Hansard Transcript 1998-Oct-08 vol. A | Legislative Assembly of Ontario

Bill 66, An Act to proclaim Holocaust Memorial Day - Yom ha-Shoah in Ontario / Projet de loi 66, Loi proclamant le Jour commémoratif de l'Holocauste - Yom ha-Choah en Ontario.

Mr Ted Chudleigh (Halton North): I begin debate on my private member's bill, An Act to proclaim Holocaust Memorial Day - Yom ha-Shoah in Ontario. This bill speaks to human rights, civic and moral responsibilities and democratic freedoms, which are the threads that connect all cultural communities worldwide.

What can we do to stand in solidarity with our fellow citizens who experienced these events first-hand? What can we do to stop similar events, such as we are seeing in the Balkans right now, from happening again? We can provide a day for the citizens of Ontario to reflect on the past, to consider the present and to prepare for the future. We can commemorate the victims of the most terrible genocide in modern human history and hold it out as an example to all people from which to learn.

This bill, if passed by this House, will designate an annual day of the Holocaust, or Yom ha-Shoah, in Ontario. This date, Tuesday, April 13, 1999, will be determined by the Jewish calendar. This bill will also help us focus on all events where people have been systematically destroyed due to race, ethnic background, religion or physical or mental disabilities.

Six million Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically deprived of their human and political rights and murdered between 1933 and 1945. In this century alone, genocide has been perpetrated many times, including in Rwanda in Africa, in the Balkans today, by Stalin in Russia, Pol Pot in Cambodia and on the Armenian people.

During the Holocaust, not only Jews were targeted by the Nazis but people with physical or mental disabilities were killed. Others, including gypsies, were murdered because of their racial or religious background and still more because of their sexual orientation.

Canada, along with other Allied nations, took part in the armed struggle to defeat Naziism and its collaborators. The Holocaust was an event that has touched the lives of all citizens of Ontario, especially those who fought during the Second World War who helped to liberate the inmates of labour and concentration camps.

It is important to note that most of the Jewish Holocaust survivors who emigrated to Canada settled in Ontario. For these reasons alone, I believe it is entirely appropriate to establish a Holocaust Memorial Day - Yom ha-Shoah in Ontario to commemorate the victims of the Jewish Holocaust and other state-sanctioned genocides.

Further, such a day would also provide Ontarians with an opportunity to reflect on these events. Citizens of a multicultural Ontario need to understand the enduring and profound lessons that these events teach and see the consequences of ignoring them. The first lesson is, never again. Never again can the world allow a repeat of the Holocaust. We have seen all too recently in Africa and in the Balkans today the consequences of ignoring this most important lesson.

Another lesson is that we cannot discriminate on the basis of race, religion or disabilities. Jews and gypsies, as well as the disabled, were seen by the Nazis as a serious biological threat to the purity of the Nazi ideal of an Aryan master race.

A third lesson is the necessity for us to defend democracy. This European Holocaust began soon after Adolf Hitler moved to end democracy and institute himself as dictator. Jews were forced out of the universities and public sector jobs, they could not attend public schools, they could not go to the movies or vacation resorts and they couldn't walk in certain sections of the cities.

Attacks and boycotts on Jewish businesses gave way to destruction of synagogues and homes and eventually to physical attacks. By the time the war began, Jews were second-class citizens. It must not be forgotten that each turn in a sickening spiral of the Holocaust occurred as one by one their human rights were stripped away. The lack of true democratic freedoms paved the way for these atrocities to occur. This theme runs through all examples of state-sponsored genocide, including in Stalin's Russia, in Pol Pot's Cambodia and against the Armenians.

Where individuals do not have a direct stake in their own government, they often abrogate their civil and moral obligations as well. However, some people recognize these obligations even while facing their fear. At this point, I'd like to remember the heroism of Raoul Wallenberg, Canada's only honorary citizen, who, as Swedish ambassador to Hungary during the time of the Second World War, saved the lives of over 100,000 Hungarian Jews and was himself deported to Russia by Soviet forces at the end of the war. To this day, we do not know the fate of Mr Wallenberg, whose goddaughter is a citizen of Ontario and resides in Toronto.

Another lesson we can learn is that citizens need to take an active role defending our society. These atrocities were carried out with the active help of local collaborators and the acquiescence or indifference of numerous bystanders. However, some bystanders, such as Mr Wallenberg, and members of various Resistance movements opposed the Nazi terror. There are other examples of heroism in these events, and let's hope that teaching the lesson of the Holocaust can inspire this kind of heroism in all of us.

The Nazi legacy was a vast empire of murder, pillage and exploitation. It is a legacy of ruined cities, lost generations and untold horrors. It is this legacy which must be understood by Ontarians as the price of a lack of interest in defending human rights and democracy and condoning racism and discrimination. The full magnitude of the Holocaust and its moral and ethical implications are only now beginning to be understood in full.

I'm convinced that an official provincial Holocaust Memorial Day - Yom ha-Shoah is an appropriate way to honour the memory of six million Holocaust victims. We can remember this event in union with Holocaust survivors living in Ontario and people around the world who have experienced similar horrors or are now defending themselves against them.

The international movement for human rights also has its origins in the moral issues raised by the Holocaust. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights came about as a direct result of that movement, as did in 1962 our own Ontario Human Rights Code.

Finally, the ideals of cultural harmony and respect in a multicultural society also derive from the Holocaust experience. Multiculturalism is an ideal our society derived from the Holocaust, which espoused racial and cultural superiority and oppression of minorities.

Furthermore I'm proposing, as I believe to be entirely appropriate, that we declare a provincial day in accordance with the Jewish religious calendar on which Yom ha-Shoah, the day of the Holocaust, is observed. That day in 1999 will fall on April 13.

I hope on that day people in Ontario will reflect on the lessons that we have learned. I hope people in Ontario will remember the victims of the Jewish Holocaust and also the victims of other genocides, lessons which have evidently not been learned by the people in the Balkans, who are practising a form of genocide based on ethnic background.

Of all these examples of genocide, none is more important to an individual than the one which affected them personally. The Jewish Holocaust of 1933-45 was arguably the cruellest and most premeditated in modern history. The declaration of a memorial day to the Holocaust will remind each of us of our personal commitment to human rights.

It's been a privilege and a pleasure for me to consult with the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario region, and with the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto, UJA Federation, throughout the development of this piece of legislation. I would like to also thank Keith Landy, chair of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario region, Bernie Farber, the executive director, and the entire executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress for their support for this project. I would also like to acknowledge Moshe Ronen, the national president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who is with us today.

I wish especially to thank Dr Carole Anne Reed, the director of education at the Holocaust Centre, and Hershel Sahian, the public policy coordinator of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario region, for the many hours of their time, which they gave willingly to help me develop this bill.

I thank everyone who has attended here in this House this morning - and I look forward to hearing your comments - for your support on this important piece of legislation.

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Mr David Caplan (Oriole): It's an honour to speak to this bill. I will of course be supporting it.

I first want to comment on the importance of commemorating the Holocaust. As legislators, we have a responsibility to take a leading role in ensuring that not only do we use the phrase "Never again," but that we take that attitude and make sure it is imbued in legislation and actions of this province, ensuring that this type of inhumanity does not occur, that it is confronted at every step. Ensuring that we never forget the persecution of the Jewish community that did take place in the Holocaust will lead towards those kinds of goals.

I'd like to recognize the efforts of the Canadian Jewish Congress, UJA, the B'nai Brith, the Yad Vashem Foundation, the Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre of Toronto and many others. Representatives from those organizations are here today, along with many leaders of the Jewish community. I'd like to thank them for coming here and marking this occasion.

Given the events of the past few days in this House, it's important, as legislators, that we also commit to educating our children about discrimination and what it can lead to even in its extremes. This government has promised many organizations that it will ensure the Ontario curriculum is such that our children are educated about the Holocaust, yet I'm personally embarrassed that we discovered yesterday that the Ministry of Education, under the leadership of the minister, deleted anti-racism and anti-discrimination measures from the provincial curriculum. It's embarrassing to me as a legislator that there have been no steps to guarantee that our children are educated about the horrors of the Holocaust. I believe it should be entrenched in the curriculum, and I hope one day this minister and this government realize the importance of these measures.

I'd also like to comment, as the previous member did, on other instances of genocide. It was interesting to note that when Adolf Hitler was asked if he would be able to implement his final solution, his comment was, "Well, who remembers the Armenians?"

On April 24, 1915, a planned and systematic effort by the Young Turk regime was begun to eradicate the Armenian population in eastern Turkey. April 24 marked the 83rd anniversary of this event, an event, by the way, which has gone unrecognized by the Turkish government and much of the world. Until those types of recognitions are made, these wounds can never be healed, this type of action cannot be confronted.

It's critical that we learn the lessons from these kinds of events; obviously, as a people we haven't. We've seen events in the Balkans, in Rwanda; we've seen enforced famines. These are recent examples of a pattern of bloodshed and human tragedy that has taken place since those events in 1915.

I believe very strongly that recognition, however, is only a first step in ensuring that these events do not happen again. The Holocaust and other genocides and tragedies, instances of genocide, racism and discrimination, serve to remind us that we must work even harder to challenge hatred; we must work even harder to challenge racism and intolerance.

I am supporting Bill 66. I think it's an important first step but, as I said, a first step has to be measured and actions have to follow those steps. I think we can use a day in remembrance to speak up about these kinds of things and put our actions where our words are.

Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold): First, let me indicate very clearly, very adamantly and without hesitation that we in the New Democratic Party caucus support this bill, this proposition, with great enthusiasm.

It's tragic - and I reflected on this as I was coming into Queen's Park this morning - that we're being forced, compelled to talk about what really is the unspeakable: the atrocity, the crime of the annihilation, the slaughter of six million Jews, along with so many others. along with political progressives; along with members of religious communities; along with the Roma, colloquially known as gypsy people; along with gays and lesbians; along with trade unionists.

The Holocaust, and the recognition and recall of that atrocity, must become an event - and this is where we agree so completely with this proposition - that becomes part of our community and our culture and our regular life here in this community of Ontario and across this country.

As we know and as has been noted, so many of those survivors, what there were, have come here to Ontario. We also know that these people are getting older and we are losing these people as living chroniclers of the horrible atrocity of the Holocaust. It then becomes incumbent upon us to ensure that that Holocaust is recalled and remembered and that we make a firm commitment to struggle to ensure that it indeed never happens again.

I suppose Holocaust Memorial Day is a day of reflection, a day of grieving, but it's also a day for celebration of the courage of those people; the courage, for instance, of the 60,000 Jews left in Warsaw in April and May 1943. There had been 400,000 Jews contained in Warsaw, behind walls, and in April and May 1943, the 60,000 - that's all that was left - unarmed, stood together and stood against the Germans and their collaborators, under attack by flame-throwers, German troops, armoured cars and tanks.

We also have to recall that Allied governments did far too little to aid those Jews, be it those Jews in the Warsaw ghetto or in the Vilnius ghetto or in the Bialystok ghetto, along with so many others.

We also have to recall the tragedy, a very dark period in our own national history when this country not only didn't do as much as it ought to have done and could have done to assist those Jews who were rising up against Nazi oppression, but also didn't open our doors to those Jews who were in flight, seeking refuge outside of their own countries. It's an unpleasant recollection for us to have to make as Canadians, and there are other nations that have the same dark period in their own histories, but we have to recall how we shut doors to Jews whose fate was going to be, among others, the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau a few years ago. Hundreds of thousands of people visit that place every year. I was among groups of people who were representative of every nation on this earth. I tell you, it's a grey, silent, solemn, sad and incredibly moving testimony to the reality of the Holocaust. Being a participant in that monument to oh, so many victims is something I would tell others is so compelling and indeed serves to etch in one's own consciousness the reality of that Holocaust.

I speak to that because you know there are people in our community who would dare deny the Holocaust and the death of six million Jews, along with so many others. The support of this bill and, as has been noted, the commitment to a recognition of that day in our Legislature, in our schools, in those places where people gather in communities across this province - the recognition of that day, a remembrance of that day, a taking heed of that day is, as it should be, an imperative message to those who still in our community would promote Naziism, Fascism, anti-Semitism, the irrational, perverted and distorted hatred that gave rise to and sustained the Holocaust in Europe, and indeed that gives rise to and sustains atrocities against humankind in other parts of the world and atrocities which persist and occur even in this day and in this time.

The recognition of a day of Holocaust memorial is a statement, an affirmation of the innocent lives - the children, the old people; it's just far too many, and one was too many - who suffered at the hands of hatred and anti-Semitism, racism, Naziism and Fascism, and must serve us as more than yet another day on the calendar, but must serve us as a commitment to reaffirming in our own country and in this province our respect and indeed our celebration of our cultural and religious and linguistic diversity, that should serve to remind us of the need to keep our doors open as a country and as a community to people who in 1998 are persecuted in their homelands in, again, far too many places in the world, of a need for us to show a generosity of spirit and an embracement of humankind which, once again I say to you with some great shame, was denied so many Jews in Europe during the period of that Holocaust.

We have some atonement to do. I say that seriously and sincerely. We have some atonement to do, not for what we didn't do; for those who died at the hands of Naziism and their collaborators. The Holocaust Memorial Day can be a day of recall, of remembrance, of celebration of the courage of those people slaughtered by Nazis and Fascists and their collaborators, of the courage of the Jews who rose up and fought back, and a commitment to not only ensuring that it doesn't happen again, but that those who would advocate it understand that an advocacy of that type of hatred will not be tolerated in our community, that it is not acceptable and will be challenged, will be confronted, will be exposed, will be attacked and will be overcome.

There has been recognition of so many organizations, but I want to give some specific appreciation to Hershel Sahian from the Canadian Jewish Congress, who was generous with his time in ensuring that people were aware of this bill this morning and ensuring that all members of this Legislature had material before them that would enable them to understand how important this bill and its goals are.

We, in this century, were witnesses to an effort that, because of the incredible efficiency, the cold, brutal efficiency of the slaughter of Jews and others, was almost a complete annihilation of a people. That is indeed a frightening observation. Surely one is too many; six million is enough to have this burnt and etched into our memories as a community forever.

Hon Charles Harnick (Attorney General, minister responsible for native affairs): I'm pleased to rise today and have an opportunity to take part in this debate and to acknowledge Mr Chudleigh, the member for Halton North, who is advancing this bill, and of course to express my support for it and to acknowledge the work that went into this and the importance of this for the people of Ontario. I can't say it much better than Mr Chudleigh or Mr Kormos just did.

When I look at my experience in this place, I'm very proud of the contribution that the Ontario Legislature makes to the lives of people in Ontario and for the recognition a long time ago of the need to remember the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust. Some time ago in this Legislature, I guess back in 1991, with the support of the member for Wilson Heights, Mr Kwinter, I began to acknowledge the accomplishments of many of the individuals who survived the Holocaust who live in the province of Ontario. I'm happy to say that we've received support from all parties, very widely, for that initiative to recognize the contribution that survivors of the Holocaust have made to the life we so cherish in Ontario.

We've had the opportunity every year since that time - initially it was done by my sponsorship; it was ultimately taken over by the former government and became a government-sponsored event and it has continued. I'm pleased to say that Premier Harris has been involved in this from the outset. I want to acknowledge the former Israeli consul-general, Dror Zeigerman, who was very instrumental in helping us begin this day of recognition, and now this day is going to be officially recognized upon passage of Mr Chudleigh's bill.

Certainly on each of those occasions on which we have acknowledged the contributions that have been made by people who were survivors of the Holocaust, we as well acknowledged and honoured the families representing the righteous among the nations who attempted, sometimes successfully, to save Jews from the slaughter of places like Auschwitz. We have done that as well, and that's a very important acknowledgement and important part of remembering the Holocaust.

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The real importance of this, and Mr Kormos touched on it, is that we're now 53 years past the end of World War II. Even someone who was a small child who may have survived the atrocities of the Holocaust is now part of an aging population. It is important that we do everything we can in this Legislature and in this province to perpetuate the memory of all those who perished in this unspeakable atrocity that occurred.

We have an obligation, and I congratulate every member of this Legislature, particularly Mr Chudleigh, for doing whatever we can to perpetuate the memory because what we are perpetuating is the memory of six million people who died, who perished, who left this earth with no monument and no marker to acknowledge that they ever existed. Thank you for doing it.

Mr Rick Bartolucci (Sudbury): I'll only be speaking for a couple of moments. But I want to tell the members across the way and particularly the member who introduced this that it is important, that it will get the support of this side of the House, that indeed we should never, ever forget and indeed we should remember with passion the way the Attorney General remembered with passion and with devotion and with dedication to ensuring this will never happen again.

In order to do that, the Attorney General suggested that there should be unique ways to ensure it's always brought to the forefront. The Toronto Jewish Film Society and the Italian Cultural Institute, along with the Bloor Jewish Community Centre and the Bathurst Jewish Centre, will be showing, next Thursday, October 15, at the Leah Posluns Theatre at 4588 Bathurst Street in North York, will be proudly presenting, The Righteous Enemy. It is a rarely shown moving documentary about the little-known efforts of Italian soldiers and diplomats to protect 40,000 Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

This was a very proud time with the Italian and the Jewish cultures, when we came together to protect what we considered to be treasured and precious, and that's life. I encourage and thank Ethel Teitelbaum, who is organizing this with the different groups. I encourage you to come out next Thursday at 7:30 and listen and learn from the film so that what we know is right and what we know must always be the forefront of anything we do, the protection of life, the assurance that this horror will never, ever happen again.

I commend the member. I also commend those in this House who will speak with passion.

Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): This morning I also want to give thanks to the member for Halton North, Mr Chudleigh, with the rest of the House, for bringing before us this day an opportunity to reflect, if only for a moment, on a theme that is universal and has some tremendous importance for all of us, to reflect, if only for a moment, on the face of evil as it exists in the world, as it existed in those days when so many people lost their lives needlessly in such an unimaginably terrible way.

Robert Burns in a poem says:

Many and sharp the num'rous ills

Inwoven with our frame!

More pointed still we make ourselves

Regret, remorse, and shame!

And Man, whose heav'n-erected face

The smiles of love adorn, -

Man's inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn!

When you read a poem like that and you listen to a group such as the one I listened to not so long ago in Sault Ste Marie, a group of survivors of the Holocaust at the place of gathering for the Jewish community in that city, and you hear the stories and you see the pain in the faces, you wonder to yourself, how could this happen? How could this have happened then? How can it possibly happen again? How can we not have put in place those checks and balances that would stop that from happening again?

I know in my own life, when I take the time to reflect in the quiet of someplace where I can get in touch with the power of God in my life and I have the courage to look deep inside and for just a moment try to figure out why it is that I respond sometimes in a way that is not in keeping with my wont and I do things that hurt others, I touch ever so shallowly a reservoir of energy there that I have discovered I can use in my life for tremendously wonderful and great and positive achievements in the world. But I can also choose, if I'm not careful, if I'm not thoughtful, if I'm not in touch with my community, those people around me who love me and care for me and support me, to do some very destructive and damaging and evil things. We all have that potential.

When that potential is put together in community, we can do things that in reflection afterwards will make us all wonder how and why and, for goodness' sake, is there anything we can do to stop this from ever happening again?

So it's important that today we take this opportunity, led by Mr Chudleigh, in this place to say once again that we must remember, and in remembering we must say no to that. We must say no to that part of the human reality that might give rise to such an occasion again.

I end with some thoughts from another person who spent some time in jail fighting the forces of evil, Vaclav Havel. He says, "There is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly and tolerantly."

Mrs Lillian Ross (Hamilton West): I am very pleased to rise in support of my colleague's bill, the Holocaust Memorial Day Act. I have always personally believed very strongly that we in this province should officially recognize Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom ha-Shoah, in order to commemorate those who suffered in the Holocaust, but also to provide us with an opportunity to celebrate the survivors of the Holocaust.

I want to recognize the many contributions that the Jewish community has made to Ontario and to our community, and especially to my community in Hamilton. Part of the Jewish community's events in Hamilton is a tribute to an individual or family in our community through the Negev dinner. I'm very pleased to be allowed the honour of sitting on that dinner committee this year and helping in their efforts. The Negev dinner pays tribute not only to an individual or a family who have given of themselves to their community and to the state of Israel, but also allows an opportunity to raise community awareness about the state of Israel and about the needs of that community.

From the agricultural efforts, such as the wonderful, beautiful farmland that currently exists in the Negev desert, to the achievements and support of academic institutions in my community, the Jewish community continues to achieve great things for Ontario and Israel through their hard work and continuing efforts.

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This proposed bill affects each and every one of us. Holocaust Yom ha-Shoah represents the bleakest, darkest era in the history of human mankind.

I want to speak particularly about the children. Of the millions who were murdered, 1.5 million were children. These children ranged in age from infants to teenagers; children who came from every walk of life, from different families, different backgrounds, different religions and cultures. Some were rich; some were poor. Out of all the differences they had, they had one thing in common: By the 1930s, with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, they were all potential victims. For them, this ended an era in their lives, and their lives were forever changed.

Many children were forced to live in ghettos. Many of them suffered under horrible conditions. Typically, many families were crowded into a few small rooms, with little or no heat or food and certainly no privacy. Many in the ghettos perished from malnutrition, starvation, exposure and epidemics.

Some children escaped deportation to the ghettos by going into hiding, with or without their families, aided by non-Jewish families, friends and neighbours. Children who did find refuge with others outside the ghettos had to assume different identities, and they had to conform to the local religious customs, which were different from their own, in order to survive.

One case that was somewhat different and that I want to point out was the case of two Polish Jewish children. I bring that to light because I come from a Polish background as well. These two Polish Jewish children were taken in by a Polish family in Krakow and were hidden there for a great deal of time. After many months, the family decided they wanted to adopt these children and have them baptized in their Catholic religion. They approached their priest, who advised them that they should wait in case the family should survive and should turn up to reclaim their children. The family waited, and the priest said he would pray for the family and for the reunification of the family. Eventually the family did survive the ghetto and did come back to join their children. That's a remarkable story. That parish priest went on to become the Archbishop of Krakow and today is Pope John Paul II.

As we debate the passage of this important bill, let us do so with those child victims of the Holocaust in our minds. Let us make this day of Yom ha-Shoah a tribute to them and to the survivors, many of whom live in Ontario. We are all the beneficiaries of their contribution to our society. We must reach out to receive the suffering children of the world today. We must remember the tragedy of those countries that refused to hear the cries of the suffering children of 1933 to 1945. Let us at least begin with Yom ha-Shoah and with the silent prayer that ends with the words "Never again."

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): I certainly would like to congratulate the member for Halton North for bringing this forward, because this helps tell the story that six million people could not tell.

I just want to read a poem from Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz.

In the brutal nights we used to dream

Dense violent dreams,

Dream with the soul and body:

To return; to eat; to tell the story.

I think this is what this bill helps to do, to tell the story. As the Attorney General said, we are now 53 years away. Those of us who are old enough perhaps can remember from what we experienced or from what others have told us. The problem is the children who come. What will they know about the story? That's why I think it is obligatory for us as legislators, as teachers and as adults to make sure the story is told of this horrible episode in history. We cannot allow it to be lost, and it will be lost, because we find too little time to teach history and to know history. I had the good fortune of being a history teacher and I had the good fortune of having help back in the late 1970s from Ruth Resnick from the Canadian Jewish Congress, who helped me develop a curriculum for teaching the Holocaust to high school students.

I can remember the only available material at that time was a National Film Board of Canada documentary called Memorandum, which talked about a gentleman from Toronto who went back for the first time to the concentration camps and took a group with him.

We have to tell the story to our children, and that is what I hope we will do through our curriculum, through our educational system, because we cannot let the six million people die totally in vain. That is our obligation, and I think this Bill 66 does this.

We must make the link to reality, because this is not a faraway, oblique thing. We know the story of the SS St Louis, the ship filled with Jewish people who tried to get out of Nazi Germany. They were refused entry in the States, refused entry in Cuba. They were refused entry in Canada. That's the dark side of the story we must also tell to remind everybody that this wasn't an isolated event that occurred in some far-off time in a far-off country. This is a human story of human tragedy beyond proportion and belief, and that is the linkage we must make to our young people.

It can happen again if we don't learn from history to ensure that it does not happen again. I think Mr Chudleigh's bill and the efforts of the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith and all these organizations should join with us in ensuring that the story is told over and over again, because we all know of the deniers who are out there. They will not go away, and that's why we have to recognize Yom ha-Shoah and make it important for us, and especially for the children, to not forget.

Mr John R. Baird (Nepean): Mr Speaker, 15,000 children passed through the camp of Terezin from 1941 to 1945. One hundred survived. One who did not was Frantisek Bass, born in 1930 and deported to Terezin in 1942. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. He left a poem, which I'll read:

A little garden

Fragrant and full of roses

The path is narrow and a little boy walks along it

A little boy, a sweet boy

Like that growing blossom.

When the blossom comes to bloom

The little boy will be no more.

Six million little boys and girls and men and women

Six million of our cousins,

Who by the whim of monsters are no more.

I'm privileged to have the opportunity to speak on this important issue, and at the outset want to compliment my colleague the member for Halton North, Mr Chudleigh, on this important initiative.

The symbolic importance of this bill is quite meaningful to everyone in my constituency, but undoubtedly it's of special importance to the significant and vibrant Jewish community, not just in Nepean but indeed throughout Ottawa-Carleton, a people who have contributed so much to our community over the years, many of whom lost a loved one or a family member in the Holocaust. I have constituents who lost a mother, lost a father, an aunt or an uncle.

The most startling nature of the tragedy of the Holocaust in one respect is that an entire generation never got to know their grandparents, who were murdered in undoubtedly the most horrific circumstances imaginable. It is our responsibility to ensure that this never happens again. Never again. The most meaningful tribute we can pay as a community and as a society is to work against this evil among us.

Tragically, accidents in Cambodia and in the Balkans today, as we sit here and speak, continue. Tragically, a small number continue to try and perpetuate the vicious lies of denial. Tragically, a small number continue to perpetuate hate in our society. We must all speak up against it and work to eliminate it from our society.

Earlier this year I had the privilege of visiting Israel, and the most sobering experience was visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum. It was undoubtedly one of the most shocking and horrific tales that could be told. One of the most meaningful things for me was to see a glass case of 3,000 eyeglasses taken from victims - 3,000 of six million - and to think about each of the owners of those eyeglasses. The museum details a very meaningful and important accounting of the lead-up to the Holocaust that perhaps is even more important than the Holocaust itself, where the state - not a group in the state, but the state itself - led a campaign to inspire hatred and then violence against its own citizens of Jewish descent. I was shocked to learn the small percentage of the German population who were Jewish - very small.

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This bill, albeit small, is nonetheless symbolic in a meaningful way, and it provides an important opportunity for all of us to reflect and educate ourselves and, most important, as the member for Oakwood said, the next generation, about the enduring lessons of the Holocaust, to ensure each and every year that we commit ourselves not just as individuals but collectively as a society to work to ensure that we will not tolerate hatred and that we will not let this happen again. Never again.

Mr Gerry Phillips (Scarborough-Agincourt): I'm pleased to lend my unqualified and enthusiastic support to Mr Chudleigh's bill and to say that I think it will serve an important purpose. Every year I visit with members in the Armenian community on April 24, and they recognize a genocide that took place 83 years ago, when 1.5 million Armenians - men, but a lot of women and children - were killed. The world community essentially was by and large silent on that. Hitler once said, as he began to plan his atrocities, something like, "Who today remembers the Armenian genocide?" In other words, the world community simply ignored a genocide. What we had was a despicable act, six million men and, as we know, many women and children, systematically killed.

It started initially with economic sanctions. The world community to a very large extent - not exclusively, but to a very large extent - was silent. Hitler continued his plan, which then became physical abuse, and then it became genocide and, as I say, to a very large extent the world community was silent. There were heroes there, but overall far too silent.

Today, Mr Chudleigh's bill is to try to make sure that never again are we silent. By the way, I would say that the B'Nai Brith League for Human Rights is probably a model for us. Whenever I see a human rights violation in Ontario, the first group to respond to it is B'Nai Brith League for Human Rights. Often it's not a popular issue, but there they are. If we want to have a model, watch what they do. There was a group of refugees in Scarborough, actually, who were in motels awaiting hearings on whether they'd be allowed to stay in Canada or not, and some skinheads began to picket them. The B'Nai Brith League for Human Rights responded instantly to that.

That's another purpose of this bill of Mr Chudleigh's: to make sure that all of us together respond and that we have the courage that when we see an abuse of human rights, there is an overwhelming response against it.

I have my own view of Canada. I view it as like a flower garden of people. Initially, there was one flower in this garden. Those are our First Nations. Then, over the history of Canada, we've been fortunate to attract flowers from around the world. I happen to think perhaps some of the best have come from other countries, to provide the most beautiful flower garden in the world. We are a diverse nation of many, many, many cultures, religions and races.

The flower garden has to be fertilized. But like any flower garden, weeds creep in. One of the purposes of this bill is to make sure that when we see a weed of racism, of discrimination, of abuse of human rights, we remember the Holocaust as a tribute to those six million people and that all of us will respond together to weed that weed out of our garden and to make sure that this continues to be the most beautiful flower garden in the world.

I appreciate your bill.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): You have two minutes to reply.

Mr Chudleigh: I want to thank all of the members of the House but also particularly those members who spoke so eloquently on this subject today.

The times when holocausts have taken place throughout history are indeed a sad chapter in human history. Of all the examples of genocide, none is more important to an individual than the one that affected them the most.

I thank all of you for your very kind remarks today in the House.

CHILD CARE

Mr David Tilson (Dufferin-Peel): I move that it be resolved that the government of Ontario urge the federal government of Canada to provide a fair tax and benefit option for child care programs that provide parents with the opportunity to care for their children in the manner of their choosing, and that creates a "level playing field" where parents receive equal benefits regardless of the method of child care chosen, including direct parental care.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): Pursuant to standing order 95(c)(i), the honourable member has 10 minutes for his presentation.

Mr Tilson: Over the years, the definition of "family" has gone through drastic changes. The nuclear family of the 1950s is no longer considered the norm. In order to meet the challenges of today's economic and social realities, families have had to adapt. It is safe to say that there really is no "normal" family. Today we have single parents working or furthering their education; we have double-income parents; we have single-income parents where one parent stays home to raise the children; and the list goes on. All of these types of families should be honoured and respected for the choices they have made.

With this diversity in today's working families, it is clear that one form of child care is not enough. These families cannot fit into one mould. The Ontario government is responding to this challenge. Earlier this year the Honourable Ernie Eves, the Minister of Finance, announced a budget that would hold great significance for families all across Ontario. A minimum 30% tax cut rate was announced, an improved and expanded child care supplement for working families was announced and, finally, a workplace child care tax incentive was announced.

The 30% tax cut rate will relieve all families regardless of the choices of daycare they have made. The child care supplement for working families will also provide savings and choices. This supplement is available to assist all low- and middle-income families regardless of whether they have double incomes or a parent attending school or whether one parent stays at home to care for their young children. This government is responding to the needs of today's working families.

A two-earner family with two children having an income of $37,000 will save up to $2,810 with the tax cut and child care supplement; a single parent with two children and an income of $32,500 will save up to $3,855; and finally, a one-earner family with two children earning $34,500 will save up to $3,115.

Why are these figures that I have just read important? They show that our government is providing the necessary assistance to meet the needs of today's working families without bias. With the workplace child care tax incentive, child care at one's own place of business has even been made more accessible to families. These kinds of incentives provide today's families with a number of options when it comes to how they choose to raise their children, and it is clear that this government also recognizes that at-home child care is an honourable profession worthy of recognition.

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The current federal tax structure, on the other hand, is biased and unfair. The federal government does not recognize at-home child care to be honourable, and they have arranged their tax and benefit options accordingly. The federal child care expense deduction, for example, can provide $3,000 per child between seven and 16 and $5,000 per child under seven. However, one-earner families are not eligible for this deduction and it is assumed that stay-at-home parents incur no child care expenses.

Activities such as hockey camp, drama or music camps, play schools and nursery schools may also be claimed by double-income families. Double-income families can also claim wages to a child care worker while a parent is on maternity leave, this being necessary to ensure that the worker will still be available once the parent returns to work.

In fact, this federal deduction is even designed to have an inverse relationship to need. Unlike the Ontario provincial supplement designed to assist low- and middle-income families, child care expense deduction benefits increase as the family income increases. For instance, a reduction of $5,000 of taxable income to a family in a 17% tax bracket would mean a savings of $850; however, this same reduction to a family in a 50% tax bracket would mean a savings of $2,500. Once again, I remind you all that this deduction is available only to those who choose child care out of one's own home.

While subsidized child care is extremely important for those families who need or want it, it cannot be the only option. Child care expense deduction provides an obvious incentive to seek child care outside the home. For families who need the assistance of this deduction, the federal government is essentially making the child care choices for them.

While I'd argue that the tax programs designed to allow both parents the option of entering the workforce are necessary, I would also argue that the system that forces parents into this arrangement is wrong. Obviously the child care expense deduction is not provided to cover food and clothing expenses for children. It is meant to cover the expense of going to work and seeking child care services for your family. However, it should not be assumed that a parent who chooses to stay at home to look after the children does not incur child care expenses. Hopefully we will all agree that forgoing an entire income in order to look after your children is a great expense.

There are those who would argue, on the other hand, that if a parent chooses to stay at home it is because the family is economically sound enough to do so. However, this is another assumption that should not be made. According to Statistics Canada, one-income families earn less money than dual-income households, a gap that has been widening over the years. The same source also states that dual-income families also spend more on restaurant meals, appliances and family vacations.

One must also consider the families who aren't necessarily choosing to have one parent stay at home. There are some low-income families who are unable to afford child care outside their home. That's why the Ontario government still provides the child care supplement to families even when the care is occurring in the home. However, I remind all members that the same is not true with the federal government. Then again I also remind you that the federal government's child care expense deduction isn't really designed to help low-income families.

What can the province do? What can we do to put an end to this inequitable taxation system? I am certainly not the only person to debate this issue of tax inequity. It has been going on all over the place. In fact, the need to recognize the role of a parent in the home as a valid child care provider within the taxation and pension systems is currently a highly debated issue.

The federal Liberal caucus committee on social policy has tax treatment under consideration regarding the issue. Policy matters relating to stay-at-home parents have recently been put under review. Several members of Parliament from a variety of parties have spoken on this and other related issues in the federal House of Commons. Why then is there a need for our government to take a stand on this important social issue? Because the changes have yet to be made. A reporting time frame for the federal Liberal caucus committee has yet even to be established. Clearly now is the time to show our support for these much-needed changes.

The people of Ontario have the right to choose how they wish to raise their children. They have the right to decide what arrangements will best suit the needs of their own families. It's therefore wrong for federal child care benefits to so unfairly direct parents to make the choices they may otherwise not have made. Until these changes have been made, the federal government is making the important decisions for families. Evidently from the federal government's point of view, Canadians do not have the right to make these choices.

So what can be done? Obviously making the child care expense deduction available to all families with children is a step in the right direction. However, it does not address all the issues. In fact, it's designed to provide greater savings for those families with lesser needs; it does not address the needs of the lesser-income parents, and that issue needs to be looked at as well.

What remains the important issue is that the lower- and middle-income families need to look after their children and they need to be able to decide for themselves how they want to do that. We cannot allow the federal government to interfere with how these choices are made. It's time for us to lend our support to all those parents demanding choice and equality.

Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): I'm happy to speak to this motion today and I think I should say at the outset that I believe the member who is advancing this motion does have a sincere need to see that daycare opportunities are there for parents who need them. I think he is on record for some time now as being a personal advocate for children and I believe he is being sincere.

Having said that, I must go on that regardless of his own personal intent with this motion today, the government's record is all too clear in the area of child care, like daycare, here in Ontario. Over the last three years we have seen extraordinary difficulties being faced by Ontario families. We have to put this in the context of the policy the government has advanced over the last three years, what we know is happening just in large urban settings like Toronto, and that is that the daycare spaces that exist in Toronto today are fewer and the lineups longer than they have ever been. When we see individual MPPs standing up for children and for daycare and for care for children, we would only ask that the caucus that advances that be consistent in that regard.

As an example, today we are having debates daily about the changes in education. Because of the government advancing the new school funding formula, this has had a direct impact, not just on children in education but indeed in daycare. Where we have families who have had consistent and stable daycare opportunities for the children in schools, what we're seeing now with the new funding formula is that school boards are making choices to charge rent to the daycare centres that exist in their local schools.

When parents choose daycare, their first option always is, "I wish I could stay home myself with the children." Having said that, if they cannot be home with the children, they are choosing, if they can, well-regulated, high-quality daycare. What we know is that's what parents want. What we know is that since this government took office it has been more and more difficult for parents to have that opportunity.

What's quite interesting in the debate about child care is that this is the government that advanced, through various papers that were eventually leaked to the public, the consideration of vouchers for child care. Our greatest concern over the last three years has been the consideration that you may be weakening the daycare act so that you would be weakening the regulations that surround child care centres.

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We had great concern with that and the Ontario public should have great concern with anything that will advocate spending Ontario taxpayers' money in anything other than highly regulated child care centres. We say that because that is what parents know. We have had example after example in our province where parents have taken their children to daycare centres with the full knowledge that their children will be cared for as they would care for them at home. What we don't want to hear is that a government would try to move away from that kind of system and take Ontario taxpayers' money with them outside of a regulated field.

There's a good reason that governments historically have even moved into homes that are opened up as daycare centres, so that if you're caring for children over a certain number, you too are subject to the same kind of regulation that a daycare centre would be. That's because parents have to have some kind of a sense that regulation is what they're looking for. They know that it's against the law to have an infraction against the regulation. They can feel comfort in knowing their children are being cared for well.

That has been the history with this current government. You've not made moves to strengthen the act where it could be strengthened. In fact, you have advanced positions that would potentially weaken the act and that concerns us. Where you have had the opportunity, more so than the federal government - because we can all argue that the federal government is the furthest away from people and the Ontario government is closer and has traditionally looked at providing actual spaces, not just tax credits. The advantage of actually having the space provided is that the children have somewhere to go, into a space, versus a tax credit. We would argue that a tax credit puts a family in a position to have to pay the money out in order to receive the benefit of a tax credit. Often it's these same poor working families that don't have the money up front to pay those kinds of fees in order to take benefit of the tax credit.

In the whole discussion of daycare, which can't be as simplified as coming today, this morning, to speak to this particular resolution, we have to look at it in a much broader scope than that. Yes, if parents had a choice, if financially they could stay home, that's their first preference. Second, if they're not looking after their own children, they want to see their children in centres that are highly regulated and of the highest quality. We believe that if we're going to spend Ontario taxpayers' money in the area of daycare, it must be within the guidelines of the daycare act that is going to make it a very highly regulated, safest place to keep our most precious cargo.

That is what we've said all along. Instead, we've had to go out there, around the road show, all across Ontario, talking with daycare workers who are worried about job loss. Go to schools that are facing eliminating the daycare centre that exists in their own school.

We cannot hear today and this morning in this House that in fact you've done more for children in the area of daycare than any other government. I wouldn't even suggest that the last term of government and certainly the term before that had a special focus on improving the opportunities. We know there are people who are currently on welfare who would be out in the job market if only they knew they had daycare space. In fact, if daycare were made available to them, you would have a significant decline in welfare rolls.

That's where we expect the direction of the government to go, to move people from the system because they know that it's the daycare opportunities that are lacking in order to have them get out there and into the workforce. That's the kind of thing we expect in terms of consistency if we're going to talk about daycare out of this government. We can't suddenly come in and advance the idea that you have to urge the feds to do something.

Every time the feds do something, you end up clawing it back. That's been your history. You've done that most recently again with a clawback. You've done that again in training programs, where every other province in Canada has managed to make a deal with the federal government except Ontario. The last thing we can see you doing, and it's been your history, is to try to work together to come to some good conclusion that would benefit families in Ontario. Every other province in Canada manages to come to that conclusion but Ontario.

We're seeing that again today in the discussion of daycare. If you were sincere about improving the lot of daycare opportunities for families, you wouldn't be throwing daycare centres out of schools across Ontario because of your new school funding formula. I'd like to ask the members of this House who are here and who may speak to this bill what intervention they have made to their Minister of Education to say that the school funding formula should not be forcing school boards to go out there and charge non-profit daycare centres that operate in schools - because you know they can't afford it now, as is the case in the minister's own backyard. They're facing rental fees that they simply cannot afford, and if that should continue they'll simply close and go away. The 60 or 70 children who are there in the daycare centre will be out there. Those are kids of working parents.

We can't on the one hand stand up for families who need daycare and who need every opportunity for child care, and on the other hand your own government, through various ministries, is taking those opportunities away from parents who are already out there. You have to be consistent. Individually, every one of us wants to see us do right by the children of Ontario. I would ask very sincerely that if you're genuinely interested in making the lot of our children better, then you will be consistent in your government policy, that you won't play this as a political game and use it as another opportunity to blame some other level of government but look instead at your own ministries, your own history and track record in the area of child care.

Every child care advocate out there today will tell you that your record has not been wonderful and that you need to be improving this. You want to make improvements for the economy of Ontario, and the one surefire way to do that is to focus on daycare opportunities.

I'll stop there. I have other colleagues who will speak to this. I look forward to the resolution coming to a vote.

Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine): I appreciate the opportunity to address Mr Tilson's resolution. I appreciate the comments by Ms Pupatello and I'm largely in agreement with her.

I'm torn about the final part of the resolution. I have to say to the member that I understand the intent of what he is proposing. An opportunity to provide equitable access to the benefit of good-quality child rearing and child education, however that may be found by a family, is a sentiment with which I agree, but I have to say that I find the resolution, in the very narrow approach it takes, looking only at the federal tax treatment, to be a solution that doesn't match the complexity of the issue.

I understand that of course in a simple resolution that we debate in private members' time, it is difficult to cure all the ills of the world, including all the ills of the current child care dilemma faced by many families. I'm appreciative of that and appreciative of the attempt of the member, but I believe that setting out in this direction takes the debate in the wrong direction, and for that reason I am not in complete agreement with the resolution he has set out.

I believe there are solutions we can find that would make accessible to all families the choice of good-quality child care options and early childhood education options. I think one of those is a clarion call that for years I was part of demanding of government: the move towards a completely universal, accessible, quality child care system. Over the years, I think the call for that has become more sophisticated in understanding the important role not simply of child care as an option for parents who must work and who require that support for good quality care for their children while they're at work, but in understanding the basic importance of early childhood education and looking at the body of research that has been developed that speaks to the incredible outcomes, particularly for children in vulnerable family situations, that come from the opportunity of early childhood education.

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One of the things that I believe was an important step of the last government, which unfortunately has been abandoned as a direction, was the pilot projects on the early years project. The early years learning project, a recommendation that came out of the Royal Commission on Learning, was a model different than the current child care model that we have in the province. It was a model designed to provide opportunity, not compel attendance, for children younger than the junior kindergarten age for an experience of early childhood education. This is the three-year-old project that had been talked about. While there was a concern among some when the concept was first brought forward that it might mean that we would compel all children to attend - well, we don't compel children to attend junior kindergarten; it's an option that would be open - I think moving in that universal way would be an important contribution.

At the other end, at the much younger end, is understanding the important role of parental leave for those who are in the workplace and looking at what is happening. One place where I might join in with the member in being critical of the current state of affairs at the federal level is with respect to what's happening under employment insurance and the kind of restrictions on eligibility that have been put in place, particularly as they apply to young or new mothers - mothers in the workforce with new children, no matter whether they are young or it's their first child or not.

If you look at the experience of the use of maternity leave benefits and UI supplements, their latest statistics show that there has been a dramatic decrease, something in the order of an over 7% decrease in the use of those benefits, and not because there has been a corresponding decrease in the birth rate - I think there's less than a 2% decrease in the birth rate over the last couple of years, the corresponding period - but because of two things: first, the change in employment patterns in very difficult times when more women are finding themselves in part-time work as opposed to full-time employment, even though full-time employment might be their first option; and second, because of the restrictions on eligibility for UI, they are simply not eligible. That supplement program that had been put in place to support parenting and parental leaves in the very early days of a child has become less useful to the vast majority of Canadian parents, men and women, but primarily women on maternity leave who had used the majority of that benefit in the past.

The call for a more universal approach to understanding the need for child care must also, however, go hand in hand with a recognition of the importance of quality child care and regulated child care. One of the concerns I have about the direction of the current government in Ontario, and I see it reinforced time and time again, whether it is in the Ecker report when the now minister was a parliamentary assistant and studied the child care system and produced a report with recommendations or whether it is in her current moves with respect to the funding of child care and the review of that funding that she is undertaking for those recipients of social welfare or those participants in Ontario Works. The direction seems to me to be clear, and it is a concern that I have with the proposal before us today.

I may be wrong about your own feelings on this, Mr Tilson, but the direction from the government that I see is one which, in using the language of supporting parental choice, seems to be looking for a much cheaper option and approach which provides a lump of money to parents to purchase that service out there, and a lump of money which is so inadequate that for many low-income working families or others, the option becomes one of unregulated care. You can find some good caregivers in unregulated care - I don't paint the broad brush for them all - but I do have to tell you, in terms of the research that has been done and the anecdotal horror stories that we have amassed over the years, any parent who had the option of being able to afford good-quality, regulated child care, if they required that kind of support, would choose and in fact is choosing that option.

There are currently in Toronto alone 21,000 families who are affected by forced participation in Ontario Works, who are on a waiting list for quality, regulated child care spaces. That's in addition to the 15,000 who are already on the list. There is a crisis there, and I have to say to the member that the approach that she lauds so highly on behalf of the government, the approach of the income supplement, does nothing to address the issue of the shortage of quality, regulated child care spaces. In fact, it does very little for those working families which she, rightly, would like to assist. It is in the amount of about $85 a month per child. That comes close to buying maybe a half a week of quality child care.

The options that you're providing for parents are not a true choice. While I will say that I prefer the income supplement approach to the previous approach of a year ago - which you were going to spend the same money on, by the way - which was the tax credit approach, neither of them measure up to an approach which would be a commitment to expanding the amount of quality, regulated child care spaces and subsidized spaces that are available in our province.

I do have to say that it's with some irony that I respond to the claims members of the government made about how much they have done for parents and for the child care system in this province, particularly the minister who spoke about this yesterday. I have to roll my eyes. Three years ago in 1996 in the budget the finance minister got up and made an announcement that, "Over the next five years we're going to be spending $40 million more a year cumulatively to the total of $200 million more a year, the most any government has ever spent in the history of the province on child care." Those words are right in the budget document.

Applause.

Ms Lankin: No, Mr Klees, you shouldn't clap. You have to wait for the rest of the story. Not a penny of it was spent that year.

The next year in 1997 he announced the $40 million again, but this time it was going to be a tax credit for child care. Then in 1998, and the member referred to this, he announced the same $40 million again, but not one penny has yet been spent. Three years later, the same money again and now it's an income supplement, and an income supplement that is not going to purchase good-quality child care and help those families meet those needs. Enough said on that. I'm sorry. What's that great movie with that great line? "Show me the money." Enough with the announcements; it would be nice to see some action.

But the crisis that we are seeing emerge in terms of waiting lists for good-quality child care should be instructive at least in one way to the government which does herald parental choice - and I understand that and I am supportive of the view of the importance of parental choice. They should, then, understand the vast majority of parents who are opting to choose good-quality child care and who can't afford it and who require subsidy help for that. That should be like the polls that you listen to with respect to other policies that you're developing in the direction of the government. That's a real-life poll; that's not some hypothetical question over the phone. That's an action parents have taken to enlist and to hope and pray that someday that subsidy may become available to them.

Let me now tie back into your calls for a change in the federal government's approach. I would prefer an approach of government at all levels which sees a number of aspects to it, which sees support for an increased number of quality, regulated child care spaces in our country, support which sees a greater number of those spaces being cost-shared for subsidy. I will admit that the federal government under, first of all, Prime Minister Mulroney and then Chrétien has essentially decimated the cost-sharing from the federal level of government for subsidized child care. There is no doubt about that, and there should be round criticism of that.

But those two aspects, along with an expansion of the view of universality of accessibility, let me put it that way, to early childhood education opportunities and an expansion in the parental leave provisions and making them meaningful and, again, accessible to people not in the way in which we've seen them being done through the employment insurance system with all the restrictions that have been put in place which have made it less accessible to Canadians, the array of options there seems to me to provide more of an opportunity for real choice.

The last comment I want to touch is in response to the member's plea for the federal government to understand the important role of parenting and parental choice, stay-at-home parenting, in some way in the tax system and the pension system. I thought that was very interesting. I remember for a number of years the call for pensions for homemakers. It was something generally that members of the Conservative Party were not in favour of, so I'm interested to hear you moving into that direction and talking about pensions and how pensions treat difference in terms of working individuals and stay-at-home individuals. It's not just parenting. It's in terms of recognizing what happens within the home and its importance to the economy and the sustaining of our economy and understanding that stay-at-home parenting and stay-at-home homemaking is a vital role in allowing families and individuals to participate in the economic workforce.

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I'd be interested in your thoughts about whether it is only parenting that you see as having a value for this kind of tax credit and/or pension treatment or whether the issue of homemaking comes into that. There have been many debates over the years as to whether or not that is a worthy cause, those debates similar to what you said where people simply say you then would be subsidizing the wealthiest who can afford to stay home. As you point out, that is not always the case; sometimes it is and maybe there's a way of addressing that. We're very good at making tax systems complex, so maybe there is a way of addressing that.

I find myself conflicted. I think that the direction and the specific issue you bring forward, while I understand the intent and I'm actually very sympathetic to the intent of what you bring forward, doesn't match the complexity of the issue. To move on that one piece takes us down a road that I think is counterproductive to the overall goal of where we need to be.

I find myself in opposition to the specific recommendation in your resolution but torn and quite sympathetic to the sentiment which gave rise to it.

Mr John O'Toole (Durham East): I'm pleased to rise in support of Mr Tilson's ballot item number 24.

Just as a small preamble, I should always remind people that as a parent with five children, and my wife is a teacher, a professional, we've had to make many choices with child-rearing responsibilities. That's why I chose to speak on this. It is a shared responsibility, it is not a gender issue and the world of work itself is changing. There is a whole argument aside from that.

Many constituents in my riding of Durham East are homeworkers - consultants, professional people in business and financial areas - who are contending with home care issues. I think that as you look to the next century, you have to look for choice. Clearly, my support here is that the governments, both provincially and federally, have to look at a series of options, of which one of course would include the motion by Mr Tilson today.

Our government clearly recognizes the important role of children and the important aspect of paying some additional attention to that. In that respect, the Honourable Margaret Marland, the first minister for children in this province, has outlined a number of initiatives on the part of this government: For the sake of those listening today, the child care supplement, $40 million, is an important addition, $100 million for the national child care benefit; next year this will grow to $200 million. This year the program will be delivered to 210,000 families and support some 350,000 young people in Ontario.

We're also working with business and providing for the workplace that is changing. As we know, many agreements with the union representation - in fact, there are areas here at Queen's Park where there are child care places right in the place of work. We're providing a 30% child care tax credit in capital costs for those businesses, making those investments for their employees. I would encourage that. Also, for people with young children who are trying to reskill themselves and return to work, because the two-income family situation is the reality today, we're providing a supplement of over $1,000 per year when the parents have children under the age of seven.

The member for Beaches-Woodbine suggested that perhaps there was some decline in the provision of regulated child spaces. The reality, in my research: In 1984-85 the then Liberal government spent some $87.3 million in this area. Today we're spending some $600 million, so clearly the money is there, more than in any other province on a per capita basis. The licensed child care system has also grown. Currently, there are 143,000 regulated child care spaces. That's an increase of some 14,000 spaces since March 1995. I think it's entirely good news.

On a more personal note, why did I take the time to come this morning? Not because I'm a parent of five children but because from way back this issue has been of some value to me. I was struck this morning by the member for Windsor-Sandwich's comments. The member for Beaches-Woodbine probably covered that better than I did. The member for Windsor-Sandwich accused the provincial government of clawbacks. We were all part of the debate earlier this week with respect to the EI fund and their clawback in that area. I would remind members of the federal Liberal government's clawback of some $6 billion out of the health care system for Canadians.

I also remind them to look at their income tax statement, the weekly or monthly stub on their cheque, and see the increases over time in the CPP - that pension contribution is increasing double for the employers as well - and more specifically the income tax itself. I have a statement here that the income tax system is clearly stacked against the single-income family. In fact, I'd like to read for the record a paper in my research. This is from Mr Louis Lévesque, director of the personal income tax division in the federal government, the Department of Finance. This was issued in February 1997. I'll read a couple of things.

I'm just going to deviate here for a moment. I supported a federal Liberal private member's bill in Ottawa to address this very issue of Mr Tilson's. My first correspondence was very early in 1996, when I wrote to then-member Paul Szabo. I believe he was the MP for Mississauga South. Mr Szabo was dealing with the same issue, a child tax credit. I supported him and wrote to a number of people in my riding to make them aware that there are Liberals who really do care about making the playing field level.

Going back to the comments made by Mr Lévesque in the report he submitted to the ministry, he says:

"Nevertheless, under the current income tax system, the combined tax liability of one-earner couples (defined in this paper as those in which one spouse has income not exceeding $6,456) is generally higher than that of two-earner couples with the same income and family structure.

"A one-earner couple with two children and $60,000 income can pay as much as $7,000 more in total federal and provincial income taxes" - about $15,000 more per family that's disadvantaged. That would go a long way. I'm going to quote this for the member for Beaches-Woodbine, who's looking at that. I'm going to refer to this chart from the federal government and make one more reference. A one-earner family with an income of $60,000 would pay $15,600 in tax and a two-earner family would only pay $8,600.

Clearly, the initiative by Mr Tilson would indeed help those single-income families to have a level playing field.

I'm sharing my time with other members.

Mr Gerry Phillips (Scarborough-Agincourt): I'm pleased to join the debate on the resolution. I expect that all of us are supportive of measures that will bring our society up to date. In the workplace most are now two-income families. My wife and I have four grown children who are facing the challenges of combining work and being parents as well. It is not an easy job. My children happen to live in the Metropolitan Toronto area, and with distances and time travelled it is extremely challenging. I'm very supportive of things that will help to bring up to date measures that make it easier to combine work and family. I'm supportive of the thrust of the resolution, which I guess is designed to be one step forward.

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My only challenge is that I normally like to know what the cost of something is, and I have no idea whether we're talking here about $100 million or $1 billion or $5 billion. I simply don't know. One of the luxuries of private members' time is that you can support in principle a thrust, always with the proviso that when it's finally costed out it may be an idea that is directionally sound but unaffordable. I think everybody in Ontario understands the need to be fiscally responsible.

I'm pleased to be supportive of things that bring our workplaces up to date. I think there's much more we have to do to change our laws and regulations around making it easier for families to combine work and parenthood. As I say, I'm supportive of the thrust of it. Normally I'd like to see a lot more about the cost of it. Frankly, the resolution is quite open-ended on that, and it talks about "regardless of the method of child care chosen, including direct parental care," so I suspect the intent is some tax break for parents who stay home. As I say, I'm supportive of the thrust and concerned about the details.

Mr Frank Klees (York-Mackenzie): I'm pleased to participate in this debate on this important resolution brought forward by our colleague. I'll try to focus my remarks specifically to this resolution. Much has been said about what is being done already in this province. It's particularly important to note that we are discussing this issue on this day, which falls into Family Week, and I think the underlying focus here is on the importance of the family and the role governments play, either directly or indirectly, in supporting that most important institution in our society.

Back in September 1997, I presented a petition to this Legislature that was brought to me by one of my constituents, a Ms Cheryl Stewart of Bolton. On that occasion I read into the record this petition:

"That managing the family home and caring for infants and preschool children is an honourable profession which has not been recognized for its value to our society and deserves respect and support;

"That child care policies and funding should provide equity and fairness to all Ontario families."

The petition went on to say that we would encourage discussion with the federal government to encourage the federal government to make some adjustments to its tax policies to recognize the importance of families who make the choice to have one parent stay at home and look after the child.

I will be the first one to say that I wish we could do more as a provincial government in that direction as well, and I will join with other colleagues in this House to advocate that much more be done in this area on the part of our government. But I will say this - and I won't repeat what has been said by other members in this House - that this government already has done much more than many other governments that have gone before.

I would like to speak very briefly to the fact that I believe we do need to appeal to the federal government, which is the thrust of this resolution, to make some changes not only to how they deal with child support but also to the underlying tax system that's in place. We know that somehow the taxation system in this country really is undermining much of what parents would like to do in support of their children. For example, if you have a single earner in a family earning $60,000 and you compare the taxes that are paid by that single earner to a family that earns $60,000 between two parents, there's a difference of about $5,600 that's paid in income taxes.

I think what we need to do as a society is really focus on how we can have our taxation system not undermine the family but in fact support the family and make it possible for those choices to be made by parents to elect that one of those parents stay home.

The member for Beaches-Woodbine made reference to the affordability of this. I question in the long term whether we can afford to continue not to support this kind of program, because encouraging a system where we perhaps reward parents for placing their children into organized, structured daycare out of the home and encourage them effectively to go to work rather than making it possible for them financially to stay home I think has its true cost in the long term.

I commend my colleague for bringing this matter forward. I trust the message will be loud and clear to our colleagues at the federal level of government, as they consider this important issue, to make the appropriate changes, and that together, provincially as well as federally, we set this matter right.

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): The first comment I would make is a general comment on the use of this period. The government members seem to use it to point at other levels of government, particularly the federal government. I've always believed, even when I was in opposition and when the Mulroney government was in power in Ottawa, that the best thing to do is to deal with provincial issues within this purview.

I happen to get along very well with the member who has proposed this. I like some of his thoughts. For instance, I hoped he would have brought forward a resolution on something he and I agree on, that is, the Niagara Escarpment Commission and the need to preserve the Niagara Escarpment lands, because he's been very consistent on that issue and we happen to share our view on that. I would have been here enthusiastically endorsing that and the work that Norm Sterling, when he was Provincial Secretary for Resources Development, did in the early days of establishing the Niagara Escarpment Commission. But we're not talking about that today, so I'll deal with the issue.

I find it interesting - this member isn't a Reform-a-Tory, but many of his colleagues who are quite right-wing are - that he would offer a resolution where the cost is somewhat uncertain. It's just unusual for this particular government to do that and it's something no doubt he would want to look at along the way anyway.

This can be a bit difficult to administer, I think he would agree, in that, how do you determine who should get that tax break or not? There have to be rules. I think it's administration more than anything else that we'd have to look at there.

I think what we need is the best possible daycare out there for people as well. Where the provincial government can play a role is to fund, for those who choose the option of daycare, where you have people who are qualified in the field to deal with children in many ways - that that's available. Dr Fraser Mustard has emphasized in many of his speeches the importance of early childhood education and early contact with children to ensure that later on they don't encounter some of the difficulties that they can.

I appreciate the fact that the member is dealing with an issue that I think is of considerable importance to everyone, the care of children, particularly at that very young age. I think we'll have to look at the details of it. I just wish it would have been in a provincial initiative.

Mr Tim Hudak (Niagara South): I'm pleased to stand in support of the resolution of the member for Dufferin-Peel, who as chair of our caucus I've come to respect a great deal. You can see some of his work through his resolution today, an important and long-standing issue, not one that's spurred by some recent headlines that gets some quick press but one of those issues that families and parents and their children talk about across the dinner table, something that has been there for a long time. I think he's right to press it, to bring about the necessary change, a change to the bias in tax policy against those families where one parent chooses to stay at home, and through this resolution calling on the authors of Canada's tax policy, the federal government, to enact those changes to limit or, if possible, to eliminate that bias. I support him in that.

It's not always politically correct to push for parents to stay at home to raise their children, as the member to my right from York-Mackenzie rightly said. He made a good point that it's very tempting to support the idea that the professional child care lobby, armed with the latest manuals, the latest ideas out of the universities, are the only ones who are capable of adequately raising a child in today's society. I think on this side of the House we would argue quite the opposite, that there's something more meaningful than the latest manual and that is several millennia of wisdom passed down from one family to the next on how best to raise a child. I think it's a dangerous principle to assume or to purport that children are better off in professional daycare as opposed to being raised by the mother or the father in the home.

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In my own family, my mother took time off to help raise me, and that's a considerable sacrifice, the opportunity cost in the family, giving up the salary and the impact on her pension in retirement - but something I will be eternally grateful for - to help me prepare for school down the road through her assistance and reading to me and all of these things. Her own mother, not a professional child care worker, helped her raise her own first child.

I think it's right to try to change the tax incentives to eliminate that bias, to give families a free choice of their child care options. When you tax something, Economics 101 will tell you that you will get less of it. If you tax income at higher and higher levels progressively, then there's a disincentive to work harder and to get into those higher tax brackets. If you tax payroll, it's a tax on jobs and as a result you have fewer jobs created. So when you have a tax penalty for stay-at-home parents, inevitably on the margin you're going to have less of it.

I think the resolution is an important one, a long-standing issue, and from Niagara South I give full support to the member for Dufferin-Peel, who wants to see a level playing field to give people the choice of how best to choose child care options for their own children.

The Acting Speaker: Mr Tilson, you have two minutes.

Mr Tilson: I'd like to thank all members of the House for participating in this debate, particularly the members of the opposition who have commented on some of the aspects of this issue, the member for Windsor-Sandwich, the member for Beaches-Woodbine, the member for St Catharines and the member for Scarborough-Agincourt, in particular. I get the impression that they support the intent but they're opposed generally to the resolution. We'll see.

I understand their saying we've got to broaden the issue, we've got to look at all issues of daycare. Quite frankly, the intent of the resolution is to zero in on that type of tax benefit that's part of our overall daycare, whether it's federal or provincial. If you're going to provide tax benefits to some, for those people who work, the intent of the resolution is that you provide the tax benefits to all.

To my friend who has just spoken, obviously the issue is to put all of these people on a level playing field. That's their job, to criticize. I respect both the two critics who spoke. They do a good job in trying to keep us on our toes. But I don't agree that we should broaden this issue. We should look at this one issue and ask the Ontario government officials to speak to their federal counterparts with respect to changing this law. The federal Liberals are looking at this. It's currently in one of their caucus committees, and we're simply trying to light a fire to keep them going. I don't know where they're going to go on it, but I hope they do something about it.

I'd like to thank a couple of people from my riding who are here today: Cheryl Stewart, Ashley Stewart and Anne Oldham. Cheryl Stewart has been trying to get me to speak on this for four years. Maybe it's because I just had a child three months ago. Thank you very much.

The Acting Speaker: The time for private members' business has expired.

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 SUR LE JOUR COMMÉMORATIF DE L'HOLOCAUSTE

The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): We will deal first with ballot item number 23, standing in the name of Mr Chudleigh.

Mr Chudleigh has moved second reading of Bill 66. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? Carried.

Pursuant to standing order 95(j), the bill is referred to committee of the whole.

Mr Ted Chudleigh (Halton North): I ask that it be referred to the standing committee on social development.

The Acting Speaker: Everybody agrees? Agreed.

Therefore, a majority of the House being in agreement with the request of the member, this bill stands referred to the standing committee on social development.

CHILD CARE

The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): We will now deal with ballot item number 24, standing in the name of Mr Tilson.

Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?

All those in favour, say "aye."

All those opposed, say "nay."

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

Call in the members. This will be a five-minute bell.

The division bells rang from 1156 to 1201.

The Acting Speaker: All those in favour of the motion will please rise.

Ayes

Arnott, Ted

Baird, John R.

Barrett, Toby

Bartolucci, Rick

Bradley, James J.

Caplan, David

Chudleigh, Ted

Colle, Mike

Curling, Alvin

Danford, Harry

Duncan, Dwight

Elliott, Brenda

Ford, Douglas B.

Fox, Gary

Galt, Doug

Gerretsen, John

Gilchrist, Steve

Grimmett, Bill

Guzzo, Garry J.

Hardeman, Ernie

Hastings, John

Hudak, Tim

Johns, Helen

Johnson, Bert

Jordan, W. Leo

Klees, Frank

Kwinter, Monte

Lalonde, Jean-Marc

Leadston, Gary L.

Martiniuk, Gerry

Maves, Bart

Munro, Julia

Murdoch, Bill

Mushinski, Marilyn

Newman, Dan

O'Toole, John

Ouellette, Jerry J.

Pupatello, Sandra

Rollins, E.J. Douglas

Ross, Lillian

Ruprecht, Tony

Sampson, Rob

Sergio, Mario

Shea, Derwyn

Sheehan, Frank

Tilson, David

Wettlaufer, Wayne

Wood, Bob

Young, Terence H.

The Acting Speaker: All those opposed will please rise.

Nays

Bisson, Gilles

Boyd, Marion

Lankin, Frances

Clerk of the House (Mr Claude L. DesRosiers): The ayes are 49; the nays are 3.

The Acting Speaker: I declare the motion carried.

All matters relating to private members' business having been completed, I do now leave the chair. The House will resume at 1:30 this afternoon.

The House recessed from 1204 to 1330.

MEMBERS' STATEMENTS

SCHOOL BUS SAFETY

Mr Pat Hoy (Essex-Kent): The government killed my school bus safety bill last year. Though it had the unanimous consent of the Legislature, they would not allow it to be carried over to the current legislative session, but I have reintroduced it.

I have in my hand several recent articles urging drivers to stop for school buses with their red lights flashing. The Chatham Daily News states, "The reminder comes after police received numerous complaints that motorists weren't stopping for school buses." This, in the midst of the back-to-school blitzes conducted by most police departments.

The same thing happened last year. Elgin county OPP had to issue a warning to say: "The consequences for failing to stop for the bus when it has its lights activated can be disastrous. A child could be severely injured or killed because you were either not paying attention or in such a hurry that you thought you could beat the bus lights."

The Harris government refuses to give the law teeth. It refuses to give the law a mechanism to convict drivers who pass school buses illegally. Raising fines isn't enough to protect children. The government law is a failure. There is no deterrent. Police shouldn't have to beg drivers to heed the law.

Premier, your job is to protect innocent children, not guilty drivers. Lives are at stake. Pass vehicle liability to protect our children.

NIAGARA REGIONAL POLICE FORCE

Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold): The ministry inspection of the Niagara Regional Police Force released yesterday reveals some very startling findings. In fact, it confirms what the Niagara Regional Police and their association have been trying to tell the province, this government, and the people of Niagara for some time now. The Niagara Regional Police are shy 77 officers. That's 13% of their staff complement as it was in 1991.

The ministry inspection report indicates a number of complaints, the most common being the shortage of available deployable officers, resulting in reduced response times and compromising the health and safety of members. In fact, among the conclusions by this inspection team was that there was a shortage of personnel in various operational areas as a result of redirection of staff to front-line patrol to address staff shortages there. It indeed finds that there has been a delay in at least one major criminal investigation.

The head of the Niagara Regional Police association, its administrator, Mike Pratt, on behalf of police officers in Niagara has called upon the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services to conduct their own inquiry, as they're empowered to do under the Police Services Act. The administrator speaks of the concern about the safety of the community, about indeed the safety of police officers and their effectiveness if they continue to be under-resourced as they have been as a result of this government's downloading on to the province.

I call upon the Solicitor General to support that request for an inquiry.

BREAST CANCER

Mr Jack Carroll (Chatham-Kent): On Friday, October 2, 1998, the community of Chatham-Kent was the scene of the first candlelight run-walk to beat breast cancer. Five volunteers - Peggy Seaman, Penny McGregor, Caroline Evans, Karen De Koning and Janette Carroll - worked with Mary Anne McCrae and other staff of the local branch of the Canadian Cancer Society to initiate, design and plan this fund-raiser to raise money to assist in research into the causes of breast cancer, and hopefully someday a cure.

What was most inspiring about the event were the several cancer survivors who led the 150 participants around the first lap of the candlelit course on the grounds of St Clair College. It was indeed an emotional start to a very special evening.

Over $20,000 was raised at this very unique event, one that could be held in so many more communities next year. My congratulations to the organizers, the volunteers and all the participants who made this walk of hope and remembrance a huge success.

TUITION FEES

Mrs Lyn McLeod (Fort William): Ontario has now moved to the head of the pack. We are number one in the country when it comes to the cost of getting a university education.

According to a survey by USC Education Savings Plans, when all things are considered - tuition, board and books - it costs $10,348 a year to go to university in Ontario. Nova Scotia, the only other province to have deregulated tuition fees, is still slightly ahead of us in tuition costs, but we are catching up fast.

Ontario university students face the biggest tuition fee increase in the country this year. Fees have gone up 71% in Ontario in the last five years, thanks to hikes by both the NDP and the Tories. But under Mike Harris and his deregulation, we'll see even higher fees in the future. Fees in some deregulated programs have risen 50% to 100% this year. By next September, medical students at the University of Toronto will be paying $11,000 a year for tuition alone.

What does this mean to students? It means soaring debts that cripple them on graduation. The loan default costs went up again last year - in fact they doubled - from $63 million to $126 million. They had doubled the year before that and they are expected to increase again next year. That means graduates are in more debt than they can pay off.

Instead of helping to keep the debt down, the Harris government keeps driving it higher and higher. Ontario graduates aren't facing a world of opportunities in Mike Harris's Ontario; they're facing a lifetime of loan repayments and bad credit ratings.

EMERGENCY SERVICES

Ms Shelley Martel (Sudbury East): Ontario's health system has failed Kevin Bushey.

On September 16 he arrived at Blind River's health centre with a lacerated cornea and the iris coming out the laceration. A piece of metal was still in his eye.

He was given a tetanus shot but no pain medication. He was driven 165 kilometres to the St Joseph's Health Centre in Sudbury in the company vehicle. He had immediate surgery to fix the cornea and iris. Because Sudbury didn't have the expertise to remove the metal, he was sent to Toronto the next day.

He was told the following: He would be taken by air ambulance to Toronto Hospital, Western Division, register at emergency, be taken immediately to the eye clinic and surgery would be done. He could not have an escort on the air ambulance. He was not given any pain medication to take with him. His wife had to drive him to the Sudbury airport to catch the air ambulance as no land ambulance was available. At the airport she was then told she could go with him.

The air ambulance landed instead at Toronto Island Airport. There was no land ambulance to meet him. Kevin had to walk on to the ferry and take it across to catch a cab to the hospital.

At emergency, Kevin was told that patients who came in ambulances would be seen first. His wife explained what arrangements had already been made. The receptionist said he'd have to wait. An emergency nurse was told the same story. She said she needed someone from ophthalmology to give her instructions before he could go to the eye clinic. She finally found a doctor to give him pain medication six hours after the last dose.

After three and a half hours in emergency, he was finally sent to the eye clinic. The receptionist asked him where he had been as they had been waiting for him all day. He had three hours of surgery to remove the metal from his eye.

The Minister of Health must investigate this -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Statements.

BRAMPTON BATTALION

Mr Joseph Spina (Brampton North): This Friday night, October 9, marks an important date in Brampton sports history. Our new addition to the Ontario Hockey League, the Brampton Battalion, will play their home opener against the Kitchener Rangers.

On December 3, 1996, Scott Abbot, co-inventor of Trivial Pursuit, was awarded the OHL franchise for Brampton. Over 40,000 ballots of support were gathered from our residents to select a team and the Battalion name was chosen in January of this year.

Battalion will play their home games in our new 5,000-seat bunker called the Brampton Sports and Entertainment Centre, which includes three other ice pads and a 360-seat restaurant. It was entirely built without taxpayers' dollars.

The centre held its gala opening last night for the public, hosted by CFRB morning man Ted Woloshyn and included special guests like Canadian medallists Josée Chouinard and Elvis Stojko.

Battalion's strong staff are led by president Greg McNamara, director of hockey operations and coach Stan Butler, and assistant coaches Rob O'Brien and Luigi Villa.

The Brampton Battalion will be a great team. They'll be complemented by a number of off-ice activities over the winter including a tailgate party, tacky tourist night and jeep race. The Battalion mascot, Sarge, will be on hand to lead our team forward to beat those corny ice dogs.

AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY

Mr John Gerretsen (Kingston and The Islands): Mr Speaker, I would like to add my congratulations to Ontario's farmers today as we continue to celebrate Agri-food Week.

Too often the work done by our farming community is underestimated and undervalued in today's society.

As you know, recently the international plowing match and farm machinery show was held in Sunbury, just outside of Kingston. The event was superbly organized by Ken Keyes, a former member from Kingston and The Islands in this House, and his hundreds of volunteers. Close to 100,000 people visited the IPM and farm machinery show, whose theme this year was "Quality Living/A Partnership" between the agricultural and urban communities. Congratulations to Ken and all for a tremendously successful event.

Once again a VIP plowing match was held. I thought you would be interested in seeing what the winner of the VIP plowing contest received. Here it is, something I will proudly display on my desk as the winner of this year's match.

I want to assure all the members of this Legislature that for once we were a united team. I want to tell you that I won this trophy and accept it as a win by the Ontario Legislature against the federal House.

But to the members across the floor and the third party, let this trophy be a reminder. Here in the Liberal caucus we have a winning team, and we are set to grasp another trophy, which will not be shared with you, whenever the Premier decides to issue the challenge and call the next provincial election.

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UNITED WAY

Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): In Sault Ste Marie again this year we've kicked off the United Way campaign, led by the able persons of Mike McEwan and Donna Irving, who will do an extraordinary job, just as the leaders of last year's campaign did. The theme chosen for this year's Sault Ste Marie United Way campaign is the same as last year, "Building an Extraordinary Community," because we who live in Sault Ste Marie and call it home truly believe we have an extraordinary community. We're going to do everything in our power, in spite of the attack of this government, to make sure it continues to be just that.

In Sault Ste Marie, the United Way not only collects and spends money but goes through an exercise of prioritizing what the challenges are. This year we're going to focus on poverty, on access to health care, on jobs, because we have an extraordinarily high unemployment rate in our city, and we're going to be focusing on crime.

In Sault Ste Marie, we politicians have also joined in the quest to build an extraordinary community. We have what is called the round table there, where the mayor and the federal MP and the provincial MPP sit and work with groups like the United Way to decide together what it is we need to be doing in our city to respond in a proactive way to the challenges that face us, and to look ahead to see what it is we might be facing a year or five or 10 years down the road.

I encourage everybody to support the United Way.

HOSPICES

Mr Bob Wood (London South): Hospice Awareness Week is Sunday, October 11, to Saturday, October 16, 1998. It is entirely appropriate that Thanksgiving falls within Hospice Awareness Week.

The highly motivated and trained hospice volunteers of Ontario now number well over 10,000. Every month, new volunteers are trained by existing hospices, new hospices are created to meet specialized needs, or hospice organizations are formed in new areas, all important steps in meeting as much of the great unsatisfied need as is possible.

These volunteers, backed by dedicated medical professionals who often provide many volunteer services themselves, provide critical emotional and spiritual support and pain and symptom relief for those suffering. Volunteers also supply respite, information and other support for family caregivers.

Most importantly, they facilitate opportunities for moments of joy and reconciliation, particularly for those who face life-shortening illness, and for their families and friends as well.

Hospices and the volunteers often enable people to continue living at home or close to it. If necessary, they bring as much of family and home as possible to those who must have care in a nursing home or a hospital bed.

This year, the Ontario Hospice Association and the Canadian and Ontario palliative care associations, along with many of the other related 650 Canadian programs and services, are sponsoring "living lessons" as a step towards increasing the awareness of hospice care.

I ask all members of the House to join with me in recognizing and thanking these volunteers for the important contribution they make to the quality of life in our province.

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): Mr Speaker, on a point of order: I would ask that unanimous consent be given for a debate today on the need for urgent government action to combat homelessness and a declaration that a state of emergency exists in regard to homelessness across Ontario and especially in Toronto.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): This is just a request for unanimous consent for emergency debate. Agreed? I heard a no.

VISITOR

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): I'd like to take this opportunity to invite all members to welcome a visitor in the Speaker's gallery: Señor Remigio Alvarez Andres, Minister of Tourism for the State of Morelos, Mexico. Please join me in welcoming him.

ORAL QUESTIONS

ONTARIO PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEES UNION

Mr Dwight Duncan (Windsor-Walkerville): I have a question to the Chair of Management Board of Cabinet. Yesterday we came into possession of a 122-page secret document that gives explicit instructions to your managers in the event of a public servants' strike later this year. The document reads in part:

"You may use a contractor to do struck work. You could move struck work from a struck location to a non-struck location to be performed by a contractor but only with the minister's approval."

Sounds like scab work to us, Minister.

My question is very simple: Will you tell the people of Ontario today that in the event of a legal strike by Ontario's public servants you will not use scabs, contractors, temporary agencies or fee-for-service agencies to perform the work normally done by Ontario's public servants?

Hon Chris Hodgson (Chair of the Management Board of Cabinet, Minister of Northern Development and Mines): The report the member of the opposition talks about is a lengthy document that is in preparation for disruption of service due to a strike. As everyone in this House knows, the collective agreement with OPSEU expires on December 31 of this year. We are starting the negotiation process and OPSEU has publicly stated that if there isn't a contract signed on December 31, they will withdraw their services.

Similar to what's happened in the past, we issue guidelines to managers on how to manage in the event of a strike. We intend to share that with the bargaining units. We would have shared it with them a week ago but they withdrew from the table. They will receive it. They will, consequently and subsequently, at the same time give to us their plan on how they will conduct their strike.

The first step in negotiations is negotiating the essential service agreement. That is going on. They temporarily withdrew from the table. I hope we will have a settlement that's in the interests of the taxpayers and also respects the hard work that our public service has done and this will be unnecessary.

Mr Duncan: Minister, there's nothing wrong with planning. We'd be surprised if you didn't have a plan. I certainly hope that you don't want a repeat of what happened two years ago, if this is in fact your plan. That was a disgrace not only to your government but to this province that was reported worldwide.

Our problem is that this plan very clearly indicates that you have no intention of bargaining in good faith, that in fact you're attempting to bully, you're attempting to threaten Ontario's public servants. You are talking, Minister, I will remind you, very clearly from this document about hiring scabs. Let's forget the plan. I just want to know from you: In the event of legal strike, are you prepared to use scabs to perform the work of Ontario's public servants?

Hon Mr Hodgson: Let me be clear. The member is correct when he states that this is prudent planning. It's done by organizations throughout the world that of this nature are large in size.

Like the federal government, we have the right to use replacement workers. We also think it's prudent that we get a plan out to instruct managers in all the uncertainties around the situation that might be created if there is a strike.

Like I stated before, we have an obligation and a responsibility to make sure that services are delivered to the public. We also want to, in good faith, bargain a collective agreement with our government employees, represented by OPSEU, before December 31. As the member knows, it takes two sides to reach an amicable agreement that all can live with.

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Mr Duncan: The minister has just said that they're going to use scabs, that the government clearly intends to do this. Let me ask the minister this, then: What do you think that does to negotiations? How do you think that affects the morale of public servants in this province? What does it say to public servants who in the last five years have seen their contracts stripped, have gone through the agony of a strike that they went through two years ago? What does it say to those public servants?

Will you admit now that you have no intention of negotiating in good faith? In fact, Minister, will you not admit that you'd like to provoke a strike and that you intend to use scabs? What are you going to do about it? Why won't you make sure that you negotiate in good faith instead of using threatening and bullying tactics against Ontario's hard-working public servants?

Hon Mr Hodgson: If the member of the Liberal Party is suggesting that we shouldn't take the time and outline in a comprehensive manner instructions to our managers, that's prudent planning. He agreed a question ago that that should take place. Like the federal government, we think it's prudent to share those plans with the bargaining agents and we're going to do that.

The bottom line is that we think it's possible to reach an agreement with OPSEU before December 31, but like I said, it takes two sides to negotiate in good faith. We're there and we're hopeful that will work out in the fullness of time.

I'm not sure of his point on the event that he talks about. If he's saying that releasing the plan and telling managers what to do in the event of labour disruption is wrong and somehow incites the situation, I disagree with him. If this is just a move to try to get the union dollars for the Liberal Party, I find that reprehensible. Leah Casselman, who represents OPSEU, and our negotiating team will be working from now -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Thank you.

HOSPITAL FUNDING

Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): My question is for the Minister of Health. For the first two years of your government you cut $800 million from hospitals in Ontario, you ordered the closure of 35 hospitals and you failed to provide funds on a timely basis.

This past Thursday, you specifically instructed your caucus to vote against a private member's resolution that would have helped all of those hospitals that are facing deficits and accumulated debt, even though we presented facts from many hospitals in many regions in Ontario that are now in the worst financial crisis they've seen. I'd like to know, if the situation wasn't so dire, why you would take the time to strong-arm the members of your own caucus to vote against the resolution?

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): I don't know how well you know the members of our caucus, but I can tell you they are very independent-minded individuals. I think it's quite an insult for you to suggest that anyone could persuade them to do something they were not inclined to do.

Mrs Pupatello: Here is the letter that you as the Minister of Health sent to all your caucus colleagues. This is the letter you sent telling them to vote against the resolution. Clearly there are problems even in the caucus areas that they represent in their ridings. We know that the London Health Sciences Centre is facing $6 million in deficits; the Cambridge hospital, $2.2 million in deficits; the Ottawa Hospital, $25 million in deficits by year's end; the Grand River Hospital, $4 million, and the list goes on. We presented all of those succinctly last Thursday.

How can you continue to deny that Ontario hospitals are facing the worst crisis they've ever seen? The Ontario Hospital Association likewise clearly indicated unequivocally that hospitals in Ontario are facing extremely serious funding problems: "Over half of Ontario's hospitals are running deficits and these deficits are likely to be in excess of $200 million in this fiscal year."

Minister, can you continue to deny that this problem -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Minister.

Hon Mrs Witmer: The reality is, our government is taking an initiative which I can assure you yours has never done. We have set up a joint Ministry of Health task force with the OHA to discuss the funding issues that are related to the hospitals.

I have a quote here from the Toronto Star, September 21, 1988, "Health Minister Elinor Caplan has ordered the province's 222 hospitals to balance their $5.5 billion budget, saying, `The government will not bail out debt-ridden hospitals.'" It appears she didn't even talk and try to solve the problem.

Mrs Pupatello: What I didn't say to you was that in your first two years of government you removed $800 million from their budgets. We know in this House the response to that in communities. Yesterday we heard from Sudbury about a woman who was in an ER 14 hours until she fell on the floor and required stitches. We know the parents in Ottawa who had to take shifts to take care of their child or pay $8,000 a month for nursing care. We know that in Windsor this summer alone there were 230 times when an ambulance could not discharge patients because the emergency rooms were clogged. Your own report from your ministry documents the reports of all the hospital woes that are documenting the reports of this deficit that is causing only more reports to be written.

Why, Minister? Belleville, Hotel Dieu in Windsor, North York in Toronto, Woodstock, St Thomas Elgin, St John's in Toronto, and the list goes on, itemize financial crises in their hospitals. Will you continue to deny that this problem exists?

Hon Mrs Witmer: What I will say is what I said in my response the second time, that we are working with the Ontario Hospital Association because what we want to ensure is high-quality patient care. let me again quote, this time from the Windsor Star, September 28, 1989: "Mr Bierman was one of about 120 Windsor area patients" -

Interjections.

The Speaker: The member for Windsor-Sandwich come to order, please.

Hon Mrs Witmer: "Mr Bierman was one of about 120 Windsor area patients who have been waiting as long as a year for open heart surgery at hospitals in London and Toronto. Several Windsor patients died of heart attacks while on the list. Last month, local cardiologists began advising high-risk patients to have the surgery done in Detroit area hospitals even if it costs them $10,000-$15,000."

That is your health record. We are going to ensure that we can provide this type of cardiac surgery. We're very proud of the fact that because of the additional reimbursements, we have been able to reduce our cardiac waiting lists.

VISITOR

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): I want to bring to the attention of the members, in the opposition members' gallery, from the last Legislature, the member for Scarborough East, Mr Bob Frankford. Welcome.

HOMELESSNESS

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): My question is for the Minister of Community and Social Services. This morning my colleague Rosario Marchese, the member for Fort York, attended an incredible news conference. More than 400 homeless people and their supporters packed Trinity church, a few blocks from here, to call for emergency action for the homeless.

Renowned scientist Ursula Franklin, public health nurse Cathy Crow and a number of advocates spoke movingly about the devastation your government has created in the area of housing and the number of people who are now homeless and living in the streets. This is a movement that's growing. Churches are becoming part of this movement, community organizations; even some developers are joining this movement.

Earlier this week the member for Fort York asked you to take urgent action on this. I'm asking you again today: Will you build the 5,000 urgently needed units for people -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Minister.

Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Community and Social Services): This is indeed a very important issue. I know it is a very complex issue and it is also very tragic when individuals find themselves in a situation where they are homeless. Our municipalities across this province have done a very good job. Here in Toronto we can see the many creative solutions that have come forward that are actually helping individuals to get linked up with housing or to get the other supports they need, whether it's mental health, substance abuse or whatever.

We support the call for a national strategy. I think that will be very helpful. We are working closely with Toronto and the other municipalities to continue to put forward more solutions that will help this. We continue to be a major funder of emergency shelters for people who find themselves homeless. That is something that has not been reduced, nor should it be reduced, because we believe it's a very important support for those municipalities. We will continue to support them in doing that.

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Mr Hampton: Minister, not only are you not doing anything about the homeless and this problem, what you are trying to do will make matters worse. By off-loading responsibility on to municipalities that don't have the budget, you'll make matters worse. You're trying to get the federal government to join your plan to download the rest of social housing on to municipalities.

I've got a leaked communications plan from the Ministry of Housing. It says on page 7, "In writing to the federal government, the minister will want to indicate that broad-based consensus has been achieved among the majority of stakeholders and request a meeting to start negotiations for a new social housing agreement, ie, for downloading."

Minister, there is no consensus. The co-op housing federation is here; they oppose you. Tenants oppose you. Just about every community action group out there opposes you on this. Where is this so-called consensus? Everybody is opposing the steps you're taking. Everybody is opposing you because you don't care about the homeless. Where's your consensus, Minister?

Hon Mrs Ecker: The honourable member is trying to equate that somehow if we don't rush out and throw money at a problem, a government doesn't care. One of the messages we heard very clearly when Mr Carroll was doing his consultation with municipalities and front-line providers was that there is a lot of money in the system but part of the problem is, because we have three levels of government involved in it, because we have a myriad of agencies involved in it, money that quite rightly should be going to those front-line workers, those front-line people who need that help, isn't; it has been caught in this crazy government process.

That's why concentrating those housing services with municipalities, with appropriate financial support - we continue to pay 80% of emergency hostels. I think that is appropriate, because that's backup they need to provide those services. We have, as a province, spent over $100 million in terms of backing up those housing supports. The question is, what productive solutions does the honourable member have, rather than sitting here saying the government doesn't care?

The Speaker: Final supplementary.

Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): What we are saying to this minister is that she has done nothing on the issue of homelessness. We have a crisis on our hands, and it's a national disaster. This minister is saying, "We are linking people up; we're working with the cities, we're talking to them" year after year. We've got a national disaster.

At the same time, you and your Minister of Municipal Affairs are manufacturing consent with the federal government where there is none. You don't have the stakeholders here. You have shut out the tenants who pay over 59% of their housing. They have not been involved in those consultations. They have been completely shut out. The co-op sector, that provides valuable, healthy communities, says your social housing reform will destroy their communities. That's what everybody is saying.

Are you and the Minister of Municipal Affairs going to the federal government to have them believe that these tenants and the co-op sector are not stakeholders?

Hon Mrs Ecker: We have indeed consulted with not only all of those who are involved in social housing but also those who are helping to meet the needs of homeless people on the streets across this country. The honourable member is saying somehow or other nothing has happened. I beg to differ.

We have spent over $100 million on supports and services for those who are homeless. We pay 80% of those emergency shelters, which I think is appropriate, to give municipalities that backup. We have $2.5 million in additional funding from health for front-line mental health support workers. We have another $4 million that we're going to be allocating to municipalities, consistent with the recommendations from our task force, consulting with Anne Golden. We have fewer people on social assistance. We have the most generous social assistance and disability rates in this country to help those people. We've taken back domiciliary supportive housing, because we know that is something that needs to be better linked up with health services. We have done many things.

ONTARIO PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEES UNION

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): My question is for the Chair of Management Board. Since the Chair of Management Board has been around this Legislature for a few years, he will remember that it was the NDP government that brought legislation before this House outlawing the use of scabs in Ontario workplaces. You will remember that your party voted against that legislation and the Liberal Party voted against that legislation. You will also remember that in the last election your government said that you would change the law and bring scabs back into the workplace and the Liberal Party said they would change the law and bring scabs back into the workplace.

I want to get to the point of the headline that was in a couple of today's papers, the headline which says that you are considering using scabs in any negotiations of a collective agreement with OPSEU. I'm going to ask you here, will you categorically say here that you will not use scabs?

Hon Chris Hodgson (Chair of the Management Board of Cabinet, Minister of Northern Development and Mines): I was interested to hear the leader's rendition of the Liberal position on this issue. I think that's very factually correct.

As he knows, the OPSEU agreement expires on December 31 this year, and we're in the midst of negotiating. The first step is the essential services, and then, from that, we hope to reach an agreement. As he knows, Leah Casselman, the representative for OPSEU, has publicly stated that if they do not have a collective agreement signed by December 31 this year there will be a withdrawal of labour or a strike. So it's prudent, similar to past practice, similar to 1996 when the last collective agreement came into place, that we issue some guidelines to our managers. We intend to share that with the bargaining unit of OPSEU, and they will also share with us their strike plan. We hope, and I'm sure they hope, that we never have to implement that plan, but it is a good comprehensive plan.

Mr Hampton: I wanted you to clearly indicate that you have no plans to use scabs and you will not use scabs. I'm going to give you another chance at that, because you must be aware, for example, that at J.B. Fields in Trenton the employer has used scabs and it has caused a huge rift in that community. In Red Lake, in Balmertown, Goldcorp, scabs have been used, and it has caused the longest ongoing labour dispute in Ontario gold mining history.

You must know that when you use scabs, you create incredible hostility and you create the environment for intimidation. This is not the way to negotiate collective agreements. I'm going to ask you again, will you categorically state here that you have no plans to use scabs and you will not use scabs should a dispute develop with OPSEU?

Hon Mr Hodgson: As the leader of the third party knows, the employees have a legal right to strike under the Crown Employees Collective Bargaining Act, which was passed in 1994. The NDP gave OPSEU and the government employees the right to strike. Having done that, it's our responsibility and our obligation to make sure that we have plans in place if that unfortunate reality occurs. Having said that, it's also our responsibility and our obligation as a government to make sure that we deliver services to the public. We think it's responsible and prudent to issue a comprehensive plan, guidelines to our managers, which we share with the bargaining units, on how it would be conducted if there was a strike and the precautions that should be taken.

But I want to stress to this House that we're negotiating in good faith and it's our hope that we will be able to come to an amicable settlement which respects the professionalism of our public servants who work on our behalf and on the public's behalf and also respects the taxpayers' ability to pay.

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Mr Hampton: This is about the tactics that you are prepared to use. One tactic would be to go to the bargaining table and to say, "We want to achieve a collective agreement and we have no desire to use scabs." I would suggest to you that you could achieve a collective agreement by doing that.

The other way, and I have great fear this is the way you are setting up, would be to threaten to use scabs, to release a document like this which shows your intention to potentially use scabs, in which case you create quite a different scenario for collective bargaining. You can approach this from a positive direction. You can approach it from a very negative direction. What you're doing is setting up for the worst kind of outcome.

You've forced a number of conflicts with teachers across this province. You've forced conflicts with a number of other organizations across this province. Is that what you want here, another conflict? Is that what you're trying to force, another conflict? If so, don't. It doesn't work. Avoid it.

Hon Mr Hodgson: I think everyone would agree that it's prudent to inform managers that if we end up in an unfortunate situation of a strike, they would have some guidelines on how to conduct operations. That's a comprehensive plan. It's not lightly done. It's similar to what's done in other large organizations. It's similar to what's done in the federal government, for example.

If the member is giving us advice on the negotiating mandate, I would like to remind him to check out the former Premier of the province's book when he talks about negotiations with OPSEU and the fact that your government couldn't even come to an agreement.

We've planned, with good-faith bargaining, to come up with an agreement that respects the professionalism of our public servants where we won't need to enter into a period where there is a withdrawal of service. It takes two sides to do that. We're trying to negotiate that in good faith. The issue that you talk about today is a preparation document. We think it's responsible and prudent and we'll be sharing that with the bargaining units, and they will be sharing with us what they would do if unfortunately we couldn't reach an agreement by December 31 of this year.

HOMELESSNESS

Mr Alvin Curling (Scarborough North): My question is to the Chair of Management Board. I'd hoped to put a question to the Premier, but he's not here today.

We have a disaster on our hands. This disaster is homelessness, and as you know, it's on the rise. Unlike other disasters, it has not received a quick response from governments.

Are you prepared today to admit that homelessness is a crisis in this province by signing this petition which I'll send over to you, which is distributed by the Disaster Relief of Homelessness, and further, commit to establishing a cabinet action committee made up of the Minister of Health, the Minister of Community and Social Services and the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing so that they can respond immediately to this crisis?

Hon Chris Hodgson (Chair of the Management Board of Cabinet, Minister of Northern Development and Mines): I know that the Minister of Community and Social Services wants to answer this question.

Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Community and Social Services): I agree that the expertise of the Ministries of Health, Community and Social Services and Housing, for example, are very appropriate to addressing the needs of people who find themselves to be homeless. That is why the task force that Mr Jack Carroll, my parliamentary assistant, chairs does have representation from those different ministries, because we quite recognize that when we are trying to support our municipal partners in dealing with homelessness, we need a wide variety of support.

For example, we have increased funding. The Ministry of Health has put forward over $2.5 million in funding for mental health support workers to help people who are homeless, who have particular difficulty. We cost share, as I mentioned previously, on emergency shelters. We are working to get more people off welfare and into paid jobs, for example, so they don't have to be relying on social assistance.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Answer, please.

Hon Mrs Ecker: So there are a range of strategies we have undertaken. We will continue to do that as we support cities like Toronto that are doing -

The Speaker: Supplementary.

Mr Curling: Your strategy and your study isn't working, and you know it. You know it is not working. What we need to do is respond to this emergency and this disaster right now, immediately.

It has been your government that has eliminated social housing. It is your government that has increased costs for health care. It is your government that reduced the welfare and, as a matter of fact, you yourself applauded the fact, the subsidies to those who are on welfare. Maybe it is not evident enough for you to see that it's not working.

Maybe you and the two other ministers who don't seem to want to co-operate in all this would walk with me down University Avenue, walk with me along Queen Street. That's evidence enough of what your cutbacks and your policies are doing to the people. You are the main cause of this. I urge you, Madam Minister, and I urge your government, let us all go together and try to solve this disaster immediately.

Are you prepared now to establish a cabinet committee, an action committee to act immediately on this disaster, this emergency that we have today? Are you ready to do that?

Hon Mrs Ecker: We had already established a task force some time ago that has the expertise of this provincial government, the different ministries, and that is also working very closely with Anne Golden, who is doing the Toronto task force to help devise further strategies in addition to what is being done to help address this issue. Anne Golden has talked about a national strategy, because it isn't just Toronto and it isn't just Ontario that is facing this challenge. The honourable member might well wish to join me in travelling to Ottawa to help convince them that we need to have a national strategy. That might well be a helpful thing to do.

We will continue to rely on our municipal partners to make the decisions about the capacity, the size of hostels, what they need in their communities. We will continue to financially back them up, as we do today, because we think that's an important support for us to give them.

YOUNG OFFENDER FACILITY

Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold): To the Minister of Community and Social Services, I've got a letter here that was sent to the staff at the William Hay Centre in Ottawa. It's a secure-custody facility for young offenders.

The letter was sent by a company called Eastern Ontario Young Offenders Services. William Hay is one of the facilities that you're privatizing as you abandon the operation of young offender facilities across the province. Eastern Ontario Young Offenders Services is a company that was formed by managers from William Hay. They are writing to say that they changed their mind about submitting a proposal to you to manage it. Here's the reason they give:

"On the basis of extensive research and consultation, we have concluded that the maximum allowable budget included in your RFP will not sustain staffing levels and quality service delivery." They go on to say that your budget will compromise the integrity of the William Hay Centre's programs.

Minister, these are professionals, these are experts, and they've decided that it's absolutely irresponsible to run a facility this way. When are you going to use some common sense? Stop using an ideological basis for your decisions. When are you going to withdraw this RFP?

Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Community and Social Services): With all due respect, the honourable member says that somehow or other an ideology is supposed to be part of this. I would certainly disagree. Some 93% of the residential facilities that the Ministry of Community and Social Services has are already run by community-based agencies, whether non-profit or private sector. That was a policy decision with the previous government which the member was part of. They were quite happy with that. They did not think that was a problem. It wasn't.

Those community agencies run those facilities extremely well, in a very cost-effective manner, very good quality services for the young people who are there. That's why we think the few remaining facilities which we have that are run by the ministry should be run the same way, so that not only do the young people get the best services they can have, but also it will be done in the most cost-effective manner for the taxpayers.

Mr Kormos: Minister, please. What you've begun is the process of privatizing secure-custody facilities. These aren't shoplifters; these aren't first offenders who are contained in these facilities. These are some of the most dangerous and disturbed young people in the province. These are young people with serious problems who pose a real threat to their communities. These are the facilities that you're privatizing in this move towards privatization. Communities rely on the fact that these facilities have been safe and secure because their staff and management were highly trained professionals who were accountable to the government, to you.

You've said that your decision to privatize these facilities has nothing to do with cost savings. You've said it has nothing to do with improving the quality of services. So you're putting our communities at risk -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Question?

Mr Kormos: The tentative bidder has withdrawn their proposal, saying your budget will not allow them to run William Hay and its programs with the integrity that was there -

The Speaker: Thank you. Minister.

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Hon Mrs Ecker: I think the bottom line here is quality services, standards that are being administered and adhered to now by community agencies, both non-profit and private sector, that currently run the majority of our young offender facilities, including secure custody facilities. There's a proven track record with that delivery. It has worked extremely well. That's why we are continuing to do it. If the honourable member is questioning the professionalism of those members of community agencies, many of whom are also members of unions which this member supports, if he thinks they are not competent, he should say so. We have seen they have a good track record and that's what we are building on.

This particular step is to ensure that these facilities are provided according to our standards. Those are the same standards that our community agencies are currently meeting. They meet not only the needs of the young people who are in those young offender facilities, but they also meet the safety standards of communities. Not only that, it has been a very cost-effective mechanism, and we will continue to build on that.

HOME CARE

Ms Marilyn Mushinski (Scarborough-Ellesmere): My question is directed to the Minister of Long-Term Care. As you know, Ontario's seniors population is growing daily. In fact, it's expected to double within the next 20 years. With more seniors living longer, there's a growing demand for home care services - visiting nurses, physiotherapy and homemaking. What is the government doing to meet these needs?

Hon Cameron Jackson (Minister of Long-Term Care, minister responsible for seniors): I'd like to thank the honourable member for the question and indicate clearly that this government has made a very strong and early commitment to build the infrastructure, 43 new CCACs in our province. This has enhanced access to important services and allows seniors and disabled persons to live with greater independence in their communities.

In Ontario we have increased funding by $346 million in three short years. This is one of the largest areas of expansion in health care. We are today spending $1.2 billion in total, which is more than all the other provinces in Canada. We're very proud of our record of building this infrastructure and providing the highest access for any Canadian senior or disabled person right here in Ontario.

Ms Mushinski: Thank you for that answer. Home care is not covered by the Canada Health Act and people need reassurances that their communities are getting their fair share of these services, something that was not assured by the previous two governments, I might add.

Last year you were responsible for the creation of a new access centre for Scarborough. Why was Scarborough given a separate access centre, and what are you doing to ensure fair shares of these important services for all municipalities?

Hon Mr Jackson: When this government was elected three years ago, we found out that the distribution of health dollars was done in a very discriminatory manner. We found that seniors in one part of this province were receiving four times as much service as other parts of the province. We were surprised to learn that right here in Toronto, the Metro home care program was also dividing these dollars up in a most unfair manner. That's why we decided to put in place a community board in the communities of Scarborough and York and throughout the old Metro area.

We have increased funding in Metro by $120 million in three years. That's a 56% increase. We found three years ago that seniors in Scarborough were receiving about $39 of service per person, while their next-door neighbours in Toronto were receiving over $70 per senior. We have abandoned this discriminatory model and produced an equity model. Today, under our government's commitment, Scarborough's seniors and disabled are finally getting their fair share of home care dollars.

LONG-TERM CARE

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): I have a question for the Minister of Health. You will recall perhaps that in the last session, in June of this year, the Leader of the Opposition, Dalton McGuinty, raised an issue with the Premier regarding Ian Strathern, who is a quadriplegic who resides in Niagara Falls. Ian was left a quadriplegic after he broke his neck in a sports accident in 1995. He's on a life support ventilator and requires 24-hour care from your government or from the Ministry of Health.

Unfortunately, Mr David Strathern is spending $1,500 a week - that's about $6,000 a month - caring for his son. That's out of their own money. Of course, that's very stressful on the family as a result of that for a variety of reasons.

The Ministry of Health apparently is going to an appeal hearing -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Question.

Mr Bradley: - speaking against this appeal by the family. Would you assure us that you'll withdraw that objection?

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): Mr Speaker, I'll refer that to the Minister of Long-Term Care.

Hon Cameron Jackson (Minister of Long-Term Care, minister responsible for seniors): I would like to advise the member opposite that I am aware of the tragic circumstances around this individual. I'm prevented, without the family's permission, from referring to him directly. I know that not only the member for St Catharines but the member for Niagara Falls has been working very hard to look at the situation and the circumstances that this family is coping with.

As was stated earlier in this House, all of these long-term-care services that Canadians have come to appreciate and need are outside of the Canada Health Act and, as such, no province in this country is providing 24-hour care. There are programs available that have been put in place in this province and others to deal with cases where tragically the circumstances of life have left people handicapped.

The Speaker: Answer.

Hon Mr Jackson: I simply want to assure the member opposite that as our government continues to work closely with the family, and we are doing so through the local member, we are looking for solutions to help this -

The Speaker: Thank you. Supplementary.

Mr Bradley: The family is somewhat desperate in these circumstances. They attended a Conservative fundraiser in St Catharines on March 7 to put the case forward because they knew the Premier would be there. When the Leader of the Opposition, Dalton McGuinty, was in St Catharines speaking to the chamber of commerce, Mr Strathern came to the microphone to ask if any progress had been made in this regard.

Earlier this year, the Niagara Community Care Access Centre turned down the appeal by the family for nursing help beyond the maximum it said it was allowed: 53 hours per week. For the Strathern family, home nursing help is essential to ensure that Ian does not have to live in an institution. The family is dipping into its own savings to the tune of $1,500 a week and it going to be in dire financial straits as a result. This reminds me not of our province of Ontario; it reminds of the United States, where people almost go bankrupt trying to meet their medical needs.

Minister, would you ask the Minister of Health to withdraw the objection that the Ministry of Health is putting into this appeal? They are going to appear against the Strathern family in an appeal process.

Hon Mr Jackson: I wanted to indicate to the member opposite that in the conversation that has been had with the family regarding this tragic case, they have indicated that they are seeking less the sensationalism around the key issues of access to the programs, but rather that they are trying to work out a range of options that might be available to this family, and we are still in that process. I want to be careful, but my understanding is the family has said, "We do not want our son embroiled as a political football on a very important and sensitive issue."

Mr John Gerretsen (Kingston and The Islands): Do something.

Hon Mr Jackson: I believe that if I had the authority - to the member's interjection - to make some further statements in this chamber, the members opposite would be surprised to learn about the considerable amount of effort that's been going on in this community, and in co-operation with the local member in Niagara Falls, to find some solutions for this family. That is what this government is prepared to do. That is what we are proceeding with and we're prepared to do that. However, I must say that no province in Canada is providing 24-hour unfettered access for the -

The Speaker: New question, third party.

YOUNG SEXUAL OFFENDERS

Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine): To the Minister of Community and Social Services: I recently received a letter accompanying this report entitled The Adolescent Sexual Offender Project: A 10-Year Follow-up Study. This study is the first of its kind in Canada by virtue of its size, its use of a comparison group and, most important, its findings, which demonstrate that a comprehensive treatment program can reduce criminal reoffending by as much as 73%. The letter that accompanies the report alleges that your ministry prevented the publishers of the report, a directly run program of your ministry, from notifying the media about the release of the report. Let me quote:

"The government does not, in the months before an election, want to have anything presented that does not fit with their law-and-order agenda.... In effect, they are hindering the effective intervention with this population because it does not suit their political needs."

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I don't understand. You guys are pretty good at holding press conferences and announcing all sorts of things that you think are good news. Why the silence on this? It seems like good news to me.

Will you assure us that you have not shelved this important report which shows the efficacy of treatment rather than the simplistic "shame `em and punish `em" approach of your Crime Control Commission?

Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Community and Social Services): I am not aware of the memo or the report. I'd be very pleased to take a look at the situation. I'm always very interested in any information, especially research-based information, that shows how we can improve our young offender facilities, both in the Ministry of Community and Social Services and the Ministry of the Solicitor General. Trying to prevent young people from reoffending again, trying to prevent them from getting into young offender facilities is a goal the honourable member and I share.

Ms Lankin: It's a problem that you don't know about the report. It's a report of your ministry. Our concern is that it's sitting on a shelf gathering dust.

Let me quote a couple of experts with respect to this.

Sue Hunter, the executive director of the Toronto Child Abuse Centre, says, "One of the things this report really indicates is that treatment has the capacity to work for teen sexual offenders and that we shouldn't just move them into punishment."

Dr Howard Barbaree, chief of forensics at the Clarke, says: "I have nothing but good things to say about this program.... They meet the highest standards and do a superb job. This program is a much-preferred approach to treating the young sex offender rather than the punitive approach." He says that research shows the punitive approach just doesn't work in reducing recidivism.

Given that research shows that most adult sexual offenders began offending as a teen and that before an adult offender is identified they've assaulted upwards of 300 times, intervention with teens is absolutely critical. Surely you don't want to contribute to making teens hardened criminals with hundreds of notches on their belts. Will you commit to removing this report off the shelf and into action?

Hon Mrs Ecker: As I said previously to the honourable member, I'm quite prepared to look into the circumstances around this particular report. We frequently and often seek out information about how we can do a better job to support young people who are in young offender facilities. Obviously public safety has to be one of the prime concerns here, but if it is possible to prevent a young person from turning into an adult who is also going to offend, of course that's our goal. For her to suggest otherwise is quite erroneous.

I had the privilege of being part of a consultation exercise looking at the strict discipline facility, and one of the things we heard very clearly and which very much shaped our recommendations was the need for good rehabilitation, the need for good steps to protect public safety and the need for follow-up, because all of those things prevent recidivism, and that's certainly what we want to achieve.

ONTARIO WORKS

Mr Ernie Hardeman (Oxford): My question is to the Minister of Community and Social Services. I read in the local press in the past week that on Tuesday you were in Brantford to survey the success of the local Ontario Works program in that area. I too had the pleasure of meeting with the director of our Ontario Works program in Oxford in this past week to discuss how that program was faring. I was wondering if you could tell me and my constituents and all the members of the House what you heard on your visit to Brampton.

Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Community and Social Services): One of the privileges I have had is to travel around to different locations where Ontario Works, our work-for-welfare program, is being provided and have the opportunity to meet with individuals who are participating.

In this case, there were several individuals. I must say I was very pleased to hear how the program we had was actually helping them. One individual was a single mother who talked about the child care support she had received and the work experience she was getting, which was going to get her into a job. We had another one who had actually landed a job. One of the community agencies that has been providing community placements for individuals on welfare talked about the success they have had with some of the placements, some of the individuals who have gone through their organization. So it was a very good meeting, and I was pleased to hear yet again that Ontario Works is working for those individuals on welfare by getting them off and into paid jobs.

Mr Hardeman: Thank you very much, Madam Minister. I'm glad to hear that the response you got in Brantford was indeed the same as I heard from our director as to how well the program was working in Oxford.

Yesterday in the House you told us that the number of people on welfare had declined by some 20,000. This is an unprecedented decline. Could you tell us what this means?

Hon Mrs Ecker: I'd be very pleased to do so. We had last month the largest drop in our caseload that we have experienced in some two years. Over the last three years we've seen a steady decline downward. We have over 323,000 fewer people trapped on welfare today, people who are now off welfare because of our economic reforms and our welfare reforms. I'd also like to stress that that's over 130,000 fewer children who are trapped on welfare.

In Oxford county, for example, over 32% have left the welfare system. This is a saving of approximately $12 million for the taxpayers there. It's good news for taxpayers, it's good news for those people who are no longer on welfare and who are out there working, and it's certainly been good news for our community.

It was a very successful visit. I look forward to continuing to travel around the province to meet individuals on welfare whose lives are being helped by the supports we've put into place.

GASOLINE PRICES

Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South): My question is for the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations. You may have noticed on your drive in this morning that gasoline prices have rocketed some five cents a litre in the city. Let us quickly review what your ministry has done about this in the past.

In your May 14, 1998, press release you boasted: "We're gathering evidence to continue the fight against the price-gouging of Ontarians." As far back as August 1997, Premier Harris, when he was playing the competition cop, said: "My own personal opinion is they're being gouged." Premier Harris also said, "Ontario will do what it can to bring the oil companies to heel, including regulating prices."

What's happened? Nothing. Your attempt at sending out gas-busters was nothing but a publicity stunt. There are five million Ontarians who are gas-busters out there, and prices are going up five to eight cents a litre. Your engine's sputtering, Minister. Why don't you put some octane in it and do something?

Hon David H. Tsubouchi (Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations): I thank the member for the question. I know he's genuinely concerned, as are all of us. The Premier and I have certainly expressed our concerns about price increases and the volatility of gas prices across the province, as did previous governments, particularly the Liberal government in the province in those days.

I want to tell you there are a number of things. First of all, if you recall, at the last provincial ministers' conference, through the initiative of the province of Ontario, we were able to establish a joint committee made up of the federal government and the provinces and territories, but with consumers as well, to make sure there is transparency to this, for us to actually have some evidence to do something here.

I might add that it's very interesting that the Consumer Watchdog Commission, who have been dubbed the gas-busters in this province, chaired ably by Lillian Ross, my parliamentary assistant - it's kind of interesting and coincidental, I suppose, that the first long weekend since the summer that they did not raise awareness about this issue was the first time gas prices have dramatically increased.

Mr Crozier: If you are not prepared to protect the consumers of Ontario, why did the Premier say that he would bring the oil companies to heel and then do nothing? Why did you say you're gathering evidence to continue the fight against the price-gouging of Ontario consumers and then do nothing? Why is it you send your gas-busters out with their Polaroids and you do nothing? Minister, when are you going to do your job and do something about gasoline prices that have nothing to do with the market and everything to do with holiday weekends?

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Hon Mr Tsubouchi: I will remind the member that when we actually embarked upon this I indicated that what we were trying to do with the Consumer Watchdog Commission was gather evidence for me to report back to the provincial ministers' conference, which incidentally will be taking place next month. The consumers out there in the province are assisting us in this. We've had a lot of response to the hotline we established for us to gather the evidence.

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Minister.

Hon Mr Tsubouchi: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I appreciate your ability to really stop some of the backfiring going on over there from the Liberal benches.

Next week the Consumer Watchdog Commission is meeting with the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, and I have a funny feeling that when they do meet they're certainly going to be indicating that they don't like price volatility in this province.

MP Dan McTeague and many of his Liberal colleagues, in their gas pricing report, are calling on his own Liberal government to strengthen the Competition Act. Maybe you could pick up the phone and call -

The Speaker: Thank you.

New question, leader of the third party.

NORTHERN HEALTH SERVICES

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): My question is for the Minister of Health. The Minister of Health will know that on May 14 Mike Harris went to the community of Ear Falls and promised the community health centre there, which was shut down at the time because of your government's actions, that they would receive $300,000 a year in funding so they could reopen. The community health centre took Mike Harris at his word. They reopened the doors of the clinic, they hired a nurse and support staff, and they contracted for some physicians to come to the community three times a week.

It's now five months later and the community health centre hasn't seen any of the $300,000 that Mike Harris promised. In fact, the municipality has had to fork over $26,000 to keep the community health centre open. Minister, where is the $300,000 that Mike Harris promised when he was in Ear Falls? Is it coming or is this just another one of your empty, phony health care announcements?

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): We certainly have been recognizing and moving forward in order that we can address the unique needs of the northern communities. When I was up to Sudbury recently I indicated that there were three additional communities that would be subsidized through the global group practice initiative. I will follow up and if there is an issue I'll share that with you.

Mr Hampton: Minister, the problem is bigger, deeper and broader than that. The fact of the matter is that people from this community, from Ear Falls, have been in touch with the minister responsible for northern development, they've been in touch with the Premier's office, and your government keeps saying, "The cheque's in the mail." We live in the age of electronic transfers. If you said last week that the cheque's in the mail, it should have arrived the same day. But the money isn't there.

The problem the community has is that they know you also announced $36 million to help attract and retain doctors, specialists and nurse practitioners in northern Ontario. They haven't seen any of that money either. They also know that you announced $5 million to help attract nurse practitioners especially in northern Ontario. They haven't seen any of that money. They know it hasn't been spent.

Minister, you've got a credibility problem here. You and the Premier go from community to community making these announcements and then nothing ever happens. When is it going to happen, or are these just phony announcements?

Hon Mrs Witmer: I'm very pleased to say that a tremendous amount has happened under the leadership of our government. We have recognized the unique needs of northern communities. As you know, we have the Scott sessional fee, the $70 per hour that now applies to 78 hospitals. We very recently completed a tour for all the underserviced communities. They had an opportunity to visit the university locations here in order to go through the process of recruitment. We have the medical services corps.

When it comes to globally funded group practices, I am very pleased to say that we have provided funding already to communities. We are in discussions with other communities. When it comes to the $5 million regarding the nurse practitioners, we are presently in communication with communities. We are now gauging their needs and they are providing the information in order that we can provide the additional services that are required.

As I say, we have, as a government, moved forward -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): New question, member for Durham East.

VEHICLE SAFETY

Mr John O'Toole (Durham East): I was very interested in the response from the Minister of Health.

My question is to the Minister of Transportation. Clearly our Minister of Transportation is a minister who puts road safety first. Last week in my riding, and indeed all over Ontario, constituents were celebrating the seat belt challenge. I would ask the minister to tell me about this, how the volunteers in my community were stopping or observing cars to observe the number of people who were properly wearing their seat belts. Minister, could you tell the people of Ontario just how important wearing a seat belt is and the result of your observations last week?

Hon Tony Clement (Minister of Transportation): I thank the honourable member for the question. I'm very pleased to be part of the launch of the fifth annual one-day seat belt challenge. On Saturday an estimated 1,300 volunteers across 130 Ontario communities proudly wore their seat belt challenge T-shirts and counted the number of drivers who were properly wearing seat belts.

We've received some of the preliminary results and so far they show that some communities had over 90% seat belt use rate. Last year they counted use in more than 327,000 vehicles and that rate was 84%. So we're up 6%. We want to get to that 95% rate by 2001. I think we're well on our way.

If I could add one comment at the end of this question period, please remember, everyone, buckle up.

VISITORS

Mr Tony Silipo (Dovercourt): Mr Speaker, I want to draw to your attention and the House's attention the presence in the gallery of some special guests from the province of Alentejo in Portugal. They are the mayor of Aljustrel, Antonio Jose Godinho, and the mayor of Almodavar, Manuel Lopes Ribeiro, accompanied by Jose Luis Lopes, the president of the Casa do Alentejo community centre, which this week is celebrating its cultural week. I would like to welcome them to Queen's Park.

NOTICE OF DISSATISFACTION

Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: Pursuant to standing order 37(a), I wish to advise you of my dissatisfaction with the response of the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations to my question on gasoline prices. The reason is the minister did not provide an answer that included a solution.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Please file the appropriate papers.

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PETITIONS

PROPERTY TAXATION

Mr Dwight Duncan (Windsor-Walkerville): I have a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

"Whereas Mike Harris has imposed skyrocketing taxes on small business owners in Windsor because of his government's downloading debacle;

"Whereas many small business owners in Windsor who pay commercial property taxes face tax increases of more than 100%;

"Whereas the Harris government tax assessment system is confusing, chaotic and an administrative nightmare for municipalities;

"Whereas the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers called the Harris tax assessment system a `high-risk strategy' that will create `serious problems' for taxpayers and municipalities; and

"Whereas Windsor small businesses facing massive tax increases will be forced to pass on these increases to their customers, causing a decrease in business and causing the Ontario economy to suffer;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to devise a fair and uncomplicated system of tax assessment."

I'm pleased to join the merchants of the Riverside business improvement area in signing this petition.

PALLIATIVE CARE

Mr Bob Wood (London South): I have a petition signed by 80 people.

"Whereas most Ontario residents require adequate access to effective palliative care in time of need;

"Whereas meeting the needs of Ontarians of all ages for relief of preventable pain and suffering, as well as the provision of emotional and spiritual support, should be a priority to our health care system;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to resolve that a task force be appointed to develop a palliative care bill of rights that would ensure the best possible treatment, care, protection and support for Ontario's citizens and their families in time of need. The task force should include palliative care experts in pain management, community palliative care and ethics in order to determine effective safeguards for the right to life and care of individuals who cannot or who can no longer decide issues of medical care for themselves. The appointed task force would provide interim reports to the government and the public and continue in existence to review the implementation of its recommendations."

ROAD SAFETY

Mr Gerry Phillips (Scarborough-Agincourt): I have a petition on red light cameras. It says:

"To the Legislature of Ontario:

"Whereas red light cameras can dramatically assist in reducing the number of injuries and deaths resulting from red light runners; and

"Whereas red light cameras only take pictures of licence plates, thus reducing privacy concerns; and

"Whereas all revenues from violations can easily be directed to a designated fund to improve safety and enforcement at high-collision intersections; and

"Whereas there is a growing disregard for traffic laws resulting in serious injury to pedestrians, cyclists, motorists and especially children and seniors; and

"Whereas the provincial government has endorsed the use of a similar camera system to collect tolls on the new Highway 407 tollway; and

"Whereas the mayor, council and concerned citizens of Toronto have been seeking permission to deploy these cameras due to limited police resources;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislature of Ontario as follows:

"That the province of Ontario support and provide financial assistance for, number one, a pilot project and, number two, the subsequent installation of red light cameras at high-collision intersections to monitor and prosecute motorists who run red lights."

I've affixed my signature as well.

PROPERTY TAXATION

Mr David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre): "Whereas the Harris government's `downloading' to municipal taxpayers is directly responsible for the $36.3-million shortfall to the region of Hamilton-Wentworth; and

"Whereas the Harris government `downloading' is directly responsible for creating a property tax crisis in our region; and

"Whereas the Harris government, while boasting about its 30% tax cut which benefits mainly the wealthy, is making hard-working families, seniors, homeowners and businesses pay the price with outrageous property tax hikes and user fees for services; and

"Whereas city and regional councillors are being unfairly blamed and forced to explain these huge tax hikes, Hamiltonians know that what's really going on is that they are being forced to pay huge property tax increases to fund Harris's 30% tax giveaway to the rich; and

"Whereas homeowners, including seniors and low-income families, are facing huge property tax increases ranging from several hundred to thousands of dollars; and

"Whereas the Harris government `downloading' has led to huge property tax increases for business that will force many small and medium-sized businesses in Hamilton-Wentworth to close or leave the community, putting people out of work; and

"Whereas Hamilton-Wentworth region is proposing that the Harris government share in the costs of an expanded rebate program, worth about $3 million region-wide;

"Therefore we, the undersigned, demand that the Harris government immediately eliminate the $38-million downloading shortfall that is devastating and angering homeowners as well as killing businesses in Hamilton-Wentworth."

I continue to support these petitioners.

PROTECTION FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS

Mr Ernie Hardeman (Oxford): "To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"Whereas nurses in Ontario often experience coercion to participate in practices which directly contravene their deeply held ethical standards; and

"Whereas pharmacists in Ontario are often pressured to dispense and to sell chemicals and devices contrary to their moral or religious beliefs; and

"Whereas public health workers in Ontario are expected to assist in providing controversial services and promoting controversial materials against their consciences; and

"Whereas physicians in Ontario often experience pressure to give referrals for medications, treatments and/or procedures which they believe to be gravely immoral; and

"Whereas competent health care workers and students in various health care disciplines in Ontario have been denied training, employment, continued employment and advancement in their intended fields, and suffered other forms of unjust discrimination because of the dictates of their consciences; and

"Whereas the health care workers experiencing such unjust discrimination have at present no practical and accessible legal means to protect themselves;

"We, the undersigned, urge the government of Ontario to enact legislation explicitly recognizing the freedom of conscience of health care workers, prohibiting coercion of and unjust discrimination against health care workers because of their refusal to participate in matters contrary to the dictates of their consciences and establishing penalties for such coercion and unjust discrimination."

It's signed by a great number of my constituents, and we present it on their behalf.

DENTAL CARE

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): I have a petition that reads:

"To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"Whereas a new schedule of dental services for children and people with disabilities was introduced by the government under the Ontario Works Act and the Ontario Disability Support Program Act; and

"Whereas the new schedule fails to meet the special needs of children and people with disabilities, reduces services, places barriers to accessing care and creates an environment for various different dental programs across Ontario; and

"Whereas the move away from an emphasis on prevention under the new dental schedule brings significant health risks for children and people with disabilities who are often least able to practise good oral hygiene; and

"Whereas the new dental schedule interferes with the patients' rights to consent to treatment by requiring administrators, and not patients or substitute decision-makers, to authorize and deny dental treatment; and

"Whereas there is no method for the patient to appeal a decision by a plan administrator to deny dental treatment; and

"Whereas pre-authorizations, called predeterminations in the new plan, will require that a higher level of confidential patient health information be disclosed to dental plan administrators; and

"Whereas the Ontario government has caused confusion among patients by introducing the plan without adequate consultation and has not included any affected patient groups in consultations after releasing the new dental plan;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly as follows:

"Delay full implementation of the new dental plan until the requirement for predeterminations is removed, patient confidentiality is protected, the plan emphasizes prevention in oral health care, and the government consults directly with affected patients to ensure the new plan will meet the special needs of children and people with disabilities."

This is signed by people in Port Colborne, Welland, Thorold and St Catharines. I affix my signature in agreement with the petition.

COMPENSATION FOR HEPATITIS C PATIENTS

Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): "Whereas many Ontarians have been infected with the hepatitis C virus as a result of transfusions using contaminated blood; and

"Whereas the current compensation package only provides funding for those people infected between the years 1986 to 1990; and

"Whereas in Canada, there are at least 20,000 surviving victims who were infected with hepatitis C before 1986, who placed their faith in the blood system and are now suffering; and

"Whereas the Krever commission recommended that all victims be compensated;

"Now therefore, we, the undersigned, respectfully petition the Legislature of Ontario, on behalf of the victims, and their families, in support of the Ontario government's call for a compensation package for Ontarians who are infected with the hepatitis C virus through the blood system prior to 1986, and that pending a resolution of federal liability for the contaminated blood problem, Ontario agree in the interim that such new package be funded by the Ontario and the federal government on the same basis as the federal-provincial agreement covering 1986-90. We call on the government of Canada to do the right thing."

I affix my signature to this.

SCHOOL CLOSURES

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): I have a petition here from over 600 concerned parents from the St Alphonsus school community who are very concerned that the minister is about to close 200 schools in Toronto.

"We, the undersigned supporters of keeping St Alphonsus Catholic school open, request the Minister of Education to give parents an opportunity for full and proper input by extending the deadline for the review of the school's future beyond the November 15, 1998, deadline."

I've got 600 names, and I'll affix my name to the petition.

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HOSPITAL RESTRUCTURING

Mr David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre): The petition reads as follows:

"Whereas the Harris funding cutbacks are having a devastating impact on hospitals and patient care across Ontario, and have resulted in an anticipated $38-million deficit at the Hamilton Health Sciences Corp hospitals; and

"Whereas the Hamilton Health Sciences Corp hospitals will receive $4 million less in revenue from the Ministry of Health and other sources; and

"Whereas the Mike Harris funding cuts are causing a crisis in hospital care in Hamilton-Wentworth, with hospitals facing huge deficits, cuts to patient care and bed closings; and

"Whereas Scott Rowand, president of the Hamilton Health Sciences Corp hospitals, spoke out recently in the Hamilton Spectator saying, `For the first time in my career, I don't know how to fix this problem other than an awful lot of closures of programs and services needed by the community'; and

"Whereas Mr Rowand went on to say: `We need more cash in the system and we need it now. And that is cash to deal with the issues that we are dealing with today. Don't ask us to do anything more because the people in the system are at their limit.'

"Therefore we, the undersigned, demand that the Harris government stop underfunding Ontario's hospitals to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and act immediately to restore funding to the Hamilton Health Sciences Corp hospitals so they can continue providing quality health care services to the people of Hamilton-Wentworth."

I continue to support my local community by adding my name to this petition.

PROPERTY TAXATION

Mr Tim Hudak (Niagara South): I am pleased to present a petition signed by over 400 residents of the Black Creek Retirement Park in Stevensville, Ontario. It reads as follows:

"To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"Whereas we, the residents of Black Creek Retirement Park, live in a leisure home community as independent and self-sufficient individuals; and

"Whereas we, the residents of Black Creek Retirement Park, represent a vastly increasing number of Ontarians who reside in leisure home parks; and

"Whereas we currently pay property taxes to the owner of Black Creek Retirement Park, who in turn remits taxation payments to the municipality as one group, without the opportunity for an appeal;

"We, the undersigned, respectfully petition the Legislature of Ontario to enact legislation whereby each resident of Black Creek Retirement Park receive an individual property tax roll number from the province of Ontario and an individual property tax bill from the town of Fort Erie;

"We furthermore petition the Legislature of Ontario to enact legislation that will allow each resident of Black Creek Retirement Park the right to appeal their property tax assessment and bill on an individual basis as they deem appropriate."

In support of my constituents, I affix my signature.

HEALTH CARE

Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview): I have a further petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario which reads as follows:

"Whereas we are concerned about the quality of health care in Ontario;

"Whereas we do not believe health care should be for sale;

"Whereas the Mike Harris government is taking steps to allow profit-driven companies to provide health care services in Ontario;

"Whereas we won't stand for profits over people;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

"We do not wish to have our health care system privatized."

I concur with the intent of the petitioners, and I will affix my signature to it.

PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS

Mr David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre): I have a petition to save Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital.

"To the Honourable Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"We, the undersigned citizens of Hamilton and the surrounding communities, beg leave to petition the government of Ontario as follows:

"Whereas the Health Services Restructuring Commission has announced the closure of Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital; and

"Whereas the government of Ontario, through the Health Services Restructuring Commission, is divesting its responsibility for mental health care without hearing from the community first; and

"Whereas community-based mental health care providers will bear the brunt of this ill-fated decision by being forced to meet what is sure to be an increased demand for their services; and

"Whereas the community pays the price for cuts to mental health care;

"Therefore we, the undersigned citizens of Hamilton and area who care about quality, accessible and publicly accountable mental health care for all Ontarians, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to immediately set aside all recommendations to divest and/or close Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital and the programs and services it provides; and

"Further, to call for full hearings to seek community solutions to community issues and to democratically decide the future of mental health care for the citizens of Hamilton and area."

I add my name to these petitioners.

Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South): On a point of order, Madam Speaker: I have been informed in my request for a late show that the minister and the parliamentary assistant won't be available today. I ask unanimous consent that it be put over until Tuesday.

The Acting Speaker (Ms Marilyn Churley): Is there unanimous consent that the late show be put off until Tuesday? I didn't hear a no. Agreed.

OPPOSITION DAY

EDUCATION FUNDING

Mrs Lyn McLeod (Fort William): Madam Speaker, I request unanimous consent to move opposition day motion number 1.

The Acting Speaker (Ms Marilyn Churley): Can I have consent for the member for Fort William to move the motion? Agreed.

Mrs McLeod: I move that whereas the Mike Harris government has successfully and deliberately created a crisis in our children's education;

Whereas the Mike Harris government stated clearly at the beginning of its mandate plans to "create a useful crisis" in education;

Whereas Mike Harris and Dave Johnson have repeatedly poured fuel on the education crisis with expensive ads and calculated attacks on our teachers, trustees and students;

Whereas Mike Harris's Bill 160 and the education funding formula have only added to that crisis;

Whereas Bill 160 amounts to a power grab by the Mike Harris government, removing local input from our children's education;

Whereas Bill 160 imposes conditions on local boards but fails to provide adequate funding allowing many local boards to meet those conditions;

Whereas Bill 160 causes all school board and teacher contracts to expire at the same time;

Whereas the Mike Harris government is forcing schools to close across the province;

Whereas the Mike Harris government has taken at least $1 billion out of our classrooms;

Whereas for these reasons and others, this government's education policy has been a failure;

Whereas we value our children's education and the dedication of Ontario's teachers;

The Ontario Liberals call on the government to admit that Bill 160 does nothing but create a crisis in education across the province;

That the government immediately initiate an independent, objective review of their funding formula to ensure that each board is given the resources needed to provide quality education to our students.

The Minister of Education and every other member of the Harris government have absolutely refused to accept any responsibility for the exercise of the power they have given to themselves. They wanted to take $1 billion out of education. They decided they could only do that if they took control over all education funding, so they did. They now control all the dollars, they make all the rules about how those dollars are to be spent, and they made their cuts, but they refuse to accept the responsibility for what is actually happening to students and to classrooms because of their decisions.

The minister says that he isn't shutting down junior kindergarten programs or English-as-a-second-language programs or adult education programs. All he has done is cut the funding so drastically that these programs have to be reduced or lost in their entirety. The minister doesn't limit special education programs; he says he's giving special education $1 billion a year. The fact that this means a loss of service for many special-needs students simply isn't his concern. And he doesn't close schools; he keeps telling us that school boards will do that, that nothing is different from before. Except this time school boards aren't looking at closing schools because of declining enrolment; they're being forced to close schools, as many as 600 schools, because this government will not pay to heat, clean or light what they consider to be extra spaces, and there is no flexibility in the funding formula to recognize where the students might be or where they can get an optimal education.

Unfortunately, while the minister refuses to recognize the consequences of his decisions and the impact on the classroom, the impact on those classrooms is only too real indeed.

I want to take my time today - and I know a number of my colleagues are anxious to speak, so I'm not going to go on at length - to paint a picture of what is happening to real students in real classrooms through the words of Margaret Jackson, who is a parent from Kakabeka Falls, Ontario, and who has written the following letter to David Johnson.

"Mr Johnson,

"I would like to draw your attention to the fact that your government's promises are not holding true. You have stated many times that you're putting money back into the classroom and that quality early education is important. Your funding formula has taken money away from the classroom. I challenge you to prove otherwise.

"The performance and welfare of children in the classroom is being affected by reduced funding for busing, reduced lunchtime care, reduced custodial care, increased class size and reduced funding for special education. All these factors are a part of the whole picture called education.

"You have cut custodial care in our schools. The classrooms are cleaned every other day. This affects the children in the classroom who have allergies and asthma. You are creating a health risk for the school community."

At estimates yesterday, one of the members of the government was taking lightly the suggestion that this is creating a health hazard for students in the classroom. This parent is clearly concerned about the lack of maintenance that is being caused by the cut in the maintenance budget. This is a parent whose school is not threatened with closure, at least not imminently, as far as we know, but this is a parent who is seeing the result of what will happen to the maintenance of our schools if boards do not close the schools that they are being forced to close because this government has withdrawn the maintenance funding for what they consider to be extra spaces.

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This parent goes on to point out to the minister:

"You have provided funds of $5 per child per year for lunchtime supervision. I've been informed by my board that most children in the city of Thunder Bay stay at school for lunch. In a rural setting" - and Kakabeka Falls is a rural setting - "where my children attend school, all children are bused. Therefore, all children must stay in the classroom for lunch.

"You, Minister, have not provided sufficient funding for a basic service that is a necessity in schools. You have reduced funds for busing. These buses bring children to the classroom.

"In northwestern Ontario most children live in rural settings and must take a bus to school. These bus rides for some are close to two hours each way. Tell me that this doesn't affect their concentration and performance in the classrooms."

Again, this particular parent's school is not imminently threatened with closure.

If you were talking to my colleague Pat Hoy, who listed a school in his area, Romney Central school, the parents will say, "We don't want our children to be on buses even longer because of the crisis in education that this government has created."

This parent goes on to say:

"Minister, you have been very generous in providing funding for all those wonderful, pricey new American textbooks. But you've stopped dead in your tracks and forgotten there's a next step. These books need to be used in the classroom, but won't be used effectively unless there are teaching bodies to use them, manuals for the teachers to learn from and training opportunities provided to the staff so they can acquaint themselves with the new material. They need to develop new methods by which to teach. Providing part of the tools is not enough."

I might add to Mrs Jackson's comments about textbooks that not providing any textbooks at all for the new science and social studies curriculum certainly doesn't enable teachers to teach that highly vaunted new curriculum this fall.

Mrs Jackson goes on to say:

"You've stated that quality early education is very important, yet you don't follow the standards set by the Day Nurseries Act. The Day Nurseries Act for the same ages, three-, four- and five-year-olds, states that the ratio be 1 to 8, with no more than 16 in any group.

"These standards actually provide the base for which young children can receive quality early education. Low ratios provide quality time and learning opportunities for the young child. One teacher to 25-plus provides for little more than crowd control.

"Once again, these are young children in the classroom who are at a very impressionable age and are being traumatized by your ministry's current student ratio."

Mrs Jackson will know that 25 to 1 in a JK class is now the mandated and funded average junior kindergarten class size in Ontario. Many junior kindergarten classes are in fact higher than 25. Where they are lower, it is because boards have made classes from grade 1 and up higher to accommodate the essential lower ratios in a junior kindergarten class. Of course, the class sizes in grades 1 and 2 are going to be considerably larger than they have been before because this government withdrew $147 million that was used previously to keep class sizes down in grades 1 and 2.

Mrs Jackson goes on to address this. She says:

"Class sizes have been capped as per your instruction. What rationale dictates that JK-SK children can handle a 1 to 25-plus ratio? What rationale dictates that the primary grades can handle a 1 to 25-or-more ratio? These are the very grades that previously received extra funding so that the number of students were less and the children in the classroom could benefit. The numbers in the lower grades need to be lower so that the children can get more individual attention and therefore get a quality early education."

Mrs Jackson comments on special education funding, which she says has been reduced over the last number of years in her school. She believes that what's happened is that special-needs students are being forced into regular classrooms without support. In fact, she says:

"Our school has close to 60 special-needs or at-risk students with one half-time special education support person. This support is inadequate and woefully not acceptable. The funding you've allocated for the testing of children at risk is not sufficient. Our school has already identified more students to be tested than the budget allows for."

Mrs Jackson goes on to comment about secondary schools. She says:

"Minister, you have through Bill 160 put secondary school teachers in a position to reach burnout quickly. Teaching seven out of eight periods doesn't allow for sufficient planning time, time to mark assignments, time to volunteer for lunchtime activities or after-school sports. Once again, teachers spending time in the classroom is only a part of the picture."

She adds a comment about the value of extracurricular activities which develop leadership qualities, a love for physical activity, which in turn promotes mental stimulation, that they learn to work as a team. These are life skills that cannot readily be taught in the classroom. I won't complete the letter with the very specific comment she has of a political nature to the minister.

I wanted to paint this picture as seen by a parent who is on the front lines with teachers, with students, seeing the reality of what this government's cuts are doing to create a crisis in the classrooms of her children. Her words essentially echo the comments that were made by Justice Cumming, who was commenting on Bill 160 after having received extensive testimony on the consequences of Bill 160 in court and said that the funding formula was put together in haste without considering its impact on education. He said that some boards, just to meet the terms of Bill 160 and live within the government's funding conditions, would either have to negotiate significant reductions in salaries for their personnel or would have to cannibalize their education system.

This government likes to talk about equity, but the funding formula is simply not working in a way which is truly equitable and it certainly is not conducive to providing an equal educational opportunity for every student, because what this government has done is provide funding at the lowest common denominator and that is denying opportunity to many students.

If this government actually wants to deliver what it says it is doing in its $6.5 million worth of advertising, it should stop now, take a look at what it is actually doing and have an independent review of the funding formula so that we can determine what is truly fair and equitable funding.

Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak to the Liberal opposition resolution because it of course keeps in front of all of our minds here and across the province the devastation that has been wrought on publicly funded education in this province by the government of the day.

No one should be under any illusions about who created the crisis. No one should have any sense that there is no choice on the part of the government to do what it has done. It has proudly declared that it is almost an article of faith for it to transform the educational system to make it something quite different from what we have built up over many years in this province.

The Mike Harris Tory government has a whole different vision of what education is about. It is not the broad-based educational system that was built up in this province from the time of Ryerson through Bill Davis. It is not the kind of system that is there to develop in students a sense of community, to help students to learn how to be part of their community, where the school system is directly connected to the local community through its governance structures and through its funding structures. It's a whole different ball game now.

Through Bill 160 and through Bill 104, this government has decided to remove the local elements from education, to give the central control of education to the Ministry of Education, to control entirely the purse strings - absolutely no flexibility allowed to local communities to meet their own individual needs - to revise the curriculum to a back-to-basics kind of curriculum focused primarily on preparing children and youth as if they were widgets for the industrial market, rather than to educate them and to make them better citizens.

It is extremely serious when we see a government that has cut what they call frills out of an education system - frills that include the kind of psychological supports that children need, the kind of mentoring supports that children need, the music and art and drama that help children learn self-expression and socialization. They will tell you: "We haven't done any of those things. Local school boards may make those choices." But we all know, and the parents and the students all know, and the teachers and the boards all know, that when you cut the funding into little pieces and force the funding into your priorities the way this government has, the things that this government considers extraneous - things like social studies, we heard the Premier say, things that do not fit their model of job training as a form of education - we know that local school boards are going to have very little choice. That's really what this is all about, is making sure that there is a conformity that enables the system to turn out children to be pawns in the larger picture this government has.

Bill 160, which the Liberal motion talks about, is only one part of this, because there are many other parts of this. Bill 160 deals only with the funding of elementary and secondary schools and it doesn't deal with the underfunding in post-secondary education, it doesn't deal with the lack of access to post-secondary education under a deregulated system of tuition fees. It doesn't speak to the devastating changes to the apprenticeship program, which we are in the process of discussing here with Bill 55. It doesn't deal with the download of responsibilities to a municipality, on the one hand, in terms of municipal services, but the absolute lack of power left for school board officials as a result of Bill 104.

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Lest anybody have any kind of illusion left that these are not deliberate effects, and I can't imagine that anyone has that illusion left after watching the previous Minister of Education explain how a crisis was going to be created and then that was how this government was going to engineer the changes it wanted from its ideological point of view. I can't imagine people are under that illusion, but if perhaps they are, they need to look at Bill 160 and the kinds of concerns that have arisen out of Bill 160 in that context of the broader perspective.

We have a real need to be very clear about the fact that we're at a crossroads. Publicly funded education as we know it in this province is being decimated by these decisions. It is very clear that the kind of interaction between teachers and students and parents and the local boards is being undermined, and I would suggest quite deliberately undermined, by the rhetoric of this government.

This government has consistently attacked teachers, and the disgusting display of the Minister of Education celebrating World Teachers' Day the other day was a spectacle indeed to behold, after there has been attack after attack after attack on teachers and their legitimate bargaining unions.

One of the clear issues that is at stake is, who is going to have the interests of children at heart? Is it going to be people who have trained themselves, who have chosen to teach, who in many cases have worked within the educational system for a long time, who have committed themselves and recommitted themselves day after day to the task of teaching students, or is it going to be government members, many of whom have expressed nothing but contempt for education, nothing but contempt for the kinds of policies that have made our system one of the best in the world?

What we have is a situation where so much has been done so quickly to move us in the wrong direction, in exactly the wrong direction, that sometimes people are blinded to the reality of what's going on, and that's a very serious matter.

It is my belief that at stake here very clearly is the whole notion of publicly funded education, a public education system that is the system that's available to all those in the province who seek an education, to all those in the province who are of age to be entitled to education. We, of course, believe that all Ontarians ought to be entitled to education, and one of the most offensive things about the government's actions has been its steady attack on the educational opportunities for adults who are seeking the kind of training that will make them better able to feed themselves and their families.

When we talk about public education we often think about children from age 4 through age 19, but we have to be very clear that we have a large number of people in this province who still require the basic education sometimes of elementary school and sometimes of secondary school. Yet what has this government done? It has withdrawn the kind of funding that would enable that education to take place in the most effective way. By treating all adult education as though it's continuing education, as though it's something that people do on the side, it's not something that people dedicate themselves to on a full-time basis, has the effect of making it extremely difficult for marginalized people to participate and extremely difficult for boards of education to explain an emphasis on adult education in an appropriate way. It is a tragedy that we see the opportunities that had been built up over a number of years for daytime all-adult schools being destroyed by this government's policy, and it is another part of this kind of destructive force that is going on.

There's no reason to assume that this government's belief in privatization is not at the root of many of these attacks. We have seen the kind of belief expressed in many ways that privately offered and delivered services, this government says, are always going to be more effective and efficient than those delivered in the public sphere. They have taken that tack by privatizing, by contracting out in their own government ministry. They have taken that tack in terms of the so-called market basis for the long-term health care system, where competition, not competence, not care of patients, is at the base.

It is quite clear, because we hear the echoes in their voices every day, that they have bought into the Fraser Institute vision of privatized education. This is an ideology that this government has, that people ought to be able to pay for the services that they have, and they ought to be able to pay for them in a direct way. We heard that kind of ideology expressed by David Frum only recently about health care. We see it in the Fraser Institute's reports on privatized education. We see it in the demand for vouchered schools. We see it in the demand for all sorts of private schools for equity funding with the publicly funded education system. Many would say: "What's wrong with that? It's all education." What's wrong with it is that once we get that private pay system in place, what we do is skew the availability to those who have no ability to pay, exactly as we do in the health care system.

While we certainly would agree with many of the concerns that are raised in the Liberal opposition day motion, one of the things we find missing from here is that whole focus of what is really at the base of the changes that this government has made in education.

This government has a belief that those who have dollars have dollars because they're smarter and they work harder and they deserve all of the best things, and the people who don't have money are, by contrast, necessarily lazy, less able, less worthy, less deserving of the best things in life. As soon as you begin to privatize education, and I would suggest health care, as this government's vision clearly shows them moving towards, then what we do is make the almighty dollar the only thing that matters. Those that have dollars can purchase the education they choose for their children; those who don't have dollars do not have that capacity, and a truncated publicly funded system will go the way of publicly funded education in many of the states in the United States.

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As a direct result of federal and state underfunding in the United States, the public education system in many parts of that country is unable to deliver the quality kind of education that is going to bring those who are less fortunate up to the threshold so that they can actually enter into opportunities in the rest of the community.

I don't have that vision for Ontario. I don't think most people in Ontario have that vision. I think most people in Ontario know that one of the reasons we are known as one of the best places in the world to live is because we have developed a good, publicly funded education system that cares about the success of every child - not just children whose parents have deep pockets but every child.

What is happening with the education system is a de-equalization of opportunity in education that is concerted and that is having an effect already. When you go to speak to young people in junior and senior high school about what they expect to see in the future, invariably in working-class neighbourhoods, in neighbourhoods where parents do not have a lot of savings, do not have a lot of income, you hear young people saying: "I always thought I'd go to college" or "I always thought I'd go to university, but I don't think I can afford to do it now. I can't afford to start my adult life with a debt burden of $25,000 to $30,000." They're overtly saying that they don't believe that opportunity is going to be there for them.

If it isn't, we know that their chances of employment are very little. We know very much that as our economy changes, as the skill-knowledge matrix changes, the chance of well-paid employment if you do not have post-secondary education drops dramatically.

What we see happening in this whole context of all the changes in education is the reality that a whole lot of young people in Ontario today, people the age of the pages we have here in the Legislature, are suddenly facing very different opportunities than they would have faced had the system been a more open system, had the system encouraged that participation.

Only part of that is Bill 160, but Bill 160, because of the rigidity of the government's decisions to top-down decide what is valuable and what is not, has the potential of disenfranchising, disadvantaging lots of young people. There are lots of young people whose road to learning is not through what this government thinks is important. It's not through the nuts and bolts that are going to turn them into the widgets that this government thinks they should be, but it is through a lot of the peripheral support that they have been able to have in school that they will likely not be able to have given the constraints that school boards are going to have.

We know the stories of hundreds of young people who through music, art and drama, for example, through after-school activities, have suddenly found their feet, have suddenly taken fire, have suddenly had a capacity to learn that didn't appear to be there before because we couldn't access their particular kind of learning.

When you put the kind of emphasis that this government is putting on its curriculum to prepare people for the jobs that industry says today they want them for, we're limiting them for possibilities in the future. They need to be very flexible. They don't need to be hammered into square holes to meet the needs of an employer today which are likely to change tomorrow, and that is the great fear that people have when we see the education system being controlled top-down from people who do not know what the community is like in which people live, do not know what the aspirations of that community might be and who do not know what the real opportunities are within the community for those young people.

Yesterday we got a sense that the kinds of learning that make us a civic society, that help us to live together in the multicultural, multiracial society we have somehow are not as important.

Those are the kinds of issues that people are fearful about, people who've had experience with the Ministry of Education. One of the reasons there was this duplication around curriculum was that when the curriculum came down from on high, it very often did not mean much to the people living in a community. It needed to be rewritten to meet the needs of those communities, and we quite clearly see that's not something that this government thinks is important, because there's no provision for teachers within a particular community to fashion a curriculum that's going to meet the needs of those students. That is not to say that those students wouldn't be learning the basics. They would be learning the basics, but they would be learning them in a way that enabled them to understand.

I must say that added to the whole dollar issue which the Liberal motion clearly puts an emphasis on, this whole philosophical, ideological context is equally as serious as the context about the dollar being the bottom line.

As the last point, I would say that what I find missing here in the resolution is very much of an idea of how the Liberals think this whole problem should be solved. I personally think that when you criticize what is going on, you need to be very clear about what you would do differently. You need to be very clear about what it is. Is the Liberal motion saying that they would restore the dollars to the education system? I don't seem to see that here. One of the real concerns we have is - the faults they have found in the system we agree with. We agree that all of these and many more dangers exist in this bill. But we don't see anything coming forward from the Liberals that suggests that they're going to reinvest in education, and if they are going to reinvest in education, where they're going to get the resources to do that.

That is a clear difference between us. While we agree on the dangers, we as New Democrats believe, first of all, that there must be a reinvestment, that it must be done in such a way that it very clearly puts focus on the things that have gotten lost in the system along the way. Yes, there needs to be an independent objective review of the funding formula, because there are many communities where that funding formula, that cookie-cutter approach, is being very destructive and other communities where the cookie-cutter approach is giving them an advantage over neighbouring boards. So an objective overview of the funding formula needs to be done.

But where are the dollars going to come from? We as New Democrats say very clearly that we know where some of those dollars will come from. Some of those dollars will come from our determination that the top 6% of earners will have the opportunity, as the government says, to reinvest in education because many of the top earners have already benefited from the education system and will continue to benefit from the added prestige and power they get by virtue of their income.

We also clearly say that much more may be necessary. We need to find some way to build into this whole system that's been set up the flexibility to reflect some of the local diversity in our province. Education does not occur in a vacuum; it occurs in a community. It is important that education speak to that community. In many of our communities, there are many parents who do not have education as a top value for themselves, and one of the tasks of education is to ensure that they have confidence that what children learn in school, what their young people learn, is going to actually be to the life they are going to lead. There is no such confidence, given that this curriculum is going to come down from on high, from the ivory tower of the Mowat Block, and be imposed on each community as if that community were exactly the same as the one next door.

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Hon David Johnson (Minister of Education and Training): We've heard the doom and the gloom in education. We've heard the doom-and-gloom critics from the Liberals and the NDP, who see nothing but worry and concern and bleakness in our education system. I'm here to tell you that I have a completely different vision from the doom and gloom that we've heard from the opposition ranks.

We in the governing party, the Progressive Conservatives, have a very optimistic and bright vision of education in the future, one that stresses equal opportunity for all students, one that stresses excellence and quality in the public education system, a system that parents are happy to send their child into.

Unfortunately, over the past number of years, some parents have taken their children out of the public education system because they were concerned. But we have turned that corner now and we are reinstating quality -

Interjection.

The Acting Speaker: Order, please. Member for Fort York, come to order.

Hon David Johnson: - into the education system, discipline into the education system. I see nothing but a bright future. As the investment dealers say, I am bullish on education in the province of Ontario.

There are a couple of aspects that I could comment on, though. In our vision of education, teachers are an integral, central, core component of the education system in the province, excellent teachers. We do have excellent teachers in the system and we count on those excellent teachers -

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): Yes, those ads really demonstrate that.

The Acting Speaker: Member for Oakwood, come to order.

Hon David Johnson: - to contribute and to keep education on track in the future. I find it somewhat puzzling that the Liberal Party would only as an afterthought, the very last "whereas" clause, make scant reference to the dedication of Ontario's teachers. They worry about the funding, they worry about the dollars, they worry about everything else, but barely mention teachers in their proposal. I want to tell you that we put teachers up front.

I also say that the motion before us references repeatedly pouring fuel on the education crisis. Unfortunately, this has happened. We did have an illegal strike last year. There were at least two members of this Legislature who walked that picket line, who inflamed, who fanned the flames during that illegal picket time. One of them was the leader of the official opposition, Mr Dalton McGuinty. He was out there proudly fanning the flames, pouring fuel on the fire.

When I mentioned this the other night, the NDP said, "Don't forget about our leader." They said, "Our leader was there too. Our leader," they said, "was also throwing fuel on the fire at the same time that the Liberal leader was." The two of them were there.

Mrs Boyd: And individual members too; not just the leaders.

Hon David Johnson: Now the NDP are telling me it wasn't just the leaders; there were more of their members there. That's why I said there were at least two members of this House. The leader of the official opposition not only walked the picket line, adding fuel to the fire, but spoke at the rallies and encouraged the fact that the schools were being closed to our students, encouraged this situation. I say shame on the leader of the official opposition for being a part of that, for throwing that fuel on the fire, and shame to the members of the third party, although we expect it from the third party. That's their bit, so I guess to some degree we can excuse them.

The agenda that we have for education is one of quality. In the very few minutes that I have, I want to reiterate some of the key components of the quality in education which we are restoring in the province of Ontario, a quality that parents have said needs to be restored. Parents have been pleading for this quality to be restored to education. We have listened to those parents.

I would like to start with the new curriculum at the elementary level. We know that over a course of years, prior to last year, the curriculum had been sliding, that the rigour was no longer in the curriculum, either at the elementary or the secondary level, that there were no expectations, so parents didn't know at the end of each grade level what their students should have been taught or what the students should have learned.

I'm proud to say that beginning over a year ago, last fall, we did, through the new mathematics curriculum and the new language curriculum, begin the process of revival of the curriculum. These two were introduced a year ago.

The remainder of the new curriculum was introduced just this past month, in September, a curriculum that at the science and technology level, for example, involved the first new technology curriculum in over 30 years, the first kindergarten program since 1944. We did it over the opposition, you might say, of the opposite ranks. But we held true in our belief that the curriculum needed to be upgraded, needed to have annual year-by-year expectations so that the parents, the teachers and the students themselves would know at the end of each year, whether it's an arts curriculum or physical ed and health, what they should be taught, what they should have learned.

Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): What about English?

Hon David Johnson: Language as well: each and every course. The curriculum is more challenging. It has been applauded, and it has been introduced at the elementary level.

It's now being developed for the secondary level. The new secondary school curriculum will begin next fall, in the year 1999, and it will work hand in glove with the elementary curriculum and introduce that rigour back into the secondary schools which we have introduced into the elementary schools.

What is the next natural step, once the curriculum has been introduced? The natural next step is to test against that curriculum. I'm pleased to say here's the Cobourg Daily Star indicating that the province is to test grade 6 students. This is just one newspaper that is carrying the message that next year not only will we be testing grade 3 students right across the province of Ontario, but grade 6 students as well.

This testing program, along with the new curriculum, is being developed with the assistance of teachers. We have involved teachers in all aspects of the reform. Teachers developed the new curriculum; teachers have developed the testing. Not only have they developed the testing, but obviously they're involved in marking the results of the testing. They're doing so very enthusiastically, I might say, because as I recounted to this House recently, I was fortunate to drop in one day when they were marking the grade 3 test results, and the teachers were extremely enthusiastic. We had three times more volunteers to be involved in that testing process than actually could be accommodated. These are the elementary teachers.

The testing is going to be helpful to the individual students, the testing is going to be helpful to schools so the schools know how they stand and the testing is going to be helpful to school boards so they know how to allocate their resources and if there are specific areas, specific schools that need a greater allocation of resources to assist the students there. The testing, I think, is a wonderful new addition.

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Next comes a new report card, again developed with the assistance of teachers. Report cards are important not only to the students but to the parents, and the teachers are glad to see report cards that are understandable as well. We have a report card that finally parents can understand. I know all the members of this House have talked to parents over the years who have said: "We cannot understand these old report cards. We do not know where our students stand. Please give us a report card so we know how our children are faring in the education system." With the assistance of teachers, that has been developed. It will be out all across Ontario before Christmas in all the elementary schools. I'm really proud of that.

What comes next? How about textbooks? As the Port Hope Evening Guide says, "Schools Get New Textbooks." Finally.

Interjection.

Hon David Johnson: Exactly right, those old dog-eared books. Some schools in the past would say, "We'd be delighted to have dog-eared books," because they didn't even have dog-eared books. Where was all the textbook money going?

Mr Marchese: Teachers had a couple of days. How many days did they have to choose those books?

The Acting Speaker: Member for Fort York, will you come to order.

Hon David Johnson: It was perhaps going into administration or bureaucracy. Unfortunately, not enough of it was going into textbooks where it should have gone. So we've done two things there.

Mr Marchese: You're the best, Dave.

The Acting Speaker: Take your seat for a moment. Member for Fort York, this is not a dialogue between you and the Minister of Education. You'll get your chance, I'm sure, in a few minutes. Please come to order. Minister of Education.

Hon David Johnson: I'm always delighted to have the input from the member for Fort York. He's always helpful.

I will say that the two things we've done with regard to the textbooks are, number one, by protecting classroom spending in the new funding formula we have ensured that more funds will go into textbooks through the school boards' annual purchasing program. Those funds are protected, they must be spent in the classroom, and the students will get more textbooks. But this year we felt that to start this new process I'm so optimistic about we would double the amount of money going into the elementary textbook system. The province of Ontario organized the purchasing process. Over 3.2 million books -

Mr Bert Johnson (Perth): That's a lot of books.

Hon David Johnson: That's a lot of books - have found their way into our elementary classrooms across Ontario. It's overdue. And I can tell you that we're only about halfway there. Because of the $100-million total allotment, because of the excellent value we've received for this mass purchase, there remains $45 million yet to purchase more books, science equipment and computer software in the classrooms, all of these resources to help our students. Over the course of the next several months, we will be working, and have been working, with teachers across Ontario to determine the science equipment they need, the computer software they need, and you'll see more of those resources flowing into the classroom.

I mentioned the new funding formula a couple of times. It's the key aspect here that allocates fairly. The member for London Centre says we need to look at each individual student, and I agree with her 100%, and each individual school and we need to ensure a fairness. Unfortunately, I'm sure the member for London Centre would agree with me that the funding has not been fair in the past, has not been allocated fairly to each student, to each school, to each board. Boards have had vastly differing amounts of resources to spend on those individual schools and those individual students.

Now that has come to an end. Now we say that each child is valued equally in Ontario through the funding formula. Each child receives the same amount of resources to assist in his or her education, whether that child is in a rural area or an urban area, whatever system that child is in. That's a key element and an element we believe in very firmly.

Finally, and I guess my time is just about up, I would say that the other aspects, such as the cap on class sizes, are most important. As I've indicated to this House, between 1991 and 1997, for example, every year, unfortunately the average size of classes across Ontario has increased; each and every year in the elementary system more children on average in every class. We've said that has got to stop and we've put a stop to it. We've put a cap on average class sizes. That will lead to quality.

All of these measures are leading to improved quality, more instructional time for our students so that our students will now have the same number of instructional days as students from other provinces such as British Columbia and Alberta. Formerly they had fewer instructional days. These are adding quality to our education system.

My time has run out, but I will say that with these added improvements, these added quality initiatives, I think this House should be bullish on our education system and should look forward to a bright future for our education system in Ontario.

Mr Gerard Kennedy (York South): I'm sure for the public of Ontario, for anyone who has watched the debate, they think there have been enough things related to bulls in this House to last for some time.

Minister, when there is a book written, one that covers the history of Ontario accurately, one that hasn't been thrown together to meet your political deadline on trying to push money out the door, it will have some regard for you as minister. What it will talk about is that instead of an education minister, we had a flim-flam man trying to sell us the equivalent of snake oil by trying to show us that somehow the education system which he's wrecking over here is being improved by a few little window dressings over there. "Drink some of this elixir and everything will be fine," says Dave Johnson.

That elixir contains some pretty sad ingredients. It contains a rushed and almost wrecked book-buying program. It contains an attack on teachers which began with your predecessor, who sits in the House, continued and perpetuated by yourself, and it continues to this day.

I don't know how you didn't choke on the words when you tried to criticize the Liberals for not putting teachers first. The problem is, you've put teachers first - right in your sights, right in your agenda of pulling things down, of attacking and denigrating. You've had nothing sincere to say about the well-being and the practice of teaching in this province. Instead what you've created, precisely and clearly, are the obverse conditions. Working with your predecessor, you've been able to make sure that teachers can't do the job they want to do, the job they signed on to do, the job they've committed to do in this province.

It's very instructive to the people watching this debate that you refrain from defending the very things this debate is about in terms of what you're actually doing to the education system, and that includes closing schools, because that's substantially what you're accomplishing with your bill in the first place and everything that you've followed through on with your amendments on class size and so on. You're still following through on the closing of hundreds of schools in this province. That will be your legacy. Nothing will fool the parents around this province when they see, as they will in my riding, five and probably 10 schools shut down simply because of the clumsiness and lack of commitment on the part of your government.

Similarly, you refrain from talking about what you're actually doing in terms of teachers. You're firing them. You're letting teachers go. You had the gall to stand in this House last week, fortunately caught out by our education critic, Lyn McLeod, and try and pretend otherwise. Your own figures show that there are 8,000 or 9,500 who have taken up retirement. You talk about hiring new teachers. The net effect is 3,500 fewer people instructing our children at the same time that there are 5,000 more children. That is the kind of flim-flam that only a Minister of Education less concerned with children, less concerned with parents, less concerned with creating an effective citizenship in this province, could try and get away with.

What he hasn't reckoned with is that there are deeper roots than that. This isn't the kind of thing to be dealt with with the superficial tricks this minister is trying to purvey to the public. Instead, the public has an abiding respect for teachers doing their jobs. That's the kind of thing this minister hasn't counted on, that these things will be found out, just like some students are finding out now that some of those textbooks that were ordered are erasable. They were printed so badly and in such a rush that they're not even going to hold up. But that doesn't matter to this minister because what he's interested in is that they lasted for the photo op, that they last long enough to be propaganda, he hopes, for next year's election.

What people really want is some certainty, some stability and some security in the classroom. What they don't want are members -

Interjection.

The Acting Speaker: Member for Etobicoke-Humber, come to order.

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Mr Kennedy: This is, of course, bigger than the Minister of Health. We heard from the member for Scarborough East and the present member for Etobicoke; and from each of them, not a peep on behalf of students, not one thing is said on behalf of students to protect them from the impact of this.

Let's look at the core of this. This is the part that makes the government members so irate, because they know in each and every school in their riding this is being played out right now - not more teaching time for students but rather 25%, 30% more students per teacher. They know the parents in their ridings are going to find the attention that their kids get fragmented by their minister and by their government.

They're giving them four periods to teach, for example, in the separate school system. I cited the other day the case of a music teacher, a biology teacher, a high-level English teacher. They're not talking about 25 more minutes a day. You're talking about an extra period, 75 minutes, and you're taking away the time they have to mark tests, to pay attention to those students, to do the extra things that they need to do. And they're not extra things; they're part and parcel things.

In this House, we might sit some 20% of the time of a normal week. If we were to listen to the members opposite, if we were to take them seriously, if they had the courage to stand up and say, "This is what we want to do: We want to diminish the effectiveness of our teaching profession, we actually want to deduct from them some of the time they have to do a good job," if they had the courage, if this minister, instead of trying to sell his trinkets out there in what he thinks is some frontier, that people won't be fully paying attention, told us that's what he wanted to do, at least the debate could begin.

You won't hear one member, not one member on the government side, stand up and acknowledge what they're actually trying to accomplish: to have more students per teacher; to divide and fragment and pull apart their ability to provide a learning experience for each of those students.

It begets the question: Why would they do that? This is a group of individuals that we have in government today, led by their flim-flam minister, who will not hunker down on what the real fundamentals of education in this province are: a learning environment that has teachers inspired to do their job, that sees the government as a referee between them and the boards, not someone who meddles and makes mischief and delves into things that aren't necessarily the purview of government at all. It's only done because this minister wants to have that effect in terms of teachers, wants to reduce their ability to function, because it's one of the ways this minister will hope to discredit public education.

This minister and those members opposite haven't invented a crisis for nothing; they've done this for a purpose. They've done this so that if they can slide past the next election, if they can fool enough people about what they're doing currently, they'll bring us an even more fragmented and probably not even public system, a charter system, a voucher system, something based on some of the philosophical beliefs that unfortunately none of the members opposite have the courage to put out there in the open where they can be debated, so we can see what the public values are for some of the nonsense that's going on when they take money out of the schools, when they discourage teachers, when they slam the school administration, when they attack the boards and then say, as this minister did just a few minutes ago, "We're going to give you better quality." Nobody is buying that flim-flam except for the Tory backbench. Somehow they think they and their little junior flim-flammers are going to be able to go around the province and sell little vials of this stuff in their own ridings.

If they had the courage to take their phone calls, meet with some of the parents, meet with some of the teachers, debate with some of the opposition members they've been running away from, they'd be able to find out just how poor the ingredients of this education flim-flam really are.

There is no manner in which the children of our province are going to be well served by the latest manoeuvres of this government. We are compromising our ability to be able to provide a proper learning environment. This government talks about equality, and it talks about equality in the only way that a Reform-Tory government can reckon it, and that is to bring people down to a certain level, to pull down people who are aspiring to do their best. So, rather than setting a standard in terms of what actually needs to be accomplished for each of the children and funding that, they're letting the funding, an average for the province - for example, for maintenance - drive what actually is going to be there for those kids.

Schools in my riding are going to be less safe, the playgrounds will contain more broken glass, their hallways will be dirtier and there won't be as many support services to make those schools function as a direct result of the things this minister, this Premier and this backbench are permitting to happen in this province. They've used, for example, an average amount of money that it costs to be able to provide maintenance and not had respect for the extra costs that exist in some of the larger centres. There is no choice in that connection that they've provided to the school boards, not one iota of local community decision-making to say: "This is what we need to do to keep our children safe. This is what we need to do to deal with the requirements of our community."

This funny, quirky, Reform-Tory party doesn't believe in community. It has forgotten all about it. You know that, the public of Ontario, because you're the ones who have been on the receiving end of this Tory government walking into your town and telling you which hospitals are going to shut down. You're on the receiving end of this Tory government now when it tells your board, "No, you can't have money to keep those schools open," even when they play a role in your community, even when they're important for special education, even when they're the sites for adult education, which this government has sentenced to extinction. This regressive government doesn't recognize that people don't need just their first chance but their second and third chances at getting the education they require if they're going to succeed in this world. Instead, there's no allotment for that, none whatsoever, showing a detachment on the part of this government from the basic values this province was founded on.

Sadly for the members opposite - I mean, we hate to be of any aid and assistance to them - they have yet to reckon with the fact that the public out there is not going to be fooled, that Dave Johnson is selling us flim-flam, that he doesn't reckon on the public having a much better instinct about this than he has so far taken a notion of. I think it only behooves the backbench today to start to show us some of the fibre, some of the timber that brought them into politics in the first place. Let's see one of the backbench actually talk to us about the flaws in this bill, the flaws in Bill 160, the flaws in the makeup legislation, the actual trouble and turmoil they've inflicted on the education system. Let's see one honest Tory today.

Mr Marchese: I'm happy to have this opportunity to speak to this motion. I really don't disagree with much of what is contained in this motion, obviously, so I'll speak generally to what this Conservative government has done to the education system and refer myself to the comments of the minister, because he's a smooth kind of guy.

Mr Douglas B. Ford (Etobicoke-Humber): A nice guy.

Mr Marchese: I'm not sure about nice, but he is smooth. There are a lot of people out there watching who think he's a very sincere kind of guy who means what he says.

Mr Colle: Slick.

Mr Marchese: Slick, it's true, but he is smooth. You must admit, he does a good job.

He talks about equal opportunity, he talks about excellence, he talks about quality, he talks about parents being happy, he talks about turning the corner. In fact, he said a lot of people were going to the private system before, and now, through the policies of this government, they're able to turn the corner and bring people back to the system. This man can in fact say, with the appearance of sincerity, the opposite of what is happening out there, but he will have us believe that what he's saying, of course, is the truth. It's remarkable. That's why I speak to his wonderful talents as a man who is very smooth, and he does it very well. He's one of the best we've got in the front benches. Trust me, I say that with sincerity.

But he talks about things such as report cards. Who can disagree with report cards? New Democrats talked about that, introduced that, in fact, before we left this place. Did we disagree with a better report card system? No one will disagree, obviously. He speaks about curriculum changes, about putting more science and technology into the curriculum. He doesn't speak about how, in putting more science courses into the curriculum, you are displacing other courses such as English, which I would say is needed by a whole lot of you on the other side. If you folks are an example of what we learn through the English curriculum, I tell you, we need more, not less. Maybe science is what we need, because it leans to the proclivities of this minister, who happens to have studied mathematics. Perhaps those leanings are clearly being manifested, but I tell you there's a whole need for more English in the curriculum. The minister could certainly benefit and many of you would benefit from that, I argue.

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You've got to put the context of the anger of people out there, teachers and others, by speaking about Bill 104 and Bill 160. But the minister, if you listen to him, never talks about Bill 104, never talks about Bill 160. He is always on the periphery, talking about other topics that he believes people will listen to. That's why he speaks about report cards. That's why he speaks about testing students, his latest kick, and textbooks.

It was interesting, on the issue of textbooks I read two letters to the editor just yesterday, teachers saying, "It is amazing to me how this government can, in the space of a short time, say to teachers `You've got a couple of weeks' - I'm not even sure they had a couple of weeks - `to buy these books.'" Otherwise if they didn't make it by the deadline they would have no books. Some of these poor teachers had to rush out without any sense of guidelines as to what they might buy, but they had to rush out in a short period of time and buy books so they could say to the minister, "Yes, we bought books."

It is in my view quite an amazing thing that governments are engaged in when, without any sense of thought - this government doesn't think, it acts. They're proud of acting. You should be proud of thinking, but there is no corresponding thought that follows your actions. All of you, as with the eminence, the Premier, love to speak about action, but most human beings will tell you it's nice to think before you do that. This is a government that does not respect thought. It likes to have people believe they are real men who know how to act and act decisively. Our problem is -

Ms Marilyn Mushinski (Scarborough-Ellesmere): Your problem is you want to control it.

The Acting Speaker: Order, please.

Mr Marchese: Our problem is that we think you should think. The former Minister of Culture says my problem is that we like to control things. I refer the public to Bill 160, which contradicts the comments made by the former Minister of Culture and says that this is the government that, in the history of governments in this province that I'm aware of, has centralized power unlike any other. Bill 160 does just that. It takes control away from local boards.

Bill 104 did that by making sure the trustees have no more power. Their remuneration is so small that I'm not sure why people run any more. Trustees are no longer accountable, can't go to meetings because where in the past they might have had one family of schools, they now have four families of schools. If in one family of schools there might have been six to eight, and you multiply that by three other families of schools, you've got 24 schools. Trustees can't make it to the meetings any longer to tell them about what's happening with your policies. They can't do it.

They also are not there full-time any longer to be able to assist parents who might have a problem with the system or, for that matter, a teacher. We have effectively destroyed advocacy for parents, for whom the trustee was the mediator. They've destroyed all of that. This government doesn't like advocacy. It wants to destroy it, under the guise of saying parents have more power than ever before.

Then there is Bill 160, the most centralizing bill that I have ever seen. They now effectively control education and education finance and major decisions through that bill. But you won't have M. Johnson, the Minister of Education, saying that. In fact, he'll tell you that he doesn't understand why teachers are so upset. What could he have done that could rile teachers so? He cannot discern the problem. That's the word he used the other day, he cannot "discern" it. Yet the problem is so palpable that why this man can't discern it is beyond understanding.

Bill 160 is the palpable reason why teachers dislike this minister and dislike this Premier and dislike these government members.

Laughter.

Mr Marchese: But Mr Ford laughs. I hope he survives the nomination meeting against the Speaker, because we love him here. He's a good man. He chuckles well in the House. We need him to come back. He understands Bill 160 very well. That's why he's here chuckling at my remarks. I appreciate it.

Mr John Gerretsen (Kingston and The Islands): Get real.

Mr Marchese: Don't you think we need him?

Mr Gerretsen: We need him in the nomination fight, yes.

Mr Marchese: It'll be an interesting fight.

Bill 160 takes all the control away from boards of education. No longer do trustees make decisions on local curriculum to reflect the needs of that local board. They have no such power any longer. Why? Because under the wisdom of this new Russian, centralized kind of government they know what's better for the majority of the public. They say: "We know better. We don't need to give local boards any opportunity to reflect their communities because we do it well."

This is about money. That's what it's all about. It's about mathematics over humanity. They take money out of the educational system and then they say it's about quality. They whack teachers on a daily basis and then they say, "We like teachers." In fact, Mr Johnson, the Minister of Education, accused the Liberals of not mentioning teachers at all in their resolution, whereas this minister loves teachers. It is true they have been fighting for a while, but he loves them, to be fair.

We've got a serious problem on our hands. It's about taking money out of the education system. Boards of education used to spend about $2.5 billion out of local money. That $2.5 billion did not figure at all into your figures because the province has no responsibility for them because they do not pay for any of those programs.

Ms Mushinski: It didn't figure in the classroom either.

Mr Marchese: Oh, I'll get to that if I can, if I have time. There's so little time. You people have cut the time allowed for us to speak to such little length that we have no more time to speak to bills.

The $2.5 billion that used to go into local programming: The former minister of culture says, "It didn't go into the classroom." Having been a trustee and a former teacher, I can tell her she's wrong, because if she knew she wouldn't say it. As a former trustee with the Toronto board, I can tell you a whole lot of money went into programming, but these people have redefined learning and redefined classroom, so under their definition it didn't go into the classroom. That $2.5 billion will disappear because it's not in the books provincially.

People are being fired left and right. That $2.5 billion is disappearing from places like Toronto, places like Ottawa, places like Hamilton. It's disappearing, and those dollars were used to address issues connected to local needs. The Metro board is a reception centre for a great many immigrant students. We used a lot of money for that purpose. It's a reception centre for a lot of people who are refugees. We used a lot of money to assist people with those needs. It is a city that has a great deal of poverty, I might add. We as a board used money to assist students as a way of equalizing the conditions we get students from. We used money to assist parents - and there are a lot of single parents in Toronto, Speaker; you know that. A lot of money went to assist issues in terms of kids who come from some troubled backgrounds, recognizing that there are problems and that we need to provide extra resources to assist those students and those teachers in those boards.

They've taken all that away, yet you have the minister saying here that parents are happy, he's happy, Tories are happy. Someone is happy out there, and we are doom and gloom.

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On the face of what I've been saying, we've got a problem. The minister says he is bullish about this. He's using a market term. To also use a marketplace term, I would say we need a correction in this place, a political correction in the system. That's why we're hoping these people are going to go. Just like the market systems are correcting themselves, I believe there a political correction will happen in the next election. The markets are bearish, not bullish. I think he might have misused that term. As a mathematical person I suspect he would know. Maybe he didn't understand it, or maybe he does. We've got a serious problem on our hands.

I don't want to talk about the global economic problem that we have, but these Tories are connected to a larger scheme of things that is bringing it down. These guys have been so lucky in the last three years. God bless them. With the good fortunes of a good economy they can say, "We turned it all around," and they can say, "We've got billions coming into the economy." They did nothing. That money would have come to any government. But I've got to tell you, in the next six months we are going to see some serious problems.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news. So many in the Globe, Financial Post and Star are people who are informing us about this bad news. The multilateral agreements on investments are in trouble. People are demanding controls on capital finance. They're demanding that governments protect themselves from this fluidity of capital that moves by the trillions of dollars every day, causing chaos in every country around the world. It's correcting itself.

I am proud of this movement that's happening, proud of people like the Council of Canadians and Maude Barlow, who have been fighting the Liberals federally and Mulroney before that and Tories here provincially. We are so lucky to have a few dedicated citizens who are willing to put their lives on the line, to put time and dedication into the causes they believe in. They've fought them too on the issue of education because they know that this is not about quality. They know that; we know that. Parents in our systems know that, in spite of what Mr Johnson, the Minister of Education, has to say.

They talk about instruction time. Bud Wildman, the member for Algoma, and our leader talked about the fact that they do not in that definition of instructional time include guidance teachers or library teachers, because, as the former Minister of Culture would say, that's not instructional time, I assume, because if librarians are not teaching a class, it's not teaching. Would you not say that, former Minister of Culture? And guidance teachers, if they are not actually teaching something, don't really have any value because they're not teaching.

Everybody surely would know - even Tories would know - that guidance is an important part of the school system. I think they would know that. They've gone through the system and they should know or ought to know that a whole lot of students get a lot of support from guidance teachers as a way of guiding them through life, as a way of showing students what their options might be for future prospects, future work. To not count them in into the instruction time we think is stupid, but for this government it's not instructional time.

Libraries: Not part of instructional time, yet everyone I know values librarians and libraries as an important part of our educational system. But these people don't think it counts. In fact, they don't count social workers as part of instruction. I was a trustee for eight years full-time after I quit teaching and I know that social workers played an important role in the system, to assist students who have a lot of problems, who come to the educational system with a lot of problems. I don't know that you could deny that. Social workers, of course, assist teachers in that learning process. It's part of the system.

Secretaries don't count. Vice-principals don't count. School relations workers, who were a bridge to teachers and to parents, are not part of the educational system.

Literacy programs, which I see as an important part of an educational continuum, in the minds of Tories don't count.

So much of what we value, in the minds of these mathematical people, doesn't count. That's why I argue that in their mathematical formula there is no humanity. These people can redefine anything they want in the way they want, but what we lose in the process is humanity.

They have been at war with teachers for a long time. No one can deny it. The public certainly is aware of it and teachers are aware of it and many parents devoted to the educational system can't deny it. Parents who support teachers will not deny it.

This government has done nothing in terms of what an effective school is all about, and I'll speak to that in a second. Effective schools involve some key research components that I have read about for a long time. One of the key components for effective schools, to raise the academic level of all students, is principals who are leaders. With what they've done to principals, I think they have demoralized those folks pretty well, and demoralized principals don't work as effectively as they can. They've done a good job of demoralizing principals. They are leaders. When you have effective leaders as principals, the entire school benefits from that. What have they done to assist principals in making them more effective? They have done nothing.

What have they done to involve parents in the educational system? That is key to educational improvement in our systems. They have done nothing. They just say parents are happy.

Interjection.

Mr Marchese: No, no, but I'm going to explain why you have done nothing.

Parents need to be actively involved. How do you involve them? How do you involve parents? It is a difficult task. It needs money. School-community relations are an important tool to connect them to parents. You need active parents and teachers who are happy teachers to be able to get parents involved. It is difficult to get a whole lot of working-class parents to come to the educational system because they believe it's the job of the teacher to teach. We know that when parents are involved, however modestly, there is an incredible improvement in learning. If they're not involved, many of those students will be kept down academically. There is a body of research in this regard.

If you hear those people here on that side, they say, "Oh, but we are giving parents more power." If you just put a couple of parents who are quite willing to give a little more extra time, it doesn't mean the whole parent body is going to be involved. It gives them no power whatsoever. Besides that, parents don't want the power to run a school system. That's why trustees were there. You cannot supplant the role of trustees with parents, because parents say: "We've got a job to do. We don't have the time to be trustees." So what did this government do to get parents involved? Absolutely nothing.

What have they done with the other key component? That was two of them. The other key component is teacher involvement, and whether or not teachers are happy in the educational system determines how well they perform in that classroom. When teachers are happy with their learning environment and the teaching environment, when they get support from governments, when they get support from boards of education, superintendents and principals, they perform better. When teachers perform better, you have a better educational classroom.

These people have whacked teachers day in and day out. Do you expect those teachers to be happy in that educational classroom? They are so demoralized that you can't get an ounce of energy out of them to do anything good in these classrooms. God bless them if they still have energy to continue doing the good job they've been doing, but I would be so demoralized after these people have taken charge.

1630

We have a problem. The educational system needs money. The income tax they introduced hurt. It takes $5 billion out of the economy. We New Democrats say that $2 billion of that should go back into the health care system and educational system. We believe in that and we would do that as a party.

We also believe that 10% of educational dollars should come out of local levies so boards have the flexibility to respond to the needs of those areas. That's what we New Democrats believe in. We hope that the Liberals will state their position at some point, but that is what we believe in, and I thank you for your attention.

Mr Bart Maves (Niagara Falls): It's a pleasure to rise and discuss this issue.

Mr Gerretsen: Where is your tie?

Mr Maves: I'm getting some congratulations from Mr Gerretsen on my appearance today. I thank him for that. You look quite nice yourself, Mr Gerretsen.

It's interesting to listen and to follow the last two speakers, one for the Liberal Party and one for the NDP, the member for Fort York, Mr Marchese, who just spoke. There's one thing that he just doesn't get. As a former trustee who gave himself I believe about a 30% raise when he was a trustee of a Toronto school board, the one thing he doesn't get is that that's exactly the kind of thing we're trying to stop in this government. We're trying to tell people, we're trying to explain to boards and professionals in the school system, that we need to focus money into the classroom. We've got to take money out of supervisory activities, consultants, building more board buildings and trustees. That's what we said all along. We didn't get complete co-operation the first go-around, and so we became a little more defiant in our funding formula so that we could separate classroom instruction funding and non-classroom funding, and the boards would be tied, couldn't go and give themselves large raises. We set trustees' pay at $5,000.

The member opposite has never understood that, the parties opposite have never understood that, but that's something we know parents have wanted for a long time. That's something we know is important in the education system and that's one of the steps that we've taken.

The member opposite also talked about teachers' unions fighting with this government. Yes, it's no surprise to anyone that teachers' unions and our government have butted heads a few times. But I'd like the member to hearken back to when he was in office and his social contract. I had a lot of folks, a lot of teachers, coming into my campaign office who were none too happy with you on that side of the aisle.

The members from the Liberal Party, I remind you about 1990 and your provincial election, when those heads of teachers' unions hounded Premier Peterson all over the province. The fact of the matter that is over the last three governments, Liberal, NDP and Conservative, each government has had a difficult time dealing with those union leaders. Our government is no different. Change is difficult, not accepted by all.

The other member who spoke earlier, Mr Kennedy from York South, this gentleman has gotten a new nickname for himself over the last little while, Gerard "Create-a-Crisis" Kennedy. The member for York South always talks about the sky falling in health care, where he's a critic. Today he gets up and talks about the sky falling in education, trying to create a crisis in every facet of the provincial government.

An interesting little tidbit came out back in a Toronto Star column by Kelly Toughill on May 25, 1996. It talked about the member for York South when he was in his previous occupation and his successor, Sue Cox, at the food bank. She was talking about her relationship with Mr Kennedy and she said: "We would scream and yell like mad. We would have terrible fights." Then she went on, "Gerard has an ability to create an artificial crisis to get the adrenaline flowing."

She's not alone in her opinion. Let me explain. Recently the Sudbury Star said, right after the recent by-election - the Liberals are a little antsy and upset right now because they dropped about 12 points in the polls during that election, and they wonder why. Maybe this is an indication to them why. In the Sudbury Star on September 19 it said, "Kennedy would better serve voters by listening to what needs to be done in the system to ensure services" -

The Deputy Speaker (Mr Bert Johnson): A point of order?

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: It's an opposition day motion talking about education and the damage that the Tory party has done to education. The member opposite is making personal attacks on members who aren't here. He should stick to the topic and to the motion or he should sit down. He's out of order.

Interjections.

The Deputy Speaker: Order. I want to address the member for Oakwood. Speaking to the topic is a point of order. I've been listening very carefully to the member for Niagara Falls and he is talking to the general subject of the motion and that is my ruling.

Mr Derwyn Shea (High Park-Swansea): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I listened to the member for Oakwood rise on a point of order, sir. He made reference to members not being in this House and he has been in this House himself long enough to know that you don't do that. Would you remind him of the rules of order.

The Deputy Speaker: That is a point of order and I think he will hear it for himself.

Mr Gerretsen: On a further point of order, Mr Speaker: You and I know it's a tradition in this House not to refer to members by their names but rather by the name of the riding they represent. The member for Niagara Falls, for whom I have some regard, has mentioned individuals by name on at least five or six occasions in the last four or five minutes he spoke. Would you please remind the member not to refer to members by their names but rather to the ridings they represent.

The Deputy Speaker: That is a point of order, and I think that because he is here, he will probably have heard your advice. Thank you.

Mr Frank Klees (York-Mackenzie): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: With regard to this ruling, it's my understanding that if a member is quoting from a newspaper article, as the member was doing, and is referring to members' names, that's perfectly in order. So I don't believe that the last point of order was in fact a point of order, given the circumstances.

The Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order.

Hon John Snobelen (Minister of Natural Resources): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I think that the Speaker should recognize that the member for High Park-Swansea is promoting safety in Ontario by wearing hunter orange in the Legislature and I wanted to congratulate him for that.

The Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order. The member for Niagara Falls.

Mr Maves: Thank you very much, Speaker. I'll just continue. This is important because people at home are watching this debate, and when they hear pieces of rhetoric from across the aisle, I want them to know that the credibility of some of these statements should be taken into account and that other people before have brought up these problems of credibility. The problem came forward for the member for York South very recently in the Sudbury Star.

I quote their quote:

"Kennedy would better serve voters by listing what needs to done in the system to ensure services are in place once work is completed on the new Sudbury Regional Hospital. His fearmongering tactics are a disservice to this community."

The Sudbury Star goes on:

"Ontario Liberal Party health critic" - the member for York South; I'll change the quote - "needs to do some explaining if he wants anyone to believe his claims that money will be taken from Sudbury's health care system next year. Otherwise, the statement made by Kennedy in Sudbury this week is nothing more than a cheap attempt at electioneering that thoughtful voters will see through."

They did in that riding, and I would say that people across the province will continue to call these things into question.

1640

As a matter of fact this same member, as health critic for the Liberals, went into the Humber River hospital to do a press conference about all the dangers that people were facing there. Here's what happened: The CEO of the Humber River hospital wrote a letter to the member for York South, the Liberal health critic. The letter said:

"While it is our philosophy to be open to the community and to you as a leader in our community, your actions to date unfortunately demonstrate that you are not coming to us with an open mind seeking the facts."

The letter goes on:

"In reviewing the fact sheets you distributed to the media on July 30, 1997, and August 13, 1997, and a more recent one, released August 26, 1997, we find them to contain allegations of unsafe, poor-quality care and very few substantiated facts. We have reviewed each case to which you refer in these documents and have found the quality and safety of care provided was not once compromised."

Let me just finish. It says:

"While there are many issues and challenges in merging organizations and consolidating services which impact on our patients, staff and members of the community, you seem more interested in generating fear within the community around the safety and quality of care provided to individuals regardless of whether or not the facts support this conclusion."

Mr David Caplan (Oriole): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: Is it not part of the standing orders that members are not to read exclusively from written materials? I believe they can be filed with the table. That's standing order 37(d), I believe.

The Deputy Speaker: It is a standing order that no member should read from a document or the journals excessively, unnecessarily. I've been listening to the member for Niagara Falls for nearly six minutes now. He has had a couple of points of order, and I'm waiting for him to bring his debate within the terms of the resolution. I'm sure he'll make note of those other suggestions.

Interjection.

The Deputy Speaker: I'd appreciate your attention when I'm talking.

Mr Maves: When I'm reading I want to make sure I don't misquote other people on their opinion about the credibility of the member for York South. That's why I was explaining in close detail. All of that goes to the point that people at home should really take the rhetoric we heard from the member for York South on this motion today with a grain of salt.

Let me talk about some of the rhetoric they've used in the past. I remember back last year, in September, the rhetoric that came out from unions and members opposite, rhetoric like myths about Bill 160 at the time, that teachers could no longer be principals or principals would no longer be teachers - completely bogus. They said phys-ed teachers would be fired, they said music teachers would be fired, phys-ed classes - I heard one would be 75 teachers. This was the fearmongering back at that time, that 10,000 teachers would be fired, and so on and so on.

If everyone hearkens back to all the rhetoric of a year ago, you can see the same type of rhetoric coming forward in today's debate. It doesn't serve the public well.

Another form of rhetoric that often gets tossed out is loss of teachers. In May, when boards send out layoff notices to teachers - and it happens in every board across the province; it has happened for years - members opposite jump up with great glee and condemn our government and say, "Look how many notices have gone out." I'll tell you, this year, as in other years, from my Niagara public board, secondary schools, 140 layoff notices went out in May. With great glee, the members opposite got up and talked about this. They all failed to mention that soon after, all 140 were recalled. In fact, in many boards across the province - for instance, at my Niagara Catholic board they have actually hired 95 new teachers at the elementary level and 22 new teachers at the secondary level.

Those things never get talked about, and when the public sit at home and listen in May when the layoff notices go out, they may not be aware that these people in almost every case get recalled. I've seen statistics for 1995, 1996, 1997. For my boards, for instance, the people who got layoff notices were all recalled. It continually happens in all the boards around the province, and many boards around the province are actually adding new teachers. People at home need to know that.

Members opposite seem to think that this government doesn't consult or talk to the public before we make a legislative move. Before we brought in Bill 160, even though we'd had a campaign and we talked widely for many years about our education initiatives and had written documents about our positions - we were going to move forward with a toolbox of initiatives. We pulled back and said, "Before we do this, we're going to go out" - we had the former NDP education minister, Dave Cooke, go out with the Education Improvement Commission, and they did a report on learning time, class size and staffing. They met with thousands of people and hundreds of organizations and they came back and they made recommendations. This government has followed most of those recommendations. When you throw at this government that we haven't consulted - we've done our homework. We've also utilized the royal commissions that the NDP had.

That's the reality, but the members opposite would prefer to continue to put forward the rhetoric in this House, and that's why it's important to lead off the way I did.

The minister talked about our new, more rigorous curriculum. A few people, a few teachers' union leaders I've seen, take some shots at the curriculum. When they do that, they take shots at their own membership, because it was teachers who wrote that new, more rigorous curriculum. Most front-line teachers I've talked to are very happy with that curriculum and very supportive of it.

Province-wide testing: Parents love province-wide testing. There's nothing wrong with accountability. It's our kids who are at stake. What's wrong with having some accountability in the system? It can be something very useful, very helpful, not to be feared. If there's a certain board or a certain school or certain teachers that continually perform well on province-wide testing and other that perform less well, perhaps those that do perform well can say: "What are we doing differently? What's happening here that's different, so that maybe we can help those boards and those schools, those teachers that aren't doing as well on this testing year after year?"

There's nothing wrong with that and our kids deserve that. I'm quite proud of province-wide testing and I'm finding that the good teachers who are out there - there are so many of them, and they know that they're good teachers - are happy with province-wide testing. They think that in the long run it's going to improve our system, as we do.

Our funding formula: I started off by saying our funding formula is all about directing more money into the classroom. We've got a recent article from the Niagara region, where the board is considering rationalizing its schools. I'm going to read a little bit from an article because I think some of what is being said in it is so instructive. I'm very proud of the superintendent who made some of these comments, very proud of the principal, the head of the principals' association down in Niagara, who made some I think very brave and very instructive comments.

"The public board has significant extra capacity, said John Sharp, superintendent of education, but it's `far more serious at the secondary level'" - my board.

"The board has room for 42,845 students at its 115 elementary schools, said Sharp. Enrolment is about 30,000 students.

"At the secondary level, enrolment is about 16,000, but the board has room for 32,095 students in its 25 schools."

We are funding spaces that we have no students for. That's robbing the kids who are there of resources that could be utilized for their education, and that's wrong. This government, through its new funding formula, knows that's wrong and knows that needs to be changed. That's why more money, $585 million more, is being directed into the classroom today than last year, because we're concentrating on funding that goes directly into the classroom.

I'll quote further from this article in my region.

"Even the principals have asked the board to close schools quickly.

"`We see schools needing to be closed,' said Janet Savard, principal of Carleton public school in St Catharines. Savard was head of the local principals' association in the spring when members passed a motion asking the board to act `expeditiously.'"

Why? "`We've been subsidizing the small schools forever,' said Savard....

"Principals have agreed that they will not get involved in any `save our school movement,' said Savard.

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"Despite the pain of losing a neighbourhood school, there are benefits to making the system more efficient," said Savard.

"Librarians, music teachers and other resources will be more readily available when school enrolments are up. Schools will be cleaned five days a week instead of the current four, and schools will have full-time secretaries....

"At the secondary level, small schools are also a burden, said Sharp.

"As the former principal of Eastdale Secondary in Welland, Sharp saw enrolment at his school go from 300 to 800 when another school in Welland was closed."

You've heard us say quite often that some boards have been very efficient over the years and closed the older, less efficient schools and rationalized their schools so they would be putting more emphasis on funding students. Mr Sharp continues:

"A bigger school gets better timetabling, with more options for students.

"`Yes, it's emotional, no one wants a school to close'...but a bigger school `is better educationally.'"

With that I'm going to leave off with the debate, because once you cut through the rhetoric, once you cut through the political fearmongering that comes from across the aisle, parents, many teachers and many people in the school system understand that it is more important to fund the classroom and stop funding waste so our students can get the best education in the world.

Mr Caplan: I hear a lot in this House, but the member for Niagara Falls - it absolutely amazes me - must be from another planet. He held up the EIC document, which says that any dollars cut out as a result of this government's actions should be reinvested into education, something this minister has refused to do. I wish the government members would read their own materials that they're going to present to this House before they do that. It would be very interesting if they actually did follow the advice they received from parents, from teachers, from opposition members, from all stakeholder groups. It never seems to happen.

Before I get into the heart of my comments, I want to mention that a number of my colleagues are going to speak to this bill and some won't have the opportunity. My colleague the member for Prescott and Russell, Jean-Marc Lalonde, has asked me to just make a note of a few things. We hear much about the cap on class sizes and how this is promoting quality. I think those were the minister's words. St Joseph school in Wendover, 27 students in a combined grade 6-grade 7 class; Saint-Victor school in Alfred, 27 students in a grade 3 class; Pope John Paul school in Hammond, 32 students in a grade 3 class; Ste-Trinité school in Rockland, 30 students in a grade 5 class; Rockland Public School, 36 students in a grade 6 class.

What happens to this cap and this quality that the minister talks about? It's absolute bull. The minister said he was full of bull. It's about the only thing we agree on. He is definitely full of something.

The Deputy Speaker: Excuse me. I don't think that will enable the debate to carry on. I would give that second thought.

Mr Caplan: I am pleased to speak to this motion, because this government has created a crisis in education with its illegal Bill 160. Justice Cumming made it very clear: Bill 160 is illegal. In fact, their funding formula has robbed our children, robbed our students, robbed our parents, robbed our teachers of something so precious: education. An immediate, independent, objective review of the funding formula is very much needed.

I'd like to talk about the impact this funding formula has had on schools and classrooms in my riding of Oriole. Oriole is an incredibly diverse community. We have daycares in our schools. We have concerns about school closures, about busing, about there being adequate supervision in our playgrounds. Let me talk a bit about the daycares. There is no money in the funding formula to provide for those daycares in the schools. They provide an essential service, an essential part of education: early childhood education. We have a minister for children, who does God only knows what, but to cut those daycare centres - one has already been given an eviction notice; more are to follow.

The boards have a crisis on their hands. They now have to charge daycares full cost recovery. That will put these daycare centres, which are in the heart of the community school, in jeopardy. We know the Toronto District School Board can't guarantee they'll be able to stay, even if they were to find full cost recovery, even if they were able to come up with the dollars. The reason for that is that the schools might close themselves or, in order to amalgamate the space, they may have to force the daycares out of the schools.

I have to tell members of the House that 23 daycares in the riding of Don Valley East are in jeopardy of being forced out of schools, being forced to close. That is the legacy of this government. That is an absolute shame. It is literally putting kids and families in an incredibly perilous situation. You see, 23 schools have a community purpose that goes beyond this government's definition of education. As I said, the daycare centre at Don Mills has already been given an eviction notice. It's ironic that on a day when we had a private member's resolution from the member for Dufferin-Peel about flexibility for child care options we see that the inflexibility of the government's funding formula for education is closing down some of those options for my constituents in the riding of Oriole and in the riding of Don Valley East.

Let me take a minute to talk a bit about what the funding formula means for school closures. I've spoken with the parents of children in four schools in the Toronto Catholic District School Board. The schools are St Leonard, Blessed Kateri, Holy Redeemer and Our Lady of Mount Carmel. All are on the list to be closed; all have been identified by the board as not meeting the criteria that this government has placed, that this minister has placed. This government refuses to be held accountable.

The last member speaking, from Niagara Falls, talked about something courageous. I don't know what's courageous about closing down classrooms. They say that education taking place in the classroom is very important to them, but their actions are quite a bit different, seeing the prospect of 600 closures across the province, like Romney in Essex-Kent and those four schools. But it doesn't stop there.

In just one small part of my riding of Oriole, I've spoken with the parents of children at Muirhead school, at Ernest school and at Cherokee school. I don't want to create undue apprehension, but these schools were listed in an article that was published in the Toronto Star earlier in the year as having been identified. Those decisions are going to come down later this month for the process to start for school closures. It is a very sad legacy.

I'll be the first to say that I will be there with the parents and communities to fight to keep those schools. They are valuable. They are the heart, the hub of the community. People use those not just for education of children but for community events as well - for Girl Guides, for religious groups, for international language, for a whole variety of purposes. You can't tear the heart out of our community. So why are these boards considering closing schools? Because of the inflexibility of Dave Johnson and his funding formula.

The funding formula has other implications. Parents from St Timothy contacted me about transportation. Their kids were denied busing to school. If you've been at the corner of Don Mills and Sheppard, you've seen the kind of construction that's going on there. The transportation grant that's contained in the funding formula has no flexibility, so those parents were informed that starting this September there would be no more transportation for those kids. How can you get the benefit of education if you can't even get to school? How can parents have confidence in education when they don't know if their children are going to arrive at school safely or arrive at home safely afterwards?

The boards have had their hands tied. This government has created a crisis. The funding formula needs to be immediately reviewed, and confidence and stability need to be returned to public education.

There's only one way; that's with new leadership, with Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario Liberal Party providing that stability, that confidence and that leadership.

I thank you, Speaker, and I look forward to the comments of the other members.

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Mr R. Gary Stewart (Peterborough): I rise to speak to this resolution. I have been reading this resolution most of the day, and I suggest that if we had had province-wide testing of grade 3 and grade 6, possibly this resolution might have had some substance to it and might have resembled something intelligent. If I look at this resolution, by the time I get to the final "whereas," I would say that education as we know it would be obsolete and we'd have to start all over again. So I have great difficulty with this type of resolution. That is one of the reasons why something that has not been changed in many years has to be changed.

I'm going to speak from the perspective of a grandfather who has children in our system, children I think a great deal of and I think the world of. I not only have children in the public school system here in Ontario, but I have children in the public school system in the US. It is most interesting to do some comparison.

The other day I was reading in the Detroit News where it is suggested that in Michigan the government there is trying to increase the amount of time that teachers spend in the classroom teaching the students. I think what it suggests is that not only in Ontario but in many places across this country and indeed across many places in North America, we have to change the way we're doing business or the way we are making sure that education is the quality it should be.

These changes, certainly in the last few years that nobody did anything about, have been in direct response to the parents, to the taxpayers and indeed the teachers themselves. If you look at the parents, should they not have some type of input into the way their children are taught? I believe they should. They bring them into this world, they nurture them, they raise them and follow them all through their life as best they can. Should they not have input into how they are educated?

I believe they should, and that is one of the reasons why we created parent councils. Recently, as of about two weeks ago, I met with about 70 parent council members who were extremely supportive, very supportive that they finally had some say in the way education is conducted in this province.

I also made comment about the taxpayers. Taxpayers are the people, and we're all part of it, who have to afford to pay the bills. I don't believe that taxpayers can afford any more taxes, nor indeed can they, as they have in the past, be part of a system that at the whims of boards, whatever, constantly raised taxes. Whether it's the seniors, the disabled, those who are on a fixed income, or indeed the business community itself, they cannot afford to pay any more. Indeed, the cost of education was running rampant in this country and this province.

Many of the teachers wanted change. They want change because they know as well that education has to change and that the way we've been doing things over the past many years has got to change.

I have a letter I would just like to read. It was faxed to me from a person who teaches in the Kawartha Pine Ridge school system. It reads:

"I am a high school teacher. Our union has been conducting work-to-rule. I'm a music teacher in high school who has put up with work-to-rule for five weeks now. I wish to begin extracurricular activities in my school. The union, in response, has threatened me with censure, fines of up to 21 days' gross salary, threatened to publish my name and to rid me of federation protection.

"My question is whether Dave Johnson, in the interests of students, could pass a regulation stating that teachers could not be prevented from or punished for conducting extracurricular activities. This would be a win-win situation for him. It would enable teachers to conduct activities without fear of recourse on the union's part and also would stop the union from saying what they want to do," regarding work-to-rule. "So in effect he is not stopping the union from doing so," but would allow teachers to do.

That is a letter from a teacher. When I said that teachers want change, they want it. They want to be able to teach and are not able to because of union pressures. To me, that says it all. That's the situation that we have gotten ourselves into in this country.

As I mentioned, the taxpayers want to focus on the students in the classroom. In the past, education has been funded like a funnel: You pour the money into the top and it goes down through the bottom. But administration can control the amount of money that goes through the bottom part of that funnel. They are the ones that control the amount of money that goes to the classrooms. You know and I know - all you have to do is look at the buildings, look at the money that's been spent in administration over the past many years - what has happened. We, in comparison, want to show the reverse. We want to put the money in the top, let it trickle into the administration, and have the main part of those dollars go to the student in the classroom.

Indeed, it's funny. I think about this resolution. The only part of that resolution that has any substance whatsoever is one "whereas" that says, "We value our children's education and the dedication of Ontario's teachers." I do as well.

But one thing that really concerns me is the fact that when we talk about quality education, when we talk about a new curriculum, when we talk about a new report card, when we talk about parent councils, when we talk about more time in the classrooms, when we talk about set class sizes, those are all the things that we've heard about from some 22 reviews and three commissions over the years. Those are all of the things that we have been told will lead to quality education. Ask the teachers; ask the students; ask the parents. All of those things we believe will lead to quality education, and yet our opposition votes no and has the gall to suggest that they value our children's education and the dedication of our Ontario teachers.

I suggest that what has been happening in this House is constantly saying no to everything that is going to make our students better educated and prepared to be part of our society, to make sure they are equipped to compete in the global marketplace. Our opposition votes no to all that and, as I said, suggests that they believe in quality education.

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Certainly over the years there has needed to be change. Change is not perfect. I don't know very much of what is perfect these days. God is about the only one I ever run across who is, but if we don't change, if we don't prepare - they probably used to come to this House 100 years ago in a horse and buggy. I doubt very much if there are horses and buggies outside today. We have to be ready for change and that is what we're trying to do, but we seem to fail to remember the student who wants that change. As I said at the start, I want to make sure that change is there, quality is there, the standards are there, so that my grandkids will be able to be part of the society we all want.

I congratulate our government on what it's doing in education. It's long overdue. It is necessary because people have told us it's necessary. I support what we're doing. As I said, when I look at a resolution like this which says one thing, and yet they turn around over the last many months and votes no to everything that suggests we could improve education, I have real difficulty with that.

Mr Colle: In terms of this debate on the opposition day motion, I guess the critical thing is to put in perspective what we're here for today. We're here because we want to bring attention to the destructive forces that this government has unleashed on children in this province through their revolutionary changes. These are not constructive changes, and they wave the revolutionary flag. This government claims and is proud of being revolutionary. The tragedy is that the children have been victims of their revolution. It's been a reckless revolution. It's been a destructive revolution.

I don't mind if they play revolutionary games with adults, but they are now playing the revolutionary game, the ideological game at the expense of our children. They have made our schools the battleground of their revolution and that is shameful. That is appalling because what they've done is they've brought in innocent children who are there preparing themselves for their future and they have made them pawns in their revolutionary game.

That is what is at the essence of this Bill 160, the revolutionary thrust of Bill 104. It was all to take revolutionary control of education, to extract money out of education to feed the revolutionary changes. That's why parents and students are so appalled and upset at this government. We have a government that spends $50,000 a day vilifying teachers and public education. Every day you turn on your television, every half-hour there's a government ad paid for by taxpayers that vilifies and attacks public education. That is appalling.

The public in fact is so upset. Everywhere you go they are saying, "I'm sick and tired of this government of Mike Harris running these ads with my money, tearing down, being destructive of public education." They are fed up with it. In fact, while we speak here, on another station there's probably one of these attack ads against public education being run by this minister and this government. This is the government and the minister and the backbenchers who stand up and say they value public education, they value teachers, while they're spending $50,000 a day running high-priced television ads, not on off-hours, on prime time, attack ads on public education. So you wonder what their motives are.

Their motives, the public verified in a recent Angus Reid poll. They know that the government's motive is to extract money and control the system, not to improve education. If I look at what is happening to our schools, we see it's a government that's basically putting our kids at risk by turning our schools upside down. The teachers, the parents and the students are really at their wits' end in trying to figure out what this government will change and revolutionize tomorrow. There is so much disruption and chaos that this government has caused that you had 40,000 children at the SkyDome for the first time in the history of this province literally booing this Premier - 40,000 children, and I think as someone said, "Ontario, listen to your children." Children don't have a political agenda, but the children feel they are being victimized by this revolutionary government that is basically hell-bent on turning schools, on turning communities upside down.

Can you imagine that this is a government that has planned to close hundreds and hundreds of schools in this province? In your own community there are schools they're planning to close, Mr Speaker. In my community, in all our communities they are going to close down schools, possibly up to 600 schools in our province. Never in any jurisdiction in the western world have we've seen this massive assault on public education that this government is perpetrating in this revolutionary zeal they have, to what end I don't know, but who will stand there and fight and defend the kids? It's not this government, so I think it's up to the parents, the communities, and they're going to fight this government.

I know there are meetings being held all over this province to try and stop this government from closing down their community schools. The community is saying: "We as taxpayers over the last 30, 40 or 50 years paid for these schools, to build them, to maintain them. What right has big government down at Queen's Park to come and tell us that you're going to rip the school out of our community?" What right does the Minister of Education have to do that, when that school's been paid for by local taxes over and over again, for years, and now this government comes along and says, "We are going to rip that school out of your community."

I think the ratepayers and the parents and the students across this province, in every town and city, are saying, "We are not going to let this government do that." They are going to protect their schools from these closures. They are going to fight to keep those doors open, to keep children in those schools because those schools belong to the children, they belong to the taxpayers in those communities, and they don't belong to the government. They have no right to dictate closures arbitrarily from central headquarters here at Queen's Park. Those are locally paid for schools, by local ratepayers whose hard-earned tax dollars paid for them. The communities built them literally brick by brick and they won't have this minister and this Premier close their schools down.

I think they're in for the fight of their life. If they thought they were in for a fight with the hospitals, wait till you see the fight they're going to get into when they start to try and close down community schools. In Toronto alone they want to close up to 180 to 200 schools and they've got the gall to do that when the Minister of Finance arbitrarily decrees a higher tax rate for Toronto schools than schools anywhere else in the province. We pay $300 million more for property taxes on commercial for education, set by this Minister of Finance and his cabinet colleagues by decree - $300 million more - and they're telling us they're also now going to close down up to 200 of our schools.

The taxpayers of Toronto will not stand for it: three hundred million more on top of regular taxes that they paid to keep their schools going. Now this government says, "We're going to close them down." They're in for the fight of their life.

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In terms of the education system itself, the education system has never been perfect in Ontario. I think the only education system that was supposedly perfect was the one in the Soviet Union 20 or 30 years ago, and that was not, as we know, perfect. It was fraught with problems because it was overcentralized. Our education system in Ontario has had some flaws in it. We all know that. They can be corrected. But it's just like if you have a home: If the kitchen sink and the plumbing in your kitchen don't work, you don't bulldoze down the home. You fix the kitchen sink and make sure the plumbing is fixed. What this government has done is come into the school, which needs some repair and retrofits and reinvestment, and they're bulldozing our schools and our education system. What we need is fine-tuning, investment, innovation. We don't need bulldozing.

Our parents, our teachers, our students need support. They need positive reinforcement, not constant attack ads on TV. Why not put those constant attack ad dollars into the schools to clean the schools and buy computers, buy books, buy better library equipment, rather than spend and waste millions on attack ads on TV? You get a lot more with honey than you do with vinegar, as they say. You get a lot more with positive reinforcement. This government is hell-bent, as I said, on destroying, vilifying, condemning everything about public education. I tell you, they're in for a fight because the parents are blaming this government for the chaos. They see through the rhetoric, they see through the condemnation. They aren't going to stand it.

If you look at our schools, our schools do not have everything they need. Our teachers need support. They're not all perfect, but I'll tell you, there's a lot more good teachers than bad teachers. There's a lot more good students than bad students.

We had a Premier of this province going before the chamber of commerce or whatever it was a couple of weeks ago. He had the audacity to tell them that our kids in Ontario don't measure up to his standards. What kind of Premier is it that condemns his own students under his own system? Students need support. They don't need lectures and condemnation from a Premier. I think we can do a lot better if we help our students with more investment in them, less investment in attack ads; more investment in people, teachers. Stop attacking them daily. Help people rather than attack them.

But this government is not going to change its direction. It's hell-bent on saying they can get some cheap votes by attacking. They will keep attacking teachers, public education, children if they have to, to get their political agenda through. The people of Ontario see through this facade. They are going to give this government the lesson of their lives come the next election because they see through all this phony ideological revolution that they've launched on the people of Ontario.

Mr John O'Toole (Durham East): It's my pleasure to rise and respond to the opposition day motion and add something to the discussion with respect to education. It's important to hear in this House that there is on all sides recognition that the system had to be reformed. That's clearly the history that I'm going to be bringing to this discussion today.

We're supposed to learn from history or we're doomed to repeat it. In my riding there are five boards, district boards as they're now referred to, and at some point in my remarks I'll bring some very specific points to the debate with respect to quality education in Ontario. In fact, in Durham we should be very proud of many of the results in education, provided that the system at the time and the curriculum at the time and the report cards at the time were all less than adequate. I could bring to your attention that the Durham Board of Education was one of the leaders in development of curriculum and development of standardized report cards.

All this was happening when we first met - the then director of education was Pauline Laing. As you would know, she went on to become the curriculum leader at the Ministry of Education, not only as a symbol of excellence in that board, but the ministry recruits, I believe, many of the best people to make the needed improvements

I look to our current Minister of Education. As a bit of preparation for today, I asked to get some information. I started by looking at what is the plan. I brought forward here the Ontario government's business plan for 1998-99. I would encourage each and every one of you to avail yourselves of a copy of this public document, and for anyone watching today to call my office, because it certainly clarifies the plan, not just for education, but indeed, and respectfully, under the leadership of our Premier, setting a clear vision and a clear set of instructions on what the mandate is.

The discussion here today is about education. Our commitment has to be there in writing. It's not some debatable thing, that we're going to debate away quality education. The rest of these elusive comments need to be accountable. Our comments need to be accountable and measurable, as the boards do and as the students themselves do. I think they want that. I think the teachers do as well. For too long we've had a system that wasn't accountable.

I'll just read a couple of things in the business plan signed by our Minister of Education this year.

"We have introduced a new funding formula for education which will offer students access across Ontario to fair and quality education no matter where they live."

No one would dispute that, but that was a long-overdue reform.

"This new formula will see additional five hundred and eighty-three million new dollars to be spent in the classroom."

That's where the money is and that's the significant change we see. Many of the boards are stacked up in opposition to us and the reason is because clearly there are envelopes of where the money should be spent. As the member for Peterborough mentioned in his comments, clearly the money should be spent in the classroom first. There should never be a shortage of resources in the classroom when we have excess resources, perhaps, in other areas.

He says that an additional $583 million is to be spent in the classroom while reducing administrative duplication and waste.

Clearly the job is not done there. I hear continually from my riding that that's still an issue. They're not satisfied. Any resources in the board offices should become school-based resources. I think that's the solution to many of the debates when it comes to the amount of teacher time. We have teachers who aren't in the classroom. Yes, I hear from my constituents. But when you look at our direction, our goal, our minister's objective is to reduce the size of classes - in secondary one and 22 and in elementary one and 25. When I know there are teachers who are not in the classroom, the resource-based teacher with no students, somebody else has their students.

The minister at the macro level, for those of you listening, must accept their business plan and their business plan, their budget, must demonstrate what is in Bill 160; that is, one and 22 in the secondary and one and 25 in the elementary. They have discretion and flexibility at the board level to allocate resources - that is, teachers - into other positions of non-teaching, but that ultimately means class sizes are going to be larger. So when parents call me in my riding of Durham East, concerned about the size of classes, I give them the names of their school trustees. By the way, I might add, most of them don't know who they are, which is unfortunate.

I do the best I can. I let them know who the people are who are publicly elected to report on quality education and to be accountable for quality education in their area.

There are several initiatives in this budget document that I have to share in the very limited time left. The new approach includes $1.2 billion over three years to protect class size. That's all part of this new sizing of classes. We're providing the capital funding. A very important initiative is the over $1 billion for special education. There are two levels of grants in special education, the SEPA grant that every student gets a portion of. There is in total over $1 billion for the ISA, the intensive support amount, the high-cost students - absolutely critical. The minister, I'm sure, is addressing that issue as I speak.

Over the last year we've increased the funding by some $40 million in that special education envelope. Those children with special needs - I know our minister is clearly listening.

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I've got to put on the record here that the background in education reform starts way before the 1990s, when I was a trustee. I'm referring to the Royal Commission on Learning, the document by Monique Bégin and Gerald Caplan. We're all familiar with it. It's called For the Love of Learning. I know the members here are all familiar with it. There are over 160 recommendations. I'm just going to review a few of them in the remaining couple of minutes. Unfortunately I should have much more time on this.

I challenge all those in the House and indeed I challenge those watching today, those educators who I know believe this debate is important. I use this as a scorecard. In fact, I'm going to start at the very end just to see how we're doing here. Recommendation 167: "That an implementation commission be established to oversee the implementation of the recommendations made by the Royal Commission on Learning."

Well, we have the Education Improvement Commission, the EIC. And who did we put on that? We put David Cooke, who was the previous Minister of Education for the New Democratic Party, and Ann Vanstone, who was the chair of the Toronto Board of Education. These people have their own political commitments and their own commitment to education. They're holding us to it. In fact they had a meeting this morning to deal with the school community councils.

In this whole thing, the thing establishes many of the things that we put into regulation. It talks about class size, it talks about the important role of parents, it talks about testing, it talks about the College of Teachers. Almost everything our government has brought in with respect to the important focus of quality and accountability in the public education system is in this document. If anybody wants one, I would ask them to call my constituency office at (905) 697-1501, Durham East, John O'Toole, and you'll get a copy.

This is the most important debate in the history of Ontario. Our students should come first in this debate. This is all about students in classrooms. You'll never find me in argument or disagreement that we must support our teachers and our teachers need to be in the classrooms. When they're not in the classrooms, I believe we should be questioning how much value added to the life of those students and the education of those students there really is.

There is far too much for me to cover in this time, but I do want to comment on the commitment of the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Education, Mr Bruce Smith. Mr Smith from Middlesex has been an asset to each and every one of the schools and boards in this province.

Mr Gerretsen: I just have a few very short comments to make on this subject. Let me say that the people out there in Ontario must be really confused about this issue. They constantly hear information in the media, either from one side or the other, and they must be totally confused. The government has been saying basically, "We're spending a lot less money but we're making it better." That's been their argument about a lot of things, about health care and education.

I think it is all about money. I think where people have some real difficulty in understanding this is that you've taken $1 billion out of primary and secondary education. One billion dollars has been taken out by this government over the last three to four years, and when you think about it, all you have to do is look at the budgets of the individual school boards and you realize that 85% to 90% of it is in salaries for teachers.

For the life of me, I don't think people will buy the argument that if you take $1 billion out of budgets that are primarily salary-oriented, you can end up with more money for teachers. What you end up with is $1 billion less and therefore you end up with fewer teachers in the system. Yet our population in this province is growing all the time, so on that score alone, the argument that the government advances is very poorly orchestrated. Nobody is going to buy the fact that if you take more money out of a system that is salary-oriented, you end up with more money for more teachers. The bottom line is there are going to be fewer teachers, and class sizes are going to rise. It doesn't really matter what it says in your legislation, that you want smaller classes. You will see that with the different systems out there, the school boards simply won't be able to meet your targets because there won't be enough money in the system to allow them to do that.

Let's just very quickly, in the two minutes I've got left, talk about what's happening in Waterloo region: 12 schools are to be closed. In your own district, Speaker - you know all about this - in the Avon Maitland board, up to 17 schools are to close. Even Bert Johnson, the member for Perth, said on one particular day, "I think the chair of the board has put these potential closures out in the public prematurely." What's happening in Guelph? Nine schools are closing; in Hamilton-Wentworth, 10 to 15 schools; here in Toronto, somewhere between 120 to 180 schools; in Niagara district, 10 schools are to close; 60 more in Lambton-Kent; Halton, 17 schools are being closed.

You add on top of that the fact that this government has spent something like $6.4 million - money that could have gone into the schools, money that could have been used by the boards to hire those expert teachers - on an advertising campaign that they should have paid for with their own party money rather than government money. It is shameless.

The people of Ontario will not buy the argument that if you take $1 billion out, somehow you improve the system. The people who really suffer in all of this in the long run are the children in our school system, and for that we can hold this government accountable.

Mr David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre): I appreciate the opportunity to join in the debate on the resolution. Let me pick up where the former speaker mentioned the number of schools in Hamilton-Wentworth that are now on the chopping block. Indeed there are up to 15 schools that will close as a result of the government changing the funding formula.

In answers to questions in this House, the new education czar, the Minister of Education, will say: "Well, there've been school closures before under all governments so what's the big deal? Why is the opposition raising this the way they are?" The fact of the matter is that any closures that happened in the past took place because of the number of students in a school. If there weren't enough students there to substantiate maintaining the school, then a decision was made, following a long community involvement process, that led to that closure. That's not what's happening here. This is all about the fact that there's not enough money. It's not a question of not enough students.

The timelines that have been put on this process, whereby at the end of the year the boards have to have their recommendations in or their information in, again the minister stands there and says, "Well, it's not my decision, it's the board's." But the reality is that when you say to the board, "Unless you give us your list of schools that are going to close, you're not going to get any more money in terms of capital investment in your community," you've put a gun to the head of that board and you have de facto made that decision.

This is not the first time. We've seen this game before. The health restructuring commission: "We're not closing any hospitals," the government said. "Oh, no, it's that awful, evil body, the health restructuring commission. They're doing it, not us. We wouldn't close any hospitals. It's that commission that's doing it." Meanwhile the reality is that commission was created by this government, you appointed the people who are on that commission and you are as accountable for those hospitals closing as the people who are signing the paper, and everybody knows that.

Municipally right now, and certainly in my community of Hamilton-Wentworth and in every other community across Ontario, there is outrage at what's happening with property taxes. Once again you hear the minister stand up and say: "Oh, but we didn't do that. That was those awful municipal councils. They did that. They're the ones that are hurting you." The reality is the downloading of responsibilities on to municipalities has left in my community of Hamilton-Wentworth a shortfall of $38 million - $38 million that you shortchanged my community. Our council had no other choice after they made all the cuts that in good conscience they could make and still maintain a civilized, decent community. They have had to increase the taxes to cover that off. You did that.

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Mr John Hastings (Etobicoke-Rexdale): Poor management.

Mr Christopherson: I hear the member from Bedrock in the corner saying, "Poor management."

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): You must call them by their names, not any other term.

Mr Christopherson: The member for Etobicoke-Rexdale is yabba-dabba-dooing from the corner, "Poor management." He's blaming the municipality. There he is saying: "It's your fault. You can't run things right." It's always somebody else's fault. So the schools closing is not your fault, it's the boards, even though you've told them, "If you don't give us a list of schools that are closing, you don't get the capital investment."

You said, when the hospitals are closing, "That's not us, it's the commission," although you rammed the legislation through that created the commission, you appointed the people who are on it and you are as accountable as they are.

That's what's going on. There were a number of us, for anyone who wants to check back, who said in this very House, and it's in the Hansard, over two years ago that this was the game plan. It was that obvious. It's there in the Hansard for anyone who wants to look it up. Certainly I said it. I know others of my colleagues in the NDP said it: "Here's what's happening. This is a set-up where you're hoping that the local entities that have to make the decisions carry the freight."

Then, on top of all that, you're going to run around in the next election and say: "Oh, but we cut taxes by 30%. We're the good ones in this. We're the good people. We're the good guys. It's that restructuring commission. It's those school boards. It's those municipal boards. They're the ones that are evil. They're the ones that cut your services. They're the ones that have cut your programs. They're the ones that have raised your taxes, not us." Yet the reality is you did it.

To pay for that 30% tax cut that you're so proud of, that, by the way, isn't giving you the job creation you were making so much noise it was going to - it hasn't even achieved that, and of course it couldn't - you had to take $5 billion to $6 billion out the system because you said no to $6 billion of revenue. That's money that doesn't come into the provincial government. Like any budget, when you've got money that's not coming in, then you've got to cut expenditures. You cut those expenditures by closing our hospitals, by raising our property taxes, by raising user fees and, yes, by shutting down schools.

There's a demonstration in Hamilton tomorrow at 3:35 out in front of Allenby school, 357 Hunter Street West. I guarantee you there will be a lot of people there because they've been through this before. They have fought before for that school. It's probably one of the best examples the government would ever see of a small community school that is the focal point of a revitalized neighbourhood.

What does Mike Johnston, who's the chair of the Allenby parent council, say? "If Allenby school is forced to close, it will impact not only on the Locke Street neighbourhood but also on Hamilton's efforts to revitalize the downtown core." Not to mention the fact that in a lot of the areas of my riding in downtown Hamilton, those schools represent the only haven kids have from asphalt. It is not just their school; it's their recreation centre. In many cases it's the only extracurricular activities that they have that keep them there instead of hanging out at a mall. These are people who are already facing challenges in terms of income. In many cases, in that part of my riding, a lot of people do not have English as their first language. By changing the funding formula and equalizing it, as you say, you are denying the children in my riding the kind of education that we all received and that they're entitled to.

As for Bill 160, every government has had their fights with teachers in terms of legislation and having a governing role, but never have we seen 120,000 teachers do what they did a few months ago in fighting for students and saying, "It's important for me to be out there and lend my credibility to the fight to save the education system for the kids I want to teach."

Those are my constituents. They're our children. You have no right and no mandate to do this to our kids.

Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): I'm very happy to speak to this resolution that I agree with. I wish to put on record a letter that I received from a parent who has a child who attends Century Secondary School. Century is a vocational school. There aren't that many left in Ontario, but there certainly are some in larger urban centres.

What we're facing in Windsor is the possible closure of six of our high schools. What's very important to note is that any time we have had school closures in Ontario's history, it has solely revolved around student enrolment. In the past, in the Windsor and Essex county areas, there have been discussions around the closure of Forster and Harrow high schools. They have surrounded the issue of student enrolment.

Of course they've addressed those issues. What they realized, over much deliberation locally, by local trustees and parental input, was that those schools had a value in their community that went far beyond what the student enrolment as a percentage was in that community. Because the local school board was able to raise some portion of their total revenue from the local property tax base, the people who lived there said that this was worth the investment to keep the school open in the community.

The high school, Forster, sits in the middle of the west end of Windsor. There are grade schools in the neighbourhood. There is the vibrant Sandwichtown on the west side of Windsor. Now we have 200 people showing up at the first meeting at Forster to talk about how difficult it would be for those kids to move from the west end grade schools, one of which has just been refurbished and rebuilt, to go who knows where to attend a high school.

I read you a letter from a parent from Century Secondary School:

"I sat at the meeting for one and a half hours on September 28, 1998, listening to former students and teachers alike, on why Century should stay open.

"I have a partly autism child that will graduate at her full ability this year, and now has a chance in life, to be a part of the working class, if it were not for a school like Century.

"If you would have watched her growing up in a regular grade school, she had rocks thrown at her, name calling etc etc every day, despite my wife and I waiting for her and picking her up every day. What a nightmare. Without Century she should not have reached her full potential. Merging a regular high school and a vocational school does not work.

"Another reason is financial. If these schools do merge, the stress of trying to keep up to regular children in fashion and appearance in general will be so great that the dropout rate will be enormous. These children will become one of Harris's statistics: welfare, mother's allowance....

"The board has already closed down two vocational schools to save money, Monarch and Shawnee. Let's put it this way: Pay now or pay later. Give these children a chance, please."

I would like to personally invite the Minister of Education, Dave Johnson, to come to Kennedy collegiate high school on Tuesday, October 13, for a parent meeting of a number of parents who are coming together over a number of schools that are going to be forced to close.

I called the director of our Windsor board of ed yesterday and spoke with him and I said: "I just wanted to tell you and I wanted to get your feedback. The Minister of Education says that the school closures will be your fault. These are your decisions and essentially it's your fault. I want to tell you the difficulty that our Minister of Education places every director of education in in Ontario, understanding that the government will not stand up and say what it is they are doing and laying the blame wholly on the part of some other level of government for them to take the fall politically."

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I can tell you that's exactly what's happening in Windsor. But the people in Windsor aren't going to fall for this too many more times. We've already seen the effects in our health care system in Windsor. We know exactly what happens when the government cuts money from our Windsor hospitals. Then we see the advertising campaign that they decide to launch. In my community they chose to put up a highway sign, signed by the Premier, that said, "Look, your Ontario tax dollars at work." I invite the Premier to come to Windsor so he can see my sign. It's a duplicate image that says, "Give back our tax dollars." It's a beautiful sign. Now I didn't spend taxpayers' money to put up that sign and the Premier shouldn't have done it either. Sheer, clear propaganda.

What's very disturbing about the education debate is that if the government were doing right by the people and kids in Ontario, they would not have to spend over $6 million in propaganda ads to try to get their message out because the parents in Ontario of the some two million children who are in the system today would see the effects of what you're doing if it was a good thing. You wouldn't need to spend money on ads at prime time during the news hours, at dinnertime, to try to launch your message through to parents. I wouldn't have a parent come to me in great surprise and say, "I don't understand why my kid is still sitting on a radiator in the classroom because that's how many children there are in the classroom."

Why is it that when the Premier had to do his next press conference advancing some other item in terms of change, they went to a class and they said to the teacher, "Bring 20 of your students in so we can do the photo op." That teacher had to select 20 of the 31 in her class to then appear on television that day because the class you selected had 31 kids in it, not the supposed 22 or 25 that you're purporting to be the number who are going to be in the class, thanks to this new school funding formula.

The people of Ontario will not buy this because the facts are exactly as we see them. Just as we see the Minister of Health ignoring and denying the facts of the matter in health care, and we see the Comsoc minister denying the facts of workfare and its failure, now we have the Minister of Education joining the ranks, burying his head in the sand and saying, "We don't have a problem here." We have a problem in education in Windsor. We would not be closing schools in Windsor and Essex county because of student enrolment this year, and instead we're faced with school closures.

I'd like to quote from a former principal who's now retired. His name is Gene Pavan. He was the principal of Monarch when it closed because of student enrolment. He spoke at the Forster school closure meeting and what he said was very interesting when we're talking about vocational schools especially: "Here are students you need to work with to ensure come to school every day. You need to make sure they find their place in the world and need that kind of extra help."

When they closed that school and forced those students to move to other vocational schools in the area, within one year those students who had been moved, 50% of them dropped out of high school. Even today, after a year or so of retirement, Mr Pavan still remembers that year and felt personally responsible for how many of those kids would have gone on and to what potential had they graduated from high school, but for decisions that had been made at the time because of student enrolment.

But that's not where we are today. Today we're talking about school closures because of this government's school funding formula. They've made a determination of a certain number of feet allowed per student and that's it. Now you can pass this off and say it's just partisan ramblings, but we talked to the former Conservative candidate from Essex county who chairs the Windsor board of education, who says: "We have no flexibility with this formula. We can't help it. We don't have the money. These decisions are being forced on us." That lays the blame right at the feet of the minister.

That's why this Minister of Education should be at Kennedy high school on Tuesday, October 13, in the evening for that meeting with parents. I need that minister to explain to those parents. It has nothing to do with student enrolment. It has everything to do with the fact that they are not allowing funding for janitor services, secretary services, to turn the lights on in these places. The fact is that Forster high school is a community school in the west end of Windsor that has brought into that school Sandwich health centre, various community programs, to keep that west end of Windsor alive with a place for those students to go in the evening, with community things that happen in that school. That is what trustees said was of value to those people on the west side of Windsor, and this government's funding formula will deny that to the people of the west end of Windsor, I might add, the same group of people that lost a west side emergency room because of the closure of our hospital at that end of town as well as the closure of the Grace emergency site, once again all focused in the west end of Windsor.

During that last parents' meeting at Forster, one of the parents stood up and said: "What else is our community going to lose? We've already lost two emergency rooms at the west end. Now we're going to lose our high school." Let me tell you that if you choose to go forward without significant change in your school funding formula, which does not work, we will not let the local people take the blame. The blame will lie squarely at your feet. What is happening in Windsor is being repeated throughout Ontario.

When Dalton McGuinty was at Harrow high school, he looked around and saw that those people who were advocating for Harrow high school weren't necessarily the parents of the kids who go there. They weren't necessarily the councillors who represent the Harrow area or the mayor there. It was the business community, the small business community which could clearly see the economic benefit of Harrow high school on that town, because if you close the high school in Harrow, what reason do people have to continue to go into the downtown of Harrow?

I would ask every member of this House to consider what benefits a school has on community and what benefits and what responsibility we have as taxpayers for all those things in providing education in an area. This is a very serious item for this government in rural areas, in urban areas, and in particular in old neighbourhoods which now tend to be filled with new Canadians who may be the least able to fight for themselves. We will continue to fight for them.

The Speaker: Mrs McLeod has moved opposition day number 1. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry?

All those in favour, please say "aye."

All those opposed, please say "nay."

In my opinion, the nays have it.

Call in the members; it will be a five-minute bell.

The division bells rang from 1758 to 1803.

The Speaker: All those in favour of the motion please rise one at a time and be recognized by the Clerk.

Ayes

Boyd, Marion

Bradley, James J.

Brown, Michael A.

Caplan, David

Christopherson, David

Colle, Mike

Conway, Sean G.

Cordiano, Joseph

Crozier, Bruce

Curling, Alvin

Duncan, Dwight

Gerretsen, John

Hoy, Pat

Kennedy, Gerard

Lalonde, Jean-Marc

Lankin, Frances

Phillips, Gerry

Pupatello, Sandra

Sergio, Mario

Silipo, Tony

The Speaker: All those opposed please rise one at a time and be recognized by the Clerk.

Nays

Arnott, Ted

Carroll, Jack

Chudleigh, Ted

Clement, Tony

Danford, Harry

DeFaria, Carl

Ecker, Janet

Ford, Douglas B.

Froese, Tom

Galt, Doug

Gilchrist, Steve

Grimmett, Bill

Hardeman, Ernie

Hastings, John

Johnson, Bert

Johnson, David

Kells, Morley

Klees, Frank

Leach, Al

Maves, Bart

Munro, Julia

Mushinski, Marilyn

Newman, Dan

O'Toole, John

Parker, John L.

Rollins, E.J. Douglas

Runciman, Robert W.

Sampson, Rob

Saunderson, William

Shea, Derwyn

Sheehan, Frank

Skarica, Toni

Smith, Bruce

Snobelen, John

Spina, Joseph

Stewart, R. Gary

Tascona, Joseph N.

Tilson, David

Turnbull, David

Vankoughnet, Bill

Villeneuve, Noble

Wettlaufer, Wayne

Wilson, Jim

Young, Terence H.

Clerk of the House (Mr Claude L. DesRosiers): The ayes are 20; the nays are 44.

The Speaker: I declare the motion lost.

It now being just past 6 of the clock, this House stands adjourned until 6:30 of the clock later this evening.

The House adjourned at 1805.

Evening meeting reported in volume B.

October 8, 1998

PRIVATE MEMBERS' PUBLIC BUSINESS

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 SUR LE JOUR COMMÉMORATIF DE L'HOLOCAUSTE

CHILD CARE

HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 SUR LE JOUR COMMÉMORATIF DE L'HOLOCAUSTE

CHILD CARE

MEMBERS' STATEMENTS

SCHOOL BUS SAFETY

NIAGARA REGIONAL POLICE FORCE

BREAST CANCER

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BRAMPTON BATTALION

AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY

UNITED WAY

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VISITOR

ORAL QUESTIONS

ONTARIO PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEES UNION

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VISITOR

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COMPENSATION FOR HEPATITIS C PATIENTS

SCHOOL CLOSURES

HOSPITAL RESTRUCTURING

PROPERTY TAXATION

HEALTH CARE

PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS

OPPOSITION DAY

EDUCATION FUNDING