unfortunately would not back down on, but one that has somehow caught its imagination and one that is going to go through despite the opposition.
If the people of Ontario had a chance to vote on this bill independently, I think they would vote against it. In fact, if there was a free vote in this Legislature, I am sure -- if the party whip would not exert any discipline on them later on -- a majority of the members here would vote against this piece of legislation.
I would like to touch on another subject: compensation. When one wants to negotiate something and get both sides to the bargaining table, the stronger side should take the initiative rather than expect the weaker side to do it. In this case we have the provincial government on one side with a budget of $25 billion and a large deficit, and on the other side there is small Vespra township with a budget of a few million dollars. It is a kind of David-and-Goliath concept.
We have Goliath here, the provincial government, saying to David, "You have to accept this legislation." All Vespra township has said, over and over again, is: "Give us a package. Tell us what you are prepared to give us. We are reasonable people. We will sit down with you, but do not expect us to go to the bargaining table prepared to negotiate when you have not given us a red cent." Not a single member in this Legislature has ever seen the government put anything on the bargaining table; not one red cent.
They are all honourable members. That is what the record says and I am sure they are all honourable members. Small Vespra township is saying: "Please put something on the bargaining table. We are not going to sell our soul just so you people can get exactly your way. We want a few dollars. We are giving up our livelihood in a sense, 2,000 acres." That is most of their industrial and commercial assessment, 40 to 45 per cent of their total assessment. They are asking the government to put a cent, put $1 million, put $2 million on the bargaining table. We have been after the government to do that.
It is not finished yet, but I hope that before today is over or before tomorrow is over or before the debate on this thing has been completed, the government will come to its senses and put something on the bargaining table. Then it can expect Vespra to negotiate. But until the government puts something on the table they will not, and they should not, negotiate. They should not negotiate until the government is prepared to do something for them.
All we have is the statement by the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, however he is advised, saying: "Fellows, trust us. We are trustworthy people. Just sit down at the bargaining table and we will give you something you will be happy with and you can go back and win the battle at home. The people will have pride in the way you have acted and we can go home to our cottages or go in our jets to baseball games or wherever we want to go."
But the government has not put one cent on the bargaining table, and I will challenge the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to stand up in his place today and tell this Legislature, all 125 members minus the ones who are not here tonight, what he is going to put on the bargaining table, where exactly he is going to start. I challenge him to do that.
I do not think he is sincere enough to want to do it. Anyone who would appoint someone as biased as the Solicitor General to chair a meeting to try to mediate between the two sides would not find it in his good graces to put something on the bargaining table such that somebody else would want to negotiate.
I hate to say this, but I do not think the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing has been very open with the Legislature or with Vespra township with respect to this whole issue. If he had been, he would have tried to convene a meeting himself or with someone in a very neutral position and put something on the bargaining table so Vespra could as least say yes or no to it. But it has nothing to say yes or no to, because nothing has been put on the bargaining table.
I regret very much that this bill has been put forward. We have opposed it at every stage, and this is the only party that can say it has opposed this bill on every single clause in committee. We have opposed it in principle, so how could we support the various clauses? We have opposed every single clause in the Legislature.
This is a dark day for this Legislature; it is a dark day for Vespra, and I hope that before today or tomorrow is over the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing will at least be able to put something on the bargaining table for Vespra township.
The other municipalities across the province, particularly the smaller ones, are keeping a close eye on how Vespra is treated. If Vespra is not going to be treated fairly, they will know exactly what will happen to them if they oppose any piece of legislation or any particular wish that the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing may have.
Mr. Speaker: Does any other honourable member wish to participate?
Mr. Breaugh: I thought you would never ask. Mr. Speaker, I have a few notes.
Mr. Cousens: I am running downstairs to cry.
Mr. Breaugh: It is not necessary to leave the chamber to cry; you can cry in here.
Mr. Sheppard: Notes or garbage?
Mr. Breaugh: "Notes or garbage," sayeth the honourable member. They are resolutions from 104 rural municipalities. Do you consider them notes or garbage? Give me a hint.
Mr. Sheppard: Whatever you think is fair.
Mr. Breaugh: I think they are appropriate notes.
Mr. Speaker: I might remind the honourable member that the debate is on the adoption of the report.
Mr. Breaugh: I am being harassed.
Mr. Speaker: I heard that.
Mr. Breaugh: Including by the Deputy Chairman.
I wanted to make a few brief remarks on the matter of whether the committee report should be adopted. I think it is important that we pause for a moment as we go through this process to point out that there has been a reasonable amount of debate on the bill. Certainly the areas in question have, by and large, in a number of ways been set out rather nicely and carefully.
It is not unfair to say that at this time many of us who have followed this bill through its previous history, which was about a decade, and through this Legislature, which certainly took somewhat less than that, have two or three key areas in which we think some more work needs to be done, and that this bill should not be reported from committee but rather should be simply set over until the fall session.
8:30 p.m.
I do not think there is any question in anyone's mind now. However much of the history of the bill one might reach back to, as the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing did last night, to bring out all the old arguments and talk about the Ontario Municipal Board and the lawyers' fees and letters from the Premier (Mr. Davis) to Vespra and Vespra to the Premier and on and on and on, frankly I do not think it serves a great deal of purpose to go back into that. That is not really what we are dealing with; we are dealing with Bill 142 as it comes out of a committee of the Legislature.
What remains the critical missing factor is that nowhere in all of this has the government of Ontario, in my view, made a serious attempt to fill in the financial components. I believe it is necessary for the government to take the initiative and put in place those components.
I would have, for example, a very different perspective on this piece of legislation if the government were to say: "We will put a package on the table. We will make it public knowledge. We will say, for example, that Vespra township is essentially the municipality which is aggrieved in this process." I would think even the government members would admit to that much, that the land is coming out of Vespra township, that it is virtually gutting the assessment base of a rural Ontario township. The people in Vespra are essentially aggrieved in this process.
One could mount a reasonable argument that the city of Barrie is essentially getting what it has wanted for some time. In committee, we went through precisely why a city such as Barrie would want a chunk of essentially rural land. There are some reasonable grounds for saying that Barrie at least has a bit of a planning case. From a planning perspective, the minister has put 79 ministerial orders on different parts of the province, essentially for planning reasons.
He felt that in many of our rural municipalities there was an absence of an official plan. There were no zoning bylaws. There were no policy statements. There were no rules to the game. The minister, like many others who have been observers of planning in Ontario for some time now, will know this causes some difficulties.
This means, for example, that a development company such as the one in question here, Cadillac Fairview -- what does the page have for me tonight? You will excuse me, Mr. Speaker, but I have found it a wise practice lately to smell the water in this Legislature.
Mr. Sheppard: We thought the member would be dry.
Mr. Breaugh: This is the best my friend had to offer, is it? Great hospitality from Northumberland-Durham.
Mr. Sheppard: No, no; just Northumberland, not Durham.
Mr. Breaugh: Northumberland; sorry, my apologies. Yes, I remember that.
At any rate, Mr. Speaker, one of the prime considerations for many of us from a planning point of view was that in those areas of Ontario where there were no official plans and no zoning bylaws, it meant the municipality was particularly vulnerable. Development firms, most of them from Toronto, such as Cadillac Fairview, could go to a rural area of the province, put some options on property, come in and just kind of dazzle the local folks with a proposal for development which was seen to be good from all points of view in many parts of Ontario.
Interjections.
Mr. Breaugh: I am caught in a crossfire between Sudbury and Toronto.
Mr. Speaker: Please do not disturb the speaker.
Mr. Breaugh: Thank you.
From many points of view, a development proposal in a small municipality is almost seen to have no faults at all. It brings jobs to the area. That, of course, is in the forefront of the argument about it. It brings some new development in terms of shopping facilities, it brings office facilities, all of those things are kind of rolled into the ball. A few years ago it would not have been unusual to see a development proposal go through unopposed in local council in many areas in Ontario.
Mr. Martel: Hey, George; did you notice all the Toronto members?
Mr. Breaugh: Would you call the member for Sudbury East (Mr. Martel) to order, Mr. Speaker?
Mr. Speaker: I should think so.
Mr. Martel: I was just drawing attention to the fact, Mr. Speaker, that as usual there are very few members from Metropolitan Toronto or within 50 miles, and we have to sit at night.
Mr. Speaker: It was your colleague's idea. The member for Oshawa has the floor.
Mr. Breaugh: I see you are having your usual success with the member for Sudbury East, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, it poses a number of problems when there is not an official plan in place and this development proposal is brought in. It does kind of dazzle people who have not seen proposals of that magnitude before.
When I first went to the planning and development committee of the region of Durham, I had been accustomed to seeing proposals for a subdivision in the city of Oshawa of 60 and 70 units, on occasion more than 100 units, and things of that nature. When I went to the regional level, we had developers making proposals to provide water and sewer systems for an entire town. It seemed they would be prepared to build arenas, shopping centres and just about anything anyone could ever name, to get their development proposal under way.
I have shared that much of the experience. I understand what it is like to see a major development proposal brought in and I understand the reason for the ministerial order. Having said that, though, I think most of us who have dealt with municipalities where there are ministerial orders in operation will also understand that is not exactly the ideal way to proceed.
A ministerial order tends to freeze an area and it means local planning ceases as well. In this instance, where a ministerial order was rescinded, it really means there was no local planning decision about that matter. That decision was made within the minister's office and that notice, unlike any other planning process one might care to name, is one that does not have a public meeting at which citizens in the affected area can actually come and make representations.
That means the local council does not get to strike a committee to consider a matter, hold public meetings, make the recommendations known and circulate them through various departments of public works, planning and finance. It means all that is circumvented by the very simple fact that the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing retains the authority, when he has a ministerial order, simply to rescind that portion of the order affecting a particular development, which is precisely what happened here.
In my book, that is not good planning. I do not think even the minister would agree that is the correct way to proceed. What the minister has said, as I understand him over the years, is that in the absence of official plans and things of that nature, there has to be some control. If I remember his remarks correctly on the Cadillac Fairview shopping centre just north of Barrie in Vespra township, he said, "The approvals for that one went through before the ministerial orders were available to be put in place."
There has been a sequence of what might be called omissions. In a strange way, the bill currently in front of us runs around the whole system of planning in Ontario. It diverts what most of us consider to be the main criteria. For example, on this particular lifting of a ministerial order there is no occasion for the public to appear, which would appear to me to be a simple criterion and one that ought to be observed.
There is not really an approval process by either of the local councils. One can go back into the history of this matter and say, "One council approved it and the Barrie council objected to it." Then, in a rather mysterious way, the Barrie council removed its objections to it. That allowed the minister to proceed by issuing one single piece of paper to allow for the development to expand the Cadillac Fairview mall. There was a long history involved in this and we all know it.
I would like to try to get the members on all sides of the Legislature to consider this evening, particularly at this stage of the bill, which I think is an appropriate point to pause, whether they agree it is essential that the ministry put forward a position now that addresses itself to the matter of liabilities and assets. The ministry should put forward a discussion paper. In almost any other area one can name, it is not reluctant to do that. The ministry puts forward discussion papers, green papers and white papers, holds forums and spends a lot of time and effort putting forward things that ought to be talked about.
8:40 p.m.
One thing lacking in this bill is a portion that might be called financial liability. To my knowledge, the ministry has not made public a position, for example, on what ought to be offered in the way of compensation to Vespra township. As far as I know, the ministry has not in a formal and public way put forward a position that might outline what it sees as being the responsibilities of the city of Barrie in this matter.
As far as I am aware, the ministry has not put forward a position which outlines what role will be played by the county of Simcoe in all of this. Of course, we are aware that the province and those three other levels of government do have some responsibility and some interest in the matter. Some of them without question will have, at some time, some financial liability.
The plea I want to make to the minister this evening is a pretty simple one. Before we proceed with the other stages of this bill and before the House itself considers the report of the committee, it is essential that the minister's position ought to be on the table in regard to all of these players.
It is important that the minister -- and I hope he will participate in this debate, because he is present this evening and that is a bit of an achievement in itself -- lay out the government's official position with respect to financial responsibility for each of the participants who are there and for the government of Ontario itself.
Let me elaborate just slightly on what I would say would be a reasonable way to proceed. Without question, the government of Ontario has a measure of financial liability in this matter which I would say is paramount. It is, after all, not the city of Barrie that is here this evening proposing legislation for us to approve or modify or reject. The legislation before us this evening is at the initiative of the government of Ontario; so in my humble opinion the prime liability for any compensation that might be ordered after this point is that of the government of Ontario.
There may be those who disagree with that point of view, and I would be interested in hearing what the minister has to say on the matter. But I think without question that it is clear -- whether the law firm of Goodman and Goodman caused this to happen, whether the Barrie council caused this to happen or whether the minister was just suddenly seized with a vision and decided to proceed -- the one person who has shown initiative in attempting to put forward the legislation is the minister himself. I have never heard in committee, and I have never heard during the course of the public hearings, the minister or his unable parliamentary assistant express what they felt was a legitimate amount of liability on the part of the province.
We did get a bit of a glimpse at what this means to Vespra township with respect to the loss of assessment and we did get a bit of a ball-park idea that there will be a dramatic effect. If one wanted to talk in terms of percentage, roughly half of their assessment is gone with this; almost their total commercial and industrial assessment is gone with this. This may translate into something like $100,000 to $200,000 a year in revenue. That, of course, would fluctuate depending on what happened to the mill rate and depending on what happened to grants from the provincial government.
At any rate, I think what we can say with some safety is that there is a significant impact on the economy of Vespra township. There is certainly a dramatic impact on the economy in terms of that local council's ability to generate funds. There will be a dramatic shift from a municipality that ran relatively debt free. It did not run deficits and it did not run up major expenditures. It was one of those things that in most parts of Ontario would be seen as kind of a tight ship. The expenditures were well in hand. There was no grandiose plan in place for expanding services.
In all of the committee hearings we had, we listened with great care to people from Vespra township address the committee and say they liked the level of service they got and there was no need to upgrade the level of service, say, to urban standards such as might be found perhaps in the city of Barrie. So it seemed the council had struck a nice balance between its ability to generate income and the constituency's need for services. That balance appears to be in harmony just now.
We believe that balance will shift rather dramatically with the imposition of this bill; and it will shift primarily because the government of Ontario, in its wisdom, decided to introduce this bill and has now decided to move closure to get this bill through and is slowly but surely moving the bill through the legislative process.
That being the case, I would say the prime responsibility for the payment of moneys to Vespra township for damages lies with the province. I would go a step or two further. I would say it is the province that claims to be responsible for the structure of municipal government in Ontario. It is the province that has been at times a participant, but for the most part an observer, in this long 10-year battle the minister says is worth $1 million. If such is the case, then it seems to me the province's first order of business and first level of responsibility is financial compensation.
In my view, the province ought to be picking up the associated costs for the lengthy dispute that has gone on, a major portion or all of it. If nothing else, it would be a tremendous public relations gesture on the part of the province to say: "We would like the past to be forgotten. We would like to start with a clean slate. We would like to have all this ill-feeling dissipated."
It seems to me this government, on other occasions in other ways, has shown no hesitation at all in spending large amounts of money for what I would call questionable purposes. This year we are celebrating an event that did not happen, a bicentennial that will not happen for another seven years. Going into the process, we will spend somewhere in the neighbourhood of $10 million, and coming out of the process I believe they admit to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 million. That probably means they will have spent somewhere in the area of $40 million. That has been the pattern of expenditure for most projects in Ontario.
I believe the first order of business for the province should be to put an admission on the bargaining table. Whether they were guilty or not, they were certainly aware there were processes going on that were not quite as productive as they might have been. The first thing for the province to do is to clear the decks. I believe the first order of business on the part of the province should be to put compensation on the table.
The second order, without question, is that the province has done something in initiating this legislation that will have in the long term an economic impact on Vespra township. It will also has an impact on the county of Simcoe and may have a bit of an impact as well on the city of Barrie. I believe the province has to acknowledge that. I believe it has to offer compensation up front, probably in terms of unconditional grants.
I am suggesting that because it is the traditional way the province puts its -- I was going to say bribe money, but I am sure the government would be offended by that -- its upfront money. There will be no questions asked. The minister will put together a little package of things to justify it later and he will say, "Here is X amount of dollars for your municipality for whatever reason."
We see this happening whenever regional municipalities say they cannot afford the cost of policing. The province has devised a magnificent technique over the years for totally ignoring that argument. All of a sudden, if the screams get too loud, if the representations to the government get too strong, the minister will arrive and announce: "Here is a new police headquarters. We will pay the cost of funding it." In other municipalities where transportation might be a problem, one of the other ministers, perhaps the Minister of Transportation and Communications (Mr. Snow), will arrive in town, cheque in hand, and announce some great new project.
The response does not show a direct link from one established problem, as identified by the local municipality, to an admission on the part of the province that it is in some way responsible for that, but there is a response. The municipality may be crying that it does not have enough oranges and the province arrives with a pail full of apples, but one does not have to be too sophisticated to sort out that the province has responded in some way. They are not likely to admit guilt, they are not likely to admit fault, they are not likely to admit they are responsible for all this; but they will come with a cheque in hand and in that way will respond.
8:50 p.m.
That is the second order of business I would put on the government's plate. The government of Ontario ought to take the initiative now to talk about financial liability, to talk about compensation and to put on the table, so to speak, a financial offer that is the beginning of the negotiating process. I believe we talked about -- at least the minister did -- around $1 million in legal fees. I think that is fair game. I would be happy to use that number and say: "That is one part of the package. The second part of the package is unconditional grants."
It is difficult to estimate exactly what money should be talked about. I know the only amount stipulated in all the debate so far was that the township of Vespra said during the committee stage it thought a compensation package around the $10-million mark would be fair. I did not see the parliamentary assistant jump up and down and say, "That is a good number." Oddly enough, I did not see him respond at all.
I think $10 million is probably a little high, but there is an argument to say that somewhere in the neighbourhood of $5 million to $6 million as a package would be an appropriate amount of compensation that ought to be put on the table. It would be an interesting starting point. I said in casual conversation to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs (Mr. Wells), the government House leader, yesterday that it would be an important recognition if the government of Ontario would say: "There is $1 million on the table. It covers the cost of everybody's litigation for the last 10 years. We are going to use that money to wipe the slate clean."
Second, the government could put on the table an amount in unconditional grants it felt was a reasonable dollar value. That is a little difficult to pinpoint because the government does not want to establish that straight-ahead relationship, but it wants to establish something. I think something in the order of another $1 million or $2 million in unconditional grants would be appropriate. I think we are building for that kind of package, which has to be negotiated.
There are actually two parts to the final component. One may be that the county of Simcoe has some claim that it deserves some compensation as well. It will be damaged somewhat in an indirect way. I must admit I have not had representations from Simcoe county claiming compensation, so I will set that aside. I just want to put in the mix that I believe the county of Simcoe could make a claim for compensation of some sort. I do not know whether it is fair to say some negotiations have taken place, but I know the county has initiated some discussions about the financial component. I do not want to stick that in the middle of this bill, but I want the members to be aware of it.
The final component is what does Barrie gain, so to speak, that Vespra loses? I think we have to address ourselves to the obvious, which is the dramatic loss of assessment on the part of Vespra township that immediately shifts to Barrie.
It seems to me that for a time the easy way to go on this would be to try, perhaps initially for negotiation purposes, to ball-park how much additional money the city of Barrie will pick up for X number of years. We would probably talk about five or 10 years of increased assessment for Barrie. For that length of time those additional moneys ought to go back to Vespra township. In the bill itself I think we talked about a six-month period where Vespra will continue to pick up the assessment.
Those are the components of the package I think need to be dealt with. It is hard for me as an opposition member and one who is not going to be directly involved in this set of negotiations to be specific, but I will risk a couple of numbers that in my view would get negotiations under way. If the ministry said at this time, "We will probably start by acknowledging that there is $1 million in past debts that ought to be paid up and we will clear the decks of all the legal costs of the people who are involved," then that package would be in place.
If it said, "Here is $1 million to $2 million in unconditional grants," that would soften much of the hostility in Vespra township and much of the opposition from a financial point of view in the process leading to this bill.
I think it is then incumbent on the government to do an estimation -- and let me ball-park it -- as to what Barrie might offer. It seems to me we have never been able to establish this direct line of responsibility that we might like to have. The province has taken the initiative in the first place, at least in a visible way; it was not Barrie that proposed this bill, it was the province. I would say the majority of the financial liability for offering compensation rests with the province.
Because the city of Barrie has pursued it over a number of years, perhaps one can muster not a bad argument to say Barrie ought at least to come close to matching what Ontario has put forward as a compensation package to Vespra township. From my personal point of view, the unknown component would be where the county of Simcoe fits. I do recognize it fits; I am just not quite sure of the dollar amount.
Again, this is one of the problems in proceeding with the bill in this manner. In similar situations in which I have been involved one of the first things we insisted upon was that a lot of data had to be generated around projections; sometimes accurate, sometimes inaccurate, but there had to be some kind of mile-post. For example, there has to be someone projecting how much additional money the city of Barrie will generate because of this bill.
I think part of the compensation package ought to be that those moneys for a period of time would accrue to Vespra township instead of to the city of Barrie. From my municipal experience, I would think anybody who would be negotiating would say that would be at least a starting point for discussion.
I suggested yesterday to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs he should put forward a two-and-two proposal. He could say to them, "Here is $2 million in different forms from the government of Ontario and an obligation on the part of the city of Barrie to put in an additional $2 million." The $2 million would not have to be up front. Most likely it would be paid at about $50,000 or $100,000 a year for X number of years -- five years, 10 years or whatever was negotiated.
If the package was shaped in that form and put on the bargaining table, I think the council from the township of Vespra, the county council from Simcoe and the city council from Barrie would have some mile-post. They could say, "There is the starting point for this negotiating procedure."
I think I have been able this evening at least to identify who will be participants in establishing both the liability and the assets in financial terms around this piece of legislation. For example, I would have thought it would have been a fairly straightforward matter for the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to take this initiative. To say they are here and Vespra, Barrie or Simcoe can always come to see them is not really the role of the province, as I see it.
It certainly has never been their position in any other boundary dispute, amalgamation, annexation or form of regional government. In my experience, when the government really wanted to do something, it always went to the councils with proposals. To its credit in my experience with it, it has never gone with an inflexible proposal. It has always said: "This is the way we see the package being fitted together. The first order of business is to identify who has responsibility for what, who has a rightful claim on some compensation and who has an obligation to be a participant in the funding of this process."
Perhaps my point of view is simple, but I think this is a time for a little simplicity. It seems to me that a package of two and two -- $2 million from the province and $2 million from Barrie, probably saying the province's money would be up front in unconditional grants and Barrie's would be a financial obligation over a number of years -- would certainly get the negotiating process under way.
We have not had much in the way of looking for an initiative, in particular looking for a dollar value initiative, that would take us down this road. However, as we go through the debate on whether this bill ought to be reported to the House, I believe we should talk about this basic problem.
Mr. Martel: Mr. Speaker, I do not think we have enough members to constitute a quorum. Will you count the bodies and then ring the bells? I counted them and there are 18, not including you.
Mr. Havrot: Where are all your members?
Mr. Martel: It does not matter where mine are.
The Deputy Speaker: We are slightly short of quorum, I understand.
The Deputy Speaker ordered the bells to be rung.
9:03 p.m.
The Deputy Speaker: We have a quorum. The member for Oshawa wanted to wrap up.
Mr. Breaugh: I do not know about wrapping up. We just had half-time here. I am all set to go now.
Interjections.
Mr. Breaugh: It seems to me there is grave disorder over there. Do you want to try them on for size, Mr. Speaker?
The Deputy Speaker: Will all members find their seats.
Mr. Breaugh: Good idea. It is bad enough that I should have to talk to their faces rather than look at their better halves.
Mr. Hodgson: You do not have a lot of members there to support you.
Mr. Breaugh: I have more than I need to take on members opposite tonight. I have the member for Sudbury East on my side. The two of us can handle 125 of you any day of the week.
Interjections.
The Deputy Speaker: The member for Oshawa may continue.
Mr. Breaugh: I am being harassed again.
As I was saying before we had to reach out and apply some order to this business, I believe it is time for the government to put whatever set of numbers it cares to on the table in terms of this financial package.
I do not have computers nor a lot of staff to do this, but I have tried to observe the situation as I understand it and to put some starting points on the table. The government may say it is too rich a package to put on the table but I have attempted to base my observation on things the minister has said on previous occasions.
Interjection.
Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, I do not know what is going on. It seems a bit of an orgy has broken out over there. I believe the Minister of Energy (Mr. Andrewes) has the best-looking hairdo of the two, but I am not sure what is going on over there. I am not sure a young boy of my age should be exposed to this kind of stuff.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. Could the member for Oshawa return to the debate. The chair will deal with the other members.
Mr. Martel: Would you tell me what rule you are applying?
The Deputy Speaker: No. He is not to incite riots and other things. The member for Oshawa can continue.
Mr. Breaugh: I will try.
Whatever numbers the minister may care to put out as beginning points for these negotiations, I think the time has come for the government to do just that. As someone who has been involved in various sets of negotiations, it is frustrating when there is not a starting point on the table. When one side says $10 million and the other side says nothing, that cannot be negotiated.
I believe one of the fruitful things that could be done before proceeding with the final reading of this legislation is to have the minister stand in his place tonight and tell the members what the government's position is, as of now. I would not hold him to that as being the final negotiated solution to the problem at all. I simply think he needs to take that initiative. If he was courageous enough to move Bill 142 in the first instance, for reasons of his own, I think it is incumbent upon him --
Interjections.
Mr. Breaugh: I do not mind seven or eight arguments going on at once, but when it hits 15 or 20, I have a little trouble addressing the chair. If you will call a little order --
The Deputy Speaker: I am following your every word.
Mr. Breaugh: Yes, but you and I are having a conversation which is being drowned out by the government's back bench.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. Could the mini-cabinet meeting there sort of --
Hon. Ms. Fish: No.
Mr. Martel: Yes. Get out.
Hon. Ms. Fish: We would not want to have a quorum call.
Hon. Mr. Andrewes: There is our Metro member.
Mr. Breaugh: That, I believe, is important in proceeding from here.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. If the member for Sudbury East could tone down his comments, and the group across the floor could refrain or could retire out of the chamber, then the member for Oshawa, who is so anxious to wrap up his comments -- we can all sense it -- may resume.
Mr. Martel: I rise in my place, Mr. Speaker, and you should have known better. Let me count them for you -- there are about 18 of them and there are all kinds of conversations. I said earlier this afternoon I have always found it strange how you can detect a member from this side of the House and yet you have such great difficulty with that side of the House. I remind you of last night's debacle and last Thursday night's debacle when you gave a third and fourth warning to some member who weaves his way in and out of this Legislature.
The Deputy Speaker: Order.
Mr. Martel: I find it passing strange --
The Deputy Speaker: Order. If the member is calling my impartiality into question, we are not going to have that debate because one of us will be leaving and it will not be me.
I have asked the members over here to refrain from their debate and the member for Oshawa to continue. We thank the member for Sudbury East for his assistance, and for restraining himself.
9.10 p.m.
Mr. Breaugh: It is so difficult to try to work in these conditions.
At any rate, I believe it is important, in all seriousness, that the government put forward its position. On a number of occasions I have had it said to me that the government has a position on this financial package, but I do not know what it is. It has been said to me that everybody who is involved in these arguments knows the government position. I am not sure that is true, but I do know I have not seen it put on the public record in the House when we went through second reading debate, in the course of committee hearings or in the rather lengthy debate we have had so far on these aspects of the bill.
I believe it would be useful if we knew the government's position on this compensation package. Members of the Legislature could then, I think, exercise some judgement concerning whether the financial package supposedly put together by the ministry was a fair one. We could judge then whether the ministry is serious about negotiating a compensation package. It would give us some indication of how far we might have proceeded in negotiations.
In the absence of that we do not have much idea where this is and we are left --
Interjections.
Mr. Martel: Do you hear that, Mr. Speaker? Tell me, Mr. Speaker, are you having a hearing problem?
The Deputy Speaker: No, I can hear almost every word the member for Oshawa is sharing with us.
Mr. Havrot: Cut out the bazonga, Michael.
Mr. Breaugh: Get out the who?
Mr. Havrot: The bazonga. Cut it out. You are filling the House up with bazonga.
The Deputy Speaker: Order.
Mr. Breaugh: I am being harassed now by various members opposite.
The Deputy Speaker: You are a big boy; you have been through this before. Carry on.
Mr. Martel: It is the anti-labour member for Timiskaming (Mr. Havrot).
Mr. Breaugh: The anti-labour member for Timiskaming was harassing me. He is here so infrequently and makes such infrequent contributions I have difficulty identifying him.
Mr. Havrot: I have no difficulty identifying you because you have wasted more time than anybody else in this House.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. The debate is trailing off into an exchange of personalities, and we all know the rules do not permit that. Member for Oshawa, I know the member for Timiskaming, who has been here and attentively listening to the debate, wants to hear more. Could the member for Oshawa carry on?
Mr. Breaugh: I have to speak through the body of the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, and I am prepared to do so if necessary.
I think it is a prerequisite to proceeding that we see precisely what the government of Ontario has in mind. The rumour is that it does have a position. It was not presented to the committee; it is not available to the Legislature; it is supposedly known by Barrie, Simcoe and Vespra, but I am not certain of that. I have heard this rumour, spread particularly by members like the member for Wilson Heights (Mr. Rotenberg), whose credibility is somewhat in question on occasion and who occasionally makes statements I am not in full agreement with, so it may or may not be true.
But essentially what I have to say this evening is that this debate should not proceed, this bill should go no further, until such time as we have had an opportunity, all of us, to take a look at what the government of Ontario is proposing in the way of a compensation package. I have in the course of my very brief deliberations here this evening attempted to assess the various parties and who might have --
Mr. Boudria: I missed some of it.
Mr. Breaugh: I may have to repeat this. I do not want to repeat it, but I may have to. Members are putting in requests now that I fill in portions they missed previously.
I have attempted to assess at least who the players are and should be, and I think there is consensus on that. I have attempted to put forward a concept that here would at least be a point of initiation. I know Vespra made its initial assessment in committee. I do not believe it misunderstands the negotiating process so much that it thinks it can walk into a committee of the Legislature, put a dollar value on the table and automatically get it; but I do think it is interested -- I know it is interested -- in attempting to negotiate some compensation package before the passage of the legislation.
The only alternative would be for the government to use its majority to move closure this evening and again tomorrow afternoon, then in some rather mysterious way have a change of heart on the matter and say, "We have the legislation in hand, but we will not proclaim it until we have completed these negotiations." That would be an awkward way to proceed, and it would certainly be an unfair way to proceed from the point of view of Vespra and the point of view of Simcoe, and perhaps even from the point of view of Barrie.
As we learned this afternoon in clause-by-clause debate, which we did meticulously, there is provision, in case these matters are not successfully negotiated, for a couple of things to happen. An appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board could occur. It would be somewhat ironic if that routine was followed, because the initiation of this legislation by the minister was supposedly because the 0MB did not work quite as smoothly as the minister wanted, it had not quite resolved the problem. That is one scenario.
The second is the provision, written in rather stark terms, that the minister personally has the power now to establish this financial package and decide who pays. That would be an unfortuate way to proceed. It would be quite wrong. To say that one person, the minister, can arbitrarily determine, for example, that Barrie might have to pay $4 million or $5 million to Vespra, and that he has the ability to say it unilaterally, almost without question, would be quite wrong. If one takes a strict interpretation of the bill, he can do that. He has that power, but that is not a preferred option either.
The other options have not been discussed at any great length to date. One of them is, as far as I can understand it, any one of the participants, although Vespra might be the most likely participant, may decide that what is happening in this legislation is illegal. The Speaker will know, and other members may know, a number of people across Canada are now looking at the new Charter of Rights for Canadians and beginning to establish by means of precedent precisely what that charter means.
An individual or township council such as Vespra has this option at its disposal. It could exercise its legal right to test the Canadian Charter of Rights before a court and establish whether this legislation is legal. That might be the most awkward option of all, because these precedent-setting cases will take some time and they will be expensive.
Groups such as the National Citizens' Coalition, for example, intend to test the waters in the courts. They are looking at a rather substantial expenditure of money, but that is okay with them. They have no urgency about their plans, and they appear to be a well-financed operation. They will challenge how far their rights extend in the courts of this country at as many levels as they can. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Vespra or any other players who are directly impacted by Bill 142 have at least sufficient grounds for taking the matter to court. Whether they want to pursue that through the various court systems and appeal levels, and to what extent they are prepared to argue in front of a court in Canada about their legal rights, are good questions.
9:20 p.m.
It would be expensive and time consuming. We know that. If, for example, Vespra township felt it was not being offered fair compensation in this legislation -- it did not know what the package was, and when it was announced felt it had not been dealt with fairly -- this is probably one of the ways it has the potential to get the government of Ontario to spend three or four times the amount of money in legal fees arguing this case before one of the courts in Canada than the government is prepared to offer in compensation. We should be mindful that if some measure of fairness for everybody involved is not brought to this process, that is what is going to happen.
That is not a particularly rational way to proceed, it is not the best way to proceed, but I have to admit it is one way to proceed. That could happen. A bill that is brought before the Ontario Legislature, supposedly to resolve a long-standing dispute, might well result in yet another long-standing dispute. A bill brought before us to resolve what has been touted as a $1-million legal problem may well generate another $2 million in legal fees subsequent to its passage.
One of the difficulties we have with this bill, and one of the reasons it would be liable to that kind of extended court proceeding, is that one certainly cannot argue that the bill represents a consensus.
The Deputy Speaker: The member for Oshawa, I assure you we are listening to your every word.
Mr. Breaugh: I did not want to interrupt your conversation.
The Deputy Speaker: We are seeking a little advice on procedure.
Mr. Breaugh: Fine.
What must be recognized is that this bill does not represent, by any stretch of the imagination, a consensus position on the whole matter that is in dispute here. One could not even carry out a good fake that there was much of an attempt to reach a consensus position either. In the course of the committee hearings, more than 100 people or groups appeared before the committee. I can think of perhaps three who might have said something in favour of the bill. The remainder were, without question, diametrically opposed to proceeding with this legislation. We understand that.
If one looks at the legislative track record of this bill, one will find it is flawed in spots. It certainly has some unusual aspects to it, the most distinguished of which is the fact that in order to get this legislation this government had to move closure motions twice in one evening. That would be taken into court and the courts would rightfully say, "It certainly was a contentious issue." They may rightfully say the government of Ontario has a majority and moved within its legal boundaries to pass closure motions which would expedite the debate.
As we found out in the course of the arguments here last night and yesterday afternoon, one will recognize that although the rulings of the chair, and we are not going to challenge those by any stretch of the imagination, allowed the government to move its two motions, at least members of the opposition parties questioned those rulings. That is a matter of record.
As we went through the debate last night, there was some considerable questioning as to whether the motions put by the government were in order, were proper or were fair. As we go through this debate this afternoon and this evening, members will see more occasions when the government uses its majority to put a closure motion in effect.
This makes this legislation particularly vulnerable in a court of law. The use of closure motions around a boundary dispute, which is at least ostensibly what we are dealing with, has not been done anywhere that I can find in any parliament. No government anywhere since parliaments began has moved a closure motion on what is called a boundary dispute. That has never been done. We are in uncharted waters here.
We have a new Charter of Rights in Canada which is every day unveiling new precedents. Just to conclude this little portion of my remarks, to put it as politely as I can, this thing is pretty tenuous. It is a little fragile. The government of Ontario in this Legislature has a majority. As we saw when we went to California a couple of years ago, the California state legislature has a rule called the rule of 41. There are 80 members; if 41 of them agree they want to do something, they can do it, no matter what the rules say. If one has a majority, that is what will happen.
We know that in the course of this debate that is precisely what the government has done. It has set aside the ordinary rules of debate and invoked closure. It has invoked what it calls a guillotine or time allocation motion. That is going to earmark this legislation for considerable dispute in the courts. At the very least, the government has laid the groundwork for some creative lawyer to go before the courts and say: "There are lots of irregular things about these proceedings. There are lots of irregularities about the drawing of map lines, the committee hearings, the way the votes were held and the closure motions that were used. All of that opens up new turf." The government has made it a field day for the legal profession.
That is one option Vespra, Simcoe county or Barrie may choose to exercise, as may any of the citizens in Vespra township who are directly affected and who spoke so vehemently against this bill during the hearing stages. Any of them has that avenue of protest and redress open to him. The chances of that proceeding quite smoothly are nil.
I want to put the government on notice that no matter what might happen this evening or tomorrow afternoon, the government does not have what I consider to be just a moral obligation to put its bargaining package out front. From a practical point of view, the government has now exercised its authority. We all agree the government has more members in the Legislature of Ontario than the opposition parties. We knew that going in, and it has been reaffirmed. Now the government has an obligation to put out front what it believes to be a reasonable starting point for a compensation package.
It is not an easy matter and it does not mean the matter is resolved, but I believe it is an obligation if the government wants to preclude some of the other awkward, expensive and likely arguments. The government will have to show some further initiative now and clarify exactly what its stand is on these financial matters.
That is why I believe this report from the committee of the whole House reporting Bill 142 should not be dealt with now. I believe it is premature to say the least. I will reiterate that I believe something must be done to break the impasse and to change the nature of how this bill proceeds. I am trying -- not to threaten because I cannot threaten -- to warn the government that the compensation package could be settled now and surely should be settled by the time we proceed with third reading. It is possible to do that.
If it does have a package in mind and if there are numbers available which the government says represent its current position, they should be known to the participants and the members of the Legislature. In the absence of that, I believe it is wrong for us to proceed with the motion before us this evening. It would be wrong for us to proceed tomorrow, according to the closure procedures, with third and final reading of the bill. It would be wrong from a moral, legal and straight practical, common sense point of view.
The government can have its way in the Legislature of Ontario. Such is not necessarily the case in the courts of Ontario. There are many interested participants in and observers of this bill who will exercise their legal rights. The initiatives taken by the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, ostensibly to resolve a long-standing property dispute in short order, may be thwarted entirely by the fact there are people who are not members of the Legislature and who do not care that the Tories have a majority here.
They are citizens of Canada and they have some legal rights. They may not be quite as clear under the new Canadian Charter of Rights as many of us would like them to be, but they are interested in considering whether they should test the waters. Their right to test the waters is clear and some of them -- perhaps from Vespra township, perhaps not -- may take that right in hand and actually exercise their judicial right to find out whether this bill in its current form will stand up before the courts.
9:30 p.m.
The better way to proceed, and I believe the preferred route, is to have a negotiated package in place before we proceed with third reading. I beg the members of this House to give due consideration to delaying the reception of this report of the bill from clause-by-clause discussion in the committee until we have had that package put in front of us.
Mr. Charlton: Mr. Speaker, I had hoped to have the opportunity to make some comments last evening. Unfortunately, the minister moved closure on us at the end of his comments, so I did not have the opportunity. Therefore, I am going to take the opportunity this evening to make a number of comments.
Most of the debate to date has focused on the pros and cons of the bill itself, the specifics with respect to those who support and those who are opposed to the situation in Vespra as it relates to the city of Barrie's desire to annex part of Vespra township. But I am surprised and disturbed we are even here having this debate. I say that for a number of reasons.
The party across the floor has been the party of government in this province for more than 40 years. It quite frequently taunts us on this side of the House with that fact. It is interesting to note that, having been the government for 40 years, it has learned very few lessons.
I recall a lesson it learned in the early 1970s. Although it went a long way to learning the lesson, it rushed too quickly to the solution and got burned in the process. It has very quickly forgotten those facts that it started to learn and started to piece together.
Although I was not in this Legislature then, I recall meeting with a number of members of the government party in the early 1970s on the issue of regional government. One of the rationales for regional government that came from members across the floor was that, in part, it was to get away from the piecemeal approach to expansion of urban centres and to create a new structure in which the major and expanding urban municipalities in this province could grow without the disruption, acrimony and unfairness of the whole question of expropriation.
Where are we now? We are right back where we were in the late 1960s and this government has learned no lessons. All it has done is to realize one folly, create another folly and allow both to continue to exist.
Any way the members want to look at that, I recall from my very early childhood and repeatedly through my life people telling me that two wrongs do not make a right. Instead of progressing to create a planning process that has some logic, understanding and flexibility, we have reverted to a system that allows us in this province to maintain the worst of both worlds: the worst of the world of regional government and the worst of the unfairness of the old processes in those areas of the province where regional government was never implemented because the government got burned in the process of implementing those regions that were put in place.
Mr. Bradley: I thought the New Democratic Party was for regional government. Is your party for or against that?
Mr. Charlton: We are not in favour of Tory regional government.
Mr. Bradley: Oh, that is fair.
Mr. Charlton: It never implemented the regional government we recommended.
Mr. Epp: Good thing the member for Welland-Thorold (Mr. Swart) isn't here to defend regional government.
Mr. Charlton: That is what I am saying. It has not listened on either front.
What is really unfortunate about this whole thing is we have a government that is so attuned to and so wrapped up in governing by polls that it has lost touch with communities. These polls, ultimately and unfortunately, become province-wide polls as opposed to polls that take into account local feelings and local autonomy and all of the questions that, in our rhetoric, we always express as very important, both from the government side and from our side. The government has lost touch with a community's desire to structure and protect its own future and a city's desire to plan its future. It has lost touch with both of those.
Not only has it lost touch with the questions of local autonomy in the cases of planning matters like this bill before us tonight, but it has also lost touch with that local sense of community in almost every area we can speak about in the House.
I have spent the last three years as the environmental critic for our caucus. One of the things I have noticed out of that role is if one takes an issue like acid rain it becomes, in the sense of Ontario, a global issue, an issue that virtually everybody in this province is concerned about.
It affects our forests, which are a major aspect of our economy. It affects our lakes, both in terms of their economic utility as a part of this province for fishing and other things, and from the perspective of their recreational value.
It also potentially affects our ability in this province to produce food. It is the one area that very little is known about yet, but we are starting to learn a little about it. Over the course of the next decade, we will learn a lot more about the impact of acid rain on our food crops.
With an issue such as the acid rain question, which in the context of Ontario becomes a universal or global concern, the government will adopt rhetoric that suits its mood because acid rain shows up in its polls as a global problem. The government not only adopts rhetoric that addresses that global concern but it moves in some small way to deal with that global concern. Even if, from the opposition's perspective, it does not move far enough or fast enough, it does move.
If we look at how this government responds to individual localized concerns around the economy -- I relate that back to a localized set of concerns around the annexation in Barrie and Vespra -- it ignores those local, isolated environmental problems. It also refuses to admit the problem even exists.
9:40 p.m.
The Minister of the Environment (Mr. Brandt) will get up and say acid rain is a problem and the government has made a commitment to deal with that problem. It is going to cut emissions by the middle of the 1990s by such and such. Even though the emissions happen to be going up this year, it has made a commitment and it will solve that problem because it is a real problem.
But in Stouffville, in Tiny township, in Wentworth riding just south of my riding or the Upper Ottawa Street dump, those local, isolated, individual problems that are not province-wide issues get ignored. They not only get ignored, but the government refuses to admit they are even a problem. The minister stands in his place, as the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and his parliamentary assistant have done in this case, and belittles the problem.
One of the things that has been missing from this debate, and one of the reasons I decided I wanted to get up and speak last night, although I know very little about the specific disputes in the case of the city of Barrie and the township of Vespra, is that I have learned a few lessons over the course of my very short life.
I remember when I was nine years old I moved into the riding I represent at present. At that time, it was not Hamilton Mountain riding; it was called Wentworth riding. It was an era when the mountain in the city of Hamilton was just starting to develop. About five years before I moved into that riding, the city of Hamilton had annexed half of Barton township against the better judgement of the council and the residents of Barton township and against the better judgement of a number of politicians in the city of Hamilton. About five years after I moved into the riding, the city proceeded to annex the other half of Barton township.
During the course of this debate, a number of people have talked about the possible benefits of this annexation for the city of Barrie and a number of others have spoken about the potential for problems for the city of Barrie resulting from this annexation.
For as long as I can remember, most municipalities in this province have lived with the myth, have believed the myth and have professed or carried on the myth that commercial-industrial assessment reduces the tax burden for residential home owners and their urban municipality. I say "myth" because it is a myth; it is not a reality at all.
I am not sure why this myth has survived, because if we sit down and look at the facts with respect to tax burdens and services, it is a myth. Commercial-industrial assessment does not provide a municipality with a tax benefit for its residential home owners. It costs them money. The reality is that the services we have to provide to commercial and industrial areas are services that cost far more per capita than the services we provide to residential homes.
There are those who are still caught up in that myth in the city of Barrie, those who are after a hunk of Vespra township in order to fulfil the so-called benefits the myth provides, benefits that do not exist.
I go back to what I was saying about that period in the early 1950s when the city of Hamilton annexed half of Barton township on the escarpment. The city annexed it on the basis that we had to have more assessment in Hamilton -- residential, commercial and industrial -- in order to facilitate the expansion of the city on the one hand and a reduction of the overall tax base for residential home owners in Hamilton in general.
What they did not realize was that there were problems in this approach and that the whole approach, in fact, was fraught with problems. One of the very first problems that arose was that right after they annexed half of Barton township and issued building permits to a number of developers to start doing surveys on the mountain, surveys that included four shopping malls and about 20,000 homes over the very short span of about six years, they suddenly discovered they had too many people on the mountain and there were access problems up the escarpment.
What they ended up having to do was to reduce all the assessments on the escarpment for lack of proper access and for inconvenience, and this affected the market value of all those properties. Those reductions in assessment caused a shift of tax burden to the home owners in the old, lower city, those residents and ratepayers whom the expansion of the city of Hamilton was supposed to help.
They shifted an additional tax burden to them because they ended up having to give a tax break to the new areas of 10 per cent, which remained in place from the early 1950s right up until 1980, because of lack of access. This would have been a very simple question and a very foreseeable problem if we had not been so caught up in this rhetoric and this myth that assessment, especially commercial-industrial assessment, means tax benefits.
What we have done by the proliferation of this myth, by the continued belief in this myth, is to create the kind of confrontations we have between Vespra township and the city of Barrie. Everybody gets caught up in it, and we have seen it here.
On rare occasions during the course of this debate over the last number of weeks, we have heard the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing put his position. We have heard the parliamentary assistant to the minister put his position. We have heard the comments that have been made about the Solicitor General and his involvement in this whole process. We have heard about the likely deals that went on among the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, certain law firms and Cadillac Fairview.
9:50 p.m.
All of this for what? Certainly not for anything that is logical or human or fair in its aspect, certainly not for anything that was going to provide something to anyone that did not already exist, and certainly not for the benefit of a rural municipality, Vespra township, in which the residents should have the right now and in the future not only to decide what their community is and will be, but also to decide the ways in which that municipality will be altered, will grow and develop and to decide what the nature of that community will be.
We all talk the rhetoric of local autonomy but we all seem to forget what it means. None of us can provide easy answers on how decisions were made in the past about what communities were. We have before us an established community, Vespra township, and its residents want to be able to decide what their community is and should be. We throw into that another community, the city of Barrie, which not only wants to have the right to decide what its future will be, but also to decide, outside of itself, where its future growth will happen, on somebody else's back.
Most of the debate on this bill is centred on the commercial developments, the mall developments that have gone on in Vespra township, and the question of who has to service those commercial developments. I am not here to defend or analyse the sins of administrations from the past that allowed those developments to occur. None of us, unfortunately, is in a position to do that.
Along with the annexation we have in this bill, the very arbitrary annexation by legislation that is about to occur to grab the commercial development and move it into the city of Barrie, there are going to be people in the township of Vespra who are not a part of that commercial development and who have built rural homes. They may have spent 50 per cent more to get themselves a home than they would have had to spend in the city of Barrie on a much smaller lot with full services, in order to get out of the congestion of urban development. Those people are going to be affected by this arbitrary process and by the extensions of this process that will continue.
It does not matter whether we put a limitation in the bill that says the year 2012. If Barrie needs no more room to expand between now and 2012, then that limitation will hold, and after 2112 the city of Barrie will move out to take the next hunk. The parliamentary assistant knows, even though earlier in today's debate he shook his head to indicate no, if the date of 2012 that we have put into this bill as the limitation becomes obsolete by 1992 and if the city of Barrie, which has more votes with this government than Vespra township has, desperately claims to need another major expansion, this government will come back into this House and amend this piece of legislation, remove the 2012 date and proceed to annex another hunk in spite of whatever objections might come from Vespra or from the opposition in this party or in the Liberal Party. We all know that to be a reality; we have seen it happen too many times not to believe it will happen again.
Mr. Eves: At least you admit this government will still be here in 1992. I agree with you, by the way.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: That is an ugly thought.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Cousens): Order.
Mr. Charlton: I would say to the member for Parry Sound (Mr. Eves) at the rate this government is going, this province will not be here in 1992.
Interjections.
Mr. Charlton: We even have seals over there, do we?
I find this bill offensive, as other members have said, because of the very arbitrary nature of this kind of legislation. But I also find it very offensive because it so clearly reflects the fact that we have not learned lessons from the past and from our past mistakes.
It is interesting to note, just as a measure of what I am saying about our past mistakes around the city-county system and the expropriation process that has gone on in the city-county system, and about our mistakes around regional government, that in cities such as Hamilton, where we have a regional government and where we also had the problems of annexation and arbitrariness before regional government, we find a government that has ruled the province for 40 years with an almost total inability to convince voters of anything.
Mr. Rotenberg: They re-elect us.
Mr. Charlton: Not in Hamilton-Wentworth they do not, my dear friend. The government's total plurality in the regional municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth is 150 votes. As a result of the government's approach on things like this and the way the Minister of Transportation and Communications is jamming GO Transit and a number of other things down the throats of the people of Hamilton-Wentworth, I can assure members that after the next election it will revert to the situation it was in before 1981 without a single member from the Hamilton-Wentworth area.
That is true not only in Hamilton-Wentworth but in a number of other areas around this province where the people have seen the ultimate effects of the arbitrary and unthinking approach of this government to municipalities, to boards of education and to annexations and any number of other arbitrary measures we want to talk about.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: This is good.
Mr. Charlton: This is good? They are encouraging me to continue. That is fine.
The Acting Speaker: The honourable member will proceed.
10 p.m.
Mr. Charlton: Mr. Speaker, there are any number of other examples from across the province we could draw on. For example, we could look at what happened to the government members from Kitchener-Waterloo after the arbitrary imposition of regional government. We could look at what happened to a number of government members from Ottawa and the Sudbury basin after the imposition of regional government.
There are clear examples for the government of what happens when it takes this swashbuckling, slash-them approach. We all like the movies that occur in the vastness of the Pacific jungles with heroes slashing their way through the bush, but for a government to operate in that fashion is just not acceptable.
The member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk, a member who has been around this Legislature for God knows how long and maybe even God does not remember how long, came to me just a few weeks ago because, as part of the voluntary-arbitrary program of reassessment in this province, a small piece of farm land that the member has outside Brant county, which happens to fall in the Hamilton-Wentworth area, was reassessed at market value last fall and implemented in January for taxation and his taxes doubled all of a sudden.
Mr. Nixon: They more than doubled.
Mr. Charlton: They more than doubled. I will get the situation of the member straightened out.
I raise the issue simply because it is a reflection of the insensitivity over there. Did those people ever stop to think why they lost a riding like Wentworth North, a riding that for 100 years was never held by anyone but a Tory? Then all of a sudden they lost that riding. Not only did they lose it all of a sudden, but in the first round in 1975, the first time they ever lost the seat, they lost it by 17,000 votes.
Do those people understand what the impact and reality of that is? Do they understand what they did to those people to cause that kind of resentment? Do they understand how much one has to hurt people to lose a seat that has been Tory for 100 years to a member such as the member for Wentworth North (Mr. Cunningham)?
Hon. Mr. Elgie: Hamilton Mountain may be in trouble.
Mr. Charlton: Hamilton Mountain is always in trouble. That is why we have members such as myself. The arbitrary measures this government proceeds with will keep my riding in trouble for ever, because the economic approach this government takes causes chaos for the people in my riding. If we combine that with the economic approach that is taken in Ottawa by the Liberal Party, we have a total disaster on our hands.
There is the arbitrary nature of this bill and the lack of an ability by members on the government side to look back and understand what we have done in the past and how we tried for a short period to remedy the problem. Even if the remedies were not much better than the problem, at least for a short period we realized the problem and tried to remedy it. I will give at least that much credit to some members of the government party who unfortunately are no longer with us. Unfortunately, they got out --
Mr. Shymko: Is the member referring to Ed Ziemba?
Mr. Charlton: No. I am talking about members of the government party.
Mr. Shymko: Where is Ed Ziemba?
The Acting Speaker: Order.
Mr. Charlton: The member does not run against members of the government party, does he? He does not defeat members of the government party, does he?
Mr. Shymko: We defeat your members; that is for sure.
Mr. Charlton: The unfortunate thing is that some government members at least realized the problem of our arbitrary approach to urban growth. People such as the former member for Chatham-Kent, the Honourable Mr. McKeough, may not have found the proper solutions, but at least they realized the problem. Those people drove him out. They would not listen. The reason they would not listen is that they were too short-sighted to see the problems he recognized. Now we are here with a bill like this because they were too short-sighted to deal with the problems he recognized. The former member may not have found all the solutions, but at least he made an effort.
As the member for St. Catharines (Mr. Bradley) mentioned earlier, this party has a position on regional government. Our position was not the same as theirs. We supported some aspects of what they did but not others, because our vision of regional government was not identical. At least the former member for Chatham-Kent and the members of this party uniformly saw a problem that had to be dealt with and attempted to find solutions.
We are not in a position to know whether our solutions are any better than theirs that failed. We would not be so presumptuous as to suggest that our existing policy on regional government and municipal planning in this province is any better than theirs. But at least we are still prepared to recognize the existing problem and try to find some solutions.
All this party of power across the way has been able to accomplish is to recognize the problem for an instant. When the solutions did not work just like that, it drove out those who were looking for the solutions and went back to the old, the arbitrary, the unfair. It continued pushing the myth of why the old, arbitrary and unfair had to keep happening.
10:10 p.m.
Members of both parties on this side applauded the member for Oshawa (Mr. Breaugh) when he spent nine hours on his feet. They knew what he was doing and what he felt he had to accomplish. All of those on the other side of the House booed or criticized that approach because they have before them a government bill they are told they have to support.
As the member for Oshawa said a number of times during this debate, they will support it both tonight at 10:15 or 10:20 or whenever it is we vote, and tomorrow night at six o'clock when we have the final vote on third reading of this bill. Then they will go out into their rural ridings and try to rationalize why they supported this kind of arbitrary, unfair and detrimental legislation. It is not only detrimental to Vespra township, but also ultimately in many respects probably detrimental to the city of Barrie as well.
Until we can stand up in this House and freely admit we have a problem with the planning and growth process and with urban development in this province and then sit down together to try to work out some reasonable solutions, not the kind of precedent we are setting with this bill -- and it is a precedent; the member for Oshawa has made the point that it is not only a precedent moving this bill to settle a boundary dispute, but also moving closure to bring to an end a bill to settle a boundary dispute -- we will see more of these kinds of bills here before us. It is like everything else: if they do it once, it is always easier to do it the second time and even easier the third.
For all those reasons and for all the lessons we do not appear to have learned here in this House, we cannot support this legislation.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Speaker, I rise to participate in this debate at the insistence of several guards who shall be nameless, as well as my uncle Jack Johnston and one page who has since left. They will just be a few short remarks.
Mr. Breaugh: We like those short remarks.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I was born in 1946 --
Mr. Conway: Where?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: In Pembroke, Ontario. I remember it well. My father was Robert C. Johnston --
Mr. Conway: Buck.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Known as Buck to the member for Renfrew North (Mr. Conway) and others.
Mr. Conway: A Liberal and a hell of a good ball player.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: A Liberal probably to this very day, as is being noted. He was at that point on the town council in Pembroke as a councillor.
Mr. Rotenberg: What has this got to do with Vespra? Only two minutes left.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I am being rushed in my pithy remarks. I wanted to raise that because there was no annexation on at that time in Pembroke. As a result, the people of Pembroke never had to suffer the way the people of Vespra township are now having to suffer.
I want to pick up on a point the member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Charlton) was making about this whole business of the infectious nature of annexation and unilateral action and lack of proper consultation and negotiation. It is like peanuts, as I was just saying to the Hansard reporter. Once one starts eating them, one cannot stop. Once one of these annexations gets going, there could be many others afterwards.
This is a matter of extreme seriousness to this party, as I thought it was to the Liberal Party of Ontario, but it seems the speeches we have been anticipating have evaporated. All the complaints about the short précis my colleague from Oshawa delivered to this House on this matter, saying this was somehow interfering with other members' time, seem to have been totally unreal. There have been no speakers from the other side, just the occasional interjection, basically unintelligible as usual, from the member for High Park-Swansea (Mr. Shymko). Over here we have seen no one wanting to rise and participate.
Interjections.
Mr. Speaker: Order.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I felt I had to get up at this time.
Mr. Kerrio: There were only three New Democratic Party members when I was here last. What happened to all the lefties? They should come back into the chamber now and say it the way it is.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Is this a point of order?
Mr. Speaker: No.
Mr. Kerrio: I thought it was a good point.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Speaker, you come from Peterborough and you know there has been no attempt to annex Bridgenorth as yet. If you were to think about Peterborough moving on Bridgenorth en masse with the help of its Tory friends over here, I know you would be offended by this and would rise to the defence of those people in Bridgenorth to make sure this kind of thing did not take place in the province.
Mr. Breaugh: He would not sell them out.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: That is right. It would be the same kind of thing as suggesting they should move south and infringe upon Bewdley. I know again that would be nothing --
Mr. Speaker: I must point out to the honourable member that in accordance with the motion passed by this House, the time has come to place the question.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I was just getting started.
Mr. Speaker: You were indeed.
The question before the House is, shall the report be received and adopted?
10:25 p.m.
The House divided on the motion for adoption of the report, which was agreed to on the following vote:
Ayes
Andrewes, Ashe, Barlow, Bennett, Bernier, Birch, Brandt, Cousens, Cureatz, Dean, Eaton, Elgie, Eves, Fish, Gillies, Gordon, Gregory, Grossman, Harris, Havrot, Hennessy, Hodgson, Johnson, J. M., Jones, Kells, Kennedy, Kerr, Kolyn, Lane, Leluk, McCaffrey;
McCague, McLean, McNeil, Norton, Piché, Pollock, Pope, Ramsay, Rotenberg, Scrivener, Sheppard, Shymko, Snow, Stevenson, K. R., Taylor, G. W., Timbrell, Treleaven, Walker, Watson, Wells, Wiseman.
Nays
Allen, Boudria, Bradley, Breaugh, Bryden, Charlton, Conway, Edighoffer, Elston, Epp, Haggerty, Johnston, R. F., Kerrio, Mackenzie, Martel, McClellan, McKessock, Miller, G. I., Newman, Nixon, O'Neil, Renwick, Ruston, Spensieri, Swart, Van Horne, Worton, Wrye.
Ayes 52; nays 28.
BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Hon. Mr. Wells: Mr. Speaker, tomorrow afternoon, June 27, we will deal with third readings of Bills 62, 84, 85 and 142.
The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.