L022b - Mon 8 Jun 1998 / Lun 8 Jun 1998 1
RED TAPE REDUCTION ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 VISANT À RÉDUIRE LES FORMALITÉS ADMINISTRATIVES
The House met at 1830.
ORDERS OF THE DAY
RED TAPE REDUCTION ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 VISANT À RÉDUIRE LES FORMALITÉS ADMINISTRATIVES
Mrs Ross, on behalf of Mr Tsubouchi, moved second reading of the following bill:
Bill 25, An Act to reduce red tape by amending or repealing certain Acts and by enacting two new Acts / Projet de loi 25, Loi visant à réduire les formalités administratives en modifiant ou abrogeant certaines lois et en édictant deux nouvelles lois.
Mrs Lillian Ross (Hamilton West): Mr Speaker, before I begin, I'd like to share my time with the member for Huron, the member for Hastings-Peterborough and the member for Halton North.
The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): Agreed? Agreed.
Mrs Ross: I'm pleased to rise today to speak on second reading of Bill 25, the Red Tape Reduction Act, 1998. This bill continues the government's war on red tape in an effort to make it easier for the public and business to deal with government. This bill amends or repeals several pieces of legislation or sections of legislation that have become obsolete or cumbersome. It also helps cut business free of unnecessary rules and regulations that cost business time and money. This restricts economic growth and can form a formidable barrier to job creation.
The Red Tape Reduction Act, 1998, consolidates seven red tape reduction bills that were before the Legislature in the last session, plus some additional measures.
It will amend the Loan Brokers Act to strengthen the legislation to deal with unscrupulous loan brokers. It will allow the ministry to issue cease and desist orders against loan brokers who violate the law even when charges have been laid and the broker has been convicted under the act.
It will repeal the Sheep and Wool Marketing Act, an act which has not been used since 1985, when the Ontario Sheep Marketing Agency was established.
This bill replaces the list of prescribed investments for trust funds by introducing a "prudent trustee" standard, to allow more flexibility to invest funds and maximize income for beneficiaries.
It will repeal the Parks Assistance Act at the Ministry of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation, made redundant by new land use planning guidelines. Also at that ministry, it will repeal section 12 of the Ministry of Citizenship and Culture Act, which sets out regulation-making authority to establish financial assistance programs. That ministry has always had the flexibility to establish, revise and rescind grant programs without recourse to the regulation and has never established any financial assistance programs under section 12. No regulations have ever been made under section 12 of the Ministry of Citizenship and Culture Act, and none are foreseen.
This bill will amend the Ontario Energy Board Act to improve flexibility in approving rates, reduce regulatory controls and permit the use of performance or incentive mechanisms to improve utilities' productivity. It does not alter the government's requirement that the boards set just and reasonable rates and other charges.
Under the Public Hospitals Act, this bill will merge health sector appeal boards, streamline hearing and review processes and clarify procedures relating to complaint, discipline and appeal proceedings.
Under the Ministry of Natural Resources, it will reduce 11 forestry-related acts to five and repeal outdated legislation to simplify and enhance forest protection.
In total, the Red Tape Reduction Act, 1998, includes more than 100 amendments to more than 40 acts. At my ministry, the Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations, there are many steps towards reducing red tape, and I'd like to mention just a few.
One is changes under the Corporations Act which will allow not-for-profit corporations other than charities to dispense with an annual audit if their annual income is less than $10,000 and if all members consent in writing. Not-for-profit corporations can include, for example, hockey and bowling leagues, or even community centres in our own communities.
This bill allows changes to mutual insurance corporations to hold annual shareholders' meetings within the first three months, rather than the first two months, of every calendar year. They will also be allowed to published notice of the meeting and the annual statement in a local newspaper instead of mailing these documents to every policyholder.
This bill will bring changes to the Liquor Licence Act to eliminate unnecessary delays in the granting of a liquor sales licence, while still maintaining regulatory control. Thus, this bill will stop frivolous or vexatious objections from creating unnecessary delays in the processing of a liquor sales licence.
Changes to the Theatres Act will permit films and videos to get into circulation faster and yet allow the board to continue to perform their duties effectively, quickly and efficiently.
As members know, the government has achieved considerable success in its efforts to eliminate regulatory provisions that no longer serve any useful purpose. Much of this is the result of the dedication and hard work of the Red Tape Review Commission, now known as the Red Tape Commission.
The Red Tape Reduction Act, 1998, together with other measures, will continue the fight to cut the stranglehold of unnecessary rules and regulations.
I urge all members to support this bill.
Mr Harry Danford (Hastings-Peterborough): It is my pleasure this evening to also speak on Bill 25, our government's latest red tape reduction bill. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has worked consistently with the Red Tape Commission and reviewed our legislation and regulations to reduce the regulatory burden on residents of rural Ontario, to eliminate duplication, to encourage industry self-reliance and save both the ministry and its clients administrative costs.
Our ministry covers three components of this bill and proposes to repeal the Sheep and Wool Marketing Act and amend the Tile Drainage Act and the Drainage Act.
First, the Sheep and Wool Marketing Act originally authorized the promotion and improvement of sheep and wool marketing activities. This act has not been used since 1985 when the Ontario Sheep Marketing Agency was established. The agency has the legal authority for industry promotion and improvement. The act was to be left in place for five years to give the agency time to establish its effectiveness. Today, the proven self-reliance of the industry itself makes the Sheep and Wool Marketing Act redundant and we propose to repeal that act.
Second, under the Tile Drainage Act, municipalities can borrow money from the province to lend to local farmers for tile drainage work. The act requires, in turn, that municipalities must first pass a borrowing bylaw giving authorization to borrow money. Once this bylaw is passed, it must be registered in the local registry office.
The Ministry of Consumer and Commercial Relations is converting local registry offices to the new land titles system under which general bylaw indexes will not be maintained. As a result, some municipalities have encountered problems in registering these bylaws. In general, the registration process adds costs to the municipalities, results in time delays and no longer serves any useful purpose. Our amendment to the Tile Drainage Act will remove the requirement for municipalities to register borrowing bylaws in the local registry office.
We are also amending the Drainage Act, an act which provides land owners with a procedure to resolve drainage problems through their local municipalities. The drainage systems that are constructed are paid for by the land owners and ensure that agricultural land remains viable and productive.
1840
The Drainage Act requires the cost of all drainage work to be assessed to land owners and that each assessed owner in turn must be notified and receive a copy of the engineer's report for the project. In some cases, the cost of providing the report by an engineer exceeds the assessment being collected. Our proposed amendment will allow municipalities to decide if property owners being assessed less than $100 for drainage work need to receive a copy of the engineer's report.
Finally, the Drainage Act also allows a municipality to appoint an individual as drainage superintendent and allows the minister to pay a grant to the municipality towards this employment cost. The superintendent is responsible for the maintenance and repair of all the drainage systems in the municipality constructed under the act. In some recently amalgamated municipalities, it is literally not possible for a single individual to fulfil all the responsibilities placed upon them by the present act, so our proposed amendment will allow municipalities, with the approval of the minister, to appoint more than one drainage superintendent and, in turn, receive a grant for the cost of employing more than one individual. This will allow municipalities to continue to provide the same level of municipal drain maintenance and repair services as rural land owners have received in the past.
These regulatory reforms have three goals: to remove the barriers to investment and job creation in the agrifood industry in the province; to reduce the cost of government to the taxpayer; and to improve service to government customers. Last spring in our ministry we introduced the agrifood and rural business bill, which amended nine acts and repealed eight others. We also revoked a number of unnecessary regulations and eliminated the use of 38 different forms and licences.
These efforts and the red tape amendments presented for second reading tonight will help build a positive climate for business in Ontario and, in turn, fuel continued job creation in rural Ontario.
Mrs Helen Johns (Huron): It's my pleasure today to rise to speak to this red tape bill. The reason I was asked to speak to the red tape bill is that schedule F of this bill relates to the Ministry of Energy, Science and Technology. Although the amendments happening in schedule F are fairly minute, I thought it was important to talk about what red tape means to me and the members of my community as well as the people of Ontario.
Any of us who have worked in business before recognize that at some point we fill out a form and we wonder whoever reads it when we get it through to the government of Ontario, or to the federal government, for that matter. The Premier felt it was important to evaluate the whole process and look at different opportunities that might be available to streamline the system. Initially, he set up a committee of people who would look at red tape.
Some of my good colleagues are on this committee, and I would just like to recognize them for a minute. Of course Frank Sheehan was the chair; he's the MPP from Lincoln. Then there's a number of different caucus colleagues of mine. Marcel Beaubien, who is of course in the riding next door to mine, is the vice-chair and the member for Lambton. We also have Jim Brown, who is from Scarborough West; Gary Fox, from Prince Edward-Lennox-South Hastings; John Hastings, from Etobicoke-Rexdale; Morley Kells, from Etobicoke-Lakeshore; John O'Toole, from Durham East; Toni Skarica, from Wentworth North; Joe Spina, from Brampton North; Gary Stewart, from Peterborough; and Joe Tascona, from Simcoe Centre. These people all looked for ways we could improve the way government works.
You may think this is a bunch of MPPs who have come together and are making decisions about what the province should do, but I'd also like to say that they draw on an external group, an advisory group of people from businesses and federations who help make this work. We have the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and Judith Andrew represents them, Stuart Eagles, from Aegean Development Inc, Donald Fleming, Morley Gunderson, Hugh Heron, Bill Laidlaw, Bonnie Patterson, Blake Smith and Bernard West. All of these people assist us when we look at opportunities where we can make Ontario be more efficient and work for us.
When you're listening at home and you're thinking, "Gee, these are very technical amendments," as we heard from my colleague, the PA to the Minister of Agriculture, you realize that in some cases what we've put into legislation no longer really makes the government work better for the people of Ontario. This government is trying to break down those barriers that we have to economic growth. We're trying to break down barriers to be able to reduce the size of government, we're trying to improve performance standards in the public service and we're trying to cut red tape.
We on this side of the House believe that red tape is the biggest barrier we have to job creation and economic growth in the province of Ontario. People are sick of filling out forms that nobody in the province looks at. It's very important that this government has put a priority on assessing exactly what we need to enhance the ability of Ontarians to stimulate business, to create business and to compete all across the world.
I have young children, as you all know, and we want to have a place where these children can compete in a global economy. If we have excessive red tape or bills or legislation or forms that make our businesses not competitive with other businesses in the world, we do our businesses and our people and our jobs a great disservice. We really need to ensure we reduce the red tape.
Other people might say, "How do you know that these are truly red tape and that in effect these aren't there to protect someone?" That's why we have this great Red Tape Commission. They look at these issues and decide whether this is a health and safety issue, for example, or whether this truly in some way sets up a barrier that stops our businesses from competing. They look at legislation, they look at regulations, they look at licences, permits, approvals, standards, registrations, filings, pay for work enforcement and other measures that are truly not there to protect the health and safety of the public or to maintain environmental quality. That's what their mandate is.
I'd like to say that last week we were looking at evaluation of some potential new legislation that the government may in the future decide to bring forward and the Red Tape Commission was there saying: "Do you really need this section? How does this improve the ability to create jobs in Ontario?" So not only are they looking at past legislation, they're looking at future legislation to make sure there's an opportunity for all of us to build a better Ontario.
I look at some of the reasons the Premier decided that this was an important mandate. One of the things that was stated in the initial objective or vision of the Red Tape Commission was that from 1975 to 1994 federal and provincial governments passed more than 100,000 new regulations. When you think about that from a business perspective, if even some of them affected you, that's a substantial number to try and keep in touch with and work with within the laws of the province. We need to look at those very carefully to see, does this create jobs, does this help us in the province, does this protect us in any way?
In 1993-94 rules and regulations were estimated to have cost the Canadian economy $85.7 billion, nearly $12,000 for each Canadian household.
I remember being an accountant on the financial side of a business and filling out forms day after day for the provincial and federal governments. In some cases, you recognize the benefit of where they are going and how that helps the economy and what that does. In other cases, you wonder if anybody at the other end of the line ever looks at these forms and whether this in some way helps the economy. Really that's what I'm trying to say today. We need to look at some of this old legislation, some of this legislation that was passed in years gone by, and say: "How does this help us in the province of Ontario to govern, from our perspective? How does this help to create jobs, from the perspective of the people in my home town? How does this help the government to help people?" If it doesn't do some of those things or it doesn't protect people, then we need to look at whether it's really important.
1850
Of the firms that were evaluated in a survey, 43% said that they spend six hours per week on government paperwork, and 17% spend more than 10 hours per week on government paperwork. We have to be very careful about asking businesses to comply with that kind of time frame.
These bills were brought forward before my energy bill, which I'm talking about today and which is one or two pages. That was brought forward in February 1997. It was Bill 121 at that time and here it is again as Bill 25. What's important to notice about that is that the bill is the same. We couldn't get it through with the agenda we had before, and I guess we have some discussion tonight about whether we should be looking at red tape. It's certainly my stand, and the stand of the Premier and this government, that red tape and an evaluation of red tape is a very important issue. It makes the economy go, it makes jobs be created and I think that we need to look at it very carefully.
I want to talk about exactly what's happening in the energy schedule. Schedule F of the bill is basically a page long and it touches on two amendments. After we think about them, we think: "I wonder why someone didn't take these away previously. It doesn't make any sense." We're talking in one section about the Ontario Energy Board and what we're doing is amending the Ontario Energy Board. What happens right now is that when we're talking about natural gas and the energy board is considering costs, they have to consider the exact cost of the natural gas from the cost that they incur. As we all know - and I think this is no secret to anybody - if the costs are X and you will receive those dollars for it, there is no incentive in the world to reduce those costs.
We're bringing in competition to Ontario Hydro, we're looking at making sure there's customer protection, but what we need to do is try and drive those costs down, because the people of Ontario cannot continue to pay higher electricity costs and higher natural gas costs than other provinces and other states near us. This bill says the board can look at other things besides costs. They can say, "If you drive your costs down, we could leave the price you'll be able to attain at a similar price," so that it's a win-win for the consumer of the province and for the person who is actually providing the natural gas.
It makes only good common sense that we look at ways we can start to reduce the costs, because in some of the businesses, especially in my riding, electricity and natural gas can be 20% to 25% of their operating costs, depending on what they do. We have to be very sensitive to fix costs such as electricity and natural gas and we have to look for ways we can help those costs be reduced.
Of course, the government is doing that, because we have a white paper out, a direction for further change with respect to Ontario Hydro. We're introducing competition into the marketplace and in that regard we're trying to look at opportunities to create jobs. We're looking at opportunities to make Ontario grow. We're looking at opportunities for there to be a different pricing schedule across the province for the people of Ontario that benefits us all.
In this particular case in this bill, we're talking about natural gas, but it is in the same line. We have companies competing against Alberta companies, we have companies competing against global companies and we need as much as possible to find incentive rate-making possibilities so that we can reduce the cost of natural gas.
The regulator will be there to protect the consumers of the province. They will be there. With the Ontario Energy Board, we have now of course hired Floyd Laughren, who comes from the NDP. He'll be there to protect consumers, but on the other side he will be there to ensure that he doesn't have to take a cost-based price that may be inflated or may be -
Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): He can set an arbitrary one, can he?
Mrs Johns: That is what we're recommending here. I think Ontarians would be pleased that we're concerned about trying to find ways to reduce the fixed cost, both in our homes and in our businesses.
The second thing we're doing in this bill, and I think you'll find this as amusing as I, is that we're repealing the Ontario Energy Corporation Act. What happened with the Ontario Energy Corp - I can hardly remember this and I'm not a young pup any more - is that apparently in 1986 the government decided that all Ontario Energy Corp activities would be terminated, so it hasn't really been an active company since 1986. But prior to that, the corporation's mandate was to promote stability in the energy sector and its most high-profile activity was the purchase of 24% of Suncor Inc, a move that did nothing to promote stability and resulted in a net loss of $300 million to a number of individuals, including the taxpayers, as I understand it.
Mr Wildman: Who did that?
Mrs Johns: I wasn't around then and I can't comment about the logic for that happening. I don't stand here today saying that everything that happened in the past was the fault of someone else. What I do say is this corporation has not been active since 1989 when the activities were terminated and the assets were sold in two instalments, in 1992 and 1993. Since that time, the corporation has been essentially inactive, other than managing the existing assets, and that has been done by bureaucrats. What's going to happen with this schedule F is that those assets will be brought into the government and what will happen is that specifically designated bureaucrats won't need to be there to carry out those functions. It makes sense. The company is basically, for all intents and purposes, inactive. Why would we have regulations that would keep the corporation on the books? It just doesn't make common sense.
It's important to recognize that some of these items are very important to making sure that Ontario continues to grow and create jobs. It wasn't very long ago that this side of the House talked about interest charges alone that this province had accumulated, ranging in the area of $1 million an hour. I think we need to talk about how we can do things better in this government. We have a decade of mismanagement in the province. We have record debt. We had record unemployment previously. We had record numbers of people on social assistance. We had record lows in economic performance and growth. We need to get Ontario back to work. That's what we're doing today. We're taking some of the red tape out of regulations so that we can create opportunities for private sector people to create jobs within Ontario.
I don't think I need to remind the House, the Speaker or the people at home that today the economy in the province is stronger than it has been in the whole lost decade. We have retail sales at an unprecedented level. We have consumer and business confidence that's very high. We have housing starts up. Welfare rolls are shrinking and we have new jobs, 341,000 new private sector jobs since September 1995. That's a perfect number, no matter what side of the House you're on.
We have the fastest job creation rate in all of Canada and we have to keep it going. We have to find ways to ensure that this province stays as the economic engine. We have to find ways to ensure that we create the 725,000 jobs we said we would create in the Common Sense Revolution. We're going to continue to work to find ways to entice businesses to start to create jobs, not just the low-paying jobs that my opposition colleagues talk about, but good-paying jobs that we can be proud of in Ontario.
I'm very pleased to say today that I support the sections on energy in schedule F of this bill. They're strictly for red tape. They did nothing to protect the consumer, to protect the taxpayer, to save the taxpayer from excessive dollars being spent. This is a good move from the energy side and I'm very proud to be part of the speech tonight.
1900
Mr Ted Chudleigh (Halton North): I'm very pleased today to have the opportunity to make some comments on this, the second reading of Bill 25, the government's Red Tape Reduction Act, and I'd like to comment on those parts of the bill that come under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Natural Resources.
The Ministry of Natural Resources changes are outlined in schedule I of the bill, and for the most part they are very similar or identical to those proposed by the ministry under the former Bill 119. While this bill expired when the Legislature was prorogued last December, it previously was posted on the Environmental Bill of Rights registry for a period of 45 days. At that time, the ministry considered all public input and responded to all written submissions from stakeholders and individuals. The amendments proposed in schedule I reflect improvements and additions suggested during this consultative process.
I believe the economic, social and environmental considerations have been balanced throughout this process. I also point out that the amendments have been reviewed by the Red Tape Review Commission and carefully examined internally across all divisions of the Ministry of Natural Resources. This bill, if approved, will reduce red tape in the Ministry of Natural Resources while maintaining our commitment to protecting the environment, improving customer service, and reducing administration costs and duplication. In addition to keeping more than $11 million in annual forest renewal dollars protected from federal taxation, the Ministry of Natural Resources red tape changes will improve the ministry's planning process for crown land, streamline forestry legislation and, if you'll pardon the pun, clean up the Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act, and make other necessary housekeeping changes to this legislation. They will do this by clarifying roles and responsibilities, by making improvements to acts that are older or unclear, and by increasing efficiency.
Overall, the Ministry of Natural Resources schedule of amendments will affect 17 pieces of legislation and eliminate unnecessary regulations. Consolidation of regulations is consistent with the government's commitment to reduce the cost of government while improving customer service.
Through our red tape changes, we will improve our efforts in a number of important areas. We will improve the land use planning process for crown land and set clear rules for appropriate environmentally sensitive development, and give industries working on crown land more certainty about making business decisions. This will be accomplished by giving the Ministry of Natural Resources clear decision-making authority governing the use of crown land based on a land use planning process. In addition, provisions will be made both for public notification of proposals to approve or amend land use plans and for greater flexibility in dealing with commitments and objectives to land use plans and activities.
Our changes will update Ontario parks legislation to increase maximum fines for damaging natural or cultural heritage found within the parks and other offences. It will increase these fines from $5,000 to $25,000 and it will also allow the ministry to enforce cleanup and repair orders to our natural heritage.
We will also change and update some of the terminology, in particular pertaining to the classification of provincial parks and parkland. These changes will bring the legislation up to date with current planning processes.
We will improve the Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act to emphasize public safety and add the ability to issue a stop-work order consistent with protecting public health and safety and our natural resources. As well, our changes will make the act clearer, more accessible and more easily understood by the general public.
The approval process for undertaking work or construction in water will be clarified and simplified. The changes will also help make it easier to deliver a more efficient, one-window approach to permits and approvals through the Ministry of Natural Resources.
We will streamline forestry legislation by reducing 11 acts into five acts. We will accomplish this by repealing the Spruce Pulpwood Exportation Act and the Settlers' Pulpwood Protection Act, because the Crown Forest Sustainability Act covers these acts, and by repealing the Forestry Workers Employment Act, as current labour legislation also addresses this matter.
We will consolidate several forestry acts relating to forest management on private lands into a single act. Pertinent sections of the Forest Tree Pest Control Act, the Trees Act, the Woodlands Improvement Act and the old Forestry Act will be incorporated into the new act. The new act will be clearer, easier to understand and more accessible for municipalities and regulated parties. Obsolete and redundant provisions will be eliminated.
Our changes will remove unnecessary work in declaring restricted fire zones under the Forest Fires Prevention Act. Restricted fire zones are a tool that the Ministry of Natural Resources uses to help protect public safety during forest fire emergencies. The restricted fire zones will be declared by order rather than through regulation.
We will follow up on earlier changes made to the Conservation Authorities Act that clearly identify flood control and protection as provincial interests in conservation authority matters. As well, our changes will give participating municipalities full responsibility for other conservation authority program decisions. I'll address those changes in just a moment.
We will streamline crown lands administration. Among other things, we will allow for the release of reservations on lands previously sold by the crown where no such release was legally possible before.
Our changes will clarify certain provisions of the Mining Act. They will allow for the consolidation of three regulations covering the disposition of crown-owned oil and gas into one regulation.
Finally, we will give some additional responsibilities to the Association of Ontario Land Surveyors. Under the proposed changes, the association will be responsible for developing regulations that set standards for monumentation in subdivisions and other development areas. "Monumentation" refers to the physical reference points placed during the surveying of land. The association has the expertise and the experience to administer these standards, and any proposals made will be subject to government approval before being implemented.
Some of the most significant changes proposed in schedule I are related to the Conservation Authorities Act, and I'd like to speak about those briefly. The amendments proposed in the bill will clarify the role of conservation authorities in hazard management consistent with the provincial interest in provincial policy statements.
Regulations on fill and construction will be revised to focus on important wetlands, shorelines and other natural hazard areas.
Approval of conservation authority regulations will be streamlined. Municipalities in a conservation authority watershed will have at least 30 days' notice of proposed budgets and levies, and the province will remove itself from involvement in conservation authorities business that is not directly related to provincial interests.
The consultation on the former Bill 119 resulted in a number of changes to the original conservation authority material proposed by the ministry. For example, the ministry acted on suggestions to further clarify the conditions for enlargement and amalgamation of conservation authorities; to allow CAs to issue and enforce conditional permits; and to focus CA authority to regulate within river and valley streams.
These changes clarify and focus the regulatory jurisdictions of conservation authorities, provide a mechanism for one-window delivery of permits and strengthen the enforcement capabilities of conservation authorities within their jurisdiction.
There are many other important amendments that are part of schedule I. In summary, the Ministry of Natural Resources red tape changes will consolidate a number of acts into simpler, more focused legislation, remove unnecessary regulation and improve government by both increasing fines and strengthening the ability to control activities related to our natural resources.
The changes will also create new opportunities for business and industry involved in resource management activities, and of course the Ministry of Natural Resources will maintain its ability to manage natural resource sustainability in this province.
1910
Mrs Johns: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I'd like to introduce Mark Montague, the past president of the Municipal Electric Association, in the east lobby today.
The Acting Speaker: Questions or comments?
Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): I was taken aback by the member for Huron's attack on Bill Davis and his legacy. He talked about mismanagement and lost years. The Suncor decision of Bill Davis was certainly a mistake, but I think Bill Davis can be remembered as a Premier who did a lot of good things. To characterize his time as Premier as lost years I don't think is appropriate, and I would think that Mr Davis, as Premier, did a lot of good things. His mistake with Suncor is only a small part of his legacy.
In terms of red tape and this bill, the funny thing is that it's 198 pages, so we're introducing mounds more red tape to eliminate red tape. If I saw the regulations that would go as accompaniment to the bill - this is basically the shell of the bill - I'm sure the regulations would probably reach the ceiling. I wonder how you can eliminate red tape by expanding red tape to details like the inclusion of cherries and grapes and so forth in the distillation of liquor.
I think what this bill is really all about is consolidating more power in the back rooms of this government. That's what it comes down to. It's not about eliminating red tape; it's about putting power into the hands of the whiz kids, into the hands of ministers' aides, and very little power up front where people can question it and understand it. This bill doesn't help the average consumer understand what this government is doing. I think it's going to make life much more complicated.
Mr Wildman: I listened very closely to the comments of the two members of the party supporting the government bench speaking about this omnibus bill. Neither admitted the problem with omnibus legislation that we have seen time and again with this government, that they have enormous pieces of legislation to cover all sorts of matters, myriad other pieces of legislation, and it's inevitable that they make mistakes. There are mistakes involved, which they sometimes try to rectify by bringing in myriad regulations. So while this bill purports to get rid of red tape, as my friend from Oakwood indicated, it really probably produces more paper and red tape.
This is an attempt by the government to get rid of a number of pieces of legislation, some of which are not important but others which are quite important, and lump those all together. A lot of what is considered red tape by this government is protection of workers, consumers and citizens. One thing we have to consider is that governments, when they pass legislation and pass laws, do it for reasons - they don't just do it because they want to pass laws - and sometimes those reasons have passed and are no longer applicable. In those cases it makes sense to get rid of no-longer-necessary pieces of legislation or regulations, but in other cases they are still required and needed. For instance, not one of the members mentioned why they're getting rid of the P and P committee of cabinet. I'm curious about that.
Mr Doug Galt (Northumberland): I'd like to compliment the four speakers on an excellent presentation this evening on red tape and some of the problems the government and the people of Ontario have had with excessive red tape. Across the way they're complaining about this bill. The bill is almost 200 pages, 198 to be exact. That in itself is indicative of why it's necessary to get rid of this red tape. Look at the quantity here, if nothing else.
If you want to get a definition of red tape, we're really talking about unnecessary regulations, regulations that don't make any sense. I can assure you, we certainly have a large number of regulations on the books that don't make an awful lot of sense. We have regulations on agricultural waste, and the Minister of Agriculture is really frustrated over this whole area. If a cow passes some manure at home in the barn, you can spread that in the field, but if you take her to an exhibition or take her to a fairground, it's waste that has to go to a landfill site. I know that as Minister of Environment you tolerated that, when in fact that manure should be taken to the farm and spread properly. That's exactly what we're doing, changing such definitions as that and getting rid of some of the ridiculous red tape we've had in the past.
Also, if you were to spill water out of a watermain that's chlorinated, it's now considered as a hazardous waste and has to be cleaned up as such. The previous Minister of Environment, the member for Algoma, tolerated that kind of thing. Just because pure drinking water had a little chlorine added to it, they would put up with that kind of red tape.
The public is totally fed up with that kind of foolishness. Red tape is the kind of thing that has been killing industry, that has been killing small business. It's time it was gotten rid of.
Mr Michael A. Brown (Algoma-Manitoulin): We obviously have here an omnibus bill. These things used to be handled a different way around here. What used to happen was that if the government wanted to get rid of red tape - and goodness knows there was always obsolescence, always things happening that didn't make much sense.
Interjection.
Mr Michael Brown: He talks about the NDP. I will say that the NDP had an omnibus bill - I forget the number -that was bigger than this. They went around to the opposition critics with it and said, "Have you got any problem with any of this?" They went section by section. If I recall, they said, "If you don't like it, we'll take it out; we want a consensus on this bill," and when it went through the Legislature it passed in about an hour, because there was some thought put into it. That's the way omnibus bills used to be put through this place. You wouldn't be back reintroducing the same bills again if you had dealt in such a manner, but of course this has some contentious parts.
One of the things that concerns me is this is not so much about reducing red tape, although I'll grant you there are some things in here that should be long gone; what it's about is giving ministers an unbridled ability to raise fees. It is a tax bill, if nothing else. Under 40 statutes, this piece of legislation gives the minister - not cabinet, not legislators - the right to impose any fee that he or she decides. I suggest to you that this is a tax bill. This is a bill that will provide for taxes on Ontarians without any review by anybody - not cabinet, not the Legislature. Ministers will impose these taxes.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Hamilton West, you have two minutes to respond.
Mrs Ross: I listened with interest to all the members, from Oakwood, Algoma, Northumberland and Algoma-Manitoulin. This bill is about reducing red tape and eliminating barriers to creation of jobs and growth. The responsibility of the Red Tape Commission was to look at pretty much everything government does and look at some of the restrictions we put on people, on business and on organizations and find out if they were outdated or old or outmoded and update those things and modernize them.
For example, one of the things we did was look under the Corporations Act: "A corporation is allowed to hold directors' meetings by telephone or other means of communication and to keep corporate records at any place where there is electronic access from the head office." That absolutely makes sense in the age of technology. You have to update and upgrade your systems and keep pace with what's happening in the changing environment, so those are the kinds of things we're doing in this red tape bill.
The other thing is that it looks at all the things - for example, when we look at the consolidation of health boards, it references the boards that are being amalgamated or changed so that they refer to the new board. That makes absolute sense. Why wouldn't you do something like that in a red tape bill to eliminate all the confusion that would arise out of something like that?
This whole bill is about looking at things that are outdated and outmoded and modernizing them, bringing them up to date, making it easier for business, for people and for organizations to conduct their business and to do business, and at the same time making sure that consumers are protected throughout everything we do. This whole bill is about eliminating obsolete provisions and achieving harmonization with other statutes.
1920
The Acting Speaker: Further debate?
Mr Colle: I think governments have to do this; they have to go through legislation to see what is redundant and what is out of date. I should mention that one of the aspects of Bill 25 that I think is going to be part of further bills - section 7 deals with the Evidence Act. Essentially the government is now going to allow CD-ROM disks and other electronic innovations to be acceptable. That is an area which will no doubt have to see further revisions, because certainly the whole area of electronic business and electronic commerce is growing. That is one small part of this bill, but it's part of this bill that I can see as being reasonable. Governments will have to undertake to explore ways of accepting electronic information and electronic transactions as being part of everyday business.
In general, the bill looks at government trying to be more citizen-friendly; at least that's what they claim they're trying to do. But what I find most difficult about this bill is that it talks about ministerial powers over and over and over again, listing ministerial powers one after another. It's "powers of the minister," "minister's orders," "conferring on the director," "specifying the manner," "specifying the manner in which property identifiers are to be assigned" - the most intimate details or tiny bits of information are now under the powers of the minister.
I wonder whether the public will have any recourse to find out, first of all, what the minister is actually doing and then if they can question or challenge the minister's decisions, because most of these ministerial decisions will be made behind closed doors where they won't even be accountable to the members of this Legislature. Ministerial power is the predominant theme of this bill, and it's repeated on almost every page. "The minister may make regulations" - the minister's powers, the minister appointing, the minister regulating.
That kind of trend is not the trend the public wants. The public wants more accountability for ministers so they know what the ministers are approving, so they know what ministers are signing. This bill goes in the opposite direction. It just gives more extraordinary powers to ministers who already have extraordinary powers.
The genesis of this type of omnibus bill, which includes hundreds of tiny statutes, goes back to a trend that this government started with Bill 26. With Bill 26, another omnibus bill like this, what they tried to do, basically, was take power away from the Legislature and even away from cabinet and give it to the Premier and to the people in his office. That's what this omnibus bill reinforces, that trend by this government to centralize power. As you know, the hallmark of this government has been centralization of power.
It's ironic. Originally, the claim of most of the members on the other side was that they were going to be about smaller government, they were going to be about getting rid of government, but they have created some of the biggest governments ever seen in this province.
If you look at the mammoth school boards they've created - in the city of Toronto we have a public school board with 300,000 students. How can that be good for ordinary students and parents? How can you access the powers that be if you're one of 300,000? How would you ever have a hope of getting a fair hearing when you're one of 300,000 students?
This is what this government has done. If you look at hospitals, they don't like the small community hospital. They've centralized power into mega-hospitals. In the city of Toronto, we're losing 11 hospitals. We're losing the small community hospitals, like Runnymede hospital being closed down, Northwestern closed down, Doctors Hospital being closed down. All these hospitals were linked to the community, but this government says, "We've got to make things bigger and better."
This is what this bill does. It tends to centralize, whether it be the powers of a ministry, the powers of one individual or the Premier's office. That means the public doesn't have the ability to find out - never mind what's in this bill; you can imagine the public trying to find out what the regulations are all about. You'll have to hire a lawyer or lobbyist to get informed, because it is very complicated when you try to find out what a minister has passed.
I can remember that a few months ago in the Gazette there was a one-liner that said, "We have deregulated the moving industry." Because of Bill 26, the Minister of Municipal Affairs has the power to do almost what he wants in the area of municipal regulation. With the moving industry, people would hire a moving company, which would have to have a licence to operate that moving company. But with one line in the back room of the minister's office, you don't have to have a licence to operate a moving company in this province now. I tell people who are seniors, who are vulnerable, be very careful when you hire a moving company because you may never see your furniture again, because they now no longer need a licence to operate in this province.
It's the same with courier companies. At one time, courier companies required a licence to courier your valuables in this province. Through regulation, in the minister's back room, courier companies are no longer required to be licensed in this province. If you've got valuable documents to ship in this province, be careful, because the companies don't have to be licensed.
This is what this bill continues. It continues to put extraordinary regulatory powers in the hands of the minister who, on a whim, can change an industry, can change consumer protection, eliminate consumer protection.
This bill also talks about the Ontario Energy Board. I had wished that perhaps in this bill there would be some protection for consumers against those rip-off gas brokers who go door to door claiming to save all kinds of money for consumers by switching to some fly-by-night gas company. In this province so many seniors especially have been victimized by these fly-by-night gas brokers who go to the door and say, "I'm from the gas company; you've got to let me in." The poor consumer feels they probably represent one of the recognized gas companies. Well, they don't. They represent a paper company that is just going door to door trying to get people to switch from one company to another. What they've even done - and I see this bill does nothing to protect them - they issue these cheques to people for $40. They said, "If you cash this cheque, you've just won a cheque for $40."
What's happening to the poor consumer is that when they cash that cheque, they find out they're now a member of this other gas company and are now under contract; when they took that $40 cheque to the bank and cashed it, they were now signing a contract with that company, and they had no idea where that company came from. Many of these companies don't even have offices; they're just boiler rooms. This is the type of consumer protection that this bill eliminates. Where is that in this bill?
In small towns like Listowel and all over this province, they're going door to door and saying: "Sign up. You're going to save money if you sign with this gas company." There is no attempt to regulate that or protect consumers in this bill. That's the type of thing that could have been included in this bill because consumers all over this province are really being set upon by these door-to-door scam artists who are claiming to be from the so-called gas company. How many people have been scammed by that already to the tune of how many dollars, where basically they signed contracts for life? It's an eight-year contract if you cash that $40 or $20 check. You're in an eight-year or 10-year contract to get gas from some fly-by-night company.
1930
This government has refused to step in and stop that. That's the type of consumer protection and the kind of action the minister should take, but there's no mention of that in this bill whatsoever.
Another thing that's not in this bill: If you talk to ordinary working people, they say what is wrong in terms of dealing with a ministry is, "Don't dare phone a ministry after 4:30." If you can't get through from 9 to 4:30, you have no hope of ever pleading your case or going to see a ministry official. Almost all of them shut their doors and the phone is on voice mail hell after 4:30. That poor citizen who wants to talk to a real live person on the phone or take their complaint to an office, the Ministry of Finance or the Ministry of Transportation, for example, can't get to see anybody, because the vast majority of ministry offices still operate on the basic principle that everybody works 9 to 4:30 or whatever the hours are.
Wouldn't it be wonderful, if they really wanted to be consumer-friendly, to start opening government offices? Can you imagine going to a ministry office at 8 o'clock at night when you've come home from work, that you could actually do that? There's got to be more of that. There isn't any mention of that in this bill in terms of opening up these offices. Let people work in different, perhaps modal, shifts so they can see the customers, who can't always get there before 4:30. That's a very common complaint I get from people.
Another thing in terms of delays is when you try to do something, for instance, like property assessment. It's going to take years for all these appeals to go through, to get a proper hearing. If you look at the red tape in the assessment system in this province, it's greater than ever, because they just passed four bills on property assessment. How an ordinary citizen is going to make any sense of the property assessment system in this province is beyond me. They have not made that any less cumbersome. In fact, it's even more complex with all the amendments and the new bills and the omnibus tax bills, bill after bill after bill.
This is a government that claims to be against government and legislation. As you know, they changed the calendar. They've got the new Thermidorian calendar here, where they've got two days in one, so they can pass more bills. They love passing bills. They're addicted to passing, jamming them through. They not only pass them but force them through here in closure after closure, which means you can't debate bills. This is the hallmark of this government. The government likes to shut down debate because it loves to jam bills through, bill after bill after bill. This government is addicted to that.
They feel they can re-engineer the world by legislation. That's why every day we sit here and we see bill after bill after bill. These guys are in love with government. That's all they want to do, legislate, legislate, legislate, and they're the ones who say, "Oh, we're against government." They're addicted to government and government control.
The worst thing about it is that the control is not in the hands of the ordinary MPPs. The ordinary MPPs on both sides know that the control is the hands of the whiz kids, those unelected, faceless whiz kids who lurk in the back rooms of the Premier's office. That's who makes all these fancy rules and regulations. That's who passes bill after bill after bill, trying to give more power to unelected officials and to ministers and make things more difficult for scrutiny. That is what this omnibus bill is about. That was the tone set by Bill 26, which shifted power away from this Legislature into the back room, where the whiz kids control things.
That is what they call red tape. If they were really interested in red tape, wouldn't it be interesting to see a bill that would constrain and control the power of the whiz kids? That would be an interesting bill for you to pass. I would like to see that come forward in a private member's bill from the other side of the House, a bill to restrict and control the power of the unelected whiz kids in the back room of the Premier. That would be a wonderful bill. We would support that bill. I think that bill would get unanimous approval, a bill to restrict and control the power of the unelected whiz kids in the back room of the Premier. That bill would probably get speedy passage and there would be unanimity on that bill to control and restrict the power of the whiz kids. I wonder who has the courage to introduce such a bill. I wonder who has the courage to stand up to that type of regulatory control.
This bill doesn't mention the whiz kids at all but we know they're lurking behind it, because when you push power back into the minister's hands, when you give more power through regulation, you know who's making those regulations. It's the whiz kids, the unelected, self-appointed power brokers of this government, behind closed doors. That is who really runs this province right now.
Another very prevalent thing in this bill is that it talks about giving all kinds of technical powers to unelected officials, like the registrar general. Do the people of the province know who these registrar generals are, how they get appointed? Who is this registrar general? To whom is he or she accountable?
Immense power: "The registrar general may by order...set and collect fees for services...provide for the waiver of payment...." This person, the registrar general, can decide what you pay for things the government gives you. They can set these fees. They can also say you don't have to pay a fee. That's the power this bill gives to this unelected - who is the registrar general? Who knows that? Mr Speaker, I don't know if you know. I don't know who the registrar general is and where they came from or who they are, where their office is, but this bill gives them immense power.
The people of Ontario will only find out when they have possibly been hard done by and it's too late, because this bill gives people like these registrars general much more power over their daily lives. That is not a good thing, to see power continually given into the hands of unelected, faceless, nameless people who have this extraordinary power over our daily lives and over our businesses big and small.
I'm surprised that some of the supposed exponents of small government would favour that type of approach in this bill. Why would you give someone who's not elected, who nobody knows, this mystery person, this kind of power? Who do you call? What's the name of this person you call? That would be interesting to put in this bill, to name this person, who he or she is who has all this power.
Mr Michael Brown: We should have a quiz show.
Mr Colle: We could have a quiz show: Who is the registrar general? Is there one or two or three or five of these registrar generals? Where are they? Are their offices in Sarnia? In Scarborough? Where does this person hide out who has all this power?
Mr Derwyn Shea (High Park-Swansea): Mike, where have you been for the last hundred years?
Mr Colle: For all I know, maybe he or she is in Swansea, with all this power. We have no idea where these people are. Never mind where they are; we have no idea where these people lurk and who they're accountable to and who makes phone calls to them.
I'm sure the whiz kids know who they are. The whiz kids have a direct hotline to them. But ordinary MPPs and ordinary Joe and Jane Citizen can't get hold of the registrar general with a phone call or a fax or an e-mail, because we don't know who they are. We have no idea who these people are. This bill has given them extraordinary power, and that is not good government, when you give unelected, faceless people extraordinary powers.
1940
One of the members talked about jobs, that this bill will create jobs. I was looking for the word "job" in this bill. It's 198 pages long, and I couldn't find the word "job." Why is the word not in here? If this bill is about jobs, where is the word "job" or "jobs"? How can this be about jobs when it's not even in there?
Maybe the jobs are in the registrar general's office. How many people work in the registrar general's office? Maybe that's where the work is: "Help wanted: whiz kid to work in the registrar general's office." Maybe that's what you do. That's what I'll ask people across this province to do: If you want a job, phone up the registrar general. I'm sure he or she has got all kinds of jobs, but you have to be a whiz kid. What's a whiz kid? It doesn't say in this bill, so we'll have to find that out.
In terms of jobs, sure people have jobs, but do you know what they tell me? They tell me they're working for minimum wage. If a job were posted in the front window of a government office, the Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Education, or let's say a company in the private sector, a car company, that said, "Help wanted: decent wage for full employment, five days a week, with full benefits and $12 or $15 an hour," I bet there would be about 10,000 people lined up at that front door. People tell me that when they apply for a job, they're always one of 2,000 applicants; they get turned down. They're one of 500 applicants; they get turned down.
A lot of these so-called jobs out there are those bottom-end jobs, and do you know what happens with those jobs too? In some of these jobs they beg to work 40 hours a week. Their employers only allow them to work 20 hours a week because they're spreading the work around. Maybe the employer has a difficult time doing that and I can understand that difficulty, but these ordinary workers are saying, "Please - "
Mr Wildman: The employers don't have to pay benefits then.
Mr Colle: Right. They don't have to pay full benefits if they only work for 20 hours. That's the game some employers play.
People in the streets of Toronto are saying: "If I could find that job that gives me full benefits, gives me a living wage so I could pay my rent, pay my mortgage with, put food on the table, I'd love that job. But right now I'm working for $7.50 in a grocery store and all I can get is 21 hours a week." That is what is happening.
It's too bad that this bill didn't talk about providing jobs that have full benefits, where people could work those 40 hours they want to work. That's all they're asking for. They're not asking for any government handout. They're saying, "Government, start making it possible that people get real full-time jobs, with full benefits, that give people respect and respectful return for their hard labour." Too many jobs around right now, as I said, are barely making it possible for people to put food on the table, and I'm not exaggerating. That's where they're at with $7.50 or $7 an hour. You can barely put basic food staples on the table.
I don't think we should be patting ourselves on the back; the government shouldn't be so proud. There's so much more work to do and work to create, because it is not okay yet. The jobs that have been created are not enough to satisfy all those who are desperate to work. Don't finger-point at these people and say they don't want to work. These people would do anything to get that full-time job. That's what you should be trying to do in these pieces of legislation. But again, I see nothing in here that's going to do this.
Part of the bill here talks about the Public Hospitals Act. I went to the public hospital meeting in my area last week and asked the auditor of the hospital board: "People in my area are complaining that you're laying off nurses and firing orderlies, but you gave a 10% bonus to the hospital executives. How could you do that?" He said: "It's none of your business. I don't have to talk to you about it." That's what the auditor of the hospital said. I said, "It's a public hospital."
Maybe that should be in this bill, to make it mandatory for these members of hospital boards to answer questions of the public, because senior citizens in my area are saying: "How can they afford to pay bonuses to hospital big-shots who run the hospitals?" Some of them make $200,000 a year and they get a bonus, yet the nurses are fired, the orderlies are fired, and they've got no money for emergency room services. But the hospital board can afford to give bonuses to the managers, the president, vice-presidents, the big-shots of the hospital. I don't see any attempt to make that possible whereby a citizen can go to the hospital board and say, "You justify to me how you can give a bonus to your chief executive and get rid of 10 nurses." He said, "No, its none of your business." That's what they said at the public meeting: "We don't have to tell you. We gave them a bonus. That's our business."
That is the attitude now prevalent in this province, because this government has given the hospital big-shots the opportunity to do what they want and there is no accountability, just like there is no accountability with the other people given extraordinary powers in this bill. I would hope to see that bills like this make hospitals and their boards more accountable, because they are still public hospitals. The last time I checked, the hospitals are still owned and supposedly under the control of the public. But last week at our Humber hospital, they refused to even tell us how much they gave in bonuses and to whom. They said: "We don't have to justify anything to you people. We're in charge here."
To me, that is what red tape is all about. If you want to eliminate red tape, that's the kind of red tape that should be eliminated in this province, whereby faceless, appointed bureaucrats and high-paid executives who work for public corporations are made accountable to ordinary taxpayers, who are really wondering how they can justify giving themselves pay raises and then cutting beds in hospitals and not having room in emergency.
This is not something the public will accept for long, and I don't see anything in all these omnibus bills you have passed, and this one you're trying to pass, that will at least try to open the door to these boards and these faceless, bureaucratic cliques that are starting to run this province. The public will not be able to keep them accountable because more and more power is given every day to these cliques that run this government.
Talk about hours of operation: Under the former government, in my area there were a couple of Ministry of Transportation offices where people could go and get their licences. In the last couple of years they've closed them down. There's only one in this huge catchment area. You line up and the people in there - I mean, even getting a smile out of them is impossible, because they're so overworked. There's now just one office and the other local ones are all closed and the hours of operation are never amenable to the public, yet this government says, "We're open for business." They're closing these offices. They're closing down places where people go, to get their licence or to get some information, maybe a driver's test booklet. You can't say you're open for business when you're closing government offices and you don't extend the hours. People in my area are very upset that this government, even without informing the local member, closed the Ministry of Transportation office that used to be on Oakwood Avenue. They just closed it in the middle of the night without any kind of notification, and this government says it's open for business.
Well, in this place here they're closed for business. They could probably do a lot more good for themselves and for this province if they made the government more accessible. Not everybody can afford to come downtown to do business. Not everybody can come to Toronto. We've got to have the local neighbourhood offices where people can go and get government services.
1950
This government seems hell-bent on consolidation, as they call it, making these mega-centres. They assume everybody is going to do things in a centralized office. People don't like over-centralization. Even in a place like Toronto, which supposedly has everything, a lot of neighbourhoods in this city don't have everything, and this government is systematically closing down access to government ministries. We would like to see government offices open in neighbourhoods rather than closed, but the trend with this government - as I said, it's in love with over-centralization, in love with putting everything under one roof so it can control everything. What about public service? What about that ordinary citizen who wants to walk down to Main Street and get that service?
This bill does nothing to improve that kind of ordinary, everyday service. We're not talking about the service the big Bay Street lawyers want. We're talking about service that citizens want. They want to find out, for instance, about their tax bill, about the assessment system in this province. They want to find out how that kind of stuff out works.
Try to get hold of an assessment office in the city of Toronto or in Ontario. They've got you on this voice mail run-around for months. You can't get through to find out how this new assessment system works. People have been trying for three months to get a phone call in to the assessment office. There is only one and it's way at the other side of town. What about getting people some information about what's happening with things like that? But that doesn't fit the cookie-cutter approach of this government.
They talk about the Pharmacy Act in here. For instance, right now there are people interested in getting alternative medicines. They want to look at complementary medicine. I hope the government will move towards that, allowing people who perhaps believe in an alternative, complementary medicine to access that and find out about these complementary medicines at some government office. Right now they can't get any information about whether a non-prescription vitamin or drug or something is good or bad. They can't get through. They get nothing but bureaucratic answers or, as I said, they get this voice mail run-around and people just give up.
This bill is supposedly an attempt to get rid of red tape, whatever that means, but the most interesting thing is what's not in there. It's the immense continued trend toward more ministerial power in every aspect of government. If you think you're going to escape this, people out there, you can't escape this government's attempt to centralize power. With every part of your life, this government will be in there. The problem is that you won't know who these faceless people are.
The Loan Brokers Act, the Marriage Act, the Mortgages Act, Motor Vehicle Dealers Act, Ontario New Home Warranties Plan Act, the Corporations Act, the Consumer Reporting Act, Collection Agencies Act, Change of Name Act, Costs of Distress Act, Extra-Provincial Corporations Act: It amends act after act affecting people - the Courts of Justice Act, the Coroners Act, Public Accountancy Act. Who is going to know what's in this? They even go into the Drainage Act and the Sheep and Wool Marketing Act. I wonder how many people will know what these changes are that are going to affect their lives.
It's good to make changes. We're all in favour of making good changes, but the question that really arises is: "If these changes are now under the auspices of a faceless, nameless, appointed bureaucrat, how will I know whom to call? How will I know whom to complain to if I don't like the wool act, if I don't like the changes to the Marriages Act?" They will not know whom to call because they have no idea due to the complexity of this government, the complexity of these acts, and the fact that this act is part of a trend whereby power is now somewhere in these back rooms and offices and we have no way of accessing them, whether we're members of provincial Parliament, whether we're on either side of the House or we're ordinary citizens. That is the fearful part of bills like Bill 25. I hope the public will ask questions and try to find out, and maybe this government will reveal the name - I dare the government to reveal the name of the registrar general. Let him come here. That is my challenge: Let him come here.
The Acting Speaker: Further debate?
Mr Michael Brown: I start out by reminding members we're speaking to Bill 25, which is An Act to reduce red tape by amending or repealing certain Acts and by enacting two new Acts.
I don't know whether members have really read this thing or had a look at it, but I would submit to you that much of what this is about is about fees. It's about setting new or enhanced fees on at least 40 statutes.
I like this. This is reducing red tape. I bring your attention to page 96, the Theatres Act. This is heavy duty reduction of red tape, I'll tell you. It says,
"270.2(1) The deputy minister may appoint a person as the director to administer and enforce this act and the regulations." That means you get to have a director. That's helpful. It moves the concentration of power down a little.
"(2) The director has all the powers of an inspector." That's really helpful too.
Mr Gilles Pouliot (Lake Nipigon): What about ushers?
Mr Michael Brown: "What about ushers?" he says. No.
"(3) The deputy minister may appoint an assistant director who shall act as director in the absence of the director or when so instructed to act by the director."
Mr Wildman: This is creating red tape.
Mr Michael Brown: This is reducing red tape.
"(4) When acting as the director, an assistant director has all the powers of the director." That's really good.
"271. Subsection (4)(1) of the act is amended by striking out `Lieutenant Governor in Council' in the first and second lines and substituting `director.'" That means the director can set the fees; the cabinet does not need to.
Then we go to section 272:
"Subsection 9(2) of the act is amended by striking out `prescribed fee' in the fourth and fifth lines and substituting `required fee.'
"273. Subsection 12(1) of the act is amended by striking out `prescribed fee' in the fourth line and substituting `required fee.'
"274. Section 13 of the act is amended by striking out `prescribed fee' at the end and substituting `required fee.'...
"276. Section 25 of the act is amended by striking out `prescribed fee' at the end and substituting `required fee.'
"277(1) Subsection 28(1) of the act is amended by striking out `prescribed fee' in the fifth line and substituting `required fee.'
"277(2) Subsection 28(2) of the act is amended by striking out `prescribed fee' in the fourth line of the portion after clause (b) and substituting" - what? - "`required fee.'"
It goes on and on and on. What this is about is taking any kind of public accountability, placing it in a nameless, faceless bureaucrat, and charging increased fees: fees that this government, that this Premier when he was on this side of the House, used to call taxes.
I find this strange. There is no requirement anywhere in this act for a fee to reflect the cost to government. A fee should, in my view, reflect the cost of providing that service. If it is more than that, Mr Speaker, I think you would agree that it is in fact a tax.
I think parliamentarians all over the world have to consider this particular question. In the British tradition, Parliament is supreme; only Parliament can raise taxes. What we are doing in this bill and others that the government has brought before us is devolving that power to directors and to other folks who are the chief honcho, for want of another word, of their particular empire.
2000
Mr Wildman: The grand Pooh-Bah.
Mr Michael Brown: The grand Pooh-Bah. What this means is that there is no accountability anywhere in the system to Parliament for charging new taxes. Frankly, I think the public should be very concerned because we have seen at least 300 to 400 new fees and taxes imposed by these very measures across Ontario, with no accountability whatever to the people of Ontario, to the Legislature. In most cases, the public doesn't know until they actually are forced to pay it, and then they call my office or one of the other members' offices -
Mr Richard Patten (Ottawa Centre): My office.
Mr Michael Brown: - they call your office too - and say, "Wow, $100 for that?"
I raised this issue in the Legislature not too long ago, which is that under the former government, a fee was imposed for probating wills. It was set at a percentage of the size of the estate. I'm not a lawyer, but what that means is that the will is authenticated by the registrar in the particular jurisdiction you're in, and whether that estate you are to deal with is worth $10 million or $100, the cost of authenticating the will as being the true will is the same. It has nothing whatever to do with the size of the estate. In Quebec, for example, they do the same service for $45. It doesn't matter whether that estate is billions or whether that estate is $50, because what the registrar is doing is just authenticating that the will is the will. It makes sense.
Why would we have a different fee depending on the size of the estate? We would have a different fee if you chose to have a tax, if it was in fact a tax, would we not? That is a tax, because the cost of providing the service is the same.
This is being taken to court at the moment. It's being challenged in the courts, and it has to do with the right of Parliament, and only Parliament, to tax.
I would have thought that this government that seems so incredibly concerned with taxes may have addressed that particular situation in this bill. But lo and behold, although it is almost 200 pages long, mostly referring to required fees rather than prescribed fees, we're finding this government is addicted to fees.
You'll know that what Bill 25 really is about is completing the unfinished provisions of Bills 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121 and 122, which were left over from the last session. As you know, by putting them all into this one bill, we are supposed to deal with it expeditiously, I suspect. But I'm not so sure that is in the interests of the people of Ontario because, as I mentioned, this has more to do with consolidating and centralizing power in the ministries of the provincial government than it has anything whatever to do with making sure we have less red tape.
We can go through this. Schedule A, the Drainage Act, is amended to exempt municipalities from sending engineers' copies to affected land owners whose properties are assessed at a value of less than $100. I think that could get through here like a shot.
But this is interesting: The Drainage Act is amended to allow the minister to pay a subsidy of any amount less than the current 50% on approved drainage projects. This will be of particular interest to the people of the old Carnarvon township, in particular in Mindemoya, where they have a flooding situation that has occurred three of the last four years. It has been aggravated by provincial works. The province has reconstructed the highway through there, and there has been a new water and sewer project go on in the village. That has fractured the rock in ways that obviously it wasn't before. It has changed the grade of the road. It has changed sump holes. It has changed much of the flow for the worse.
So every spring it appears that the businesses in Mindemoya, in this small hamlet on Manitoulin Island, are flooding. My friend Ben Wilson, who has had a huge problem over the last number of years at his store, and Kevin Mackan across the street, whose flooding has been aggravated by recent events, are hoping and the township is hoping that they can take advantage of the Drainage Act in order to make improvements that will at least mitigate this flooding, because it's not once in 100 years or once in 50 years or once in 25 years; this is a situation that goes on, it seems, every year. Something needs to be done. They will be concerned if the minister wants to provide them with less than the 50% that is provided for in this particular act.
If we go down, we find that the Attorney General is going to come into maybe the 1980s and allow for the electronic processing of writs and land registry documents. That's a good thing, but it's hardly a huge cutting of red tape, I would suggest.
It's interesting to note that cutting red tape includes repealing the Parks Assistance Act. Did you know that? I'll bet most people over on the other side didn't know that repealing the Parks Assistance Act is cutting red tape. The act was used to provide grants to municipalities and native bands to acquire parklands. I guess you don't need it if you're not worried about acquiring parklands, so that's unnecessary red tape.
The schedule in consumer and commercial relations makes 100 amendments to 30 ministry acts, almost all of which are extremely minor. Those are the prescribed-to-required fee type of things. That is not the stuff the great Red Tape Reduction Act needs.
The Ontario Energy Board Act is amended to allow the OEB to approve natural gas rates that use incentive or performance-based setting methodologies. I don't really know about that one, but I'm deeply suspicious.
The Ontario Energy Corporation Act is repealed. This is the one that gets everybody so excited over on the other side, because the Ontario Energy Corp was the corporation set up to buy the Suncor shares. This is the corporation that bought the Suncor shares, the oil company that Mr Davis believed the people of Ontario absolutely needed to have. I think the shares were sold in 1992 or 1993, finally. That was an expensive little venture into capitalism for that Davis government.
There are some consolidations of the Health Professions Act and the Ministry of Health Appeal and Review Boards Act. I'm sure these are important issues, but I'm sure the public would not find these to be terribly meaningful in terms of reducing the overall amount of red tape in the province.
But what catches my eye as the critic for natural resources are some of the items that appear in those issues. I see I'm just about out of time too.
Interjection: You've got 11 minutes.
Mr Michael Brown: Oh, I've got 11 minutes. We're okay.
The Conservation Authorities Act is amended to remove the need for provincial approval of the enlargement, amalgamation or reduction in size of conservation authorities and to allow CAs to enter into agreements to allow the oil and gas industry access to conservation authorities' oil and gas reserves. Pretty interesting.
2010
A controversial amendment to the Conservation Authorities Act will identify flood control as a provincial interest in conservation authority matters. The Minister of Natural Resources will now have to approve conservation authority plans, regulations and amendments impacting flood plains, shore areas, unstable slopes and wetlands.
The conservation authorities of Ontario believe this amendment will result in substantially more overlap, duplication and confusion between the role of conservation authorities and the role of the province in protecting these areas. I thought this was about reducing red tape. This apparently is about increasing red tape.
Conservation authorities are also concerned that this amendment will leave gaps that will result in the elimination of regulations while having polluted landfill buried near these sensitive water areas. This will be very hard for us to support.
At a minimum, the conservation authorities are terribly upset that the province didn't even talk to them about these changes. Wow. Do you see a pattern?
We do see some good things. We're going to see fines increased. The government likes to increase fines because that increases revenues as well as being a deterrent. Fines for damaging parks and natural heritage sites are increased from $5,000 to $25,000 under the Provincial Parks Act and fines are increased for violations to the Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act. Forestry legislation is to be streamlined a bit and moved from 11 major forestry acts to five. But most of these will be under the forestry industry act.
We are being sold, I think, a bill of goods when we're talking about this: 200 pages. Mr Sheehan would be somewhat disappointed because most of this has absolutely nothing to do with his report on streamlining red tape. This has to do with providing bigger government, more expensive government and more difficult government to access.
I want to say this, because I've had one of the strangest experiences since I've been an MPP in the last couple of days. It does have an amendment to the Liquor Control Act, and I want to tell you about this. You want to talk about red tape and government stupidity? I'm not blaming this government or any particular government, even a municipal government.
I have a situation in one of the towns I represent that has four licensed establishments today. Two are commercial, one is the Legion and one is the curling rink. One of the local entrepreneurs went out and spent some money and then applied for a liquor licence because he was going to ask for a liquor permit for his restaurant. Seeing as there was a lodge and a similar type restaurant already in the hamlet, he thought this shouldn't be a problem if he met the criteria and there weren't objections in the town.
The town gave him a letter of support and he trundled off to check all these things out and then sent his application off to the new Alcohol and Gaming Commission. That's new. It's a bigger and better LLBO, I guess. But guess what? They wouldn't even take his application. They wouldn't take Bill's application. Ask me why, Mr Speaker. Why? Because the town's dry. They have apparently never had the plebiscite, or a successful plebiscite, in any event, to permit liquor licences to be available in the town. However, there are four establishments with liquor licences today. Of course the municipality would never have held the plebiscite because they have four establishments already there, so why would you think to have the plebiscite?
So we have poor Bill, and I don't know what we can do to help him out. I suspect the town may have to have the plebiscite, but there are four other licences. Reality is conflicting with bureaucracy here in a huge way.
That's the kind of thing that maybe we should be trying to figure out here. But no, nothing like that. They're talking something about including grapes and cherries or some sort of thing in the liquor act, which I'm sure is important, but it is not the kind of thing that Ontarians would find to be terribly helpful in reducing red tape.
On the subject of the Liquor Licensing Board of Ontario, I don't know if other members have noticed this, but I've had calls from constituents, from businesses. One person said: "I want to transfer the liquor licence from my wife to myself. She's not well. She's not able to look after the business as well and I'd like to do that. What do I have to do?" Do you know what? It will cost him $1,000 to do that. He got the original licence two years ago for $300, but to change just between himself and his wife it is now $1,000. That is a government friendly to small business, I would suggest.
This bill should be broken up. There are clearly parts of it that all people could support and there are clearly parts of it that are unsupportable.
Ms Marilyn Mushinski (Scarborough-Ellesmere): Which ones do you support?
Mr Michael Brown: That's a conversation. The former minister says, "Which parts do you support and which parts don't you?"
When I started this out, I said that in the old days, prior to you guys taking power, what used to happen was that that question was the question. You would go to the critics of the opposition parties, you would canvass your own caucus, and you would ask: "Is there a problem with this? Should we do it?" You'd find that at least 90% of the information was quite amenable to all members. It was clearly red tape. It could be gotten rid of, should be gotten rid of and was gotten rid of, because the bill was then put before the House, just the parts that there was a consensus on, and the bill went through here in the space of an hour because there were not contentious issues put in here. But it would be very hard for somebody on the opposition side and I would suggest for a government backbencher to vote in favour of giving bureaucrats the unilateral power to raise fees without any kind of accountability to Parliament.
That's what this does. There is no accountability in this bill whatsoever. I think the public demands accountability. I don't think the public likes surprises. I think the public would like to know that they are getting value for money and that it's not just a tax grab. In these bills, I can't find any kind of accountability to anyone.
I would suggest to the government, why don't you withdraw this or at least put it on the back burner for a little bit, come across, talk to a few people? We could probably deal with this in an hour if you would withdraw the sections that we have some trouble with, and we would have a good bill. We would have a bill we could live with. If there were contentious parts of ministry policy you wanted to deal with, then you should bring a separate bill to deal with those. They could be debated intelligently on the basis of each and every individual bill.
I think that's the way to proceed. I think that makes sense - maybe not common sense from your perspective but perfect sense from ours. I would like to see the government and the government House leader come and have those conversations. Let's deal with an omnibus bill in the way an omnibus bill should be dealt with, and that's by consensus for the omnibus parts and breaking out into individual bills those parts that deserve individual debate, because no one can be an expert on something that changes 40 statutes. You're asking members to make decisions that frankly no one can make.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to participate today, and certainly we're willing to hear the questions and comments.
2020
The Acting Speaker: Questions and comments.
Mr Pouliot: Both the members for Algoma-Manitoulin and Oakwood did persevere, and of course it can be a confusing bill. Before I go any further, I wish to commend - and they've been referred to as faceless, a name in the book - the bureaucrats.
Mr Michael Brown: Who are they accountable to?
Mr Pouliot: They're not to carry the guilt on it. It is the designers, the architects, the puppeteers, the conjurers of illusion - the government - which should take and must take full responsibility. Can you imagine the stress that one would be under, all the legalese, because here we have 198 pages, a litany of diatribes, a pêle-mêle, a potpourri of amendments, of messed-up previous endeavours that ends up in their laps. They border on the patriotic and I wish to commend them. They looked tired. Have a look at them. They're shells of their former selves.
They've been under a state of siege because the higher court has decreed that things must be changed, and under revolutionary times and circumstances things must be changed in a hurry and en masse. So I want to pay tribute to the bureaucrats who have persevered. They're true professionals and unfortunately, by virtue of that mandate, they find themselves at the mercy of a government which chooses to ignore debate. All they have to do is to go piece by piece and what you will have is the ready acquiescence of all parties.
On the other hand, there is so much that we can't swallow; ie, the unprecedented powers given to ministers. What we have is those ministers being able to dictate while bypassing the necessary discussion which is conducive to good legislation and good implementation.
I want to commend the members, but the government ought to be ashamed of itself for 180 pages -
The Acting Speaker: The member's time has expired. Comments and questions.
Mrs Ross: I listened very intently to the member for Oakwood and the member for Algoma-Manitoulin. I was quite surprised to hear the member for Oakwood go on and on about the unelected, faceless, nameless people, and the member for Algoma-Manitoulin as well. They're quite concerned about who this nameless, faceless person is, this unelected official, and they're worried about the accountability of the government. They want to know, who is this person?
I'm here to tell you who that person is. That person is the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations, not a nameless, faceless, unaccountable person, but someone who is fully accountable to this government and to the people of Ontario. I'm quite surprised that the Liberals wouldn't know that, or the members of the opposition. I'm pleased to inform them of something that's been the history in this province for a long, long time.
With respect to this bill, I might point out that if previous governments had looked at some of this legislation, we wouldn't have to go through this today; it would have all been done. But I want to really look at consumer protection. I want to talk about what we're doing to protect the consumer, and I'll just look at two minor parts of the bill.
One is the Real Estate and Business Brokers Act. The change in this bill will allow administrative authorities set up by this industry to establish consumer protection programs such as a compensation fund in which registrants would be obliged to participate. These compensation funds have proven to provide important protection for consumers, and I think that's a very significant, good piece in this red tape bill.
Again, I spoke to the Loan Brokers Act, that it allows the ministry to issue cease-and-desist orders against loan brokers who have a court order against them and have violated the law. I really want to make sure that the members are aware - they can look at their birth certificates, marriage certificates, any of those things - the registrar general's name is on there.
Mr Alex Cullen (Ottawa West): I am pleased to stand up and use my time to comment on the remarks made by my colleague the member for Oakwood and my colleague the member for Algoma-Manitoulin. They have clearly indicated in their remarks the kind of activities that are contemplated by this bill, which really is an omnibus bill that puts together eight bills.
Quite frankly, this being the anniversary of the Harris government's election some three years ago, one of the major themes this government ran on was reducing the presence of government in our communities. Instead, what's happening with this bill and with many other bills is that we find more ministerial control, more government by regulation, the advance of government into regulation and taking away from more accountable bodies that citizens can approach and deal with.
Quite frankly, we discover elements of duplication even within their own legislation. I think it was the member for Algoma-Manitoulin who pointed out schedule I for natural resources and the comments that were made by the conservation authorities about what was happening in terms of conservation plans impacting floodplains, shoreline areas, unstable slopes and wetlands. This is an area I have some familiarity with, because this has been covered in official plans. Now we have conflicting sources to deal with these very important things.
The major problem with this bill is that while it tries to accommodate government downsizing and remove obsolete legislation, it really does provide for more regulation by this government through cabinet, more fines, more complication, more red tape than less, and for some of the benefits that are in there, there are clearly more demerits, in my view.
Here we have a bill that allows for new enhanced fee-setting powers under 40 statutes, and really it's just going on too far.
Mr Wildman: As I have listened to this debate tonight, I know why we didn't want to debate these bills before.
At any rate, I want to say that I was taken by the comments of my friend from Algoma-Manitoulin with regard to the changes in consumer and commercial relations set out starting on page 96. It allows the minister to have a director, an assistant director and so on appointed under the Theatres Act, and it keeps changing the term "prescribed fee" to "required fee." All of us know what that is about. In the past a prescribed fee was set by regulation, and in order for the fee to be changed, the regulation had to be changed. This changes the term to "required fee" in the act, so that means that the director, an unelected person, appointed, can set the fee at whatever she or he thinks is required, and therefore it is then the required fee. That means less accountability, it means less control by the elected members over what the fee is going to be. It just gives the bureaucrats the control over the ability to tax. This is a denial of the term "responsible government."
Responsible government requires the Legislative Assembly to hold the treasury bench accountable, that the Treasurer and his colleagues must be accountable to the members of the assembly, the elected members representing the people of Ontario. At no time will this director, who now can set the required fee, have to come before a committee of the House and justify why he or she believes this fee to be required. This means less control -
The Acting Speaker (Mr Bert Johnson): The member's time has expired.
The member for Oakwood has two minutes to respond.
Mr Colle: I certainly appreciate the opportunity to point out the conjuring façade this government is basically putting forward now. The member for Hamilton West's comments about the faceless Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations - why the doublespeak, why the doubletalk? Call him the minister. Why give him this title of registrar general? If it's the minister, say it's the minister. That's what this bill is about: doublespeak.
2030
I appreciate the member for Algoma's comments about the excellence of the debate. In terms of this bill, if they were concerned about consumer protection, why wouldn't they protect the consumers of Ontario who are daily being scammed by these door-to-door gas brokers who are ripping off people, especially seniors? That's not in this bill.
If they're talking about taxation, as the member for Algoma said, it's taxation without representation. This government has the audacity now to tax properties across this province for education purposes, and guess who sets the rate? Some faceless bureaucrat or whiz kid in the office of the Minister of Finance. The local property taxpayers have no say over education any more, they have no say over the rate. This government, with its tendency to centralize and grab all its power into Queen's Park, is about taxation without accountability and without representation.
Time and time again in this bill there are more powers of taxation through the backdoor and no accountability, because there's someone you don't know who is setting a fee or setting a new tax. They are faceless, they are not accountable, and they are people, hopefully, who will somehow exercise this power over us in a just way. But how can we trust that to happens if we don't know who they are and how they got there?
The Acting Speaker: Further debate?
Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): Although this is indeed a tedious bill, it is important for those of us who are speaking tonight to be very clear that it has the potential of having a huge effect on the lives of the people of Ontario.
I want to start by talking a little bit about omnibus legislation and why we're in a position with this omnibus bill now, when the government originally introduced these measures through a series of discrete acts introduced by the ministers of the particular affected ministries.
It goes back to a bill that was under my auspices as Attorney General during the last government, when we took a number of different bills that had obsolete sections in them, most of them dealing with the method of reporting but some of them dealing with similar matters to what we see in front of us here today. What we did, as the member for Algoma-Manitoulin suggested, was to go through the requests from ministries for minor housekeeping changes in various acts they administered. We then took that whole package and had each caucus thoroughly briefed on what was being asked for by those ministries in those acts. Where there was an objection to any of those changes once the members of all three parties understood what was going on, those objections were removed from the package. What came to the House was a bill that already had reached consensus by all three parties. It was justly and aptly called a housekeeping bill, which passed the Legislature very rapidly with little concern on any side except the notion of having an omnibus bill in the first place.
Those objections came primarily, although not exclusively, from the current Premier and many of the ministers of his government. Their objection was that of course it was difficult for the public to understand the impact of the changes in that bill. They ranted and raved about omnibus legislation and how unfair it was, even though, of course, they had already agreed to all the constituent parts of the bill, and in the end it was passed.
What this government then found out was that this was a great tool, and in their first effort at an omnibus bill - or an ominous bill, as the previous Speaker of the House termed it on frequent occasions - brought forward the infamous Bill 26, not the one after this bill that we're discussing, because of course we were in a different session of the Legislature at that point, but the infamous Bill 26 that took away successor rights from public servants, that set up the hospital restructuring commission, that provided the Minister of Municipal Affairs with all sorts of extraordinary powers to reshape the municipalities of the province. I could of course go on and on. The government used as its excuse for that bill the previous bill that our government had brought in, saying it wasn't a precedent and therefore they had every right to lump legislation together.
The government was pretty badly burned around the nature of that bill. The public did not at all like having a bill like that thrust down their throats. We all know that it caused the government to think again when this series of bills, the red tape bills, began to come forward. They quite wisely, I think, had those brought those forward by the individual ministries as individual bills and then of course couldn't manage the House. They were so incompetent that they found themselves with a pile of bills that normally might be uncontentious, but because of all the contentious issues they were trying to drive through this House, they found that they had flung a noose around their necks and were not able to get their legislation through.
So of course we have this bill, an aggregation of a bunch of bills, Bill 114 from the citizenship ministry, Bill 116 from OMAFRA, Bill 117 from consumer and commercial relations, Bill 118 from health, Bill 119 from MNR, Bill 121 from energy and Bill 122 from the AG and Solicitor General. They simply allowed those bills to die on the order paper at the end of the last session when we were prorogued and reintroduced them in this massive compendium.
What people at home may not understand is that when you read a bill, particularly a bill like these bills, which is mostly repealing or changing or adding to another bill, unless you have that other bill in front of you it's very hard to sort out what is actually happening. I've been looking around tonight, and although the government is required when they first introduce a bill to include one copy of all of the bills that are connected to the bill they're introducing, I note that not many of us have that huge pile of paper with us today. It's very difficult when what is said is, "This section is repealed," and that's all it says, if you don't have the original bill in front of you to see what the section was.
If it appears that speakers on this bill are having difficulty explaining clearly where their fears lie, that's one of the issues. It's one of the problems with a bill like this, that it in fact is so detailed that there are many little hidden details in it. You know, Mr Speaker, that the devil is often in the detail and that the problem with trying to be a responsible legislator is that when you're passing a bill like this it is easy for things you did not intend to slide through.
In fact, this isn't exactly the bill they came forward with the last time. I'll give you three examples of things that are different between this bill and the original. For example, under the Drainage Act, there's an added sentence. It says the schedule amends section 93 of the act so that "a local municipality may, with the approval of the minister, appoint more than one drainage superintendent...."
I personally don't see why I would object to that. It seems to make good sense to let a municipality make a determination about whether they need one, two or more drainage superintendents under that act. But it apparently wasn't in the original act that came forward, as I understand it, and so it is an addition. There is a change. This isn't just simply acts that were in front of us for a long time.
2040
Under the Corporations Act there's an addition. A mutual insurance corporation is required to hold a meeting of shareholders within the first three months of every year rather than within the first two months, as at present. The corporation is required to send a notice of a meeting of the corporation to shareholders and members or to publish the notice in a newspaper rather than do both, as at present.
Again, I have no particular objection to this, although when individual members get a notice, they at least know that the shareholders' meeting is going on. One could easily be on a business trip or at the cottage or the dog might get a hold of the newspaper and run off with it or, as frequently seems to happen in my apartment building, someone else seems to receive my newspaper or, as sometimes happens at home, it gets thrown into a mud puddle and it is quite possible that people might, if the report were only in the newspaper, miss the shareholders' meeting. I think a lot of people would be concerned if that could be the case. Obviously, from an expense point of view, depending on the expense of putting ads in your paper, it might be far more expensive to notify people through the newspaper than notify them individually. On the other hand, the opposite could be true. It may be a significant change and it's something that shouldn't just pass by without our noticing it.
Certainly to have that meeting during the first three months of the fiscal year makes real sense because most of us who are engaged and have experience with corporations know that it very often takes three months to have a thorough audit done and be prepared for those meetings. So as I say, it's not the content but the fact that this is a change from the previous bill.
Again, under the Liquor Licence Act there's an addition. The schedule amends the definition of "Ontario wine" in the act to include wine produced in Ontario from agricultural products containing sugar or starch. I'm not sure whether that is to include some of the very fine combination wines that we're producing in our vineyards that do have a hint of grapefruit or a hint of peach or some other fruit than a grape. I assume it is. But again, it's a change from what we saw before.
The impact of some of these little changes is also cumulative, certainly in the very extensive changes under the Ministry of Consumer Commercial Relations, which of course is why it was brought forward by that certainly not nameless or faceless Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations, the Honourable David Tsubouchi. This bill has so many changes to regulations that come under that minister's purview that quite frankly, even though I know he's a hard-working minister, I wonder if even he understands the impact of all those changes.
But it's not just his ministry, because as we go through this act, there are many ministries that are affected and there are many changes in some of the areas. I, of course, as health critic tend to get particularly interested about the changes that occur under the auspices of the health ministry, but I know that my colleagues equally are more interested in the areas with which they are more familiar. It is extremely important that we each get an opportunity to comment on what we may see as concerns under the particular areas of expertise we've developed.
I want to go back to a comment that my colleague from Algoma made earlier. He said that the true impact of this bill is to reduce the whole notion of responsible government. I've made comments on this before with respect to these kinds of regulatory bills, but it's extremely important that people understand what this means. This means that a single minister in many of these places or a designate of a single minister now can put into place regulations that affect the population of Ontario without any scrutiny of those regulations by the government itself.
The whole purpose of having regulations go through the process of Lieutenant Governor in Council regulatory approvals is that others get an opportunity to look at those regulations to measure what the impact may be. We see different things when we look at them that way. That's part of it. I will give you a couple of examples later of ways in which this current government, this current cabinet, has itself prevented regulations from going through because of real or imagined problems with the regulations.
If the cabinet is throwing away its regulatory responsibility in these acts, then it will not be able to keep mistakes from happening as a result, or at least what in their view might be mistakes. Equally, we as citizens of Ontario will find it difficult to have a clear line of responsibility to the government, which consists of the Premier, the treasury officer and the treasury bench, as my colleague pointed out - the members of cabinet.
Some people might say: "Is that really important? This government never takes responsibility for anything it does. It's always blaming everybody else anyhow, so we hardly have responsible government any more." They could be quite right. There is a certain aspect of irony to the fact that we're pleading about having responsible government with a government that consistently tries to blame everybody else for everything and not accept its own responsibility, particularly when things go wrong, which of course is most of the time.
What we see here is a codified ability of this government to deny any responsibility for whatever mistakes may be in this book. And it is a book. This is a very thick bill with, I think somebody said, 180 pages. It's actually 198 pages and so it's a fairly hefty document.
People may not think that's terribly important but a lot of the major aspects of our parliamentary democracy depend of our notion of responsible government. They depend very much on the collective responsibility of government. That's what cabinet solidarity is all about. That's why it is not acceptable for someone to dissociate himself or herself from the decision of the cabinet and still remain a cabinet minister.
It is an important concept because the legal authority of the government rests with the Lieutenant Governor in Council, and to holus-bolus, as this government has, not just in this bill but in a series of other bills, hand that responsibility off to individual ministers who act on their own or who indeed, as was pointed out in the registrar general's case, appoint a director who then will exercise that authority - where is the accountability, where is the responsibility when that happens?
2050
I can well imagines, if this blows up in somebody's face, the other cabinet ministers saying, "I didn't know anything about this and I'm hardly going to exercise cabinet solidarity when I wasn't part of this decision." That's where we should become concerned, because we know that mistakes are made in terms of regulation. Why, the very minister who's bringing this act forward had to withdraw regulations that were passed even through the Lieutenant Governor in Council on welfare issues in October 1995 because they suddenly disallowed 115,000 or more people who were disabled from receiving benefits.
So we know that mistakes can be made in regulations and we know that it would have been easy for the government to evade its responsibility in reneging on its promise to the disabled community that they would not in any way be damaged by the changes the government was going to make. They understood that. They understood they had to accept that responsibility and they caused the minister to withdraw the regulation. Of course, with Bill 142 it's now in place in a different guise, but at least at that point in time what the government claimed was an error could be corrected quite easily.
What happens when the government doesn't even know? What happens when a minister, as is only too likely given what we see with this government, says, "I'm right and you're wrong and I made the regulation and that's it"? That may sound farfetched but with all of these responsibilities being downloaded on to individual ministers and their appointees, it's only too likely that kind of issue might occur.
One of the bills that is extensively changed in this act is the Regulated Health Professions Act, 1991. To be very frank, given the lack of confidence the general public has in the ability of the various colleges of the regulated health professions to self-regulate appropriately the kinds of complaints that are only too common, particularly about the College of Physicians and Surgeons, it's rather disturbing to see in this act more and more of the responsibility for how these regulated health professions are going to govern themselves being given to them themselves.
When that act was put into place - and it was put into place largely because people wanted these health professions to be regulated, they wanted the government to have a mechanism to hold these registered health professionals responsible for their behaviour - we specifically designed it so that they would have to get permission to change regulations, particularly around the disciplinary processes, particularly around the complaint processes that happen, because this is consumer safety that we're talking about, this is patient safety that we're talking about.
It's interesting to see more and more of the responsibility being exercised by the colleges independent of the government of the day. It may save government members' time. One of the things that interests me when we talk about red tape is that what really seems to bother the members of this government is having to do the work that's required to be a responsible government. I was on the legislation and regulations committee when the regulations were coming through about the regulated health professions and I can tell you it was a lot of work, and just the little shade of change that might be necessary in those regulations, from one profession to another, required a lot of attention to detail. It required people to come from those colleges to explain why it was appropriate for those changes to occur or for those particular regulations to be put in place. It was important for the government members of those committees to scrutinize very carefully to ensure that none of those changes in regulations or additions to regulations were watering down the consumer protection that was built into the act.
You can imagine how concerned I am to find on page 109 of this act an amendment that says, "If the panel," referring to the panel of the college that's receiving a complaint, "considers a complaint to be frivolous, vexatious, made in bad faith or otherwise an abuse of process, it shall give the complainant and the member notice that it intends to take no action with respect to the complaint and that the complainant and the member have a right to make written submissions within 30 days after receiving the notice."
The next section goes on to say, "If the panel is satisfied, after considering the written submissions of the complainant and the member, that a complaint was frivolous, vexatious, made in bad faith or otherwise an abuse of process, the panel shall not take action with respect to the complaint."
I can tell the members of this place that although there may be many other benign changes in this act, I don't consider that a benign change. All of us as members hear far too many times that the colleges have not taken complaints very seriously, have not exercised their authority appropriately in terms of consumer protection, and those complaints are becoming more bitter all the time.
This is similar to an action this government took in its first year of office, allowing a change in the privacy commissioner's act around frivolous and vexatious complaints. There it may have seemed justified because of the absolutely extreme and extraordinary actions of a couple of individuals, but the commissioner at that point made it quite clear that there was a mechanism already within the report and that it wasn't necessary to allow municipalities or police forces or others who might be receiving these freedom of information complaints to be able to term them vexatious and simply turn them away. But the government went ahead. What is frivolous and vexatious to the person being complained about or the group being complained about may be a very serious matter to someone else.
One hopes there would be very strong guidelines in each of these colleges as to what would constitute a frivolous complaint, because I assure you that there are many, many instances in which the general public believes complaints are turned away or turned down when they are very serious matters and various colleges do not consider them very serious at all. That's an example of an area where there are some real concerns about what may happen as a result of the changes being made in this act.
There are many, many parts of this that are simply trying to enable the various ministries concerned, the various regulatory authorities concerned, to take advantage of the technology that's available to them. The member for Scarborough West said something about, "What do you agree with?" I certainly agree with the changes that enable us to make good use of electronic technology in terms of reporting, in terms of maintaining data, in terms of protecting data. I'm very much in favour of that. Where throughout this act those kinds of permissive abilities are given to ministries and to regulatory authorities, I think we should all be in favour of that, and we should be working to make sure that we are making the best possible use of technology, that it is interactive to the extent possible and that it is organized in such a way that it protects the privacy of individuals, that it ensures information is used only for the appropriate matters, but that it enables us to speed our response times, enables us to collect and maintain data in a more appropriate way. I want the members to know that I really approve of that action throughout.
2100
I approve of another section, but I suspect it's going to be somewhat upsetting to the government for me to mention this. I'm going to have to go into a fair bit of explanation about it. A section of the act changes the Pharmacy Act; I believe it is on page 124. There are some changes there. There's another section, the Drug and Pharmacies Regulation Act, on page 128. A particular section would allow the pharmacists to make the regulations around drugs in particular correspond to the regulations in other jurisdictions, particularly the federal government, to do that automatically, in a way that does not make it difficult for them to get that through.
What is interesting about this particular change in the regulation is that we had a recent example where the regulations which currently have to go through cabinet went through the whole process and then were turned back by cabinet. I want to explain to people what this particular regulation was.
In September 1997, the cabinet rejected proposed regulations to change the status of nicotine replacement therapy products from prescription and behind-the-counter to self-selection. This may not sound very important to people, but it is. Since the time when that happened, September 1997, about 10,000 Ontarians have died from tobacco-related diseases, based on a report by the chief medical officer of health in 1996, using the statistical method used in that report.
It's clearly important for all of us to understand how necessary it is for us to support any measures which are going to cause people to stop smoking. The human cost to our health care system of smoking is enormous. It is within the power of government to do many things to stop smoking. One of those things that the Minister of Health and the ministry brought forward to the cabinet was to make Ontario's laws correspond to the federal laws, frankly to the laws in virtually every other place, and stop the practice of requiring prescriptions for nicotine replacement gums of four milligrams or more or the patches that people use to help them stop smoking.
A very extensive presentation was done in preparation for those regulations coming forward, and some of the points that were brought forward in that call were very important. Tobacco is Ontario's number one killer. It kills four times as many people as traffic crashes, murder, AIDS and suicide combined. Twelve thousand Ontarians die every year from tobacco-related illnesses, one every 33 minutes. That's similar to having the population of whole towns, say a town like Bracebridge, completely die out every year. From 1991 to 1996, 60,000 Ontarians have died, a population the size of Kingston or Barrie. These are huge numbers.
Mr Wildman: I wonder, Speaker, if there's a quorum present. Could you check?
The Acting Speaker: Would you check if there's a quorum present.
Clerk Assistant (Ms Deborah Deller): A quorum is not present, Speaker.
The Acting Speaker ordered the bells rung.
Clerk Assistant: A quorum is now present, Speaker.
The Acting Speaker: The Chair recognizes the member for London Centre.
Mrs Boyd: From 1991 to 1996, tobacco has cost Ontario at least $18 billion, almost $4 billion a year and $10 million every day. These include direct health costs but also the lost income, the lost economic output. At $4 billion a year, the cost of tobacco is equivalent to one half of the hospital operating expenses in Ontario. Ontario spends $1 billion each year treating diseases caused by tobacco.
With all of these facts, with cabinet being presented with a representation from the Minister of Health that the simple removal of the requirement for a prescription for nicotine gum or nicotine patches would result in a much-increased cessation of smoking, one would have assumed that the government would leap at the opportunity of increasing the cessation of smoking.
It's very interesting that this is a very easy method to actually have a real impact because the kind of statistics that come forward from the groups about smoking indicate that this is a method of dealing with those who are having real difficulty ceasing to smoke because of their dependence on nicotine, because nicotine itself is not a carcinogen. I quote from a number of reports, particularly the UN Roundtable Conference on Social and Economic Aspects of the Reduction of Tobacco Smoking by Use of Alternative Nicotine Delivery Systems, which was published in Geneva in 1997:
"Nicotine per se does not substantively contribute to the medical complications of tobacco use. Scientific research indicates that nicotine is not a carcinogen....
"Nicotine-delivering medicines are safe in short-term use when taken as an adjunct to smoking cessation. Long-term nicotine use is not a demonstrated harm with the possible exception of use during pregnancy."
2110
The Addiction Research Foundation of Canada said in a hearing that they have had no reports or concerns with regard to abuse or misuse of nicotine replacement therapy. There have been a large number of international studies to determine whether nicotine replacement products are themselves addictive and add to the addictive problems in the community. There's an overwhelming consensus that it does not. In fact, the United Nations conference in 1997, the same one that I mentioned before, said, "As a general principle, less-hazardous nicotine delivery devices should be as or more easily available and affordable than cigarettes."
It remains entirely amazing to me that when the cabinet was asked to pass a regulation recommended by the health ministry that Ontario remove the requirement for prescriptions for nicotine gums of four milligrams and above and for nicotine patches, cabinet refused. The cabinet wouldn't even agree to have those products relatively easily available behind the counter.
Why? My understanding is that there was an unsubstantiated belief among the cabinet that this was going to add to teenage problems, that teens were somehow going to use these drugs as a substitute, that they were somehow going to abuse these drugs and get high. I don't know how many of those cabinet ministers have ever chewed that gum, but people who have chewed that gum tell me that you couldn't chew enough of it. You would throw up, literally, because it is so strong and it is not a good-tasting material. It is not the kind of thing that you would see teenagers deliberately abusing because there is no significant high that they can get from the drug.
International studies have confirmed - these studies were available to the Ministry of Health, available to the cabinet - that there's no significant abuse among teenagers of this drug. In fact, there's one that was printed in Stockholm in 1997, and I have that report with me, that talks about adolescent use of nicotine reduction products as being in no way susceptible to addictive behaviours by teenagers; a special study done because of this mythology that has grown up.
Nicotine replacement therapy products, NRT products, have been available for self-selection in the United States since 1996, sold over the counter, available without a prescription, available without going through a pharmacist. That's been studied to see whether that added any danger to those who were using these products, because obviously the manufacturer, as well as the government, want to be sure that this is not true. The study indicated that the attempts to quit smoking in the United States in 1997 were 5.8 million quit attempts, which was double the figure for 1995 when those products had to be available only by prescription. What's more, an estimated 3.8 million of those quit attempts were attributed directly to the over-the-counter availability of the nicotine replacement therapy. There was no significant misuse or abuse observed in any age group following over-the-counter availability.
Looking at the experience in Europe, looking at the experience in the United States, the National Drug Scheduling Advisory Committee, after their thorough review, recommended that self-selection in retail pharmacies occur following federal deregulation from prescription status.
Our government, in 1993, had already deregulated the two-milligram nicotine replacement gum. It has been available over the counter, and there has been no evidence in Canada of misuse or abuse of that. Ontario remains the only province requiring a prescription for the four-milligram gum or for the nicotine patch. The federal government deregulated the whole process in 1996, and we have not seen any appreciable evidence since then. As of June 1 of this year, the patch has also been deregulated by the federal government. As of just a few days ago, under federal law, it is possible to deregulate the patch, and only in Ontario, where the cabinet turned back the recommendation from its own health ministry and its own health minister, does this continue to remain a product requiring a prescription.
But there's good news in this, there really is, because one of the effects of the changes in Bill 25, under the appropriate act, will enable the pharmacies of this province to allow the regulations to be harmonized with the federal government, and we can expect that one of the results will be that these products will be available.
As I say, it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we want our government to be responsible and to take responsibility for its actions, and that's why regulation-making powers, through the Lieutenant Governor in Council, are important. On the other hand, you get a bit torn when you find that you're faced with a government, a cabinet, that is making decisions that are totally illogical and that are not in the best interests of the citizens of the province or the economy of the province. Obviously anything that would enable people to quit smoking more easily, as these products have been proven to do, that would enable them to go to a pharmacy and choose these products by themselves, without having to go through the rigorous shaming that some health professionals think is necessary when people approach them for a prescription, would be something that would be absolutely jumped on by the government, and it wasn't. So although in general I think this is a negative thing when governments are making bad choices, it may not be the reality in this particular case.
If we look at a bill of this size, we know that there are many other issues, and it's impossible to deal with all of them. Even though under the new rules I have an hour to do so, quite frankly, going through all of the problems in this bill, all of the potential problems, would be impossible.
I want to be sure I have time to mention one, and that is one that I find very ominous, the repeal of the Policy and Priorities Board of Cabinet Act. What this does is remove a very important discussion tool as a necessity for every government, another filter through which to put important legislation. The policy and priorities board sees the full presentation and makes recommendations to cabinet about their actions.
2120
I have a fair bit of experience with making presentations to the policy and priorities board of cabinet, and I can tell the members that that kind of rigorous examination, that kind of second look at legislation, that testing of the recommendations which are coming forward from the bureaucrats and ministry, which are very often forced upon ministers as we would force a card in a crooked card game, is really important to be done. As most people who have been ministers in this place know, very often you bring a presentation to policy and priorities board and you don't get approval for it, because the other cabinet ministers who sit at the table ask you some pretty difficult questions and want some pretty clear answers. It's almost as though this is the way in which you can prepare appropriately for recommending a major change to cabinet.
Hon Noble Villeneuve (Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, minister responsible for francophone affairs): We all lived that.
Mrs Boyd: The agriculture minister said, "Yes, we've all been through that, that's true."
What happens when there isn't a policy and priorities board? Who looks at those proposals? Who does that detailed work? Who acts as the filter through which we see whether the effect of these bills is going to be as anticipated by the bureaucrats who have made the bill up in the first place? Policy and priorities committee is a very important venue, because a minister working closely with the bureaucrats in his or her ministry very often is persuaded that the ministry has the only way in which a certain goal of government can be accomplished, and it takes the advice of others who have not been influenced by those bureaucrats to look at it and say: "There are alternatives; this isn't the only way we can reach our goal. There are several other ways in which we can reach our goal, and most of them wouldn't hurt people as badly as this method." We have all seen that.
The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce the member for Huddersfield, Mr Rick Cooke. Welcome.
The member for London Centre.
Mrs Boyd: Mr Speaker, the member for Huddersfield?
The Speaker: Yes.
Mrs Boyd: In?
The Speaker: England.
Mrs Boyd: Welcome.
We don't know even the names of our own new ridings, Mr Speaker, never mind the names of the ridings in England.
So one of the issues that you have to ask yourself here is what is the motivation behind removing the Policy and Priorities Board of Cabinet Act.
Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): To give the whiz kids full control.
Mrs Boyd: The member for St Catharines says, "To give the whiz kids full control." It certainly sounds like it to me. The real problem is that the whiz kids aren't responsible for government. All the members of the cabinet are responsible for government, and if you can't be sure that the proposals that are being brought forward from ministries are looked at by other ministers who don't have the vested interest that we often develop in our own ministries, who don't become so influenced by the predominant kind of corporate milieu in which you work as a minister and don't ask some of the tough questions that may appear, things will slip through.
It's simply another way for the Premier of this province to direct everything that happens according to the word according to Mike, and that's a really big problem. It's a big problem for cabinet ministers because, believe me, all of you will still be held responsible as a group, as is appropriate in a responsible government. If you have not had an opportunity to go through that process to be sure that the tough questions have been asked, not by bureaucrats, not by whiz kids, but by other ministers who are also going to be held responsible by the public, then you're not going to have good government.
This is not the way you run good government. Good government in a parliamentary democracy depends on that whole notion of cabinet responsibility. It depends very heavily on being sure that not just one minister or one ministry is responsible for what happens but that all of you are and that that chain of accountability is clearly demonstrated in the process that is gone through to bring forward legislation.
Heaven knows, this government more than any other has this habit of sending out ideas to outside agencies for them to develop into legislation. They don't even trust the ministries that they pay to develop those policies and that legislation. They're always busy referring things out to, not just their own whiz kids, but to the whiz kids of Andersen Consulting and the whiz kids of the Royal Bank -
Mr Wildman: KPMG.
Mrs Boyd: - KPMG, Price Waterhouse, all of these very expensive, non-salaried people who get huge fees for developing these policies.
Already we've had a concern that you're not accepting very much responsibility and you're not using the mechanisms of government properly. But when you do away with an important body like policy and priorities, it becomes very clear that you not only have no notion yourselves about the importance of responsible government, you are relinquishing what balances and controls you had upon it. That's very, very serious.
Mr Speaker, I think it's 9:30 and I move adjournment of the debate.
The Speaker: Adjournment of the House. It now being 9:30 of the clock, this House stands adjourned until 1:30 of the clock tomorrow.
The House adjourned at 2128.