L063B - Wed 2 Dec 1998 / Mer 2 Déc 1998 1
The House met at 1831.
ORDERS OF THE DAY
TAX CREDITS AND REVENUE PROTECTION ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 SUR LES CRÉDITS D'IMPÔT ET LA PROTECTION DES RECETTES
Resuming the adjourned debate on the motion for second reading of Bill 81, An Act to implement tax credits and revenue protection measures contained in the 1998 Budget, to make amendments to other statutes and to enact a new statute / Projet de loi 81, Loi visant à mettre en oeuvre des crédits d'impôt et des mesures de protection des recettes contenus dans le budget de 1998, à modifier d'autres lois et à en édicter une nouvelle loi.
Mr Alex Cullen (Ottawa West): I'm pleased to participate in the debate about Bill 81, An Act to implement tax credits and revenue protection measures contained in the 1998 Budget, to make amendments to other statutes and to enact a new statute. It sounds very interesting, I'm sure. It is the follow-up, of course, to the budget that was tabled last spring. I just want to cover about three or four issues that are a result of not only the budget but the bill we have before us today.
The budget that was tabled back last May announced the implementation of the final stage of the Harris income tax scheme. To quote here, "Most of the tax reduction will go to the nearly three million middle-income taxpayers in this province. These taxpayers, who earn between $25,000 and $75,000, will receive 64%, or almost $3 billion, of savings from the tax cut every year."
We know as well that the government is still running a deficit. The deficit for 1997-98 will be $5.2 billion; the deficit for 1998-99 will be $4.2 billion. We know that had the government not introduced its income tax scheme at the beginning of its mandate, we would not be in a deficit situation today; we would be in a balanced budget situation today and we would not see ourselves in the context of so many hospital closures and so many school closures to generate the funds to cover the deficit and the income tax cut. So it is a problem we have with the government's own agenda.
I know from my own by-election, from going door to door just a year ago, that when I asked people if the Harris income tax scheme was worth the price of closed hospitals - in Ottawa-Carleton we're dealing with the closure of the Riverside Hospital, the closure of the Grace Hospital, the downsizing of the Elisabeth-Bruyère and the Montfort and Ottawa Civic Hospital. Now we learn that Bill 160 encompasses the closing of schools in my community. Queensway school is a target for closure; Whitehaven school is a target for closure. It's not clear whether it's Confederation High School or Merivale High School, but some 28 to 30 schools have been targeted for closure - all of this to accommodate the government's income tax scheme to hand back money to particularly those in the higher income tax brackets.
I am convinced that the program that is being put forward by the New Democratic Party to address this, to ensure we have funds in place so we can provide for adequate health care in our communities - as you know, Mr Speaker, we have tabled a patients' bill of rights which will set standards in health care delivery so that no one need wait for or want needed care. To finance this without adding to the deficit, we would roll back or recover the Harris income tax scheme for those individuals earning $80,000 or more. That will generate $1.5 billion. When we say "those individuals earning $80,000 or more," we're talking about the top 6% of the working population in Ontario.
This budget is unfortunately a continuation of this wrong-headed policy of the Harris government -
Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Riverside): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I don't believe we have a quorum present.
The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): Would you please check.
Clerk Assistant (Ms Deborah Deller): A quorum is not present, Speaker.
The Acting Speaker ordered the bells rung.
Clerk Assistant: A quorum is now present, Speaker.
The Acting Speaker: The member for Ottawa West.
Mr Cullen: To resume debate on this government bill, which basically follows up on the 1998 budget, I was just making the point that the Harris income tax scheme, which this government is wrong-headedly committed to and which is costing our communities in terms of health care services and education with the closure of hospitals, with the closure of schools, is not supported by the general public, as I know from a year ago in the by-election in my own community.
All parties ran on balancing the budget. However, there is clearly a rejection of this scheme of the Harris government to close hospitals and close schools and shut down important social services merely to finance an income tax break for those with higher incomes in Ontario, and people don't think the trade is worth it. As I was mentioning earlier, the position that our party is pleased to carry forth into the next election deals with the top 6% of out population. Those individuals earning $80,000 or more will have their Harris tax break rolled back so that we can have the funds to ensure that no one need suffer, that no one need want or wait for needed care in our health care system. I think this is a very responsible approach because it's in the context of a balanced budget that our party is pleased to pursue it.
Some people may question whether or not the New Democratic Party has adjusted from its previous experience in government. I have to say to you that being in government, and you know it full well, Mr Speaker, is a reality check, and I'm pleased to say that my colleagues have benefited from that experience. But still, to govern is to choose. We have to set priorities. The priorities we have on our side of the House meet community needs and we believe that the government's priorities do not reflect that. But that's only one part of this bill.
The other elements of this bill, and I'll read them out to you, deal with changes to the Ambulance Act, the Community Small Business Investment Funds Act, the Corporations Tax Act, the Employer Health Tax Act, the Estate Administration Tax Act, the Income Tax Act - I think I've covered that already - the Land Transfer Tax Act, the Ontario Lottery Corporation Act, the Pension Benefits Act, the Retail Sales Tax Act, the Teachers' Pension Act and the Tobacco Tax Act.
I want to pick up on one small thing about the Teachers' Pension Act. We've had the opportunity to meet with the teachers to discuss the government's proposed amendment. To our surprise, we found that the Ontario Teachers' Federation expected to be partners with the government in dealing with any amendments to their pension plan, but instead the government simply has drawn up the amendments that are contained in this bill and tabled them unilaterally without showing them to the OTF officials except just prior to the bill actually being tabled. The bill was tabled a little more than a week ago, on November 23.
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That is no way to consult with the major players who are going to be affected by this legislation. It is a slap in the face to the Ontario teachers. What they are suggesting to us is that since we're touching upon a complex topic, something that their experts are going to have to look carefully at, to make sure there are no unintended effects, they're asking this government to please sever part XI here dealing with the Teachers' Pension Act out of the bill and deal with it separately so that we can ensure that all the right things are happening. Quite frankly, I think this is a responsible approach.
We know this government is already calling time allocation as soon as it can to ram bills through. It would be irresponsible in this context to find this portion of the bill being forced through under time allocation where there is no opportunity - we saw the government earlier this afternoon, after three days of debate, forcing through the Greater Toronto Services Board Act to committee without any public hearings, with only four and a half hours to consider amendments. We know there will be some amendments proposed on the government side, yet the guillotine will fall. I would hope that in this context here we would at least respect the Ontario Teachers' Federation's request and sever that part out of the bill.
I'm more concerned about another element in the bill that deals with the transfer of responsibilities for ambulances to regional municipalities. Here we have proposed legislation that gives the minister the ability to either direct it to an upper-tier municipality or to another agency. Quite frankly, I think this calls out for amendment. If indeed there is going to be a proper downloading of these responsibilities to the regional level, the upper-tier level, whether it's regional government or county, they should have the option of how ambulance services should be provided in their community.
In Ottawa-Carleton, we have an absolutely scandalous situation. I have in my hands a report that went to the regional municipality of Ottawa-Carleton dealing with an independent audit of ambulance response times in Ottawa-Carleton. You may know that the response times for ambulances are governed by legislation here in Ontario, the Ambulance Act, and that the legislative requirement for response time under provincial legislation, approved by this House and by the government through the Ministry of Health, in an urban area is nine minutes, 90% of the time. This means that the population in an urban area, whether it's Ottawa-Carleton, Hamilton, Toronto, London, Windsor, any urban area, the taxpayers there can expect to receive, 90% of the time in nine minutes, an ambulance to meet their emergency needs.
The audit that was done in Ottawa-Carleton discovered that 90% of the time in the urban area the response time was 13½ minutes, a full four and a half minutes late. Because we have some of the top cardiac treatment centres on the continent, Dr Wilbert Keon's institute at the Ottawa Civic, as well as the work done by Dr Justin Maloney to bring in paramedics, which Ottawa-Carleton was a leader on, we know that four-and-a-half-minute time is so crucial to get treatment there, to get the paramedics there so they can save lives and bring people directly to hospital so that they be given the best treatment and recover from their experience.
To find ourselves in a situation in the urban area where we're looking at 13½ minutes, 90% of the time, when the legislative maximum - I mean, there are municipalities at better than nine minutes, 90% of the time, but we're talking about the legislative ceiling, maximum, and yet here in Ottawa-Carleton, under the ministry's administration, we find this terrible drop in standards.
When all this responsibility goes down to the regional municipality, it's that level of government that should have total control because they will be responsible, accountable to their taxpayers for the level of service and will be able to put in the appropriate resources. Unfortunately, the act does not allow all the ambulance services to go directly to regions and counties; there is an opportunity for them to go elsewhere. I don't think that's the right way to go. This is an important public service. It has to go to an accountable, responsible body, and I would think it is the regional municipalities and the counties that would best be the judge of that, seeing that they're going to have to pay for it anyway. Here the minister may direct it to another body, but the regional and county taxpayers will still have to pay the full freight. Why can they not have direct control over this? That's an important issue.
I'm going to come to something that's actually more near and dear to my heart, and that's that part of the budget and that part of this bill that deals with child care. For over three years now, three and a half years, the government has been trying to announce some kind of child care initiative and spend some $200 million or so to "provide for child care needs," but the will is not there. The political will just has not been there. They try one program after another. There's been announcement after announcement. Even in the budget we find yet another reannouncement of a child care initiative.
What did this government do when it took office back in June 1995? It cancelled 14,000 Jobs Ontario child care spaces, each and every one of them being used by a low-income family that was trying to put themselves back on track, that was either in an education facility or out there working, trying to help their families get the income they need so they can have a future for themselves, have a future for their children, have an ability to deal with their long-term issues, whether it's health or education, retirement or what have you, to help these families get going.
What did this government do? It cancelled the program - that's 14,000 spaces we're talking about - and only after there was a storm of protest from the local municipalities and the regional municipalities did some of those get rescued by property taxpayers on an 80-20 basis. Since that time there have been no new subsidized spaces created for those families in need. These are families who need the supports so they can go out and earn a decent wage and support their families in these trying times, based on all the cuts in support services, social services, that this government has foisted upon the working poor, the working families in our province.
Three and a half years and not one single subsidized space has been provided, yet we know - I have in my hand here a report on child care in Ontario that was put together by the Ontario New Democratic Party caucus, Putting Children First: Quality Care for Ontario's Children. This particular document summarizes quite correctly the child care needs in our community. This government has really no commitment towards providing an adequate child care program that meets the needs of working parents. Here it brings in the workfare system. There is a requirement that you're going to force each and every welfare recipient - by the way, Mr Speaker, you know and I know that each and every welfare recipient is longing for a job, is longing for training to get a job, is longing to have the ability to look after their six-year-old daughter or their 80-year-old mother or their disabled brother, is longing to have those community supports put in place so they can earn a decent wage, so they can go forward and look after their future, their health, their family.
It's a myth that the government puts out that welfare recipients aren't interested. Come to my community in Ottawa-Carleton where we have well over a fifth of the residents receiving some form of assistance. The overwhelming majority of them want those jobs, but this government has not given them a hand up at all. In fact, it has cut the supports that would enable them to get a decent wage and help their family.
But here we have in Bill 81 the reannouncement of a child care initiative after three and a half years, the same darned initiative, yet we're not getting any further ahead. Yet in the three and a half years we've also had a federal government that has tried to announce a child care initiative, tried to put money on the table, yet this government and that government haven't been able to put their act together to provide for the needs in our communities that are transparent to us all, quite frankly, because of a lack of political will - simply put, a lack of political will. Now that we're three and a half years into this process, three and a half years into this government's mandate and we're on the edge of an election, all of a sudden this government finds that there's a need out there and it's throwing money left, right and centre.
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We're spending more than ever before on health care and we're looking at hiring more nurses. Never mind they took $800 million out of our health care system, creating the basis of our emergency rooms overload. Never mind the imbalance that was thrust upon home care.
Mr Garry J. Guzzo (Ottawa-Rideau): Wrong.
Mr Cullen: The member for Ottawa-Rideau knows full well the home care crisis that was generated by this government's policies. He even put pen to paper, but he has a hard time hearing from the Minister of Health. What's his opinion about the Minister of Health and her initiative? He has stated it quite clearly. The member for Ottawa-Rideau says that the Minister of Health was not listening to him when he tried to talk about the health care crisis in Ottawa-Carleton.
We had a situation in Ottawa-Carleton last winter where the hospitals were offloading their emergency room patients on to community care. The community care couldn't handle it. They found themselves with a $3-million deficit. People were being told they were going to be cut off over the Christmas season and had to depend on their families and friends, and only then did the government come down and say: "Oh my God, our policies are in error. We're going to have to put some money into this." The member for Ottawa-Rideau knows that story full well, but he can't get a reply from the Minister of Health. He has said so on more than one occasion.
If we want to talk about long-term care, which this government crows that it's making such tremendous advances on, when the member for Ottawa-Rideau announced in Ottawa-Carleton the government program to provide I believe some 1,400 long-term-care spaces over eight years at the same time that the Health Services Restructuring Commission said there had to be more than that in five years, the member for Ottawa-Rideau acknowledged that it was inadequate to meet the need; acknowledged that the need for long-term care in Ottawa-Carleton was not being met by this government. So don't talk to me about trying to meet needs in our community here, in my community in Ottawa-Carleton. The government's record is plain and will be remembered by the voters in Ottawa-Carleton.
But I want to come back to the provisions in this bill. I got sidetracked. I want to come back to the provisions in this bill because I face day to day in my constituency office the walking wounded from the Mike Harris Common Sense Revolution. Every day people come in and say to me, "Mr Cullen, we have been on the waiting list for social housing for five years now. I'm in a one-bedroom apartment. I've got a 12-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter and I'm on social assistance. I'm trying to get a job. It's very difficult out there. I don't have the skills. The government's not providing any training programs. I'm spending more than my shelter allowance on rent. That means less money for my children," for their children's food, for their children's education, for their children's health, for their children's future. "Mr Cullen, can you help me?"
I'm faced with this government having cancelled social housing projects when it took office. We have 22,000 units of social housing in Ottawa-Carleton. The waiting list is now 14,000 long. The wait is five years, net every month there are 300 people going on to this list, and this government just sits there and says, "Well, you know, we're going to have to work with the feds and we're going to have to work with the municipalities and sometime in the future somehow we're going to meet this community's needs." For crying out loud, the need was transparent three years ago, and this government has sat on its hands and merely offloaded on to the property taxpayer the responsibility for this. It is irresponsible.
I want to get back to this bill. I want to get back to child care because, quite frankly, this is something I know. For nine years I was a policy analyst at health and welfare and we dealt with the emerging issue of child care.
Interjection.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Perth.
Mr Cullen: I can tell you that 80% of women who have children under the age of six are out there working. They have to work. Despite this government being in place for three and a half years, these women have to work, they have to contribute. They have to contribute to their family; they have to contribute to their family's well-being. What is this government doing to support them, to make sure that these children are being adequately looked after? Are they supporting the educational system to make sure that these kids have the wherewithal to go to school, to make sure that there are after-four programs to deal with their needs? Not at all. This government has cut that.
You go into the school boards now and you look at that magnificent formula they brought forward, and I say that so sarcastically because that formula does not allow these school boards to provide these after-four programs any more. You can't shift money from silo to silo. You can't go to your taxpayer and say, "Can we have these after-four programs in our schools to meet our kids' needs?" This is a saving to the taxpayer.
The government on the other side knows full well, because ministers have quoted this, every dollar invested in early childhood intervention saves the taxpayer $5 downstream. Yet this government insists on cutting out that dollar at the outset. If you don't put that dollar investment in, downstream you pay for the additional cost of re-education, the additional cost of retraining, the additional cost of welfare, the additional cost for crime and the additional cost for housing and support for these people. It's all there.
What does this government do? It insists on giving back dollars to taxpayers who didn't ask for it in the first place, who have said, "Do not close my hospital." Tell me out here, has any member of the Conservative Party found ordinary residents who have said they have been overserved by their health care system? I tell you, come to Ottawa West where we are second to Victoria, BC, in terms of our seniors, where in the last by-election, September 4 last year, by a 53% majority, they sent a message very clearly.
Mr John Gerretsen (Kingston and The Islands): They thought they voted for a Liberal. They wanted a Liberal member.
Mr Cullen: The member here talks about sending a Liberal. They want to have that income tax rollback to support their community. That message is very clear, and I'm proud to stand behind it.
The Acting Speaker: Questions or comments?
Mr Doug Galt (Northumberland): First I'd like to congratulate the member for Ottawa West for having found a party that he could enter and move into. I think he's right at home. He seems to fit in very well. The leader of the NDP said he was a breath of fresh air, and I trust that leader won't regret his comments. I notice he was in a party that kept flip-flopping all over the place and obviously he wasn't comfortable with that. He's now with the NDP and we understand he's going to be very consistent with their policies. I can understand from his previous performance that he's going to be dead-on.
He made a lot of reference to the downloading of ambulance, which in fact was a transfer of ambulance, the revenue-neutral of the Who Does What. The ambulance services fit in with the other emergency activities - and that was the intent - that are being run by the municipality, the police and the fire services.
If he remembers back to the AMO conference, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing was there as was the Minister of Health, and suggested to AMO if they had a better idea, please come forward with it. I understand that AMO is considering and may come forward in the not-too-distant future with a new suggestion on how ambulance services might be provided in Ontario.
I think the member should also remember that a year ago April or May AMO came to us with some adjustments to the Who Does What and this government adopted every single item they came in with, with the exception of the 5% that they wanted to have the municipality -
Mr Cullen: I was there. Don't try and do that.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa West.
Mr Galt: - to continue the levy property tax for education. This government wasn't about to have that. I can understand why you might think that was a good idea: Put the wedge in and keep spreading it out and the next thing they'd have 50% or 60% again, just as education was out of control before.
I come back to congratulating the member for finding a party. I hope it works out well for him in the NDP.
Mr Gerretsen: What the member for Northumberland has just stated about AMO's position with respect to the downloading is absolute nonsense. Absolute nonsense. The theory that he has been spreading here tonight the government has been attempting to spread on this issue over the last year or so. Let's just go back.
It was the government's plan originally to download about $1 billion worth of provincial services on to the local taxpayer. They were going to download $1 billion worth of a variety of services. AMO then met with them and, as a result of various discussions that took place, in fact only about $500 million of services were downloaded. Sure, AMO appreciated the fact that the municipal taxpayer was only going to be downloaded $500 million rather than $1 billion. It's like saying, "What would you rather have, a kick in the legs or a kick in the head?"
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To somehow take that situation and say that the municipalities of Ontario were in favour of that kind of a download of $500 million to the local taxpayers in Ontario is a totally erroneous statement to make. It simply is not so. I think it can be borne out by the fact that for the first time in five years about two thirds of the municipalities have felt that it was necessary to increase taxation in this province by 5% or more. That comes from the Minister of Finance's own words in the House here.
Of course, the Tories like to spin another theory on that as well, that there's somehow a conspiracy that the municipal councillors don't like Mike Harris and that's why they all ganged up and decided to increase the taxes within their own municipalities. Anybody who believes that is absolutely absurd, so I say to the member for Northumberland, don't make those kinds of statements again.
Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine): I'm pleased to respond to the member for Ottawa West, but I do have to say that the member for Northumberland is using what I can only call creative interpretation, if that's parliamentary, Mr Speaker.
To the member for Ottawa West, in particular two things I want to comment on, as well as a question to him. He spoke at great length about ambulance services, and I know that he is very familiar with the ambulance services in the Ottawa region. In fact, he's quite right that they were one of the leaders in terms of introduction of advanced life supports and paramedic skills in that area. Also, he's quite right when he ties it into the Ottawa Heart Institute. I had the opportunity when I was the Minister of Health to do some work with Dr Keon. It's an amazing group of people there.
The whole issue of response time and defibrillation and those sorts of things in terms of paramedic skills is absolutely critical when we're talking about saving lives. One of the things I have always thought is that it would be better to move toward some unified ambulance service in response to the Swimmer report and others. I wonder if the member thinks that might have been a better way to go than through the downloading that's happening without the necessary resources there and the lines of accountability.
He is also absolutely right in the comments that he makes about child care and this government's record on child care. We heard the phoniest announcement from the finance minister two and a half, three budgets ago, when he said, "We're going to spend more than any government ever spent in the history of the province." Of course, three years later not one penny has been spent. They've changed the program. It was going to be subsidies and then it was going to be a tax credit and now it's an income supplement.
It would be very helpful if they looked at the root problem. The root problem is there aren't enough high-quality subsidized daycare spaces. Before the parliamentary assistant gets up and says, "We've created 14,000 spaces," not one of them has been created by the government and not one of them is subsidized and accessible to low-income people who need that support to get off welfare and to get back into the workplace.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Chatham-Kent.
Ms Lankin: Oh, I guessed.
Mr Jack Carroll (Chatham-Kent): I wouldn't want to disappoint the member for Beaches-Woodbine by not standing to offer a couple of comments; however, I'm not going to deal directly with the issue of child care. I do want to offer some comments, though, on the member for Ottawa West. It's interesting that he's shifted parties across the way. But you know, the rhetoric is exactly the same. It has nothing to do with anything constructive. He went into a diatribe for 20 minutes, critical of absolutely every initiative that this government has undertaken.
We have come to expect from the third party more constructive criticism than that. We don't always agree with their criticism. Quite frankly, the member for Beaches-Woodbine tends to lead the charge on this. She offers to participate, to help, to give her services in order to provide something better in the way of government in Ontario, and oftentimes she has been a great asset to me in different things we've dealt with.
In the time he spent in the Liberal Party the member for Ottawa West did nothing but rant against things he had very little knowledge about. He's now moved over into the third party and his rant is exactly the same. You could close your eyes, he could be anyplace. He really has a serious credibility problem in this place.
It's interesting that he's got on the kick now of rolling back the income tax cut. He wants to raise taxes. It's nice to know that he's left the Liberal Party, which doesn't know what they want to do, and he's endorsed the NDP position of increasing taxes. At least we know that he endorses the policy of higher taxes and he's abandoned the Liberals, who, by his own admission, have no idea what they want to do about anything. So he's in a pretty good place.
Mr Gerretsen: Oh, he was just upset he lost the nomination. That's what it's all about.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa West, you have two minutes.
Mr Cullen: I'm not going to get into the process of who did what to whom, but I do want to thank - and to the member for Kingston and The Islands, if you want to go out for a drink sometime, I can tell you all the details.
Mr Gerretsen: You already have.
Mr Cullen: No, unfortunately, you don't know them all.
I want to thank the members for Northumberland, Kingston and The Islands, Beaches-Woodbine and Chatham-Kent for their contributions. If there are a couple of things that I do know what I'm talking about, it certainly is my community, their concerns about health care, their concerns about education because I was a trustee for six years, their concerns about the ambulance services. I was on regional council and we did go through the downloading exercise and we had excellent staff to guide us through this.
I just want to quote something here, because the member for Northumberland talked about the downloading of ambulance services and how that was supposed to meet up with other dispatch services in the regional municipalities and counties and how it's supposed to be a greater synergy or a greater coordination.
The fact of the matter is that a very crucial element of the downloading or transfer of ambulances to regions and counties is missing, and that's dispatch. Dispatch is staying with the province. Here we have a local, regional 911 system that looks after parameds, fire, police, the whole bit, but dispatch for ambulances is being withheld, retained by the province, and it's wrong.
I have here a letter that was sent to the Honourable Elizabeth Witmer, Minister of Health, written by Bob Chiarelli, chair, region of Ottawa-Carleton:
"The region of Ottawa-Carleton accepts its responsibility for full service provision of land ambulance services in the year 2000. It does not, however, accept the current very poor service provided by your ministry. This new information," which I outlined earlier, "very clearly demonstrates" -
The Acting Speaker: Thank you. Further debate?
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North): It's my pleasure to speak on this bill, and as well as speaking to the bill, I'd like to address some of the comments made by the member for Kingston and The Islands. He made a very intriguing comment that interested me: Why would the municipalities raise taxes on their small businesses? Perhaps I could refer him to what's happened in Hamilton-Wentworth and give him some explanation as to why municipalities would in fact do that.
The situation in Hamilton-Wentworth, for the member for Kingston and The Islands, and I don't expect him to be totally familiar with it, is that with the recent CVA changes what happened was that the downtown area in Hamilton had basically collapsed. Taxes were too high there for a long time and the property values had collapsed accordingly.
Meanwhile, the Hamilton municipality was overspending and having numerous failed programs. Anyone in Hamilton is pretty familiar with them. In fact, the local taxpayers' federation has a pamphlet called 37 Reasons Not to vote for any Incumbents, and it lists the numerous fiascos totalling $178 million, all of which had to be paid for by taxpayers, and a large bulk of that by downtown Hamilton businesses, over the last 20 or 30 years.
But anyway, what happened in Hamilton was that the downtown businesses were paying large taxes to the point where they couldn't do it, so they started to leave the downtown - that's pretty predictable - and they went out to the suburban areas and out to the Mountain area of Hamilton. When the CVA changes came in, the downtown areas all of a sudden found themselves with collapsed property values. In fact, they would benefit from CVA changes by paying a lot less taxes.
But what happened at the same time was those taxes, which were already too high in the downtown area - Hamilton has the second-highest tax rate in the province - now went out to the outlying areas. So what was happening was that after the downtown being ruined and the businesses fleeing, those heavy taxes were coming out to the outlying areas. When the CVA changes came in, Hamilton used the tools to make sure the downtown area benefited immediately by having dramatic tax decreases, and the outlying areas had dramatic tax increases.
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Then the question was, dealing with the point you made, why would municipalities do that? Why would a municipality deliberately inflict large tax increases on the outlying areas? The answer in Hamilton, unfortunately, was somewhat sinful and somewhat disturbing. Hamilton felt it was shortchanged on the download and was desperate to have some kind of compensation for that.
If you break down who benefited from the tax decreases and who was hurt by the tax increases, the downtown area benefited. Those two areas - and it may be a coincidence - were represented by the opposition, including your fellow member from Hamilton East and the NDP member from Hamilton Centre. The large tax increases were taking place in the outlying areas, which were represented by Tory members: myself, Mr Doyle and Mr Pettit.
What happened politically in Hamilton was that there were dramatic tax increases in the outlying areas and there were dramatic tax decreases downtown, which by the way were never advertised. I'm sure this is the first time you're hearing about it. Municipal politicians never told anybody that there were going to be all these tax breaks to the downtown area. That was one of the best-kept secrets in Ontario. They never mentioned it.
Mr Cullen: What was their motive?
Mr Skarica: Their motive was quite simple. There's something called A Citizen's Guide to Regional Services in Hamilton-Wentworth. Here they explain the provincial changes. Nowhere in this document, the official document of the region, is it ever mentioned that there are substantial property tax decreases. In fact, the only page that's devoted to property tax changes is entitled "Provincial Downloading and Tax Increases." It's basically blaming all the tax increases on the download shortfall, and even according to their own document it says 3.5% was the download shortfall.
Meanwhile, businesses in my area are going up 100%, 200%, 1,000%. I have a whole list of them here. I don't need to go on and on, but many businesses were doubling and in fact tripling. I'll give you a couple of examples: Flamboro Quarries paid $19,000 in 1997, $121,000 in 1998; Redland Quarries paid $55,000 in 1997, $153,000 in 1998; and on and on it goes.
Basically, the position the province was in and certainly the position I was in was that it didn't change. When the reality of what happened came forward - and I address this again to the member for Kingston and The Islands - the region's response was troubling. They saw that all these businesses on the outside of the region, in the suburban area and Hamilton Mountain, were going to fail. There were numerous articles on it, a number of newspaper articles entitled: "Tax Hike Threatens Survival"; "Local Taxpayers Must Have Help"; Arend Kersten from the Flamborough Review described the crisis in Flamborough as the gravest to ever face the town; and so on and so forth. The only response from the regional chairman was, "The politicians have failed taxpayers." That was most evident and didn't need to be said by anyone - a very dramatic understatement of what went on.
What happened there, I say to the member for Kingston and The Islands, going back to the official document entitled A Citizen's Guide to Regional Services in Hamilton-Wentworth, was that the region had the audacity to put this in the document: "A tax structure has been created to offset large increases caused by reassessments for commercial and industrial properties. In addition, eligible small and medium-sized businesses have received tax rebates as indicated on the property tax bill."
Mayor Bob Morrow, who doubles as the mayor of Hamilton and fundraising chair for the member for Hamilton East, stated on October 21, 1998, "There certainly was a strong attempt to use the tools as best we could."
Mr Gerretsen: What's the point?
Mr Skarica: I'm addressing the point. You said, "Why would municipalities deliberately inflict large tax increases on small business?" That's what happened in Hamilton. They did it deliberately.
Mr Cullen: No, they didn't.
Mr Gerretsen: No, no.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa West, member for Kingston and The Islands.
Mr Skarica: The municipalities used the tools extensively to accomplish two things -
Mr Cullen: So it's all their fault?
Mr Skarica: I'll address whose fault it is in a minute if you want.
What they did, and it was deliberate, was that there were dramatic tax decreases in downtown Hamilton, which by some strange coincidence is represented by members of the opposition, and the tax increases all took place in areas which are represented by Tory members. The only response from the region and from the towns was, "We need money from the province to address this situation." They were not prepared to do anything. Finally, the province had to move in with a 10-5-5 situation, and that provided relief for my businesses and for the businesses in the suburbs of Hamilton and on the Mountain.
Even to this day, I should tell members of the opposition, I am being lobbied by those same municipal politicians who say, "Hamilton needs an exemption," knowing full well there are hundreds of businesses in Hamilton, many of them in my riding and some in Mr Doyle's and some in Mr Pettit's, that will be wiped out under the present situation.
Mr Cullen: These tax increases happened because of what? What changed to cause those taxes to go up?
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa West, you had your turn.
Mr Skarica: The region's response is, not only will they not deal with anything in the present situation that's going to bankrupt numerous companies; now that the province is moving in to save those businesses, the region has the audacity to lobby myself and others to say, "No, don't do that; give us an exemption; let's go back to the way it was a couple of months ago," knowing full well that hundreds of businesses are going to be wiped out. We're not talking Chrysler or large corporations; we're talking mom-and-pop operations. We're talking people who have worked their whole life, who work 60 to 80 hours a week to make a modest income. They know those people will be wiped out and they don't care. Their response is: "Do nothing, or at best we want more money from the province. We want the download money."
Mr Gerretsen: That's nonsense.
Mr Skarica: That's not nonsense. If you look at the Hamilton Spectator -
Mr Gerretsen: They don't care? That's nonsense.
Mr Skarica: I suggest to the member for Kingston and The Islands, look at the Hamilton Spectator, look at all the local papers. The explanation from the regional politicians to the local small business people is: "It's not our fault. We can't do anything. It's the provincial changes. It's the download."
Mr Gerretsen: Well, it is the changes.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Kingston and The Islands.
Interjection.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa West.
Mr Skarica: I want the House to note that the members have agreed with what the regional politicians are saying: "It's not our fault, it's the province. It's the download." Well, the download, according to the region's own documents, is a 3.5% increase. How does that translate into a 100% or a 200% or a 1,000% increase?
Again, members of both oppositions have indicated here tonight that, yes, it is the province's fault. It is their changes, and so on and so forth. It's Mike Harris's fault for Hamilton's problems. It's interesting to note, if you take a look at -
Mr Cullen: It wasn't there before. We didn't have those problems before.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa West, I don't want to repeat it again. Please.
Mr Skarica: Actually, I don't mind, Mr Speaker. The member for Ottawa West is helping me considerably. He just indicated that it was there before. He's right, it was there before. Let's take a look at the tax rates before any changes.
Burlington - isn't that in the province of Ontario? Burlington is in the province of Ontario. Is not Mike Harris the Premier there? The tax rate there was 3.58% before any of the changes by the province. The town of Paris - I know Paris is in France, but we have one in Ontario too - 4.4%; Caledonia, 4.15%; Cambridge, 2.01%; the city of Mississauga, 3.82%; the town of Markham, 3.3%; the town of Dundas, which is where my area is, 6.12%. That's the commercial rate. Is that Mike Harris's fault? Isn't he the Premier of all those other places? How come the tax rate in my town is double and triple other places? You can drive to Cambridge within an hour and you're going to get one third of the tax rate. That's not Mike Harris's fault. Like the member for Ottawa West said, that existed before. That's not our government's fault; it's a fault of the region.
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Why is the region the second-highest taxed area in Ontario? Why is that? Is it Mike Harris's fault that the tax rates in the Hamilton-Wentworth region are the second highest in the province? Is it? I'm not hearing anything from the opposition, because they know the answer to that. You can help me out, member for Ottawa West.
Mr Cullen: The government made all these changes. You screwed up.
Mr Skarica: All right. Before the changes, what was a commercial business in Hamilton-Wentworth paying? The comparison of education taxes - that's another thing. "Hamilton's been unfairly picked on. There's an $18-million shortfall," and so on and so forth.
Mr Cullen: You did that, got the download and the education tax. Oh, my lord, there's no benefits to the commercial there.
Mr Skarica: The commercial rate for education in Hamilton-Wentworth is at the provincial average, $16,500. Halton's right next door. So if you have a business in Hamilton-Wentworth, you're paying $16,500. If you move a couple of kilometres to the east, you're paying $10,500. Isn't Mike Harris the Premier of Halton as well? I think he is. Six thousand dollars less. Isn't there the same education system in Halton as in Hamilton-Wentworth? The answer is yes. Go west, young man. Waterloo, $12,500, $4,000 less than Hamilton-Wentworth. Go south: Niagara, $10,500. All the areas surrounding Hamilton are substantially less.
I've heard time and again in this Legislature from the members from Hamilton on the education changes: Hamilton has been shortchanged. On the industrial rate, not the commercial rate, they're paying $18 million more and so on and so forth. Yes, they are. But is that the province's fault? No. It was the Hamilton Board of Education that set those rates. We froze them and now we're reducing them over eight years. The thing that nobody from the opposition talks about in this House is: What if we hadn't made those changes? What if we hadn't put in Bill 160? What would happen in Hamilton is that you'd forever be paying more, $18 million more. In eight years, that'll be wiped out, but you'd probably be paying more than the provincial average forever.
The tax rate on industrial properties in Hamilton is almost double the provincial average, which is 3.3%. In Hamilton-Wentworth they're paying 5.4%, about 75% more. In the surrounding regions: Halton, 3.4%; Waterloo, 3.9%; Niagara, 4.6%. Those are all areas that surround Hamilton, those are all areas where Mike Harris is the Premier, those are all areas where for a long time they have been paying less tax, long before Mike Harris ever became Premier of this province.
For the region or for anyone else to say Hamilton has real problems due to high taxes, they're right on that count. But when it comes to blame, it's got nothing to do with the province and it's got everything to do with what's been going on in Hamilton for a long time: failed businesses, higher tax rates and basically no attempt to curb spending. Again, I'm not hearing anything from the opposition right now, because they know deep down in their heart of hearts that everything I've said is true and in fact it's documented.
Mr David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre): Bullshit.
Hon Al Leach (Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing): What kind of talk is that?
The Acting Speaker: Order, order. I didn't hear anything, honestly. There's so much noise. Order. If someone has said a wrong word, whoever that is, please apologize.
Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: The member said "balderdash."
Mr Christopherson: No, I didn't, and I apologize, Speaker.
The Acting Speaker: I would ask you to keep quiet, otherwise I can't hear a word. Member for Wentworth North.
Mr Skarica: The fact of the matter is that Hamilton does have higher tax rates than most other places. There's an explanation for that and the explanation is very simple. This is not me saying this; I didn't prepare this document. The Taxpayers Coalition of Hamilton-Wentworth prepared it. It's entitled, 37 Reasons Not to vote for any Incumbents. They have an itemized list of failed programs, of money that's been spent in the region of Hamilton - and this may well contribute to why the tax rates there are so high. I'll give you some examples.
The air show, $700,000. Over the past five years the air show has lost $800,000, which has been covered by the region; in 1997, a regional grant of $100,000 to reduce the loan. Art gallery, $1.3 million.
One of my favourites is the constituent assembly report - $600,000 for this document. This document said that you could save $100 million to $200 million by amalgamation. When Gardner Church came into the area and talked about what savings could be had, somehow that $100 million to $200 million shrunk to $35 million.
Gore Park rebuilding and restructuring: Gore Park is an island, basically, of government ineptitude in the middle of Hamilton. If you go into downtown Hamilton, you have to drive by it. They used to have a beautiful fountain, probably as beautiful as any in the country. That was torn down for improvement. People didn't like the improvement, and so another fountain was put up and buildings were put up. They were torn down. Basically, Gore Park is always changing, never for the better, it seems. But $8 million has been spent on makeovers there since 1983.
Grey Cup 1996: who here remembers who played? I don't, but I remember who paid: $2.8 million is what the taxpayers had to pay for it. The Hamilton Street Railway, which has been losing money for a long time - $13 million to build a facility in 1984. Apparently public transit did not use this, as the increase anticipated in Hamilton did not occur, and that facility is not in use. Some $2.2 million was spent to recover two boats, which remain on the bottom of Lake Ontario. It's not the Titanic, but the taxpayers there have lost $2.2 million. NHL bids: As you know, Hamilton has bid for an NHL team. Everybody knows that. What most people don't know is it costs a lot of money: $300,000 was spent on that. Science fair, $300,000. I don't know what happened at the science fair, but it appears that the politicians invented a new way to lose money in Hamilton. So about $180 million in total.
When you hear in the Legislature that there are changes in Hamilton, it's true. They have high tax rates, but the reason they have high tax rates is because of misspending for a long time by regional government.
The Acting Speaker: Questions or comments?
Mr Gerretsen: I actually have respect for the member who just spoke, but not for the approach he took here tonight. I think it's pretty low to start attacking other levels of government and individuals in those levels of government when they don't have an opportunity to respond. I note that the entire speech related to Bill 79, not Bill 81, which is all right, because I want to address some issues relating to Bill 79 as well.
Let me suggest to the member that what happened in Hamilton-Wentworth is happening elsewhere as well. As I indicated here last week, the same thing, or something similar to it, has happened in the greater Napanee area, where as a result of a restructuring that was ordered by this Minister of Municipal Affairs - and I have the actual tax figures here - there have been great shifts in residential taxes from the town of Napanee to the surrounding four townships. Let me review those figures. These people are madder than heck too, because all of a sudden they have seen their taxes increase by 100% to 150%.
Let's just take a look at the residential portion. What has happened? Adolphustown: $108,000 was taken in residential taxes and for 1998 it's $278,000, more than twice the amount. South Fredericksburg went from $33,000 in taxation for residential purposes to $243,000, a 626% increase. In Richmond it went from $794,000 to $945,000, a 19% increase. In Napanee it went from $1.8 million to $1 million. What you have to understand is that when you get these major restructurings and throw in downloading, you're going to get these massive changes that the people out there have absolutely no understanding of. All they know is that their taxes are going up and it's not right.
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Mr Christopherson: I wasn't even scheduled to be in the House this evening, but I happened to be working at my desk and listening to the House and started to catch the rantings of the member for Wentworth North, particularly the last 10 minutes, and shot down here to the House right away. I didn't hear all of it, but I heard the part about the fact that - get this - the whole city, and I guess the regional council too, according to the member, supposedly have this big conspiracy where they were able to finagle the whole tax bill so that the business taxes only went up in Tory ridings and went down in opposition members' ridings. What a lot of nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that the people who got hurt the most by your screw-up of changing the property tax system - bear in mind, we're on your seventh bill, trying to correct all the mistakes you've made and even that one has flaws - the area that got damaged the most, was downtown Hamilton, and that's my riding. Downtown Hamilton, I remind the member, is also the official downtown of the region. So before he moves off too far into this fantastic psychological analysis of how council supposedly is conspiring, and gets lost in his own paranoia, I suggest he stand back and have a look at what the reality is.
Further to that, he goes on to say - I think he used the word "audacity" - that the local elected officials have the audacity to ask him for an exemption for our community from their latest property tax scheme. That proposal is being put forward by the chamber of commerce. You're supposed to be dialoguing with those folks, as the senior parliamentary assistant for the region, which obviously isn't going to do us one hell of a lot of good. The fact of the matter is that, given what I heard today, I think this member owes every Hamiltonian an apology.
Mr Terence H. Young (Halton Centre): I think what the member for Wentworth North said related to what the member for Ottawa West was talking about. It all gets back to how much people can afford to pay. The member for Ottawa West was talking about mothers who have to work, and it's true that with the structure of our society, with what the cost of living is and what we expect out of life, we have most families where the mother and the father work.
I spent some time during my last Christmas holiday on the Internet looking up issues related to child care and day care. I came across a writer by the name of Penelope Leach, who wrote a book called Children First. She talks about creating a society where children have a higher profile, a society that makes children more important. What she talked about on child care - I'm no authority but I'll just pass it on as I understood it - was that the absolute best thing for children, in her view, was for one parent at least to be at home; increasingly in our society it's the father as opposed to just the mother - I suppose more often it's the mother - but for one parent to be at home. Second-best, she suggested, is regular care in a nearby house without any turnover of the other children who are there, an environment which is a homelike environment, where there is stability and a caring environment. She picked professional daycare as third-best, behind those other two.
I think it relates very much to what parents want, and parents want choice. What we've done in this bill is give parents choice. We're giving parents with children under seven years old tax credits - actually, cheques in the mail - which will amount to up to $1,020 for middle- and lower-income families, so they can choose to have one parent stay home with their child, which was Penelope Leach's first choice, or pay for day care, perhaps in a nearby house, which is Penelope Leach's second choice. We're giving parents the choice they need and want.
Mr Cullen: I am pleased to provide some commentary on the remarks made by the member for Wentworth North. Quite frankly, I thought we were dealing with Bill 81. The member for Wentworth North went off and discussed something that's going to be very interesting for Hamilton politics and politicians.
One of the concerns I have is with the comments he made that said all the problems with the property tax increases are not the responsibility of the government. I have to go back 23 months to Bill 106. That's the point where we start the sorry slide into the botched application of all these changes to the poor, humble, lowly property taxpayer, who has got this bill and has to figure out: "Which new property class am I in? Which new property ratio am I in? What am I paying for education that's now being levied by the province? What's happening to business occupancy tax? What's happening to market values? Why am I being stung for an increase in market values when my income hasn't gone up?"
All these things are the result of government initiatives: the government initiative to bring in market value assessment, the government initiative to go in with pooling of education property tax throughout Ontario, the government initiative to fold in business occupancy tax, the government initiative to provide some kind of - they called it a tool box.
I have been a property taxpayer for over 30 years. I have paid these property taxes and I look at these bills and I know exactly who to call when there's a problem. With this government I have to call the Minister of Education for the education portion, not my school board trustee. I can't call my regional council and my city councillor to find out what's happening with market value assessment, because the province does that. We went through market value assessment in Ottawa-Carleton and we certainly didn't botch it like this government has done. It's amazing.
The Deputy Speaker (Mr Bert Johnson): The member for Wentworth North has two minutes to respond.
Mr Toni Skarica: I want to thank the members for speaking and responding to what I had to say, and particularly the member for Hamilton Centre. He obviously cares about his job and ran down here, feeling provoked by what I had to say. I don't have the figures here, but I have seen figures where in fact, on the original changes, the tax load had come from downtown Hamilton out to the outlying areas.
What I found interesting were his comments, and I wrote them down, where he indicated that the original changes - that's before the 10, 5 and 5 change - hurt his area the most. If I'm opposed to the exemption, then he should be opposed to the exemption as well. Since he was hurt the most by the changes by the government prior to 10, 5 and 5, then he wants the same thing I want, and that's no exemption from the current legislation. So I don't really understand his objection if he indicates that the government changes hurt his area the most.
I think we get into a philosophical debate. What our government is trying to accomplish is a reduction in taxes. It doesn't really accomplish a whole lot to say, "All right, we'll shift from one to the other." What we would like to see is a reduction in taxes at all levels. The opposition does not seem to be coming from that angle. They've opposed the 30% tax cut. They've opposed virtually every change that we have implemented that resulted in tax savings. We have a basic different philosophical bent. If I could go to Bill 81 for 10 seconds, there are tax credits in there. We take the position that tax cuts increase economic stimulus and are good for the economy.
Mr Christopherson: On a point of order, Speaker: The point of order is to correct my own record. Given what the member for Wentworth North has said, in listening to what he said, I did indeed put forward a position that was not consistent with what I meant to say. Clearly, the original move by the province hurt my entire riding, but one area that did benefit was downtown and Westdale, and the changes to that are what has done the greatest amount of damage. That's where the chamber of commerce was asking for the exemption and I'm supporting that exemption.
The Deputy Speaker: Further debate?
Mr Gerretsen: It was certainly a very interesting speech that the member for Wentworth North gave on Bill 79 here tonight; we're discussing Bill 81. But it is a tax bill we're talking about, and whenever this government introduces a tax bill, we all get very weary, people on all sides of the House. Remember, Bill 79 was a tax bill as well. They've had about seven or eight different tax bills to deal with the property tax situation, and they got it wrong, so we are extremely worried that they've got Bill 81 wrong as well.
Let's go back to what the member for Wentworth North was talking about it. I take it that basically what he is saying is that he does not want an exemption for Hamilton-Wentworth. I wonder if he could talk to the member from Halton Centre, and the other three Tory members from the region of Halton, because it's my understanding that those four members do want an exemption, as far as Halton region is concerned.
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I'm quoting right now from a document that was just handed to me today. It's a combined brief submitted by AMO, which is the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario, the Municipal Finance Officers' Association of Ontario and the Association of Municipal Tax Collectors of Ontario. Three of these groups are the professional civil servants who work for each and every one of us in our local municipalities, who make whatever changes we do here in this House actually work on the ground.
These groups have been begging the government for at least the last year and a half to meet with them. They want to implement whatever the government wants to do in a systematic, rational fashion. I've met with them a number of times and so have other members of our caucus. They have said, "If there's only one thing you can convince the government of, please let them meet with us because we think we can implement all of these various policies in a fashion which will be acceptable to the majority of the people in Ontario, by far, and we can do it in a rational, reasonable way."
I will be referring to this document throughout my speech. Let's just deal with what they say about Bill 79 as it relates to the exemptions etc. They say, for example, "Bill 79 doesn't recognize local efforts and local solutions," which have already been implemented by the municipalities, of which the Minister of Finance said there were too few. But what Bill 79 doesn't deal with at all are those municipalities that actually did do what the province wanted in one of your other ill-fated bills that preceded Bill 79 dealing with the property tax situation.
They say: "Municipalities utilized the legislative tools provided to best mitigate tax impacts, but in a small number of cases, an identifiable group of taxpayers still faced excessive tax increases. In Halton region, a plan was adopted by regional council and supported by the four chambers of commerce within the region" - and the four local MPPs, who were all Conservative MPPs - "that would have ensured that no ratepayers faced tax increases of 15% or more. The mandatory nature of the provisions in Bill 79 fails to recognize the considerable efforts taken by municipalities to implement the new assessment regime in a manner which addresses local solutions."
I would request that the member for Halton Centre and the other four members of that area propose an amendment exempting them from that and then I would like to see how the member for Wentworth North, Mr Skarica, who just spoke, intends to vote on that. It seems to me that the Conservative caucus itself seems to be flip-flopping on this issue. Some people take this position; some people take that position. What it underscores more than anything else is that if there is total confusion about what's happened to the property taxation in this province, it is squarely the government's fault and nobody else's.
I know they've tried to blame the local municipalities. We saw a brilliant example of that just now when the member for Wentworth North basically took on the entire regional council of Hamilton-Wentworth and called them all incompetent etc. That's been the attack mode the government's been in. I must admit that the strategy they employed in this particular case is, to a certain extent, brilliant, at least so far, because people don't know who to blame. They have dumped everything together.
They have dumped restructuring together. Remember that was sold on the basis that it was going to save money. We've given example after example where it hasn't saved any money. As a matter of fact in some municipalities, as a result of restructuring, massive tax changes have taken place where whole municipalities - and I gave you the example of the greater Napanee area where the residential taxpayers cannot understand that their assessment, in a lot of cases, has actually gone down yet their taxes have somehow gone up anywhere between 50% to 100% or more. That is taking place.
We've got the whole downloading situation. We've already heard from the member for Northumberland tonight who said: "Well, that's what the Association of Municipalities of Ontario wanted. They went along with it." Yes, they went along with it because they preferred half the downloading that the province was originally intent on doing.
When you take all of these situations into account, plus the current market value assessment situation that is affecting a lot of the properties around the province as well, you can only come to one conclusion: The province didn't know what it was doing, it didn't listen to the sound advice given by these various organizations, the people who work with this on a day-to-day basis, and somehow it hopes - and this is what they're really hoping for - that the general taxpayer out there, be they residential, commercial or industrial, will be so confused that they will take it out against their local councils and somehow Mike Harris will get off scot-free. I, for one, certainly hope it isn't going to work, because that isn't what happens in real life.
I would like to take a few moments to read you some - and this letter just came out today, December 2, 1998, from these four organizations, three of whom are the representative organizations of the professional civil servants in our municipalities. I'd like to read you some of the comments they have made with respect to the property taxation system in this province.
They say: "Bill 79 is a complex piece of legislation." There's an understatement if I ever heard one. "It certainly does not appear to support the government's objective of an assessment and taxation system that is fair and understandable to ratepayers." Can you imagine? These are municipal civil servants saying this. "Instead, it is an overreaction to a manageable number of property tax increases. Our evaluation is that it does not afford the protection for small businesses that it was intended to provide."
Listen closely to that. In their letter to the Treasurer of Ontario and to the Minister of Municipal Affairs, the clerks and treasurers, the municipal finance officers, the municipal tax collectors are telling the province, "Our evaluation is that it" - Bill 79 - "does not afford the protection for small businesses that it was intended to provide. Our associations are opposed in principle to Bill 79 in its entirety." That is in heavy print.
This isn't the first time these people have told us. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the finance minister or his officials have refused to meet with these people. They had a plan laid out in a 14-page document that I tabled here, I believe about three or four months ago, in which they actually showed how a rational changeover could take place without some of these huge, tremendous, totally ununderstandable - anyway, you couldn't understand what was happening.
Let's just go on to see what they say. A little bit further on it goes on to say: "Collectively, our associations have significant concerns with Bill 79. It is imperative that the municipal tax billing process not be further delayed or complicated, as this has already resulted in tremendous costs to municipalities in 1998."
When you think about it, most municipalities set their budgets anywhere from about January to April. Usually the last tax bills that went out, or at least the tax bills that actually reflected whatever increases or decreases there were in that municipality, used to go out sometime in May or June. There may be a couple of instalments after that, but the actual tax rate was usually reflected in a tax bill no later than May or June. What's happened this year? You may recall the tax bills didn't go out until sometime in October or November, and in some municipalities they still haven't set a budget for this year.
Remember how the Minister of Municipal Affairs and the Minister of Finance on more than one occasion said, "Oh, there's no cost to municipalities." Well, our municipal civil servants don't seem to think so. They go on to say: "This must not be allowed to spill over into 1999. The legislative timing prevents adequate time to respond to the bill, nor to fully examine the potential impacts of the capping provisions."
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You must recall that not only has the government once again invoked closure on this bill; it doesn't even want to hear from anybody by way of public hearings, which is totally unusual. I think 95% of all the bills I've been involved in in the last three and a half years have usually had a public hearing component to them, once they've gone through second reading. The government doesn't want to do that. It basically only wants clause-by-clause debate on one particular day, and that's next Monday.
Speaker, you and I know from the track record of this government that they're going to get it wrong again, because they won't listen to the people who actually know how to implement what they want to do. All they want to do is just create confusion.
That's about all I want to say about Bill 79, because we are here tonight to discuss Bill 81.
Interjection.
Mr Gerretsen: I notice that the member for Chatham-Kent is applauding that, but your member spoke for 20 minutes on Bill 79. I've only taken about 12½ minutes.
There are a couple of other comments, though, with respect to this budget bill. Remember, it's a tax bill, so we're very leery because it's probably not the last time we'll see this tax bill. It's a bill that goes on for 118 pages and deals with everything under the sun. There are actually a couple of things I like in it.
I like part II, the Community Small Business Investment Funds Act, which makes some changes with respect to community small business investments, the labour-sponsored investments and the Working Ventures investments. I think those are good investments. It's a great opportunity, because of the various tax credits that are available to individuals, to invest in those kinds of initiatives, particularly since the money stays right within the various communities, or at least within Ontario, and it makes small business grow and prosper and create jobs. I like that. These are basically housekeeping changes, but at least I like that particular part of it.
The Ambulance Act we've already heard about. I've got another little clipping here. Not only are you making local councils now pay for ambulance services, but up in Halton - my gosh, this must be Halton day here at the Legislature or something like that. The headline in the Hamilton Spectator today screamed out, "`Get Out of Our Face,' Province Told," with respect to ambulance costs. What the people of Ontario should understand is that for the next year or two the ambulance services are still going to be run and operated and managed by the province, but the local municipalities are going to have to pay the price for it. I always thought - what's that old expression? He who pays the money should call the tune. I don't think that's the way it goes exactly, but it's something like that.
Mr Christopherson: He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Mr Gerretsen: He who pays the piper calls the tune. Anyway, that's not happening here, and Halton is extremely upset about that. I don't know why this government, on a continual basis, just wants to upset the local councils and the regional councils out there. The local councillors are, after all - and you know of what I'm speaking, Speaker, because you were a local councillor as well - the closest to the people.
It used to be, when we had relatively small forms of government throughout most of Ontario, that your local councillor was no farther away than one concession road or two or three blocks over in an urban municipality. You could actually discuss the issues of the day with your local councillor and hopefully some of these items would be raised at a council meeting and you could influence the public policy that was set at the local level. Of course, we're rapidly losing that with these larger and larger governments that are being created under the guise of saving money but that are really costing a lot more money. We're seeing the exact opposite. We've already talked about that as well.
The other interesting one, of course, is the one dealing with estate taxes. I know there have been a fair number of articles written in the paper about the fact that - I don't know what the record is in a provincial Legislature anywhere in the world, but we surely must have reached a new high or low, depending upon how you look at it, in a tax grab by a government in this particular bill.
You may recall that there was a court case about three or four weeks ago at the Supreme Court level that basically decided that the estate taxes that have been collected by the provincial governments and that were significantly increased under the Rae government - they increased them by something like 200%. The probate fees used to be about 0.5% of the value of the estate and they were increased dramatically, if you had an estate over $50,000, to 1.5% in the Rae days. The fees went up tremendously. It's like the land transfer tax on the purchase of new homes. At one time people didn't realize - "I never paid those taxes." I'm a lawyer and I've dealt with a lot of clients over the years. People who bought a house 25 years ago said, "I never used to pay land transfer taxes." Oh yes, you did, but in those days you may have paid $20 or $30; it was a little bit. Now of course in many cases it's $2,000, $3,000 or $4,000. The same thing happened with the probate fees. The probate fees went up significantly as a result of what the Rae government did some time ago.
Anyway, the court said: "That's not right. You cannot change a tax like that without bringing in legislation. You cannot do it by way of regulation." The reason for that is, it is more than just a probate fee. A fee is intended to somehow pay for roughly the cost that it takes to supply the service that is required. Of course, when probate fees are $4,000, $5,000 or $6,000, and the actual work that's involved is maybe of the value of $100 to $200, it's no longer a fee for that service but it's more in the nature of a tax. So the court said: "Province, you've got to pay those fees back. It's not right that you did this." By some estimates it may be as much as $1 billion.
What does Mike Harris, the Taxhiker, do? He has included a little clause in this bill that says, "We're going back to 1950, and whatever probate taxes have been charged since that time, they're all going to be made legal." That's surely got to be the world's record, going back some 48 years to try to collect taxes in situations where a court has, strictly speaking, told us that they were illegal.
The legacy of the Harris government will be the fact that this is actually the biggest tax grab and the biggest tax hike of them all.
Mr John L. Parker (York East): Come on, John, they've already been collected.
Mr Gerretsen: I'm sorry; it's like saying, "OK, judge" - or whoever was involved in the court case - "you won, but you lost anyway, because now we're going to change the rules of the game." It's not a fair way of doing it. The province stands to gain $1 billion in taxes that it shouldn't have collected in the first place.
Interjection: Get real, come on.
Mr Gerretsen: This man says, "Get real." Well, sir, Mike Harris will from this day forward be known as the only Premier in this province's history who actually went back 50 years in order to collect taxes. That's the legacy he will leave to the people of Ontario.
Interjections.
The Deputy Speaker: Order.
Mr Gerretsen: I know my Tory friends get extremely excited about it, but that's the fact. Just read the bill. He's going back 50 years to collect taxes that never should have been collected in the first place. With that, I will simply retire at this time.
The Deputy Speaker: Comments or questions?
Mr Christopherson: I want to commend the member for Kingston and The Islands for his very clear and passionate speech. He also mentioned a number of times the member for Wentworth North and his remarks, which I believe gives me a parliamentary segue to comment on those myself once again.
It's one thing to be given the honour and the opportunity to sit in this place representing your home community, in my case Hamilton, and feel the responsibility of promoting the interests of your community and defending your community whenever it's under attack from anywhere. But I'm still seething, as I stand here, at watching someone who is from our own community - because the member for Wentworth North is still a citizen of the region of Hamilton-Wentworth, and when he wasn't taking cheap shots at Hamilton city council proper, he was taking cheap shots at the regional municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth. Quite frankly, it's tough enough to be as close as we are in Hamilton to Toronto and get the kind of attention that our community deserves, and given the population base of close to half a million people, without having, if you will, one of our own stand up and fire those kinds of cheap shots across the bow of our own hometown.
Instead of doing what that member did, why didn't he stand up and defend the fact that the $36 million that our community says we were shortchanged by this government is accurate? The numbers that were compiled were done under the leadership of the former CAO of the region, whom you just hired to be the new Deputy Minister of Municipal Affairs. Those numbers are as accurate as any numbers that you're putting out from your government, since he's a part of it. But instead of doing that, they attacked our community and got a headline from the Hamilton Spectator that said, "Local Tories Abandon Community," and they're supposed to be their friends.
2000
Mr Carroll: A few comments on the speech made by the member for Kingston and The Islands, who pined at great length about the loss of local councillors. I'd like to tell him that in my community of Chatham-Kent we lost a bunch of those local councillors. We went from 156 down to 18, so that math is about 138. But the citizens of Chatham-Kent are much happier with the $11 million that we found for them rather than the loss of those 138 councillors. I would suggest to the rest of the province that maybe they should take a look at more losses of local councillors.
I have to make some reference, though, to his rather strange comments about the estate tax and the probate fees. He knows full well, and he should have been just a little more straightforward with the people of Ontario, that for 50 years the government of Ontario, governments of all stripes - Liberal, NDP, Conservative - have collected probate fees. A judge ruled, during the tenure of this particular government, that those probate fees collected over the past 50 years were in fact contrary to the law. That judge or any other judge could have made that same ruling during a term of the Liberal Party, during a term of an NDP government or during a term of a Conservative government. It happened in 1998. The government is faced with the situation of deciding what they should do with those. Any government of any stripe would have made the same decision: to change that probate fee to a tax and leave it at the same level so the taxpayers aren't impacted.
However, I would assume, from what the member for Kingston and The Islands said, that the official position of his party now will be that they will eliminate this whole area of taxation, and that will be a position that I'm sure we will hear the member for Kingston and The Islands state. It's unusual for the Liberals to state a position. I'm sure he will on this particular issue, though.
Mr Cullen: I'm pleased to give some comments on the fine speech made by the member for Kingston and The Islands. One of the difficulties on this side of the House is that there is unfortunately so much to criticize of the government's initiatives.
Mr Lessard: And so little time.
Mr Cullen: "And so little time," is said to me. Here we have Bill 81 before us today, which is finally to follow up on the budget provisions seven months ago. We're on the cusp of leaving in a couple of weeks' time, so this bill is going to have to be rammed through. It contains a large number of provisions, some of which ought to be severed out, and the member for Kingston and The Islands was unfortunately unable to get to the point of talking about that section dealing with teachers or the other section dealing with ambulances or the many other sections. His points about probate are certainly relevant. Mind you, it's a fault that all governments since 1950 have had to carry. But here it is; we're trying to deal with it today.
I personally am very concerned about one topic that the member for Kingston and The Islands was not able to finish off, and that was the idea about land ambulances being transferred over to the regions. I just want to quote again the letter from Bob Chiarelli, chair of the region of Ottawa-Carleton.
"The region of Ottawa-Carleton accepts its responsibility for full service provision of land ambulance services in the year 2000. It does not, however, accept the current very poor service provided by your ministry. This new information" - the independent audit that I have here - "very clearly demonstrates the fact that the region of Ottawa-Carleton has been downloaded an inadequate service, insufficient funds, and once again highlights the critical importance of including regional control of the ambulance dispatch process when this program is downloaded."
Dispatch is the very thing that's missing here. How can you talk about an integrated system if you won't allow the devolution of dispatch to the -
The Deputy Speaker: Thank you. Comments and questions?
Mr Parker: I listened with interest to the comments of the member for Kingston and The Islands, as I listened with interest to the comments made earlier by the members for Northumberland, Hamilton Centre and Wentworth North. What distinguished the member for Kingston and The Islands from those other three was the utter unhelpfulness of his remarks on the subject of Bill 81. The other members managed to focus their comments on the bill itself and to put forward remarks that were helpful in developing an understanding and an appreciation of the issues involved in the bill. But I was quite surprised that the member for Kingston and The Islands would reduce himself to the level of suggesting that the correction of the matter of the collection of estate fees amounts to "Mike Harris reaching back in time to collect new taxes."
Mike Harris has not reached back in time to collect a nickel in this effect. What has happened is that over the course of many years, previous governments, the previous Liberal government, the previous NDP government and other governments, have collected probate fees and it was established that there was no technical basis for collecting those fees, and the technical basis for collecting the fees has now been corrected. No new tax is being raised as a result of that decision.
No one is going back in time to raise a nickel. All of that money has been raised. David Peterson has already raised that money, he's already spent that money and spent far more than that money. He spent money that hasn't been raised yet, and we still have to dig ourselves out from that legacy. The effect of the Mike Harris correction to the technical basis on which probate fees are corrected in no way whatsoever amounts to reaching back in time to raise a single nickel.
The Deputy Speaker: Further debate?
Mr Gerretsen: I get a final comment.
The Deputy Speaker: Yes, two minutes.
Mr Gerretsen: Thank you, Mr Speaker. There were so many comments made, it's hard to know which one to focus on first. It's like saying to the people who were involved in the court case, "You won, but you lost." The least you could have done was no longer to collect the taxes after the judge said it was illegal to do so. You basically tried to legitimize something that clearly has been found to be illegal.
I still challenge the member for Halton Centre - I was kind of disappointed that he didn't get up here and say anything, because he is in the House and he was in the House for most of the time that I spoke - to come forward and do what he said he was going to do to the regional council of Halton and to the four chambers of commerce in the area: to bring in an exemption for Halton. He said he was going to do it when he met with all these people, and I was hoping that tonight he would say he was going to do it, but we haven't heard that yet.
Let's go back and to what the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario and the municipal finance people have to say in very summary form in their table of contents. They say what Bill 79 does not do: "It doesn't cap tax increases at 10%; it doesn't provide protection for small business; it doesn't target properties that are hardest hit; it doesn't recognize local efforts and local solutions; it doesn't provide fairness for property taxpayers; and it doesn't address the rebates to charities." This is not my propaganda. This is from the Municipal Clerks and Treasurers and the finance officers who run each one of our municipalities and look after them in an extremely competent way from a financial viewpoint.
What it does do: "It increases municipal costs; it increases ratepayer confusion; it delays current value assessments; it further delays tax billings; and it erodes the gains in federal payments in lieu." I'll just leave it at that.
The Deputy Speaker: Further debate?
2010
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): I appreciate the opportunity tonight to stand and speak on this bill and connect it to the budget of this government. In fact, the direction that this government is taking this province in speaks for some short time on the impact that direction is having on the lives of most of the people who call Ontario home and work in this province and contribute to the economic and social and spiritual life of the communities that we all feel so very proud of as we speak of them here and represent them here, that make up the fabric of the province that we call Ontario.
This is yet another massive, complicated, omnibus bill from a government that just doesn't seem to be able to get anything right. We've seen over the last week or two in this place - I know the nights that I've been here listening and speaking to various bills - one bill after another coming forward to correct some mistake that was made previously, to solve some problem that was generated by this government, by a piece of legislation that wasn't well thought out, that wasn't well prepared, that didn't allow for the kind of consultation and input and processing that we've come to expect in this place over a long number of years and that we have all supported in many serious and significant ways as we've tried to make Ontario the best province in the country, and by way of that, Ontario contributing to a country that is the envy of many countries across the world.
This bill that we're looking at today is an attempt by the government to round out, finish off a package of initiatives in the budget that is contributing to what has become known over the last two or three weeks in this province because of the study that was done, the excellent study that was done by the social policy committee of what used to be the old Jesuit Centre for Social Justice, where they speak about the growing gap in this province between the rich and the poor and the disappearance of the middle class.
That's a reality that should bring sober second thought to any thinking person in this province. Anybody who is seriously interested and concerned about the loss of themselves, their family, their neighbours or their community ought to sit up straight and pay attention when they are told in such a very simple, understandable, clear form that there is a significantly increasing, growing gap between the rich and the poor in this province and that the middle class is disappearing. It is directly tied into the budgetary agenda of this government, laid out for the first time for all to see in the Common Sense Revolution before the last election.
Everybody saw that when it first came out as rather base and didn't really give it too much thought. But having come to government in 1995 in such a dramatic fashion for all kinds of interesting reasons as you speak to people out there - mostly people voted for this government in the last election because they played into that sense of fear, mistrust and resentment that seemed to be building at that time in this province in the thinking of at least enough people to have elected this government. I don't think they realized when they elected this government to hurt somebody else, that in fact at the end of the day it would turn around and get them too.
That's what this study is saying very clearly, that there aren't too many of us, if we allow this to continue, who won't eventually be caught up in the net of the growing gap between the rich and the poor. It's interesting, when you look at the numbers and the graphs in that study and you see that, yes, this is a trend that has been growing for the last five, 10, 15 years in this province and across the country, as we bought into the Thatcher-Reagan approach to economics and economic development around the world, that Ontario and Canada would slowly but surely lose their grip on some of the more fundamental, basic infrastructure pieces that made our country and our province such a wonderful place to live in, to work in, to bring up kids in; that that was starting to slip between our fingers, starting to get away from us.
It's just in the last three years that we've really begun to see that shift happen in a very dramatic and quick way for a whole lot of people. I think people out there are beginning to feel it too. I think that this government is in haste now to wrap up a whole lot of things, to put a nice wrapping around it, to put a nice bow on it and to deliver it re an election campaign that I'm sure we will see in this province within the next six months. Some say it'll be in June; others suggest that it'll be earlier.
When you look at what this government is doing by way of this bill, trying to tie up some loose ends, trying to put a lid on some things that potentially will cause some difficulty down the road, and to keep it all together until they can get through an election, while there are still enough people out there who think that perhaps this is the right thing to be doing, just a little too fast, just a little too much, getting a little too close to home, I think the government will find that they're really not fooling too many people. In fact, if they spent more time on the streets of the communities that they represent; if they did what so many of us on this side of the House, particularly in the NDP caucus, are doing these days, which is knocking on doors and walking the malls and shaking hands at workplaces and plants as people go to work in the morning, they'll find that there aren't very many people any more who aren't anxious in some significant way about their lot in life.
There are a growing number of people in Ontario who do not have -
Mr Guzzo: How is Bob Rae, Tony?
Mr Martin: Bob Rae is doing fine. He was in the Soo last Tuesday night and we had a great time. The people of Sault Ste Marie came out in great numbers and they're telling me that they're going to vote for me in the next election. Do you know why they're going to vote for me? Because they know that what the New Democratic government of 1995 did for Sault Ste Marie at Algoma Steel and St Marys Paper and the ACR, and the list goes on and on, we will do in spades for the rest of the province because it'll have to be done by whatever government comes after this present government. Sault Ste Marie understands that.
Did you know that last Wednesday in Sault Ste Marie -
Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte): Do you believe in Santa Claus, Tony?
Mr Martin: Yes, we do in Sault Ste Marie. He comes in the shape of Bob Rae and the NDP government.
Last Tuesday night he came back to Sault Ste Marie. The day after he was there, interestingly enough, coincidentally enough, St Marys Paper, the company that Bob Rae almost single-handedly, at the end of the day, saved, gave a $36,000, on average, bonus to every worker who works in that mill. Phenomenal.
Let me just give you a little peek into the role that Bob Rae played in that restructuring. Those people, management, workers, financial institutions, the new owner, were sitting around the table for a number of weeks trying to hammer out a deal. At the end of the day, they decided that they couldn't and they were leaving town. I remember hearing it. Somebody phoned me from the Holiday Inn, saying, "Tony, it's falling apart." I jumped in my van and I drove down there to almost be bowled over as they came out of the door, heading for God knows where. I tried to talk to somebody, and I couldn't, so I went back home and phoned Bob Rae.
I said: "Bob, it's falling apart. After all the work we've done, after all the time that was put in, after all the energy, the leadership and the effort, it's falling apart." He said to me: "Tony, it's not over till it's over. Not to worry. All those people are coming to Toronto. They're getting on planes. They'll be in Toronto tomorrow and I will gather them up. I will make sure that phone calls are made. I'll get them in here and we'll see what we can do."
The next night at midnight I got a phone call. It was Bob Rae calling to tell me that they'd done a deal, that he would be landing at the airport the next morning at 6 o'clock and I was to pick him up, because he wanted to come in and tell the mayor and be part of the group that would have to sit down and convince the workers that this was in fact in their best interests.
2020
Last Wednesday, St Marys Paper, as I just said a few minutes ago, announced a $36,000 bonus for every worker because now they're part-owners of that plant. That was part of the deal. They gave up somewhere between 10% and 20% of their wages so that deal could be cut. Some five years later they're getting a $36,000 bonus for Christmas. Santa Claus came to Sault Ste Marie last Wednesday night for the workers at St Marys Paper and their families.
Has anybody been able to find even very slight traces of an economic development policy from this government, of an industrial policy? Does anybody know? Nothing. They just let the market decide. If the market had been left to decide the future of Sault Ste Marie in the early 1990s, you know what we'd have now. It would be a shadow of the community that it is now.
Algoma Steel has reinvested half a billion dollars in new technology so they can take advantage of the new steel industry that will come at us in the next century. That wouldn't have been possible had it not been for an interventionist government, a government that believed in people, a government that was willing to say in front of some pretty tremendous odds: "We can do something. We're not paralyzed. We're not useless in front of these things that come at us. We have a concern and an interest and we have a job to do."
We have a government over there that doesn't think that they're government. Can you imagine? They don't think they're government. The Premier is on record as saying that he doesn't think they're the government; they're there to fix the government. I tell you it presents as a problematic scenario to me.
This budget that we're wrapping up today, that we're trying to put a cap on, that we're wrapping up in Christmas wrapping and putting a bow on so we can get it ready for the election that's coming in the new year is taking us down a path that is diabolically opposed to the kind of thing that happened in Sault Ste Marie, Espanola, Thunder Bay, Sudbury and Kapuskasing and almost every major community in northern Ontario -
Mr Lessard: And Windsor.
Mr Martin: - and Windsor. Completely the opposite of what happened in those communities is where we're going with this government, with the budgets that they present and with the agenda they speak of when they do some kind of a speech in this House to show a vision or a direction.
There is absolutely no economic development plan. There is absolutely no industrial plan for Ontario coming out of this government. It's, "Let the market decide." It's, "Let's go to Japan and see what they're doing over there" and "Let's go to Germany and see what they're doing over there. Then when we come back we'll hook up with their buddies on the golf course and we'll talk to them." According to them everything's going fine - the stock market, my mutual funds, we're all doing OK. But you know, you're not paying attention to the guy on the street. You're not paying attention to your constituents. You're not paying attention to the person who is working on the plant floor, who is becoming increasingly more anxious, more nervous as time goes on and as this government continues its devastation and destruction.
There isn't a person in Ontario today, I suggest to you, who isn't worried about their future. There used to be a time in Ontario when there were jobs that you could aspire to, jobs that had some longevity to them, that had a benefit package and a pension package, that you could look forward to retiring from, that you could grow into and get good at. You could go away and take courses and come back and know that job was going to be there for you.
That's not the case in Ontario today. The Ontario that we're moving into is an Ontario where most jobs will be short-term, contract, part-time, low-wage, no benefits, two or three jobs at one time, catch-as-catch-can. That doesn't speak to me of stability or confidence; that speaks to me of a Third World country, a system that generates nothing but the lowest of common denominators, no matter what area you look in, whether it's social or health care or education or environmental or work standards, the whole bag of tricks. That's where we're headed.
The people out there that I certainly give a lot of credence to, that I have listened to over the years as I've grown as a citizen of this province and this country and tried to contribute to in the way that I can with the gifts that I have and that I tell my children about, that I hope other children are being told about in schools - that approach to citizenship, that approach to what it means to be a good, participating, active member of a community is slowly but surely drifting away from us as we see the gap between the rich and the poor grow in this province and as we see the middle class disappear altogether.
I was going to say that it was only in 1996, after this government came to power, that for the very first time in the history of this province - the gap between the rich and the poor was always fairly wide. Nobody is denying that. It was always fairly wide and growing at a pace that should have been troubling to all of us. But for the first time, in 1996 the poor, the bottom end, the bottom group of citizens in that graph, began to lose ground.
It was in the summer of 1995 that I personally had my biggest awakening re what this government was going to do and what it was about. I read the Common Sense Revolution and I debated in the election of 1995 with my competitors the right and the wrong of slamming the poor, of taking money away from welfare people, of taking services and programs away from those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in our communities.
I argued that and we had a really good discussion -
Mr Guzzo: Because you guys had it right.
Mr Martin: - but I never, ever, Judge, thought in my wildest dreams that you would actually go ahead and do that. I didn't think that morally or ethically anybody could get away with taking 21.6% out of the income of the poorest families, food from the mouths of children, clothes off the backs of women and children in communities like Sault Ste Marie, Ottawa, Windsor and downtown Toronto. That was the first real dramatic example that all of us had of what this government was going to be about, because you said that was your high-water mark, or as others might say, your low-water mark.
After you did that, you showed yourself as the bully you truly are. You walked into the playground, you looked and you picked the scrawniest and the smallest kid you could find and you beat the tar out of him. You said to the rest of the province: "You're next."
Mr Young: A third of a million off social assistance.
Mr Martin: A third of a million off social assistance because you raised the bar and you changed the rules and none of them could qualify any more. That's what's happened to social assistance. It's absolutely disgusting. It's absolutely morally and ethically out of step with anything this province has seen as right and just, certainly over the years that I have lived in this province, and I'm sure, if you look around this place, anybody else will say that too.
Completely opposed, taking us down a road that I think we will regret. I think we will look back on the three or four years that you folks have had as government as the black spot in the civil life of the community of people that calls itself the province of Ontario. That's really sad because it doesn't have to be that way. It does not have to be that way. But the people of Ontario will have a chance within the next six months to cast judgment and they will - trust me, because I'm talking to them - give you a message that you will not be able to avoid.
The Deputy Speaker: Comments and questions?
2030
Mr Galt: It's interesting to hear the usual speech from the member for Sault Ste Marie. It doesn't matter what the bill happens to be; he's always on the same topic, and it's just on and on, the same kind of drivel we hear from him.
He talks about the address we had for social services, for welfare, that our program is totally out. He tends to forget that we're still 10% above any other province. We're way above the average across Canada. As a matter of fact, we're way above anyplace in the world, and any time any other province wants to come up to ours, then maybe we can start discussing raising the bar a little further.
You're more interested in having people sit at home on welfare than you are in having them get out and get a job. That was the point you were making when you were in government, and it's unfortunate, when you were debating with that other good Conservative in your riding, that that good Conservative hadn't won and added the 83rd seat here at Queen's Park. Nevertheless, that's the way it goes; congratulations on the fact that you ended up winning.
By having people get out and work for welfare, they are now feeling good about themselves. It's an opportunity for them to get a good recommendation and be able to go out and get a job afterwards. If it hadn't been for unions, the people you continuously support, there would be a lot more of these people out doing work for welfare. There are women and men pleading for the opportunity, but you have been out there shooting them in the foot, not giving them the opportunity, discouraging organizations from coming forward to give that opportunity so there can be work for welfare.
There is just no question that there are so many people thrilled with the opportunity to go out and prove themselves so that down the road they can get a job. That's why we have created over 400,000 jobs in this province in the last three years.
Mr Jean-Marc Lalonde (Prescott and Russell): I want to commend the member for Sault Ste Marie. The comments he brought forth today were really about what Ontarians are expecting from this bill and from this government.
The 1998 budget was designed to distract people from the past three years of cuts. With an election but a year away, Mike Harris wants Ontarians to forget about his broken promises. He wants you to forget the chaos he has caused, and he wants you to forget how he has refused to listen to your concerns. Mike Harris boasts about 36 new tax cuts, but he is silent on the 35 hospitals they have slated for closure.
Let's remember that Mike Harris has done to our hospitals and our schools. Mike Harris chose to fire over 10,000 nurses, he has plans to close 35 hospitals, he has made deep cuts in our classrooms and he has denied 60,000 four-year-olds the benefit of junior kindergarten.
When we look at the goal of this government, a 30% personal tax cut, let's not forget Ontarians are going to pay for every service they are getting. If you cannot afford the service, you don't get the service. Let's remember. I have a few examples in my riding. Yesterday I received a phone call. The library in Bourget was open only two days a week. Today they are planning to close it. They don't have any more money. Closing a library in a small town - it's like having a ghost town.
Mr Lessard: It's always a pleasure to listen to my colleague the NDP member for Sault Ste Marie debate in this House, a member who speaks with compassion and with a sense of caring about his own constituents, a member who says there is a downside to the market-based solutions that are always being proposed by this government. That downside is that there are some who will sink and there are some who will swim. The member for Sault Ste Marie cares about those people who are going to sink because of this government's market-based solutions and he talks about what a government can do and should do to help those people a market-based approach is not going to protect.
He talked about some examples that the NDP government was involved in, St Marys Paper and Algoma Steel, where government intervention saved thousands of jobs in his community, jobs that continue to exist, for which people are well paid, and as a result that community is continuing to prosper. In my own community in Windsor, there's a similar example, where we established Ontario's first casino, an undertaking that is now permanently employing 6,000 full-time people, plus all the other spinoff jobs.
The member makes an excellent point that there is a role for government to play in economic development. You don't just leave it all to the private sector and the markets to come up with every solution, because we have seen what has happened. We see the growing gap between the rich and the poor. We see what has happened in places like Mexico, Brazil, Japan and in Asia. Those economies are suffering now because they have gone down this road. It's not the right road; it's the wrong direction.
Mr Skarica: I just want to respond to the member for Hamilton Centre, who indicated a few moments ago that I had taken cheap shots at the local politicians. In fact, I never mentioned any names, but if I could just quote what they themselves are saying, in an article in the Hamilton Spectator on Wednesday, October 21, 1998, the chairman of the region, Terry Cooke, is quoted, "Cooke Says Politicians Have `Failed' Taxpayers." The article indicates "that politicians - himself included - have failed the voters and taxpayers of Hamilton-Wentworth."
Mr Cullen: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I thought the comments were to be made on the speech to the House by the member for Sault Ste Marie. It is too late to comment on the comments made by the member Hamilton Centre.
The Deputy Speaker: I was listening very carefully to him. I'd like to see where he is going with it.
Mr Skarica: Continuing then, "Region Wants to Cut Tax Rates: Exodus of Businesses Feared," and there is a quote from one of the local mayors, Flamborough Mayor Ted McMeekin: "The simple reality is that if you take an average of seven areas around us...we're about 40% less competitive in terms of our tax rates."
One of the areas in which the region has been very successful in saving money in the last two years is in welfare costs -
Mr Lessard: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: The member is obviously not commenting about the member for Sault Ste Marie's speech; he's making comments about Hamilton-Wentworth and the speech that was given by the member from Hamilton. It doesn't have anything to do with the remarks from the member for Sault Ste Marie.
The Deputy Speaker: That is a point of order on speaking towards the debate at hand. The member for Wentworth North is speaking towards Bill 81, and it's my understanding that that's the item he is commenting on.
Mr Cullen: It's comments and questions.
Mr Martin: Come on, Speaker.
The Deputy Speaker: I would like to remind the member for Sault Ste Marie and the member for Ottawa West that when I'm standing up and talking, you don't. I will not warn you again.
I'm listening to the comments of the member for Wentworth North under comments and questions, and he is commenting on the effect of Bill 81 to his regional municipality, the same as the member for Sault Ste Marie brought his comments within his own community in Sault Ste Marie. My ruling is that I am allowing the member for Wentworth North to complete his time.
Mr Skarica: The member for Sault Ste Marie is talking about welfare. The point I want to make is that locally in my area, due to the policies of this government, the region has saved $35 million in the last two years due to our policies. That's a very positive change. A lot of people have left welfare and have saved the taxpayers of our area a lot of money.
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The Deputy Speaker: The member for Sault Ste Marie has two minutes to respond.
Mr Martin: You know, Speaker, I sometimes just can't believe what I hear in this place.
I want to thank the members for Northumberland, Prescott and Russell, Windsor-Riverside and, even though he didn't speak to my comments, the member for Wentworth North for taking the time to respond. It's always good to have back and forth in this place.
I'm always amazed that this government actually thinks that what they're doing in the area of what they call social assistance reform is helping anybody but their rich friends, who are getting a tax break because of the money they're sucking out of the pockets and out of the homes of the poorest and most marginalized and most vulnerable in our communities.
I don't know where you're living. I don't know who you're talking to. I don't know where you're hanging out when you go home on the weekend. But the people I talk to are telling me that they're worse off, that they're having a heck of a time. This business that they're all going back to school -
Interjection: You need a new set of friends.
Mr Martin: I need a new set? You need a new set of friends. You need a reality check. You need to get out of whatever it is you're in and get back into your communities and get back on the streets and talk to real people. They will tell you that they're not happy, that they're uneasy, that they're anxious, that they're nervous about their future. They don't know, even if they have a job, whether they're going to have a job in a year or two years from now, because of the course you've set us one.
The poor - somehow, you'd think to listen to the government members that they're out there and everybody's got a job and everybody is doing well, but that's just not true, they don't. You've raised the bar so high that they can't get over it. You've changed the regulations so they don't qualify any more. That's why they're not on welfare. That's why they're not getting money to feed their children. That's why they can't buy the clothes they need come the winter. That's why there are so many people sleeping on the streets of Toronto. Wake up. Get a life. Get back into your streets. Find out what's going on.
The Deputy Speaker: The member's time has expired. I'll just be a minute; I wanted to respond to the debate. We're getting on in the evening -
Mr Martin: You have to sit in your chair and take your turn.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. I'm addressing my comments specifically to you. One thing that a very experienced member of this House pointed out to me was that when you skate on thin ice yourself, you shouldn't complain too much about it when others are on that thin ice.
Mr Martin: Point well taken.
The Deputy Speaker: The Chair recognizes the member for Quinte for further debate.
Mr Rollins: It's a pleasure for me to rise and speak about Bill 81. Before I get into Bill 81, I want to ask a couple of questions, and I know from the noise of the crowd in here that we'll hear the answer.
The paper mill they saved in Sault Ste Marie saved some 200 or 300 jobs, and it certainly was a great success story. When Bob Rae and the government of the time did that, it was excellent. But there were some other stories, things they did to try to save some companies, that weren't successful. When the tally ended up at the end of their term, that government lost 10,000 net jobs in five years. How do you address those 10,000 people? Yes, you squeezed out the 200 or 300 that did get that big bonus and it was very complimentary that the paper mill was saved. But the other 10,000 net jobs that were lost in that decade - those are the people who are really upset.
Mr Guzzo: Bob's going to do another book.
Mr Rollins: Bob doing another book and saving another company will be quite something different.
Bill 81 is a tax measures bill, and there are some things in it: more tax cuts for Ontarians and small businesses to create jobs; assistance and accessibility to child care for working families with children; greater access to capital for small businesses; help for people with disabilities to get jobs; support for small, growing firms for job creation in the new millennium; and a fairer tax system. All those things are part of this bill.
Starting out with the bill to support jobs and the phase-in of the employer health tax exemption, some $400,000 that we were looking at to phase in. We've increased the speed of that; we've moved it up to $350,000 by the end of this year. By the end of 1999, on the self-employed it will be eliminated completely. That 5%, a payroll tax, was certainly a job killer, by all imagination. No one has stood up and told us that that tax did not discourage companies from hiring more people. It was a hindrance to small industry, to small businesses, keeping handcuffs on them and not allowing them to expand and put that money back into their company.
Those kinds of tax cuts for small businesses do make a difference for the people of Ontario, the small entrepreneurs who have four of five people working for them, a small business that has 25 or 30 people working for it. It doesn't look like a lot of money, but at the of the year, it makes a difference that means they may be able to hire another person for five or six months or maybe for a whole year.
Another part of it was the community small business investment fund. In 1997 we announced that in some of the budgets and it was put into place. The community small business investment fund was to be set up to provide a greater opportunity to access investment capital for growing businesses with $1 million or less in assets.
The labour-sponsored funds: Somewhere along the line, with the input of labour and the dialogue that we as a government had with their people, we saw that there was an opportunity for these people to make an investment in these companies, to make an investment in the labour market and to make sure there was an opportunity to put it together so these smaller companies can make that. Individuals will receive a cash incentive of up to 15% on investments between the $150,000 and $500,000 range.
I know a lot of people say, "Those are very small companies," but those are the kind of companies that really need the little bit of help. They need an entrepreneurial spirit to be able to develop a new widget or whatever they're going to start to develop to make sure they can create those jobs, but they have to have access to that capital. When those monies are put down to a lower level, the bar is lowered a little bit, and they may be able to take that opportunity to make the technology that they can express into and go on and improve the opportunity for hiring more people.
Clarifying, the minimum size of the corporation is $5 million and the maximum size is $10 million. There again, it's just lowering that bar a little bit and allowing those smaller companies to make sure they can access that amount of money.
The labour-sponsored investment funds: We talk about labour and we dialogue with labour all the time. Here's an opportunity for these people to invest in the future of our country and our communities, growing small businesses so we can get into those companies, be part of them, put some money into them. That gives the opportunity, particularly for the labour-sponsored investment funds, to help out, other than just saying that we're going to create more jobs and we want higher wages and all those things that work towards that. As long as those tax credit claims are increased from $3,500 to $5,000 for the 1998 and subsequent tax years, it allows those people to invest a little more heavily into our own companies and to make sure the companies we're trying to invest in are the same companies that are trying to make a better opportunity for advancement and to hire more people.
Access to investment capital for small businesses: During the ice storm last year, when we had a disaster in eastern Ontario, the minister stood up and made an announcement that there would be an extension for putting money into RRSP investments, extending it for a month, because the ice storm, that disaster, was right at the 11th hour when those monies had to be sent in. We had areas, not in my riding but further east of us, that were out of power. They didn't have power for a few days, the roads were in dire straits and the mail wasn't getting through.
So as the government, we saw fit to extend that ability for them to put in RRSP money for another month. A part of this bill moves that, making it become law that we can enjoy, that those people have the same opportunity and will not be breaking the law when they invest that money.
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Encouraging job creation for the new millennium: We've encouraged high-technology, knowledge-based industries, proposed tax initiatives to support interactive digital media, sound recording and computer animation and special effects industries.
These initiatives will help to try to create more jobs for the people of Ontario and for small businesses; for example, in the communities of Belleville and surrounding area. Whether they come to Belleville or come to any part of Ontario, when they open their doors and hire more people they certainly add to the thing that's called more jobs.
We have listened, and I've heard other speakers tell us, that in the last three and a half to four years - we're getting close to the four-year mark - there are over 400,000 more people working in Ontario than there were when we took over as the government. Yes, not all those jobs are the high-tech jobs we need, and they're not all making huge salaries, but they are jobs and those are people who are working. All that contributes to the well-being of the province to make sure that we're doing the kind of commitment to the people of Ontario that we as a government said we would do: creating jobs and giving the people of Ontario an opportunity to work. All the tax credits and all these things contribute daily to making sure that initiative is out there.
Enrichment of the Ontario computer animation and special effects tax credit: When we leave this place every night, by the time we leave here we can walk around and see the amount of film work that's being produced here in Toronto. There is hardly a night when, driving home, you can drive four or five blocks here and there aren't people out there shooting films and working in that industry. It's cradled, yes; it's a new industry, something that didn't start a long time ago, but it has created a lot of jobs in the province and they need to be encouraged to make sure those kind of jobs are made, to keep improving.
We are also eliminating the annual tax credit maximum of $500,000 per associated group of corporations. All those kind of things give the opportunity to make sure that small businesses have the opportunity to keep on expanding and moving.
We have the Ontario sound recording tax credit. It would be a 20% refundable tax credit to Ontario-based sound recording companies for expenditures incurred after January 1, 1999, related to sound recordings by emerging Canadian artists. Once again, we're looking to the artists who need that help. We need to give them the kind of help and encouragement so that these people can go on and be encouraged to be part of the entertainment world, to be out there trying to make sure they can fend for themselves, making sure those people have that opportunity. Yes, maybe a 20% refundable credit isn't a lot of money, but it will make sure those people still keep working. They need to keep being encouraged on that type of work.
Another small amount is the $140-million child care supplement for working families to replace the $40-million child care tax credit for lower-income families introduced in the 1997 Ontario budget. It will help a lot of families, particularly families on the smaller end and particularly families with children under seven years of age. When mom and dad are working, and you have small children at home under that seven-year-old bracket, it's very hard to make sure there are babysitters there for everybody to keep working. It's hard to keep mom and dad both working when they've got that problem at home, looking after young children.
This is another ability this government has looked at and said, "OK, fine, let's try to help those people out," particularly the people who are on the lower end of the scale so that those people can pick up $1,020 per year for children under the age of seven. That kind of a reduction doesn't sound like a lot of money, but for those people who are only making $20,000 a year, it's certainly a big chunk of that income. I think that really helps those families to be able to say, "OK, fine, we can afford to go to work." It's not the greatest job in the world, but it's just a little bit more encouragement, instead of taking all those monies away from them.
The workplace child care tax incentive: I think people want to go out to a workplace where companies are able to provide the kind of facility in that company, so that they can look after some daycare centres and child care, where the moms and dads are, so that their children are not very far away from them. They can certainly be involved to help out, and it's close to having those children at home. They may have worked there for five or six years and then all of a sudden they get married, a family comes along and they want to be able to look after that child. The company doesn't want to lose that employee, because they've spent a lot of time training that employee to make sure they know what's going on as far as the workplace is concerned. If they can encourage that mom and dad to bring that child to their place of work and look after them there, it makes it that much easier to make sure they can keep their people working there.
Helping people with disabilities: We look at supporting companies that are willing to put in chairlifts and elevators, that are willing to help people to work, whether they have to have an extra writer or whether they have to have some device that they need, encouraging these people to work. I know in my own community I've had people come up - we have Sir James Whitney School there, the school for the deaf, and many of those people are extremely good workers. They're very handicapped because they can't hear, and yet if you can convince a company to hire those people, they find out that those people are some of the best workers they've ever had. But they need special conditions, special abilities to be able to train with.
In this bill, we're allowing those companies to write off 100% of the expenditures they have, to make sure those people can be employed at that company. When you put in a lifter or a chairlift, or allow a person to be able to get around the workstation a little bit better, it all adds one more thing: It means that company is helping our community out by making sure that individual is looked after in the workplace.
We're allowing small businesses to write off up to 15% of the refundable tax credit. Those are not incorporated businesses. That's the little, small businesses that can spend that money. As to those people who spend that money to help those people out, I know those companies must feel awfully good at the end of the month or at the end of the year when they have taken that extra step to make sure that a person who has some major disabilities has the ability to work in that workplace.
Those people don't even have to work a full 40 hours a week; they only have to work 60 hours per month for a period of not less than three months. We have opened the door for those people and for those companies particularly that can go out and make some changes to make sure those people can be looked after. Those are the kinds of things we as a government should be very pleased with.
One of the other areas I'd like to touch on for a minute is the tobacco tax. We've had a lot of cigarettes come into our area with no tax on them. There have been charges through the RCMP and our local police. The amount of smuggling that's been going on has certainly been an underground market. Mr Speaker, you and me and everybody else in the province loses when that happens, because those people are cheating the tax man out of the dollars that should be put out so we can look after other people a little bit better and a little bit fairer. But no, it's become a large part of it, these wholesale dealers selling tobacco like that, unbranded cigarettes, untaxed cigarettes, under the counter.
It got so large, Mr Speaker, as you well know, that the federal government decided they couldn't collect all those taxes and couldn't stop all that smuggling that was going on in the tobacco industry, so they decided to lower the tax on it so it wouldn't make it nearly as profitable. I think that's the wrong way to go at it. If I had been in government at that time I would have been much more prepared to hire another 50 or 100 police officers to make sure that smuggling could be arrested, making sure that you stopped it, rather than taking the taxes off cigarettes or lowering them, so it wasn't going to be as profitable to smuggle back and forth and miss the tax man. As long as a government in Ottawa is prepared to do that, we have to say: "Okay, fine. We used to have fines of $200 to $1,000. Now we've increased those fines from $5,000 to $25,000, and the existing term in jail from three to six months." Those are the kinds of things we have to put in place, as lawmakers in this province, to make sure we can discourage all those people trying to beat the taxman.
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One of the other things I wanted to touch on, and I know it may not be in all of this bill but it's in part of it, is where we've had some downloading as far as municipalities are concerned. In my community of Belleville, we had a meeting a few weeks ago. We had a lot of business people come out and tell us that their taxes had gone up to the point of 200% and 300%, that their taxes had doubled. As a government, we need to take a look at that.
Where the municipalities had not chosen to use the 1.5% cap or any cap whatsoever, we would have had a lot of business people in very dire straits if we were to allow it to happen. That's one of the things I'm very pleased with, that as a government we brought in a bill that put a cap on that and made sure the tax situation was alleviated. We did not allow those people to have 200% and 300% tax increases, making sure that those people were - it wasn't making sure, it was just forcing them right out of business. I think we've got to be able to deal with that.
One of the areas they talked about was the inheritance tax. The inheritance tax is something that it's probably nice to sit on the other side and laugh about, that going back some 40 years or so we've been illegally taxing people in this province, but I can tell you that the other two governments before us were collecting the same amount of tax as we are. We're not increasing the tax, we're just making it legal so we can continue to collect the same amount of tax that we have in the past. We're not raising any taxes, we're just making sure we can collect it and put it in the account where it has to be without a judge coming along and telling us we're collecting it illegally.
I want to thank you, Mr Speaker, for having the opportunity to speak on this bill. I'm sure we will support this bill 100% when it comes time to vote.
The Deputy Speaker: Comments and questions?
Mr Lalonde: I'm going to get down immediately to the last point the member for Quinte brought to our attention, the downloading. It is in real chaos. At the present time the government has come down with Bill 79 to try to correct their error, but it's too late. The year is over. We're not even a month from the end of the year and the municipalities don't know where to get the money.
At the present time we have introduced Bill 79 to put on a cap of 10%, but where will the municipalities be getting the shortfall? In my own municipality, they decided yesterday to close the Chartrand bridge in Ettyville, a $600,000 repair, because of what? Because of the downloading. They cannot afford to have this bridge repaired.
He referred to child care, $140 million, in his comments. It's only good for families with $20,000 in revenue or less. Tell me, what family that has two workers is not making $20,000 a year? There aren't any. If you're on welfare, a single person will make $20,000. So it looks good in front of the public but they will never gain from it.
Once again, the downloading: In my own municipality, ambulance is $2.9 million; social housing, $4 million; assessment, about $1 million; police services, $10 million. All that downloading to the municipalities, and you're going to tell me that this bill is going to correct everything? Bill 79 is causing a real headache for the municipalities. We will have to cut the majority of services. People won't have any libraries to go to, they won't have any arenas to go to. We'll be closing every facility to be able to meet the ends at the present time.
The bill came out too late. You have caused the chaos, and the municipalities cannot afford to reinvest that money.
Mr Lessard: The member for Quinte was talking about Bill 81, An Act to implement tax credits and revenue protection measures, another one of those bills that has a nice-sounding title, talking about tax credits. The member made a long speech about how that's going to benefit taxpayers in Ontario, but a lot of taxpayers in Ontario recognize what this government's tax scheme really means to them, that many working families are paying for those tax breaks to those who are the most well off. They're paying for them through higher property taxes, through increased tuition fees and through cuts to the health care system as well.
A lot of people in Ontario are saying no to the Mike Harris tax scheme, the phony tax scheme that benefits those who are the most well off, and are looking forward to an opportunity to get rid of this tax scam agenda. We're looking forward to that as well.
One of the areas he did bring up that's in Bill 81 that I thought was interesting was taxation of cigarettes. He talked about increased fines. We think that's a good idea, but in order to ensure that higher fines are levied, they have to have people out in the field to do the enforcement work. Because of the cuts that have been made to the public service, there aren't going to be the people out there to catch the people who are breaking the law.
One thing this government should do is urge the federal Liberal government to support Bill S-13, to place a levy on every package of cigarettes sold in Ontario to be used to reduce the incidence of smoking in young people.
Mr Young: I've been listening very carefully to the debate tonight and what is very evident is that the NDP and the Liberals still don't get it.
Ms Marilyn Mushinski (Scarborough-Ellesmere): They never did.
Mr Young: They never did. They don't understand that you can lower taxes and more revenue will come in. I admit, it's hard to explain that to people. I was explaining it to a group of high school students on Friday night in my own riding.
Mr Lessard: Did they understand?
Mr Young: They did understand it after I explained it to them. What happens is, because we don't have a closed system, more people come to Ontario to invest and they start businesses. Other people, who perhaps would have liked to be in business but left when the NDP were in power, go back into business and they create jobs. There are other people who decided to take time off between jobs, who weren't working because they were depressed paying 65% of their total income in various taxes. Those people are back in the economy again.
The NDP and the Liberals, who spend most of their time arguing and fighting and writing and talking about how we should divide up the economic pie in our society, hardly spend any time at all, if any, talking about how to make the pie bigger, how we get more investment into Ontario, because when that happens, everybody gets a greater share.
People are spending. They're optimistic. They're planning for their future. I honestly don't understand what the member for Sault Ste Marie was talking about. I don't know what people he's talking to, because the people I talk to are very optimistic. They're hopeful. They're now able to plan for their children's post-secondary education or save for a family holiday. They're optimistic about their future because there's every reason to be so. Some 440,000 more people have jobs since we became the government. They're very optimistic.
Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): I promised Gary Carr's mother, who lives in Etobicoke-Rexdale, that I would speak tonight and offer at least two minutes, because she watches this all the time. I hope she's watching tonight. She'd be wondering, as so many of my constituents are, about Mike Harris and the probate fees. They all thought Mike Harris was about cutting taxes, so they're phoning up and saying, "Surely Mike Harris and the Conservatives will now be reducing the probate fees, or eliminating them, and giving all the money back from over the years when it was collected apparently illegally." Much as I wanted to tell them that Mike Harris was going to give it back, I've had to explain to them that in this bill Mike Harris is signing the note that says, "All those fees collected will stay with the Ontario government."
They may understand that, but they're asking, "Maybe we understand why a government can't give back all the money, but surely Mike Harris is significantly reducing the probate fee, or eliminating it." Alas, I have to tell them: "That's not going to happen. Mike Harris wants that money, because he has already given the tax benefit to the richest people in the province. He has given them the tax break, so he has to have the money." The poor widows and widowers and those who are involved in families where someone has passed away are going to continue to pay the probate fees. Mike Harris is not going to reduce those probate fees.
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The Deputy Speaker: The member for Quinte has two minutes to respond.
Mr Rollins: I'd like to thank the members for Prescott-Russell, Windsor-Riverside, Halton Centre and St Catharines. I hope the member for St Catharines doesn't change his mind and cut over to the idea of being a tax cutter because all of a sudden they decided they were cutting taxes.
If you look back in this little budget book, in 1994 the total revenue for the province was $46 billion. If you look under 1998-99, it becomes $53 billion. There's a difference of $7 billion. That does not have anything to do with the $5 billion we as a government gave back to the taxpayers. When you take what we gave back as a tax credit to the taxpayers of Ontario, yes, a small percentage of those people - 7%, they say - are over $80,000, but those people are also paying an additional health tax that will compensate for the rest of the province.
The jobs we have created - they say, "If we had saved that $5 billion we gave back as a tax cut, we would have had a balanced budget." I want to tell you, by the time we said we would have a balanced budget, I am confident this government is going to have a balanced budget. We're bringing in more dollars than ever before in Ontario. One reason is that we did give it back to the people of Ontario to put more money in their pockets to spend. That does create jobs, whether it's in Belleville or St Catharines or wherever. It still creates jobs, and they pay more taxes.
Interjections.
The Deputy Speaker: The evening is wearing on. If you want to have a conversation, I'd like you to go outside the door. If you're going to have an argument, go a little bit farther. Further debate?
Mr Sean G. Conway (Renfrew North): God forbid that we should have an argument in Parliament.
I want to join the debate and pick up on a couple of the items mentioned by my friend from Belleville. He's quite right: This economy in Ontario in the last couple of years - actually three or three and a half years, the political cycle of which I note - has been very robust. Those with a political interest can take credit in whatever fashion they wish to. I remember the Harcourt government in British Columbia just a few years ago taking great credit for the BC miracle, and in a sense there was a miracle.
Mr Galt: They raised the taxes.
Mr Conway: It had much less to do with the domestic tax rate than it did with the collapse of the Asian economy. I think the public does expect a certain economic literacy in these debates. I don't quarrel with partisans supporting the current government, doing what we did 10 years ago, because quite frankly some of these circumstances look a little familiar. I remember taking office in 1985 and we had much better luck than the Miller government had had, and the Davis government, in the early 1980s. It had much less to do with us, quite frankly, than a very sharp uptake in the American economy.
Mr Young: Tell us about SkyDome.
Mr Conway: Listen, the guy who gets the credit about the SkyDome is Chris Stockwell. I want to say something about the SkyDome.
Mr Young: What about Peterson and $600 million?
Mr Conway: Listen, there's lots of blame to go around on the SkyDome. I'm not going to deny that at all. I just want to make the point that if you go back and look at the literature of the times, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, it's rather like the nuclear commitment of a decade earlier: Big government, big business and big labour were all singing out of the same hymn book. This was a scheme that could not go wrong. There were people who said the SkyDome was a problem. I remember Chris Stockwell - he wasn't here; he was down at Metro council - was a harsh critic. But I can tell you, Paul Godfrey just swept him aside, as did most of the prevailing class of the time. I'm not here to quarrel. I'm a democrat; I'm prepared to accept -
Ms Mushinski: And the labour unions.
Mr Conway: And the labour unions, as the member for Scarborough-Ellesmere says. She's right.
My only point in saying this is there was a clear debate. There were people, smart people apparently, who stood up and said, "This emperor may not be fully clothed." You know what? They lost the debate. The Dome was built. It was initiated by a Conservative government, completed by a Liberal government, probably exacerbated by us in retrospect, but again, I think one has to be very ecumenical about the assignment of blame. The point is that there were people - good people, thoughtful people - who pointed to problems, and they were simply swept aside by the current of majority public opinion.
I want to come back to the point about the current state of the Ontario economy. It has been very good, and I think anyone who would look at this situation - the government has to get some credit, obviously, but let there be no confusion. Ours is an export economy, and 90% of Ontario exports go to the great American republic and the great Clinton bull market and the great robust -
Hon Mr Leach: What about BC?
Mr Conway: BC? Because of Asia. Just as you have to understand that the problems today with Ontario pork are to some considerable extent the problems of Asia.
I think it's important that we observe these matters, because we are an increasingly integrated economy. We've been very fortunate and I'm very happy. Let me tell you, my family is in the lumber business. When the American economy is strong my relatives do well, and most of my constituents engaged in the lumber and forest economy of the Ottawa Valley do well. We have been an export economy in the Ottawa Valley since the first European settlement came to this part of British North America. But the American economy has been extremely robust, and whether it was automobiles or lumber or other products, we have had a very good market in the United States. Let's hope it continues. It is going to be interesting in the next year or two to see what the so-called downturn in the American economy is going to mean. There are recessions as well as bull markets, and the American bull looks like it's losing just a little bit of its gusto.
I want to also come to a point that the member from Belleville talked about in his remarks, having to do with downloading. I want to hook my comments to part I of the bill, which deals with the downloading of ambulances. To give me an opportunity to address the concern -I'm very pleased the Minister of Municipal Affairs is here tonight. There is a situation in my county, particularly in my part of the county - I want to pay due regard to my friend Mr Jordan, who is here as well tonight. Downloading is a particular challenge in areas like southwest Renfrew county, for a reason I want to touch on tonight.
I do so because before coming to Toronto this week I met with the reeve, the chief magistrate, of the great united townships of Brudenell and Lyndoch, Mr Gilbert Welk.
Mr Young: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: We're not debating Bill 79.
The Deputy Speaker: I've been listening very carefully to the member and I think he's bringing his comments within the bill very well.
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Mr Conway: Mr Welk made the point - and he is as a mayor in that rural municipality going to be faced with the charges that are now going to befall his voters for, among other things, the downloaded ambulance services, and it's just one of the downloaded services which the member from Belleville rightly mentioned are dealt with in this particular bill. The point Reeve Welk wanted me to address at an early opportunity in the legislative debate, I say with all due respect to my friend Mr Leach, the Minister of Municipal Affairs, is the peculiar situation that municipalities in areas like Brudenell and Lyndoch, Hagarty and Richards, Raglan or Head, Clara and Maria in the county of Renfrew face, and let me be specific.
This is the problem of Her Majesty owning most of the real estate. Mr Welk is reeve of - and it's a very unusual situation, known to my friend in North Hastings, certainly known to the member from Lennox and Addington, because in southwest Renfrew, in North Addington, North Hastings and, yes, Haliburton, there are municipalities where Her Majesty owns anywhere from 30% to 80% of the real estate. In Mr Welk's township, Brudenell and Lyndoch, the crown owns 15,000 of 44,000 hectares. Roughly 33% of the real estate is owned by the government of Ontario.
Let me just give you some of the other statistics: In neighbouring Griffith and Matawatchan 70% of the land is owned by the province of Ontario; in Head, Clara and Maria, 83% of the land is owned by the people of Ontario; in Sherwood, Jones and Burns, an area around the village of Barry's Bay it's 50%.
You might say, what is the relevance? The relevance is simply this: Not too long ago the government of Ontario decided to take the crown lands off the tax rolls. They're no longer on the roll. So as we look at, for example, the downloading of ambulance services provided for in part I of Bill 81, it is now going to fall to ratepayers who own property or pay rates on property in areas like Brudenell and Lyndoch to pay for things like ambulances and policing and, in our case, in Renfrew a couple of hundred of kilometres of additional highways that used to belong to the county or to the provincial highway system.
Reeve Welk and the council and hundreds of people in my county who signed this petition want me to stand in my place today and ask the Minister of Municipal Affairs, and perhaps even more importantly ask the Minister of Finance, is it fair that Bill 81 imposes a new charge on the property taxpayers of Brudenell and Lyndoch and other municipalities in Renfrew county for ambulances, which they're prepared to pay if the deal is a fair one?
Where the reeve of Brudenell and Lyndoch rightly points to an unfairness is simply this: How do we possibly justify exempting the biggest single property owner in the township from his or her responsibility in paying their fair share of those costs? Surely the argument of the government's new policy with respect to property taxes - and it's an argument that I accept; I understand at least theoretically and I don't necessarily accept totally, but I understand - is that if you own the property, you've got to be willing to pay a greater share of particularly the hard servicing costs, the roads, the fire, the police.
That's the argument, and I understand that argument, but how do you in an area like Brudenell and Lyndoch say he or she who owns 30% of the real estate - actually it would be a third, so it's 33% of the real estate - gets a complete exemption? In fact, Reeve Welk tells me that in Brudenell and Lyndoch they get a grant in lieu of $14,000, and I gather most of that is for a provincial waterway park along the Madawaska River, which is partly in the township of Brudenell and Lyndoch. If you take that $14,000 provincial grant in lieu that the township of Brudenell and Lyndoch receives and measure it against the 46,900 acres - I presume that translates into 15,000 hectares - Reeve Welk tells me that means the province of Ontario is paying about 30 cents an acre for the 46,900 acres which the government of Ontario owns in that municipality.
Minister, I ask you to think seriously about the peculiar situation which these municipalities in southwest Renfrew, North Hastings, North Addington and Haliburton face as a result of what is admittedly a rather unique and anomalous situation in southern Ontario, namely, that the provincial government owns a very large amount of the property in those counties.
Mr Young: Even Gary Carr's mother is falling asleep.
Mr Conway: The member from Halton wherever says people may be falling asleep. Let me tell you - and Mr Danford, the good member from Hastings, understands this because this is all about tax impact. Can you imagine a situation in Halton region or in Kent county where a landowner had something like 30%, 40%, 50% or 60% of the land or the real estate and managed to take themselves off the tax roll at the very time we were saying to people who own property and pay rates on that property, "You must expect to pay a greater share of costs like policing, fire protection and roads"? It is simply not sustainable. It's not fair. The reason it has been allowed to pass to this extent is because it is so unusual.
I talked to a number of my colleagues and they can't imagine - they don't know what I'm talking about. Most people think when I raise this subject I must be talking about the grants in lieu; I'm not. I'm not talking about grants in lieu. I'm talking about that situation in our part of southeastern Ontario where the crown owns so much of the provincial land, and it's more than that. In Brudenell and Lyndoch, I say to the minister, not only does the crown own 33% of the land, but the crown is actively developing that land in the name of the Ministry of Natural Resources.
If you're the municipality, what you see are MNR vehicles running up and down the roads, you see logging trucks and forest operations, which we are glad to have. Most of the revenues, by the way, go to Her Majesty's provincial government in Toronto. So it's not just that the crown owns land that lies dormant, the crown is an active manager of those lands, particularly insofar as the forest economy is concerned, and that development activity creates costs, road costs, policing costs, fire protection costs, real costs.
You can amalgamate a number of these municipalities. You could take Brudenell and Lyndoch, Sebastopol, Radcliffe, Sherwood, Jones and Burns and put them all together and you wouldn't change the tax base. You wouldn't change the fact that in that part of southwest Renfrew even a great big municipality would still have probably in excess of 35% of the land owned by the provincial government.
In the old days, the way we dealt with this anomalous situation was in part, largely I would argue, through the unconditional grant program. You look at a situation like Griffith and Matawatchan township where you've got 70% of the land owned by the provincial government, you would simply recognize the budgetary and fiscal pressures that would be put on the local government and you would compensate for that by a rather generous unconditional grant. That's gone. In fairness to the government and the minister, they will argue, "We've got some transitional funding to help along the way," and I appreciate that, but it doesn't change the fundamental reality.
As time runs out tonight, I just simply want to use this opportunity in all seriousness to ask the House again, and the minister particularly, to hear the pleas of my constituents in areas like Brudenell and Lyndoch. Reeve Welk is a very good, highly regarded local reeve and he managed to get something like 1,000 signatures. People who hear this expect that a fair government, of whatever political stripe, is going to recognize the special circumstances in which these communities now find themselves. The old grant programs are gone, but the tax situation and the land tenure situation remain. It is simply not possible for any of us in this House to argue that you can own as much real estate as we in right of the government of Ontario own in municipalities like Brudenell and Lyndoch and simply exempt ourselves from the charges that arise for everyone else by virtue of that kind of ownership.
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
The Deputy Speaker: My thanks to you. I was going to let you finish out your time. Are you finished?
Mr Conway: Yes.
The Deputy Speaker: It being almost 9:30 of the clock, this House stands adjourned until 10:am tomorrow.
The House adjourned at 2130.