Legislative Assembly of Ontario

The House met at 1333.

Prayers.

MEMBERS' STATEMENTS

UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE

Mr Ruprecht: December 1, 1991, will long be remembered as a historic date in the life of the Canadian Ukrainian community, the Ukrainian nation, and indeed, all freedom-loving peoples. More than 90% of Ukrainians voted for independence, a very clear signal that the yoke of oppression and Moscow's control is finally over. Today, Ukrainians will freely join the council of free nations as equals. Their precious democratic rights will finally see the light of day: freedom of speech, press, religion and travel and, most important, the right not only to criticize but also to vote openly for the party of their choice.

The courageous determination of the Ukrainian people to regain this kind of freedom is a source of inspiration to all mankind. Having tasted liberty, neither the weapons of starvation nor prison walls could extinguish the torch of freedom and hope that has been resolutely passed on from one heroic generation to the next. Some members of the Ukrainian Canadian community who steadfastly supported independence at great personal cost by being reported to the KGB are with us today in the gallery:

Dr Hlibowych, past president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Ontario provincial council; Mr Marko, representing the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto branch; Dr Romanyshyn, president of the League of Ukrainian Liberation; Mrs Lesia Shust, president of the League of Ukrainian Canadian Women; Mr Kachmarsky, representing the Ukrainian Youth Association; and Mr Taras Pidzamecky, representing the Ukrainian National Federation.

To those who are here it is fitting that Ukrainian independence is declared in 1991, the very year Canadians celebrate the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Ukrainians in Canada. Their contribution to our nation has been exemplary. To all our friends from the Ukraine and in this Legislature let me simply say [Remarks in Ukrainian].

ONTARIO ECONOMY

Mr Sterling: Last night when I went home and turned on the television news, I was amused to see Premier McKenna, Premier Filmon and our own Premier calling on the federal government to call a conference on the economy. What a joke, when we are doing nothing to encourage people in our province to invest, to work and to create wealth. Prime Minister Mulroney is quite right in refusing these premiers' silly call for a silly conference. These provincial premiers want to foist all the blame for our economic ills on our federal government while asking our federal government for more and more federal dollars to create larger and larger provincial debts.

Why does this government not do some positive things for our economy? Perhaps the greatest of all the things they could do to instil confidence in the business community of this province is to withdraw their ridiculous paper on labour changes. It is adding to the ills of business. It is chasing more businesses in eastern Ontario out of the province. Why do they not do something for a change besides blaming the federal government for all their ills?

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Mrs Mathyssen: It is not often I take the time to look at the Toronto tabloids, because I find the small weekly papers in other parts of Ontario more balanced and the editors more interested in news, as opposed to the sensationalism that seems to be the trademark of papers like the Toronto Sun.

Unfortunately, I have been compelled to turn my attention to today's Sun because it has once again shown that it prefers to use the newspaper's space, energy and efforts to attack for the sake of attacking, rather than use its quite considerable power in a responsible way to speak out against behaviour that destroys the lives of women, children, men and families in this province. I refer to the Christie Blatchford article entitled, "Rae's White Ribbon Like White Flag." It describes the white ribbon campaign against violence aimed at women as feminist pap that does not deserve our collective attention.

In 1990, 234 women died violently at the hands of abusive partners. That deserves our attention.

On December 6, 1989, 14 women were slaughtered by a man who specifically sought out and victimized women. That deserves our attention.

One in four women in this country will be sexually assaulted. That deserves our attention.

I would like to praise those men and women in this House and in this province who have the courage to wear the white ribbon. That campaign for awareness deserves our attention.

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REGIONAL GOVERNMENT RESTRUCTURING

Mr Chiarelli: The restructuring of municipal government in Ottawa-Carleton is long overdue. The previous Liberal government commissioned the Bartlett and Graham reports and introduced legislation which the current government has abandoned. Last January the current minister, the member for Windsor-Riverside, said that immediately after the municipal elections he would establish a new task force to restructure Ottawa-Carleton before the next election.

We understand that the task force will be established in January. The people of Ottawa-Carleton are concerned about the review process. The minister has an obligation to ensure his task force is objective, independent, professional and non-partisan. The member for Ottawa Centre is on record as supporting one-tier government. However, there is a very strong body of opinion, perhaps even a consensus, that while the number of municipalities should be reduced, one-tier government may not only be undesirable but could be very divisive and fiscally counterproductive.

In fact, in the recent election for regional chairman, the one candidate who made one-tier government the main issue finished third while the two main candidates who did not support one-tier received about 70% of the votes. I say to the minister that he should not play politics with this issue. Ottawa-Carleton demands a professional and non-partisan approach.

RURAL ONTARIO

Mr B. Murdoch: For the past year, I have been pointing out to this government its lack of concern for rural Ontario and its lack of interest in learning anything about it. This government says it wants to work with all the people in the province, so you would think things would improve. But once again I have an example of Queen's Park ignorance of any place that is not Toronto.

The Ministry of the Solicitor General is presently looking for an appointment to the Hanover Police Services Board, so it decided to advertise in a local newspaper. You would think it would use the Hanover Post. After all, it is in the same town as the services board; it is 111 years old and it has grown to be one of the largest weeklies in the region. But no, the ministry chose to advertise in the Durham Citizen, a very good weekly, which appreciated the business, but is not in Hanover and is not the Hanover Post.

What are rural Ontarians to think? How can we blame them if they feel slighted? Why should they not feel the government does not care? This government is woefully short on geography and on sensitivity. This ignorance and apparent unwillingness to learn anything about the regions beyond the GTA does not and will not endear it to the hundreds and thousands of people who live there.

WOLFGANG SCHOLZ

Mr B. Ward: I rise today to recognize the lengthy contribution a citizen of Brantford has made to the beautification of our fine city. Mr Wolfgang Scholz recently retired from the parks department, after 34 years of service.

Wolfgang started with the city as a gardener in 1959 after serving his horticultural apprenticeship in his home country of Germany. He received various promotions, first to lead hand, then to foreman, and finally he was promoted to assistant superintendent of parks in 1980.

He was known throughout the city for growing his own flowers from seed, at a great saving to the city. Wolfgang could take an area of dirt in the early spring and transform it into a wondrous and beautiful sight, using various types of flowers and shrubs to obtain the effect he was looking for. Not a year would go by without someone writing a letter to the editor about how lovely our parks looked.

Wolfgang was a member of the Ontario Parks Association for 25 years and was well respected by his peers. In fact, he was invited across Canada to speak on the issue of horticulture and even to the United States, in Atlanta.

As Wolfgang enjoys his retirement, I would like to thank him for making Brantford a better place to live. I am proud to call him my friend.

CHILD CARE CENTRES

Ms Poole: My comments today are directed to the Premier, who unfortunately is not in the House again. That does not surprise me. Just as he avoids us here in the House, yesterday he refused to face commercial day care operators to tell them that they are now out of business in Ontario. But the Premier certainly made time to go next door, where the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care was meeting, to accept the accolades of his union buddies.

There is an old saying, "No guts, no glory." This Premier has no guts but he still wants all the glory.

Yesterday the NDP announced it was spending $75 million to force private sector day care to convert to non-profit. My biggest fear is that this is going to be the last concession the Treasurer will make to child care. With the province's books in terrible shape and the NDP's day care and union friends appeased for the moment, the Treasurer will close his purse.

Sadly, this latest attack against private business in Ontario is typical of how the NDP operates. No thoughtful analysis went into this decision, no long-term planning, and certainly no consultation, just rigid ideology.

Yesterday's announcement does nothing to address the real crisis in child care. Not one more affordable space has been created. Not one more child will have access to the system, and not one more parent will be able to get back to work. Welcome to the Premier's Ontario.

ENERGY CONSERVATION

Mr Jordan: My statement today is to advise the people of Ontario that Bill 118 has already been implemented.

The chairman and chief executive officer of Ontario Hydro has no intention of waiting to receive directives from his "lights-out" shadow minister. This fact was drawn out the other day in the House by the minister's complete ignorance of the marketing and conservation policies of the chairman and chief executive officer.

It would appear that this minister was hand-picked, not by the Premier but by the director, chairman and chief executive officer of Ontario Hydro. The policies being implemented are not in the best interests of Ontario Hydro customers, but only to serve a philosophy of a handful of people who are against nuclear power.

The result of this is negative marketing which brings increased costs, an abundant supply of power for the rich, and I say to you today, Mr Speaker, and to this government, and to the Treasurer in particular that I suggest he combine this ministry with the Ministry of Natural Resources and save the people of Ontario $65 million a year.

ELINA ZAVGORODNAYA

Mr Fletcher: It is my pleasure today to recognize a guest in the members' gallery who is visiting Queen's Park from Estonia.

Ms Elina Zavgorodnaya is from the city of Tallinn. She is a guest in my riding of Guelph for the next few months. She has been visiting Guelph through the political studies department at the University of Guelph where Professor Fred Eidlin has been quite active in bringing professionals and academics from Eastern Europe to speak at the university about the changes taking place there. The University of Guelph is organizing exchange programs at universities in Krakow, Moscow and Prague.

Elina is a broadcast journalist for Radio Estonia. While in Canada, she prepares stories on political, cultural and social issues for broadcast in Estonia and in Europe through Radio Canada International.

This is her first visit to the Ontario Legislature. She is planning a story on provincial politics for international broadcast and will also be talking to members from all three caucuses. I hope you will join with me in welcoming her to Queen's Park.

HANSARD REPORTING SERVICE

Mr Harris: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: As you may know, standing order 130 states, in part, that "full Hansard service shall be provided for all meetings of the House or the committee as the case may be."

I would like to bring to your attention briefly a case where full Hansard service was not provided. Last Thursday, November 28, I asked a question of the Minister of Labour about the rampant nepotism in the Ontario Federation of Labour. The title of this question shows up in Hansard as "Employment Equity." If standing order 130 is to be adhered to and full Hansard service is to be provided, I suggest the title of my question on November 28, 1991, be changed from "Employment Equity" to "Employment Inequity." Thank you.

The Speaker: To the leader of the third party, regarding the point he raises, the member may know that while Hansard is the official record of what is said in the House, the titling is not. It is a discretionary aspect of Hansard. Your point is certainly noted and of course noted by the people in Hansard who keep the records.

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VISITOR

The Speaker: Before proceeding with our routine business, members may wish to join me in welcoming to our midst this afternoon an MLA from the province of British Columbia, representing the riding of Fort Langley-Aldergrove, Mr Gary Farrell-Collins, seated in the members' gallery west.

ORAL QUESTIONS

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Mr Beer: In the absence of the Premier, my question is to the Attorney General. Today's Globe and Mail reports that between 1980 and 1990, over 2,500 women were victims of homicide in Canada and half of those women were killed by their male partners. Thousands of others are assaulted, abused and harassed. Indeed, a sexual assault is committed every 17 minutes in Canada.

Despite these horrifying statistics, there are three key areas in which the Attorney General has failed to address the real needs of women. First, due to the government's failure to respond adequately to the Askov decision, almost 800 sex-related charges, including sexual assault, have been withdrawn or dismissed. Second, the Attorney General has delayed implementation of the support and custody orders legislation until March 1992 and has slashed $850,000 from its budget. Third, the Attorney General is considering radical changes to the legal aid system, including drastic cuts to family law coverage. This will seriously affect poor women, many of whom have been abused.

Will the Attorney General here today make a commitment to the women of this province that he will not cut the Ontario legal aid plan so that it cannot effectively help women in need? Will he speed up implementation of the support and custody orders enforcement legislation and replace the money slashed from its budget? Will he ensure that criminal charges such as sexual assault that are currently before the courts are not dismissed?

Hon Mr Hampton: The opposition members obviously think that because they come in here and recite something, it must be fact. Allow me to disagree completely with the statements from the member and point out a few things to him.

The vast majority of charges that were lost in the criminal court system were lost because they were overdue when we became the government. Somebody before should have looked at that and should have been taking care of that.

Second, the opposition members believe they can come in here and repeat over and over again that we are cutting funds for SCOE. The truth is otherwise. If they would like to compare the budgets for 1989-90, 1990-91 and 1991-92, they will see that the budget of SCOE, now called the family support plan, has grown astronomically. In fact, if that effort had been taken by the former government, we would not have the backlog in SCOE that we had to deal with when we became the government.

Finally, with respect to cuts to legal aid, absolutely no one in the review process has indicated any sort of cut to legal aid certificates dealing with family law matters, and that has been very clearly established. I can say to the honourable member that in terms of the mail I receive from the practising bar, it turns around questions of public defender or it turns around questions of whether or not we might set up a family law clinic. No one is even questioning at all some issue as to cuts in legal aid certificates for family law.

Mr Beer: I take it from the last comment that the Attorney General is indeed making a commitment to this House that legal aid will not be cut back and that the services for women in need will continue. I remind him that there was a real cut in terms of the budget of support and custody orders enforcement, SCOE, the $850,000. Those dollars could have been used to help people who needed the money directly.

The second part of my question to the Attorney General is this: In May of this year, the provincial government announced initiatives to combat male violence. The Attorney General would know that many of the community agencies that were to receive funding are still waiting, and in particular, none of the almost $5 million that was to be directed to battered women's shelters and counselling services to assist the disabled, native and minority women has been flowed.

The Treasurer has already indicated that he is going to be cutting moneys to transfer payment agencies, and we can see at the universities, by the incident that took place at Humber College on the weekend, that there is a real need to ensure moneys are there to help these transfer payment agencies deal with questions of sexual assault and violence.

I ask the Attorney General if he will commit to this House to ensure that the moneys that were supposed to be spent beginning last May will in fact get through to the community agencies, and will he ensure that whatever help is going to be provided to universities to combat violence on campus, the provincial government will provide those dollars directly and not force universities to cut programs in order to find the money to do that themselves?

Hon Mr Hampton: Again, the opposition members seems to believe that if they come into this House and make an assertion, it must therefore be fact. This year, this government is spending over $70 million dealing directly with issues of wife assault and battered women. My colleague the minister responsible for women's issues has pointed this out on many occasions and in fact more money has flowed to those organizations than has ever flowed before.

Second, the opposition members seem to insist that because a particular organization may not at this time have received funds it may be entitled to, this is somehow always the fault of this government. We are making up for cuts in the Canada assistance plan. We are making up for federal caps on the legal aid plan. We are making up for cuts in the established programs financing system with the federal government. We are going further than any other government has, and I believe the public knows that and appreciates that very much.

Mr Beer: Surely the question is one of government priorities, and the Attorney General cannot always hide behind what the federal government is or is not going to do. He has a responsibility and his government has a responsibility.

Now, we recognize that at least one in 10 women is physically assaulted by a male partner each year in this country. Clearly this is a problem of such magnitude that it crosses class lines, crosses cultural lines, crosses age lines. One of the key things governments today and before have said is that we need to increase the awareness and understanding of people in this province about the issue so that we can be more effective in dealing with it.

I ask the Attorney General today if he would make a commitment to bring before his government a proposal to establish a select committee on violence. The purpose of that select committee would be to ensure that members of this legislative body are able to travel this province to hear from those who have been affected directly by this violence, to hear from those who are working with those who have been assaulted and to bring back to this House in a relatively short period of time proposals for change and action.

I think we have to recognize that no matter what we have done over the past decade, this is a problem whose magnitude has outstripped our ability, it would appear, to deal with it. Will the Attorney General make a commitment to bring forward the proposal to set up a select committee?

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Hon Mr Hampton: I do not disagree with the premise that the problem that is there in terms of the assault and the abuse and violence towards women is a very serious one. No one in this government disagrees with that statement.

In fact, one of the things we have done since we became the government has been to give great priority to that issue, whether it be funding for women's shelters; the appointment of more women to the provincial bench, where a great many of these issues are dealt with, in court; training for crown attorneys so they may more sensitively and adequately deal with these kinds of issues; issuing rape shield directives which directed crown attorneys to ensure that women who were questioned in sexual assault trials as to their prior sexual history were not abused on the witness stand or, when it comes to issues like SCOE, dealing with women's issues there.

I want to point out to the member again that the funding for SCOE when his party was the government was $14 million. When we became the government it jumped to $19 million. In the current year it is going to jump to $24 million. We are already doing quite a lot. We do not feel we need to open discussions. We already have an agenda and we are implementing that agenda.

Mr Beer: I regret very much that the Attorney General has decided not to take that proposal seriously, because by creating a select committee we would involve members of all three parties in a way that could be extremely useful in bringing forward new initiatives. I would ask the Attorney General to consider that.

SOCIAL ASSISTANCE

Mr Beer: My second question, in the absence of the Premier, who I am now informed is working on a new game show with William F. Buckley in Hamilton, is to the Treasurer.

In October 1991 there were 433,000 children on social assistance in Ontario, and 42% of the entire social assistance case load in Ontario is in fact children. The Treasurer will know what that means in terms of child poverty is that infant and childhood mortality rates are twice as high as the national average, the rate of infectious disease is 2.5 times higher than the norm, poverty affects school performance, and the list goes on.

I am aware that next week the government intends to announce a 2% increase for social assistance benefits. Is this really the best the Treasurer can do for the children who live in poverty in this province?

Hon Mr Laughren: The announcement of the increase in social assistance rates will be made later this week, I believe, and has not been made yet. I would simply say to the member opposite I do not think there is anything that bedevils us more as a government than the state of the economy and what that means, because when we use a term like "state of the economy," it really does manifest itself in the way to which the member opposite has referred, namely, children living below the poverty line.

That is obviously a major concern to us all. The numbers I have looked at show that this is not going to abate very much in the short term either and that there are going to be substantial increases in the numbers and the case loads of people on social assistance as well. The member opposite raises an appropriate concern, and I can just assure him that we will do what we can.

Mr Beer: I think we know what the government thinks it can do, because we are already seeing where its priorities lie. I come back to yesterday's announcement, where this government has said that one of its clear priorities is not to increase child care spaces, is not to increase subsidies for child care spaces; it is to spend $75 million to buy out independent day care centres. That tells us something about where the Treasurer's priorities are.

The Treasurer may like to know that at 4 o'clock this morning out in front of Honest Ed's, mothers and young children, children below the age of 16, were lining up for free turkeys. We have food banks that continue to grow, but we see where the priority of this government is. It is not to put money into directly helping children but to buy out centres that do not need to be purchased.

What led the Treasurer to believe that, to help the children of this province, it was a more important priority to buy out independent day care centres as opposed to using that $75 million to provide direct assistance for shelter, food and other kinds of assistance?

Hon Mr Laughren: First of all, I think we should put the member's comments in some kind of perspective.

Mr Chiarelli: You already did that. Just answer the question.

The Speaker: Order.

Hon Mr Laughren: The member for Ottawa West should enter the leadership race if he is feeling so aggressive.

I am trying to address the very serious issue raised by the member for York North. I think he will recall, because I believe he was the Minister of Community and Social Services, that he struggled with the way in which the Back on Track reforms should be implemented. As I recall, there was a bit of a stall in that whole process when he himself was the minister, so he knows there are no simplistic answers.

He should know as well in terms of public policy -- and I know the member opposite is interested in public policy in the broadest sense of that term -- it seems to me to be very strange public policy to pit one needy group in our society against another. I do not believe for a minute that continuing to underpay the people who work in our child care centres is good public policy. Perhaps the member did when he was the minister. We do not believe it in this government.

Mr Beer: There is a certain element of hypocrisy in that statement, because the Treasurer knows we are not pitting people one against the other; we are talking about the children of this province.

The honourable members opposite may recall this document called Children Have Rights Too, a primer on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Just a little over a year and a half ago, we had a debate in this Legislature and we passed that convention. It said Ontario should approve it. I raise it because the Treasurer will know that it speaks to the needs of children.

The Treasurer may remember as well what the Premier said during the last election in talking about the needs of children: "The overwhelming evidence, and it continues to grow, is that while the wealthy have done very well and indeed wealthy kids will always have opportunities, the fact remains that poor kids are more likely to get sick, more likely to drop out of school, more likely to have to go to food banks and, bluntly put, more likely to die."

Can the Treasurer assure us that we do not need any more studies, that what we need is action? As he holds the purse-strings of this province, will he make sure, in looking at the priorities of this government, that the dollars he has will go to help children directly, poor children in this province who need help? Will he make sure that happens and that it not go for other uses which at this time are not a priority?

Hon Mr Laughren: Given the fiscal problems we face, I can assure the member opposite that any moneys we spend will go for absolutely critical priorities, and that is all.

Second, I want to remind members opposite that we have already taken some action. A year or so ago, we decided that the people receiving social assistance were getting an inadequate level of support. We increased their level of benefits by 7% and increased the shelter allowance by 10%, because they were getting assistance at a level that had been determined by the people on that side, the government of the day, and we decided that was inadeqate. To put things in perspective, I would say to the member opposite that under very severe economic constraints, we have already done more than he was prepared to do at that time.

Mr Beer: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I know the Treasurer would not want to mislead this House in any way. What the government did a year ago was increase by 2%; we had already committed to 5%.

The Speaker: Would the member take his seat, please. The member does not have a point of order. It is certainly a point of debating.

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NORTHERN HEALTH SERVICES

Mr Harris: My question is to the Minister of Health, who has put a cap on the fees of doctors in northern Ontario. Many northern Ontario residents are now seriously concerned about how this will affect health care and access to specialists in the north.

Many specialists who practise in northern Ontario tell us they will be forced to cut back on the number of patients they see or continue operating and lose money. Some are leaving the area altogether. The minister will be aware of some specialists who have moved out of the country. These doctors are not covered by the underserviced area program.

Could the minister explain to me why she is exempting southern Ontario specialists to fly up occasionally to northern Ontario -- if they will do that, she will exempt them -- but to the very few specialists we have been able to attract to northern Ontario, mostly through the efforts of my government when it was in office and then the Liberals when they were in office, through the underserviced area program, her very program is now saying: "No, we don't want you to move to the north. In fact, you can make more money. We'll exempt you if you stay in the south and fly in once in a while." Why is the minister discriminating against the few specialists we have been able to attract to northern Ontario over a period of time?

Hon Ms Lankin: I truly appreciate that the member has placed this question, because I think it will allow me an opportunity to assure him and other members of this House and people in northern Ontario that the situation as he posed it is not based on fact.

Let me start by saying I think the member would want to be fair and surely would put to all members of the House and the people listening that the improvements in northern health care over a number of years were, by and large, brought about as a result of members of the caucus of the government -- in opposition in those days -- from northern Ontario who pushed governments for those kinds of reforms and to make those kinds of changes. However, that is probably a little bit of partisan exchange which is not that helpful in answering the issue people are concerned about at this point in time. I would like to focus on that.

There are some very technical issues under the threshold caps we are talking about and it is important that we are able to meet with the individual doctors and work through this. We actually believe many of those doctors, for example, who have outreach clinics in northern Ontario which are exempted under the kinds of exemptions for northern services we put --

Mr Harris: Yes, the southern Ontario ones were exempted. What about the ones living in the north, the ones who have been prepared to make that commitment?

Hon Ms Lankin: The member across the floor indicates that they are southern Ontario doctors. If he will listen, what I am trying to tell him is that many of the northern Ontario doctors, some of those who are in Sudbury and have been raising the concerns, are unaware of the fact that parts of their practice, like their outreach clinics, are exempted under the rules we put together.

The Speaker: Would the minister conclude her response, please.

Mrs Sullivan: That's not what they have been told. They have not been told that.

Hon Ms Lankin: The member yells that this is not what they have been told. Again I am trying to put the record straight. We do have a meeting coming up on December 5 which I think will be able to clear up many of these unfortunate misunderstandings.

Mr Harris: The minister's letter of November 13 is very clear. It says, "The decision not to extend further exemptions this year stands." That is it for the year.

Now northern Ontario doctors are getting these types of flyers: "Want to double your income without necessarily increasing your workload? Here's what you do. Move your office to Toronto or any southern Ontario city. Now come back up and serve the same patients but have an office in Toronto. The government will pay you $300 a day, secretary's salary, nurse's salary, pay your travel expenses and -- the greatest bonus of them all -- your income will not be capped."

We have very few specialists we have been able to attract to the north. There is no question they are trying to meet a demand far in excess of the recommended averages here in southern Ontario. Now the incentive is to relocate from northern Ontario and open an office in southern Ontario where the minister will exempt them from the cap, provided they fly up north. She will pay all those expenses too. What about our specialists in northern Ontario? Why, in her application of exemptions to the cap, is she so quick to exempt the southern Ontario specialists who will fly up, but to those living there who have made the sacrifice, who we have encouraged to come to northern Ontario, she has said no way, no more exemptions for them?

Interjections.

Hon Ms Lankin: Some of my northern members are upset about the reference that to live in the north takes a sacrifice. I do not think the member actually meant that.

The member can stand up, yell, get blustery and make all sorts of assertions, but that does not make it fact. If he will sit quietly and listen I will try to correct his misunderstanding. He talks about doctors who have closed up shop, are no longer specialists and are no longer going to deliver services. It would be very helpful if in response to a request I have made, the doctors were to open up the books and we could have that open discussion. I question whether under some circumstances some of these specialists will even be touched by the threshold because of the application of the exemption to protect needed services in the north.

The issue becomes very complicated and it needs to be worked through with the doctors, with their practice books open in front of everyone. That meeting is taking place on December 5. My colleagues have been meeting with the doctors. They have been very proactive in advocating on behalf of northern health services and we believe we will be able to resolve the situation under the exemptions that have been put in place already.

Mr Harris: The exemptions that have been put in place already do not apply to Dr Dan Bryer. He is an ear, nose and throat specialist in North Bay. He sees approximately 200 patients per week. Placing a cap on his fees will mean that 4,000 patients each year, most of them children, will have to go outside the area for treatment. With travel costs and fees to southern Ontario specialists, the minister's cap will cost taxpayers up to $900,000 for travel expenses alone for one specialist's patients to have to come to southern Ontario or to travel to see another specialist. His partner has already gone to the United States, so he is the only one left in North Bay.

The minister's misguided efforts to cut costs will in fact cost taxpayers up to $900,000 more or limit access to care for children in northern Ontario who will say, "I can't make the trip to Toronto." It is either one or the other. If they are going to have access to a specialist, it will cost $900,000 more to cap this particular specialist. Given that it is going to cost more, that it is limiting access to specialists' services for children in northern Ontario, will the minister rescind her claim in this letter of November 13, review these northern Ontario specialists on an individual basis and use some common sense in who she is going to exempt from the cap and who she is not?

Hon Ms Lankin: The member opposite, who is often heard to urge this side of the House to be very effective and cautious in expenditure of government dollars, I think would want me to do that.

Mr Harris: It's costing $900,000 more, five times as much. Don't give me that garbage.

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Hon Ms Lankin: Mr Speaker, I take offence at the comments made by the member.

Interjections.

The Speaker: Minister.

Hon Ms Lankin: I am sure the member would want us to approach this issue with caution to ensure that the steps we are taking are both cost-effective and involved in maintaining as high a quality of delivery service to the north as we can. In fact, the way we look at applying exemptions for the underserviced areas, I believe, can take that into account. I believe that needs to be done by criteria consistent across the north, not, as the member would say, on a pick-and-choose basis from community to community.

The people in northern Ontario have respect for their doctors and specialists, and they do not believe that simply because a doctor or a specialist reaches $400,000 and starts to be returned at 66 cents on the dollar from the OHIP schedule they will pack up and leave. I am sure the member would not want to suggest that is the case either.

However, I truly want to ensure that the services required are maintained in northern Ontario and that we do not take an approach with respect to trying to be cost-effective in this deal that harms northerners. I do not believe we are. I understand the concern in the north and the kind of media coverage that has taken place. Part of it, unfortunately, is that I am left at a disadvantage when doctors I have asked to open their books in some circumstances have refused to do that. You cannot have a level-playing-field debate about some of these things.

The Speaker: Would the minister conclude her response, please.

Hon Ms Lankin: I hope the member will find, after we have the meeting on December 5 and the information flowing from that, that we will be resolving some of these concerns for northern Ontarians.

Mr Harris: I am exactly suggesting that if the Minister of Health asks specialists to accept a fee less than their overhead costs and if she thinks they are going to pay the government money to keep on practising, she has another think coming. They would be better off right outside.

The Speaker: Is this the leader's second question?

Mr Harris: If the government paid northern Ontario specialists like it does those of southern Ontario for equipment --

The Speaker: Order. Would the leader take his seat for a moment. I would appreciate it if the leader would place his second question.

LABOUR RELATIONS

Mr Harris: My second question is to the Minister of Labour regarding the union-building plans. Just over a month ago Project Economic Growth proposed a co-operative task force to study, among other problems facing Ontario businesses and workers -- problems that would also deal with the declining union membership, because workers are being laid off and losing jobs -- labour-management issues in this province. The committee would be made up of representatives from the public and private sectors, both unionized and non-unionized labour. Would the minister tell us why he rejected this constructive proposal for meaningful consultation?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I find it strange that the leader of the third party seems to take such joy in declining union membership. What we are trying to do with the Ontario Labour Relations Act amendments, as we have said in this House many times, and with the discussion paper we have put out is to set the stage for a much better labour-management relationship in Ontario. Surely the leader of the third party would want us to go through our processes before we brought in some outside group to do the work that is involved in discussing what we can do to improve the situation between labour and management in Ontario.

Mr Harris: I think it is important, and the minister will want to acknowledge it, that most of the people in the Legislature were laughing at that answer, including the minister's own members.

I have a copy of a letter sent to the minister from the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association of Canada. The association president, Neil de Koker, has witnessed the minister's so-called consultation process and writes: "To call this process consultation, Mr Minister, is a gross deception, and to persist in so describing the process is an intolerable abuse of legislative power."

Business wants to co-operate, wants to consult, wants to come to the table. But they will not be manipulated into this government's agenda of paying back the big union bosses. I ask the minister again, why will he not cancel his obviously failed and obviously flawed consultation process, which is a non-consultation process, and go back to the drawing-board for full and meaningful consultation with all the stakeholders?

Hon Mr Mackenzie: Surely the leader of the third party does not agree it is an abuse when workers in the province want to have some say, along with management, in the decisions that are going to affect their lives and their futures in terms of the plants that close and the changes made in the labour relations scene in Ontario. That is what is an abuse of the process.

Mr Harris: The minister wants to engage in rhetoric and not answer the questions. I am not at all suggesting that the workers wanting that is an abuse. I am suggesting that he as minister, his Premier, the union bosses -- that is an abuse of the rights of workers and management in this province. That is the abuse taking place.

The minister has now placed Ontario's business community between what are commonly called a rock and a hard place. If they do not participate in this sham -- and they all know it is a sham -- he will no doubt ram through destructive legislation without even hearing from the business community. If they do participate in this sham, they will be discussing the big union boss Bob White/Bob Rae/Bob Mackenzie agenda. That is all that is on the table, an agenda that, as Ford chairman Ken Harrigan says, will frighten away business.

Why will the minister not listen to what business is telling him, that the fact that he is proceeding is scaring away anybody who has a choice? Ken Harrigan admits that Ford has no choice; it is here. But I think he can read between the lines and say that if he did have a choice he would be crazy to invest in Ontario with the minister proceeding the way he is.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: It is unfortunate that the leader of the third party shows such a bias. It has been a long time since I have accused him in this House of dancing to the tune of his company bosses. He should recognize that workers in Ontario resent the union boss label he throws around. These are people they elect to represent them through the collective bargaining process.

ONTARIO ECONOMY

Mr Bradley: I have a question for the Minister for Industry, Trade and Technology. I was going to direct this to the Premier, but he is debating in Hamilton with what I hope is not a neo-isolationist.

On Monday I asked the Premier about the automotive industry of this province and the difficulties confronting the automotive industry in Ontario, and the Premier used the example of Ford Motor Co as a company willing to invest in Ontario. At that very same time the chairman of Ford, Kenneth Harrigan, CEO of Ford Canada, was speaking to the Oakville Rotary Club. He had the following to say: "It appears that Queen's Park is doing everything possible to put roadblocks in the way of economic recovery. Not one NDP policy initiative is aimed at stimulating economic growth and competitiveness within the province. Frankly, entrepreneurs are afraid to invest or expand in Ontario."

I ask the minister, who is supposed to bring the viewpoint of business to his cabinet, what he is doing to ensure that companies such as Ford and, more important, other companies in the province are going to retain their investment in Ontario and that new investors are going to come into the province to place money to create jobs for the thousands of workers who have lost them over the past several months.

Hon Mr Philip: That very company received millions of dollars from this government to do the very job creation the honourable Leader of the Opposition is asking for. Indeed, if we look at where investors are putting their money in Canada, they are putting it into Ontario, not into the provinces run by Liberal or Conservative governments.

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Mr Bradley: I have another quote from the chairman of Ford, whom the Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology just insulted. It says the following:

"I ask you, if you had a choice and were in a position to make a free choice, unencumbered by huge investments already here, would you invest in Ontario at this time? Governments should create a political climate and a public climate that encourages investment, rewards entrepreneurship, rejects legislation that impairs competitiveness, and pays more than lipservice to the consultative process."

Hon Mr Pouliot: Thirty-three taxes in five years. You guys carry the guilt.

Mr Bradley: I ask the minister, and I ask the Minister of Transportation who has no automotive jobs in his town, are these people aware of the number of jobs that could be lost in the automotive industry if they continue their present policies, legislation, regulation and rhetoric? They should think of General Motors and the closing of the van plant. They should think of the number of industries. Has he canvassed them and does he know how many are going to close their doors if the government does not change those policies?

Hon Mr Philip: The particular person whom the honourable leader of the official opposition quotes went on to endorse the economic policies of Brian Mulroney. Are those the kinds of policies that the leader of the Liberal Party then endorses? One would think so.

If members want to take an independent source, Data Resources International, which is the largest economic forecasting firm in the United States, has predicted that Ontario will grow annually by 3.8% in the 1992-95 period, and that is faster than any of the G-7 economies. That is the kind of growth that we are stimulating in this province. It is too bad the member does not support them, instead of saying no, no, no to everything.

RETAIL STORE HOURS

Mr Carr: My question is to the Solicitor General and it deals with Sunday shopping. A headline reads, "Shoppers Give Warm Greeting to Return of Sunday Spending." As he will know, some of the headlines go on further to say, "Retailers Hopeful as Stores Across the Province Reported Busy." The chief executive officer of Dylex has said: "We want [Sunday shopping] all year. It is difficult enough for us to compete without having our hands tied behind our back. It's time the government woke up." It was unfortunate he had to lay off some people in the same week, and he is saying he needs to be open on Sunday.

I notice that some of the published reports say that even this Solicitor General was planning to do some shopping on Sunday. In light of what has happened, has the Solicitor General changed his mind, and is he planning to change the rules regarding Sunday shopping in Ontario?

Hon Mr Pilkey: The short answer to the question is no. I am gratified to learn, though, that the amendment brought forward to this government to allow shopping on the Sundays in December preceding Christmas has apparently met with public favour, and that the desired goal, to assist retailers and retail sales tax for the Treasurer, has in fact been achieved.

I think it was interesting to note as well from the media reports that on Sunday, notwithstanding that Ontario was totally open in a retail fashion, there was a two-hour backup at the border for people returning from Buffalo. I would just like to say to the members opposite who were claiming that the fact Sunday shopping was not available was the sole purpose and was really feeding cross-border shopping, that it certainly put the lie to that question.

Mr Carr: Some of the articles go on to say:

"They came, they shopped, they bought. Shoppers by the thousands descended on Metro-area malls yesterday...."

It goes to say -- I do not know where the minister gets his figures, but I will give him this quote -- "Customs officials reported lighter traffic at US border crossings. Meanwhile, many people were delighted to shop in town."

If it is such a good thing and he is delighted that the stores were filled and people were shopping, what is the Solicitor General going to tell them in January when they cannot shop? What is he going to tell them when they cannot do it in January? Why will they not be able to shop? What is his answer to them?

Hon Mr Pilkey: What I am going to tell the people of Ontario in January is that after this government has given this flexibility and shown flexibility to members opposite and to retailers and to the public, is it not nice that we are now going to return to another 11-month period to a common pause day for individuals, for families, for some non-commercial activity and also to a circumstance of worker protection for all the balance of the year? Is that not wonderful?

CROSS-BORDER SHOPPING

Ms Haeck: My question is to the Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology. Niagara Peninsula communities like St Catharines, Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake have the largest border community population in the province. The proximity of the region to the US for easily accessible border crossing points and a large population base contribute to one of the highest incidences of cross-border shopping in Ontario, as the Solicitor General just pointed out.

Since the advent of the free trade agreement and the gradual reduction of duty rates between Canada and the United States, retailers in the Niagara Peninsula have lost millions of dollars' worth of sales to their customers who cross the border to shop in the US. The Niagara ridings would like to know what he is doing to help the businesses and the business owners in the Niagara Peninsula stem the flow of retail dollars to the US.

Hon Mr Philip: It is a problem this government is addressing with some very concrete initiatives. Indeed, the border communities assistance fund was established to assist the nine affected communities in implementing a variety of ways and initiatives to deal with cross-border shopping. Funding for seven communities has already been approved by my ministry and I am pleased to inform the member that St Catharines and the Niagara region were among the communities that took effective steps and are being funded for these initiatives.

Ms Haeck: I am very pleased to hear that. I had not realized St Catharines had got money. The retailers in my constituency are concerned that since 1987, the incidence of cross-border shopping has increased. What is the minister doing to ensure that the businesses in border communities are able to better compete with their American counterparts?

Hon Mr Philip: I can point out that since last spring the trend towards cross-border shopping has dropped consistently, but we intend to continue to work with the communities to deal effectively with the issue. One community alone, using our government funding, has predicted that its initiatives will result in an extra $2 million being spent in that community. In another region a massive ad campaign will be matched with a price watch program and a telephone hotline that will give customers quick and direct access to their local retailers. I can assure the member that the ministry is also working in partnership with the National Task Force on Cross-Border Shopping to create a province-wide program. We are doing things about it.

ONTARIO HYDRO RATES

Mr McGuinty: That is an example of a speech that sounds good, but this province does not need speeches that sound good. We need programs that are good and sound.

The Speaker: To whom is your question directed?

Mr McGuinty: My question is to the Minister of Energy and has to do with electricity rates. I am sure the minister would agree that our high rates are taking a bite out of our electrical energy users. The consequences are particularly severe for major manufacturers in processing facilities, such as the auto industry and the mineral processing sector.

Members will of course know that these kinds of industries are energy-intensive, and that as a result electricity costs are a major part of the overhead costs. Our electricity rates are now the second highest in Canada and there is a growing concern that we are losing our competitive edge. Rising electricity rates are making it difficult for us to both attract new businesses and keep our existing businesses here. What initiatives is he taking as Minister of Energy to combat this erosion of our industrial base?

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Hon Mr Ferguson: The ministry, in conjunction with Ontario Hydro, has initiated and implemented over 37 programs to help individuals conserve energy and electricity in Ontario. I want to advise the member that some of the programs, such as the industrial energy service program, audit energy use in industrial manufacturing concerns and advise individuals and companies on how they can cut back and/or regenerate energy within the existing industrial use; in short, use energy much smarter.

Mr McGuinty: I expected the minister to make reference to the conservation programs and I want to state here and now, unequivocally, that my party and I wholeheartedly support conservation efforts made in this province. However, I am somewhat troubled by a particular element of the minister's conservation plans.

The minister will know that in August 1990 the previous government set an energy conservation target of 3,000 megawatts to be saved by the year 2000, and we had a competent and independent analysis confirming that was a reasonable target. But now some 14 months later, this government has in place a target within the same time period of 5,200 megawatts. The minister will know that is far and away the most ambitious target in all of North America. It is certainly good to reach as high as possible when it comes to energy conservation, but it is also just as important to be reasonable and responsible in setting those targets.

My question for the minister can be broken down into three parts, and I ask the minister to take his time and carefully consider my question. First, on what basis has the minister's 5,200-megawatt target been set? Second, does this 5,200-megawatt target constitute theoretical, potential savings or realistically attainable savings? Third, if this target is not reached, what backup plans does he have in place to ensure the people and businesses of Ontario do not meet with electrical energy shortfalls?

Mr Ferguson: The targets are not only realistic but are also attainable, and they are attainable for one reason: We have decided to make energy efficiency a priority. It is a priority of this government and it is a number one priority; it is not four or five down the list. We have recognized that we cannot run a few advertisements on television telling people to turn their lights off in order to get the message across. Our programs are comprehensive and they target the consumer directly, and that is where the savings can be attained.

ALTERNATIVE FUELS

Mr Villeneuve: The Minister of Agriculture and Food, I am sure, is aware of the report by the standing committee on resources development on the subject of the emergency problems with agriculture. Today I want to draw the minister's attention to recommendation 48, that intensive market development be carried out on fuel ethanol.

The NDP government's first meeting on this took place exactly one year ago today. We now hear that the government is hoping to have a report by next spring or next summer, which will guarantee no action on ethanol in the upcoming budget. Why is the government stalling on action on fuel ethanol?

Hon Mr Buchanan: I want to reassure the member that we are not stalling. I know the member would like us to move much more quickly, and indeed I myself would like to move the thing along as quickly as possible. We do have a committee that is studying the implementation: what it would look like in terms of small plants, where they would be located and how it would fit into Hydro. We are co-operating with the Ministry of Energy, I might add, to look at how this might be implemented in Ontario. The thing is continuing and we are pushing along in order to have a realistic policy which will involve the use of fuel ethanol in Ontario.

Mr Villeneuve: I hope the co-operation with the Minister of Energy is indeed positive, because we have heard that it is sometimes negative.

Every day in the United States of America two million bushels of corn get turned into 20 million litres of ethanol. Surely we do not need to study it much any more. Today the weather should remind the government, even the Minister of the Environment, that emissions in carbon monoxide increase when a lot of cars are idling and not moving very rapidly.

If the minister supports ethanol as much as he and his government have said in the past, then we need action now, before the budget comes into place in the spring, so we can proceed with the production of ethanol in 1992, not 10 years from now.

Hon Mr Buchanan: I appreciate the member's encouragement that we move this policy along and do it more quickly. We are in fact trying to move it along by putting in place something that will be long-term and not just a flash in the pan. I do not think it is appropriate for us to stand here and announce something until we are ready to implement it. I want to be ready to make sure we implement something that will be long-term and that will be around in terms of protecting the environment.

Indeed, it is interesting that this comes up as an agricultural question. It is an opportunity perhaps for agriculture, and I appreciate that. It is also an energy question and it is also an environmental question. As government, we intend to proceed. I accept the member's encouragement to get on with it, and we will do as much as we can.

LANDFILL SITE

Mr Hayes: My question is of the Minister of the Environment. As I am sure the minister is aware, there are many contentious issues surrounding the reactivation of the Fletcher tile landfill site in my riding in Kent county.

The proponent of the landfill recently applied to the ministry asking that the site, which has not received waste since 1978, be allowed to reactivate waste disposal operations. Residents, the township council and the county officials are opposed to any rebirth of waste activities on this landfill site, especially since the community of Fletcher has been virtually built around this dormant site which has not been in operation for 13 years.

Certain information has been requested by the Ministry of the Environment to be provided in relation to this site. The deadline for the first report was October 21, 1991. What I would like to ask the minister is when the proponents failed to meet this deadline date, why did the ministry extend the deadline for that landfill site?

Hon Mrs Grier: I am very well aware how contentious this landfill issue is and indeed how many contentious landfill issues there are in the riding of Essex-Kent and of the member's great interest in these issues.

The proponent in this particular case requested an extension of the time for filing the report with my ministry and gave us some technical reasons as to why he needed a minor extension. The first report was submitted on November 16, 1991. I am glad to be able to tell the member that the next study which the proponent was required to submit to the ministry was submitted on schedule yesterday.

Ministry officials are currently reviewing both of these reports and we are taking all the steps that are legally available to the ministry to ensure the greatest possible environmental protection at and near the Fletcher tile landfill site.

GOVERNMENT OFFICE BUILDING

Mr Cleary: My question is to the Minister of Government Services and is about making promises and keeping them. As the minister is aware, my riding has been particularly hard hit by the recession. The loss of manufacturing jobs and cross-border shopping have had a terrible effect on the Cornwall area. This is why Ontario's promise to build a new multimillion-dollar provincial office building is so important.

In addition to the recent confirmation of the multimillion-dollar project to construct five new courtrooms, this building will house 12 provincial offices currently scattered across the surrounding area. It is also hoped the Premier will follow through on the former government's commitment to transfer another provincial government ministry.

The building and the jobs it represents are absolutely crucial to the Cornwall and surrounding area. While many potential sites for the building were considered, the municipal council clearly stated that the choice location was right downtown, between 2nd Street and 3rd Street, west of Pitt.

Subsequently, the municipal council was told in my presence to clear the title on this property. The Ontario government has consistently said it will buy the property for the new building. This was confirmed by Bob Riggs when he met with the mayor on August 27. However, the ministry staff now states the location has been narrowed down to two locations.

My question is for the Minister of Government Services, to ask him to confirm his administration's promise to the people of Cornwall once and for all, as Mr Riggs did, that the new government building in Cornwall will be located at the corner of Pitt Street and 2nd Street. Among the finalized plans, there seems to be some question if the government of Ontario will own the provincial building outright on a leaseback agreement.

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Hon F. Wilson: The building the member refers to, the Ontario government building for Cornwall, will proceed, I will tell him that. It is well under way right now. Site selection has not been made certain yet, and it will be made certain in due course. I do not think they will have to wait very long for an answer.

Mr Cleary: Will the minister confirm that the building will be constructed at the corner of Pitt and 2nd, as previously promised? The municipal council was told to clear the title on that property. That was a commitment from the government just recently.

Hon F. Wilson: No, I cannot confirm that at this time. As I said to the member, the site selection was never definitely confirmed. The information --

Interjections.

The Speaker: Order.

Hon F. Wilson: You will tell me, Mr Speaker, when you can no longer hear me, I assume.

The information the member has is erroneous. The subject we discussed will be taken care of in due time.

Mr Cleary: On a point of privilege, Mr Speaker: I understood the minister to say I was in error. I was at that meeting and I was there when the municipal council was to clear the title on that property, and that was where the building would go.

The Speaker: The member will know that is not a point of privilege, but it certainly is one of discussion, at least between the two of you.

NOTICES OF DISSATISFACTION

The Speaker: Pursuant to standing order 33(a), the member for Scarborough North has given notice of his dissatisfaction with the answer to his question given by the Minister of Labour concerning employment agencies legislation. This matter will be debated today at 6 pm.

Also pursuant to standing order 33(a), the member for Burlington South has given notice of his dissatisfaction with the answer to his question given by the Minister of Community and Social Services concerning day care. This matter will also be debated today at 6 pm.

PETITIONS

SEWAGE TREATMENT

Mr Runciman: I wish to table a petition addressed to the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. It reads:

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

"The sewage system of the village of Westport is inadequate. The twice-annual dumpings of the lagoon together with an estimated three months of spillage and constant leakage are polluting Upper Rideau Lake.

"We, the undersigned, request that the Parliament of Ontario follow the recommendation of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority as presented in its study Rideau Lakes System Carrying Capacities and Shoreline Development Policies, which recognizes the cost burden to the village of Westport for a sewage system that would have zero impact on Upper Rideau Lake, and states:

"'Given the regional and national importance of the Rideau Lakes as a recreational resource and heritage waterway, we believe that the province of Ontario should step in and provide the additional funding needed to enable the achievement of best available technology economically available in the Westport sewage treatment plant improvements.'"

I have affixed my signature.

REPORTS BY COMMITTEES

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

Mr Mills from the standing committee on administration of justice presented the following report and moved its adoption:

Your committee begs to report the following bills without amendment:

Bill 28, An Act respecting Class Proceedings

/Projet de loi28, Loi concernant les recours collectifs;

Bill 29, An Act to amend the Law Society Act to provide for Funding to Parties to Class Proceedings.

Motion agreed to.

Bills ordered for third reading.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

WANT OF CONFIDENCE MOTION / MOTION DE CENSURE

Pursuant to standing order 42(a), Mr Harris moved that the government has lost the confidence of this House as a result of its continuing failure to recognize the dangers inherent in its fiscal, budgetary and economic policies and programs and in particular: (1) because of its failure to abandon its tax, borrow and spend agenda, an agenda detrimental to the best long-term interests of the people and taxpayers of Ontario; (2) because of its failure to implement effective measures to control public sector costs and to cut government spending; (3) because of its failure to conduct meaningful consultations with all its economic partners on key policies, and (4) because of its failure to develop and pursue the new directions in fiscal and economic policies required to ensure economic competitiveness, job creation and universal access to affordable public services.

Mr Harris: I know there are many members who wish to enter into the debate today. It is unfortunate that we do not have several weeks to debate this resolution; however, we do have today. I will try to get a few thoughts on the record and allow other members the opportunity to speak. My caucus and members in the Liberal caucus, and I know secretly and privately a number of members of the NDP as well, agree with me.

Whether they will be allowed to blossom forth and express their own viewpoint today we will see. Whether they will be able to vote as I know their constituents would want them to vote we will see. Whether those who feel most strongly that their government is moving in the wrong direction will either be whipped into shape or will exempt themselves from the House today we will see as well. Clearly when a non-confidence motion is placed and a member is not here for the vote, it is usually 100% that he or she agrees with the motion and is against the government but is too embarrassed to come into the House and vote. We will watch the voting at 6 o'clock to see who those people are.

We placed this resolution today in response to the overwhelming number of letters and phone calls and people who are stopping us in the street asking: "What has happened to this great province of Ontario, this province of opportunity?"

What has happened that we are now not envied by the rest of Canada, not envied anywhere around the world? What has happened to this province that used to be the location of choice for investment and for entrepreneurs who say: "We want to do business and service this North American market" -- or this Canadian market or even the Ontario market. "We'd like to set up somewhere in that market." They used to choose Ontario. They said: "This is a great place to bring up a family. This is where I'd like to have my workers live and work. It's where I'd like to invest my money."

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Over a period of time, Liberal taxation and misspending -- disastrous moves on their part -- and then this NDP government moving fast-forward 180 degrees in the wrong direction completely scared off anybody else.

I was out west about a month ago and I visited Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. When Ontario politicians used to go out west, at least until 1985, they always said: "We don't like you guys from Ontario because all the money's going there. All the investors, all the entrepreneurs, all the jobs are going to Ontario and we're envious." When you went out there, you had your head down a little.

They understood us cheering for the Argos from time to time, as fruitless as that was, or for the Leafs -- that was even more fruitless -- but they were truly resentful of Ontario, with its well-balanced management for 42 years, balanced between labour, workers, unions and management, the sense that all was well in Ontario and that the future boded even better, that our children could have a future and an opportunity, an education system second to none, roads, leading the country in the provision of environmental protection, sewers, clean water and air.

They wonder what happened after 42 years of -- not perfect government. Some mistakes obviously were made, but on balance it was the kind of government that produced this climate where people wanted to grow up, where they wanted their children to go to school, where the universities excelled, where the clean air and water were envied.

When I went out west about a month ago, they were not envious. In fact, the media asked me what I was doing out west. I think I have shared with the House that they suspected I was out there helping Grant Devine campaign in Saskatchewan. I admit that while I was there I did the best I could; you can see how effective I was in Saskatchewan. However, the point that is important for members of this House to understand is that they were asking, "What happened in Ontario?"

By the way, the other thing I said to them was, "I'm trying to meet with Ontario entrepreneurs, investors and business people in my role as opposition, and I had to come out west to find them," because they are not in Ontario.

As Mr Harrigan, the chief executive officer of Ford, the third-largest company in this country, so eloquently said yesterday, he has no choice. Ford made investments in Ontario when it thought the same commonsense kind of government would carry on. They had no idea, nor did the voters of this province. They thought, "We'll try the Liberals; these politicians are all the same anyway." Then in the last election they said, "We'll try the NDP; we think they're all the same."

They had no idea how dramatically different was that putting into perspective, balancing the rights of labour and the rights of business, making sure we had a climate where investors could make a buck, make a profit, succeed. When we had that balance, jobs were created, prosperity flowed and we were able to develop in this province the most comprehensive, guaranteed universal access to welfare programs, to the best health care system in Canada; indeed, I think it used to be the best in the world. We were able to generate the wealth to be able to provide that, to provide homes for those who perhaps could not afford them on their own, to provide decent housing and shelter.

They ask what happened in Ontario. I have to point out to them that we elected governments from 1985 on that did not understand, that were not good managers, that did not understand this balance. Then we elected, kind of by default, an NDP government, very similar to the Liberal one except moving even faster.

Many of the Liberals -- I see them travelling the province -- have now recognized the error of their ways. Where were they in 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990? I am happy to have them on my team today, because I accept converts no matter when they come, and I will be happy to accept converts from the benches of the NDP, those few who are here. In fact, if they are at home today, too embarrassed to be here and watching on TV, I invite them to come down. They still have time to get here for the vote at 6 o'clock and join us in trying to bring some common sense back to this province.

There is a $10-billion deficit this year, and we all know it will be more than $10 billion. There is no way the Treasurer is going to be able to keep it under $10 billion. We also know next year's projection is that the deficit will be higher. We know the year after that it will be higher, a doubling of this debt.

On the debt alone, I say there is absolutely nothing more despicable and more disgraceful than saying to our young people, our children and our grandchildren, those in school today, those in the colleges and universities, my son, who is six years old, and all children of his age and a little older and a little younger: "You're going to have to pay it back. You're going to suffer with reduced health care, with reduced services, with reduced controls on the environment, with reduced job opportunities, because the generations ahead of you took more than they were prepared to put back in."

There is nothing more disgraceful than that. As disgraceful as the Liberals were in setting us up for this fall as they did, by making us the highest-taxed jurisdiction, even they were not that despicable, to say to our young people, "We were too selfish and we wanted this money spent, even though we didn't have the dollars ourselves to pay for it," or "We didn't want to say to the public: 'Do you realize this is going to cost you money? We'll have to tax today.'" I have consistently given Bob Nixon credit for saying to David Peterson, "If you want to be stupid, Premier, if you want to spend all this money foolishly, I'm at least going to force you to tax for it." Bob Nixon deserves credit for that one thing and that one thing alone.

Look at the spending and look at the deterioration in access. Look at the fact that just from 1985 to 1991 there are more people on welfare, more people without access to affordable housing, more people being shut out of the health care system. Today we heard of these misguided policies whereby they are denying northern Ontario children even the limited access they have today to specialists. The NDP is to them: "No, you're going to have to travel somewhere else to get it. We're going to drive the specialists out of northern Ontario."

It is disgraceful what we are doing to the future, to the economy of this province, to the opportunities for access to services. When you look at the direction we have gone in since 1985, now fast-forwarded by this government, it is an absolute disgrace.

I do not want to spend time today saying "I told you so," but I will tell members that if they check back to the pre-budget reports, the ones I and my caucus did in 1985, in 1986, in 1987, in 1988, in 1989, in 1990 and again in 1991, they will see in those reports common sense, truths about the reality of our fiscal situation. We also pointed out what would happen. They make for great reading, because even then we were saying some things that may have been unpopular in the short term. It is always more popular to say: "Don't worry. We can spend; somebody else will pay."

That was the whole 1990 campaign of the Premier. I said: "We're in a little difficulty at this taxation and regulation level. We're not competitive and we're coming for a big fall." The Premier said: "Don't worry. We can afford all the Liberal spending and $5 billion more, because somebody else will pay."

Who is paying? The workers of this province are paying today, because they do not have jobs. The poor are paying today, because they have to rely on food banks. The homeless are paying today, because the lineups for housing and decent affordable accommodation are larger than they ever have been. My son, the members' children, the children all across this province and the grandchildren and the children to come are going to have to pay and they are going to have to pay dearly.

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It is in response to this. We have tried everything. We tried the pre-budget reports; we tried that route. We pointed the way. We said to David Peterson and the Liberals: "We'll join with you in limiting the growth of government and spending to keep our taxes down. We'll help you set priorities." We said the same thing to the New Democratic Party.

We released a document called New Directions. Here it is. It is available for all the citizens of the province. They should get it. They can ask for it; they can write to me at Queen's Park. We will send them this document because it provides commonsense solutions.

We offered this document to the NDP. We put it forward in good faith. We said: "Here's a direction you should be going in. Everybody knows the direction you're taking now is disastrous." We said we would help the government and work with them but they ignored us. They said they did not want our help, that they wanted to proceed with their own big-spending, high-taxing socialist agenda even if it ruins this province, even if it means less environmental protection in the future and even if it means that our children are going to have to pay the principles of Bob White/Bob Mackenzie/Bob Rae/big-labour socialism, which are more important than the people of this province.

We have tried and we have put forward positive suggestions. We have been the most constructive opposition party in the history of the world, anywhere in the world. We have put partisanship aside. We have said, "We'll help you see the way, we'll help you see the light, we'll provide solutions, we'll sit down and work with you," and we have been shunned by this government.

I am particularly distressed with this government. In opposition the New Democratic Party said it was a party of the people; they have abandoned the people of this province. They said they were the party of consultation; they consult only with Bob White and the big union leadership. It was 16% to the brothers and sisters in the public sector, the big civil service union in Ontario last year, while the brothers and the sisters in the private sector paid the taxes for it, lost their jobs, were on welfare and went hungry. If ever there was a disgrace in priorities, that was one of them.

So we have come to today, and that is why we are placing this motion. We have been told by people inside and outside this province: "What a disastrous direction you are going in. Why is this allowed to happen?" We have been asked by our constituents, by people we see in the street, getting our hair cut in the barbershop. I was asked as I met with Earl and the boys at Earl's Shell just last Friday. I went into Earl's Shell, because they do not have any representation now; this is in Brant-Haldimand. They used to have a member who, while I disagreed with many of his policies and much of the spending of the former Liberals, would at least go into Earl's Shell and consult with those who dropped in and hear what people were saying in the town of St George, small-town Ontario.

On Friday I went in. I had a coffee and I met with the boys at Earl's Shell and with Earl. David Timms was with me, someone who, I would say in a biased sense, is running as a commonsense candidate in that by-election, if this government ever has enough guts to call it so the people of Brant-Haldimand could have representation.

Here is what they told me in St George at Earl's Shell. They said, number one, this government is wasting a lot of money, moving in the wrong direction. They said their former member and Treasurer was responsible for part of the massive taxation grab the Liberals brought in. But more important, they said the last Premier to play politics with the timing of an election, David Peterson, found out that you do not fool with the people of this province.

Now we have this Premier playing politics with the timing of the by-election: "I don't want to call it just yet because the voters are mad at us, so too bad, Brant-Haldimand doesn't have any representation."

Sooner or later, by the end of February, the government is going to have to call this by-election. In the meantime, I want the people of Brant-Haldimand to know and the people at Earl's Shell in St George to know that I will be happy to express their viewpoint until such time as we can get a commonsense Ontario Progressive Conservative member giving them a voice here at Queen's Park. If that representative were here today, he would be saying the same things I will be saying -- if David Timms could only have a voice in this Legislature today, as he will have shortly in the new year.

We are now at the stage where we feel we have been given no other choice. The government will not co-operate with us. It will not co-operate with the people of this province. It will not co-operate with the union members of this province. It will only co-operate with a few élite union leaders. That is why we are moving this motion of non-confidence. Clearly the people of this province do not have confidence in our current Treasurer, in our current Premier, in the current backroom boys who are running this party and running this government today here at Queen's Park.

In giving ample opportunity to the many others who wish to get on, I conclude with this: I ask all members of this House to reflect on the document we have put out, New Directions, and on whether we should be heading in this direction or in the direction in which the NDP is taking us. If members agree with me -- because this vote today at 6 o'clock is that simple -- that the document New Directions more accurately reflects how we should be putting Ontario back to work and should be guaranteeing universal access to the programs our citizens want and need and deserve, and can easily have with sound management, if they believe that New Directions represents a better direction than the current disgraceful direction of big spending, high deficits, high taxing and big union agenda that we have, then they must vote for this resolution today.

I encourage all constituents who are watching to call their NDP constituency offices right now. Look them up in the blue pages. If they are open -- a lot of times they are not open to provide service -- you can call. If not, call Queen's Park and say: "I just heard Harris speak. I just heard the motion. I want a new direction and I want you to represent me as we voted you to do and to vote for a new direction in this province."

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Further debate on Mr Harris's motion of non-confidence? The honourable Treasurer and member for Nickel Belt.

Hon Mr Laughren: Thank you, Mr Speaker, for recognizing me and allowing me to take part in the debate this afternoon. I think I would feel a little worse about the expression of non-confidence if it were not coming from a Tory. It seems to me that any time a Tory in all of Canada expresses dismay at the way in which the economy is being run, I take some satisfaction in that vote of non-confidence.

I want to tell you, Mr Speaker, that I have never pretended --

Interjections.

Mr Jackson: I can see you're real proud of the Communist economies in the world.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Order, please. The Treasurer has the floor and we will all have an opportunity to participate if we so desire.

Hon Mr Laughren: I will try to ignore the red-baiting, McCarthyite tactics of the member for Burlington South. I will attempt to ignore that. I thought that era was gone in Ontario. It certainly is for all thinking people in this province.

Mr Jackson: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: To refer to McCarthyism when in fact President Gorbachev referred to himself as a "social democrat" in the last elections in Russia is clear evidence that the Communist party and the socialist party have a lot in common. That is not McCarthyism; that is the lessons of history.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Order, please. The honourable member for Burlington South does not have a point of order.

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Hon Mr Laughren: It seems to me that when people hear Tories talk about the way in which the economy should be run, they pay about as much attention to that as they would a speech from the member for Burlington South on how to fake sincerity. That is really where it is all at.

The basic thrust of the non-confidence motion from the Tories is divided into four sections. The first one talks about this government being one of high taxing, high borrowing and high spending. That is what the Tories say, and they of course decry the tendency to tax, borrow and spend.

I can tell the leader of the third party that it does not ring quite true. He stands in his place and says we are taxing too much, then in the same breath commends the former Treasurer, the member for Brant-Haldimand, Robert Nixon, for his high tax policies. There is a certain lack of consistency on the part of the leader of the third party.

I suppose the leader of the third party does not want us to spend money to fight the recession we are experiencing in this province. I find it really hard to take when the leader of the third party stands in the House in a debate like this and says, "We've got to cut government spending." What was he doing about one hour ago? He was in here telling us he does not like the cap on doctors' incomes and he was beating up on the Minister for Health because she had put a threshold on doctors' incomes in Ontario. You cannot talk out of both sides of your mouth in this place and get away with it, and that is what the leader of the third party is trying to do.

I know there are a lot of people nipping at the leader's heels. Not only are there the aggressive backbenchers in his own caucus, but there is the Reform Party as well and he has to look out for that. The leader of the third party cannot simply carry on like traditional Tory parties because the Reform Party has overtaken them. That is what has happened.

Of course the leader of the third party cannot stand in his place and say, "We want you to follow the Mulroney agenda that they've taken this country down since 1988." Can he say that? I never hear him saying that. Why would he not be consistent and say, "We believe in the economic policies of the federal Tory government"? Does he say that? No, he does not say that. He tries to put as much distance as he can between himself and the Tories and put as little distance as he can between himself and the Reform Party. That is what the leader of the third party is all about these days.

If he really thinks that he will appeal to the population of this province by continuing to go after working people who happen to have combined into an organization called a trade union, he is sadly mistaken, because I want to tell him that people in Ontario believe there is a basic fundamental right to bargain collectively. If the leader of the third party does not believe that, let him stand in his place and say so instead of simply standing up and by innuendo day after day bashing anybody who happens to belong to a trade union. It is a sad comment when you try to divide the people of this province along those kinds of lines. I regret that very much.

Of course, not only can he not refer to his friends in Ottawa, he went out to Saskatchewan -- was it Saskatchewan he went to? I think it was -- to tell Grant Devine he should not have run nine straight years of deficits in that province. That is what he went out to tell Grant Devine. What did Grant Devine do? He said, "Well, don't worry. We've only got a $250-million deficit this year. Not to worry, Mike. We won't embarrass you in Ontario."

What happens? The election is held, the books are opened up and what is the deficit? It is almost $1 billion with fewer than a million people in the province. That is the equivalent in this province of having a deficit of over $10 billion.

Anybody who believes the direction this province should be going is the Tory direction should take a second look at the leadership that is being provided by Brian Mulroney and his friends in Ottawa. That is not the direction we want to take this province in and we do not intend to.

Interjections.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Order, please. Interjections are out of order, and I would respectfully ask the Treasurer to address his remarks to the Chair. I know there are some inflammatory things being said, but please address them to the Chair and it will create less havoc. Please continue.

Hon Mr Laughren: I will try very hard not to be inflammatory because I know the members of the Tory party are just on the edge and all I have to do is give them a little nudge and they will explode. I would not want to do that, so I will try to be very careful.

I would say to the people of this province, and to other members in the assembly, that no one likes to have a large deficit. No one likes to raise taxes very much. Who would like to do that if he did not feel he had to do it?

Every time the Tories -- and the Liberals too -- tell us we are spending too much money, right after they have risen in their places and told us we should be spending more money on a particular program that happens to scratch them where they itch, it really does not ring very true. I want to hear the Tories and the Liberals in this House stand in their places when we announce our transfer payments, and I want to see them stand in their places all across this province when we take the tough action that is going to be necessary in the next fiscal year, and say, "Yes, we agree with you; that is the action that is necessary," because I have never heard one of the opposition members give us an example of where we should be cutting back, except --

Interjections.

Mr Carr: Housing; day care; public service.

Hon Mr Laughren: All right.

Hon Ms Lankin: The agenda's clear.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Order, please. This is not question and response time; it is debate time. Interjections are out of order, I remind members again. Would the honourable Treasurer address his remarks to the Chair.

Hon Mr Laughren: Mr Speaker, in case you did not hear that because of the yelling from across the floor, I want to remind you what the member of the Tory party said. He said we should be cutting back on pay equity, on day care and on housing. That is what they said. That is what the Conservative Party of this province believes should be the agenda of this province. I want to tell members --

Interjections.

Mr Jackson: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: Hansard recorded our interjections and therefore the Speaker can check the record. What the Treasurer said was he has not heard examples of cuts, and we indicated to him that he should not destroy private sector day care; he could include expansion. We are not against pay equity.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Order, please. That is not a point of order. Hansard is recording. That is the job of Hansard.

Hon Mr Laughren: As a government, we have some tough decisions to make and we do not expect support from the Tory party on any single progressive measure we take. We do not expect that kind of support. We know they would like to cater to the lowest common denominator, drive down wages in the province, drive down the living standard, drive down the quality of health care in this province, drive down the quality of education -- all in the interest of satisfying a very select few, in exactly the way Ronald Reagan did in the United States. That is the agenda of the Tory party in this province. It is not our agenda.

I want to address directly the assertion by the leader of the third party because it is his non-confidence motion. I do not want to neglect the Liberals today, except that it is the Tory motion of non-confidence and I feel I must direct my remarks more directly to them, through you, of course, Mr Speaker. I want to remind them that when we felt the pressures were building on our expenditures this year, a couple of months ago, we took action. We reallocated $600-million worth of spending. That was responsible management. At the same time we maintained essential services in health care, education and all those other programs the people of this province have come to expect.

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Second, when it was announced by the federal government -- not as a cutback but simply as a collection of tax revenues -- that we were going to receive $2.1 billion less than we were led to believe we would receive, we reallocated yet again. The total amount we had to reallocate the second time was $670 million.

I know the opposition does not like to believe -- they do not believe -- we have been able to be so tough and so consistent with our expenditure management that we have said consistently we are going to contain the deficit this year, despite enormous pressures on both the expenditure side and the revenue side. We are determined to do that, because we know there is a lot at stake in making sure we control the deficit as we plan for the future.

I would remind members that at the provincial level, even after this year and the next three years, while there are going to be deficits every year, the amount of our revenues that will go to pay the interest on the public debt will be in the neighbourhood of 12% to 12.5%, 12 1/2 cents on the dollar.

An hon member: What will it be in four years?

Hon Mr Laughren: That is what I am saying, 12 1/2 cents in four years. At the federal level, with the Tories in charge, they are spending between 33 and 34 cents of every revenue dollar to service the debt. We do not want to fall into that same Tory fiscal trap as they have done in Ottawa. We are determined to avoid that.

What we also did to show leadership in terms of managing our expenditures is we froze the salary levels at 1991-92 of all MPPs in this Legislature, all cabinet ministers, all parliamentary assistants, all deputy ministers and senior bureaucrats in this government. To me, that was a signal of leadership in our attempts to control expenditures in the province. We are very much aware that we have to control our expenditures and we have taken action when we felt it was absolutely necessary. We will continue to do so, but it is going to be a very difficult several years.

The opposition can say it is all our fault, but I think fairminded people out there know this government did not cause the recession. They know that and they expect the opposition to say we caused it, but they know we did not cause it, for heaven's sake. It is not a recession confined to Ontario. We all know that, and I think the opposition politicians do themselves discredit when they try to blame everything on this government. We have been in office about a year and we are coping with the most severe recession we have experienced since the 1930s.

We are doing the best we can, and I think the people in the province understand that. They do not expect instant answers. They know it is going to be very difficult and they know we are going to have some very difficult choices to make. But the one thing I believe they understand is that the agenda the federal government has laid down, with very high interest rates, a high Canadian dollar and free trade, is not the answer to our economic problems. As a matter of fact, in many ways it is the cause of our economic problems, not the solution.

I do not want to take up any more time, because I know a lot of members want to speak. I do want to assure members we are aware of the economic difficulties and we are aware of the need, as the non-confidence motion points out, to head off in a new direction for this province. But the new direction is not one which is mean-spirited, which denies people services, which drives down wages; that is not what we think the people of this province want, even given the fact that we are going to have extremely difficult fiscal times, we are going to have to curtail our spending, there is going to be some reallocation of expenditures, there is no question about that, and of programs as well. I have been saying that as often and as loudly as I can.

I think what is important is that the people of Ontario have a sense that there is a balance in what we must do and that everybody will be sharing the burden equally, as equal as it is possible to make it in this world. That is what we are determined to do, to make sure that people share the burden of a very difficult time. We are absolutely determined to do that, despite the fact that it is going to be difficult.

I expect the opposition to be critical of us. That is their job; that is why we pay them the salaries we pay them. It is because they are there to criticize us, and that makes us a better government. We are determined to manage the economy and deliver essential services in this province because we are determined not to allow those essential services to deteriorate. Even though it is going to be extremely difficult, we are determined to do that.

Mr Mahoney: I am pleased to join in this debate. I want to begin by saying I understand what the Treasurer is saying when he says the people do not blame this government for the entire ravages of the recession and all the problems. I do not have a difficulty with that. I think the majority of the blame properly belongs on the shoulders of the federal Tories and on Mr Mulroney, but I find it rather interesting to have the leader of the third party standing up as if all of a sudden he has found religion. He is the champion of social democracy, taking care of the homeless and the needy and the poor and the single moms. My heart was just thumping. I was really quite underwhelmed by the comments.

While I can very much agree with much of what is being said in this resolution and at the end of the day will clearly be supporting it, I find it somewhat passing strange when a member in this House representing former Tory regimes known for acquisitions such as Suncor and Minaki Lodge stands up and all of sudden says they are the models of fiscal responsibility.

Having said that, though, and being in support of the resolution in spite of the comments, I think there are some very valid points here, and I do think, frankly, that all governments have to accept a certain share of responsibility.

I want to give the Treasurer credit, although he takes all the credit he needs these days, for one thing. When the New Democrats took over the government, I met the Treasurer and I said to him, "I really thought you showed a lot of class in not simply blaming Bob Nixon," when the deficit they were facing went to $2.5 billion. He told me at the time there was a lot of pressure from his caucus to blame Nixon, but this Treasurer had enough class, in the press conference in reply to the very first question asked by the media -- which was, as I recall, "Did the Liberals lie?" -- to publicly admit, "No, nobody lied."

He recognized the fact that retail sales tax revenue had dropped by about $1 billion and the revenue from land transfer tax had dropped by some $300 million. He recognized the fact that they chose to pay off the debt at UTDC in Thunder Bay, some $400 million. He went on and he laid it all out and about $2.4 billion, I believe, was the amount we would call either discretionary or under nobody's control. He was honest about that, and I appreciated that.

That took us to $2.5 billion. What then took us to $9.7 billion was perhaps a little different. I saw a very interesting photograph in one of the newspapers of a large mobile sign. This clearly belongs in the realm of all governments. It was for Paul's Garage, and it said, "Our price includes the PST, the GST, the EHT, the MBT, the MPT, the CPP, the UIC, the WCB." Then it went on to say, "We were going to include profit, but there was no room left on the sign." That really told me something. There are three municipal taxes in there, three provincial and three federal. So the reality is that people are being overtaxed and overburdened as a result of being overgoverned.

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What bothers me the most about this Treasurer and his colleagues is that I believe they truly believe what they are doing is right. That is what is so scary. They truly believe the best way to generate economic activity is with more government intervention. They are committed to that. The socialist view says that government should intervene, that government should overregulate, and that in turn will create spending in the community. They are so wrongheaded in their thinking that every citizen in this province knows it, even the ones who have supported them know it.

The real danger, I say with respect, is that the Treasurer did not just say that for one year we are going to have a huge deficit. He did not even just say that for two years we are going to have a huge deficit. He actually laid out a business plan that said to the people of this province, "For the term of our mandate, we are going to run a deficit each and every year."

For the folks at home, what that means is they run an overdraft in their personal bank accounts and at the end of the year, they go to their bank manager and say, "I can't pay off the overdraft so I want you to put it on my mortgage." The bank manager agrees and then they say, "Now, Mr Manager, I would like another overdraft for next year, and then next year I will put it on the mortgage."

How can the Treasurer's mathematics make sense, when he says that in four years' time the debt service, the amount of money needed to pay the interest on the debt, will be 12 1/2 cents? When we left office, the debt for this province was $39 billion. The debt service was nine cents on every revenue dollar. When we get a chance to get government back, the debt will be a minimum, based on the Treasurer's projections, of $76 billion. That is almost double. My feeling is they overestimate their revenue potential and the debt will likely be in excess of $80 billion, maybe in excess of $90 billion, maybe even $100 billion.

Now how do you service a $39-billion debt with 9 cents on every revenue dollar and then service $100 billion with 12 1/2 cents? My math says there has to be a trick here. So what is the option? More taxes. That is exactly the philosophy that will drive this province into a morass to make this recession look like a cakewalk. That is the exact philosophy. Never mind spend or save; what we are talking about here is a long-range business plan that plunges this province into economic ruin.

What can we do about it? All we can do as the opposition is point out to the people of this province what a travesty this Treasurer and his economic policy are creating in this government. People are losing their jobs all over the province. As the members know, I have been travelling all over the province. People are losing their jobs, businesses are closing, businesses are going to the United States. They are saying, "We've had it with Paul's Garage type of taxes. We're not going to take it any more," and they are leaving.

Where is the cash cow that this Treasurer is going to use to bail us out? I will tell members where it is. It is their pocket and it is my pocket and it is the pocket of the ordinary men and women in this province who are going to pay the price for this totally wrongheaded, disastrous type of policy.

I feel there are so many other areas, but time is limited and I want to share the time with my colleagues. I support this resolution and call for the Treasurer to stand up and admit his policies are going to destroy this economy.

Mr Runciman: It is a privilege to participate in this debate in support of my leader's motion of non-confidence in this government. I guess we are going to hear from a number of the Liberal leadership candidates today being critical of my leader and our party.

They do not have much to boast about. The member for Mississauga West talked about the record of the Liberal Party during its five years in office. They had 33 separate new tax increases, representing something like a 132% increase in taxes for the people of this province. I do not think that is anything to boast about.

The member for Mississauga West, who was not a member of cabinet, as a leadership candidate is now going around the province talking about backbench independence. Where was he during that time when those taxes were being increased 132%? He was another seal kissing every ministerial fanny he could find.

The Treasurer talks about Mr Mulroney. I am not an apologist for Mr Mulroney or a defender of many of the things the federal government has done, but comparing it with the current government in Ontario, it is doing a much better job. As I understand it, their expenditures are equivalent to their revenues. What they are trying to deal with now and what is creating so many problems for this country at the national level is the debt they inherited from the federal Liberal Party run by Pierre Trudeau. This socialist government in Ontario is going to make its successor face the same kind of problem in Ontario that Pierre Trudeau put in front of a Conservative government in 1984.

I want to talk about a range of issues. We have limited time because there are a number of speakers who want to make a contribution during this debate. I want to talk briefly about one element -- I think this touches on it as well -- Ontario's hydro costs: an 11.8% increase in 1992. I saw a press clipping today that stated we now have equivalent rates to New York state. We have lost that edge in terms of attracting new investment in Ontario and expansion of industry due to cheap electric power generation in this province. It is not there any more, and it is going to worsen, as we know when we see quotes attributed to Marc Eliesen, the chair of Ontario Hydro, or the Minister of Energy.

I have a letter from a major manufacturer in my riding; I am not going to mention the name of the company. This is a letter to the Premier: "To be globally competitive we need lower rates, not higher. Ontario Hydro is raising rates faster than we can find ways to reduce our costs." This is presenting a significant problem to this manufacturer in my riding. I am sure it is creating problems right across this province. This is just another element of this government's agenda forcing business out of this province or making it less and less competitive in a global economy.

Another matter I want to talk about is the Workers' Compensation Board. We have talked about the unfunded liability; I think it is in the neighbourhood of $10 billion now. We do not see any real, positive initiatives forthcoming from the new chair of the WCB, a former NDP member. They obviously do not believe in patronage, as they were quick to tell us in the past. We have a former NDP member heading up the WCB. Now they are looking at extending WCB benefits to cover stress. What a hornet's nest that is going to be. What a dog's breakfast. How in the devil are employers expected to cope with increasing assessments based on decisions that will come from defining stress? It is going to be a significant additional burden.

We have looked at news clippings recently of poor investments made by WCB management, costing over $100 million in losses. We look at elements of nepotism in the so-called Workers' Health and Safety Centre with the former president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, Cliff Pilkey, and a host of other union bosses retaining their own relatives. With respect to Gord Wilson, the current president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, his 22-year-old daughter was hired right out of school at a salary of $57,000, and relatives of Bob White, a niece of Cliff Pilkey and a host of other relatives.

Mr Jackson: The son of Bob Mackenzie.

Mr Runciman: The son of the Minister of Labour. I was not aware of that one. A host of relatives of big labour leaders who work for the health and safety centre. We heard over the years pronouncements from the NDP when sitting in opposition about appointments made by either the former Liberal government or the former Conservative government, and screams if there was something they perceived to be a patronage appointment. Look at these people when they get at the trough. There is no end to their appetite, apparently.

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Another element I want to talk about, which has not been discussed, is mandatory indexation of pensions. We hear that is going to be forthcoming. Again, that is going to further deter business from expanding or even locating in this province. Those are the kinds of questions and issues we have to take a look at. They are talking about mandatory private sector pensions. As someone who owned a small business with seven or eight employees, if I had had to incur those costs inflicted upon me by the senior level of government when I owned that business, I know I would have had significant difficulty in continuing to operate. It is to be hoped that the government will take a fresh look at these kinds of concerns being expressed right across the province.

Another element I want to put on the record is the increase in the minimum wage. I have a copy of a fax that was sent to the Premier by Pat Dickey, who runs a small inn in Portland in my riding. The Premier has a small cottage just offshore from this inn; I hope he drops by and visits this summer and gets some feedback from the people who are impacted upon by his government's decisions.

The minimum labour rates went up; as of November the general rate is up 11.1%, the student rate is up 21.9%, the liquor server rate is up 12.2%. These are on top of 8% and 9.6% increases put into effect October 1, 1990.

Mr Dickey says: "Our expenses, cost of doing business, have just gone up by more than 5% in wages alone. Overall...this will require an increase in sales of 22%." He goes on to say they have employed approximately 15 students throughout the year, but now these students are going to be earning this new rate and after November 1 they simply will not be able to find employment at the Gallagher House in Portland. He doubts that any place in the area, in terms of the small margins of profit they have to operate on, will be able to afford these kinds of increases. Again, this is a decision taken by this government without full thought about the impact it will have on low-income earners and students in this province.

I want to talk about 300,000 manufacturing jobs being lost in this province. When I read news clippings about the Ontario Federation of Labour's convention, where the OFL is calling for even stronger measures from this government with regard to labour legislation, with the job losses we are faced with in this province, probably permanent job losses, for the life of me I cannot understand why organized labour -- at the senior levels, anyway; I am not talking about the grass-roots level but the people who attend OFL conventions and who apparently run the show -- cannot understand the impact these kinds of decisions are having on their futures and the futures of their own membership.

During the hearings my party conducted on the NDP budget, the socialist budget, I attended one hearing we had in the city of Kingston. A chap by the name of Bill Fraser, who is the president of Computer Assembly Services in Brockville, gave testimony for about 10 minutes. It was, in my view, very moving testimony. It affected me deeply, in terms of the future of this province and the kinds of burdens that manufacturers and business people must face on a daily and weekly basis to continue operating in this province. They have to have a significant love for province and country, because it is getting so unattractive to continue operations.

Computer Assembly Services has an operation in Ogdensburg, New York, and when you compare the costs and burdens -- I am not talking only about taxes, although that is an important element. We also have to look at administrative costs that have been thrust upon businesses operating in this province in the last five, six or even eight years, when you go back into the latter few years of the Davis government when it undertook some initiatives that were indeed not in the best interest of the businesses in this province as well; I am prepared to stand up and say that.

We talk about widget makers -- I can say that. Mr Fraser and his company can move out of the province; they can move into the state of New York and move all their operations there. But I had the publisher of a daily newspaper express concerns to me that he cannot simply pull up stakes and move; he has to continue operations. Many companies are in that position.

When we look at the tax burden, at the administrative cost burden the former government inflicted and that the current NDP socialist government is inflicting upon the people of this province, it is incumbent upon us to do something. Perhaps we have to do it in a non-partisan fashion. It may not be in the best political interest of the Conservative Party, but we may have to do what we can to bring this government down before three or four more years go by and this province is beyond the state of quick recovery. That is my concern and it is the concern of many people across this province. It is the kind of decision that many of us as politicians sitting in this House are going to have to take in the next few months. We have to set aside our own political fortunes and do things that are in the best interest of the province. That is why I am very strongly supporting my leader's resolution.

Mr Winninger: I am pleased to join in this debate today. I listened with interest to what the member for Mississauga West, a member of the opposition, had to say. While I disagreed in the main with what he said, one thing I did agree with, that this government is true to its beliefs. When it came into office a year ago last October, after the most prosperous years ever enjoyed in Ontario, and inherited the legacy of a deficit from the Liberal government, it had to do one of two things. In the face of declining transfer payments from the federal government and declining revenues from corporate tax, retail sales tax and land transfer tax, as mentioned earlier, in order to maintain existing programs this government had to mount a deficit of $8.2 billion, as members of the opposition well know. The other $1.5 billion making up the $9.7-billion deficit was to stimulate employment and improve social assistance for the unemployed -- the human fallout from the federal policies of the Tory counterparts of the third party.

We hear about companies leaving the province. I am hearing about many of these companies that relocated to the southern United States and the Maquiladora belt and are now coming back to Ontario because they appreciate the value of well-trained, well-educated workers in the labour force, who are motivated enough to come to work the next day, who are not being paid a pittance of a wage of 90 cents a day, who are not subjected to all kinds of occupational hazards, who are well educated, well trained and well treated. This is the value of the labour force in Ontario.

I would also add that 77% of all foreign investment in Canada remains in Ontario, so Ontario is being seen as a strong and prosperous economy. Those companies that would criticize the government are only slitting their own throats, because they benefit from Ontario's continued economic prosperity. To hear the CEO of the Ford Motor Co of Canada suggest that this government is driving business from Ontario is very ironic indeed, particularly when, as an economic stimulus, Ontario has poured literally millions of dollars into assisting Ford to remain in Ontario, to do business here and to maintain those jobs that are so vital to our economy in this province.

I suggest that business should value, build and foster an economic partnership with this government, rather than engage in vitriolic invective. Certainly a good model would be Germany or Sweden or Japan, where labour-management relations have remained cordial, harmonious and productive over the past 17 years or more that I have been aware of the situation in those countries. That has not hindered by one iota the competitive, productive edge those countries have displayed in the global market.

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In regard to the non-confidence motion of the leader of the third party, I suggest that our agenda as a government has not been detrimental to the best long-term interests of the people and taxpayers of Ontario. Overall, our revenue policy has been supportive of economic conditions. The impact of government policy decisions on revenue has in fact been relatively neutral. Major changes introduced by this government have supported consumption and investment.

In 1991-92, the retail sales tax no longer applies on top of the federal tax. Managers are benefiting from a doubling of the Ontario current-cost adjustment. Many low-income people, as a result of midyear adjustments, are no longer paying income tax. Over 100,000 low-income people have money left in their pockets to go out and purchase goods and services to bolster this economy.

Moreover, our tax increases have been selective. Across the board changes to major taxes have been avoided, unlike in previous years where there were significant increases in the provincial income tax, the corporate income tax and the retail sales tax. Our tax increases have been strategic. They have been focused on ability to pay. We have imposed a surtax on high-income-earning taxpayers, those earning over $85,000 a year.

We have made more effective tax expenditures, targeting the small business deduction, eliminating the insurance premiums exemption, limiting the three-year mining tax exemption and imposing taxes to support amelioration of the environment. I am talking now of the gas and diesel tax. Moreover, we are not introducing quarterly increases in the tobacco tax, alcohol tax, diesel tax and gasoline tax, as did the third party in the early 1980s, where quarterly increases in these taxes were the order of the day.

I also add that this government has not failed to implement effective measures to control public sector costs and cut government spending. The government's midyear spending adjustment plan redirected approximately $600 million to deal with urgent pressures, including $240 million for additional spending for social assistance, $53 million in extra costs for firefighting experienced in northern Ontario, $250 million to cover the increased costs of pensions for Ontario teachers, and finally, $35 million to fund farm assistance to the ailing farm community.

I might add that we have taken the initiative to freeze salary levels for the next two years for the Premier, cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, members of the provincial Legislature, deputy ministers and senior bureaucrats. Again, this is a fine example of selective restraint. If anything, we as members are more comfortable than the average taxpayer in my riding of London South, for example, so we should be a signal, an emblem, to the taxpayers of Ontario in displaying restraint right here in the Legislature. At the same time, however, the government will seek to contain wage rate increases for the remainder of the public service in keeping with the fiscal constraints that are so necessary at this point in time.

There are other members who wish to speak. For that reason, I am going to keep my comments short. However, I suggest that there has been no failure to conduct meaningful consultations with all our economic partners on key policies, as the leader of the third party suggested earlier.

Just to name a few, the Ontario government has taken a number of meaningful consultations with economic partners on such key issues as the Ontario budget, the employee wage protection program, the Ontario investment and worker ownership program, the Premier's Council on Economic Renewal, the Ontario Labour Relations Act reforms and the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board.

In my own community of London, next week the employment equity commissioner will be coming to visit and she will be hearing submissions over the course of two days with respect to employment equity initiatives. It is vital and important that we continue this process of consultation with the public because I believe, and I believe the members of my riding in London South believe, that there has been a failure to consult fully with the people in the past. My constituents in the riding of London South certainly respect this government for being prepared to listen to what the people of Ontario have to say instead of taking any high-handed, top-down fiscal decisions.

In conclusion, I submit this government is taking very positive steps to contain tax increases, to tax selectively and to use those revenues from taxes in a productive and fair manner. At the same time, cuts may have have to be made to spending and to programs. This government will continue to respect its commitment towards social justice and economic renewal for the people of Ontario.

Mr Sorbara: I will just say to my friend, the member for London South, that if that is the only defence he can make of the programs his government is putting forward in the most difficult economic times Ontario has seen in perhaps the last 60 years, we are in a very sad state indeed.

I support the motion of the member for Nipissing, the leader of the third party. I support it not because of what it contains in specifics. I think the member is not spot on, I say to the Treasurer who is not here, in his analysis. The want of confidence motion is not really supportable on the basis of what is in the motion, which refers to lack of consultation, to a "tax, borrow and spend agenda" and to the "failure to develop and pursue the new directions in fiscal and economic policies." The reason it is important to support this non-confidence motion, I say to you, Mr Speaker, and to the members of this House, is that the government has lost the confidence of the people of this province.

I simply invite the members of the government who are staying around for this debate to ask themselves honestly whether in the past 15 months, since September 1990, in any aspect, in every aspect of life in Ontario, have things improved or have they got worse? Have companies been given more reason to invest and create new jobs, or fewer? Do we have more confidence in our health care system now than we did 15 months ago, or less? Do we feel now, as a result of 15 months of government under the social democrats, that our education system shows signs of improving, of coming back to life, of responding to the needs of our children, or less?

Do we have more confidence now that the social safety net we all claim to be so proud of is more effective, or less effective? Do we have a sense that the kind of vitality, prosperity and real potential this province has is growing or expanding, or is it decreasing by the minute, the day, the week and the month? I suggest that in every single case, in every single area of government activity, in every single aspect of life in this province over the past 15 months, things have got worse.

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The Treasurer -- I guess I take him at his word -- said, "Fairminded people don't blame us for the recession." He says: "We are trying to take a balanced program to share the burden of the worst economic times since the 1930s. We're trying to distribute the load. We're trying to develop programs that share the burden of the recession in every corner of the province."

I say to the Treasurer, who is nibbling on peanuts, that this is precisely the problem. The problem is that instead of realizing the very serious economic times we are having, instead of setting aside the agenda he would have otherwise pursued, instead of setting aside the determination to put private sector day care businesses out of business in favour of the non-profit sector, instead of that he should be setting aside all the non-urgent agenda and bringing forward to this Parliament and the people of Ontario an urgent plan for economic reconstruction. Everything else, I say to him, must become secondary.

I and my colleagues who want one day to be leader of the Liberal Party and the Premier of Ontario have been visiting communities. I say to the Treasurer that we support the motion of the member for Nipissing because there is a grave want of confidence not just here in Parliament, but in every community in Ontario. I suggest to the Treasurer that he simply visit Windsor and look at the number of stores that have closed up, that have gone out of business, and that he then ask himself whether his gasoline tax was the kind of measure that would help the economy get back on its feet.

I invite the Treasurer to visit Thunder Bay and look at the terrible pressure the pulp and paper industry and the entire forest industry is under, and then ask himself what programs have been brought forward by the Minister of Natural Resources to get that industry on its feet. Sure there is a glut of pulp and paper in the world market, but those are the challenges governments are expected to respond to, not simply throw up their hands and say: "We're doing the best we can in distributing the burden of this recession. We're trying to hold the line on the deficit." One day we announced $700 million in capital expenditures, and then throughout the rest of the year we took back about $400 million. That is not enough, I say to the Treasurer. That response is not solid enough.

One goes to other corners of the province and hears it reported that the Minister of Health says there are perhaps $5 billion worth of unnecessary expenditures in the health care system. Suddenly the people say that our health care system is in crisis. Our health care system is not in crisis. We have a great health care system. We have to maintain that system. What is in crisis is our economy and our ability to generate the wealth to maintain that kind of system. I plead with the Minister of Health not to use this recession to start to tear away at a health care system that sets us apart from every other jurisdiction in the world.

Hon Ms Lankin: I get to speak after you.

Mr Sorbara: The Minister of Health says she gets to speak after me. I invite her, when she speaks, to retract the kinds of comments that suggest we are unnecessarily spending $5 billion on our health care system.

I invite the Treasurer to visit the Kitchener-Waterloo region, where we have seen more plant closures and layoffs than in just about any other region of the province. That triangle of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo, with its universities and its intellectual abilities and the skill of its workforce, can be one of the most vital components of the Ontario economy.

What is the Treasurer's response? He says, "We are doing the best we can." I simply say to him to set aside what he is doing and to set aside the Minister of the Environment's terrible environmental protection legislation where she takes away the rights of communities to participate in environmental decisions. The government should set that aside. They should set aside the Ontario Labour Relations Act amendments. We can deal with them later. They should set aside the kinds of initiatives that are going to put private day care operators out of business. They can set that aside for a while, and let us together get on in this Parliament and in this province with an emergency plan for economic reconstruction.

I tell the Treasurer there are precedents for this. There are precedents for the kind of rebuilding we need to do in Ontario. There are precedents indeed all over the world. We can look at the reconstruction of the United States and Canada after the Depression. We can look at Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. That is the kind of situation we are in right now, and to be piddling around with amendments to the Ontario Labour Relations Act and putting day care workers out of business and trying to take away the rights of the people on environmental matters simply does not match up.

We can look at the kind of work that C. D. Howe did.

Hon Mr Laughren: The next thing you will do is declare war.

Mr Sorbara: The Treasurer says, "The next thing you will do is declare war." Yes, I think we should declare war. I think we should declare war on the part of the poor.

Hon Mr Laughren: If you declared war on poverty, you'd throw stones at --

Mr Sorbara: The Treasurer makes light of it. The Treasurer makes light now of declaring war on poverty.

Hon Mr Laughren: No, I don't make light of it.

Mr Drainville: Don't get on the poverty bandwagon, Greg, because you don't belong there.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Villeneuve): Order, please. The honourable member for York Centre has the floor.

Mr Sorbara: I think at least we have got their attention a little bit.

The Treasurer makes a little bit of fun of the notion of declaring war on poverty. He makes fun of the suggestion that our obligation here is to get on with the economic reconstruction of this province. We need to start building again. We need to start building a new economy that can really provide full and meaningful employment for the people of this province. It is not enough, I tell him, to suggest that the recession has been caused elsewhere.

He talks about the high interest rates. We now have pretty low interest rates not only in Ontario but throughout Canada, but we need some direction from this government other than to say, "We are trying to cope."

Look at what the Premier has been doing. The Premier talks the right talk. He has all the right words. He says the economy has to be our first priority, that the Constitution of Canada also means the economy of Canada. We rarely see the Premier in the House any more. He does not participate in the debates of this House. He offers no substance. He does not tell us how we are going to get on with the reconstruction of the Ontario economy.

Of course, he has Frank McKenna in and he has Gary Filmon in from Manitoba, and he gets a good headline calling for a first ministers' conference on the economy. What is a first ministers' conference on the economy going to do? He knows full well that given the constitutional dilemmas we are having in Canada right now, it is futile to call for a first ministers' conference on the economy, but that is the Premier's response. We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, and what does the Premier call for? A social charter.

Which of us would not espouse the notion of a social charter to say in our fundamental law that everyone should have health care, that everyone has a right to a job, that everyone has a right to the very best of education? But we are not getting on with it here.

When you travel this province and have people saying to you, "I lost my job a year and a half ago. I no longer have any unemployment insurance. I have never gone to the welfare office to ask for assistance. I am in distress," what do you say? What do you say to the farmers of Ontario who are suffering through times unmatched in our history, except for the period from 1929 to 1939?

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The government has made no response. I simply plead with them to understand that the reason we have a want of confidence motion in this Parliament today is because the people of Ontario no longer have confidence in this government.

Hon Mr Laughren: That's not true.

Mr Sorbara: The Treasurer says that is not true. I will tell the Treasurer, quite frankly, there was a very high degree of interest and excitement shortly after he and his government were elected that things really were going to change, going to be different. There was a little bit of nervousness. We had never had a social democratic experiment, a labour government experiment, an NDP government experiment in Ontario. We had the United Farmers of Ontario about 60 or 70 years ago, but we had never experimented with the party of the left. Even those who did not particularly espouse NDP ideology thought perhaps we were going to have an exciting time.

I say to the Treasurer that this government is in neutral. This government is not doing anything. This government is boring. This government does not bring forward measures to this House or to this province that mean anything to the people who are suffering in this province, and that is why the people of Ontario are expressing a collective want of confidence in Ontario's first, and I hope last, experiment with NDP ideological governments. That is why I say to the Treasurer that we should be supporting this motion.

Of course, the government backbenchers waiting behind the curtain to come out and defeat this motion will get their way, but they will not get their way for ever. It is not going to be like this for ever. The neglect of the government in virtually every ministry and, I say, epitomized by the Treasurer's neglect of the real problems of this province, and the Premier's insulting approach to Parliament and to the problems of this province, will not go on for ever. In a democracy the people ultimately do have a chance to have their say.

If this want of confidence motion does not succeed today, I simply say to the government members that soon the people will be able to express whether or not they have confidence in this government, and the answer at that time will be that they have no confidence and that this first term in government will be their last.

Mr Carr: I will be brief -- there is always so little time with this -- to give my friend the member for Etobicoke West as well as the member for Wellington some time.

We got a fax that just came in as a result of the member for Nipissing's comments on calls and faxes, and it says: "I totally support your motion. This present government is against private ownership, has shown itself to have ideological ideas with no compromise."

It goes on to say some other things that I will not read into the record because they are rather insulting, but the end of the particular fax -- and faxes are coming in, as well as some phone calls, I believe -- says: "I wish you the best of luck in your endeavours. Please tell Floyd for me he is out to lunch." I am saying to the Treasurer that the people of this province are saying he is indeed out to lunch.

I was a little angry yesterday when the Premier stood up and said that the Ford Motor Co was investing in this province and that this was a great government and that was proof of the fact it was doing things right. It was interesting to note, as I drove home and passed the Ford plant, that the investment he was talking about is already built. It is already built because the decisions have been made many years ago.

I see the comments today, the headline in the paper, "NDP Stalling Recovery, Ford Chief Says" and I read: "Ontario's NDP government seems to be doing everything it can to stall the province's economic recovery, said Ford Canada chairman Ken Harrigan." He told the Oakville Rotary Club lunch that the resulting uncertainty is directly responsible for delays in announcing a new product for the car assembly plant.

The Premier stands up and says: "Everything is okay. People are investing." The headlines of the next day contradict those statements. "NDP Policies Frighten Away Business, Ford Chairman Says." He goes on to say: "The stakes have never been higher. Particularly vulnerable is Canada's $14-billion-a-year parts industry, which employs 88,000, most of them in southern Ontario." Those 88,000 jobs are at stake because of this government and this Treasurer, who does not know how to control spending and who is taxing and spending like there is no tomorrow. It is a crime.

In my speaking engagements as I go around the province, I get a chance to speak with schools. As I do, a lot of the children are concerned, particularly when you put it in perspective. The deficit we are looking at costs this government $15,000 a minute, not to pay for the good roads, the good education or the health care system, but $15,000 a minute just to pay the interest on the provincial debt. We are leaving a legacy to the children of this province that is a disaster.

In fact, I even have some little artefacts here from some of the children who said, "Pass it on to the Treasurer." It says that money does not grow on a tree. They have a little sign, a little bit of money stacked, and then a little bit of shrubbery that is supposed to be a tree. The children of this province are saying: "Money does not grow on trees. We are going to have to pay this $15,000 a minute because of your government spending."

We have tried to be practical in New Directions which people are calling and faxing us about, wanting to get some practical solutions. We talk about some of the things that should be done. It was interesting, the Minister of Economics, the Treasurer responsible for this disastrous budget, said, "What would you do?" As I take a look at the Ministry of Treasury and Economics finances, in exactly nine months we have spent $200 million more in housing because of its policies with regard to Bill 4 driving the private sector out of the housing market.

As recently as yesterday, $100 million was announced for non-profit day care when the private sector has continually shown it can do the job faster, better and at no expense to the taxpayer. But it is being thwarted, shut out and penalized because it does not fall in with the ideology of this government. In the area of housing, we have shown you would save literally billions of dollars if you did not drive the private sector out. In the area of day care we are talking about millions and billions of dollars over the course of this government that could be saved if you had more private sector involvement.

There is one fundamental principle. All the things we care about, the good roads, the hospitals, the day care, do not depend upon the compassion of government with all this government's self-styled, self-serving sensitivity and assignment of blame to other levels of government. They do not depend on the compassion; they depend on having a healthy and prosperous economy to support them. What we do not have in this province is creation of wealth, because this government is driving the people who create the wealth out of this province.

As I look at some of the statistics, they say: "It would have happened. Any government would have done it." I remember, in the standing committee on finance and economic affairs, the Canadian Auto Workers were there with Bob White. During the shift change, he brought some of the crew in. We had a good exchange. I remember when I asked him the question. They said, "Mr Carr, you've got five minutes to question Mr White on what is happening with the budget."

This was after he had flip-flopped. He originally said it was a good budget, then he said it was a bad budget. This time he was back to saying it was a good budget again. I said: "How can you justify spending? In the five minutes I am going to get to question you, this province is going to spend $75,000 just to pay the interest alone on the provincial debt. Most of the gentlemen and women standing behind you don't make that in a year and you're going to spend it in five minutes." Even the auto workers who at that time were up and down and chanting, "Great, Bob, give it to him, this is a great budget," sat silent because they did not realize we were spending $75,000 in five minutes to pay the interest alone on the provincial debt.

What we are doing provincially is the same thing we did federally in the early 1980s. We spent and taxed like there was no tomorrow and we are paying for it now. All the things we care about, all the things in this province, depend on creating wealth, and that is something this government has not done.

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In the brief minute I have left, I want to talk about the reasons people are leaving this province and the statistics that have come in from the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Technology. The minister was kind enough to give me some of the information. People are saying the biggest reason they are leaving is the tax structure in Ontario. Ontario is now the highest-taxed jurisdiction in Canada, the highest-taxed jurisdiction in all of North America, and what does this government do as we face this crisis in taxes? They turn around and say, "In the next budget, we're going to have to increase taxes," the exact opposite of what they should be doing.

What this government needs to do is control spending. I stood in this Legislature and introduced a practical measure on a sunset clause that would have the financial spending of every agency or board that was created reviewed in order to be streamlined, improved or cut. This government voted against it. I might add it was the same sunset bill that the Liberals voted against when they were in power.

What we have done with New Directions is put some things together, some practical solutions. I invite the public to respond to the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. We talk about adjustments with job retraining, training and apprenticeship programs, so that we can get people off social assistance.

When the Liberals came in, when they took over from the Conservatives in 1985, they said, "We care more," and they pumped all this money into social assistance programs. Guess what happened? The number of people on social assistance and the waiting lists got longer. Then this government comes in and says, "No, we care more; we're more compassionate than the Liberals and the Tories," and they pumped more money into it. Guess what happened? The number of people on social assistance and the waiting lists got longer.

What must not judge programs by the amount of money we spend; surely we should judge them by the number of people we get off social assistance with jobs, retraining, training and apprenticeship programs. That would be a better indicator of the results of this government.

I know the time is getting short. I agree with the people who are faxing and calling in. This Treasurer is out to lunch; this Premier is out to lunch. The people of this province know there is only one party, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, that is standing up for the people. They know very clearly that this country, this province and its people can do better. We are committed to making it happen.

I encourage all political parties to have some input into New Directions, because we cannot afford what has happened over the last year under this government. Unfortunately, the children who are writing to me and talking about the money trees are the ones who are going to have to live with this, but we are not going to let this government get away with it without a fight.

Mr Sutherland: It is a pleasure for me to be involved in the discussion today, because the sense of what I get in my riding is far different from what I am hearing from the opposition side.

People in my riding are certainly very concerned about their future and they are very concerned about the economic situation. There is a great deal of uncertainty and there is no doubt that there is a general level of concern and a degree of pessimism out there, but what people want from their government is one that will balance being fiscally responsible with trying at the same time to deliver programs in a fair, equitable and compassionate manner.

The people of Oxford do realize that these are difficult times, but they also see their neighbours suffering and hurting during this recession and they want the government to maintain the level of services. That is what we tried to do in the last budget. To say we have not done anything -- right now at the high school in Norwich in my riding of Oxford people are working who would otherwise not be working, doing renovations to that school because this government made a commitment through the $700-million anti-recession program to put people back to work. That is what is important during these difficult times. People have confidence in a government that is going to be this way.

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker: To the member for Etobicoke West, I recommend that if you decide to heckle, do so from your seat.

Mr Sutherland: I look at this motion and it makes me wonder. I read section 1 and it says, "because of its failure to abandon its tax, borrow and spend agenda..." There is the greatest need out there during this, the worst year of the recession, and we have tried to respond to that need as much as we are able, but I find it rather ironic to listen to the Leader of the Opposition talk about cut, cut, cut, because when he is not in here he sometimes sends a different message.

I believe the Conservative caucus had a retreat in Brantford over the summer, and what was the headline in the Brantford Expositor? There is the Leader of the Opposition saying more money should be given to hospitals. Hospitals need more money. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth. At one time it is, "Save, save, save." Another time it is, "Spend, spend, spend." The people of this province are looking for a degree of consistency from their elected officials and I do not believe the Leader of the Opposition has been providing that.

Number 2 says we are not controlling public spending. We are. The member for London South stated that and a great deal more in terms of controlling spending, in the adjustments, in controls of purchasing new vehicles, on travel, on other expenses, and we will continue to do more.

Number 3, "failure to conduct meaningful consultations": We know there are several consultation papers out there right now. There is employment equity. There are labour relations. There is the Fair Tax Commission and the one announced last week, the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board. It is interesting to look at the press clippings. The headline in today's Toronto Star is "Rae's Training Plan Puts 'Partnership' in Practice." True consultation and partnership between business and labour is going on in the discussions around the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board. That is going to help make this province more competitive in the future.

People are unemployed. I have people calling my office looking for training all the time. They want the training. They want to work. They are not on social assistance because they want to be or because they are lazy. They want to work, but we have not had a sufficient skills training program in this province to deal with those concerns. It is this government, not the Tories, not the Liberal government, although it started the discussion process. It is this government that is carrying out the most effective consultation and is going to build the partnership between labour, business and community organizations to have proper skills training in this province.

Number 4 says "to develop and pursue new directions...to ensure economic competitiveness, job creation and" -- I love this last one -- "universal access to affordable public services." Now the Tory party, the third party, is the great defender of universal access to public services. What a great revelation this is. They had 40 years in government and now, after five years of being out in the political wilderness, they say they support universal access. One thing the people of this province know is that if we are going to have quality public services, we have to be willing to pay a price for that. Let's be quite frank. People understand that they do not come cheaply but that they are a commitment to people. If they are going to remain accessible, we have to be willing to make that commitment.

This resolution is saying "Cut, cut, cut," and at the same time is saying they want us to retain universal access. I am sure many people are very concerned about that type of mixed message coming from an opposition that claims, in New Directions, that it is putting forward concrete suggestions for alternatives.

We know these are very challenging times for all of us and all of us as elected members feel for our many constituents who are suffering and hurting through this recession, but it is through co-operative measures such as the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board that we will be able to make significant differences and put this province back on track and into a full-fledged recovery.

The third party talks about taxation and says this is the only issue affecting competitiveness. When I talk to businesses and business leaders in my riding, which I do on a regular basis -- as a matter of fact, I met with the Tillsonburg Chamber of Commerce, along with the member for Norfolk and the member for Elgin, a couple of weeks ago -- they tell me that is one issue but that there are a lot of other issues. It is skills training. It is the question of interest rates. It is the question of access to markets. It is a lot of issues that go into investment decisions. It is not just the one issue. I guess that shows some of the thinking in the third party. They can only focus in and be narrow-minded on one specific issue.

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Whatever the outcome of the vote today -- I certainly hope this motion is defeated -- I will look with great interest to see if the leader of the third party will be sending a copy of this to all the newspapers. Members will recall we had an opposition day on agriculture that stood in the name of the leader of the third party. I was quite surprised a few weeks after that debate when I saw a letter in my local paper from the leader of the third party, saying how his party had made the great sacrifice to have an opposition day discussion on agriculture because it is so committed and he is so committed to it. We all remember that the leader of the third party was not even here for the debate. Does that show his commitment or lack of commitment on those issues?

The people of Ontario do not want to be hoodwinked like that. They want to see some consistency and they want to see a government make tough decisions, which no doubt we will have to make. They want to see us try to do that in a fair and equitable manner so that all of us can try to get through this most difficult time and so that everyone will work together to bring us back together.

Some of my other colleagues want to speak, so I will wrap it up. I think we should defeat this motion that quite clearly shows the inconsistency and the lack of direction from the third party, and also shows that it is probably going to continue to be in the political wilderness, as it has been for the last six years.

Mr Beer: It is a pleasure for me to rise and participate in this debate on the motion of our colleague the member for Nipissing. I will be supporting the motion. I want to focus on one of the areas, item 4, where he talks about the "failure to develop and pursue the new directions in fiscal and economic policies," because I think the debate to this point has tended to be stuck on some of the very important but immediate problems the current government has brought forward because of its budget.

I think one of the places one can be most critical of the government is its inability to move forward and in a strategic sense begin to attack the longer-term problems and to really give people a sense of hope that once we come through this recession there will be policies in place that really are going to ensure we have jobs in the long run, and that there is going to be a competitive climate within this province and within this country that will ensure there will be jobs.

In speaking about that, I think the single most important tool we have as a province to influence economic growth is our overall education and training system. We know, and it has been said before, that the federal government obviously has a series of tools such as interest rates and the value of the dollar that have a very immediate and critical impact on how the economy is doing. What we are talking about here today is what we as a province can do and what this government can or ought to do. When we look at it from that perspective I think our answer is: In the education and training system, what are the key things that are going on, what needs to go on, and how will that have a direct impact on how our overall economic growth prospers?

I would like to share with members of the House some comments that were made in a paper by Dr Lester Thurow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because sometimes when we are looking at finding signposts as to what direction we should take to ensure economic growth, it is useful to look at the experiences of other times and other countries. Let me quote what Mr Thurow said in this paper which was delivered several weeks ago:

"If you went to a history book about the 19th or the 20th century, that history book would tell you that there are four ways to get wealthy as an individual, four ways to be successful as a business firm and four ways to generate a high standard of living as a country. Firstly, you could have more natural resources than your competitor; secondly, you could be born rich and have more capital than your competitor; thirdly, you could have better technology than your competitor; or fourth, you could be better skilled and educated than your competitor."

If we look at those four, clearly the most critical today for this province and this country is our overall education and training system, because it is through it that we will be able to ensure we have better technology. Clearly, many countries have individuals who are rich. That is no longer a dominant feature of any particular country's economy. While we have natural resources, the jobs they create are far less in terms of percentages than the jobs new technological areas will be producing if we can make sure we become competitive in those areas in Ontario.

We have to ask ourselves then, are we developing our overall education and training system in a way that will ensure we have the human resources to take the jobs that are going to be available in the rest of the 1990s and into the next century? Dr Thurow has an interesting analogy we ought to think about in trying to describe the way in which we North Americans -- Canadians and Americans -- are dealing with this problem versus the way the Europeans and the Japanese are dealing with this challenge. The analogy he draws is with the game of football. Let me give one more quote. In terms of this economic challenge facing us, he says:

"This time we are going to play football with the Europeans and the Japanese. Now, football is an interesting game because of course everybody in the world plays football. Europeans play football, the Japanese play football, the Africans play football, the South Americans play football, the North Americans play football. The problem is, in truth, it is really two games. What the rest of the world calls 'football' we call 'soccer.' There is North American football and then there is soccer.

"If we then look at how those two games are played, the problem with North American football is that its characteristics are quite different from what we call soccer. In North American football there are lots of time-outs, lots of huddles and unlimited substitution. The game the rest of the world plays has no time-outs, no huddles, very limited substitution and is a much faster game."

I think the lesson we have to learn from that analogy is that in developing our education and training systems, we have to recognize we are competing with the rest of the world and in particular with the Europeans and the Japanese. That does not mean we change every way we have approached our education system or our training systems, but it does mean we had better be very careful and prudent in looking at the things they do, at the things we can learn from to ensure that not just our young people, but our society as a whole is going to have the skills and the training required for those new jobs.

Every study that is done demonstrates clearly that the better educated and the better trained a population, the more likely you are then to attract capital, to attract investment and to produce the very jobs that in turn provide for the kind of social justice system which so many members of the government like to talk about and say they are in favour of. But many times there is a failure to recognize the link between maintaining that high-quality social justice system we have built up in this country over many years and the need for a strong private sector that is creating jobs. Those jobs in turn are creating the wealth which permits us to have the social justice we believe is important and is very much part of our society and part of us as a people.

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Je pense qu'il est toujours très important de souligner aux Canadiens et aux Ontariens l'importance de notre système d'éducation, de notre système de formation professionnelle et technique. Pour la population francophone, je pense que là on a un sens très clair de cette importance. Dans le passé, on avait le grand défi de travailler trés fort, d'abord pour simplement avoir un système d'éducation en langue française, et deuxièmement, pour développer un tel système qui pouvait former des jeunes aptes à travailler en Ontario, au Québec, au Canada et n'importe où dans le monde.

Donc, parce que l'éducation en français pour notre population francophone est peut-être plutôt quelque chose de nouveau, je pense que jusqu'à un certain point les francophones sont plus au courant de l'importance de l'éducation, et surtout de l'éducation technique. Si l'on va à Ottawa parler avec les dirigeants de la Cité collégiale, le nouveau collège pour francophones, on se rend compte très bien et très fort de l'importance de l'éducation technique pour notre population francophone dans cette province.

When we look at what we are doing in the education and training system, I think we have to recognize that we need to provide much greater stress on getting young people into maths, technological subjects and sciences. We have to put more stress on developing broader co-operative education programs, and in particular what are being called the technological education centres.

There is one I visited in Wellington in the course of my travels over the last few months. In Wellington, the separate school board has a very interesting technological education centre in which all the pupils from the board area, from grade 6 through to the OAC level, are brought in to take courses that will make them technologically literate.

If there is one thing that is going to have to change fundamentally in our system, it is not just that we want people to be literate and have numeracy skills; they are going to have to be technologically literate as well. Quite frankly, probably a lot of us in this House would have some difficulty in meeting the kinds of standards that are required.

We also have to focus on our post-secondary institutions in a much different way. We have to recognize in a better, more planned and strategic sense the links between our community colleges and our universities, and how students will be able to move between them. We have to recognize that it is important to bring the education sector to the table with business, labour and government in determining what areas we are going to be competitive in.

For example, if you go to the area around Boston, Massachusetts, if you go to North Carolina, if you go to Austin, Texas, if you go to the Silicon Valley in California, one of the interesting things you recognize in terms of the economic strength of those areas is that they have brought together not only business, labour and government, but in a very strategic sense they have brough education into that mix. They have really sat down to say: "Where can we find that leading edge? Where can we really become competitive? Where can we create the jobs that are going to be there in the future?"

When we look at that need and then look at what the present government has done and what it is proposing, or in most cases is not proposing, there is no sense that it has seized upon the essential fact that education is our most important economic tool. If we do not ensure that our young people are going to have the skills required for the jobs that are going to be there during this decade and into the next century, then we are going to be creating too many young people as an underclass.

Surely the great challenge is the 30% of young people who do not complete high school and the 15% of young people who leave high school and are illiterate. Those tell us that no matter how many strengths, and there are many, that we have in our education system, there are still too many major problems that we as a province and the government in power today have authority over, have control over. We have the responsibility to make sure we are working on behalf of the young people. We are doing nobody a service if we put young people through our education system and at the end they are not able to get and keep a job in the new economic world we face. We are in fact doing them a great disservice.

That is why I believe it is very important that this government work with the other provinces in developing a meaningful national assessment system for our own provincial system of education. We are not talking here about going back to the old grade 13 days that I went through where we all sat down in June and wrote the same examinations.

What we are talking about is developing a method of being able to assess how our overall system is doing: What its strengths are, what its weaknesses are, and then, how we can go in and make sure that if in one area they are not doing as well, in the maths or the sciences or the languages or whatever it is, we can bring about changes and put in the resources that are required to ensure that those young people are not going to be school dropouts, are not going to be without skills for the kinds of jobs that are available.

In looking at this motion today, I think the greatest problem for the present government is getting its head out of the mess it created through its budget, to recognize what the long-term and the midterm strategic needs are and to say, "We've got to make a frontal attack in ensuring that our educational and training system is going to meet not the needs of today or the 1980s, but the needs of the 1990s and the next century." In doing that, we can learn a lot in terms of what other countries are doing and indeed what other provinces are doing. We can build on the strengths that are there, but let's recognize that there is much to be done.

For that reason -- the inability of this government to take a strategic look at our education and training system and to link that to our economic growth and the creation of jobs -- I will be supporting this motion. I urge the government to really recognize how important this area is and begin to get out there and make the kind of changes necessary to ensure that all our people will be able to find work in the new global economic order.

Mr Arnott: I am pleased to rise this afternoon in support of my leader's non-confidence motion because this government has lost the confidence of this House. If it ever had the confidence of the people of Ontario, that has been lost as well. The tax, spend and borrow agenda we have been experiencing through the past six years has had a devastating effect on our economy.

I will take members back six years, I suppose, to the defeat of the Progressive Conservative government. We won a minority of seats in this House, and at that point the Liberals and the New Democrats got together and negotiated an accord. For two years they determined, basically on a shopping list the NDP provided, that certain policies would be enacted, and in return the present Premier, then the Leader of the Opposition, indicated he would not force an election for two years.

We saw the Liberals and the New Democrats getting into the same bed together and pursuing these policies that started us on the road we have reached at the present time. So for the past six years that is what started the double-digit increases in spending, the double-digit increases in taxes and the high deficits we are experiencing now. That is a fact of historical record.

This debate this afternoon, I believe, has shown absolutely that the social democratic philosophy espoused by this NDP government -- they like to call themselves democratic socialists -- is not achievable, that it is a false promise. It claims that it can take us towards an abstract Utopia, that it is achievable and that it will come at no cost to anyone. That is false and no one believes it any more.

In my view, the NDP government in the last year has shown itself to be an abject failure in many areas, but the two principal failures are as follows. I think the first failure is that it has in no quarter, in no region and in no sector of the province inspired any confidence. There are people out there, businesses out there and groups out there that from one day to the next still do not have any feeling or gauge as to what the NDP government will do tomorrow. That lack of confidence and that lack of predictability has been devastating to our economy.

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In my riding last Friday I was speaking to a men's group of the All Saints Anglican Church in Erin. I was asked a question at the end of my remarks, and I tried to give as objective an assessment as I could of what has happened in Ontario and in this place in the last year. I was asked how we are going to survive until the NDP is put out of office. I did not know how to respond to that.

Frankly, our caucus is doing everything it can to come forward with positive suggestions. We are being actively critical, as is our job as well, but we are trying to come forward with constructive suggestions. We have issued New Directions: A Blueprint for Economic Renewal and Prosperity in Ontario, which I think is a very thoughtful document. I do not agree with every single suggestion in it, frankly, but I think the thrust is good. As a discussion paper it is an excellent origin and starting point for us.

I think the other thing this debate has brought forward this afternoon is the second absolute failure of this government: its refusal to acknowledge limits. They are refusing to acknowledge that we have got to start living within our means.

Last night I was in Palmerston, in my riding, at the rededication of the Palmerston public school. Recently, they built a substantial new addition and it is essentially a new school. I was sitting there on the stage as the proceedings were going on. Right in front of me, in front of the stage, there was a student choir, and I saw those young faces of children in grades 1, 2 and 3, the expectancy and dreams in those faces. Those children have no future unless the policies of the government of this province are turned around by 180 degrees. As far as I am concerned, they have no hope as long as this government continues the way it is going.

In my own riding, another thing I have tried to undertake recently is a survey of small business people. I spent three days of the week of the break going around to small business people and asked them their view of some of the issues that are coming forward in the Legislature because I want to represent their views here as best I can. I have a number of questions. Also, I left a blank area in my survey for other concerns that I hoped people would fill in.

I probably visited about 150 small businesses over those three days. Of approximately 150 people, I found one single person who supported the NDP government. The rest were very concerned. They are afraid and they do not know what to do. I will read a few of the comments that have come back to me through the mail since I visited these small businesses. This is just a sampling. I hope to get around to the rest of the riding over the next few months, and when we get into the spring session I expect to continue to share these opinions with the members of this Legislature and the government. I hope it will act upon some of them.

I will just read a brief sampling:

"The government is putting us all out of business."

"The NDP were elected for the people, not for the unions."

"Fixed costs are increasing, ie, hydro, insurance, new taxes, reducing profits to the point of not being worth the hours and time. Small businesses will be eliminated."

"If the government keeps shoving its policies down our throat, it may soon be the only employer in the province."

"We are overgoverned and overtaxed. As owners, we deeply resent being forced to work 16-hour days, six to seven days a week, to pay for a raised minimum wage and other labour laws. We resent not benefiting from the programs which we are being forced to pay for. We're mad as hell and we won't take it any longer."

And this last one: "Greed and incompetence, greed and lust for power, greed and immorality, greed and stupidity" -- I will not continue because it gets very inflammatory.

This is what people in my riding are saying and this is what I want to bring forward to this Legislature. There is no confidence in this government and it is time it recognized it and took a reverse course. I am going to be supporting this resolution this afternoon.

Hon Ms Lankin: Like other members, I am pleased to be able to speak on this motion before the House. There are four parts to the motion the leader of the third party has put forward. I feel very strongly about all four parts and want to take a short time to speak to each.

A lot of the members who have spoken before me have talked in very general terms with respect to the economy and the broad government agenda. As a minister responsible for a portfolio that concentrates its expenditures on about one third of the Ontario budget, it is important for me to contribute to the discussion from the perspective of a ministry as opposed to the broader government agenda. I want to focus my comments on the Ministry of Health and on some of its initiatives and the perspective from which I viewed these kinds of comments in this motion.

The leader of the third party suggests there is a loss of confidence by the members of the parties opposite because of the failure of the government "to implement effective measures to control public sector costs and to cut government spending." As we look at the challenges facing us in these very difficult times, it is not good enough for the opposition simply to cast wide nets and suggest there is not effective cost control or expenditure management taking place. I suggest that not only is it happening but it is essential that it happen, and not just from a fiscal point of view but from the point of view of my ministry delivering high-quality services. I would like to take a moment to talk about that and why I believe that.

It seems to me that we are facing a crisis of confidence in this country. That crisis of confidence extends well beyond this House and this province. In general, it is one in which the people of our country wonder about the direction of our country, the future of our country and some of its national institutions. I suggest we start to look there to understand some of the cynicism and the concerns of the members of the public.

For me, that means talking about the issue of medicare. I argue that we are at a crossroads with respect to our ability to maintain our national standards and our commitment to the principles in the Canada Health Act in every province in this country. It is one of the most important things we must try to achieve. There are several reasons I believe our very precious medical health care system and the principles under the Canada Health Act which support and enforce that are in jeopardy at this time.

It is often said that we should not point fingers at other levels of government. The third party in particular gets very agitated when we talk about the policies of the federal government. Let me talk about it from the perspective of what provinces are experiencing with transfer payments and the policies of the federal government with respect to that.

I am not simply going to cast a wide net and say there is no reason to look at restraint measures at the federal level; of course there is. Of course they have a huge deficit they must manage and try to bring down. They must look at how they realign their programs, set their priorities and reallocate from lower priorities to higher priorities -- exactly the kind of management tactics and measures I would expect them to take. However, I disagree with some of the priorities they are putting forward which are reflected in the actions they have taken.

But putting that aside, you cannot argue against the fact that there is a very real impact on the next level of government, that being the provincial level, with respect to the policies that have been taken by our federal government -- in particular, the cap on the Canada assistance plan and the impact that has been felt on the established programs financing. It means something very real in every one of our provinces. I have been so struck by the fact, as I have spoken to ministers of Health in other provinces and in our territories, that there is a universal commitment to the maintenance of our national medicare system and a universal understanding that the lack of ongoing adequate and stable funding support from our federal government with respect to the cutbacks in these transfer payments is completely undermining our ability as provinces to maintain those standards.

It also means we have reason to be concerned, because as the federal government checks out of the transfer payment process with respect to our national programs like health and education, its ability to enforce national standards and use fiscal levers disappears. That means with all the well-spoken intentions of the federal government with respect to its support for the Canada Health Act and the principles there -- and just so everyone is clear, we are talking about the principles of universality, portability, non-profit administration, comprehensiveness, the things that make our health care system the national program it is so you can go from province to province to province in this country and be assured of high-quality health care services -- its ability to enforce those principles in the Canada Health Act disappears as its level of support for the provinces in those programs disappears.

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I do not lay all the concern at one door with respect to why I believe our national health care system is in danger of being undermined and why we must work so hard to try and support it. Let me say also that the subject of the motion today and much of the debate has been with respect to the economic crisis we face in this country. There is no doubt that is a very real part of what undermines our abilities in these days to continue delivery of services we want to continue to deliver without a marked examination of how we go about the delivery of those services.

What it means here in Ontario is that in real terms we are experiencing revenues that are less in real dollars -- forget about inflation for a moment; just talk about real dollars -- than they were in the year before, at a time when the demand for services is so much greater, at a time when the impact of the recession on the people in our economy in this province means there are a billion people receiving social assistance.

There are another 500 million on unemployment insurance who are about to move on to the social assistance rolls because there is not a clear hope of a job for them in the future. You cannot ignore the human impact of that. You cannot just suggest that those are some sort of statistics and that government should not, in the depths of this recession, attempt in all ways it can to continue delivery of services to those people, to protect those most vulnerable in our society during this period of time.

But that has real economic impacts on the budget, on the deficit, on our ability to balance off our expenditures against revenues. You have an amazing escalation in costs in those programs that I doubt there is one member of the opposition over there would say, at least publicly, should be cut completely. There is not one member who would argue that the very poor out there should not be receiving support and assistance from this government at this point in time. Yet they seem unable to put that together with the fact that with less absolute dollars of revenue coming in than in the previous year, of course there will be a gap in between, which is the deficit, and there are a number of ways to address that.

What that means for health care is that at a period of time when we need to deliver services effectively in this province and when we need to consider what 10 years of academic debate and 10 years of blue-ribbon committees studying our health care and 10 years of all sorts of reports and consensus being built in the reform movement out there have said, that in order to make people healthy, you do not spend more money on the traditional health care system, you have to spend money on those things that actually determine the health status of people -- those are things like ensuring that people have access to adequate and affordable housing, ensuring that people have access to good-quality education, ensuring that we try to support people who are in the state of poverty and try to bring people out of poverty, ensuring that we spend money to try to clean up our environment; those are the things that make people healthy; those are the things where everybody who has studied the system has said we have to invest our money -- but at a time when it is so urgent that we do that, we have seen expenditures in the health care system we have in our province grow at an exponential rate.

Quite frankly, that leads me to the third point that I think is part of the challenge that faces us and part of the threat to our ability to maintain high-quality services under a national medicare system that we want to maintain unless we take corrective action.

Let me say that the economic situation out there, that need to be able to expend more money on those things that actually make people healthy, can only be accomplished if we can stop the exponential growth of the health care system budget, which has grown to be over a third of our Ontario budget.

As we talk about our expenditures, we must remember that one out of every three dollars is being spent on our health care system. That has grown dramatically over 10 years. Look at our hospital budgets alone. They were about $2.8 billion 10 years ago in a reference period that one of the members opposite is talking about. It has now grown to a level of about $7 billion, yet we have people on the other side of the House saying we need to spend more money there, that the steps we are taking are not appropriate. I challenge that.

But let me come to the third premise of what I would argue is part of the threat to our national health care system. That has been, over a number of years, government's inability to grapple with and effectively manage the system. I am not saying this as a partisan accusation, because there has not been a government in any province that has effectively taken on this job. The way human nature works, when your backs are not against the wall, you do not make tough decisions. Right now our backs are against the fiscal wall and it means we do need to make some very important decisions with respect to our health care system and its future and with respect to the appropriateness of some of the expenditures within the system.

The member opposite earlier wanted me to comment on reports that I have said there is $5 billion in our health care system that is being spent inappropriately. Let me put that comment in context for the members here. I said at a convention, speaking to the Ontario Hospital Association, that there are many academic reports and studies of our hospitals and health care system which suggest that about 25% to 30% of the procedures and things we do in our health care system have no proven quality or proven value. If that number is correct and you translate that into the Ontario system where we currently spend over $17 billion on our health care system, that would translate into about $5 billion of procedures we should at least be questioning to ensure we have good value coming out of them.

If only a portion of that assessment is correct -- let's say only 10% or 15% -- the impact on our ability to expend money on other priority areas would be tremendous. All those studies also indicate that the kind of quality review that needs to be done, the kind of waste in the system that is often pointed to, actually delivers a poor quality of health care service to the individual consumer.

Let me give an example. If you are talking about a patient who sees a doctor, who gets referred to one specialist, then another specialist, who has a battery of tests ordered by the first doctor, by the second specialist and by the third specialist -- if you look at some of the decision-making points in the process, there is an opportunity for us to improve dramatically the decision-making, the review process, the expenditure process, and to deliver better-quality care to people.

That is the kind of change in the system we are looking for. It is not simply a measure to say, "We have to save money." It is a measure to say, "We have to improve the quality of services," and that there are ways we can do it. There are many people out there in the system who have been suggesting this for a very long time.

All of must recognize there will be those debates that flow from that about what the appropriateness is of some of the procedures we are performing in our health care system and is this an appropriate expenditure and should we look to other ways to spend our money.

That challenge of effective management is one this government has taken on, and let me say to the members opposite we have taken steps to try, through our agreement with the physicians, both to bring about a process for review of utilization of services and to look at cost-effectiveness. We see, with restrictions on payment for out-of-country health services, which allows us to reinvest in services here in Ontario, and with measures to try to effectively manage the Ontario drug benefit program. Every review has suggested that many of our seniors are receiving too many prescriptions and that many times seniors present themselves in emergency rooms and hospitals it is because of contraindications of different drugs interacting in a very negative way -- so a better way of managing our seniors' health.

For the objectives of both higher-quality health services and cost-effectiveness, we can see, in total, that we are looking at expenditure savings of close to $300 million in the next year and upwards of $600 million as that rolls out in mature costs.

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Those are very important quality assurance and effective cost measurements we are putting in place and, quite frankly, the members opposite have not acknowledged any of that.

Point 3, that we have not undertaken meaningful consultations, I would also dispute. With respect to the kinds of reviews that we are undertaking right now -- major program reviews, hospital funding -- who is at the table? The Ontario Hospital Association, hospital workers and their representatives, district health councils, the ministry and consumers. We bring together the partners. We consult about what we are doing.

With respect to the review of the Ontario drug benefit plan, we will be bringing together people from the pharmaceutical industry, people from the pharmacies and, again, seniors and consumers. That kind of consultation and involvement of people, that kind of true partnership is very effective. It is very alive and well in the program reviews that are being undertaken, and the assertions of the third party's motion completely deny that.

The motion goes on to say that we should be seeking to create -- I am essentially paraphrasing -- an economic policy and direction that will allow us to support universal access to affordable public services. The next time the members of the third party stand up and start to spread panic and fear because we are looking at these very issues with respect to the hospital system and are acting on 10 years of support, saying there is reason, after a move to better ambulatory and outpatient care, to move some of the acute care beds out of the system, when the member opposite says, "Wait a minute, we had a leader and a Minister of Health who talked about that at one time," they should think about it, think about being responsible in this day and age with respect to how we approach expenditures in the health care system.

After having had 10 years of movement to ambulatory and outpatient -- which started when Dennis Timbrell, from the member's party, was the Minister of Health -- now we have to follow up and move the acute care beds out that are no longer required in that system.

Finally, point 1 is that we have, by this deficit, abandoned people. If we had not approached this year's budget with this approach, with the kind of deficit we have projected, imagine what that would have meant for hospital funding. Imagine what that would have meant for the health care sector. Imagine what that would have meant for people on social assistance. Imagine what that would have meant for people who are seeking housing and who are seeking day care. What we have done is very responsible. What we have done is invest in the future of this province.

Mr Ramsay: It is a pleasure to rise today to speak in support of this motion that comes from the third party. It is certainly my experience that this motion is supported right across the province. When we stand up and debate motions of confidence in the government, usually it is involved internally here. It has to do with what members of the Legislature think of the government of the day.

But in the travels I have taken throughout the province, there is a general lack of confidence in this government right across this province. What people are saying to me is that this government is not capable of embarking upon the economic renewal that is necessary to get the economy of Ontario back on track, incapable because this government does not have the sense of good economic management this province wants, and is also incapable because of the apprehension the high-debt, high-cost policies of this government are causing.

You only have to look through the clippings every day. I refer to today's Toronto Star and the chairman of Ford, the third-largest corporation in this country. This is a company that supplies a lot of jobs to southwestern Ontario, a lot of good unionized and management jobs in this province, jobs we count upon in Ontario. The chairman of Ford, Mr Harrigan, says that entrepreneurs are afraid to invest or expand in Ontario.

It is not just chairpersons, officers and executives of major corporations. In my travels I talk to workers, people who work for many of these corporations, and they also are very afraid of what their companies may be doing. They are very afraid of the business decisions, the investment decisions their companies, the companies they rely upon for a living, are going to be making in the next little while, because the talk out there is not good at all.

The problem is that we are not getting leadership from this government. Every day the opposition parties pepper the Treasurer with questions on what this government is doing about economic renewal, and all we hear from the Treasurer is, "This is the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s." We hear: "It is the federal government's fault. If only we didn't have that high dollar and those high interest rates, everything would be hunky-dory."

Interjection.

Mr Ramsay: And "spot on," to quote the Treasurer; exactly.

What we do not get from the Treasurer, what we do not get from this government, is the plan. What is the plan for economic renewal? What are we all embarking on? Give us a chance. We would all like to support the government on the plan for economic renewal. We all, in this Legislature, in this province, need to begin to roll up our sleeves and get to work on rebuilding the Ontario economy, but we do not get that.

Mr White: What's your plan?

Mr Ramsay: I am going to get to that. I have just been asked, Mr Speaker, what my plan is. I am going to outline what I think the problem is for a minute, and then I will be positive and constructive, as I think opposition parties should be, and I will get there.

What we see instead is a government that talks about partnership. I would hope that partnership starts to develop, because we certainly need that. They say that, but what we get instead are changes to the Labour Relations Act that, again, are causing a lot of apprehension in the total community of Ontario, not just the investment community.

I will put aside the contents of that act, because I would say there are probably some good things in the amendments that are coming that probably should be enacted. The problem is the timing and the lack of consultation and partnership in doing that. The history of labour relations amendments in Ontario has been that we sit down, all three partners -- business, labour and government -- and start to ferret out the problems.

Certainly there are problems and there is need for improvement, but how we do it is to work incrementally. Step by step we start to make those improvements and we work on that together. We do not move like we are doing today, holus-bolus, pushing these amendments forward, ramming them down the throats of investors and business people in this province. That is what we are doing. It is not the partnership that should be there, and we need to get that partnership there.

What we need from this government is the plan. We need this government to embark upon a crusade of economic renewal for this province. That is what Ontario is looking for; that is what this country is looking for. Ontario should be the province leading the way, as we are the engine of growth in this country. It is up to this government to start that crusade.

This government has to start to reach out to that investment community. I do not hear anybody in this government saying to management, to the investment community, to the people who create the jobs in this province: "We need you in Ontario. We don't want you to leave. We want to sit down and work with you in getting this economy back on track. You are an important aspect of the Ontario economy and we need to work with you, because as government, we don't have all the answers. We need to forge that partnership." We do not hear that from the Premier or the Treasurer, and it is time we did.

In answer to the queries I have been getting from some of the government backbenchers -- "What is the plan?" -- we have to be positive and we have to put some ideas forward. As the opposition, I think that is part of the role we have here in this House on behalf of the people of Ontario.

One of the areas we are really going to have to improve upon and admit there are problems with is our education system. We have to make sure the people of Ontario have the skills the marketplace requires for the jobs that are coming in the rest of this decade and beyond, into the next century.

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That is going to be very important, and again that is going to mean a new partnership, because we cannot have the education system going off on its own, basically developing an education system that is tremendous for self-fulfilment for people upgrading themselves; we have to make sure there is relevance in the system and therefore we have to have a new partnership. We have to bring in the private sector to say: "Are we on track with the education system? Are we imparting the skills the people need to be competitive, to live a fulfilling life and to contribute to the life and the economy of this great country?" That is the partnership we need.

We have to turn on our young boys and girls to the careers of the 21st century. We need to bring in our engineers, technicians and technologists and talk to the people in elementary school, the children who are starting their educational life, to turn them on to some of those careers that are going to be there for them. We have to make sure that those skills are going to be there, that we look back to the basics we have left and make sure all our children going through high school take math, science, history and their language through every grade in high school.

We have to make the school system challenging for our children. I do not think they are challenged enough today. We have to make sure our children are reading, and they have to be reading the classics. We have to get our children back to know the patterns and rhythms of their language, to get exposed to the big vocabulary that is there so that we can pick up on our spelling.

We have a lot of do in the education system. We have to work with all our partners there, and I would ask those partners in the education system to come together and maybe for a minute to take off their institutional hats, for the teachers and our trustees of our boards and the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education to come together and to take off that institutional hat for just a second and to sit down to discuss, "What's the best thing we can do for our children and for the future of Ontario?" That is the type of partnership this government needs to embark upon.

The other thing we have to do is to become innovative. Quite frankly, we have not had to be very innovative because we have been spoiled with the wonderful blessing of resources we have had in this country. We have only had to harvest our natural resources, and since the Second World War we have only had to rely on the great branch-plant economy in this great province of ours for our living, but we see both those aspects of our economic development eroding. The world is no longer reliant upon our resources as much as it was in the past, and that is making it very tough, especially for northern Ontario, and by and large the world no longer wants the products we make in the south. We see every day the evidence of that, unfortunately, as factories and plants close down and jobs move elsewhere.

It is very important that we start to invest in innovation, that government stop paying lipservice to research and development and start challenging the people, our universities, other post-secondary institutions and our private sector researchers to scour the world for more private sector partners to come to us as government, to bid to us for dollars in those joint ventures to do research and development in Ontario.

Our promise to those joint ventures is that we are bringing along a highly skilled workforce that will be able to develop and manufacture the processes, the products and services that research and development are going to bring forward. That is the type of economy we need. We need a government that has a vision of a high-tech, innovative, value added economy that will take Canadians and our workforce into the next century so that we will take our place in that new global competitive marketplace we are faced with now.

This government needs to start with the fact of giving some confidence to the people of Ontario. Nobody in the government, nobody in this country is saying to people: "Let's be proud of what we've accomplished in this country. We have nothing to be ashamed of. Canada is a most wonderful experiment and it is going to continue." In fact, Canada and Ontario are the envy of the world, but we must not be afraid of change. We must believe in what we can do, and I know we can move beyond. I see these challenges as opportunities, and the government has to seize these opportunities and not be afraid to move on, not be afraid to grasp some new answers, maybe answers that have not occurred to the thinking of this government. All the answers are not necessarily just left of centre. The answers are all over there, and what we need is the flexibility of a government that is able to tackle the challenges from any angle that is needed. That is the problem with this government. They are unable to do that.

On January 1, we will see another increase in our gasoline tax in this province. I can hardly believe that a government that has very healthy representation, unfortunately, from northern Ontario, has sided with a massive increase in taxation with gasoline, a total of a 3.4-cent increase in gasoline tax from the last budget, and now another half of that, 1.7 cents, comes on January 1. This is the exact opposite thing that needs to happen right now. If this government wants to start the economic rebound of this economy, it should immediately roll back the gasoline tax.

I know that when I have travelled in the border towns -- the government knows this from the its own commissioned studies and other studies that are available to it -- the price differential of gasoline is the number one determinant for cross-border shopping. We are going to have to look at other ways to derive our revenues. I am not saying to this government that it has to suffer a shortfall in revenue; we are going to have to change the way we raise revenues.

We in the Liberal government, and the Tory government before us, basically wanted to increase the consumption taxes in this province, the so-called old sin taxes. We kept just pumping away at them every year. We increased the tobacco tax, we increased the gasoline tax and we did the same for cigarettes.

The Canadian people have passed the threshold of that and we are going to have to start to reallocate how we generate our revenues. We no longer can rely on consumption taxes, because basically they are stopping business in Ontario. It is persuading our consumers to cross the border and spend their money elsewhere. In fact, the federal government is now finding that its cigarette revenue has dropped tremendously since the last increase because people now are crossing the border and are also getting it from the black market. Some of them are quitting, and that is certainly laudable, but it is very important that we start to become competitive and find other ways to generate our revenues in this province.

I would implore this government to not only stop the 1.7-cent increase per litre on gasoline that is coming in on January 1 but to immediately roll back the price of gasoline. That would be the best thing, and the government knows it. Everybody in this province knows that the price differential between the Ontario price and the American price for gasoline is the number one reason people cross the border.

The other challenge this government has -- the Minister of Health actually commented on it, and I must applaud her with the tremendous challenge she has in her ministry -- is to try to bring government expenditure under control. Certainly the Minister of Health has a tremendous challenge there.

In general, all the ministers of the crown need to look at their ministries and at new ways to provide services and programs to people. We need to move from the 19th-century model our public service is based on and start to move to a modern, efficient, technologically renewed public administration.

I look at other institutions in society. Take the banks, for instance: very conservative institutions in this country, but they use 21st-century technology in interacting with their clients. We all use the bank machines and people withdraw and deposit money from their accounts using those. Why should you not be able to go into those bank machines and punch into the Ontario government and get your driver's licence renewed and pay off fines? That is what we have to be doing. We have to become modern and efficient. I leave that challenge up to this government, to make sure it starts the economic renewal of Ontario.

Mr Stockwell: I think our party has summed up the concerns and why we brought this motion forward today. The challenge, I believe, that we are faced with is a challenge to be painfully honest with the constituents in Ontario. I will speak specifically to the first note in here: number one, with respect to the "tax, borrow and spend agenda."

Debts kill companies; deficits kill companies, particularly in recessions. Those that are having the most trouble surviving today are highly leveraged. Companies that cannot survive today are the ones that owe so much money to the banks they cannot service their debts. The same thing has happened with provincial governments. Exactly the same could happen with this provincial government.

When you run debts and you have deficits, it undermines the programs you want to put forward. It undercuts any capacity you have to respond to recessions and so forth. It decreases the future demand. It does not allow you to do anything in the future when you have to spend billions of dollars servicing debt. That is exactly the situation the federal government is in today.

1740

We as a Legislature and the NDP as a government have a challenge to be perfectly honest with the constituents in Ontario. I listened to the Minister of Health and I do not think being perfectly honest means that when she is talking about bed closures, she should rename it "managing the beds out of the system." She should say "bed closures," because that is what she is talking about. That is what the people in this province want to know. If she is going to close beds, let her say the words. They understand those words.

If those people in this Legislature today are going to suggest that we can get this financial malaise in order and there will be no pain, they are kidding the folks. We have generation after generation raised in this province believing there is a free lunch, believing you can get everything you want and not have to pay the bill. We have $430 billion in federal debt accumulated by the Liberals and some money accumulated by the Conservatives. We have a $10-billion deficit that has been adopted by the provincial socialists in this year alone. There are generations that believe you can get something for free. There is no free lunch. All the government is suggesting today is that future generations will not have the capacity to live the kind of lives we have grown accustomed to.

There will be generations that simply will not have universal health care. They will not have it. In the 1990s the debate will be universality. The Health minister speaks of it today. She speaks about health care and the universality of that health care. Unless we deal with the deficit and the debt and the money we owe, the universality argument will simply pass us by, because we will have to spend more and more money every year to service the debt we have accumulated and are going to force on our children's backs. Anyone who does not agree with that or does not believe that simply does not understand. If we go back 10 or 20 years ago to the federal predicament, they adopted more debt, incurred more debt, to the point now where they simply cannot even service the interest alone on that debt each year.

There is a great movement out there about the Reform Party. They are travelling this country and this province. They are suggesting to the people of this province that they can retire the debt, retire the deficit. They are not being honest with the people in this province or this country. Anyone who is telling us today that he can retire the federal government's debt or deficit and see no pain is not telling the truth. There will be pain because we have incurred so much debt.

No one would relish that, no one wants to see that, but that does not change the fact that this government is going to have to deal with this deficit and there will be pain. Otherwise it is going to begin to deal with this government. This government is going to have to deal with it because if it does not, the banks will deal with it. The people who have lent this government the money will deal with it. Today this government is incurring such debt and such a deficit that future generations will not be accustomed to the standard of living we enjoy today.

No one wants to see pain or suffering when it comes to living in Ontario, no one wants to see people homeless, no one wants to see people who cannot get enough money to survive or a home to live in or enough food to eat. But by simply avoiding the issue, incurring more debt, increasing taxes and driving out business, you are ensuring that will happen. You are guaranteeing that will take place. Companies will leave, your debt will rise, you will have less money to pay it, you will have more people on welfare and more people unemployed.

Mr Kormos: How does Brian Mulroney do it, Chris? Tell us how Mulroney has done it.

Mr Stockwell: How do you deal with it? I am trying to tell the member. You have to deal with it by dealing with reality. When it comes to bed closures, you have to call them bed closures.

When you are dealing with it, you have to be honest with the people of Ontario. By doubling the debt over the next four years, you are not servicing the people of Ontario, you are not servicing the future generations who want to live in Ontario, you are not helping the people who are unemployed and you are not helping the people on welfare. You are driving businesses out of Ontario, because they will not be competitive if they stay in this province.

What more people are telling me today is that they want to work. We are losing jobs at a record rate because of the fiscal approach this government has taken. They can simply sit back, because they are gainfully employed for three years, and mock anyone who suggests this is the wrong approach today. If it is working so well, why are we suffering so badly?

1753

The House divided on Mr Harris's motion, which was negatived on the following vote:

Ayes -- 34

Arnott, Bradley, Carr, Chiarelli, Cleary, Conway, Cousens, Cunningham, Eves, Fawcett, Grandmaître, Harnick, Harris, Henderson, Jackson, Jordan, Mancini, McClelland, McGuinty, McLean, Murdoch, B., O'Neil, H., O'Neill, Y., Poirier, Ramsay, Runciman, Sterling, Stockwell, Sullivan, Tilson, Turnbull, Villeneuve, Wilson, J., Witmer.

Nays -- 63

Abel, Allen, Bisson, Boyd, Buchanan, Carter, Charlton, Christopherson, Cooke, Cooper, Coppen, Dadamo, Drainville, Duignan, Fletcher, Frankford, Haeck, Hampton, Hansen, Harrington, Hayes, Hope, Huget, Jamison, Johnson, Klopp, Kormos, Lankin, Laughren, Lessard, Mackenzie, MacKinnon, Malkowski, Mammoliti, Marchese, Martel, Martin, Mathyssen, Mills, Morrow, North, O'Connor, Owens, Perruzza, Pilkey, Pouliot, Rae, Rizzo, Silipo, Sutherland, Ward, B., Ward, M., Wark-Martyn, Waters, Wessenger, White, Wildman, Wilson, F., Wilson, G., Winninger, Wiseman, Wood, Ziemba.

EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES

The Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to standing order 33(a), the member for Scarborough North has given notice of his dissatisfaction with the answer to his question given by the Minister of Labour. The member has up to five minutes to debate the matter and the minister may reply for up to five minutes.

We will give a chance to the members who do not want to stay to please leave the House. Order, please.

Mr Curling: It is not at all surprising that the benches got empty as soon as I was about to put the question to the Minister of Labour. As you know, Mr Speaker, I tried to ask the question of the Minister of Citizenship and got no answer with regard to employment equity and the standards and rules set by employment agencies. Abuse by employment agencies is happening right now in this province.

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I will go into a little more detail, because I was extremely disappointed by the way the minister answered the question. In the first instance he got a couple of moments to think about it because the Minister of Citizenship did not answer it adequately. I thought the Minister of Labour would be, not more sensitive, but would have a little different understanding of the matter. Not at all. He answered me in a very abrupt way. When I look at the Hansard, there is nothing there, nothing of consequence, no idea of what is happening. The employment agencies out there are screening people out who are either visible minorities or women, and it is a blatant situation we have seen.

When the matter was brought before the human rights commission, it seemed to me that they swept it under the table and cut a deal and it was never dealt with properly. I thought the Minister of Labour could use the opportunity to address the matter and reassure the people of this province that although they had a sensitive government in place before, it did not matter that the NDP was now in government, that it would also be sensitive to those needs and to how blatantly these employment agencies have discriminated in this matter.

He said he was looking into it, that they were going to have some consultation. There is a law on the books that tells one how to deal with these organizations that discriminate so blatantly. I am asking the minister, and I hope he can respond in that respect, to use the existing law perhaps to take away licences.

If some bus driver, for instance, were using the vehicle and his licence to put people's lives in danger, I am sure the Minister of Transportation or the police would take away that licence. These individuals, these organizations, are using these establishments to discriminate. This has literally taken food from the mouths of children, taken away the right of individuals to support themselves if they are unable to get a job because they are black or because they are Chinese or because they are women. That is exactly what they are doing.

We are saying the law exists right now. We should take those licences away, not tell them to go on a course, and ask: "Are you more sensitive to women? Are you more sensitive to visible minorities now that you have learned and got this 15-minute course? You're on your way." I think the minister has a responsibility.

It is typical of this government. When you ask any question you get no answer. When you ask for consultation and ask them to come in, they shut you out. We have seen today a debate of confidence in this government. It goes beyond the economic situation. It is about people feeling they have no way to redress some of the issues at hand. Especially at a time of recession, a job is a life for people. They are losing their jobs, they are losing their homes and they are not getting the opportunity because agencies are discriminating.

I ask the minister again to look into this and make sure this does not continue, because the people of this province have lost a lot of faith in politicians. I am giving him the opportunity right now to respond in that way, not to tell me, "We'll look into it and do what we can." One sees the nepotism going on. Maybe we have to join the NDP or the union or be a family member of a union before we can get the job. The minister will please not let it go unanswered.

Hon Mr Mackenzie: I would like the honourable member to know that my ministry has been working very hard in this area to improve the legislation on employment agencies. He also knows this type of change takes some time.

I am pleased to tell the honourable member that my ministry has completed a discussion paper and will begin final consultations with affected groups on specific areas of reform. The paper will be released in the new year with consultations to follow shortly after that. The discussion paper focuses on the need for an audit system to detect and investigate discriminatory practices and the need for educational qualifications and licensing requirements to agency operators and individual agents.

My officials are working closely with the Ministry of Citizenship, which has the lead responsibility for employment equity. They are consulting with the Ontario Human Rights Commission on this issue. When our discussion paper is released in the new year we would be pleased to have input from the honourable member. I might say that much of this answer was given, I thought, in fair detail by the Minister of Citizenship when she responded to the member's question some time ago.

CHILD CARE CENTRES

The Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to standing order 33(a), the member for Burlington South has given notice of his dissatisfaction with the answer to his question given by the Minister of Community and Social Services concerning day care. The member has up to five minutes to debate the matter and the minister may reply for up to five minutes.

Mr Jackson: In the more than six and one half years I have been in this House, this is only the second occasion I have felt the response from a minister of a government was so inadequate and was relying on such inaccurate information from her own ministry. I now find myself tonight wishing to raise a couple of points.

Specifically, I raise questions about her flying in the face of the processes in this Legislature about sharing information, and about order paper questions that she has not responded to. She says she does not have the information I requested seven months ago and yet she tabled yesterday at press conferences at Queen's Park some of the statistics we are looking for. On the one hand the minister can say how many commercial day care centres have closed in this province by giving the statistics, but on my order paper question, when I asked her to give us which centres have closed and where they are in the community and to give us numbers, she says she does not have them.

It is imperative that when a minister's staff lies to her, misleads her or suggests that information is other than it is in reality, she does this province and this House a great disservice and she is not doing her job unless she seeks out the information. Her own staff can produce some of the statistics which indicate that the minister is not speaking the truth in the House. Her staff had some of the stats the same day as she stood in the House and said she had --

The Deputy Speaker: I do not accept that. You can choose another word, please.

Mr Jackson: Mr Speaker, "misleading by her staff" were the words I used earlier, and it obviously met with your approval.

The Deputy Speaker: But you mentioned not telling the truth and I do not accept that.

Mr Jackson: Her staff were misleading her; you do not accept. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to indicate that what is of critical importance here is that the minister has announced some $10.8 million of the $100 million for day care which is going to help bail out non-profit centres in financial difficulty. She says she does not know this and yet yesterday in the House, in the front part of her answer, she said she was aware of these centres and which ones were in financial difficulty.

On occasion in the past, I have brought specific cases to the attention of the minister: Close Avenue Road Day Care Centre right here in the city of Toronto. I attended the meeting. I took the numbers they were discussing and I discussed them with the minister. She was able to articulate which centres were in financial difficulty and yet she stands in this House and says she does not have this information. How can the Treasurer, when the dollars in this province are so scarce, indicate that he has $10.8 million to give to the minister to throw around to these centres in financial difficulty?

I have information that again her ministry was advised of yesterday. A centre in Sudbury, for example, is opening in January. It is costing taxpayers $1.1 million to produce this non-profit centre for 36 spaces. We are told by the builder they are using imported ceramic tile, light fixtures imported from Germany, a $5,000 elevator to the second floor, a $3,000 private dinette in the executive board room, for 36 spaces, and inlaid mosaic tile flooring.

If this is the kind of accountability she says she might eventually get around to, we cannot wait until she does it. Her specific specific strategy is to punish the private sector, which is paying taxes in municipalities in this province, which she says should be barred from access to subsidized spaces. She would punish the private sector which puts up all the risk capital. They do not have their hands out for $1.1 million as they do in Sudbury. They are investing it.

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I want to tell the minister that the true face of the people who are running these day care centres is mostly that of women: 85% of them are women. I want to tell the minister about a woman who came to see me with her problems in her day care centre. Her accountant told her to sell and get out, but after a year of financial difficulties and mortgaging her house to the hilt she lost her centre, lost her home and is now unemployed. She is a beaten woman in terms of her entrepreneurial spirit and her commitment to providing quality social services in this province. She was not unlike many women in this province. All they had was a simple dream of having their own autonomy, expanding the grid, allowing more day care spaces to be provided in their community, and what the minister's announcement has done is fly in the face of that.

The most tragic statement that was made yesterday while the minister stood in the House to give these flip answers was from one operator who is about to lose her centre: "No person should have to fight just to exist in this province."

Hon Mrs Boyd: I am pleased to have an opportunity to clarify the delay in supplying the answer to the Orders and Notices paper questions 435 and 436 requested by the member opposite. I would have liked to table the response more quickly, but unfortunately cabinet operations in the cabinet office felt that the answer initially supplied was incomplete. This was further complicated by the change in ministers, which meant the responses had to be resigned.

The member for Burlington South was absolutely correct yesterday when he said that the opposition had not had a chance to see the response. I owe him an apology, because my understanding was that he had.

I am also pleased to have an opportunity to explain how this ministry currently collects data on the status of child care centres. It is not nearly as haphazard as the member for Burlington South would have other members believe, but it is not done in a form that would have provided the answer in the form he asked for.

The day nursery information system, which primarily collects licensing data for child care centres, does not have the capability to provide the information requested in the order paper questions. Details on closures of child care centres have always been kept at this ministry's area offices, but previously they were not forwarded to the ministry's central office in Toronto. Under previous governments, that kind of centralized information collecting was not done.

However, over the last year our concern regarding the effect of the recession on child care centres has resulted in the development of a quarterly report on the status of centres in both the profit and non-profit sectors. This is a manual reporting system and the information is not organized in exactly the way it was requested in the order paper question. We can provide information not per municipality or region, as requested, but for larger regions as of January 1, 1991, and we will be pleased to do so. I understand that has already gone forward to cabinet office.

I must say that one of the reasons this government is initiating a major review of how child care is delivered in Ontario is embodied in this exchange we have had. I am not pleased with the creation of centres and the closing of centres and the way in which spaces have been distributed, and I do not believe the information that we get from the general public indicates any greater satisfaction. Not only are there gaps in the monitoring of services, but there are significant gaps in the services themselves, as the member pointed out.

Within the context of an organized approach towards a system that truly will provide in the long run universal availability of child care to everyone in the province who wishes to use it, who needs to use it, we will be proceeding with our review. The kinds of questions about the kind of accountability that is required will be very central in that review.

I would emphasize that we are very aware of the stress the child care sector is under and we are working very hard to ensure that we see great improvement over the next year. It is true we are doing that in the context of a non-profit emphasis, and we will continue to do so because we believe government money is best spent in the public sector.

The Deputy Speaker: There being no further matter to debate, I deem the motion to adjourn to be carried. This House stands adjourned until 1:30 tomorrow afternoon.

The House adjourned at 1816.