Hansard Transcript 1987-Jan-28 | Legislative Assembly of Ontario

Mr. Speaker: On behalf of all members of the Legislative Assembly, I would like to extend a very warm parliamentary welcome to the consular corps, our guests in the west gallery this afternoon. Please join me in acknowledging Mr. Taylhardat of Venezuela, dean of the consular corps, along with the other heads of posts representing 65 countries. Please join me in welcoming our guests.

MEMBERS' STATEMENTS

PROBLEM CHILDREN

Mr. McLean: I have a statement today which is directed to the Minister of Community and Social Services (Mr. Sweeney). Teenagers are able to defy their parents, the schools, medical help and children's aid society counsellors unless they have broken the law. There is no permissive legislation available that gives power to the children's aid society or to the parents to provide help for these children when it is needed.

I wrote a letter to the minister on December 2, 1986, regarding a constituent of young and tender years who was running the streets, involved in alcohol, drug abuse and petty theft. As yet, there has been no reply. There was no parental control and no way for the parents or the children's aid society to help by enforcing any discipline or behaviour modification. There are no specific laws that allow parents or guardians to take these distressed children under their care and bring them back within society's boundaries.

It is absolutely critical that the government come up with solutions to help this child and other such children. The government must look immediately into this grave problem and respond to the very real needs of these unfortunate children.

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT

Mrs. Grier: It is now almost 18 months since a group known as the Project for Environmental Priorities asked all candidates for election to this House some questions about our attitude to the environment. One question was, "Will you support a strengthening of the Environmental Assessment Act by restricting the exemption process and by extending the full application of the act to private sector projects?" The Premier (Mr. Peterson) answered yes to that question and so did most of the members of the present Liberal caucus. We have no evidence 18 months later of any intent to fulfil that promise.

Today the Canadian Environmental Law Research Foundation released a major study of the Environmental Assessment Act. This study represents the first comprehensive examination of the ways in which environmental assessments are prepared, reviewed and judged. The study finds that the act is sound in principle but flawed in practice and it makes a number of recommendations, one of which is that the government should announce immediately a firm commitment to regulating the private sector within 18 months.

If that timetable is adhered to, it will have taken three years from the date of the Premier's commitment to regulating the private sector to actually doing it. I call upon the government to respond quickly and positively to the study released today. Do not for pity's sake set up a task force to study the study. The time for some action has come, and we want the government to do it soon.

CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES

Mr. Andrewes: Previously, I have discussed in the House the problems associated with the operation of regional children's mental health programs and, more specifically, of the Niagara Centre for Youth Care. I wish now to expand on the problems faced by that agency.

Statistics show that one in five Ontario children suffers from a serious mental disorder. In Niagara, it is estimated that 19.5 per cent of all children suffer from some psychiatric disorder; yet in 1985-86, the Niagara agency was able to see only 2.8 per cent of the number of children at risk. More than half of them came from the city of St. Catharines, since lack of funding would not permit a greater regional outreach.

The Ministry of Community and Social Services admits to disparities in funding, since across Ontario the average expenditure on children's mental health is $10.88 per capita, while in Niagara funding is $4.25 per capita. Underfunding leaves the agency without the ability to pay staff properly or competitively with other agencies in the province. The disparity grows, and the Niagara Centre for Youth Care senses that its call for help is not heard by this government, which claims to make health care accessibility a priority.

CREDIT CARDS

Mr. Swart: I want to draw the attention of this House, and in particular of the members of the government, to the announcement made in Ottawa yesterday by the junior finance minister that Ottawa does not intend to do anything about putting a ceiling on credit-card interest rates.

We must all know that bank interest rates on credit cards, trust-company interest rates on credit cards, interest rates on department-store and oil-company credit cards are in the 21 per cent, 24 per cent to 28 per cent area. They have not been reduced in more than three years despite the fact that interest rates have gone down generally by more than two percentage points. Bad accounts, which were their excuse, are only half what they were five years ago.

The Minister of Financial Institutions (Mr. Kwinter) should be taking a stand on this issue This is simply usury. I grant that he does not have any great legislative authority, but he could call the banks in and tell them he expects them to lower the interest rates on credit cards. He could take a position and demand action by the federal government. He could increase the taxes on the financial institutions if they would not do it. We must limit the rates on credit-card interest to five or six per cent above the bank interest rates.

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SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER

Mr. Rowe: One year ago today, the American space shuttle Challenger blew up in the skies over Florida, killing six professional astronauts and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

On behalf of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and all members of the Legislature gathered today, I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to these courageous men and women who died on that tragic flight. Our hearts go out to the families of the seven members of that tragic mission: Frances Scobee, Mike Smith, Ronald McNair, Judy Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, Ellison Onizuka and Mrs. McAuliffe, the only civilian aboard the flight.

I am sure the horrendous event of that day is firmly fixed in the mind of every member of this House, every Ontario citizen and every Canadian. For example, young Tim Johns, a student at Barrie Central Collegiate, had made arrangements, along with his classmates at the school, to videotape the program and the lessons that were to have been taught by Mrs. McAuliffe.

It was a sad day, but I know Tim and his friends have not lost their interest in the American space program. They know, as we do, that the search for truth and excellence will and must go on. However, we can never forget the lessons of the past. We cannot allow Mrs. McAuliffe and her fellow astronauts to die in vain. Therefore, I rise in my place to remind the members of this House of the tragic event that took place one year ago today. I know they will join with me in sending the families of these brave men and women our best wishes.

Mr. Speaker: The member's time has expired.

Mr. Rowe: The sacrifices they have made will not be forgotten.

YOUTH EMPLOYMENT

Mr. Allen: I rise to comment on the student summer work program of $45 million announced by the Minister of Colleges and Universities (Mr. Sorbara), which is to provide work for some 62,000 young people. This, one must admit, is a small increase over last year's allocation and will provide work for a few more students.

Unfortunately, it does not do enough to make up the balance of the shortfall that comes from a less ambitious program at the federal level. As we know, responsibility for universities and students is principally a provincial affair. While one regrets the withdrawal of the federal moneys, this government must do all it can to make up any losses at that end. That has not happened.

We also call attention to a useful principle the minister has introduced. namely, allocating a certain significant part of his moneys for northern students. Again, it is only in the smaller part of the program and it will provide work arrangements for fewer than 2,000 students.

There is another very disadvantaged group in the student body, and that is women students, who, on the average, are unable to earn sufficient money over a year to meet the eligibility qualifications of the Ontario student assistance program. The minister must address that in a very vigorous fashion in the future.

Mr. Speaker: The member's time has expired. The member for Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry for 35 seconds.

TELEVISION FILM

Mr. Villeneuve: For those members who may not have read of it, I want to mention that in February the ABC and CBC television networks will be airing the Walt Disney Productions film The Liberators. The film stars Larry Scott and Robert Carradine and is about two men who help American slaves escape during the 1850s.

What is notable is that Upper Canada Village at Morrisburg in the very historic riding of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry provided the setting for the film. The staff at the village dressed in period costumes and served as extras in the film. I wish all members would look at this film coming up in February.

RECORD OF DEBATES

Mr. Speaker: This may be the appropriate time to inform the members that on Thursday, January 22, the member for Oshawa (Mr. Breaugh) brought to the attention of the Speaker and the House the matter of a reprint of extracts from Hansard of November 15, 1984, which was made to appear as if it had been published by the Legislative Assembly. I undertook to study the matter and I am ready to make the following ruling.

Recently, the member for High Park-Swansea (Mr. Shymko) undertook at his own expense and for his own purposes to have published extracts from a debate which took place in this House on November 15, 1984, during private members' business. While there is nothing technically wrong with reprinting parts of Hansard, this particular reprint does, in my opinion, give the wrong impression of what the document is, in that the reader is led to believe that this is an original publication of the Legislative Assembly published under the authority of the Speaker, which it is not.

Where the member for High Park-Swansea erred was in not clearly identifying on the front cover of the publication that he was in fact the publisher. I would strongly advise members, therefore, that in doing this type of thing, they make it clear in the future they are the originators of the reprint and not the Legislative Assembly.

Furthermore, I take this occasion to remind members that they are protected by the laws of privilege for the speeches they make in the assembly and its committees, but they are not necessarily protected when they cause to have their speeches reprinted for use outside the assembly.

I hope this is of assistance to all members.

Mr. Shymko: Mr. Speaker, since I am involved, I appreciate the clarification. I know that what I have done has been done by many members in the past.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

STATEMENTS BY THE MINISTRY

INVOLUNTARY PATIENTS

Hon. Mr. Elston: Members will recall that in December 1986 a number of amendments to the Mental Health Act were passed as part of Bill 7. One of those amendments, defeated in committee but later brought back and passed during third reading without a great deal of discussion, has raised some important concerns in this province not only among health care professionals but also among the families of patients who should be treated.???

The amendment to which I refer is the one that would remove any means for an attending physician in a psychiatric facility to proceed with psychiatric treatment when an involuntary patient has refused treatment or when the relative of an involuntary, incompetent patient has refused such treatment.

Recognizing that this amendment raised a number of issues related to the delicate balance between patients' rights and the necessity of treatment, members of this House agreed to delay implementation of the amendment until April 1, 1987. There was agreement that more time was needed for discussion and reflection.

The Ontario Medical Association and the Ontario Psychiatric Association have both expressed strong reservations about the change in legislation. In addition, there have been numerous letters to newspapers and reports from inquests pointing out difficulties with the amendment. I would also point out that last fall mental health experts from across Canada recommended that the current Ontario provisions be adopted in the Uniform Mental Health Act, which will be presented to the uniform law commissioners of all provinces later this year.

In Ontario, when an involuntary patient or his relative refuses treatment, our current procedure is as follows:

First, three physicians, at least one of whom is a psychiatrist not on staff at the treating hospital, examine the patient and must agree that treatment should proceed.

The attending physician then applies to the psychiatric review board for a treatment order.

The review board holds a hearing, at which the patient has the right to be present and to be represented by counsel. If either the patient or the physician wishes to challenge a board decision, both have the right to appeal to the courts.

It is my conviction that, with a number of additional safeguards, this mechanism can be adapted to protect both the rights of involuntary patients and the need to treat major psychiatric disabilities. It is therefore my intention to introduce an amendment to the Mental Health Act that will maintain the authority of the review board after April 1, 1987.

The amendment I am introducing today proposes that several changes be made to current practice. Specifically, they are:

First, during the first stage of seeking approval for treatment, the physicians who examine an involuntary patient will be required to give reasons why they believe a patient will not improve without treatment and why the review board should issue a treatment order.

Second, in granting authority to proceed with treatment, the review board must specify the period of time for which the treatment order is effective. The board may also include terms and conditions under which treatment is to be provided.

Third, during the course of any appeal by a patient or relative with regard to treatment, treatment will not proceed unless a judge of the court rules otherwise.

I wish to point out that electroconvulsive therapy is excluded from review board authority. This amendment provides that in order for ECT to be given, the consent of an involuntary patient or his representative will be required.

This amendment also removes the legal uncertainties that now exist in treating voluntary and informal psychiatric patients as well as those on Lieutenant Governor's warrants.

All patients will be advised of their right to designate a representative to give consent on their behalf should they become incompetent. In psychiatric emergencies, hospital staff will be permitted to proceed with treatment and take whatever actions are required to stabilize the patient.

I believe this amendment establishes an effective balance between the rights of patients and the responsibilities of physicians to determine and prescribe treatment. I urge all members of this House to assist in its speedy consideration.

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DAY CARE

Hon. Mr. Sweeney: Ontario needs to expand its child care service. It needs to offer more choice and more opportunity to families. This government, however, cannot do it alone. That is why I met last week with my federal and provincial fellow ministers in Ottawa. I am pleased today to report on last week's meetings.

There was a consensus among the provinces about the provision of genuine choice for families to select the form of child care best suited to their needs. We agreed that each province must have as much flexibility as possible to shape its child care system to meet its differing needs. We confirmed that provinces retained full responsibility for the design and delivery of child care services, with the federal government as an equal funding partner.

To that end, the federal and provincial governments committed ourselves to the following timetable: beginning on February 1, 1987, we will hold a series of bilateral meetings between individual provinces and federal government officials; by March 1, 1987, we will have the report of the parliamentary task force and a comprehensive response to it; by April 30, 1987, a national strategy will be formulated; during May 1987, formal federal-provincial negotiations will be carried out; and by June 1987, a federal-provincial agreement will be confirmed at a meeting of ministers.

I had been hopeful that a speedy resolution of federal-provincial issues would permit us to finalize our child care service announcements. I am assured by the federal government and other provinces that this timetable is the speediest they can follow. I am committed to providing an early indication of our program initiatives. Because of these delays, we are now reviewing what we can announce in advance of the conclusion of these consultations.

As members would expect, the question of federal government funding support for our commercial centres was fully debated. The federal minister, Jake Epp, stated that he has no philosophical opposition to such funding. All provinces, except one, fully endorse the principle of child care systems, including both commercial and nonprofit components.

This government has inherited a child care system in which half the licensed spaces are in the commercial sector. We want to ensure that families using those existing spaces receive the same quality of care as that offered in the nonprofit sector. We also acknowledge the need to support those existing commercial spaces while encouraging the growth of the nonprofit sector. However, we cannot do it alone. We need federal government support, and Mr. Epp confirmed his recognition of that fact.

Mr. Martel: What did that mean? Nothing else is going to happen?

Mr. Speaker: I would remind the member for Sudbury East (Mr. Martel) that question period has not started.

RESPONSES

INVOLUNTARY PATIENTS

Mr. Andrewes: I wish to respond to the statement by the Minister of Health (Mr. Elston) regarding amendments to the Mental Health Act, particularly those dealing with involuntary patients in psychiatric institutions.

The minister at the outset sounded a bit cynical in his preamble to this statement, where he said the amendments in Bill 7 were passed without discussion. It sounds very much as if the minister is suggesting that these amendments were passed in a frivolous manner. I want to assure him that they were not and that the support given to the amendments was not taken lightly.

We have expressed many concerns over the last few months on the whole aspect of treating involuntary patients in mental institutions. The Bill 7 amendments appear to have prompted the minister to bring forward this package of amendments, which I must say go some way towards improving the process. Therefore, our debate and our efforts on Bill 7 were effective.

Thus, as we give these amendments our consideration, full attention and study, and as we seek advice on all sides of this debate, I want to assure the minister that we should keep in mind the April 1 timetable.

DAY CARE

Mr. Baetz: In response to the Minister of Community and Social Services (Mr. Sweeney) on this great meeting, it seems to me to be just a long litany of more planned meetings and more planned discussions; it goes on and on and on, and nothing seems to be about to happen. I believe it was Lord Keynes who said, "In the long term, we are all dead." That is what is going to happen with the minister's so-called sought-after agreement with the feds in this thing.

It is interesting to see that the minister is trying to get some consensus on providing some assistance for the for-profit day care centres; we have no opposition to that. But I heard the minister say nothing about extending these day care services to beyond those who are eligible under the Canada assistance plan. The minister said very little about that, and I suspect he said very little about it because he has very little to say about it.

The minister also said virtually nothing about those young parents who perhaps want to look after their very young infants or children in their own homes. What kind of assistance is the minister going to give them? If he is not going to provide them with financial assistance, is that not discrimination against those who would like to look after their own children in their own homes instead of having them go off to some group care?

Quite frankly, this is a statement that means nothing. I know the minister would like to see this thing move faster, but it is a glacial speed we are looking at here. We will tune in a year or two from now and we will be right here where the minister left off.

INVOLUNTARY PATIENTS

Mr. Reville: I want to respond to the statement made today by the Minister of Health (Mr. Elston) regarding amendments to the Mental Health Act. It strikes me as particularly odd that a government that could choose from so many crying needs to attend to would decide today to bring forth further amendments to a piece of legislation that was amended in December 1986, and the amendments in question have not yet taken effect. There are many crying needs in the province for the Minister of Health to attend to, as there are many crying needs for the government to attend to, and it seems odd that the government should now seek to change the will of the Legislature in this respect.

There is no question that there is a delicate balance between patients' rights and the need for people to have treatments of various kinds. The amendments that were introduced by my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre (Ms. Gigantes) and supported by the Progressive Conservative caucus were balanced amendments that were very clear about patients' rights and about our interest in people having treatment.

It seems clear that the minister has followed the advice often given by the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. Grossman); he picked up the phone and discussed the matter with one of the interest groups. It is going to be important for the Legislature to hear from all the interest groups on this issue, because there are some compelling arguments about patients' rights that legislators clearly need to hear.

DAY CARE

Ms. Gigantes: I rise to question whether the statement made by the Minister of Community and Social Services (Mr. Sweeney) was in order. The standing orders of the Legislature, in section 28(a), say: "A minister of the crown may make a short factual statement relating to government policy, ministry action or other similar matters of which the House should be informed." This was not a statement of government policy. It was not a statement of ministerial action. It spoke of matters of which we were already quite well informed following last week's federal-provincial conference.

What the minister did was he laid out yet another timetable for an area in which this government for close to two years has been promising action. We have a timetable that will now extend well into the two-year term of this government, and we are told that some time in June of this year we will finally have some kind of policy -- there is no indication of what kind of policy -- that will be joint federal-provincial agreement and a policy for which this minister will take complete responsibility within the provincial jurisdiction of Ontario.

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In the meantime, we do not have child care. In the meantime, parents and families who have to pay for the child care that exists, if they are lucky enough to find access for their children to child care facilities in this province, cannot afford the cost -- and the cost is going up. The minister has made no announcement about transitional funding for day care centres where the costs are just too high for people in the community to bear. We do not have any announcements from the minister as to what kind of funding will be provided, even though in the past he has promised us that without federal cost-sharing he would proceed on his own. Now he says we should wait another six months.

He speaks to us once more, heaven help us, about the choices that must be available in child care. The fact is we do not have day care in this province. That is what limits the choice. Our government has not provided policy, funding, programming or accountable mechanisms so that we know what moneys are going into the private day care sector in this province. We have no financial accountability. We do not have quality control for programming in our existing centres in this province in spite of the minister's suggestion yesterday that we do. He knows perfectly well that we have a decentralized and nonuniform system of determining the quality of care that children in this province who are fortunate enough to be in child care spaces -- there are mighty few of them -- are actually involved in.

I feel the statement today was a statement made in lieu of a statement. At this point, we fully expected that we would have -- good, bad or indifferent -- some policy statement from this government. We have nothing.

Mr. Speaker: Oral questions.

ATTENDANCE OF PREMIER

Mr. Grossman: The Premier (Mr. Peterson) has been trying to make some progress in Washington for several days. We know he is back, because he had time to give an extensive interview on Radio Noon today to discuss his lack of success in Washington, but he is not here yet to answer questions. In the absence of the Premier, I ask that leader's questions from us be stood down until the Premier has time to attend the House.

Mr. Speaker: Is there agreement to stand down? Do both leaders wish to --

Mr. Rae: We are in exactly the same position. We were told the Premier would be here and we have guided ourselves accordingly. We want to go at him today and he is not here.

Hon. Mr. Nixon: The Premier will be here in a moment. Naturally, with his heavy responsibilities, he has had a big morning. He is on his way here now. If the members would like to use a procedure that is quite acceptable to us and has been used frequently in the past and stand down the leaders' questions until the Premier is here -- he should be here in a moment -- and go with other questions, we will be glad to do so. We hope we can proceed with the regular business of the House. We have many ministers here, all of them anxious and eager to provide what information they can.

Mr. McClellan: Perhaps we could start by stopping the clock while we have this discussion and putting it back to the beginning. We know the Premier found time in his busy schedule to be on CBC radio between 12 noon and one o'clock. If he was able to do that, he is able to be in the assembly for question period at two o'clock. I suggest we recess until the Premier deigns to appear among us.

Mr. Speaker: Order. There has been a request by both leaders to stand down their questions until the Premier arrives. Is that --

Mr. McClellan: We have a request for a recess until the Premier arrives.

Hon. Mr. Nixon: No.

Mr. Speaker: As I understand it, there is not unanimous consent. Oral questions.

Mr. Harris: Was consent not given to recess the House until the Premier shows up?

Hon. Mr. Nixon: No. To stand down the leaders' questions is quite acceptable. I can assure the honourable members that the Premier is on his way and we can go back to the leaders' questions in a moment.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Harris: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: Could we perhaps then get unanimous consent to move on to the orders of the day and revert to the total question period when the Premier arrives?

Mr. Speaker: There has been a request for unanimous consent.

Hon. Mr. Nixon: No.

Mr. Speaker: No? There is not unanimous consent.

Oral questions. No questions?

Hon. Mr. Nixon: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: I simply say again to the honourable members that the Premier is on his way. He will be here.

Mr. Grossman: He has an obligation to be here to answer to the Legislature.

Hon. Mr. Nixon: Of course he does. Anybody who would suggest that the Premier does not fulfil his obligations will not be believed.

Mr. Speaker, the ministry is here, not with all cabinet ministers but with many of them. We are quite anxious to respond to the questions, and the Premier will be here in a minute. He is speaking, actually -- oh, to hell with it.

Ms. Fish: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: We want to hear what the note is. If the Premier is so quickly en route, then why do they not agree to a brief recess until he arrives?

Hon. Mr. Nixon: The note says -- I always respond to the requests of the member for St. George (Ms. Fish) -- the Premier is speaking to Michael Wilson, and he will be here as soon as possible.

Mr. Grossman: We will wait. We will recess the House if he is talking to the Minister of Finance.

Mr. Speaker: Oral questions.

Mr. Pope: No way.

Mr. Speaker: If no one wishes to ask questions, I will have to consider the question period finished.

Mr. Martel: Oh, come on.

Mr. Rae: You try that, Mr. Speaker, and see what happens.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Harris: Mr. Speaker, did I hear you say you are going to deem question period finished?

Mr. Speaker: Is there anything else you wish to add?

Mr. Harris: Yes. If the way you want to run the House is for all this to cause a great disruption, then you have to adjourn it for 10 minutes and we all look like fools across Ontario; we can do that if that is what you want to do. That appears to be the way the governing party and you, Mr. Speaker, want to run this Legislature. You have an hour sitting there for question period. Our questions today are to the Premier.

An hon. member: All of them?

Mr. Harris: All of them. Do members want me to table my list?

Hon. Mr. Nixon: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: I have a feeling that if we keep up with this game of shinny long enough, the Premier will come in the door. I just want to tell you once again, Mr. Speaker -- and I say this most sincerely and I would not think for a moment of trying to mislead the honourable members --

[Applause]

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. McClellan: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: After this display of courtesy towards the members of the assembly, perhaps we could turn the clock back to 60 minutes and start all over again.

Hon. Mr. Nixon: Sure; we would be quite glad to do that. As a matter of fact, if the honourable member wants to extend question period, he should let us know. We will give it serious consideration.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I understood the members wanted to ask questions.

Mr. Martel: For 60 minutes.

Mr. Speaker: I understand there is unanimous agreement to commence at the 60-minute period. Is that agreed?

Agreed to.

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Mr. Grossman: I bet that is the first time in the Premier's boxing career he has been applauded after having been knocked out.

ORAL QUESTIONS

STEEL EXPORTS

Mr. Grossman: My question is of the Premier. Yesterday, during his trip to Washington, he found out from Senator Heinz his intentions with regard to taking action against Canadian steel. It is something we first raised with the Premier in this House last October. On that date, October 21, he was not aware of the senator's intentions. He was unaware of Senator Heinz himself and his legislation. Since that time, he has had three months to prepare for his trip to Washington and his submissions on Canadian steel.

Given the fact that Senator Heinz clearly indicated to the Premier that he intends to proceed immediately with legislation that will give Canada 90 days to buckle under or have import quotas put on our steel, can he now tell us what his intentions are in terms of how he is going to protect Ontario's steelworkers against this US action?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: First, let me apologize for being so late coming into the House. I was on the phone with the federal Minister of Finance. We were discussing a few matters, the trade issue, the steel issue and others. I was sharing my perceptions with him in that regard, as well as his expected announcement this afternoon with respect to international banking centres, which are of great concern to this government.

As the honourable member knows, I put my views on these subjects to the minister, as I have done before. I am sure the Leader of the Opposition will know that sometimes, when these things happen, my presence is required in those discussions. It might be helpful if the member would spend some time talking to the Minister of Finance on those issues, rather than just causing a fuss.

Second, the member takes credit for introducing me to Senator Heinz. I met Senator Heinz a year ago when I was in Washington, although I do appreciate his attempt to take the credit in this situation, as he has done in every other one.

We have known of his intentions for a long time. The problems in the steel industry are nothing new in Ontario. The industry and governments have been applying their minds to the export situation for a very long time.

As it stands right now, the situation is that there is no agreement with Canada. Canada has been exercising self-restraint on the issue. At the moment, we do not know whether it is going to reach any kind of legislated solution. We hope to avoid that.

We do know the US has a very active program to try to bring down the percentage of imports into that country from about 33 per cent to about 20 per cent, in that range. It has made substantial gains. Our problem is that Canadian exports were up substantially in the past couple of months. They were up to about five per cent of the US domestic market.

There is some concern about foreign steel, Taiwanese or Korean, coming through Canada and that situation is being monitored very closely. At the moment, there is no threat that jobs will be lost as a result of that. I am sure my friend would not want to create any other impressions in that regard. It is a situation that is under constant discussion with the industry, the federal government and ourselves.

Mr. Grossman: Quite apart from everything else, I have here a rather extraordinary contradiction of his rather extraordinary statement that no Canadian steel jobs may be lost as a result of this.

I will read what Senator Heinz said after his meeting with him. He said he will introduce legislation giving Canada 90 days voluntarily to reduce steel exports or be faced with tough restrictions. The crackdown would see levels drop to 70 per cent of the November 1984 levels. Obviously, if our exports to the US are going to be cut by that much, it is going to cost a lot of Ontario jobs. If the Premier thinks a cut in exports to the US is not going to lose jobs in Ontario, he should rise and say that. It is unbelievable to put that proposition forward.

Yesterday, in the Premier's absence, the Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology (Mr. O'Neil) said about the Heinz legislation that he expects Canadian and US negotiators will strike a deal to avoid legislation that would slap quotas on Canadian steel. He said a voluntary approach has worked in the past and such an approach would work in the future.

Consistent with what his minister said about the steel issue and negotiating a settlement, is the Premier going to recommend or be part of an agreement for voluntary quotas in steel, or was his minister perhaps mistaken yesterday?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I am not sure the member opposite understands the situation as it works in the US. I would be happy to explain it to him. Mr. Heinz has introduced legislation before, as many other people have introduced legislation. Every congressman introduces legislation on almost a daily basis in the US. That is not to say it becomes the law of the land.

I am sure my honourable friend would not want to misrepresent the situation in the US in any way. When the member brought this matter up some time ago, he was trying to give the impression the bill was the law of the land, when it had died on the order paper in the US. If the member is going to make these allegations, it is important that he be factually correct, which he so rarely is.

It is a situation the industry and the government have been very close to for a long period of time. This is what has been happening. They have been operating on a situation of voluntary self-policing in that sense and, from the Canadian side, watching the numbers on a monthly basis. Sometimes those numbers pop up, as they did in the past couple of months because of the strike. The situation is ongoing and being managed. It is our hope to manage this situation in conjunction with the federal government in such a sensitive way that no legislation will be brought forward but the irritant will not be there.

Mr. Grossman: The Premier, who wishes to lecture others on how the American system works, was quoted as saying he is baffled by the way decisions are made in Washington. We understand well the way legislation is introduced and dealt with in the US.

I remind the Premier, however, that while steel quotas have not been legislated, neither has the auto pact been put on the table by anyone, yet the Premier and others are trying to avert that from happening before the event occurs, as he failed to do on softwood lumber and then agreed to a tariff on softwood lumber. On autos, we are all working to avoid it happening; on steel, we want him to do the same.

Given the comments of his trade minister that a voluntary approach works and that he believes a voluntary negotiation to avoid the quotas in steel is something that will happen, is the Premier prepared to accept any part of the proposal that Heinz says he is going to make aimed at getting Canadian steelmakers voluntarily to restrain their exports to the US markets? Is he going to do as his trade minister said he was going to do and agree here, as he did in softwood lumber?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: With respect to my honourable friend, he is quite mistaken in his interpretation of the situation. The whole object of the exercise is to avoid any legislation in the US that artificially binds our industry in any way. I want to tell the member what the discussion was all about.

Interestingly enough, Senator Heinz said to us he does not believe the Canadian industry is subsidized. He does not believe there is any dumping going on and he thinks Canada is trading in a fair-minded way. That is the point I made. As I said to the member, if he understands the history of the industry, the senator is involved in a straight protectionist move to try to protect the US steel industry, which is in very serious trouble at the moment. Some of the companies are close to bankruptcy. There are massive unfunded pension liabilities that could come back on the government. They are trying to protect whatever remnants of that industry they can. Canada is the only country with which they do not have a voluntary agreement at the moment, as the member may be aware.

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What we are saying to him is that Canada is a free trader. We are not subsidizing; we do not want to see a perversion of the US trade or international laws directed against a problem that in fact is not a problem. We are not the problem; therefore, we are not part of the solution. The problem is the lack of competitiveness of the US industry, but that does not say that Senator Heinz and like-minded people may not want to try to come after us in one way or another.

One other point I will make, if I may, to the member --

Interjections.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: Okay. If members do not want to hear it, they do not have to hear it. But I say to the honourable member, because it is an important issue, that I asked the senator --

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Grossman: I might say to the Premier that we would have saved a lot of time had he made a statement, as he so often does on these occasions.

Mr. Speaker: Do you have a question?

Mr. Grossman: My question is to the Premier. He did a very fine job a moment ago in explaining the American position and the American argument for protection for the American steel industry. What we are interested in knowing is what he is going to do to protect and put forward the case for the Canadian steel industry, not how strongly Senator Heinz feels about what is happening in the US.

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology, whom the Premier did not take along with him to Washington, said in his absence he believes that in the steel area a voluntary approach will avoid the problem. Can the Premier tell us whether he agrees with his trade minister, who suggests that a voluntary approach -- i.e., voluntarily cutting back on the export of Canadian steel to the United States -- will work and whether it reflects the Ontario government's position as outlined by his minister?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: That is what has been happening for the last couple of years in the country. The member may be aware of that or he may not be aware of that. So far, it has avoided any legislation in the United States. That is the situation as it is today. I cannot predict the future. Perhaps the member can.

The member opposite is right. The minister was not with me, because he was here. The member gets a little cranky if people do not show up in question period on time -- except, of course, himself. His suggestion was that I take the member for Muskoka (Mr. F. S. Miller) and the member for Eglinton (Mr. McFadden) to help us along in putting these cases.

That is what has been happening in this country for the past couple of years, whether the member knows it or not. So far, it has been reasonably successful, but I told him that, as a result of the numbers that have appeared in the past couple of months, more pressure has come on the system. He also has to be aware that just because one senator says something does not mean it happens. He has to be aware that these things can gather steam. We have to anticipate them and manage them as well as we can, and that is what we are trying to do.

I also remind the member that the federal government has the primary responsibility in this regard, whether he wants to admit it not. Because they have dropped the ball in so many cases, he may argue that the responsibility comes back here, and it is something I am prepared to do; but these are his friends, not mine.

Mr. Grossman: I read in the paper that the Premier was saying he was there to help the Prime Minister. With the Premier's record, there are thousands of other sectors that are hoping he does not try to help them.

The Premier has now argued jointly with his minister of industry that voluntary approaches have worked reasonably well in the past. May I remind him that the last voluntary approach, and the only one that came during his time in office, was in softwood lumber? In that circumstance, he and his government agreed to the voluntary approach. He and this government agreed to a 10 per cent voluntary surtax being put on by Canadians. That is how he has handled the voluntary approach situation.

Mr. Speaker: The question?

Mr. Grossman: That brings me back to the supplementary question. Does the Premier anticipate the same kind of voluntary approach in this case, accepting some sort of voluntary approach to avoid quotas, cutting back on Canadian exports of steel? Is he going to do that or not?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: We are very much against handling this issue the same way the federal government handled the softwood lumber issue. Surely the member understands that. That is why we are there. We are trying to anticipate these problems. I cannot guarantee success. I am not principally charged with the carriage of these responsibilities, but we are down there fighting for Ontario's interests.

Mr. Grossman: I am afraid the Premier cannot rewrite history in this case. Hansard will show that the Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology acknowledged that Ontario agreed to the voluntary restrictions and the voluntary arrangement put on Canadian softwood lumber. The federal government will confirm that. All the other provinces in Canada will confirm that. He cannot get around the fact that his government agreed to a voluntary submission --

Mr. Speaker: Order. Does the member have a final supplementary?

Mr. Grossman: The incontrovertible record will show that the Ontario government under the Premier's leadership agreed to the softwood lumber proposal. We demand an answer this afternoon from the Premier. Does he agree with the minister of trade that the Ontario government might well be able to avoid the Heinz legislation by agreeing voluntarily to restrain the export of Canadian steel?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I answered this several questions ago. The member has been repeating himself like a broken record for the past little while. I have said to him and I will say again --

Mr. Harris: Do you agree or do you not?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: Just a minute. Do members opposite want to listen? I said it has been in that mode for the past two or three years. Voluntary restraint has been exercised on this side of the border so as not to exacerbate the problem. That is what has been going on. The member has been describing the past.

Mr. Grossman: Are you going to do it in steel?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: That is what has been happening in the steel business, whether the member knows it or not. The steel industry and the federal and provincial governments have been working on that mode in consultations, and so far it has been working reasonably well. I cannot predict the future.

Mr. Grossman: Are you going to support that?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: We have been supporting it. Everybody has been supporting it, the federal government and the industry.

Mr. Grossman: You are going to support voluntary restrictions.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: The honourable member has a burr in his underpants.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order. There are too many interjections.

FREE TRADE

Mr. Rae: I also have some questions for Heinz's 58th variety, the Premier. While in Washington, he said he was there in support of Prime Minister Mulroney's trade initiative and in support of Prime Minister Mulroney. I take it that means the Premier is a supporter of the free trade initiative of the Prime Minister.

I wonder whether the Premier can tell us why he has the nerve to sing a completely different song in Washington, DC, when he is speaking to American senators, congressmen and trade representatives from the song he pretends to be singing when he is in Canada claiming to be speaking up for Ontario's interests. Why is the music so completely different?

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Hon. Mr. Peterson: The music is different only to one with a completely tin ear; that obviously applies to my friend opposite in this regard. The message I take here is the same message I take to the United States and other places. I want to make one point to my friend: I have some very serious disagreements with the Prime Minister of this country on a number of issues and the member opposite knows that, but I will never go to a foreign capital and try to embarrass the Prime Minister of this country.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order. The member for York South would like to ask a supplementary. We will just wait.

Mr. Rae: When it comes to embarrassment, the Prime Minister of Canada does not need any assistance from the Premier of Ontario. Even the most charitable observer would notice that. The only person the Premier has been embarrassing with his foreign travels is himself and the government of Ontario and nobody else. I think that is very clear.

All the rhetoric aside, can the Premier tell us as clearly as he can -- he chose to be on the phone with Michael Wilson rather than make a statement in this House with respect to what went on in Washington, so we have no idea what took place. All we know is the few odd scraps he was able to give the press after coming out of each meeting. We are entitled to more than that unless the visit was just a public relations exercise. The Premier kept saying it was not but it is hard to come to any other conclusion if he is not prepared to report to this Legislature with respect to what happened and if he has the kind of contempt for the legislative process that he is showing today.

Mr. McClellan: Just like Davis.

Mr. Rae: Just like Davis. It is the same attitude, the same corny, oily contempt for the legislative process.

Mr. Speaker: Question.

Mr. Rae: Can the Premier tell us whether he now is in favour of or opposed to the Prime Minister's trade initiative? Which is it? It is the most important question facing the people of this province and he still has not had the guts to come clean and tell us what his position is.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I do not know where the member has been. My friend asked me to cut out the rhetoric. That is a most extraordinary request coming from him today; it really is. I try to answer the questions of my friend opposite in good faith and he hoots and hollers that I am speaking too long, so he wants it cut off. Obviously, he is of the view that only he and his questions, and no one else, are of any worth in this House.

The member knows my position on this. I do not know how many times we have discussed it and we will continue to discuss it in this House. I said the very same things and expressed my concerns about the auto pact, the steel industry and protectionism in the United States These are things we are fighting for. At the same time, unlike my esteemed friends opposite, I do not overestimate our importance in going to Washington but I think it is one more voice and other people should be taking that responsibility as well.

I cannot report great gains, nor will I try. I have a sense of modesty unknown to some of my friends opposite in this regard, but I can tell the member that we are out there fighting for our interests.

Mr. Rae: I still think modesty is always in the eye of the beholder.

I go back to the Premier with a question. Let me try to understand the Premier's position while he was in Washington. I take it his position was that as far as Ontario is concerned he was taking a protectionist position, but as far as our exports are concerned he was taking a free trade position. If that is the position the Premier was advocating while in Washington, can he expect anybody down there to take him seriously? Can he expect anybody here to take him seriously unless he is prepared to have the same position in Toronto, Ottawa and Washington and to tell us what that one position is with respect to trade? What is it? Is the Premier in favour of the Prime Minister's initiative or is he opposed to the Prime Minister's initiative, which now is going on and is the most important question facing the people of the province?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: My honourable friend says we are not taken seriously. I do not agree with the member opposite in that regard. He will see that a number of decision-makers in the US were anxious to talk about some of the problems. I had an opportunity to explain a number of things with which some of them are not familiar: the size of the trading relationship, the importance on both sides, how well the auto pact has worked over the years, the unique nature of our relationship, the fact that we are not involved in subsidizing, the fact that even though we have a merchandise trade surplus on the service account it tends to balance out. It is a situation that has worked very well, and I do not want to see it jeopardized in any way.

The member asked my opinion of the Prime Minister's trade initiative. I have no idea what he wants out of the deal and neither does the member. The Prime Minister has not put it on the table. I can tell the member my concerns about the situation. I can tell him again if he wants to listen to them, but we have gone through that many times before. I am happy to do that with him any time, if he can control the members opposite in their howling and barking.

Mr. Rae: I cannot believe my ears. The Premier was engaged in a trade mission, allegedly on behalf of the people of this province. He said he did not want to go to Washington and express any disagreement with the Prime Minister of Canada in terms of the trade initiative he was taking. He now comes back to this Legislature and says, on behalf of the people, he has no idea of the purpose of that trade initiative or of what is going to come out of it.

What does the Premier think is going to come out of it? What is going to be satisfactory to him, what is he going along with and what is he going to do to make sure that the people of Ontario get an understanding with respect to the future of this province that is going to protect our jobs and protect our people?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: Unlike the member opposite, I am not an ideologue, I am not a theologian practising politics and I am not one who is prepared to hoot and holler about things, unless I know the full implications.

My friend opposite has started to hoot and holler about things he does not fully understand. I do not know and he does not know the substance of the Mulroney trade initiative. He does not know and I do not know, because it has not been done yet. Maybe the member does know; if he knows, he should tell us. I have told him the things that worry me for this country. I have told him about our fight to protect jobs.

My friend the leader of the Opposition (Mr. Grossman) has bought it wholesale on various occasions. When he is standing with Mr. Mulroney, he throws his arm around his shoulder and says, "We support all this." Then, when Mr. Mulroney tumbles in the polls, he runs away and develops some other theory of trade. We have counted six or seven different theories of trade so far. Our view has been consistently in defence of Ontario's and Canada's interest.

Mr. Rae: Let me make sure I have this straight. I have a question for the Premier, by way of supplementary, I think, to the answers I have been getting, although it is very hard to tell. Have I understood the Premier's position correctly? He does not know what the Prime Minister's position is and he does not know what the Prime Minister's trade initiative is. That is the position he went down to Washington to indicate his support for, when he went down. Is that an accurate description of what he has been telling me in the past 10 minutes?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: It is not at all an accurate description, but it was very amusing. The member has chosen not to look at the situation as we discussed it.

We were not in the process of discussing the trade initiative, because it is in other people's hands and it is going on. We were looking at other situations, the current irritants that are going on. We discussed acid rain and a number of other things that are problems between our two countries. I feel a little more optimistic than I did in the past that there may be some movement in the US. We were working on all those things, and in that sense, it was a constructive meeting.

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Mr. Rae: I guess one had to be there to appreciate what was going on at those meetings. I think the position that the Premier has indicated today, and I say this in all seriousness to him, is an embarrassment to the people of this province.

Can the Premier tell us why he is unable to answer the most fundamental question with respect to free trade that the people of this province want an answer to? After all his discussions and consultations in Washington, is he for or against the initiative on which the Prime Minister of Canada is taking the people of Canada for the next six months?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: The member is right. One probably did have to be there to understand it. He has the joy that he will never be there to discuss these issues; so he does not ever have to worry about it.

It is infinitely more complex than the member will let on in the circumstances. He knows my views on the trade initiative. I do not know how many times we have put them in this House. We will continue to discuss it. The Prime Minister has entered into a discussion. We are watching that go on day by day. We are expressing our concerns to the negotiators and we will wait to see what comes out at the end of the pipe.

We are taking a rigorous view of the situation in defence of our interests and we will wait to see what happens. That is where we are. Our discussion, as I said in Washington, was premised on the fact that other people are handling discussions at this point. We were not there to settle that issue. We were looking at other issues and I think we made some progress.

Mr. Grossman: If the Premier needs more time to answer the freer trade question, I will be happy to give him a moment or two before I ask my question. Would he like to answer the question about whether he supports the initiative?

Mr. Speaker: New question.

STEEL EXPORTS

Mr. Grossman: My question is to the Premier. It is a shame he did not ask Michael Wilson during his conversation what the federal initiative was. Then he could have answered the question. He had him on the phone.

I want to get back to the question of the Premier's ability to defend the Ontario steelworkers. The Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology (Mr. O'Neil), in responding to the question on steel, said a voluntary approach has worked in the past and such an approach will work in the future. Does the Premier agree with that statement?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: It has worked so far. We cannot anticipate for sure what will happen in the future. The softwood situation is completely different, at this stage at least. We want to avoid getting into the same kind of decision that was made. That is why we are so worried about the precedent created in the softwood situation. It could serve as a model for other kinds of decisions in other commodity groups.

The member will be aware that other commodity groups could potentially be under pressure, and we are trying to prevent that in the future. It was his friends in Ottawa who made the decision on the softwood that we do not think was in the national interest at all. Therefore, I cannot predict with certainty what the future will bring or who will bring in what piece of legislation. I am trying to prevent that kind of thing.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order. Many members wanted to ask questions earlier. Do they still want to ask questions?

Mr. Grossman: I want to explain why this is relevant. There are two stages here: the voluntary stage and then the final point at which the Americans take action. On softwood, at the voluntary stage, the Premier joined in the Canadian offer to accept a 10 per cent voluntary tax on Canadian softwood. That is a fact. This is relevant because we may be approaching that now in the steel industry, the voluntary stage of the trade action. His minister says it will work in the future too. We must know from the Premier whether he is intending to consider accepting a voluntary restraint in steel as he did in lumber. We are entitled to know that.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: It is a completely different situation.

Mr. Grossman: It is exactly the same.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: With great respect -- it is a hard point to make with him, because he has asked that about eight or nine times -- the member is wrong. I do not know how to explain this to him. I will send over a group of lawyers and officials to explain this to him. I will be happy to explain to him behind the podium, after question period, any time he likes. Perhaps the member for Muskoka (Mr. F. S. Miller) can explain it to him.

The softwood situation started with a countervail action; that discussion started after legal proceedings had been launched. That has not happened in this particular case; it is completely different. I do not think my friend understands legally what is going on. It is a good thing he has chosen to lead his party rather than practice law because he would never make it practising law.

In this country they have been exercising voluntary restraint on shipments for the past couple of years; that is how they have chosen to handle it. There is no agreement and no federal legislation in the United States with respect to steel at the present time.

Mr. Grossman: I know that. Will the Premier rule it out in the future?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I cannot tell the member what will happen in the US. Perhaps he is bright enough to do it.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order. Will the member resume his seat. There are many members who would like to ask questions.

PAPER MILL

Mr. Pouliot: I have a question for the Minister of the Environment regarding the ongoing saga at Kimberly-Clark. It is my understanding that the minister has had nothing short of a parade of bureaucrats in an attempt to solve what has been going on for more than three weeks at Kimberly-Clark. We are talking about 1,600 jobs and we are also talking about a very acute pollution problem. Does the minister care to favour us with an update this afternoon? Where is the situation at the present time?

Hon. Mr. Bradley: I thank the member for the question. I know he has discussed this with people in his area and I have attempted to keep him up to date on these situations.

I assure the member that discussions have taken place and are continuing and I hope this matter can be resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned. As the member is aware, my concern as Minister of the Environment is to ensure that a control order is in place that protects the environment. I know that the member for the area, who has been confronted on a daily basis by people in his own riding with these and other circumstances, certainly shares that concern. He is probably more intimately involved on a daily basis and more sensitive to that issue. I assure him that we are working very hard on it. We have had a number of individuals assisting us to come up with what I hope he and I will consider to be a good resolution.

Mrs. Grier: I think all members of this House in addition to all the people in Terrace Bay are very concerned about these ongoing meetings and discussions. The letter to Bob Carman from Mr. Lavallet of Kimberly-Clark last week talks about the six months during which they have been trying to negotiate a control order.

I would like to hear from the minister why there has been no policy and no strategy on the part of the government for resolving this very political question of how to clean up the environment and how to preserve the jobs and why in the absence of that strategy and in the face of that political problem there appears to have been an abdication of the political responsibility and a turning over of the problem to a committee of deputy ministers.

Can the minister explain what role he and the Premier (Mr. Peterson) have played to resolve this problem and why it has taken so long to resolve?

Hon. Mr. Bradley: I think the member for Lake Nipigon, who asked the original question and who represents the riding, has to look at things in the total perspective and thus understands that it is not an easily solved problem. Precipitate action could have resulted in consequences such that this member would be standing up in the House asking me exactly the opposite question to what she implies in her question today.

We have been working very hard on it. A number of people have come forward, as the member is aware, with some innovative suggestions and have provided some excellent background in this regard. I am as anxious as the member for Lake Nipigon to see this matter resolved to the satisfaction of all. The kind of action she might have wanted might have precipitated results that she, and I am sure many of her colleagues, would not want to see.

Mr. Wildman: Balderdash.

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Hon. Mr. Bradley: The member for Algoma says "Balderdash." I think if he were privy to the discussions that are taking place and to the same circumstances the member for Lake Nipigon is aware of, he would not come to that conclusion. However, I can tell the member for Lakeshore (Mrs. Grier), as I told the member for Lake Nipigon, that I hope this matter can be --

Mr. Speaker: Order. New question.

AGRICULTURAL EXPORTS

Mr. Stevenson: I have a question of the Premier. What is the current stage of the countervail action taken by the National Cattlemen's Association?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: To be perfectly honest, I cannot tell the honourable member. I do not know what stage it is at in the proceedings.

Mr. Stevenson: I do not quite understand that answer. Canada exported $820 million of meat to the United States last year. Ontario exports $180 million worth of meat to the United States. In addition, we export live animals, $158 million from Ontario alone to the United States. The National Cattlemen's Association in the US currently has a countervail action against Canadian exports of meat, which is in front of the International Trade Commission right now. Does the Premier mean to say he went to Washington on a trade mission and yet he was not briefed and has no idea of what that issue is all about? If he does not, he should get up and admit it.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Stevenson: If he does, he should tell us what the impact of a positive outcome of that countervail will be.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I appreciate the member telling me everything he knows about agriculture in 30 seconds. There is a large number of countervails going on against Canada at present. He asked me at what stage it was at and what was the decision. I did not know the answer to that. I was forthcoming with him in that regard and I told him so.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Once again, there are other members who want to ask questions. I will just wait until the cross-fire stops. The member for Windsor-Riverside, new question.

NURSING HOME BEDS

Mr. D. S. Cooke: I have a question of the Minister of Health. On July 9, 1985, my leader asked the following question to the Premier (Mr. Peterson): "Is he" -- the Premier -- "prepared to live up to the previous commitment that there would be a moratorium on the expansion of private-profit medicine in Ontario?" The answer was: "The answer is yes. I restate our very strong commitment to a public system...."

In view of that answer, why did the Minister of Health change the policy that had been put in place by the Ministry of Health and allocate 1,000 nursing home beds, 600 of which have been allocated in the past few weeks and 400 more which are to come in the next couple of weeks, at a cost of $17.9 million to the people of this province?

Hon. Mr. Elston: The honourable member would want to indicate very clearly that although there have been announcements of nursing home beds, in some areas those have gone out to private but not-for-profit organizations. I do not think the member would want to try to indicate that was not the case.

I know his colleague the member for Ottawa Centre (Ms. Gigantes) would want to say we awarded 35 beds to the Elisabeth Bruyère Health Centre and 35 beds were awarded to the Woodroffe Centre, which are both not-for-profit organizations. I know his colleagues would also want to say St. Luke's Place, a not-for-profit organization, has also received some beds to accommodate the needs of the people of those various communities. I think they would want to make that clear.

I will also, however, indicate quite clearly that when we have answers to calls for proposals that clearly demonstrate the superiority of the service being provided under the conditions of the call, we will give those to the person, the people or the groups of people that are most superior. We will continue to do that for the benefit of the people in that area. Under those circumstances, we have also allocated some beds to the profit organizations.

Mr. D. S. Cooke: I will not say the minister is misleading the members of the Legislature, but he is coming very close, giving the impression that all these beds are going to not-for-profit operators. The fact is that the vast majority of these beds are going to the private sector. He knows it and we know it. His ministry is doing nothing to encourage the not-for-profit sector to be able to come into the system. He is not doing anything and he knows it.

Why is it that he has nearly $18 million to spend on nursing home beds, more institutions, and the total amount of money he has spent so far in the integrated homemaker service to keep people out of institutions is only $20 million?

Hon. Mr. Elston: First of all, the honourable gentleman is really quite wrong. In fact, he would want to indicate quite clearly, I am sure, that he was mistaken when he put his premise in front of us. When we have issued proposal calls with respect to the allocation of new nursing home beds, we have indicated quite clearly we would be assisting not-for-profit organizations to apply, and we have encouraged those people to apply for those beds.

I have just indicated three such organizations that actually did win those proposal calls because their programming was superior to that of any others in the competition. We will continue to do that when those programs are made available and known to us. We will continue to help demonstrate that those people have a role to play in the provision of service for the community.

One of the reasons we have spent $20 million is that we are implementing the integrated homemaker program. It is not a program that was forthcoming from the previous people, but in two short fiscal years, my colleague the Minister of Community and Social Services (Mr. Sweeney) has indicated we are expanding it. Beginning in February, I believe it is, there will be some 10 new communities that will receive the benefit of that.

Thus, we are moving right along in providing the continuum of care that I am sure the member would want to support.

STEEL EXPORTS

Mr. Grossman: I have another question for the Premier. We have established that he agreed with his minister that voluntary restraints on steel might be something he would entertain. We have established that he knew nothing whatever about the countervail action being taken on Ontario beef.

Canadian steel now accounts for about 3.6 per cent to 3.8 per cent of the American market. The proposals are that the Americans might want that taken down to three per cent. I am sure he would know, having spent the past couple of days on steel, how many jobs such a reduction would cost Ontario. Can he share that figure with us?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: The figures were up to about five per cent last month. Originally, the Americans were going at the historical average of about 2.4 per cent; they want to see it brought down. Nothing has been agreed to, and I do not believe that anything formally should be agreed to. That is the point of the whole exercise. What I said to the Leader of the Opposition was that the industry has been exercising voluntary restraint over a long period of time.

Every point, in terms of the domestic market in the United States, is about a million tons, as I recall. Theoretically, if Canada is allowed to compete in an unrestricted market, we would do much better than that. Thus, we can say that the potential for access to the United States in competing fairly, as I believe we do compete fairly, is unlimited. I cannot tell the member how that is going to settle out and what the job effect will be in that situation.

Mr. Grossman: Let us not quibble. The Premier said he met Senator Heinz a year ago. We warned the Premier three months ago about the pending legislation. He himself heard in Washington the other day that they are thinking about cutting our exports into the United States. He was briefed by the ambassador in Washington. His minister has told us he has been preparing the Premier for this trip for several months.

My simple question, and surely the Premier must know by now, is this: if they cut back our share of the market by one per cent, how many jobs will that cost us in Ontario? He surely must know the answer to that question.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: The member is talking in hypotheticals. Why does he not ask me if they cut it back 10 per cent, 50 per cent, 30 per cent or 20 per cent?

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Mr. Grossman: The Premier did not have any clue what the answer was on softwood. He should not think; he ought to know.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: We did. We told the member exactly. I recall the discussions in this House about it, because we had a pretty clear calculation of the potential job losses, given certain theoretical parameters.

What the member wants to do, because he frequently manipulates the facts to suit his own purposes, is create some situation that at this point has not developed. We are fighting for Canadian access into the United States market to the best extent we possibly can. We are trying to understand the realities there so we can deal with this problem in a thoughtful way.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I will just wait.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Mr. Reville: I have a question for the Minister of Housing. The government has responded to the problem of homelessness in the same way it responds to other problems: it set up a task force. The task force has now reported. We have a lovely document called A Place to Call Home. Is the minister going to continue to duck the problem of homelessness and refer this to an advisory committee, the usual successor to a task force, or is the minister going to implement the recommendations at an early date?

Hon. Mr. Curling: The honourable member made the point that we are ducking it, when we have faced the issue head on by appointing Dale Bairstow to bring forward recommendations. I cannot understand how he can regard it as ducking the issue. The manner in which we conduct our business is a very consultative manner. We get professional advice and set up a task force and advisory committee to look at Mr. Bairstow's report. As soon as that has been done, I will present the recommendations to cabinet and move forward to solve the problem.

Mr. Reville: I suppose if a homeless person were able to get enough copies of this report, he might get some shelter. The minister has said it is going off to an advisory committee, which is not surprising. What does he make of the fact that some of the recommendations in the report are intended for implementation this winter and as early as February 1, 1987? In view of the minister's answer, can we look to the government for any credible action at all on homelessness?

Hon. Mr. Curling: The report tells us how urgent the issue is. Of course, this should have been dealt with years ago, I presume, by the lackadaisical, uninterested, previous administration. Mr. Bairstow's report states we should implement it immediately. However, I would not like to implement a recommendation when we have not thought it through properly and may have to be retroactive in our process. The advisory group will come forth with its recommendation within five or six weeks and we will proceed thereafter.

AGRICULTURAL EXPORTS

Mr. Stevenson: Now that we have established that the beef countervail was not on the agenda in Washington and nothing was done to assist Ontario farmers on that issue, we would like to know what case the Premier put forward on behalf of Ontario farmers with respect to the intense lobbying efforts by the United States soybean industry?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I regret that agriculture was not one of the topics we were discussing in specifics but rather in very general terms, about the US farm bill and the general state of the farm economy. We were not going after these things one by one.

Mr. Stevenson: Canada exports $10 billion worth of agricultural and food products around the world. Ontario exports almost $2 billion, more than 80 per cent of which goes to the US. We have tried for many years to get canola oil into the US market. Just two years ago, the first exports went in there. Procter and Gamble, after two years, is now exporting 100,000 tons of canola oil to the US market. The previous government and this government are spending millions of dollars to put canola in Ontario as an alternative crop and it will be a major crop in this province in five years.

Why was the Premier not sticking up for the exports of canola oil, when the US soybean industry is doing everything possible to close the door we have worked for years to open?

Hon. Mr. Peterson: Again, I appreciate my friend's explanation of the agricultural question. It is a mite pedantic of him, but he is entitled to stand up and tell us everything he knows about agriculture.

There are many other things we ship to the United States as well. Why could he not stand up and talk about lumber, lead, zinc, nickel, hydroelectricity or many other products that we are shipping across the border? I am sure my friend is aware of this, that there are many things we export, not only agricultural products.

Many initiatives have been taken on behalf of all of them. My friend should reflect on his question and whether it should be handled on that basis. I think it is really a silly kind of thing to suggest at this point. The Minister of Agriculture and Food (Mr. Riddell) has stood up for the farmers as has no one else in the history of this province.

Mr. Stevenson: He was not in Washington; the Premier was in Washington. Tweedledum and Tweedledumber are looking after our exports.

Mr. Speaker: Order. The member for Durham-York has asked the question and a supplementary. Other members would like to ask questions. The member for Lake Nipigon.

SOMMET DES PAYS FRANCOPHONES

M. Pouliot: J'aimerais adresser une question au premier ministre. Le premier ministre se souviendra que lors du premier sommet des pays francophones, tenu à Paris, Pan dernier, le ministre délégué aux Affaires francophones (M. Grandmaître), ici en Ontario, y était à titre de simple observateur.

Par contre, la province de Québec, ainsi que celle du Nouveau-Brunswick, en vertu de la francophonie qui, chez eux, est très présente, avait négocié un statut particulier. Le premier ministre est sans doute au courant du fait que le deuxième sommet aura lieu au Canada, en fait à Québec, I'an prochain. Le premier ministre entend-il négocier un statut particulier pour les 500,000 francophones de l'Ontario?

L'hon. M. Peterson: Le député de Lac Nipigon a raison. Lors du dernier sommet de la francophonie, à Paris, nous étions représentés par le ministre délégué aux Affaires franco-phones. II faisait partie de la délégation fédérale, et comme le député le sait, la province de Québec et la province du Nouveau-Brunswick avaient un statut différent.

En ce moment, on ne sait pas exactement quel sera le rôle de [`Ontario au prochain sommet de la francophonie, qui aura lieu à Québec, cette année-en automne, je crois.

Enfin, on discute de ce sujet avec le gouverne-ment fédéral. Je no peux pas dire, maintenant, quel en sera exactement le résultat, mais je peux dire que [`Ontario sera largement représenté à ce sommet.

M. Pouliot: Étant donna ces deux choses: qu'évidemment nous sommes 500,000 en Ontario, et qu'aussi, le congrès se déroulera au Québec, est-ce que le premier ministre envisage de définir ou d'offrir à la population des services ou des occasions spéciales pour marquer l'anniversaire du deuxième sommet de la francophonie ou des pays francophones?

L'hon. M. Peterson: Je regrette de ne pas pouvoir dire au député exactement ce que l`Ontario peut faire, mais je comprends, comme mon ami le comprend, que nous avons beaucoup de francophones ici, et je crois qu'il est important de jouer un rôle d'importance à ce sommet.

Il y a plusieurs francophones ici, dans cette Législature, qui s'intéresseraient à ce sujet. Je crois que c'est un sujet dont nous devons discuter ensemble, tous les députés francophones de la Législature de tous les partis, afin de décider du rôle de l`Ontario, et après ça, on devra en discuter avec le gouvernement fédéral. Malheureusement, je ne sais pas, en ce moment, quel sera le rôle de l'Ontario, mais je peux dire que ce sera un rôle important.

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HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION

Mr. Dean: I have a question for the Premier. More than three months ago, I asked the Premier when we could expect a decision on the Red Hill Creek Expressway in my riding in the region of Hamilton-Wentworth. At that time, the Premier assured this Legislature that we could expect a decision in "the not-too-distant future."

Will the Premier give us his definition of "the not-too-distant future"? Will he tell us when we can expect a decision on this vital project and clear up some of the confusion he has caused by giving us his assurance that his government will build this desperately needed transportation corridor in Hamilton-Wentworth? It has been thoroughly studied. It was approved by the consolidated hearings board in October 1985.

Mr. Speaker: The question has been asked.

Hon. Mr. Peterson: I am sorry I cannot answer that question; the time has expired. However, let me say to my honourable friend, if you will permit me, Mr. Speaker, that this will be answered shortly.

PETITION

AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE

Mr. Swart: Spontaneously, a number of petitions are arriving on my desk. This one is addressed to the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and is signed by 80 people. It reads:

"We, the undersigned, beg leave to petition the parliament of Ontario as follows:

"That government auto insurance be implemented to: stop excessive premiums and escalating rates; prevent cancellation or refusal to renew insurance; stop rates which victimize young male drivers with good driving records; stop the penalizing of all drivers in a household because of one driver's poor driving record; stop discriminatory rate increases and to ensure that all drivers can afford insurance they are legally required to have."

INTRODUCTION OF BILLS

MINING TAX AMENDMENT ACT

Hon. Mr. Nixon moved first reading of Bill 189, An Act to amend the Mining Tax Act.

Motion agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Nixon: The bill contains the structural changes to implement the mining tax reform proposals that were announced in the October budget. The changes will reduce the tax liability for most of the mining operators. This will be achieved by replacing the present multiple rate tax bracket structure with a single tax rate of 20 per cent applicable to all profit levels in excess of a basic level of exemption; increasing the basic profit exemption level from $250,000 to $500,000; and establishing the operator rather than the mine as the fundamental unit of liability for tax.

The provisions of the bill have been designed after considerable consultation with the industry, and on the whole, the bill has its support. The bill also provides for administrative reform by simplifying and improving the provisions under the act. To this end, many of the administrative provisions of the Corporations Tax Act will be adopted, thereby enhancing consistency with other Ontario taxing statutes.

It is proposed that these reform measures become effective on April 1, 1986, in line with the commitment made in the October 1985 budget. In order for the mining industry to benefit from these reform proposals, I hope the bill will be enacted before the House adjourns.

MENTAL HEALTH AMENDMENT ACT

Hon. Mr. Elston moved first reading of Bill 190, An Act to amend the Mental Health Act.

Motion agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Elston: The bill that has just been introduced was the subject matter of a statement I delivered earlier in the day.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

COURTS OF JUSTICE AMENDMENT ACT

Mr. Ward moved, on behalf of Hon. Mr. Scott, second reading of Bill 161, An Act to amend the Courts of Justice Act, 1984.

Mr. Ward: I will make some brief introductory comments. Bill 161 is An Act to amend the Courts of Justice Act. It creates the position of a senior judge for the unified family court. It has further amendments which correct some erroneous cross-references in the original legislation. It also makes some substantive amendments with regard to the role of the official guardian's reports and provides the express authorization for the renewal of old writs of execution.

I would like to speak briefly to three of the more substantive aspects of the bill.

First, with regard to the creation of a senior judgeship for the unified family court, as the work load of the unified family court has grown in its nine and a half years of existence and as the judicial and support staff has grown, it has become apparent that there is a need for a senior judge on site to direct the judicial operations of the court and to provide a single source of direction for the administrative staff of the court.

With regard to the official guardian's reports, section 125 of the Courts of Justice Act now requires the official guardian to do an investigation and report to the court in every divorce action in which there is a child of the marriage, regardless of whether there is a claim made for custody of or access to the child or whether there is any problem or difficulty relating to custody or access. In recent years, the volume of this case load has increased to 14,000 cases annually. The amendments to the act no longer require that an automatic official guardian's report will have to be filed.

I look forward to the comments of other members of the Legislature, and I hope we have speedy passage of second reading.

Mr. O'Connor: I can assure the parliamentary assistant that as far as this party is concerned, this bill will have speedy passage; today, if possible.

As indicated by the previous speaker, most of the sections of the bill are of a housekeeping nature and are necessary. They require little explanation other than as contained in the bill itself.

I would like to make a comment or two about the one substantive section, section 6. Section 6 now provides that in a divorce action, a Children's Law Reform Act action or a family law action before the Ontario courts, what had previously been necessary in each and every one of those cases where children were involved was the production of an official guardian's report and presentation of that report to the court.

In about 90 per cent of all uncontested divorce and family law cases, the question of custody and access is amicably resolved between the parties. Notwithstanding that fact, it was necessary to file the divorce papers with the official guardian's office and have someone from that office conduct an investigation of both parties, usually by mail if it were uncontested, and thereafter produce a report -- usually a one-line, two-line or three-line report -- to the court before the divorce could be granted or the matter could proceed to court.

Because of the ever-increasing volume of divorces and separations in the province over the past few years, the backlog of investigations has become almost unmanageable, to the point where even in the simplest and most straightforward divorce cases, if there are children involved, the delay period is up to six, eight and 10 weeks. This is completely unnecessary in most cases where the parties have agreed to all the issues between them.

Thus, we welcome a section that now does away with the necessity for an automatic official guardian's report and provides that only in a case where there is a contest, where there is an issue between the parties as to custody and access to the children, should the matter be referred to the official guardian's office for an investigation.

This reduces the time to obtain a divorce in the standard and usual uncontested case by between six and 10 weeks, something that will be welcomed by the many dozens of thousands of couples who go through uncontested, simple divorces in this province on an annual basis. This section is long overdue. It is one with which we can agree entirely and will support on all the stages of the bill.

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Ms. Gigantes: I will speak to the bill; I will not debate it. The position of my party is that this bill should be given quick approval. We are in support of it in all its many sections for many of the reasons that have been outlined by the previous speakers.

Mr. Ward: Before second reading, I just want to indicate that I have one small amendment which I believe has been circulated to the two critics. I ask that we move briefly to committee of the whole House after second reading of Bill 161 to clear that up.

Motion agreed to.

Bill ordered for committee of the whole House.

House in committee of the whole.

COURTS OF JUSTICE AMENDMENT ACT

Consideration of Bill 161, An Act to amend the Courts of Justice Act, 1984.

Sections 1 to 5, inclusive, agreed to.

Mr. Chairman: Mr. Ward moves that the bill be amended by adding thereto the following section:

"5a. The said act is amended by adding thereto the following section:

"75a. Where no provision is made for an appeal from an order of the provincial court (family division), an appeal lies to the district court."

Mr. Chairman: Does the parliamentary assistant have comments to make on the amendment?

Mr. Ward: No. I think it is self-explanatory. It just clarifies the appeal process.

Motion agreed to.

Sections 6 to 11, inclusive, agreed to.

Bill, as amended, ordered to be reported.

On motion by Hon. Mr. Nixon, the committee of the whole House reported one bill with a certain amendment.

PAY EQUITY ACT / LOI DE 1986 SUR L'ÉQUITÉ SALARIALE

Mr. Ward moved, on behalf of Hon. Mr. Scott, second reading of Bill 154, An Act to provide for Pay Equity in the Broader Public Sector and in the Private Sector.

M. Ward, au nom de l'hon. M. Scott, propose la deuxième lecture du projet de loi 154, Loi portant établissement de l'équité salariale dans le secteur parapublic et dans le secteur privé.

Mr. Ward: I am pleased today to move second reading of Bill 154. The importance of this legislation cannot be overestimated. This government has been unwavering in its commitment to the principle of pay equity, to the principle that wages cannot and should not be based on a worker's gender.

Ontario's work force has seen remarkable changes in the past few decades. In just 20 years, the full-time female work force has almost doubled to 44 per cent of the total work force. Within 10 years, more than half of the full-time work force in Ontario will be women. These women, these two million workers, are not now and perhaps never were secondary wage earners. In fact, almost half of them are the sole support of themselves and their families. Almost 90 per cent of single-parent families in Ontario are headed by women who need and want to work.

The face of the work force in this province is dramatically different as a result of the tremendous influx of women. One would naturally expect that the earning capacity of this segment of the labour force would have made similar inroads. This has not, however, been the case. The difference in wages between men and women has remained disturbingly constant.

In the past 17 years, the wage gap has dropped only four per cent, from 40 per cent to 36 per cent. It is a problem that time alone has not cured. In spite of women's achievements and their growing numbers, their economic status lags behind. A specific, strong remedy is needed. The legislation this government has introduced will help to narrow this wage gap significantly. It confronts the issue squarely with a well-defined purpose: to remove gender-based pay discrimination in the private and broader public sectors.

It is true that gender-based pay discrimination is not the only reason for the wage gap. Differences in hours worked, experience, unionization and so on are all important factors in wage disparities as well. A number of different strategies are required before the gap can be closed entirely. Education, training, employment equity and child care will all be part of the solution. The role of pay equity is critical. This measure is the only means of addressing the issue of gender-based pay discrimination in the private and broader public sectors and the impact of this discrimination on pay practices.

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The Canadian census lists 500 job occupations. The vast majority of working women are clustered in just 20 of those occupations, primarily in the clerical, sales and service sectors of the economy. The jobs they do are labelled "women's work." We can trace much of the wage gap to this occupational segregation. The work that women do has been traditionally undervalued. When women first began their entry into the labour force, they were hired for tasks similar to those they performed at home: domestic chores, nursing the sick and caring for children. This labour was not highly valued at home and, therefore, employers paid low wages for it outside the home as well.

Women's wages have also suffered from another historical attitude, that women are secondary wage earners and do not need to work. The statistics I pointed out earlier contradict this assumption, but the salaries that women are paid today continue to reflect those prejudices of the past.

Before we developed the legislation under discussion, we consulted with many groups and individuals. We talked to women, labour and business. We held a series of public consultations all around the province and formed special advisory groups to focus on the issue of pay equity. The process we undertook reinforced our belief in the need for the legislation. We heard repeatedly throughout discussions, meetings and public presentations that women's work has been undervalued.

It is still the case sometimes that men doing work that requires less education, training and responsibility are paid more than women doing work that is more demanding, requires more education and has more responsibility. Some people in this province continue to be sceptical that this situation exists. Let me give a few examples.

The city of Windsor produced a job evaluation report in 1984 that showed some remarkable discrepancies. Basing their job evaluation system on point factors for such things as job knowledge, mental ability, manual skills, human relationships and so on, they came up with the following finding. A clerk supervisor in parks and recreation received 485 points for his job and earned $13.81 an hour. A secretary to the city clerk received 605 points and earned $12.21 an hour. In other words, she had a total of 120 points more than he did but she took home $1.60 an hour less.

There are many other such cases, all well documented. At one Ontario university, for instance, a female clerk is paid $16,000 annually. Her job requires a grade 12 education plus business or secretarial training. In contrast, a groundskeeper employed by the same university earns $20,000 a year. His qualifications include a grade 10 education and a driver's licence. This case pointedly illustrates the need for pay equity.

The female employee has more education and more training than the male employee and, I am sure it can be argued, more responsibility, yet she is paid $4,000 less per year than he is.

Case after documented case confirms the problem, and the problem refuses to disappear. These are the kinds of situations that pay equity legislation seeks to address.

Equal pay in 1951 required that an employer pay the same wages to men and women for the same work. Pay equity in 1987 will require that an employer pay the same wages to men and women who are doing dissimilar work, if that work is determined to be of equal value to the employer. It does not make sense to single out selected groups of workers to receive lower wages based not on the value of the work they do but on the fact that they are of a particular sex. In other words, women do not fully share in the opportunities that employment provides.

It is no longer true to say that women do not need the money, that they are moving up the corporate ladder and their wages will increase accordingly, or that they are now being treated on an equal footing with men and it is only a matter of time before they start to earn as much. The statistics cited earlier contradict all these arguments. The time has come to ensure that gender discrimination has no place in our society or in our work places. Pay equity legislation will provide that assurance.

It might seem strange now that not so long ago a man and a woman could sit in the same office or at the same work bench or in the same production line, do the same work and still take home different amounts in their pay packets at the end of the week, but that was happening. That is why equal pay for equal work legislation was introduced in 1951. That proposal was preceded by the same kind of debate we hear today about pay equity. It is highly doubtful that any of us would willingly return to that earlier era, to a time of such obvious injustice.

Pay equity is a natural extension of the concept of equal pay for equal work, which has been the law in Ontario for 36 years. In 1951, we overcame a historic inequity in pay practices. In 1987, our achievement will be no less significant. This legislation is a serious commitment to reform. The work of the women of this province is valuable not only to the businesses and institutions they work for, but also to society as a whole. When pay equity is established, their contribution will begin to be recognized and rewarded.

We believe pay equity legislation will help to close the wage gap, alleviate job ghettos and, in the final analysis, provide all Ontarians, men and women, with a very real sense that they are all being treated fairly in the work place. Working women in Ontario are going to gain in a practical way from the new pay equity policy. It will put more money in their pockets and help them to better their standards of living. For the thousands of women who are the only breadwinners in their families, this legislation will offer welcome relief.

Since the bill was introduced in the House last November, there has been considerable political debate about specific features of the legislation, but this has not managed to obscure the basic consensus among all three parties in this House, namely, that the pay equity legislation is essential and must be approved as quickly as possible.

This government continues to honour women's rights to true economic equality. We share that goal, that conviction and that vision of the future. We are all aware of the urgent need for this highly important legislation. It is my hope the bill can proceed through the legislative process quickly so that we can start making pay equity a reality for Ontario's working women.

Ms. Fish: I am pleased to rise today in this debate to indicate my party's support in principle for this bill and the similar wish we have to see this piece of legislation move to committee to enable members of the public and interest groups concerned with the matter to come forward and give us the benefit of their thoughts on the particulars of the legislation proposed by the Attorney General (Mr. Scott).

I would, however, like to make a few comments in a general way on the legislation before seeing it carried on. Perhaps the most important initial statement would be with respect to the uncertainty with which we now are confronted in the fit between this legislation as proposed and Bill 105 as introduced by the Minister of Labour (Mr. Wrye) and amended by the standing committee on administration of justice, a bill that deals with pay equity proposals for the public sector.

We on this side are particularly saddened at the government's intransigence in refusing to proceed with Bill 105, which was the subject of many weeks of hearings and deputations, with many interest groups and members of the public coming before the committee in good faith to make proposals and comments on the mechanisms in the bill, the coverage of the bill, details with respect to payment of funds and the rate at which adjustments would be made, only to find ourselves in a circumstance wherein, on responding in good faith to those concerns, which had the effect, we would argue, of substantially improving the bill, the government has not been prepared to proceed but has left it in limbo.

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That concern has been compounded by the fact that, in introducing Bill 154, the specific subject of today's comments, many of the areas that were the subject of critical submissions from the public on Bill 105 and many of the areas which, as a result of those comments, were amended and changed in Bill 105, have been completely disregarded by the government in Bill 154. The same thresholds are introduced, the same mechanisms used and the same triggers put in place, on which we have already spent many weeks of hearings from the public and interest groups; the committee has expressed its wish already to see them substantially changed and, we consider, substantially improved.

I note that the areas that were changed in Bill 105 and that we on this side of the House were deeply disappointed to see were not attended to by the government in bringing forward Bill 154 -- areas, by the way, that we intend to see amended in Bill 154 -- speak to some fairly obvious goals of the legislation or of any legislation that should be put forward; namely, simplicity, economy and ready understanding on the part of those who are purported to be protected by the very legislation that comes forward.

Overly complicated, complex, cumbersome and difficult to understand requirements, bases or mechanisms of implementation do not serve anyone well. Surely, as we take yet another round of government legislation on pay equity, we will be able to learn from what we have already heard and will be able to see some substantial improvement to those very things in any legislation that proceeds.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that many of the same deputants who came before the standing committee on the administration of justice to speak to these points on Bill 105 will be before us again as they see the government repeating or attempting to repeat many of the same problem clauses and problem requirements in Bill 154.

I also note that this legislation or any other legislation clearly forms only one element in an overall attempt to redress and change within our society the opportunities for women who are working outside the home. I use that phrasing fairly carefully, because there has been a tendency occasionally to suggest that women who remain in the home are not working, that it is only those who are out of the home who have worked.

In fact, women work in the home, but very rarely is a value placed upon that work which is substantial and traceable. Unfortunately, that work, often caring for the home and, most important, caring for the children of the home, the next generation, wins no value as work in the home. Similarly, it has not been valued when women have worked outside the home, particularly in the same fields.

We can look at the sorry conditions of those who are in the child care and the early child education fields, the very areas where in this chamber we speak often about the importance of the next generation, about the treasure for all of us our children are, about the family values we hold dear, one of which family values is the care and raising of our children. Yet society as a whole continues to resist a high evaluation of that very work, which is commonly classed as women's work, whether that work is performed in the home or outside the home.

It is with some considerable disappointment, therefore, that we find that Bill 154, as it is before us -- and we will deal with this at a later date in clause-by-clause, I am sure -- appears to remain completely silent on the issue of that systemic gender discrimination and pay inequity for women who have been doing traditional women's work outside the home, notably in child care.

We look forward to hearing the government's proposals through anticipated amendments to this legislation, the mechanisms it will bring forward to correct that and to ensure that one of the first and most obvious areas of gender discrimination and pay inequity will be resolved in any legislation the government proposes to bring to conclusion and adoption in this House.

However, other areas clearly require initiatives and action and must be seen as companion steps necessary to appreciate the context in which any proposed pay equity legislation is addressed. They range from issues of pension reform through educational initiatives for the young men and women of our society, skills retraining and re-entry into the workplace and human resource development, to the broader question of policy in the child care area, not just for those who work in the area but also for the availability of child care within our society.

In those areas, we will certainly be watching carefully the initiatives and noting singularly the lack of initiatives from the government benches in providing the necessary companion initiatives to make genuinely workable any pay equity legislation for the women of this province.

As we consider this legislation, we will particularly expect to be reviewing the amendments put forward in Bill 105 and will expect to be seeing them again in this legislation. We are particularly concerned, as I noted a few minutes ago, about the implementation mechanisms, the thresholds and the triggers.

It is our view that the work has already been done, through Bill 105, on the appropriate courses of action for the public sector. We will be listening with considerable interest to the submissions we anticipate will be made on those same questions as they apply to the private sector.

Notably, we expect submissions and propose to review the question of the differentials built into the structure of this legislation that distinguish different sizes of firms and companies in the private sector, the different requirements, and whether they are in conformity with pay equity proposals, the nature of the policing or monitoring, the ease of understanding by the workers protected, the case of meeting any requirement by the business affected and the period for any adjustments to be put forward.

We also want to understand with considerable clarity the impact of exemption proposals that may be brought forward. Notable in that regard would be any exemption proposals dealing with the rather arbitrary question of size of company as distinct from type of business, but we will also be interested in the proposed exemption for temporary labour shortage, how the government proposes to define that one and see us through the application of pay equity in the public and private sectors.

Finally, simply to close at this point, we are very much in support of the principles of pay equity for the public and private sectors. We deeply regret the government's ignoring of the considerable work that has already been undertaken in refining and substantially improving the proposals and mechanisms for pay equity in the public sector and we look forward to the submissions we will doubtless be hearing on the details of implementation for pay equity in the private sector as we go forward to committee.

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Ms. Gigantes: It is my great pleasure to participate in the second reading of Bill 154. In my bad periods over the last few months, I thought it might never arrive. When our government changed hands following the election of May 1985 and the accord was struck between the Liberal Party and my party concerning the work agenda for the next two years of new government in Ontario, equal pay for work of equal value in both the public and private sectors of Ontario was a commitment of the government. It was an undertaking that legislation would be tabled in the first session of the new parliament, which of course ended fully a year ago now.

There were many times when I lost faith that we would ever see this legislation, let alone get to the point where we would be in second reading of it.

I guess one has to take the attitude on these things, having waited so long, that whatever it is we now propose to offer to the public of Ontario and in particular the women of Ontario, however fine or not the product is, at least we have it. Most women are very familiar with the adage that says half a loaf is better than none. I do not know that we have even half a loaf here. There is a lot of work to do on this subject before we get legislation, and I hope legislation that will be stronger than the bill currently before us.

We cannot always get what we want, but we are going to try real hard to get what we need for women in this province. I think it would be a grave mistake for us to proceed to accept legislation that does not effectively deliver that long, long offered promise of equal pay for work of equal value. It is in that context that I speak. When I have suggestions to make on behalf of my party, it is in that context. We want the legislation to work. We do not want a promise that has been held out so long to be one that is empty when it is delivered.

The previous two participants in this debate have spoken directly to the changing nature of women's role in society. It goes beyond the work world, of course, but we see it most directly in the work world. The view that women have of themselves and of their role in society has definitely, definitively and probably eternally changed over the last two decades.

When I was young, it was thought quite reasonable for a young woman to think of herself first of all as a daughter, someone's daughter, and then to plan to become someone's wife, to expect to be a mother and to have to face the fact that at some point she might be a widow but hopefully, somewhere along all those lines of dependent role playing that she had engaged in, have somebody who would have some responsibility for looking after her, perhaps a husband who would have left behind a life insurance policy.

Always, though, the view that women had of themselves and of each other was in this very dependent role where you defined yourself and your relationship with members of your family, your father, your husband, your children, your former husband and perhaps your children now grown.

That has changed. There have been many reasons for that change. One of the most significant measures we have seen of the degree of change has been the rate of participation of women in the work force. We see it very strongly in Ontario. There are about two million women in Ontario who are in paid employment and as of November 1986, 58 per cent of the women of Ontario of working age were in the work force.

Of those two million women, only one in five works in a situation where she has the protection and position in the work force that is assisted by a labour union. Only one in five or 20 per cent of women belong to trade unions. Of the women who are in trade unions, 60 per cent are working in the public sector. In the private sector in Ontario, the rate of union membership among working women is extremely low. I draw this to the attention of the House because it speaks to women's vulnerability in the work place to a degree that is very marked in its difference from that of men. Women do not have the supportive network and strength in terms of their bargaining position in the work place that men have.

Among the two million women who work in Ontario, one in four works part-time. We are talking about 500,000 women who are in the work force part-time. That again is significant, because for part-time workers there are very few benefits and the protection of unions exists infrequently. Women are very vulnerable in their position in the work force.

We know that accompanying these circumstances, and arising out of the description we had earlier from previous speakers of discrimination based on the nature of work and the designation of some kinds of work as women's work and the undervaluing of that work, the result has been that if we compare the wages in Ontario of men who are working full-time with the wages of women who are working full-time, women are earning 64 cents of the male dollar.

When we fold in part-time workers and their wages, the statistics become even more grotesque. If we include part-time female workers and do a male-female comparison, we find that females in Ontario are earning about 50 cents of the male dollar in the work force. For example, in 1984, 50 per cent of the women who were working in Ontario earned less than $10,500 a year, and in the same year, the median income for men was $21,163.

This effectively means that women who are not looked after by rich daddies, who cannot depend on husbands for income, who have never been married, who have to raise children on their own, whose partners have died -- in other words, women who have to live on their own or assume responsibility for their children -- are getting 50 cents on the dollar on average in Ontario compared to men.

Over the past several months of work here in the Legislature, we have attempted to address in legislative terms some of the problems women face, but in many ways we have made little progress; for example, when we have tried to look at the difficulties faced by the increasing number of women who are single parents, who are responsible for raising children and who should, according to court orders, be receiving maintenance from their ex-spouses.

The government brought forward Bill 14 to provide automatic enforcement of maintenance orders. We passed that legislation well over a year ago, and we still do not have the mechanisms in place for the automatic maintenance enforcement system to work. The result is that we estimate that only 15 per cent of women who are raising families and who are dependent -- who need the maintenance orders which have been made by courts -- are actually receiving those payments from their ex-spouses.

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Progress is exceedingly slow. Sometimes one feels almost desperate about how slow it is. It makes us even more careful and determined when we get to legislation of this nature, from which we have a right to expect so much on behalf of women.

The parliamentary assistant made reference to the 1951 beginnings of legislation, which purported to provide that where the same job was done in Ontario by men and women, there would be equal pay. That legislation has not been properly administered. There are inadequate methods of forcing compliance. The Ministry of Labour has not been able, has not found the way, has not found the will, has not provided effectively that where a complaint is made by a woman that she is doing equal work -- really, the same work -- but not getting paid equally, she can get redress through our existing legislation.

In spite of the penalties provided in legislation, there are cases where a woman makes a complaint which is well founded and which the Ministry of Labour agrees is well based and she is subsequently fired by the employer who infringed our legislation. There has not been one successful prosecution of one employer who has defied that legislation.

When we see what has happened with a piece of legislation which in 1986 one would expect would have produced some real results for women where they do equal, exactly equivalent work, then we know we have to be very careful about how we frame this legislation. We have to be very insistent about how it is going to be administered.

First, when we look at this legislation, given the fact that we have had month after month of public committees, interministerial committees, advisory committees, hearings committees -- you name it, there is not much we have not done around this subject. Instead of producing legislation and getting effective measures in place, there has been a train of diversions to bring us to this day. Having gone through this whole process, at least we have had a very thorough discussion -- too much discussion, in my view -- and a good understanding has developed on a very broad public front about what we are after.

The commitment in the accord was to provide legislation offering protection that would give women equal pay for work of equal value. We have seen the development of a different kind of contract in two bills that have been presented in this Legislature; first in Bill 105, which was tabled by the government to address equal pay for work of equal value in the public service of Ontario, and in Bill 154, which is before us today. It is something that has come to be known as "pay equity."

In Bill 105, pay equity turns out to mean the following of a very complex set of planning steps. Once those steps are through, the result is supposed to be something called pay equity and it is supposed to meet the public need to have legislation that provides equal pay for work of equal value. Pay equity, as it is drawn out for us in Bill 105, does not do that, and we have the same problem when we look at Bill 154.

I am going to take a moment, with the indulgence of the House, just to read the sections that I think indicate precisely what I am talking about in the difference between pay equity as it is defined in this bill and the concept for which I think there is real public support and which should be our goal in this legislation, which is equal pay for work of equal value.

Starting at subsection 3(1), we have the purpose set out in the bill:

"The purpose of this act is to redress systemic gender discrimination in compensation for work performed by employees in female job classes."

Female job classes are defined as job classes in which more than 60 per cent of the employees are female. Subsection 3(2) reads:

"Systemic gender discrimination in compensation shall be identified by undertaking comparisons between each female job class in an establishment and the male job classes in the establishment in terms of relative compensation and in terms of the relative value of the work performed."

So far, so good. Section 4 says:

"For the purposes of this act, the criterion to be applied in determining value of work shall be a composite of the skill, effort and responsibility normally required in the performance of the work and the conditions under which it is normally performed."

Good again; we can all understand that. Then we get to subsection 5(1):

"For the purposes of this act, pay equity is achieved when the job rate for the female job class that is the subject of the comparison is at least equal to the job rate for a male job class in the same establishment where the work performed in the two job classes is of equal or comparable value."

Subsection 5(2) says:

"Where there is no male job class with which to make a comparison for the purposes of subsection (1), pay equity is achieved when the job rate for the female job class that is the subject of the comparison is at least equal to the job rate of a male job class in the same establishment that at the time of comparison had a higher job rate but performs work of lower value than the female job class."

I am sure members understand that. Subsection 5(3) says:

"If more than one comparison is possible between a female job class in an establishment and male job classes in the same establishment, pay equity is achieved when the job rate for the female job class is at least as great as the job rate for the male job class,

"(a) with the lowest job rate, if the work performed in both job classes is of equal or comparable value; and

"(b) with the highest job rate, if the work performed in the male job class is of less value."

What one can understand out of those very complex clauses is that a degree of minimalism is being structured into these sections that says that when a comparison is made and we decide there is a group of women working in one kind of work, and if in the same establishment, the same firm, the same private sector office -- whatever it is -- there is a group of males who do comparable work or nearly comparable work, when the comparison is made, then the women shall get the least in terms of pay that such a comparison would meet. When that happens, the legislation proposes to us, pay equity will be achieved.

The way in which we have proposed in Ontario to approach the question of equal pay for work of equal value is a two-step process. First of all, there is the creation of these comparisons through a planning mechanism in most cases, one would hope. That is called the proactive stage. Second, there is a follow-up step in which people who have seen comparisons carried out in their work places can appeal to the Pay Equity Commission of Ontario, which we set up under the legislation. They can say that in spite of this process -- the planning and the comparisons -- instead of the adjustments that have been made, however minimalized those adjustments have been, the group of workers they work with is still not getting equal pay for work of equal value.

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It is very important that we have an understanding of what equal pay for work of equal value is, as differentiated from these structured definitions of pay equity, if that second part of a two-stage process is going to be effective in assisting a lot of people who will not be helped by the first stage. As I go on, Mr. Speaker, you will see that in the proposal we have before us in Bill 154 it becomes particularly important that the second complaint step that we are looking at bringing into legislative effect is based on a very clearly understood principle of what equal pay for work of equal value is.

In my view and that of delegation after delegation and individual after individual who came before the standing committee on administration of justice discussing Bill 105, the concept of equal pay for work of equal value is a very simple one. It is the concept as spelled out in sections 2, 3 and 4, which I just read. It is a comparison of the skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions of jobs.

When we look at what happened to Bill 105 and the discussion which surrounded Bill 105 -- and my colleague on the justice committee, the member for St. George (Ms. Fish), has made reference to this in her speech -- we can say there were certain understandings achieved in the justice committee hearings. The representations that were made to us during those hearings clearly spelled out certain definitions and operative principles. When we came to the amendment of Bill 105, we set certain standards for what had to be embodied in legislation that was going to be effective on behalf of the women of Ontario.

If we boil down those standards, those principles and those understandings which were brought to our committee and which it reflected through amendment to Bill 105, the earlier bill that was addressed to the public service of Ontario, we can say they fall into four broad categories. They are money, what the sources of money are; timing, how quickly the legislation will have effect for women; coverage, whether the legislation will provide protection for all women; and the role of unions, whether they have a real role in this whole process.

My party has taken the initiative to try to have an agreement achieved in this Legislature that certain understandings and basic standards for effective legislation for equal pay for work of equal value be agreed upon by all the parties represented in this House. We had agreement between the two opposition parties in the standing committee on administration of justice which dealt with Bill 105. The government got snarled up a bit in terms of its concern about procedure in the justice committee hearings on Bill 105. I hope that will not provide a continuing impediment to the possibility of three-party agreement on the principles we seek to establish in the legislation we are dealing with now.

I want to run through briefly the four areas we consider to be the basic understandings, the basic standards that have to be established in this legislation if it is to be good legislation. First is the question of money. It is fairly clear to anybody who thinks about this matter that women should not have to pay the cost of equal pay legislation. That may seem self-evident, but unfortunately, given the wording of Bill 154 and some earlier statements by the Attorney General (Mr. Scott) on this subject, that very simple premise which is so obviously fair has doubt cast upon it.

Once we have said to employers in Ontario, "You must compare female and male jobs and you must make adjustments in the pay you provide to females if you find you have undervalued the work they do in comparison to the monetary value you have placed on male work," it is possible for employers to say, "What I will do is give women more money, one per cent this year, one per cent next year and one per cent the year after, but it is going to come out of wage increases."

That does not make much sense because, in terms of restrained wages and a lower increase in a general annual wage package, it means not only will men be paying, which will create division within the establishment or the firm on this question, but also women themselves will be forgoing wage increases to get something that is now called an equal pay adjustment. Obviously, we will not benefit women if that is the way the legislation is going to be set up.

It does not benefit me if my employer says: "My gosh, you have been getting three per cent too little when I compare your work with your male colleague's work. I am going to take one per cent per year out of your general annual wage increase. You used to get a four per cent increase every year, but this year, next year and the year after you will get three per cent and the other per cent I am going to call your equal pay adjustment."

That does not help me at all. It does not make me feel any better, it does not make me feel my value has caught up somehow and it does not put any more money into my pocket, which is the real measure of how good I will feel and how effective this legislation will seem to me. That is critical. It has to be the case that the adjustments in pay are paid for by employers. It is perfectly reasonable to expect they would be.

After all, it is women's work that has been undervalued. That means there has been a financial benefit to employers for all the years we have not had equal pay legislation. Now it is their time to catch up. It was women who subsidized the employer all these years. Now it must be the employer who pays, whether that employer is the government of Ontario directly, the government of Ontario indirectly, the children's aid societies, municipalities and so on or the private employers. It is elementary, it is absolutely basic and it must be established in our legislation.

We can do that. We proposed and passed amendments to Bill 105 earlier which had the effect of providing a test of whether there was wage restraint and whether employers were accepting their responsibility to provide the costs of equal pay.

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It is also critical in the same area that if this government, this parliament, is going to say it is the responsibility of all employers in Ontario to provide equal pay protection for women and to provide adjustments in cases where we can see by comparison that women's work has been under-valued, then it is the government of Ontario, the Legislature on behalf of the public of Ontario, that must provide the funding for those public sector agencies that receive a great deal of their funding from the government of Ontario.

Let me give an example: agencies that provide child services. The children's aid society in Ottawa has been living hand to mouth through years of fiscal restraint by the provincial government. It has been mandated to increase its programs and its responsibilities to children in the Ottawa area. On the other hand, the allocations given by Ontario have not kept up with the increased mandate that has been placed on it. If we turn to that agency today and say, "You are going to have to make adjustments in the pay of women if you find that women are doing comparable work to men in your work place, but are getting paid less," where is the children's aid society going to get the money to do it?

We have to be realistic about this. We have to have a separate allocation that will come from the government of Ontario, the public of Ontario, to support those agencies in the full public sector, such as universities, municipalities, school boards, children's aid societies and so on which are going to need to pay women more money under this legislation.

We cannot ask the property taxpayers back in the city of Ottawa to pick up these costs. This is a provincial standard we are setting. There is broad public agreement that we want to see these measures undertaken, that we want to see women given equal pay for work of equal value. There has to be a commitment of public money to help it happen in a real way in the public sector. Both at the level of public agencies and in the private sector, we have to have separate funds set aside for the achievement of equal pay adjustments, for the achievement of the goal of equal pay for work of equal value. These are the critical money issues.

On the question of timing, the legislation we have before us is still in a very unsatisfactory state. According to the figures we have been given by the Ontario women's directorate, in the private sector there will be 238,800 women employed in firms that have fewer than 10 employees. All firms with fewer than 10 employees would be exempt from this legislation. There are other exemptions built into this legislation, and I will address them in a moment. Firms of a size from 10 to 49 employees would be given six years under this proposed legislation before any female employee in one of those firms would be able to lay a complaint with the Pay Equity Commission.

If I work in a firm that employs 10 to 49 employees -- there are 238,800 women according to the women's directorate who work in firms of that size in the private sector of Ontario -- and if I look at this legislation, I will learn that after six years of its operation I can make a complaint. Nobody will have had to provide me with a plan or a comparison with my male colleagues. I can then make a complaint to the Pay Equity Commission of Ontario. Under the legislation, the commission would not even ask whether I had equal pay for work of equal value; it would ask whether pay equity had been achieved. That is a limited notion, as I pointed out earlier.

If I were among those 238,800 women -- that is more than one in eight of the women who work in Ontario -- I would feel this legislation offered me very little. I would particularly feel that way if I were a woman who had worked in a firm of that size for the past 25 years and were getting close to the age of retirement. If I knew that by the time we got to year six after the effective date of this legislation I would be out of the work force, I would say, "What is in it for me?"

The timing of this bill, with its stages, sizes and so on, is something that is not acceptable. It suggests we could start pay adjustments in the public sector after two years. It suggests that for firms of 500-plus employees there would be plans that would start producing payments after three years. For firms with 100 to 499, there would be plans that would start producing adjustments for women after four years. If one were in a firm with 50 to 99 employees, it would take five years before the plan clicked in and one started getting an adjustment. If one worked in a firm with 10 to 49 employees, one would have to wait six years before you could make a complaint.

In what other kind of legislation do we put this kind of staging? The only thing I can think of is pollution control orders, which can go on through stage after stage. It is insulting to the women who are in the work force of Ontario to be told that one eighth of them can wait six years before they can even make a complaint.

We have to look at the timing in this bill; we can do a whole lot better than this. It is a very serious problem with this bill. For this legislation to be viewed as effective, we have to remedy the timing problems in it.

On the basis of the submissions and the amendments to Bill 105 which were carried in the standing committee on administration of justice, we are suggesting we put a time limit on the whole business of achieving equal pay for work of equal value. We suggest that we say to employers: "Here is the legislation. It is in place. Two years from now, you have to begin your equal pay adjustments; five years after that, you have to have them finished. The women in your work force should be in a position where they can look at themselves, each other and their colleagues and say, "I get equal pay for work of equal value."

That seems to us to be a reasonable time frame in which to be working. It is not a time frame contemplated by this bill. I think we can do better, and I hope there will be all-party agreement on that.

On the subject of coverage, we have an enormous range of exemptions built into this bill. First, there is the infamous 60-70 per cent comparison. Comparisons shall be made between jobs that are predominantly filled by women, at least to the extent of 60 per cent, and they shall be compared to jobs held by men, which men occupy at a predominance rate -- what a way to say things -- where there are 70 per cent of men in jobs. That can leave out a lot of women. Just to say it has to be 60 per cent compared to at least 70 per cent can leave out a lot of women.

As the nature of the work force and the unemployment rate have gone through changes -- the unemployment rate has gone up in the past several years -- we know many more men are entering types of jobs formerly carried out almost exclusively by women. I think of our Queen's Park switchboard operators. Mr. Speaker will remember the comparison that was made in years past between the wages paid to our Queen's Park switchboard operators, who used to be almost exclusively female, and the wages of our parking attendants here on the Queen's Park grounds. Three years ago, we established that there was a real wage gap that could not be justified on the basis of skill, effort, responsibility or even working conditions.

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We know now, however, that there are many males employed as Queen's Park switchboard operators. I wonder how long it will take before it will not be possible to make a comparison between switchboard operators, all of whom, whether male or female, are being paid on the old female rating for their job. When will it happen that we will not be able to compare the switchboard operators with the parking lot attendants and say that the parking lot attendants are paid better and the reason is that they are mostly male?

This is the type of synthetic test that has been put in as a first-run look at a work place. It might be useful. It might sort out some very obvious cases, but to stop there or do nothing more is a total limitation of the coverage and the effectiveness of this type of legislation.

As I pointed out earlier, we also have a whole category of women, currently one in eight women in Ontario's work force, who would not be covered by this legislation because they work in firms employing fewer than 10 people.

We have a further list of exemptions that employers can peruse to see whether they can make their work place acceptable for exemption; in other words, whether they can have their work place avoid the implications of this legislation. We have to look seriously at this whole question of coverage again. There is no acceptable reason anyone can advance that says whole categories of women will be systematically excluded from the protection we want to offer them, that their work shall be valued properly.

There are other categories of women -- and they have been mentioned by the member for St. George -- where the comparison of 60 per cent or 70 per cent will be meaningless. It does not exist in most day care centres, nursing homes and various other categories of work where most of the employees are female. A comparison cannot be made, and the legislation does not offer us anything concrete in legislative terms.

The minister has suggested that he will call upon the commission to make studies to suggest a mechanism for dealing with the necessary comparisons and upgrading of pay for women in those areas of work, many of whom are among the lowest paid of the workers in Ontario. I think we can do better than that. We can suggest within the body of the legislation itself that the commission has both a responsibility and a duty to provide a mechanism that will provide fairness in pay for women who work in those work places.

The last area of understanding that we had relatively well defined in the standing committee on administration of justice, in submissions concerned with Bill 105 and in terms of the amendments that we are approaching in Bill 105, has to do with the role of unions. This legislation says there shall be no plans in work places with fewer than 100 employees. In other words, that first step I mentioned earlier, the proactive step, the planning step, the formal job comparison step which this legislation would call upon employees to provide -- there shall be no such steps in work places which have fewer than 100 employees unless there is a union.

There have been at least two large unions representing many women workers in this province who made very strong submissions to us that we are to build into the legislation the flexibility that will allow unions representing women to develop methods other than job evaluation methods, to negotiate with the employers a separate equal pay adjustment package and have that separate and apart from the job evaluation plan in the old formal, rigid sense.

In some areas that probably makes a lot of sense. I remind members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees hospital workers' attempt to achieve a minimum job entry rate of $10 an hour in their last large set of negotiations. They viewed that as a very important initiative towards the establishment of equal pay for work of equal value at a decent level for hundreds of women who work in the hospitals of Ontario.

We think unions should he called upon in this legislation to provide fair representation for the workers they represent. That is an important element in having this legislation be effective on behalf of women. It is all too easy for women to fall by the wayside unless an obligation is placed on their unions to look after the interests of union members in the negotiation of equal pay.

We would like to see flexibility allowed. We would like to see unions be given the power and the right, in conjunction and in separate negotiations with their employers, to establish methods other than rigid job evaluation structures for addressing the question of equal pay for work of equal value for their membership. We also want to make sure that the unions have a legal responsibility to provide fair representation. We want both union and employer to have the obligation to bargain in good faith when it comes to such negotiations.

The member for St. George talked about the historic undervaluing of the work done by women. We all know that to be true. We have a very important tool in front of us. We have the political readiness and we have the support of the public. We can do something about that long-standing unfairness, but to do it well, we have to have good legislation. We do not want half a loaf. After four years, we do not want to find women in Ontario saying: "This legislation did not do anything for me. Those politicians said they were going to deliver, but they did not."

We know what we need in effective legislation. We have spent long -- too long -- thinking about it. There is a large measure of consensus. I am very hopeful that we can go quickly and with great unanimity of purpose, mind and method, get this legislation into committee and get reasonable amendments. I think we will have widespread public support and we will produce legislation that is going to be effective on behalf of women in Ontario who have suffered unfairness in pay for ever.

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Ms. Caplan: I am pleased today to rise in this debate on second reading of Bill 154, a bill that may, with the co-operation of the opposition, see pay equity as a reality in Ontario in the very near future for the extended public sector and the private sector. I have been listening very carefully to the comments from the opposition critics, and I think it is important to take a few minutes to discuss exactly what this bill is as opposed to what it is not, and then perhaps deal with some of what it is not and why it is not.

The purpose of this legislation is to eliminate gender-based discrimination in the work force in the private sector and in the extended, broader public sector. The scope of this bill will cover all employees in the broader public sector, which includes municipalities, school boards, universities and hospitals -- effectively, all the transfer payment agencies of the government. It will also apply to all private sector firms with 10 employees or more. Effectively, 85 per cent of the two million female workers in Ontario will be covered by this legislation. That is very significant.

There are other models for legislation of this type, but I believe this one is landmark legislation because of the proactive approach it has chosen. I would point out to the New Democratic Party critic, the member for Ottawa Centre (Ms. Gigantes), that in 1983 the NDP bill for equal pay for work of equal value called for a complaint mechanism. We can see the federal model, where a complaint mechanism has benefited some 5,000 women after eight years. This bill will affect 85 per cent of the work force in Ontario in a much shorter period of time. It is extremely important to note the difference.

We also look at other models of legislation around this country and at our neighbours to the south for a very good example. Minnesota has implemented a bill for its public sector work force only. Manitoba, with a government that I am sure is very familiar to the member for Ottawa Centre, has implemented a bill strictly for its public sector. When we talk about the need for comparison in job discrimination, in fact, they chose 70 per cent and 70 per cent. The piece of Ontario legislation that is before us today selects 60 per cent to determine what is a gender-predominated work force for women, and the comparison for 70 per cent men. It takes that extra step, and that is why it is landmark: it goes beyond what even the Manitoba legislation did in its public sector work force.

I am not going to debate Bill 105, as the member for Ottawa Centre did, because we know what happened to that bill. We have the chairman of the standing committee on administration of justice in the Legislature today. A ruling of the chairman was overruled in a precedent-setting case in this Legislature, one of a few in the past little while, to extend the scope of that bill beyond the powers of the committee.

Personally, I would like to state in this House my own disappointment at the actions of the opposition parties on that committee, because it is my belief that if they had followed the ruling made by the chairman of that committee and brought that bill back into this House, we could have had Bill 105 enacted in legislation by the end of 1986. Let us not for one moment forget who has been holding up the implementation of the policy of this government for equal pay for work of equal value, which is known as pay equity in Ontario.

It is very important to recognize that this is a plan for an effective, manageable, fiscally responsible righting of a historic wrong, something that has gone on for years, whereby women's work has been undervalued and this has been allowed to continue. As I said, this is antidiscriminatory legislation. It says, "You cannot discriminate against an employee because of his or her gender." That is what this legislation is, and I think it is very important to recognize that is what it is set to do.

It does not permit comparison outside of an establishment. It says that an employer will look at the establishment and make comparisons internally within the establishment. We are not talking about a province-wide wage scale. The kinds of amendments and things proposed, particularly by the member for Ottawa Centre, would lead to just that and would interfere with our competitiveness. It really concerns me because it shows a basic lack of understanding of what this piece of legislation does.

It is very important to understand that as one deals with an employment group in an establishment, the roles of the union and of the employer are clearly defined, and those who would say this legislation is complex and should be simple are again calling for the type of legislation which would be complaint based only.

When one has specific legislation, it then calls for telling the employer exactly what he will be required to do, when he will have achieved pay equity and how he compares. If this approach of being specific in the legislation were not taken, then one would have -- and with all due respect to the very fine bureaucracy in Ontario -- a bureaucracy the size of which would be unbelievable.

What this plan will allow for is a minimum-sized bureaucracy that, by the time the phasing of this legislation is complete, will have had an opportunity to examine all the plans put forward by the thousands of employers who will be involved with this legislation in, I suggest, an effective, efficient and workable manner, as opposed to the chaos that would result if one tried to do this overnight with the snap of a finger.

I invite the members of the opposition to come forward and try to work --

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker: Order. The member for Oriole has the floor.

Mr. McClellan: She is distorting our position.

Ms. Caplan: Not at all.

The member for Bellwoods (Mr. McClellan) should take a look at the results of the federal legislation and what it achieved after eight years, and think about what the indirect benefits of this bill will be, because immediately upon proclamation of this bill, we will start to have the indirect benefits that will accrue in the market place as the market adjustments start to be made.

I believe that at the end of the timing of this bill, members will see that a full 85 per cent of the women will have been affected and probably more. I believe this is good legislation and is deserving of support. I hope, when it gets to committee, that it is given the kind of support that will allow it to become a reality.

I would like to talk for a moment about the principle and one other contradiction which disturbed me a bit. We have heard about the principle of equal pay for equal work and the fact that we have had that in Ontario for quite some time and nothing has happened. At the same time, we hear a call for a principle and a piece of legislation which says, "Give us pay equity, equal pay for work of equal value and then just give us two years or let us go ahead and do it." There is that kind of contradiction rather than having a specific piece of legislation that says, "Not only are you going to do it and here is a timetable for doing it," but that responds to that with the specifics of what will be the obligations, how to do it and when it will be implemented in a phased manner that will say to the employers of Ontario, "This has been done after extensive consultation."

My frustration through this is that we have had broad and extensive consultation. There is tremendous support for this legislation, for the approach of this legislation, for the phasing and the timetable, and for the fact that 85 per cent of the women in the work force of Ontario will be covered, that it understands the impacts it is likely to have on the market, that it understands the need for Ontario industry to remain competitive, that it is manageable, workable and fiscally responsible and that it is a way of getting it done.

I look forward to the debate in committee. I believe this type of legislation, which is landmark and historic because it is proactive in nature, will lead to the kind of social justice system that all of us in this House are striving for in this province.

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I want to deal for a moment with some of the concerns that were raised about the fact that some establishments, some categories of women's work, will not be affected by this legislation. Both opposition critics mentioned day care workers. What is significant is the commitment of the minister at the time this legislation was tabled and brought forward. He recognized that this was a problem and said: "In regard to this bill as it stands today, we recognize that because there are establishments that are wholly female, there is no comparison. We must address that and we must address it expeditiously."

The first task or responsibility for the Pay Equity Commission when it is established after proclamation will be to look at the options, and there are many, as to how that matter can be addressed, and to ensure that the time lines for dealing with the specific problems are addressed, something this legislation cannot do because of the antidiscriminatory nature within an establishment. Giving the Pay Equity Commission that responsibility immediately, I believe, is the most effective way of dealing with these issues.

In the few minutes I have, I would like to say that we have an opportunity with this legislation to move forward in the area of pay equity. We have an opportunity, which I think we lost when we were dealing with Bill 105, to recognize that pay equity is one component of the whole area of employment equity and not to try to solve the problems that fall outside the umbrella of pay equity in the component that deals with pay equity. We tried to solve things in Bill 105 that were outside the scope of Bill 105.

We can deal with the issues of child care, affirmative action, employment equity programs, skills training and education, but we cannot deal with all of those in this bill. If we try to do so in this bill, then I suggest we will have lost an opportunity to deal with pay equity, with equal pay for work of equal value, as a component of the total employment equity picture. This piece of legislation deals specifically with equal pay for work of equal value. It deals specifically with pay equity. This bill is not the total employment equity picture. I think it is important for us to recognize the difference.

Just as Bill 105 dealt only with the Ontario public service and the six schedule agencies, this bill does not deal with employment equity in total. Suggesting amendments that will expand the scope, as the opposition members did on Bill 105, will take it beyond the scope of what it is meant to do. By trying to include amendments to deal specifically with the issues of all-women establishments, education and training and child care workers, it is my fear that we may well stall the process rather than encourage the kind of progress this bill will allow us to bring forward.

I am not going to go back over the history of why we need this legislation, of why the concept and principle of pay equity has been accepted, as it has. I am pleased and proud to stand here today and acknowledge that for the first time in the history of Ontario, we have all three parties seeking the principle of justice and fairness for women in the work force. We all agree in principle. We are now given the opportunity to draft legislation that will make this a reality. I do not think we have to look very far.

As we go back over the past 17 years, we talk about the minimal change in the gap in wages, because the market was left to its own forces, and minimal changes to assist women whose pay-checks have been just 52 to 64 cents on the dollar of what men earn.

We do not have to talk about the clustering of women into 20 out of 500 jobs -- the parliamentary assistant dealt with that in his opening remarks -- but that is the reality. In Ontario, women work in 20 jobs: clerical, child care and food service jobs, that have been traditionally undervalued because they have been the jobs women worked in. We accept that. We understand that this is the reason we must stop the ghettoization. We identify the ghettoization of jobs by saying, "How do you know when you have a job ghetto?" If you can look at a job and see it is 60 per cent dominated by women, and if you can look at another job and see it is 70 per cent dominated by men, that is how you identify a male-dominated or a female-dominated job. This legislation says it very clearly.

We know, when we talk about poverty in this province -- and I think it has been said very well -- that women are, by and large, poorer than men. The difficulty is that they often do not have opportunities through pension plans, as the member for St. George (Ms. Fish) mentioned, because their wages are lower. This results in older age women being poorer.

In Ontario in the past 25 years, we have seen a great change in our work force. Now more than 40 per cent of the work force is made up of women. All this legislation does is recognize that it is time to right the historic wrong of the undervaluation of women's work. It is also specific on how to achieve that. It establishes a timetable and a time frame for seeing that this is done and achieved. The test will be at the end of that process when we look to see whether we have achieved it.

I will now respond to comments made by the member for Ottawa Centre. I thought the minister, in making his announcement, made one other very important point. That was about the role of the unions, the importance of the collective bargaining process in this province, the role it has played in the past and the role it will play in the future. I think labour, management and government -- labour, business and government -- all have a role to play in seeing that pay equity in Ontario becomes a reality. But as I have tried to state in this second reading debate, pay equity is not a panacea to solve all the problems associated with economic equality for women. Rather, it is a part of the entire employment equity policy endorsed by this government. It is necessary to view pay equity as a part of this process.

I am confident that if this bill receives at committee the kind of scrutiny, input from the public and support from the opposition members that it deserves, the system brought into place under Bill 154 will be fair and equitable to all participants in the Ontario economy. We have an opportunity to do this and should get on with it.

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Mr. McClellan: I want to make two points. First, my friend the member for Oriole (Ms. Caplan) complained about a majority of members of the assembly acting democratically to amend Bill 105. I remind my colleague that at the time Bill 105 was amended in the committee, the Attorney General, who is responsible for pay equity in the broader public sector and the private sector, had missed five deadlines for the production of his piece of legislation.

Bill 154 had not been presented to the House. The minister had missed five deadlines, five promises he had made to produce that legislation. He had missed every deadline and there was no sign, no assurance and no belief that he would produce the legislation. That is why Bill 105 was amended in the standing committee on administration of justice by a majority and that is why we have Bill 154 in front of us today. The minister was forced to bring it in.

Second, with respect to the three issues of money, timing and coverage, does the member believe that equal pay should be paid for out of restraint of wages? Yes or no? On the question of timing, now that he is with us, does the minister believe that seven years for implementation, which is what we have proposed, is an unreasonable period? Yes or no? On the question of coverage, does the member believe that day care workers should be covered by the legislation now when it is passed by this assembly? Yes or no?

These are not unreasonable positions that we have put forward: no restraint on wages, seven years for implementation and coverage of all workers -- for example, day care workers. I want my granddaughter's day care worker to be covered by this bill. Does the government want that or not?

Ms. Gigantes: I will be very brief. The member for Oriole suggested we had raised points or made arguments that, in fact, we had not. It may simply be that the member for Oriole was not a member of the justice committee which considered Bill 105, and she is not familiar with the amendments that were put forward to Bill 105.

I did my best, in the simplest way I knew how, to outline what the principles were and why we had put forward amendments. She suggested, for example, that the amendments we were proposing, the principles I was endorsing, were working towards province-wide wage rates. This is not the case. Legislation that is designed to bring about equal pay for work of equal value will be for one employer, his employees and the work place, however defined. The comparisons will take place in that little envelope, and not across the province. The member knows that to suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

She suggests that the bill is fiscally responsible. It sure is. It does not obligate the public sector, the people she and I represent and on whose behalf we speak. There is no responsibility to make sure that one cent flows from the taxes of Ontario to make equal pay adjustments. This bill would say the municipalities can pay for equal pay adjustments at the municipal level. You bet it is fiscally responsible, it is fiscally zero in terms of the Treasury of Ontario.

The member complains about the ineffectiveness of the Canadian human rights legislation. Some 479,000 women would have either a simple complaint mechanism or nothing under this legislation.

Ms. Caplan: I want to reply very briefly on the issue of wages. The bill states very clearly that there will be no reduction in wages as a result of this bill.

Second, on the timing of this bill, which has received tremendous support from those consulted as to its implementation, as I suggested, the large percentage will be affected by this legislation in the early phases because of the impact, especially in the broader public sector. The phasing and the timing of this bill will allow for the kind of indirect benefits that, I believe, come from collective bargaining and that I think are being overlooked by many members of this House. As we begin to change the market relationship, I believe we will see an indirect benefit almost immediately, even to those who are not directly covered by this bill, and that is being overlooked.

As far as the coverage is concerned, 85 per cent of women in the work force will be covered by this legislation, which I think makes it landmark and historic. Again I would like to point out that those special cases, such as child care workers -- which we have all agreed and the minister has agreed require special attention because they are unique and a wholly female work force in a specific area with a special place not only in our hearts but also in our society -- must be dealt with expeditiously and by the commission, which will best understand the different ways of dealing with that problem.

I believe all the issues that have been raised have been dealt with in this bill in a manner that could allow pay equity to go forward, and I hope that in committee we will have the support of all parties in having the kind of landmark legislation that will become a model for other provinces and other jurisdictions in this country.

Mr. Barlow: I rise to join in this debate on Bill 154. To begin with, I congratulate the parliamentary assistant on his new position, and I congratulate him for bringing this bill to the House. I hope we do not give him too much of a rough ride as we go through the debate on Bill 154.

Let me begin by suggesting and stating categorically that I am opposed to discrimination of any sort, whether it is in compensation, gender discrimination or discrimination based on race, creed or colour. Discrimination of any sort is, and should be, opposed by everyone. I support, again categorically, equality. Everyone was born equal, and I feel that this should carry on, all things being relevant and all things being considered. I feel we have to consider and we must do everything we can to wipe out any form of discrimination in the work place. That should go without saying.

Where I do have a problem, though, is with the imposition of equal pay for work of equal value in the private sector before it has even been tried in the public sector. We have heard the story about Bill 105 today. Amendments were proposed in the debate on Bill 105 that would have brought the total public sector, the broader public sector, under that legislation. Had that happened, had that been agreed to by the government, had that legislation been brought forward, it would now have been well on the road to implementation.

We would have been given an opportunity to review the public sector. It would be much easier to implement public sector wage equity within both the broader and the narrower areas, as they have come to be known. If after a period of time -- perhaps a couple of years -- it was working, then maybe it would be time to take a look at legislation for the private sector, but let us get the wheels in motion for the public sector.

The parliamentary assistant gave perhaps four examples of disparity, of unequalness in jobs within individual groups. I think every example he gave -- I could be corrected on this -- each and every one was in the public sector; he had no examples of disparity in the private sector. I am not suggesting for a moment that some could not be pointed out, but they were certainly not pointed out by the parliamentary assistant.

If after the trial period in the public sector it was found that it was going to be necessary to bring in private sector legislation, the timing would be such that we would take a look at the real reasons women traditionally have been paid lower wages than men.

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These situations have been pointed out many times in the past. I know I am not presenting anything new to this House when I suggest that some of the real reasons women have received lower wages are interrupted employment through their lifetimes, inadequate training in nontraditional occupations and lack of adequate child care facilities. These are recognized facts. These are some of the reasons for women accepting less challenging positions and for wage differences.

All women do not accept these less challenging positions. I would like to give three examples of which I have knowledge. I would like to begin with a woman in Cambridge who was recently written up in our local weekly paper. She was working for the municipality, for the city of Cambridge. She applied for a job and received it. She worked on the city's sewer crew. She was on the ground doing the work with the rest of the crew who were all men. She is not the type of person who will sit around complaining and say, "We need wage parity; we need wage equity." She is out there doing her thing, using her own initiative to get money that is going to help her in her position in life.

Most of us attend graduation ceremonies at our local high schools. It was quite a thrill to see a girl come up to the front when her name was called to receive the award as the top person in the auto mechanic class. This girl was going to be an automobile mechanic. She was going to work with the best of the guys and hope that she would be a good automobile mechanic. She is away from the traditional fields. When she serves her apprenticeship, she will be in a field that pays dollar for dollar for the work produced by whichever company she chooses to work for.

In the October issue of the Ontario women's directorate publication called Currents, there is a story about a girl who recently took on a position as a labourer for a local Toronto construction firm. She is another person who is not waiting for the world to offer her a living. She went out to look for it and accomplish it for herself.

There are women who did not have that opportunity in the past. Many women have not had that opportunity. The real failure is that women, for whatever reason, have not integrated into the full range of occupations that are available in the work place. However, to reverse that situation and have women replace men in their traditional jobs, it would take thousands of women replacing men to get a balance. This is not going to happen overnight. It is going to take generations to do it. Just switching jobs is not an answer. That cannot be the solution. What we must recognize is that pay equity is a method of treating only the symptoms. It does not correct the market failure. Only moving into nontraditional jobs will help to solve that.

I feel that Bill 154, as it relates to the private sector, is a Band-Aid solution. It is an antibusiness approach and will contribute to the weakening of our economic, competitive, industrial base. I do not think for a moment that it will help women in the lower-paying jobs. Indeed, it could have a reverse effect on many women in industry as industry finds ways to mechanize and gets involved with systems that enable it to cut down on the total work force. I am afraid that will happen.

There is another example that has come to my attention recently. I had a call from a local shoe manufacturer with between 140 and 180 employees; it fluctuates. It is on the low end of the scale since tariffs have been removed from the shoe industry. He said, "I have a happy crew working for me." Out in the shop many of them, I think the majority, are women. He said: "They are happy. We have no problems with unions."

The member for Ottawa Centre was talking about unionized shops. Here is an organization that contributes significantly to the economy of Cambridge, as the shoe industry has done for many years along with the textile industry which is another industry that employs a lot of women in its operations. This fellow said: "If I become any less competitive, there are going to be 140 people out of work. I am having trouble now competing with Brazilian and other imports. I have a happy group of people working for me. They are producing what we require to keep our head above water. If something comes along to rock the boat, who is going to accept the responsibility?"

Everything is not going to be solved with the stroke of a pen by Bill 154. I am sure the Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology (Mr. O'Neil) and his small business advocate can get up and cite many other examples of businesses that have real concern about the implementation of this piece of legislation.

There are flaws in this legislation that should be addressed if we are going to come up with something meaningful to help those we truly want to help. First, this is a piece of legislation that basically says every employer in Ontario is guilty of discrimination, period. If you want to prove otherwise, you have to go out and hire a lawyer or consultant and prove you are not discriminating. There are going to be people who will make money from this legislation; there is no question about it. They are the lawyers and consultants who are going to be involved in setting up the various plans that industry must set up.

It is going to be argued that it is only when there are more than 100 that they have to set up a pay equity plan. That is now. With the antibusiness approach this government takes, there is going to be a downward swing over time. I feel that for a business to have to go out and defend itself is wrong. Existing employment laws try to balance the rights and responsibilities of employers and individual employees or various groups of employees, whether they be organized or unorganized. The government is in the role of mediator and arbitrator.

If we truly believe legislation is required, it should be in the form of appropriate amendments to the Employment Standards Act, an act already in existence that can appropriately deal with problems. We already have the employment standards branch of the Ministry of Labour that must referee and arbitrate provincial employment standards. It is required to have due regard for the respective rights and responsibilities of both the employer and the employee.

It is also required to have expertise in other areas of employment laws and legislation. It is required to have good personnel management. It is familiar with the real world. A new bureaucracy that is set up will not look at that sort of legislation. The member for Oriole suggests it would be a small bureaucracy. We all know that once these bureaucracies begin, they feed on themselves until they are out of control. Our party will propose an amendment to this legislation to put the enforcement of the act in the hands of the employment standards branch of the Ministry of Labour.

We have concerns about the thresholds. We will have a chance to talk about these various thresholds as we go through the committee stage and when it comes back to the House after committee debate. Is 10 and over, 50 and over, 100 and over, and 500 and over appropriate? I do not know. They may be or they may not be. I am sure we will get advice on that from both sides. We received some advice on it this afternoon. We will receive advice from both sides when we get into the public hearings process.

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There are a couple of specific sections I would like to talk about and raise a concern about. One has already been discussed, the exclusions in section 7. There are exclusions such as seniority, merit, productivity and availability of skilled labour. Frankly, I do not think that is where they should be; they should be in section 4. They should be criteria to the act. After all, if because of his initiative an individual goes out and earns and produces something for his or her employer, he or she should be entitled to extra pay for productivity, merit or whatever. Seniority should also be recognized. An employer should not have to open his books to an equity commissioner or whoever it happens to be. I hope it will be the employment standards officers. He should not have to open his books and say, "This person does have more days' service than this other person."

As well, section 7 refers to temporary skills. My colleague the member for St. George mentioned this too. What is temporary? What is permanent? In Cambridge, during the height of the recession when we had unemployment at about 23 per cent or 24 per cent, there was still a shortage of certain skills in the tool-and-die-making trades and the machinist trade. This existed when unemployment was at a high very level. Unemployment is quite respectable now in Cambridge, for which we are pleased. However, that shortage of tool and die makers goes on.

What is temporary? Is that temporary? The only way a small manufacturer or a large manufacturer is getting people to work for him is by going out and offering more money. What is going to happen if the manufacturer brings somebody in, male or female, who is a tool and die maker? That is a trade I recommend any lady go into; there is always a demand for these trades. If somebody comes into a plant, does that mean that all of a sudden the balance of the rest of the employees in the plant, be they male or female, is upset? What is temporary?

Subsection 7(4) goes on to define "casual worker" as one who works "on a regular and continuing basis." As I understand it, and I did not have time to research this fully, this is inconsistent with any other labour legislation. My understanding of the Labour Relations Act is that it defines a casual worker as someone who works fewer than 24 hours a week. Subsection 7(4) gives a definition of one third of a regular employee's time. Those are not the exact words but that is the meaning of it. It is totally inconsistent with any other form of legislation.

There is another section that should be looked at and I am sure it will be addressed during the committee stage. It is section 22 where it deals with frivolous complaints. There is no recourse for an employer except to defend himself if the commissioner rules that it is not a frivolous complaint. He can go before the commission, pay his lawyer and perhaps pay his consultant to prove that it is a frivolous complaint, whatever it costs for a lawyer nowadays. My friend the member for Brock (Mr. Partington) will probably tell me it is not enough, but I am sure it is.

I had the opportunity of speaking to a labour lawyer recently. I asked him what it would cost in a fairly major defence, not a minor one, for this sort of legislation. He said an employer could look at something in the area of $100,000 to defend himself.

This leads into the area of small business, which I would like to talk about specifically at this time. Small business has its own particular concerns about Bill 154. I am sure my friend and neighbour the member for Wellington South (Mr. Ferraro) will attest to that, as I am sure he has also had the opportunity to talk to many people in the small business community.

Legislation will have an inordinate effect on people in small business because they will hesitate to expand the size of their operation. They will hesitate to create any additional jobs because it might put them into another category where they may or may not have to file a plan. Small businesses normally, more often than not, do not have job descriptions for the people who are working for them. They cannot have them because the industrialist, shopkeeper or whoever is operating a small business has to be able to move his employees from one job to another. That is a concern small business will have and it is something that is going to be addressed, I am sure, as we talk to the public in the appropriate committee that will be dealing with this.

I have already mentioned the other point. There will be a potential cost to small businesses to defend themselves in the necessary court or before the necessary tribunal, that they are not discriminating against anyone in their plants.

In summary, I suggest Bill 154 is not going to help those on the lower end of the pay scale to the extent the proponents feel it will. I believe it could very well be a detriment or a hindrance to that particular individual. Potential investors will be looking at this government and at this province and will be seeing how this government is putting on layer upon layer of regulatory controls. We talk about deregulating the trucking industry and yet we are putting in more regulations now, which is more of the antibusiness legislation for which this government now is extremely famous.

Mr. Ferraro: Does this mean the member will vote against the bill?

Mr. Barlow: No. I am getting to that. I feel it will definitely be a deterrent to future investment in Ontario. As a matter of fact, that member can answer the question for me as well as to whether he will be voting for or against it.

Our party is going to support this bill for second reading. I have tried to raise a few concerns I have. When we get into the committee stage, we will hear from all sides. We will hear from the proponents as well as the opponents of the legislation and we hope that whatever committee it will be before -- I do not think it has been announced yet -- will listen to the concerns that will be brought forward by the business community, and also by the other side.

If it is deemed necessary to have this legislation, it is up to the committee to come out with the best piece of legislation that will not make Ontario uncompetitive. We hope it will do what it is set out to do; that is, to eliminate any discrimination in the work force.

I do not really feel I have to expound on that any more. I will leave it up to the good people of Ontario who will come before the committee and explain to the committee their various wishes and concerns.

Mr. Charlton: I also rise to speak on Bill 154 and will echo the comments of my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre; that we hope the bill will pass second reading and go to hearings in committee very quickly.

I was planning to come here this afternoon and be particularly temperate and thoughtful in my comments. Over the course of the past 45 minutes, though, my temperature has risen about 15 degrees centigrade and I may blow my top at a few points during the course of my comments.

I noticed in the media the other day that the Attorney General, the mover of this bill, made comments to the media to the extent that there was a possibility of amending this bill and, on the basis of the presentations we received in the committee, he was prepared to consider some amendments.

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As somebody who has been through several sets of public hearings on equal pay for work of equal value, I sincerely hope the minister was being frank and honest when he made those comments. After listening to the comments of the member for Oriole, I think it is very apparent that the members of this administration and that former member of the administration have not listened to the debate on equal pay for work of equal value in Ontario at all.

Mr. Haggerty: It is like saying assessment is based on equal value.

Mr. Charlton: That is not a bad analogy.

The comments of the member for Oriole made it extremely clear to me, probably for the first time, that this administration neither understands the concept of equal pay for work of equal value nor is even aware of the extent to which the debate on that subject has evolved in Ontario.

I listened to the member, as I have listened to the minister and others, continually make references to the Manitoba legislation and the areas in Bill 154 and Bill 155 that go beyond the present scope of the legislation in Manitoba. It simply points to the fact that they have not listened and have not discussed it with other members of their caucus, members who have also been through hearings in the province on equal pay for work of equal value. They do not understand the extent to which the debate has evolved in this province.

I am not going to apologize for the legislation in Manitoba. The province of Manitoba is the province of Manitoba. The government and the opposition parties in Manitoba will deal with legislation on the basis of the evolution of the debate in that province.

We are here to talk about the Ontario debate around equal pay for work of equal value and the evolution of that debate here in Ontario. I recall what I thought was a particularly disgusting and degrading tragedy during the hearings and clause-by-clause as far as what went on Bill 105: watching the Minister of Labour (Mr. Wrye) in this administration, time after time, day after day, have to eat his own words, words he had contributed to the debate on equal pay for work of equal value in Ontario.

As my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre has tried to point out by running through a whole lot of specific things, this piece of legislation is a large step back from the point to which the debate in this province has proceeded. It is a very large step back.

First, in Ontario we have long since come to the conclusion that equal pay for work of equal value -- we came to this conclusion during public hearings on equal pay for work of equal value in January and February 1980, here in this Legislative Building, with a number of members across the way, a number of members from beside me and three members from this caucus sitting on the committee -- has to be a universal and equally available labour right in law.

The reason this administration does not understand the problem with 60 per cent and 70 per cent, with excluding this group and that group, with excluding part-timers and with excluding employers with fewer than 10 employees, is that it does not understand the concept of a labour right, a right of working people no matter who they are or for whom they work, to receive equal pay for work of equal value in the context of their employer.

Mr. D. R. Cooke: That was 1980.

Mr. Charlton: Yes, the debate has evolved considerably even since then. That was 1980, seven years ago.

Mr. D. R. Cooke: What do we not understand now? Speak.

Mr. Charlton: Just what I put out. This legislation does not provide an equal right. It provides a right that is restricted to certain people. I will get to a few other things that this legislation does as I proceed, but that is the first basic thing it does.

The former minister who spoke got me a bit upset. In her position in cabinet before she was forced to resign, she was the minister responsible for the public service, and she does not understand how the kinds of restrictions in this legislation and the kinds of restrictions in Bill 105 will cause a continuation of serious systemic discrimination in the public service of Ontario.

I think back to the days when I worked in the public service when I was a local president in the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. One of my closest associates was the president of the local at the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. We talk about the kinds of discrimination that have affected women in the work place and the pay they receive for the work they do, but there are also a lot of cases where the same systemic discrimination has affected men.

We know, and we all agree, that the nursing profession in the province is underpaid because it is a profession that has been dominated by women. The psychiatric hospitals have a category they call PNAs, psychiatric nursing assistants. It happens to be a category dominated by males, and always has been. The rates of pay for that job were established in the context of the nursing profession and the relationship between registered nurses and registered nursing assistants. All those male PNAs are significantly underpaid in the same way that the nursing profession and the registered nursing assistant profession are underpaid across this province.

Neither this piece of legislation nor Bill 105 as it was originally introduced will address the problems those employees face. Not only will they not address the problems those employees face, but also, because the discrimination would continue against those psychiatric nursing assistants, what then becomes the most likely category to which the medical registered nursing assistants in the psychiatric hospitals would be compared? What would be the most comparable job in a psychiatric hospital?

We have one group, registered nursing assistants, who work in the medical wards of the psychiatric hospitals. It is a group that is going to fall into the 60-per-cent-dominated-by-women category. We have another group that works in the psychiatric wards of the psychiatric hospitals, the PNAs. It is going to meet the 70-per-cent-dominated-by-males category. We are going to compare the two of them, both categories having been affected by that systemic discrimination against women's work. What is either of these pieces of legislation going to accomplish for those people? I will tell members: nothing, zero.

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I listened with interest and growing anxiety as the member for Oriole went through her comments, and I watched her continue the shell game that started a year ago when Bill 105 was introduced. It is a shell game with not just three shells but about eight of them, and with no pea at all. It is a game where we came out with first one piece and then another piece of legislation with this new term, "pay equity," in its title and definitions.

I listened to the member use the phrases "pay equity" and "equal pay for work of equal value" interchangeably for the first two thirds of her speech. She stopped doing that for the last third of her speech, because a couple of my colleagues kept yelling at her every time she did it. I watched her try to do that. It is no different from what the Minister of Labour has done, and it is no different from what the Attorney General is now doing with this bill.

Let us be clear as we go through this debate. If the Liberal government is not prepared to bring in equal pay for work of equal value, so be it. Let it stand and say that. However, let us stop this stupid shell game about whether this legislation provides equal pay for work of equal value, because it does not.

I recall that last fall, while Bill 105 was in committee, I started receiving letters from trade unions in Hamilton and from women's groups asking that Bill 105 be passed as speedily as possible in order finally to achieve equal pay for work of equal value for the women in Ontario. I did not answer any of those letters; I could not. Instead, I took the time to go to talk to each of those locals and each of those women's groups that wrote to me with that kind of request.

I went through Bill 105 with them step by step to make them understand that the request in their letters was an impossible one because Bill 105 did not provide equal pay for work of equal value.

I went through with them the amendments we were going to have to make to that piece of legislation if they wanted us to be able to accomplish the bottom line in their letters, which was to achieve, finally, equal pay for work of equal value for the women of this province.

The same shell game is going on with this bill. This bill does not provide equal pay for work of equal value. Unfortunately, even if it did provide some reasonable definition of equal pay for work of equal value, it has so many kicker copouts in it that no matter what we gain as a result of this legislation, we have also included all the mechanisms to make it possible to lose those gains all over. It is going to be fun.

The member for Waterloo North (Mr. Epp) has been around here since 1977, I believe, or is it 1975? He came in the same year I did. I am sure he does not want to be doing this in cycles once every 15 years. That is what this piece of legislation is setting us up to do.

Members should listen to it. They should listen to subsection 7(2) of the bill.

As the member for Oriole mentioned, we are trying to put into place a proactive mechanism that, for some, in six years, is going to start increments towards pay equity, whatever pay equity is. Some women are going to make some gains -- not all women, because we have excluded a whole lot of them, but some women are going to make some pay gains.

However, then we throw in subsection 7(2):

"After pay equity has been achieved in an establishment, this act does not apply so as to prevent differences in compensation between a female job class and a male job class if the employer is able to show that the difference is the result of differences in bargaining strength."

Thus, the very thing that allows this systemic discrimination in the first place will be allowed to create it yet again.

It is a copout. It is a protection and a dove to the private sector in Ontario. Even Bill 105 did not have that kind of copout in it. We did not even have to propose an amendment to protect against something like that in Bill 105. But this is the private sector bill, this is the bill in which the government has to protect its friends in the private sector, so we have to put an almost foolproof mechanism in place which will ensure that whatever gains are made in the proactive period are lost starting the year after the proactive period ends and so-called pay equity has been put in place.

If the people across the way think there are not going to be serious efforts for significant amendments to Bill 154 after we have had the public hearings, they have not listened to the whole debate and they will not have listened to the public presentations either, because this bill is very seriously flawed.

The member for Oriole in her comments also made some references to the proactive nature of this bill and to how private members' bills that this party has put forward were not proactive. Again, I know it is unfortunate, because she has been here for only 18 months and has not been a part of the debate on equal pay for work of equal value in Ontario, but I have to correct the member for Oriole.

I stood in my place in this House in October or November 1980 as the mover of a bill to create economic equality for women in Ontario. That bill included a whole range of things: affirmative action, sections dealing with sexual harassment and a whole major section on equal pay for work of equal value. That bill also set out a whole range of proactive mechanisms -- they were not identical to the proactive mechanisms in this bill -- to force the implementation of the other principal items that were set out in the bill.

It is not this government that has dreamed up the proactive approach. As a matter of fact, I would think, judging from all the mechanisms that have been built into this piece of legislation, that the government chose to take the proactive route to try to cover up the failures in terms of the major principle here, and the failures in terms of mechanisms to maintain the principle as a basic labour right in Ontario in the long run.

On the question of coverage, I will not go through all the things my colleague the member for Ottawa Centre raised, but I have some serious concerns about the question of coverage that specifically relate to the small business sector and to those business establishments in Ontario with fewer than 10 employees. That is the one sector in Ontario where the largest problem in discrimination in pay exists. It exists both for full-time and part-time employees in that sector.

To create a piece of legislation that is supposed to provide pay equity -- never mind equal pay for work of equal value; those words mean something -- and to exclude those who are the most defenceless and who are faced with the greatest discrimination in the working world in terms of pay is to say that we are not prepared to deal with the problem of equal pay for work of equal value.

1750

They are prepared to deal with something called pay equity with the larger employers in Ontario over a long phasing-in period so that they can hide the impact on them. They have built in enough loopholes so that there will not be any impact on those larger employers. To exclude the most vulnerable groups right at the bottom is totally inexcusable.

We have a situation with Bill 154 where we have time lines that are different for different people. We all know that as employers decline in size, for the most part, unless they have a damned strong union, the rates of pay with those employers are lower than with the comparable larger employer.

What is it that can in any way be called equity when we set out an implementation time line that is like Ontario Hydro rates? Ontario Hydro gives the lowest rates, as we all well know and as the member for Grey-Bruce (Mr. Sargent) has debated in this Legislature on so many occasions, to electrical users who use the most electricity or who use electricity the most inefficiently. For those who go out of their way to spend money on efficiency, Ontario Hydro slaps them with the highest rate because they are the smallest and most vulnerable. The large, inefficient industrial users get the low rate and the small home owners pay the highest rate.

We have a clear analogy here. We have a situation where for those whom this legislation was designed to protect the most and provide the most benefit, we have turned around and set out the longest implementation times. We have excluded from the legislation the weakest of all, those who work in small business and very small industry in job sites and job locations for employers with fewer than 10 employees. We have not only excluded the very weakest altogether, but we have also scaled down everything else so that the next weakest above them gets the least help over the longest time, and so on up the scale to those who already happen to be the strongest who get the most help up front.

Mr. D. R. Cooke: Are you voting against the bill?

Mr. Charlton: No; but I am going to go into committee and amend the hell out of it.

This kind of approach has been debated in this province for 15 years, going on 20 years now, and is just not acceptable. This kind of huge step backwards is not acceptable. If the members across the way would take the time not only to read the debates that have gone on in the past in this place but also to read the positions that have been taken by members of this cabinet such as the Minister of Labour and understand the size of the step we are taking backwards here, they might better appreciate what members of this party and, perhaps, members of the Conservative Party will be about when, after the hearings, we start to move some of the amendments.

I go back to some of the comments where I started out. I am not here in this Legislature to create different classes of working people in Ontario. I am here to try to tear down some of the discriminatory classes that have been built up over time; not to create new discriminatory classes but to try to provide universal labour rights that are equally and fairly available to all the working people in Ontario, rights that will become enshrined as a part of the ongoing economic nature of Ontario, and not rights into which we have built the mechanism for their eventual self-destruction.

I am for providing, as the member for Oriole suggested, a model piece of legislation for the rest of the provinces in Canada, for providing the leadership and not for providing the way out of the place we had reached in the debate in Ontario. I thank God that the Liberals at least chose to use the Manitoba government's model and to take a couple of steps forward from that, so they could claim, "We have done better," because, God, if they had taken the example of any other provincial Liberal administration in Canada, we would have no legislation at all.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. Morin): Are there any questions or comments? Is there any further debate? Are there no further debates?

Mr. Harris: I want to speak on this debate. We thought it was six of the clock and that it would be appropriate for --

Mr. Epp: No.

Mr. Harris: If it is not six o'clock, then fine, I will be glad to speak on it.

What number is the bill again?

The Acting Speaker: Bill 154.

Mr. Harris: I have fairly extensive remarks, Mr. Speaker. I draw your attention to the clock and move the adjournment of the debate.

On motion by Mr. Harris, the debate was adjourned.

The House adjourned at 5:59 p.m.

January 28, 1987

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