Transcription du comité 1997-févr-12 | Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

Consideration of Bill 103, An Act to replace the seven existing municipal governments of Metropolitan Toronto by incorporating a new municipality to be known as the City of Toronto / Projet de loi 103, Loi visant à remplacer les sept administrations municipales existantes de la communauté urbaine de Toronto en constituant une nouvelle municipalité appelée la cité de Toronto.

MEG DRONEY

The Chair (Mr Bart Maves): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the standing committee on general government. The first person to appear before us today is Meg Droney. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Meg, come on forward. You have 10 minutes this morning to make your presentation. If there's any time left at the end of your presentation, I'll ask Mr Silipo from the NDP caucus to ask some questions.

Ms Meg Droney: Mr Chairman and committee members, I'm here today to join my voice to the chorus of voices objecting to Bill 103. Like so many of this city's inhabitants, I am an immigrant. I came to Toronto from the US in 1971 to study at the university, and never left. During those 25 years, I've worn three different hats: impoverished student, struggling and eventually successful restaurateur and, my current role, homemaker and mother of three. I, like all who appear before your committee, love where I live.

I thank you for giving me the time to speak here about Bill 103. I must confess to being somewhat nervous about making this presentation. I've never before appeared before a parliamentary committee, and it is a measure of my alarm and great concern that I am willing to do so. Interestingly enough, the only other time I felt compelled to speak publicly about a political issue was in September 1995, when Toronto city council, in preparing to present to the Golden task force, asked for citizen input about the issues being considered by Anne Golden. What I said there I will say here: I do not want my city swallowed whole by a megacity. I want the distinctly urban character of my life and my children's lives to be preserved, even nurtured. I speak to you as a resident and as a parent. This is my Toronto, my chosen home.

It is a place where my children can know their neighbours and roam freely from one house to the next. It's a place where they learn that neighbours look out for each other, take care of one another in a way that somehow seems old-fashioned. It's a place where they learn that people come in a wide range of colours and speak many different languages. It's a place where they learn that families have a wide range of incomes and, more important, that net worth is not a measure of human worth.

It is a place where anyone who wishes can play in the T-ball, baseball, soccer and hockey leagues, not just the well-off and athletically talented. It's a place where children can walk to the library together or hop on a streetcar and go to the Y, all by themselves. In this city a child can gain freedom and learn responsibility gradually.

We who live in this city know that, contrary to what people outside a city think, the scale of city living is small, it is intimate. We know that neighbours, be they residential, institutional or commercial, depend on one another to maintain the integrity of the fabric of our neighbourhoods. We know that this city is not a suburb writ large or writ dense, but a much more complex and, I would say, beautiful organism. Our needs and our priorities are different from those of suburban entities, and we need those differences. They are worth preserving for our sakes and for the sakes of our children.

I believe our local governments have been instrumental in allowing us to preserve the differences that exist between urban and suburban entities. I believe it is futile and foolish to try to blend both types of entities into one. It just won't work. Like oil and water, one will float, the other sink.

But I should put aside now the issue of the difficulties of mixing urban and suburban governance, because this legislation is about more than just that.

I confessed earlier to being nervous about speaking here. Well, I have another confession to make: I'm confused. I find it impossible to think about Bill 103 without considering also the measures that were proposed at the same time: legislation affecting schools and the proposals for changing revenues and responsibilities for municipalities. This package of changes is so large, complex, far-reaching and ill-thought-out that I think it is dangerous and foolhardy to try to do it all in such a short time frame.

I have many questions still, and I hope you will consider some of the questions I have and try to answer them for yourselves before you amend and vote on Bill 103. These are some of my questions:

Why this amalgamation? I haven't read one thing that convinces me that it is necessary or desirable. The often-touted cost savings and supposed efficiencies simply have not been proven.

Why is this recommendation for amalgamation even being considered without any concrete legislative proposals for an overall restructuring of the GTA?

How can it make sense to amalgamate before the regional proposals are clearly spelled out? What's the rush? Why is it so important to change our local government so radically, so quickly?

What happened to the Golden report? No one in the government has explained why some of the fundamental recommendations of the Golden report are being ignored.

What happened to the Crombie report? No one in the government has explained why some of the fundamental recommendations of the Crombie report are being ignored.

Where are the studies, the expert opinions, the research papers that support this legislation? On a matter of great importance, I don't think any of us should just take the government's word as proof.

Those questions relate to Bill 103, but as I said before, I am struck by the interconnectedness of this bill and Bill 104 and the proposed changes in revenues and responsibilities for municipalities. About these, I urge you to consider and to try to answer the following questions before proceeding with Bill 103:

Why should school boards be changed in a way that would cause all Metro residents to be left with part-time trustees, each of whom will have to represent more than 100,000 residents?

Why should I be willing to let the province take over the funding of Toronto's educational system when they won't even talk about what level of funding they're considering?

How can the government ignore the advice of expert after expert about the perils of funding social programs from property taxes? How dare they threaten our city that way?

In this morning's Globe and Mail I read that, according to information provided by a senior finance ministry official, the province has overlooked $911 million in annual spending costs, costs which will fall into the laps of municipalities. Is this an oversight or is it a calculated deception? Either way, tell me why any of us should believe any of your figures when such a large sum has been overlooked.

I've confessed to you my nervousness about being here and my confusion about the bundling together of all these measures and the lack of answers and explanations from the government. I have one last confession: I am furious. I am furious on two counts.

First of all, I've never seen a government act with such disregard for its citizens or make proposals which show such disrespect for the democratic process, which I have assumed to be the underpinning of our society. To disempower our duly elected officials by placing them under the jurisdiction of provincially appointed trustees, to disempower our elected school trustees and place such sweeping power in the hands of, again, provincially appointed members of an Education Improvement Commission are, I believe, radical acts which demonstrate contempt for our locally elected officials and the people who elected them. It has been said that the government will disregard municipal referendum results. To be left voiceless makes me furious.

But mostly I'm furious because I believe that this whole jumble of proposed changes threatens my children. My children go to the local public school, where they've been fortunate to receive an excellent education. Their American cousins could not go to their local public schools. My children take part in wonderful recreational programs at our local community centre. Their American cousins have no such programs. My children live in a big city that is safe. Their American cousins have no such safe city. My children can use the public transit system. Their American cousins cannot. My children live in a society which still retains a degree of social cohesiveness which their American cousins have never known.

With all due respect, I believe the jumble of changes proposed, of which Bill 103 is only a part, threatens the quality of life my children will experience here in the city. We all know what happened in those US cities when people like me started to fear for their children.

I urge you to find real answers to the questions I've posed here. I urge you to take the time to explain the answers to the people. I urge you to delay any decisions about amalgamation until there is in place concrete legislation which spells out the restructuring of the entire GTA. I urge you to forget about party loyalty and use some real common sense.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Droney. You've gone a bit beyond your allotted time. I want to thank you for coming forward this morning and making a presentation.

MARGARET SIMPSON

The Chair: Would Margaret Simpson please come forward. Good morning and welcome to the committee.

Ms Margaret Simpson: Thank you very much. Hello. My name is Margaret Simpson, and I am a citizen, Ontarian, Torontonian by birth and currently an East Yorker by choice of residency. I greet this committee today, my family greets this committee today and my ancestors greet this committee today, because today myself and my history have come to voice in the strongest possible terms opposition to Bill 103's method of eliminating local, duly elected, city and borough representational government.

My understanding of and continuing respect for this form of grass-roots, democratic governing is based on the collective past experiences and nurturing teaching examples of my ancestors, tutors and present-day family members. For over 160 years, my family has believed in, fought for, assisted, publicly supported, participated in and listened to local citizen-elected governments in this country, this province, the city of Toronto and now today in the borough of East York.

Our family's belief in the democratic tradition of the right to vote and govern our own communities has been a continuing resource for good judgement as we have faced quality-of-life issues as responsible citizens. Time and time again our knowledge that we indeed had a right to discussion, debate and options in the affairs that concerned us helped to make our requests to and working relationships with government realistic and reasonable.

However, on December 17, 1996, that belief, that tradition, that cooperation died. On that day, this Harris government imposed on the citizen-elected local councils of five cities and the borough of East York and the municipal government of Metropolitan Toronto an appointed trusteeship to "oversee the financial affairs" without meaningful citizenship consultation and without electoral consent. Why? What had these municipal councils done wrong?

Their governing records show them committing no acts of misconduct to warrant the magnitude of this move or not being able to run their own affairs. My family and myself were insulted. This single act of the Harris government held in contempt our civic tradition and held to ransom the creditability of our civil rights. Gone was what I understood as elected local borough government in East York. Gone was what I understood as local government in Ontario.

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Good government is about the needs of the people truly mattering, and those same needs being serviced with care. To rush through major governing changes with no citizen debate, no citizen input and no means of citizen appeal is both a dictatorial and a rash act. This is not an act of good governing in any way.

In addition, to give to a politically appointed, non-citizen-appeal board of trustees the right to "oversee the financial affairs" of a duly elected local government and its reserve monetary funds needed to service local residents is not a democratic act nor a citizen-friendly one. For many Ontarians, the first working step to determining the best path for resolving their quality-of-life issues is still to bring them to and request financial means of servicing those issues from our local city or borough governments.

At this point, when I first worked on my presentation to this committee, I had composed from researching, reading, listening to current debate and my experience as a participant in local government for over 35 years a definition of "local government" to read to you. However, yesterday -- Tuesday, February 11 -- I felt as part of my research I should also go to Publications Ontario on Bay Street to pick up and look at the current information being endorsed and distributed by the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs about local government in Ontario, its definition and its responsibilities. I went to the display shelves and found this booklet entitled Welcome to Local Government in Ontario. This booklet is published by the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and the Intergovernmental Committee on Urban and Regional Research.

I would like to read the definition of local government and its responsibilities as explained in this booklet and enter with my submission a copy of this currently distributed literature.

"Local government is responsible for matters which affect the local area, such as: police and fire protection; schools; libraries; parks and recreation facilities; planning new neighbourhoods; garbage collection and disposal; roads and sidewalks. Why is local government responsible for so many important services? Because local government is close to the people it serves. It knows what the local community's needs are and how best to meet them."

I realized this definition was tragically misinforming anyone who read it because, as of December 17, 1996, with a provincially appointed board of trustees as financial overseers for the seven existing municipal and local governments in Metropolitan Toronto and accountable only to the Harris government, not all local governments in Ontario are now being treated equally. This is a more serious omission of fact because it is essential information to the understanding of local government in Ontario, and it is being omitted in the current information endorsed and distributed by the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs by their own agent, Publications Ontario.

I became more concerned when I read the booklet's explanation as to who it considered its readership to be: "This book has been prepared to help newcomers to Ontario, their teachers and councillors, immigrant aid agencies, schools and other non-profit groups which assist newcomers. It will also be useful to people who are looking for an introduction to local government, how it works, and the services it provides."

This book is available in 11 different, English and another, language combinations. I realized I knew an important sector of this readership. During a period of almost two years, I taught people between the ages of 16 and 24 in Toronto. The majority of them had English as a second language. I taught them business communication aids so they could go out and compete for jobs with more language and appropriate workplace skills. These people fall into the booklet's readership category, and it is not fair to mislead them and create more barriers when they are trying so hard to understand a new culture. If they choose residency within the seven areas of local government now under trusteeship, they will not receive the same servicing from that local government that has its financial affairs controlled by a non-elected board of trustees.

The Chair: Ms Simpson, you are coming towards the end of your time. I know we all have the submission in front of us. I wonder if you could maybe wrap up in some way.

Ms Simpson: I will do that. Thank you very much. I will just end with a couple of more paragraphs.

I also looked for the publication date and found it on page 3 of the preface, and I quote: "Please note: The information in this book was first prepared in January 1988 and updated in July 1991. For more current information, you should contact your municipality or the provincial agency that is responsible."

I went to the service desk of the official provincial agency for the distribution of Ontario government literature and asked, "Is this your current information on local government in Ontario?" The response was yes. This circulating of information to newcomers with cultural diversity that misleads and outright contradicts our reality must stop.

I would like to thank the committee and urge the parliamentarians today as strongly as I can to advise the Harris government to stop further passage of Bill 103. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Simpson, for coming forward this morning.

Applause.

SHAWN KERWIN

The Chair: Would Shawn Kerwin please come forward.

Ladies and gentlemen, some of you probably have not attended hearings before, but I have to remind you that the rules of the Legislature apply to committee rooms, and participation from audiences is not allowed, whether it be clapping or commenting and so forth. I'd appreciate if you'd respect those rules and keep that to a minimum.

Welcome to the committee. You have 10 minutes this morning to make your presentation.

Ms Shawn Kerwin: Good morning and thank you. I appreciate being given the opportunity to address this committee and present some of my concerns regarding Bill 103.

I have been a resident of Metropolitan Toronto for over half my life. My profession as a freelance theatre designer has allowed me the privilege to live and work in other cities, such as London, England, Chicago and New York and, in this country, literally from one coast to the other. Although I have been given many opportunities to settle and work in other places, I continue to return to Toronto. I have recently become a first-time property owner in the downtown area.

In preparing to address you today, I have spent much time trying to answer a simple question: Why do I always return to Toronto? There are many answers to this question, and it has been very difficult to narrow down the reasons to the ones I will present to you today.

What is it that makes Toronto so different, so desirable to me? Certainly many other cities offer cultural riches, geographical beauty, professional opportunities and stimulating communities in which to live, work and raise families. Why does Toronto hold my heart over these cities?

My first answer to that question is the following: Toronto maintains a very delicate balance between being both large and small, a scale which can include local neighbourhood communities as well as the international community. What is special about Toronto is not the ability to give one preference over the other, but the ability for these two elements to coexist. From my experiences in other cities, I have seen it proven over and over again that this balancing act is not a common occurrence, and we should not take this aspect of our city for granted for one moment.

I fear that Bill 103 threatens this balance in its attempt to rob citizens of their locally elected representatives. There has been talk of one mayor, one council being more efficient. I would beg to differ. I have yet to find any real evidence that has proven that one larger mega-government will be more cost-effective than our current smaller local governments. I have not found one success story anywhere in North America that would support this kind of forced amalgamation. In fact, it would seem to me that at the present moment in our country's history, much effort is being put into trying to decentralize the federal government in order to allow the provinces more control over their own futures. Surely it would just be better to do away with provincial government altogether in order to consolidate, in order to be efficient.

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To replace seven councils and seven different kinds of voices with one single voice suggests to me a lack of respect for the strength and value of our differences and a blind commitment to creating a level of bureaucracy to be forced on to the citizens of Metro's six cities without consideration, collaboration or concern for dialogue.

How can this be possible? How can any of us -- government, opposition or citizens -- trust that forcing amalgamation and reducing the number of elected representatives to serve Metro's communities can be a positive step towards a healthy future? It would seem to me that the goal of this bill would be to cut the heart out of one of Metro's greatest assets, and that is its diversity and flexibility. Why is this government so determined to consider this an inefficient expenditure rather than a unique, valuable strength?

The government can easily argue that its plans to force amalgamation will continue to protect Metro's flexibility and diversity. I disagree. Not only will the decrease in elected representation across Metro make it harder for local concerns to be both heard and responded to, but it is in direct contrast to some of the government's own recommendations on the need for local voices to have authority.

I would like to quote from information obtained off the government's Web site regarding municipalities in northern Ontario: "In 1996, the government gave authority to municipalities in northern Ontario, counties, and cities to decide how they are structured, their boundaries and how many levels of government they need." It states further down the same page, "This new regional restructuring process will be based on an existing process that allows for locally initiated structural change in counties and in the north."

If only the government showed the same commitment and regard for the local councils in Metro.

We are promised the lure of local volunteer neighbourhood committees to ensure that our local concerns are heard. I can assure you that I face this room today as a volunteer from a neighbourhood trying to raise concerns to this committee. The government has made it quite clear that it does not want to acknowledge my concerns, nor those of the many others who have stated over and over again that your plans are wrongheaded. Does this set the tone for the future working of the megacity?

I would love to trust this government to guide Metro and the province towards the 21st century. However, for the first time in my life, I distrust a government totally. Appointed trustees at this very moment have enormous powers, and yet Bill 103 is not yet law. After the bill is passed, voting boundaries will be redrawn, reducing the amount of time available to prepare for an extremely important municipal election. Yesterday's paper reported that there was some question as to whether a November election could proceed on schedule.

After the election, a transition team will have enormous power and influence over many changes to our way of life. The decisions made by these unelected people will not be able to be challenged in court. Can this really be happening?

The issue here is not a reluctance to change, but a reluctance to trust this government's process of change. To be faced with change in the authoritarian manner that this government is showing in trying to force Bill 103 through in such limited time, as well as with the huge combined impact of Bill 104 and the downloading of provincial services on to municipalities throughout this province, is simply irresponsible.

I am a gardener. When I want to put a new plant in my garden, I look at it as an investment not only in the plant but in the garden as a whole. In order to integrate this new plant into the garden, I need to make a place for it. I could dig a hole with my trowel, or I could place three sticks of dynamite in the ground and light the fuse. In both cases, I will have a new space for my plant. However, it is not difficult to see that one system of planting is vastly wiser than the other and will have greater long-term benefits. Why is this government so determined to use dynamite as the only solution in this garden of Metropolitan Toronto? I would like to remind you that the delicate, invisible roots spreading in many directions are what continue to support the plant and to ensure its life.

There is much talk of the bottom line. I understand what the bottom line means, and it is much more than the columns of figures and tidy sums endlessly quoted to the people of this province over and over. It is the need for people to feel that their elected government respects them and will listen.

This government has repeatedly stated that it will ignore the results of any of the upcoming referendums, that some of these referendums are rigged and illegal, a waste of taxpayers' money. However, if the results of the referendum showed an overwhelming support for amalgamation, would the government continue to ignore the results? I wonder. Perhaps the government should ask itself why so many people are spending time, money and effort, many like myself for the first time in our lives, trying to arrest Bill 103's crushing implications.

I feel privileged to live in this country and in this city. I hope I can continue to say that I feel privileged to live in this province. I urge the government to listen, to allow change and not to force change. Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Kerwin, for your presentation. Unfortunately, you've exhausted your time for your presentation.

DOUGLAS PERRY

The Chair: Would Doug Perry please come forward. Good morning, Mr Perry, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Douglas Perry: Good morning to the members of the committee and all present. My name is Douglas Perry. I am pleased to come before you this morning to present my views on Bill 103. I'm aware, however, that as the second reading of the bill has passed, these hearings may actually have little influence on the members of the government, those members who actually determine policy and draft legislation. What influence they do have, however, is the responsibility of the Conservative members present.

No doubt you have heard much about the city of Toronto and what its citizens feel about its proposed demise. I will begin my presentation with a discussion of something quite different from cities. I would like to begin by talking about the wetlands.

When talking to my children about the concept of the interconnectedness of things, I often use the wetlands to illustrate a number of significant qualities and facts. In the wetlands, there is virtually an infinite number of organisms living and functioning together: growing, eating, dying, decaying, on and on. It provides us with a brilliant example of an ecosystem at work, a system whose complexities are far beyond our present comprehension. The interconnectedness of all the organisms and their interspecies relationships are a marvel to observe. But what has taken hundreds of years to develop, to evolve, can be rent asunder in a single afternoon.

The reforms proposed in Bill 103, to continue to use the wetlands analogy, are similar perhaps to an idea that would have us draining a wetland to install some new high-tech water management system, then pouring the water back in and expecting that not only will all the living things return but that this new improved model will outperform the previous one.

I will talk later about my professional and volunteer affiliations, but at this moment I am speaking to you as a private citizen. I rather like the juxtaposition of these two words and enjoy calling myself this, as in the current political mindset the words "public," "public good," "public interest" and "public servants" are gaining a rather negative connotation. But you who are sitting around this table are public servants and, as elected officials, responsible to the public.

While the cutting of politicians in Metro from over 100 to 44 may appear to strike a favourable chord with some people, does this not actually show that people are extremely frustrated with politicians themselves? The fact that politicians consistently disappoint and distort reality to serve their ends is no reason to make government even more élitist.

The number of problems to be dealt with in a megacity will not diminish. Are we not simply trading politicians who are accountable to the public for bureaucrats who are accountable only to their superiors? This action cuts off the access of the citizens to their government representatives, which of course for some politicians is a step in the right direction.

I posed my first question in a public forum to Lester B. Pearson; the issue, nuclear disarmament. Now, 30 years later, the tireless work of thousands of world citizens is paying off in that area. At that same time, bureaucrats and politicians had the brilliant idea to extend the Spadina Expressway down to the water. Again, the tireless work of volunteer citizens stopped this dead in its tracks and we all today enjoy the benefit of their labours. Just stop to think what this city would be like if there was an expressway dissecting it north to south.

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This government has failed miserably to provide its citizens with any real, detailed information on just how this is a good thing, how the transfer of soft services to municipalities will not leave the urban organism prone to bankruptcy. These citizens have been chastised by the government for standing up and speaking out about these proposed reforms.

The year is 2003. Canada is in its second year of a massive world recession. The city's jobless rate stands at 17%, the welfare ranks are exploding, health care costs are radically up. Property taxes rise accordingly, forcing some people in businesses to leave town, close up shop, board up their windows. The city tries to borrow money, first from the PC-created municipal slush fund. They call, but nobody answers. Then they try to get money from the guys in New York: "No way. We don't lend to cities. We tried that before and we lost." What happens next? Do you have any answers for this scenario other than, "Oh, it couldn't happen here"?

Mastermind Al Leach refers to Chicago and New York as shining examples of how Leachville can work. I travel a lot as a performer, so I must ask, does he ever go outside the Marriott hotels he stays in? Those cities are barely working and not at all user-friendly. New York has already tasted bankruptcy, and Chicago, aside from being a very dangerous city to live in, has had one family in the mayor's chair for over 30 years. Is this where we're headed, to 44 city warlords?

The government is telling the people, "Trust us." Every study but the most recent two-week report commissioned by the government says this idea is a bad idea. The board of trade says no, Crombie says no, financial institutions say no, the people of Hamilton-Wentworth have voted no, Jane Jacobs says no, the people coming before you say no, even some backbenchers have been feeling the heat. Who is saying yes?

You say you know better. You say you can't give any details about how it will actually work, that that's the job of the transition team, when you finally get around to appointing them. You fail to give any details on how much it will cost. You want to make the change now and you will fill in the blanks later. It's like buying a house that the purchaser can't see, can't find out how much it will cost, what the borrowing rate is, can't even get a guarantee that it has four walls and a roof. You're asking us to sign on the dotted line and buy in. All you can say is, "Believe us."

The PC ruling party was elected with 43% of the popular vote and now needs some cool, hard cash to pay for its proposed tax break. How to do this is simple.

Step 1: Grab the big line item on the budget -- education.

Step 2: Balance the ledger; offset the grab with a downloading of soft services.

Step 3: Force amalgamation to try to make this whole ill-conceived idea work.

I've spoken in general about Bill 103 and have not yet discussed the concerns of my specific community. I didn't want to appear like a special interest representative, though I am specially interested in many things. I think this is a good thing. I'm a musician. I performed most recently with the Canadian Opera Company, and with a wide variety of popular stars on the CBC and in the recording industry. I sit on the board of directors of Harbourfront Centre, I'm on the board of the Toronto Arts Council, I'm the president of the Recording Musicians Association, Toronto chapter, and a member of the steering committee of ArtsVote. I'm also a founder of DERT, Democracy's Emergency Relief Team.

The cultural sector employs, either directly or indirectly, over 220,000 people. Over 90% of the money spent on culture is spent in the city of Toronto, for the good of all the citizens of Toronto, Metro, the province, our country and the world. The revenues generated are enormous. The investment pays big dividends. But if you think the wetlands are a complex, sensitively balanced ecosystem, then take a look at the cultural sector. While it consistently outperforms other sectors, it has suffered enormous cuts, almost 30% of its funding being extracted in the last few years.

Artists live in a world of change. Their expertise in dealing with constant change is profound, but there is a limit. If this pond is drained completely, what we have built up over many decades will just disappear. The artists won't die; they will relocate. Believe me, this is already happening. The exodus has begun. First the artists go, then the businesses, then the residents. Is there any question why the arts community is concerned with having only 14 out of 44 councillors to represent their concerns in a new megacity council?

Multilevel funding, rather than being seen as just a duplication of services, allows the different levels of government to set unique priorities and address specific issues that are important to their constituents. The move towards bigger and more centralized government simply reduces the public's accessibility to its government. Why not consider taking the reduction to the extreme and do away with municipal, provincial and federal levels of government and just let one person do the job? No duplication of services there.

I urge the members of the Conservative Party present here today to go back to their superiors in caucus and insist that they review Bill 103, that they listen to the people who are coming forth and withdraw the bill immediately, and then continue to work with all those people who have come forward to guarantee that this city remains the best city in the world to live. For I warn you that if Toronto falters, it will take all of Ontario with it. I personally will hold every member of this government responsible for the consequences of their actions.

Thank you for your time.

The Chair: Thank you for coming forward today and making your presentation.

WILLIAM PHILLIPS

The Chair: Would William Phillips please come forward. Good morning, Mr Phillips. Welcome to the committee.

Mr William Phillips: Thank you, Mr Chairman, members of the committee. By way of introduction, I was born in Collingwood, Ontario, and moved to Toronto when I was seven years old and was educated in the city of Toronto. Then, when I was married, I moved to East York, raised my two daughters there, became heavily involved in the community of East York and became a trustee on the school board of East York from 1972 to 1985. Then I moved to Harbourfront and became very involved in the Harbourfront community, as secretary-treasurer of the Harbourfront residents' association, trying to protect some of the harbourfront for public use from being built on totally. Then I moved up north of Bloor-Sherbourne into the Rosedale area, became involved in the Rosedale community. I'm currently secretary of the South Rosedale Ratepayers' Association.

I say that to suggest to you that I have some experience in terms of neighbourhoods and communities and elected organizations.

The replacement of the two-tier government of Metropolitan Toronto with one megacity is exactly the opposite direction from what the provincial government should be travelling. Virtually all significant studies and commissions have recommended the strengthening of the local, most immediate level of municipal government in Metropolitan Toronto -- the cities of Toronto, North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke and York and the borough of East York -- and the reduction of the responsibilities of the second tier, the more remote Metropolitan Toronto council.

The creation of a supercity will inevitably have three very negative results:

(1) An inevitable increase in municipal bureaucracy and higher costs for services. A recent study, Local and Regional Governance in the Greater Toronto Area: A Review of Alternatives, prepared for the city of Toronto, January 10, 1997, by Wendell Cox Consultancy, clearly illustrates the correlation between increased size of municipalities and increased costs. Any member of this committee who has not studied this report should do so immediately. May I point out to you that Wendell Cox is a very conservative type of consultant in terms of his fiscal views.

(2) Local government that is less accessible and less responsive to the people it is supposed to represent will be an outcome, a negative result of the megacity. One has only to compare the interaction between citizens and their local councils with the lack of interaction between citizens and Metro council. The remoteness of the Metropolitan council was increased when direct elections were introduced. It became more difficult for citizens to run for office in the large wards and there were even several acclamations. Furthermore, Metro council has been either unable or unwilling to control its spending, while the local municipalities have avoided tax increases over the past several years.

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I've had several opportunities to go to Metro council to advocate positions on behalf of my community, and the difference between going to Metro council and going to the city of Toronto council is like night and day. You have to be in the position of having done that to realize what a bad idea it is to amalgamate the whole of Metro Toronto and expect to get responsiveness to neighbourhood needs and community needs.

(3) The destruction of the political balance within the province of Ontario. A unified megacity replacing Metropolitan Toronto and its local municipalities will overwhelm the greater Toronto area and provide a major combatant to the provincial government. The opportunity to provide a workable GTA coordination mechanism will be lost and the competition between the new megacity and the outer GTA will be very destructive to both areas. I think Hazel McCallion is very aware of the results of doing this.

The transition to the new city of Toronto is undemocratic and unworkable for the following reasons. The board of trustees, not being elected officials, will be resented if they try to interfere in any way with the decisions of the elected members of the local or Metro councils. The tension created will not be conducive to good government. The current members on local and Metro councils have been elected by the citizens to govern their affairs and are quite capable of doing so. Many of them will no doubt be running for office in the next election, no matter what the political structure. To autocratically appoint bureaucrats to oversee them is an affront to democracy.

The transition team, not being elected officials, will create a bureaucracy which may not be responsive to the new city of Toronto council to take office in 1998. Since they have not been elected to undertake such a task, they can hardly represent the citizens who will be affected by their decisions. It would be far better to delay the amalgamation for one year, continue the present council members in office for 1998 and elect a new council to undertake the reorganization to take effect on January 1, 1999, or even 2000, given the complexity of the tasks they will need to complete.

This was the type of mechanism that was used when Metro council was set up. The council was elected before it came into effect and was put in charge of making the necessary arrangements. That seems to be a reasonable, democratic pattern or precedent to follow, and I cannot imagine why the government would ignore that type of thing. It works, and I can't see this working.

The board of trustees and the transition team are to be above the law. I find it offensive that the decisions of the board of trustees and the transition team are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court and that the Statutory Powers Procedure Act does not apply, especially since these autocrats have not even been elected to perform the duties assigned to them. Under the provisions of Bill 103, democracy will no longer be a part of the governance structure of my city.

I know that certain bodies are exempted from review by the courts and the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, but the transition team and the trustees are replacing elected officials who are accountable to having their decisions reviewed by the courts and are governed by the Statutory Powers Procedure Act. To take elected people who are under these strictures and replace them by non-elected people who aren't is absolutely ludicrous.

These drastic changes were never even hinted at by the so-called Common Sense Revolution. The actions announced during mega-week run counter to everything that was promised to the people of my city during the last provincial election; thus I will never forgive the Harris government for this act of deceit.

In my community of Rosedale, our member there, the Honourable -- ahem, honourable, yes -- Al Leach said he would resign if his government brought in market value assessment. There's no doubt that this AVA he's talking about is market value assessment since it's mid-1986 that the market value is set at. Maybe he doesn't quite live up to the standard set by Sheila Copps. It's too bad he wouldn't put himself forward to the test.

Thank you very much. I'll be glad to answer any questions.

The Vice-Chair (Mrs Julia Munro): Mr Silipo, you have about one minute.

Mr Tony Silipo (Dovercourt): Mr Phillips, it is your suggestion to delay the elections for a year as one way out of this morass. It's certainly something that others have mentioned. Could you talk a little more about that? The other side of the coin is the concern some people have that it is just another way of continuing the undemocratic process; that these people were elected for a certain time and now you're suggesting that they should continue for another year.

Mr Phillips: For instance, if instead of having an election for the new city to take effect immediately this fall, you said, "We're going to extend the term of the current council," which has been elected, "for a year and we will elect the new council and give them the task of putting together this new city," that would at least have the semblance of a democratic process. We could elect people who would represent us to do that, rather than some faceless bureaucrats that somebody else is going to appoint. Certainly these people who put together the new city would at least have to run in the next election and be accountable if they did not do a good job. That's democracy.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for appearing before our committee.

JOAN ROBERTS

The Vice-Chair: I call on Joan Roberts, please. Good morning, Ms Roberts, and welcome to the committee.

Ms Joan Roberts: Good morning. My name is Joan Roberts. I'm the city councillor for ward 4 and the deputy mayor in the city of York. I am not here to save my job but to do my job. I'm speaking on my own behalf.

Thank you for the opportunity to present my concerns over Bill 103 to this government. I came here today to present my questions and concerns regarding this legislation. There seems to be so much information missing from this bill that when my constituents ask me for information, I have none to give them. How are we to address their concerns when we can't get answers to our questions? How can anyone make an informed decision? Maybe you can help answer these questions:

What's the rush? Why are we hurrying to eliminate a form of government that has been around for 200 years?

What are the problems this legislation is supposed to solve? The proposals made by your government strike in every direction and are often contradictory.

Is the uncertainty and chaos of the megacity legislation good for business? Does it create a job-producing environment?

From 1992 to 1994 I chaired our land use committee. When development was very busy and people wanted to expedite their development applications, usually lost in the black hole of Metro Toronto's bureaucracy, I used to advise people to walk their applications around Metro from department to department. It was the only way to save three months in a development application.

What will the planning process in the megacity look like? Why are you making bureaucracy bigger when you want to expedite development activity? Doesn't big bureaucracy mean more red tape, not less? How will neighbours and communities have input into the planning process? Will they have to go downtown for Planning Act meetings? What happens to all the community-based planning processes we have initiated? We have hundreds of people involved.

Everything I've read in this decade about economic development says partnerships are the way to go to solve our problems in public life. How is a mega-government going to create public-private sector partnerships when all the elected officials are downtown, each one of them having to face a schedule akin to that of what our mayors now follow? How are politicians going to provide leadership to solve community problems if they are rarely in their community?

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Our council has been at the forefront of creating public-private sector processes to facilitate problem-solving. One of them that I chaired is the community economic development advisory committee which created a plan to revitalize our local economy. The person over here on my right was a member. It's good to see Ruth once again. People from all over Metro Toronto participated in that. We've also been very effective in dealing with crime hot spots because of our special crime committee started by our former mayor.

All of these processes involve private sector business, the community and all levels of government, except for Metro's economic development department, which does not see the benefit in this approach to problem-solving. So we've got federal and provincial participation but Metro chooses not to. What will happen to all this social capital we have mobilized in our community?

Everyone before me has spoken about the impact of downloading. I will not dwell upon it now, but I want to know how our quality of life will improve if our city loses its middle class. How will we move to more community-based policing if we don't have community leadership any more?

Does getting rid of politicians deal with the problem we have, which is a loss of faith in our politicians to provide effective government? I don't think so. How will a 45-person council provide leadership when council meetings will go on for days at a time? When will politicians get into their communities if they have to provide the work that is now done by both local and Metro councillors and, if I might add, school trustees?

Who will sit on the committees that make things happen? These are the committees that feed into every standing committee of municipal government and all the special purpose boards that politicians are appointed to, from the children's aid society to the CNE to every municipality's social service agencies, district health councils, boards of health, long-term-care coordinating boards, hospital boards, licensing commissions, library boards and ad hoc committees that are set up every week to deal with the latest problem to surface.

What will the political scene look like in the megacity? Will there be tax receipts for campaign donations to politicians who run? Who will run for school boards on a measly salary of $5,000 per year? Our separate school trustee represents the entire city of York, 140,000 people. It's an impossible task. Five thousand dollars wouldn't cover the cost of an election campaign in one ward in the city of York, let alone mega-wards. How will ethnic groups break into local politics? How will this proposal facilitate more women running for public office? How will anybody without party backing run in a megacity ward and have a reasonable chance of winning?

Is the megacity a first step in a city-state? What's a city-state? How do we live in one? How is having two levels of government replaced with three levels downsizing? How is having fewer politicians in a closed system of local government making government more effective? How is handing more power to bureaucrats making government more responsive to people?

The legislation proposes neighbourhood committees to keep up local involvement in the community, but I've heard they've all but disappeared in Winnipeg's unicity and have become dominated by special interest groups in Halifax. Is business a special interest group? With no salary involved, who's going to be interested in serving on these neighbourhood committees in an era of contracting out and privatization? How will this legislation prevent corruption from dominating local politics?

Where is citizen input and involvement? What happens to all the volunteers who are running things like museums and special purpose boards? Does grass-roots activism have no value any more?

Will the megacity be better at providing service to local communities? How? Will we have to go downtown when we want service? How will we get a building permit or pay our hydro bill? How do we maintain relationships in our community that have evolved into formalized projects, like EnviroWorks, a partnership between the city of York, the local hydro commission and other utilities to foster energy conservation?

How will we retain our special services geared to our special needs community?

Will local politicians be expected to take complaints on welfare cheats? Some people are expecting that now.

What will happen to social housing? Will our safe, healthy non-profits and co-ops be so starved for funds that they will deteriorate into the public housing projects built in the 1960s?

What should I tell the social service agencies that exist only because of municipal government funding in my city about their prospects for funding next year under the megacity? Will they get funding next year, or should I tell them to shut down now?

How will progressiveness be built into the property tax system to allow for natural demographic trends that will increase the load on services like long-term care?

How will the megacity maintain and enforce all the legal agreements we are signatory to, from development agreements to cash-in-lieu-of-parking agreements?

What will happen to our community's assets: the cash, the artwork, buildings, projects, festivals, identities and museum inventory?

How should I explain the tax burden shift that will occur from commercial-industrial to residential taxpayers to our ratepayers' associations? This will occur because of the removal of business occupancy tax and the ability to implement special taxation classes to favour business.

What will happen to our prioritized capital request lists?

What happens to our international partnership with a city in El Salvador that is financed by the federal government?

At the very least, the public deserves answers. Your government promised common sense. Common sense says you don't pretend things are simple when they're not. It's also common sense that people will eventually find out the truth. People with common sense will know that errors of omission are as much lies as deliberate misrepresentations. It is foolhardy to begin a journey without knowing the destination. You may want to take that trip, but at the very least, you owe the 2.3 million people you are forcibly taking along for the ride some explanations: Where are we being taken, how will we get there and what will it cost? It is not enough to say that we should trust you. As you have pointed out on a number of occasions, politicians are rarely to be trusted. I have to answer to my constituents; you should answer to them as well.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please. Thank you very much, Ms Roberts. You've effectively used your full time for presentation. I want to thank you for coming forward this morning.

BRUCE BRYER

The Chair: Would Bruce Bryer please come forward. Good morning and welcome to the committee.

Mr Bruce Bryer: Good morning. I am Bruce Bryer. I'm a resident of West Hill and an employee of the Toronto Transit Commission.

The government is showing great vision and doing the right thing by proceeding in a timely way with amalgamation and in keeping its promise to reduce one of the unnecessary tiers of municipal government. Bill 103 is a necessary, splendid part of the Common Sense Revolution, unrivalled in the province's history.

Premier Harris, on June 8, 1995, we the people gave you a mandate to change much of what was wrong with government. You have kept your promise and your word. For that, we the people owe you a debt of gratitude.

The amalgamation of the city of Toronto is no accident. It was born out of a legacy of waste, excessive duplication of services, overtaxation, political parochialism, lack of vision and an absence of city-wide planning and coordination by the municipal governments. For example, when a fire breaks out, God forbid, on Victoria Park Avenue, which is at the boundary of three fire departments, just who rescues you?

Roads ending at boundary lines are the direct result of political disagreement and a lack of continuity. Examples of this are the Allen Expressway and Lawrence Avenue East at Bayview Avenue. Discontinued roads exist due to political parochialism. A good example of this is the Gardiner east, which is incomplete. Political gridlock by municipal politicians has contributed to this deadlock.

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My colleague James Alcock, an urban transportation consultant, and I have co-authored a report entitled Transportation Improvements Needed for the Greater Toronto Area. We urge reforms to roads, the TTC, and the inception of a ring road system, which has a missing link in the east due to political disagreement. We strongly urge the construction of a bluffs roadway, which would be a scenic boulevard along the bottom of the Scarborough Bluffs, lined with parks, beaches and marinas connected to the east of the Gardiner Expressway via a suspension bridge rivalling the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco and connected to Highway 401 and Pickering. It was a 1923 vision of Norman D. Wilson, a traffic consultant to the TTC. It was endorsed by Metro's first chairman, Fred Gardiner, in 1954. It was set aside in favour of a Scarborough expressway which never materialized and has now been abandoned by Metro. Now, with amalgamation, it is our only chance to revive our only option, the bluffs roadway, creating more jobs and getting rid of through traffic congestion. Our report is endorsed by Sam Cass, retired commissioner of Metro roads, and Crawford Smyth, retired commissioner of the TTC.

Amalgamation will provide a Metro-wide council with visionary planning for the whole area; not a number of municipalities which bicker among themselves. In fact, partial amalgamation occurred in 1967, when 13 boroughs dropped to six. And those municipalities -- Leaside, Forest Hill, Weston, New Toronto, Mimico, Long Branch and Swansea -- have survived and are now distinct communities with strong neighbourhoods, one more convincing reason to move to total amalgamation.

Interruption.

The Chair: Excuse me. Whether you're in favour of or against a presenter, I'm not tolerating interjections from the audience. The gentlemen behind, can you please cease, and anyone else, whether you're in favour or against, people have the right to make their presentations uninterrupted. I want everyone to keep those interjections to themselves. Thank you.

Mr Bryer: With amalgamation, the existing six cities will still retain their distinctive neighbourhoods and their identities, as proven with the seven that were amalgamated in 1967.

The way the councils are now is that they are out of touch with the people because of political allegiance, and not much is accomplished. With amalgamation, the politicians will be doing more for the people and having to perform by staying in touch with them regularly. Fewer politicians means they must perform effectively or they will be voted out of office.

In 1953, when Metro was first formed, amalgamation was the plan by the city of Toronto, but it didn't happen because the other boroughs objected. Fred Gardiner brought in a compromise, the Metro federation. Some 40 years later, most people agree it is not working. Going back to independent cities is fragmentation and would not work. The only option open to us is to proceed with amalgamation because the other options have not worked.

The city of Toronto will then be a truly world-class city that is not only competitive globally but becomes a central trading partner on the world stage, creating and attracting investment and growth capital with vital business links, a tremendous achievement and of benefit to all Ontarians.

I live in West Hill but consider myself to be a citizen of Toronto. I graduated from McMaster University in 1978, and in 1980 I received my bachelor of education degree from the University of Toronto. For the past 16 years I have been employed as a front-line employee with the Toronto Transit Commission. This has given me a unique insight into our transit system. The question I can answers today is, will amalgamation be good for the transit system? The answer is yes, it will.

The last nine years have been particularly troubled years for the TTC. Ridership peaked in 1988 at about 460 million riders and has fallen steadily to about 360 million riders last year. For the TTC is mired in old-fashioned, costly, labour-intensive methods which have driven away all these riders: almost 100 million riders lost, and possibly $200 million in lost revenues that could have been used to buy new buses, new subway cars, and possibly paid the costs of preventive maintenance for our bus and streetcar fleet. The wasted opportunities to recapture this lost ridership and the millions of dollars in lost revenue are enough to make you weep. What can we do, together, to bring back our riders and recover the millions of dollars in lost revenue? The answer is amalgamation.

With amalgamation we must take two steps. The first step is to look back at the past and determine where we went wrong. The second step is to put in place the necessary reforms to bring back our lost riders and recover our millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Also, we must embrace a word that defined the Common Sense Revolution. That one provocative word was "change" -- change not just for the sake of change, but real change, with amalgamation that puts in place a new management that automatically brings with it new ideas, a new vision, a greater focus on the greater Toronto area, and to target that goal of recovering our lost riders and lost revenue.

There are many corporations that fall into this trap where, like the TTC, vision is confined to a sort of backyard mentality, where the focus is limited and not expanded as market forces impact on the need for adaptation to new technologies and shifting demographics that surely dictate major change. In other words, you can't get ahead by standing still.

The Metro councillors of the TTC were unable to see the vision of amalgamation as a greater whole, nor could they expand their horizons and see that the downtown core had left and expanded to the north and the suburbs. This ridership was lost.

Now amalgamation is the opportunity to reach out and embrace our suburban riders and bring them back to the core of the city. Instead of the Toronto transit system servicing an inner core of riders, it will, with amalgamation, service all suburban riders.

I have visited a large number of successful transit systems in North America and Europe. Each one of these transit systems has one common denominator: They all have adopted modern technology to create lean and efficient people-moving systems.

I have produced a report entitled Toward Self-Sufficiency for the TTC, in which I have identified savings of from $50 million to $60 million by adopting new methods of technology. For those who dispute this, I say take a look at your next-door neighbour. Some of this new technology is in use right now in Ajax.

I have investigated the use of this new technology, and I firmly believe that modern technology, such as a swipe card similar to the prepaid pay-phone pass I am holding, can be easily and quickly implemented here in Toronto. The swipe-card technology is not just cost-efficient; it is commonsense smart. It will produce significant savings and reduce passenger bottlenecks, the same bottlenecks that have driven people back to their cars.

My report is just a sample of the ideas that could be applied to a new Toronto transit system with amalgamation. With amalgamation, we the people together will have changed the management, the leadership, the vision, the direction and, yes, the success of the Toronto transit system. With the application of new technologies, we the people together will have ensured that the Toronto transit system, which is the lifeline to so many good citizens of Toronto, will never be broken.

In the process of amalgamation, the Toronto transit system could become operationally self-sufficient and reclaim its destiny once again. Then it will be said of history that amalgamation was not only exceedingly good, but it was truly beneficial to the Toronto transit system and the good citizens of the city of Toronto.

I can help. You can help. We can all help. Together let's make it. Together let's amalgamate. God bless you, and thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Bryer. You've effectively utilized your full allotted time. I want to thank you on behalf of the committee for coming forward to make your presentation today.

GORDON ROSS

The Chair: Would Gordon Ross please come forward. Good morning, sir, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Gordon Ross: Good morning to the honourable members of the committee. My name is Gordon Ross. I am a resident of the city of Toronto and I live in the neighbourhood of Riverdale. I am a business owner in a firm called ElderTreks, a company that specializes in adventure travel for people 50 and over. We are located on Markham Street in the Annex.

I have lived a good portion of my life in Ontario, but it was only three years ago that I came to Toronto to make my home. Before that, I had set out to see the world on a trip that took four years to complete and took me to over 30 countries. I spent most of my time in the Third World and I witnessed many things, but to the point of these committee hearings, I witnessed whole societies that had few, if any, democratic rights. No matter how difficult things got during my travels, political or otherwise, I always knew that I could quickly and easily return to my home, Canada, a country that in my opinion is one of the greatest on earth.

It is great for many reasons. Foremost among them are democratic freedoms and the plural nature of our society. Canada is a tolerant and cooperative society, one that derives its vibrancy and its legitimacy from allowing people the right to express their views and, to go that further important step, from allowing people their right, through democratic process, to choose their collective destinies.

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As I have grown up in this province, I've seen the political landscape change from the Tories under Bill Davis to the Liberals under David Peterson to the NDP under Bob Rae. I do not view our political history with rose-coloured glasses and I will not wax on that these governments epitomized democratic principles or processes. At the end of the day, politics is a raucous affair, one where competing interests yell loudly in the hope of being heard. Yet despite their blemishes, the governments I remember at least gave the impression that they were willing to entertain other people's points of view. The Ontario I remember was based on the spirit of co-operation, compromise and tolerance.

Enter the Harris government and the cracks in Ontario's democratic foundations start to appear. The omnibus bill, Bill 26, portended the direction of this government, and you have lived up to your undemocratic nature in the way you have chosen to deal with Bill 103.

First, you have flatly stated that you will not respect the outcome of the municipal referendums to be held in each of the six municipalities that you plan to amalgamate.

Second, you plan to remove our democratically elected officials with the stroke of a pen and place the finances of 2.3 million people into the hands of appointed trustees, trustees who are not democratically elected, who are not accountable to the public and whose actions cannot be questioned in court. The transition team will also have similar sweeping powers.

Third, the new government that you propose will have 45 politicians representing the combined interests of 2.3 million people. This is a higher, more distant level of government that will only act to alienate citizens from their elected representatives.

As E.F. Schumacher said, "Small is beautiful." Smaller governments allow greater democratic access to citizens and they allow a more customized approach to the problems that affect each municipality, and each municipality in Toronto is very different from the next. Bill 103 flies in the face of this sensible approach to government. The very health of our communities is threatened with this legislation.

As you have sat here listening to the deputations, speaker after speaker has wondered aloud what your government is really up to with Bill 103. You have given us scant information on the details of the amalgamation and you have plainly stated that you will not respect the people's voice in the upcoming referendums.

Study after study says that amalgamation doesn't work. It doesn't save money and it doesn't strengthen democracy. What then are you really after? Is it a tax grab? Is it a restructuring of power? Is it about privatization? Is it about all the above? I want to appeal to your humanity and ask you to be honest with the people whose lives you are so eager to affect.

Up until the introduction of Bill 103, I believe that most people in Ontario had been caught sleeping as to the true nature of this government. You caught the people of Ontario sleeping because they had been accustomed to successive governments that were servants of the people. They trusted their elected representatives to act in their best interests and to be good democrats.

But you have awakened the citizens of this city in a way that I have never seen them awakened before. Your arrogant and combative attitude has created a vibrant and working citizens' movement that sees you as the enemy of the people. We think of your government as a stain on democracy in Canada and you have polarized this province like few other contemporary governments in Canada have, with the exception perhaps of the Parti Québécois. In the wake of your governance, you are leaving whole sections of society seething with bitterness and resentment. Gone are the days that the government of Ontario tried to find common ground and strove to reason with the opposition.

You have crossed a line, a line of decency and civility that the people of Ontario are beginning to recognize. I believe your government is behaving in an unthinking manner. What I mean by this is that you are governing from an ideological position, not from a position that allows you to be flexible and to seek common ground with those who question your policies.

You are governing by the ideology of the far right. In my opinion, any ideology is a curse to society, whether it comes from the left or whether it comes from the right. I believe this because in my experience there is little room for discussion with an ideologue. Only an unthinking government and, I would put it to you, an uncaring government would attempt such a major change in the way local communities conduct themselves without their consent.

With Bill 103, you are messing with people's sense of identity, their sense of place and home, their sense of how things are usually done, and you are messing with their democratic rights. These issues have very deep emotions connected with them. You cannot come into someone's home and rearrange it without their consent without paying a price, a price that increases exponentially to the number of people who are affected.

If you force this legislation through without the people's consent, don't think for a moment that your problems are over. Democracy, as history amply illustrates, has known many challenges, and if you want to know about a group of people that can and will fight back, it is people who are fighting for their democratic rights.

In short, we will not let you get away with it. It was not the government that gave us democracy; it was the people. I have spoken with many people about this issue and, without exception, all who learn of the process on Bill 103 are opposed to it. I asked one person, "What would you do if Bill 103 actually becomes law?" He said, "We'll take to the streets." I hope I do not see images of Belgrade here on the streets of Toronto.

If you remove the people's right to speak, you will receive the wrath of a non-partisan backlash the likes of which you have not yet seen. And other people will move in to join them, people who have other axes to grind with your government.

You have heard many deputations here, and many presenters have talked first and foremost about the lack of democracy in Bill 103. You, the committee, are like the examining physicians putting your finger to the pulse of the body polity. You would do well politically to listen to what this body is telling you. In short, we are telling you to back off, leave your ideological position at the door and enter into earnest discussions with the people whose lives you will most certainly affect. Your government is at a critical point and you still have the time to retreat with minimal damage.

If you do not heed the voice of the people, I pray that your government can control the anger you will certainly unleash. Everybody will dig in for a truly nasty fight, the likes of which modern Ontario has never seen. Careers will be ruined and you will be held accountable in the next election.

To you, the individual Tory MPPs, I urge you to break ranks with your government and vote against Bill 103. Ask your masters the same hard questions that we are asking you. Respect the will of the people. Let the referendums dictate to you. We will not accept you dictating to us.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Ross. You've effectively used all your allotted time and I thank you on behalf of the committee for coming forward this morning.

GALE GARNETT

The Chair: Gale Garnett, please. Good morning, Ms Garnett. Welcome to the committee.

Ms Gale Garnett: Good morning to everyone and thank you for hearing my deputation. Before I make the deputation itself, I am in the rather unusual position of owing an apology to Al Leach, something I never thought would happen in my lifetime, but last night I attended a meeting in my riding of north Rosedale where Minister Leach was speaking. When we were able to ask questions and make comments to him, I said it was very difficult to talk to him because the hostility and the hatred he radiated towards what I said last night and "my city" was palpable and it made it hard to relate to him.

I did something last night that I also didn't think I could do. I think I hurt his feelings. I didn't mean to do that. He said that he was 61 years old and had been a resident of Toronto all his life and that he loved his city and resented my remark. Having heard very little honest, open statement from Minister Leach since this thing started, his response was unmistakable by being different from all his other responses.

I believe he probably does love his city and I misread what I was seeing. What I was seeing, and I will hold to that, was a general scorn, a disdain, a snickering in the way he relates to all those who disagree with him. It was not, in fact, Toronto-based, and I do apologize for that and I would appreciate it if someone would let him know that.

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I also had hoped that the Premier would be here. I'd hoped that more members of the government would be here. I hope this is not one of those wonderful, therapeutic exercises in venting that means nothing. On the chance that it might mean something, I shall proceed.

The irony of all this mega-madness that this provincial government has put upon us is that they've managed to do something that no individual or group has really been able to do for a very long time, if ever, in my province. They have united six very different individual municipalities with each other, and with the people of Hamilton-Wentworth, the people of Ottawa-Carleton, the people of Elora, probably other people I haven't even met yet, people of all ages, ethnicities, economic classes and political affiliations. We have learned, more than at any time I can remember, to know more about each other, to support each other, to ask questions of each other. Thousands and thousands of us, united by our opposition to this community-destroying, neutralizing mega-mess, have become much more of a province, a unified province in opposing megacity, in opposing the "megastisizing" of this cancer.

Our six very individual cities have grown up around both the gifts and the needs of their individual populations. It is anti-democratic and unhealthy to have community organizations that do not have real influence: patronizing, paternalistically donated little neighbourhood organizations, again places where you can vent, without elected officials, without power.

The strength of this province as a whole is only as good as the strength of its strong municipalities, municipalities with active, concerned citizens and their democratically elected representatives. Can there be tightenings and greater efficiencies? Can there be efficiencies which also maintain and even expand humanity and compassion? Yes, I believe there can, but only through democratic consultation and community participation, not by Harriscu and Leachescu turning Ontario into a maple-flavoured new-world Romania run by a closed government and its phantom, unelected trustees. Because a law can be found by which to abrogate democracy does not make it morally, ethically or democratically acceptable to Ontarians or to Canadians. What is being attempted here is a War Measures Act in a time of peace. Why is this government at war with our cities and towns?

Through my work, with which some of you I know are familiar, as an actor, a writer and a director, I have travelled a great deal, nationally and internationally. I have gotten to know well many cities and provinces of this country and to know that lots of folks in other cities and provinces dislike Toronto and Torontocentrism.

There have been times when I too have had difficulty loving my city. The words "world class" come to mind. I hated "world class." I hated all that mesquite grilling, fern bar, self-congratulations. Calling yourself world class is like calling yourself beautiful. It's better to leave those sorts of designations to other people. But you can love your city because it works for you, because you've grown there, because you've done your work there, because it is home, and that is what I believe is threatened now.

Fortune magazine, a place not known as a hotbed of left-wing thought, has called Toronto, very recently, the most livable city, but I think the one-two punch of brutal and unaffordable downloading while removing the power of our mayors and councillors to act on our behalf will destroy the already eroding livability of this place -- when I say "this place" I mean all six -- and the impossible property taxes you plan to impose. When you add that in, you'll drive people out of the centre.

Has anyone ever been in Edmonton at night? Has anyone ever been in Calgary at night? Has anyone been in New York or Chicago where any 10-year-old can own a gun, where the garbage isn't picked up, where the subways don't work? These seem to be the role models. It's not any place I ever want to live: nice to visit, interesting, colourful. So's Beirut; I don't want to live there either.

What will happen when you drive people out of the centre by letting them know that they will never in their lifetime pay for the houses that will always sit on their heads? You will leave nothing but the poor who can't leave and the rich who can make anything work, because that's what rich does. Rich makes anything possible. Of course, if those people want to stay in a city with a growing class of men, women and children with no elected representatives and local, community-based support services, a population that exponentially expands on to the streets, into the parking lots and over the heating grates, that's highly doubtful.

As for my sector, the arts community, without mutual representation, venues will close and fewer artists will be able to live and work in what has been the core of anglophone Canada's cultural product. There are wonderful artists in Edmonton, in BC, in Newfoundland, in Winnipeg and throughout Canada. I know because I've been lucky enough to work with and for them, but right now, unmegastisized, we have the numbers, and those numbers have generated the Michael Ondaatjes, Margaret Atwoods, Atom Egoyans and hundreds and hundreds of others who generate art for everybody and revenue for Toronto and for the province of Ontario.

In the form of the Canadian Film Centre and the support of people like Garth Drabinsky and Mayor Mel Lastman, North York has had this experience as well. Toronto's mayor, Barbara Hall, has repeatedly demonstrated a passion for and commitment to Toronto's arts and artists, as has the grand and glorious Mirvish family. Megacity and AVA/MVA will combine to radically reduce this productive sector and the critically important tourism it generates.

Finally, I implore Premier Harris, Minister Leach and all members of the government, climb down from this dreadful and deeply hated idea. It will not be seen as a weakness. It will be seen as the strongest and most honourable response to the will of the people for whom you work. The citizens of Toronto, North York, East York, York, Mississauga, Scarborough and Etobicoke, we are your employers. If you do this, the term "honourable" will be more than a name attached to your post. If you do this, you will have the respect of all, even those who may disagree profoundly with this or that policy. If you do this, we will, with the revivified vigour and thoughtfulness that mega-mess has inspired in thousands, find democratic solutions together.

If instead you just barrel on with neo-Romania, you will, I believe, be remembered by history as the government that brought down Canada's largest and most successful province. The choice is yours. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Garnett, for coming forward and making your presentation today.

Applause.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have to remind you about applause from the audience. Each time I have to stop and make an announcement, you're cutting into the time of the people who are going to present the rest of the morning. We're not empowered to sit beyond noon. I'm going to recognize the clock today. If I have to keep making these announcements, you're going to continue to eat into the time of those presenters, so I'd appreciate if you could hold your applause to a minimum, as inspired as you may be by some of the speakers. Thank you.

CAROLYN RIEMER

The Chair: Would Carolyn Riemer come forward. Welcome.

Mrs Carolyn Riemer: Good morning. My name is Carolyn Riemer. My family and I have lived in Toronto for 35 years and have always been very much a part of the city as it changed and grew. We very seldom felt that we didn't have the ability to be part of these changes because we felt at ease with the system and knew that we could access it quite readily when we wanted to, and have done so many times.

I am very happy to be here today to speak on the issue of Bill 103. Bill 103 caught my attention at my local residents' association meeting back in late November of last year. It became clear to all of us at the meeting that Bill 103 was something we'd better find out about, and along with my fellow neighbours we organized one of the first public meetings to learn what this bill actually said and how it would affect us.

There was certainly a balance at this meeting. Dennis Fotinos, our Metro rep and pro-amalgamation, was there along with our Conservative MPP, Derwyn Shea, also supporting amalgamation. On the other side were Mayor Barbara Hall and our city councillor, Rob Maxwell. The outcome of that meeting was: (1) We absolutely needed more information and (2) we needed more time to understand what the heck was going on.

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This public meeting was held in the first week of December and first reading of Bill 103 happened on December 17. How's that for speed? Very impressive but very suspect. Why the big rush? If this megacity was going to be so efficient and cost-saving, then surely there was time to explain to the citizens of all the cities what the advantages were and then, of course, back these advantages up with the appropriate facts and figures. After all, considering the magnitude of the changes this government was proposing, they must have done a lot of research and known what they were talking about. This was all we asked and this is what we expected. We did not get what we asked for.

While writing this submission, an analogy came to mind. We have been renovating our home, which is almost 100 years old, for many years. It has been a slow but rewarding job. We didn't want to rush the changes to our house because they were important to us and we knew that it took time to consult and to gather the pertinent information. Initially, in order to get the adequate information, we sat down and worked closely with friends who are in the renovating and design business and discussed ways of how to disentangle the good points of the design of the house from the bad points.

The good points of our house were a solid, strong foundation and lots of windows, some letting in a great deal of light and others that needed to be moved so that more light could get in. The bad points of the house included some inefficiencies with the furnace and an unwieldy floor plan that we could change to reduce waste and duplication. We planned to do these renovations by ourselves, as it was less expensive and we knew it would be done well because we were competent workers, and of course we would be in continuous consultation with our friends, who had our best interests at heart and would not try to force us to do things that made no sense and hadn't been discussed.

This initial stage was very successful. As the years passed by, and although the foundation of our house was still solid and strong, we felt that there should be some changes and we looked forward to them since changes are a good thing as long as they are well-thought-out and discussed. Our friends who had been our renovators and designers had moved away. We still kept in touch but they hadn't seen our house for a long time and wouldn't understand the changes that we wanted.

A new renovation team had just moved on to the block. We had heard that as part of their renovation policy they were committed to working closely with their clients by sitting down and discussing any major changes they might want to make to our house. After considerable planning and consultation, we were confident that they understood what we wanted, so we decided to go on a holiday. How nice to be able to go away and have somebody else come in and do all that work.

When we got back we could hardly wait to see how wonderful the changes would look. We rushed to the door and when we opened it we could not believe our eyes. They had, against all their expressed promises, completely changed our home beyond recognition. It had been gutted. When we threatened to take this issue to our elected officials at city hall, they said no, that a board of trustees had been appointed and no matter what we said, the decision of the board was final and could not be reviewed or questioned by a court and that it would be useless to wait for this board of trustees to leave because following them was a transition team, which was also appointed by the government, that had the power to impose further restrictions on our elected officials.

"This can't be possible," we said. "This is a democratic country and we will be heard." "Well, you can shout all you want," they said, "but we will not listen. Your house needed these changes so we made them without your consent, no matter that we promised to work closely with you. As well, we will be downloading all these extra renovating costs to you."

We felt overwhelmed and betrayed. We talked to our friends who had moved away. They too were angry and confused. What had happened here? We went back to our unrecognizable house and we looked at each other and said, "This was a house with a good and a strong foundation that needed some changes, but it did not need to be gutted."

Getting back to the issue at hand, you can see that the same thing is happening here. Three commissions have said to keep the city small, do any streamlining that has to be done under the small city parameters and, above all, work from the outside in. As the Crombie report recommends, "What is needed today is a mechanism to knit municipalities in the regions to the Toronto core in much the same way that the 1953 governance arrangements did with downtown Toronto and the Metro suburbs."

It took several years to make these changes in 1953. This government is trying to bulldoze through legislation: Bill 103, the megacity bill; Bill 104, which completely changes our education system; Bill 105, which gives police chiefs extraordinary powers; and Bill 106, which completely revamps our property tax. And let's not forget the tearing apart of our health care system in just the same way our house was gutted, without our consent. And it is happening in 30 days and 30 nights.

The Tory government's campaign had promised to work closely with municipalities to ensure that any action they took would not result in increases to local property taxes. They also promised to sit down with municipalities and discuss ways of reducing government entanglement and bureaucracy with an eye to eliminating waste and duplication as well as unfair downloading. It is utterly impossible to equate "working closely with," "sitting down with," and "discussing with" to Bill 103.

Bill 103 is the antithesis of the promises made by the Harris government. There have only been edicts from above: "You shall join together. You shall have an unelected board of trustees take over the job of duly elected officials and those trustees shall report back only to me. The decisions of the board of trustees are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court. After the board of trustees will come a transition team that will have the same sweeping powers the trustees had." The word "totalitarian" fits nicely here.

Of the four issues mentioned, the first, being the promise to work closely with, sit down with and discuss with, did not happen; the second point, being the appointment without legislation of a board of trustees, has happened; the third point, concerning the transition team, and the fourth point, concerning the gutting of a house that has a strong and solid foundation, have not yet happened.

This is a deadly serious renovation and the designers of it have not prepared even the most minimal drawings to show that such a gutting would make our house more efficient and less confusing, remove duplication or improve services and waste reduction. Therefore, the renovations should cease until such time as the people responsible for them go back to the drawing-board and come up with a plan that they can actually show us with pride. This will prove that we have been wrong in our belief that this government has no respect for the people in Metropolitan Toronto and indeed all of Ontario.

The Chair: Thank you very much. You have effectively used all of your allotted time. I want to thank you for coming forward and making your presentation this morning.

NANCY SMITH LEA

The Chair: Would Nancy Smith Lea please come forward. Good morning. Welcome to the committee.

Ms Nancy Smith Lea: I'm very much opposed to Bill 103, which proposes amalgamation of the six cities in Metropolitan Toronto. The Harris government is acting so appallingly in so many ways, it's hard to pick just one area in which to speak in the 10 minutes allotted to me.

A partial list of what this government has legislated within a two-month span is staggering: wiping out the city of Toronto, a city formed over 150 years ago; stripping the cities of their reserve funds; appointing trustees to have control over elected officials; forcing citizens to pay for these same trustees as well as the transition team; downloading social service costs; destroying school boards, and so on. This is a daunting list. How to respond?

I could speak to you as an educator working directly with students and researchers at the University of Toronto for the past six years. I could speak to you as a resident of downtown Toronto for the past nine years, how I walk to do my shopping at my local fruit store, the deli, the bakery, and about all the lively restaurants and cafés I enjoy. I could speak to you as a public transit user and about how integral the streetcars and subways are to the vitality of the city. I could speak to you as a board member of the Niagara neighbourhood association. It was a difficult decision but I decided to speak to you today as a cyclist.

Like most suburban kids, I cycled until I got my licence when I was 16 and then did not look back until I moved to downtown Toronto in 1989. I soon realized that Toronto was an ideal place for cycling and a place where I could live without a car with no real hardship. I sold my car and have not owned a car since. I use my bicycle, the TTC and walking as my primary means of transportation.

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Many citizens do not know or care that there are two levels of government in Toronto right now. However, cyclists soon figure this out. Cyclists are much more likely to be killed on Metro roads. Cars drive faster and there are more of them. Only one Metro road in this city has a bike lane on it. By contrast, the roads under the control of the city of Toronto are generally much safer and more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians. Many streets have bike lanes and sidewalks are wider. When a Metro councillor from Toronto tries to get improvements made to Metro roads for cyclists, their motion is voted down by the majority of council, who are from the suburbs and whose only concern is to get in and out of the city quickly by car.

In my experience as a cycling advocate striving to improve conditions for cyclists in the city of Toronto, I've had first-hand experience with both the Metro and city levels of government. The Metro level of government has proved itself to be inflexible and unresponsive to the needs of Torontonians. By contrast, the city of Toronto level of government has so excelled in its progressive policies and democratic style that it is seen as a role model by other North American cities.

To eliminate the city of Toronto local government and the Metro level of government and replace them with something even bigger, even more inflexible and even more unresponsive than the current Metro government is counterproductive and ultimately harmful for all citizens.

The recent reconstructions of Spadina Avenue and St George Street illustrate the different approaches taken by Metro Toronto and the city of Toronto towards conditions for cyclists and pedestrians. Even though Spadina Avenue, a Metro road, runs through the heart of the city, pedestrian and cycling space was a lower priority than providing for automobiles. By contrast, St George Street, a city street, was designed first for pedestrians and cyclists and lastly for automobiles. The more remote the government is from the community it is affecting, the less appropriate the solution will be.

I was involved with a citizens' group, the Spirit of Spadina Coalition, which lobbied for bike lanes and pedestrian enhancements to the redesign of Spadina. Even though this group had strong support from the community and many of the members were also involved in the Stop the Spadina Expressway campaign during the 1970s, our efforts were not successful. The politicians on the Metro transportation committee and the bureaucrats in the Metro transportation department refused to acknowledge or even attempt to understand the needs of the local community.

Even though thousands of pedestrians throng the sidewalks daily, Metro cut back the sidewalks. Even though Spadina carries many local cyclists and is an extremely wide street, Metro refused to include bike lanes in its design. This important street, a tourist attraction and local meeting place, is seen by the Metro government as a commuter speedway, destination the Gardiner Expressway.

An interchange such as the following was typical in our meetings with Metro planners:

Question, concerned cyclist: "Since you have determined that there is insufficient space for a bicycle lane on Spadina but have added a right-turn lane, what is your recommendation for the safest way to bicycle through this intersection?"

Answer, Metro planner: "Metro does not differentiate between modes of transport."

In other words, this planner did not know the effect his planning decisions would have on bicycle traffic and did not intend to find out.

I am one of the co-founders of a cyclist advocacy group called ARC, Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists. One of the functions ARC serves is to hold memorials for cyclists killed on the streets in Toronto. Most of these vigils are held on Metro roads, roads on which planners do not differentiate between modes of transport.

Toronto is built on a human scale, both physically and politically, a city that is easily accessible by bicycle and promotes bicycle use, which in turn improves Toronto's environment, economy and quality of life. We need to look no further than the bicycle itself to know that smaller systems mean more efficient and responsive systems.

The downtown core was built before automobiles. Public transit is an extremely important function of everyday life, as are bicycles and walking. According to the 1991 Transportation Tomorrow Survey, 51% of households in downtown Toronto have no car. In Scarborough, this number drops to 4% of households that do not have a car. Similar profiles exist of the other cities which this government is proposing to amalgamate with Toronto. In Toronto it is possible and often desirable to either not own a car or leave the car at home when getting around the city. The dense-built form and the lively neighbourhoods make it attractive to walk or cycle around the city. On a high-smog day in the summer, when many suburbanites are driving their cars in the downtown core, I can only shudder to imagine what it might be like if those 51% of households downtown were also driving around.

Although this is a profound difference between the cities which are proposed to be one, it is only one of many such differences. How can this government in good faith assure us that the differences between these communities will be addressed properly? It is next to impossible to have a faith in a government which appoints a used car salesman as transportation minister, an ineffective director of the TTC as municipal affairs minister and a high school dropout as education minister.

To my knowledge, a successful model does not exist of a megacity that is more economical than smaller governments. Certainly an example does not exist of a megacity which provides a sustainable, healthy, thriving environment for its residents. Yet this government believes it can beat the odds. Unfortunately we, the taxpayers, are given no choice regarding this huge gamble being taken with our money.

Last year two disparate magazines nominated the city of Toronto as number one. Bicycling magazine rated it as the best city for bicycling in North America, and Fortune magazine rated it as the world's best place to live and work respectively. That Toronto can excel, not just as a good place to work, but also as a good place to live and get around in a healthy, non-polluting fashion, is an accomplishment of the highest order. Planners visit Toronto from all over North America to see how we do it. That this government wants to ruin what Torontonians have worked so hard to achieve makes me very angry.

With the ramming through of Bill 103 despite widespread criticism and alarm, this government treats the citizens it was elected to serve with contempt. This government seems to have very little respect for the democratic process and the people who have striven so hard to work within the boundaries of democracy. Democracy is messy, slow, frustrating, but it works. Toronto has not thrived because a bunch of so-called planning experts dictated what should happen. It is the result of citizens being given the chance to say what they need and a government which has responded to these needs.

Toronto has always been a relatively peaceful place, a place many immigrants see as a refuge from dictatorial governments elsewhere in the world. I'm afraid of what this government will do to the peace that we enjoy in Toronto. If Bill 103 is passed, it will destroy the city of Toronto, the only place in Canada I want to live. There may be problems in Toronto, but this is not the way to fix them.

Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): Thank you for the presentation you provided for us. At the beginning of your presentation, you talked about the difficulties you've encountered in dealing with Metro and the insensitivity to the local issues you addressed. I just wondered, are you happy with the status quo?

Ms Smith Lea: I would say no. However, what we've always kind of hoped is that the Metro level of government would be looked at to be -- I don't know what needs to be done with the Metro level of government, but that is the level of government which needs to be changed, not the local government.

Mrs Munro: If the people who represented you had the focus both of their own local area, that is, councillors who have a responsibility in groups of six or seven, is that not the kind of thing you're suggesting is necessary: that they can look, if you like, both ways in terms of the needs of their constituents and the city as a whole?

Ms Smith Lea: The problem is the distribution of power and that Metro has so much power in the suburbs and yet they can have power over how we live our lives downtown. That seems to be the problem. I don't think I'm answering your question, but I guess I don't really understand what you're talking about. I don't know about this six or seven --

The Chair: I'm sorry, Mrs Munro, we've come to the end of the time. Thank you, Ms Smith Lea, for coming forward and making your presentation today.

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JOHN RINGER

The Chair: Would John Ringer please come forward. Good morning, Mr Ringer, and welcome to the committee.

Mr John Ringer: To our charming host and timekeeper and to the other members of the governing party, I bring a message: You are the powers and authorities responsible for Bill 103. Like all other powers and authorities, you will become dust, you will be blown away, you'll be brought down.

I'm called to speak on a holy day. This is the start of the Lenten vigil for Christians, 40 days of reflection and consideration of their motives and aspirations in this world. As a guide to the consideration of Bill 103 in this context, I look for meaning, values, ethics and spirituality. I'm not going to have a chance to cover all of those, and I may not even finish what I'm starting to do, but I want to start with the meaning.

This bill was a complete shock and surprise to me, particularly in the manner in which it was brought forward, in complete disregard of the recommendations of the Who Does What panel on local governance in its letter of December 6. The content of this bill is no more reassuring. I can refer the government members to section 2 of the bill, which simply says that all the bylaws and resolutions of the existing municipalities will continue on a geographic basis. On one level, that suggests no change is going to take place. On another level, the act appoints a transition team to oversee the movement to an amalgamated city and dealing with the perhaps hundreds of thousands of bylaws and resolutions they will be responsible for administering.

As Mr Gilchrist said in response to Barbara Czarnecki on February 5, "What the transition team will do as it works through the balance of the next 11 months...will be to simply cobble together the most senior levels, the recommended appointments that would take effect on January 1; for example, that of the fire chief." I find the government's statement of what this bill means and the powers to cobble together as being the reflection of the meaning of this legislation for this government.

This legislation was bad from the start. The procedure by which it was brought in was bad, and the fruits of bad legislation and bad actions are more bad things. It was clear from the moment this legislation was introduced that there would be more bad things coming, and this was revealed quite quickly in the downloading.

Inextricably intertwined with the attitude of this government towards its responsibilities to the citizens of this province, downloading is the fruit of Bill 103. Mr Gilchrist also made a statement to Mr Graham Smith on February 5, that Mr David Crombie and the Metro board of trade are "100% on side on amalgamation." With respect, this is not true.

I have spoken personally with Mr Crombie. His feeling is that perhaps there's not a big difference between one and four, that perhaps it's not tremendously relevant. In his conversations with me, he did not choose amalgamation as the preferred vehicle for bringing forward change in the municipal government. The Board of Trade of Metropolitan Toronto has some very considered policies. Their position on amalgamation is largely historic. They have supported amalgamation for some time. Reference is made from time to time to 1969, when Mr Dennison was mayor of Toronto and supported amalgamation. We've come a long way since then and so has the board of trade. They'll be here tomorrow. You can ask them whether they're 100% on side with amalgamation. I do not believe they are. Both Mr Crombie and the board of trade are 100% opposed to the downloading legislation and have made that statement public.

I want to talk a little about values. You've heard many people come forward before this committee and talk about things that concern them. Municipal government is clearly not just about money and finances. The concerns that people have expressed -- such as the speaker who preceded me, about her lifestyle -- are not simply issues of economics. These are issues that are dealt with on a local democratic level. But looking at the issue of economics, nobody is telling me that there are going to be savings guaranteed out of this legislation.

I attended on my local member of Parliament, the honourable Minister of Economic Development. He was candid enough to tell me that there was no guarantee that this would result in any savings whatsoever. As our esteemed vice-chair was involved in a very important movement, Environment not Economics, there are issues that transcend the economic matters here.

I'm not sure how much time I have left, but I want to proceed. As I say, it was clear from the introduction of this legislation that bad things would follow. Looking at the context of the Crombie report and this legislation, it was in terms of making changes to the greater Toronto region. That was inextricably intertwined in the recommendation. It was said that the priority was the GTA and that the consolidations had to be looked at in that context. We now have a commissioner appointed to report and he will be putting out later this week a position paper that will be public, based on his consultations to date with the municipalities involved.

Based on the brief discussion I was able to have with Mr Farrow, I came away tremendously concerned. I believe the meaning of all this legislation is now clear: We will have one city of Toronto and 29 municipalities surrounding it which will be responsible for a Greater Toronto Services Board. It seems to me to be a clear recipe for the regions around Toronto dominating the issues on the Greater Toronto Services Board, 29 to 1.

I'm sure Mr Farrow will struggle diligently to bring forward recommendations in his report, which is to be submitted to the minister by mid-March. I also believe that report will be completely ignored by this government in the same fashion that it ignored the recommendations of the Who Does What panel. The recipe will be for a greater Toronto region dominated by the regions and not even dominated by the people in those regions.

You might wonder why Mrs McCallion has spoken out against amalgamation. I think she foresees that this greater Toronto region as instituted by this government will be a region beholden to the vacant land to be developed for the benefit of the developers and not for people, that the issues that will come out of this will devastate not just the city of Toronto but the city of Scarborough, squeezed between the powers of Markham and Durham and struggling with an aging infrastructure and loss of employment, which will be drained off to the surrounding region, leaving not the hole in the doughnut but a dead doughnut.

The Chair: Mr Ringer, you're coming to the end of your time. I'd appreciate it if you would wrap up.

Mr Ringer: That is what I see as the meaning of this legislation. I think the values shown in the way that people opposing it have been denigrated as self-interested cranks are despicable. I think that reasoning from the amalgamation of Leaside, a town of 25,000 people which I grew up in, to the amalgamation of 2.3 million is fatuous. I won't have time to talk about ethics or spirituality. I'll have to stop here.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Ringer, for coming forward and making your presentation to the committee today.

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BOBBI SPECK

The Chair: Would Bobbi Speck please come forward. Good morning, Ms Speck, and welcome to the committee.

Bobbi Speck: I'll be reading an abridged version of what you have in print.

A Mega-Tragedy:

The background: The triumvirate -- Harris, Leach, Johnson, together with Gilchrist -- has executed the body politic, municipal government, and replaced it with a corporate dictatorship.

The speaker, an ordinary citizen.

Representatives, Torontonians, citizens: We live in troubled and confusing times. We have witnessed a brutal assault upon our body politic, indeed a devastating act. Who authored this rash and ill-conceived act upon that vital entity? Why, those who hold our public trust: our esteemed elected provincial representatives. Hence do the populace feel confused, betrayed and disenfranchised.

Yet they are not without conscience, these perpetrators of this unnatural act, for they are honourable ministers and have allowed us, the citizens, permission to vent our grief and sound our eulogies here in their chambers. Well, some of us, and having been cautioned to brevity.

Now well we know that Metro, our oversystem of municipal government, was not perfect. That is why in the last municipal election the populace voted resoundingly to reform the Metro system. But never did we criticize or cry out for reform of our local municipal governments, our six city-states, whose balanced budgets reflect orderly governance and whose responsiveness to the citizenry enhances our sense of pride and place. This is the true body politic: They are accessible and accountable. They serve our communities well.

Yet now are we told we must deny our very senses, that the body politic, these same local governments, have outlived their usefulness and their time. They have placed themselves in the way of the greater good. This strange news is heralded by our trusted provincial government representatives whose very title of office tells us they are all honourable men.

Hard on the heels of this announcement have we witnessed their deadly assault on our communities by inflicting Bill 103, a most devastating weapon with fearsome and many sharp and pointed sections that bring our body politic to its death before our confused and disbelieving eyes. Look ye and behold the bloodied remains of our cities once favoured by fortune.

Were we in error to laud our cities for their balanced budgets? Responsible fiscal control does not seem to be a fault, yet see here where section 9 has rent a great gaping wound, spilling the guts, for by this the municipal coffers have been seized and a board of trustees has been entrenched, a bureaucratic mini-triumvirate with retroactive powers to control these budgetary and other management matters.

Furthermore these trustees -- note their carefully chosen title -- are not subject to the common citizenry; they are appointed, not elected. So are they also even beyond the courts. Finally, they have unlimited scope because they must perform any duties assigned by the minister.

Hence these trustees appear strangely to float, unapproachable, beyond our reach, in an ethereal atmosphere, like queer, disembodied and intangible spirits. And if some mortal voices cry, "Fie, this is not democratic," we are directed to quell our puny objections and submit to the will of our government, for are they not our honourable ministers?

Now shall we gaze upon the destruction rent by section 16, which caused a blow to the very heart and life's blood of our body politic.

May you yourselves gauge the force of this act if you hear the very potent and dissembling words with which it was wielded. It decrees the appointment of a transition team entrusted with the mandate to "establish the new city's basic organizational structure" -- feel the power -- and to "carry out any other prescribed duties" -- behold the mystery. Thus by indirection is direction known.

Following hard on section 16 was another blow that penetrated the lungs of our beloved body politic. Behold here where section 18 declared: "The decisions of the transition team are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court."

Yes, the citizens weep, but lest in their horror and disbelief they may cry foul and offend our honourable ministers, let me not incite them by quoting further but simply to summarize the import of sections 16 and 18. Thus will we have in the transition team a non-elected body with unlimited powers to spend municipal revenues, to "hire staff" and "obtain expert services," to design our new system of municipal government, and who are not subject to the people nor to the courts, but who are financed by public municipal revenues. So do they have the power to dissolve and to privatize, to tender bids, sign contracts.

They may function without limitations except as imposed by the minister whose bidding they must do -- not the people's bidding.

But we are told that our objections to this are unreasonable because it has been decreed by our wise and honourable ministers who assure us they know what is best for us.

See now where sections 24 through 26 struck a fatal blow to the very brain of the body politic, for these delineate the powers of these very same wise and honourable men in whose hands we have placed our public welfare.

These sections, in their essence, grant the minister absolute power. Thus is established a corporate dictatorship, under the leadership of these very honourable ministers who protest they are acting for the public good, notwithstanding the fact that a majority of eligible voters did not cast ballots for their leadership in the last election. Indeed, some wonder, is it because they do not really represent the majority of voters that they need now to appoint themselves absolute power?

Now look you in horror and disbelief, for the final stabbing blow to the body politic was in the back. See where they thrust deep into the spine the downloading of services. Oh, what a vile, unnatural act. How mothers and fathers cry out when they foresee the strangling at first breath of the infant megacity which the province itself has fathered. It has been augured that thus is the province enabled to apply municipal revenues towards its own paternal deficit, while hamstringing the toddling megacity before it even attempts to stand and hobble its first pathetic steps.

Finally, there has been much noise abroad from malcontents among the plebiscite, complaints that the process by which Bill 103 has been presented is undemocratic, and which I have not time to elucidate today, but it is written.

Now it is well known that some us have made great efforts to speak to the triumvirate: Harris, Leach and Johnson, and even to Gilchrist, but they are removed from us. Like the gods, they dwell on high, they are our lofty honourable leaders.

We, as ordinary citizens, could neither protect nor defend our body politic, which has served us well and democratically. We stand here helpless to redress this violation amid tongue-wagging, destructive rumours and suspicions as to the motivations of these honourable ministers who appear to have betrayed the public trust.

We struggle to comprehend them. Can it be ignorance? Stupidity? Greed? A misguided use of corporate tactics, wantonly inflicted on a vital, living organism?

I care not to dwell on or surmise their private griefs. Some others would say that there are secret ambitions that would lead them to fly in the face of democratic principles; that would indeed have them fly from their constituents. But I say, they are our public leaders. Are they not acting out of disinterest?

Yet, see how the citizens are fearful. They buzz among themselves. They ask: Will the new megacity imitate the provincial one that spawned it? Will the accessibility and accountability that brought us such bounty be replaced by touch-tone recordings, canned music and a gigantic, unwieldy army of bureaucrats? Will the clone also be clothed in party politics?

Let us hope that these elected ministers in whom we have placed our trust gain wisdom in this 11th hour. Let them lend their ears to the public and mitigate the effects of this rash and brutal act upon the body politic. Let them quell the fires in our hearts that are igniting the populace to revolt, rather than arrogantly regard the citizenry as the revolting populace.

The Chair: I'm going to have to ask you to wind down, please.

Bobbi Speck: Common sense tells us that it is a truly wise and honourable man who can step back and say, "See, here have I erred and now will I redress the harm." May our honourable ministers seek the detachment, strength and wisdom to truly earn these titles.

Mark me well: Were there a tongue for every wound these men have enacted on the body politic, they would not hear themselves think. And I would tremble, if I were they, should the corpse of the bloodied body politic rise up in its putrid mass to haunt these chambers and enact its revenge.

We know that to ignore history is to invite the repetition of history's mistakes, and so our appeal: Let history, and nature, not be confounded.

The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward and making a presentation today.

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LINDAN TOOLE

The Chair: Would Lindan Toole please come forward. Good morning, Ms Toole. Welcome to the committee.

Ms Lindan Toole: I come here today as a private citizen. I do not have notes to distribute, because I only wrote this 40 minutes ago. I don't think you'll be able to read my notes.

I've lived in Toronto for 32 years. I came here from a small Ontario town and I have seen this city transform itself from a bastion of white conservativeness to a multicultural metropolis that thrives at a human level and at a commercial level. While I share a previous presenter's views of the term "world-class," we all recognize that Toronto is a very important world city. It's an important city that is the envy of the world.

I work in tourism. I work with the ministers of tourism and the directors of tourism from 50 or 60 countries in the world and I work extensively throughout North America, South America and the Caribbean. The world marvels at how well this city works. It works because local politicians over the years, people like David Crombie and John Sewell and many other local politicians, had a vision of this city that they worked hard to achieve. That vision had to do with bringing the political process to neighbourhoods, making residents of this city understand that they had input, some control over how local governments did things. It worked pretty well.

It's not perfect and there are many improvements that we can make, but this bill isn't going to make those improvements. This bill will only isolate people from local government. It will make government unresponsive to their concerns. In a quest for this megacity, what we're going to end up with are no benefits to anyone. We're going to end up with Manhattan, and along with Manhattan comes Bedford-Stuyvesant and the south Bronx. I happen to live in the south Bronx of Toronto. I have neighbours from around the world. Within 10 houses of me I have neighbours from Chile, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Jamaica and St Kitts. We are all neighbours.

I see this megacity as isolating, marginalizing many people. I don't want to live in a city where I'm afraid to walk in certain neighbourhoods. I work in those American cities. I don't want this to become a city like New York or Los Angeles or Miami.

It's different from those cities because of all of the years of work and the goal of thoughtful inclusionary democracy that politicians like John Sewell and David Crombie and Ron Kanter, whom I worked for, for many years, and Mike Colle and Joe Pantalone have all recognized and worked towards. If this government has a vision similar to the vision of these people, it's a vision only of a megacity where power is absolute and shared by a very small group of rich white guys, and that's not the city I choose to live in.

This is a wonderful city that's recognized by people around the world as bringing everyone together and giving everyone a voice. Bill 103 and Bill 104, which is very closely intertwined, will serve to destroy everything we've worked for many years to achieve. I think while there certainly have to be changes made, and I recognize that and I am not opposed to the concept of a megacity, we cannot push this through in a few short months and think we are going to cover the bases and make this a better place. We are not.

Mr Mike Colle (Oakwood): Thank you, Ms Toole. I guess the difficulty we're having in this bill is trying to make the government understand that neighbourhoods that work and small business communities that work don't happen by accident. They don't seem to appreciate that when local councils and councillors pay attention to the little things, neighbourhoods work. They seem to think these have happened almost spontaneously.

They don't recognize the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into making this place work. The line they keep on giving us is: "Well, Swansea's always been there. Swansea's always going to be there." They just have no appreciation of the amount of work the city of Toronto put into making sure Swansea worked. They think automatically this is going to take place because they're going to have these token neighbourhood councils or neighbourhood groups, whatever they're called.

Could you comment on what it takes, in terms of a real sense, to make areas that in many ways have been going through some tough times become successful as they are?

Ms Toole: I can comment from my years working for then-Alderman Kanter. We worked from 9 o'clock in the morning until 9 o'clock at night many times, meeting with neighbourhood groups, listening to and acting on their concerns. People must feel that they have some input, that they have some control over the process, and they can only feel that if they have access to local politicians. It does take many hours and many meetings and listening to many hundreds of people a week who have very small individual concerns, neighbourhood community concerns that they want to have addressed. They want to present their local councillors with their views and then have their councillors represent them to city government.

The megacity will not allow people to have access to their councillors. The areas will be too large. There will be too many people to serve. Neighbourhoods will be grouped together and an individual thought won't be given much consideration because people won't have time to give individuals or small groups their time, and with this band of trustees it's not clear they'll even have the ability to be responsive to local needs.

Mr Colle: You worked with Ron Kanter. I think he sat on Metro for a while.

Ms Toole: He did, yes.

Mr Colle: This is another thing this government doesn't understand, that this new mega-councillor will also have to sit maybe on the TTC or the police services board, Metro licensing, the new hydro mega-conglomerate. On top of that, he or she may have to sit on the new GTA coordinating body for economic development. So how is a councillor ever going to be face to face with a little neighbourhood group that's concerned about the crack house down the street or the problem in the park?

Ms Toole: Or have the time to be knowledgeable about all of the issues that they have to deal with in all of the committees they have to sit on?

Mr Colle: Yes. I guess the thing that might help them is to maybe list all the functions that would be necessary to make this thing work, but they think that somehow, by magic, they're going to be able to sit on all these committees and at the same time deal with the little things that make neighbourhoods work.

Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Toole, for coming forward and making your presentation today.

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KATHLEEN WYNNE

The Chair: Would Kathleen Wynne please come forward. Good morning and welcome to the committee.

Ms Kathleen Wynne: Good morning. My name is Kathleen Wynne and I come to speak to you today wearing a number of different hats. I am a resident of the city of Toronto and I live in the neighbourhood of north Toronto, but I grew up in Richmond Hill before it was 905, when it was still a small town.

I am the mother of three children who are currently enrolled in the public school system. I am a mediator. I sit on the steering committee of the Citizens for Local Democracy and chair a group of public school parents called the Metro Parent Network. But first and foremost, I am a citizen of Ontario who has always believed that my democratic rights are sacrosanct.

For the past nine weeks I have chaired the Monday night meetings of the Citizens for Local Democracy and it's been a remarkable experience for me as I've watched the groundswell of resistance to Bill 103 build. For the past three weeks we've had at least 1,500 people from East York, York, Toronto, Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke coming together to give each other support and to build a movement. I believe this movement is rooted in two reactions to this piece of legislation.

First of all, it is rooted in an outrage at the crippling of the democratic process that is inherent in Bill 103 with its appointment of provincial trustees and its removal of accessible local representation. Secondly, the movement is rooted in a deep fear of change that seems to be haphazard, ill-considered and far too fast. With each new announcement it seems clear that this is not a plan that has been well researched and documented. Most recently, it appears that the mandate of our current municipal politicians must be extended. The haste with which this government is moving makes us afraid that good plans are not in place. This morning's report of confusion about the exact amount that might be downloaded to municipalities seems to confirm this fear that many of us have.

I've tried for the past month to understand the motivation of the government as it continues to move ahead in the face of astounding opposition from its own and from others, and here is my humble analysis, for what it's worth:

I believe that there is someone in this government, and it may be Mr Harris or someone who advises him, who genuinely believed and perhaps still does that a tax cut would jump-start the economy. The government was then committed to the tax cut that it had promised. The megacity legislation, the Fewer School Boards Act -- Bill 104 -- and the downloading plan were introduced perhaps to facilitate the removal of political clout and money from urban Toronto.

Perhaps then the Tory politicians were advised that if all of this action at the provincial level were to take place late in the year, there would be very little, if any, reaction from people because everyone hibernates in Canada in the winter and we're pretty polite anyway and only the lefties would storm the barricade and who cares about them anyway? Maybe they were also told that the folks who would suffer the most would be women, children and the poor, and since this government was not elected by any of those groups, it didn't need to worry about the polls.

Then something went terribly wrong in the government's plan. People put aside their plans over the holiday season and started going to meetings. Folks from Rosedale and High Park and Etobicoke and North York started gathering in living rooms and joining together. They pushed their local politicians, who were sometimes reluctant to appear to be self-serving, to take leadership. They decided to hold referenda, even though they were told that no one would listen.

Simultaneously, the government started to get more defensive. In conflict resolution terms -- I train kids in schools to be peer mediators, so excuse the analysis -- the positions became entrenched. More doors were locked, more government meetings, and MPPs became inaccessible. Those of us on the outside had our suspicions confirmed that the government was trying to harm us.

So here we are today. The chorus of voices asks for more time and a more humane, democratic process that would include local politicians who have been elected to represent our interests.

On the inside, and I speak here to the government members, I can only imagine that the stakes have gotten higher. It must have become harder to back down, harder to admit that a mistake has been made. I know that it has been said before at these hearings, but it bears repetition: The courageous act now would be to defeat this legislation. The historic and noble decision would be to turn the process of municipal change over to those directly involved. It would mean a slower and more evolutionary change. It would mean producing real impact studies and creating new proposals for municipal change.

None of us knows what the outcome would be specifically, because it would mean replacing a so-called plan with a process, which is always scary. I believe, however, that this government could choose to outline parameters within which regional and local politicians could create a process that would ensure that democracy was respected and municipal governance was improved.

This government has made much of creating an Ontario that is financially healthy for our children and grandchildren. As the mother of three children, I ask you to preserve the tradition of democratic process in this province, that you allow our elected representatives to do their jobs. I ask that you not persevere with this piece of legislation that will create chaos in our community and that will probably not save any of us a dollar in the long, and even the short, run and will probably cost us many.

I suspect that many of the government members here are feeling the strain of operating in this hostile environment day after day. I cannot imagine that it makes for a peaceful existence to have your actions reviled by thousands of citizens, many of whom elected you in the first place. I ask that you pay attention to that discomfort as you finish these hearings. The energy and exuberance that you will hear on Saturday as people take to Yonge Street will be heard around the province. It would be best if you would join us.

Mr Rosario Marchese (Fort York): I want to thank you, and so many who have come today and in previous days, for taking the time to share your feelings about why it is important to save local government. We have seen wonderful deputations, brilliant deputations, by a whole number of people who have a great deal of expertise. We've had lawyers, architects, professors, consultants, small business people, a lot of people with titles, and one would assume that they have a great deal of knowledge. At least from what I read and from the presentations, they're very well researched.

They are saying that from the point of view of economics it doesn't work, because they've read the research, and from the point of view of values, which a number of people have commented on, it doesn't work either. Could so many of you be so intellectually bankrupt that only Mr Leach and Mr Harris have the knowledge and the omnipotence to be able to tell us what's good for us? Is that what it's about?

Ms Wynne: I'm going to go back to my school yard analogy. That's why I think that what's going on here is that two positions have been taken, and even when rational arguments are being presented, it's very hard for them to be heard because the position is so solid on the other side. If we make an analogy with the school yard bully -- and I work with kids who are in these situations -- it's really hard to back down. When you've said, "This is what we're going to do," it doesn't matter how much sanity and rationality comes at you. It's very difficult to say, "You're right, we made a mistake." That's why, in my presentation, it takes great bravery and great courage to, in the face of rational argument, say: "You're right, we made a mistake. We listened to people we shouldn't have listened to and we're going to change our mind."

Mr Marchese: Mr Leach has made the point that he's going to make some changes. I think he needs, to save face, to appear to make some changes. I believe this bill to be fundamentally flawed. Do you believe that somehow we can correct this or that and make it better?

Ms Wynne: I think at the core of this bill there's a fundamental problem, and that is that it puts in place an undemocratic process. It was introduced in an undemocratic way and it's got at its core an undemocratic process. Whatever small changes are made, that core piece needs to be changed so that we have people who we elected making these decisions. So if Metro councillors and local city councillors can sit down at a table and are given the mandate to change the way this city is governed, then we can believe that a good answer will be reached. But when politically appointed provincial trustees have the power to make those decisions, we are not going to trust the outcome.

The Chair: Thank you, Ms Wynne, for coming forward this morning.

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JOHAN HELLEBUST

The Chair: Would Johan Hellebust please come forward. Good morning, Mr Hellebust. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Johan Hellebust: Thank you, Mr Chair and members of this committee. My name is Johan Hellebust. I work at the University of Toronto and live in East York, the same East York that the House leader for the Tory government, Mr David Johnson, referred to as the Garden of Eden when he became mayor of the same idyllic municipality not very long ago. In an inaugural address to the East York council in 1985, he stated, "The survival of this municipality has been questioned for years, perhaps decades -- but survive it has and survive it will."

Clearly, the honourable minister must have had second thoughts about this community, as well as all of the other thriving municipalities that make up Metro Toronto. He now appears quite happy to throw his considerable intelligence, talents and personal charm behind an ill-thought-out experiment in social engineering of staggering proportions that, to me, is threatening the democratic process and quality of life in Toronto.

Why do I feel so strongly about Bill 103? First of all, the process itself is scary. To the best of my knowledge, there was no advance warning from the Tories during their election campaign that destruction of local municipal governments and the creation of a megacity was on their agenda. When it was presented last December, it was as a bombshell. Their motive? Greater efficiency and saving taxpayers money. Extensive studies to back it up? None.

The plan certainly is contrary to the Golden task force report. It is also contrary to the recommendations of the Crombie Who Does What advisory panel. In essence, Crombie's panel stated that amalgamation by itself, without attention to coordinated governance of the entire greater Toronto area, would be a huge mistake.

Wondering whether I was really missing something important, I attended meetings to find out what others thought about this bill. Peter Russell, an outstanding political scientist and expert on constitutional law, stated at a meeting at Ryerson university, "Metro Toronto has a legacy of strong municipal government, a tradition the provincial government is undermining." He also stated that the megacity plan is a bad piece of legislation. Ursula Franklin, another professor and a social thinker I greatly respect, stated that the megacity plan is destructive to the habitat of Toronto, to its quality of life.

I could go on and on about what numerous other very highly qualified and respected people have said, people who have thought long and deeply about what makes democracy work and what is important to the quality of life in large urban areas, but obviously I do not have time; others have made the same points over and over again. But the general message is that the existence of municipal governments of manageable size is essential to the democratic process.

With respect to what others think of Bill 103, I would just like to add that I was very pleased to see an open letter to Premier Harris signed by members of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto, asking the government to reconsider its plan to download the cost of welfare and social services on to municipal property taxes. It takes real courage for members of a research centre which depends to a large extent on funding from government agencies to publicly state that they think what the provincial government is doing is wrong, however diplomatically stated.

I am worried about the pride government members seem to take in their courage to bulldoze through with this megacity legislation in the face of strong and growing opposition. Since the government has not come up with concrete and convincing evidence for positive outcomes of such an amalgamation of already large municipalities, even regarding the potential savings of taxpayers' money, I can only conclude that such evidence does not exist.

I would hate to see us revert to the conditions of the disastrous 1930s when municipal governments alone had the responsibilities for welfare and social services, and the provincial and federal governments, whether Liberal or Tory, were more than happy to maintain it that way. This excused them from taking any significant action to relieve the suffering of large segments of the population over a whole decade.

There are a couple of other relevant and spectacular reversals of positions by politicians in addition to that of Mr David Johnson, which I referred to, that I want to briefly touch upon. The Metro task force summary produced by the committee headed by a former mayor of Scarborough and a Progressive Conservative, Ms Joyce Trimmer, to enlighten Mr Harris as he headed into a provincial election included the following statement: "The strongest signal received during our consultations was that local government was the one closest to the people and it must remain so."

It appeared that Mr Harris liked what was contained in the Trimmer report and he said at one meeting that he favoured the elimination of Metro and preferred the level of government closest to the people. Clearly he must have reversed his stand without warning to the people of Ontario.

Another spectacular case of reversal of political conviction by a Tory at the federal level is that of Mr Mulroney, who stated the following at a meeting in Thunder Bay: "Free trade negotiations with the Americans? It's like sleeping with an elephant. It's terrific until the elephant twitches, and if the elephant rolls over, you're a dead man." Fifteen months later, he initiated free trade negotiations with the US. We all know the outcome of free trade: terrific for some -- the competitive and opportunistic -- and dreadful for large segments of the population, particularly the young, because of long-term unemployment, badly paid short-term jobs and uncertainties for many people even in highly paid jobs.

I refer to the free trade issue, the power of the marketplace and the accompanying loss of ability of governments to protect their constituents from free flow of money and therefore jobs across borders because I think it is relevant. It seems that the Ontario government has concluded that since democratic governments have lost so much control over economies and employment in the country and provinces anyway, perhaps one should go one step further and just remove governments, particularly at the lowest, municipal levels. Ironically, this is the level of government that seems to work best. Instead, it plans to introduce a megacity government, far removed from its constituents but readily accessible to business and to the control of free market interests.

The only clear mandate that I see the Tory government has for restructuring of governments in Ontario is the creation of an effective governing structure for the greater Toronto region. Excellent justification for this comes out of the Golden and the Crombie panel reports. Please scrap the megacity plan and proceed with the creation of a Greater Toronto Services Board, as recommended. The creation of a megacity -- an unattractive elephant monster -- before proceeding with the Greater Toronto Services Board will make a very threatening bedfellow for the other, much smaller municipalities in the region.

I must admit, however, that I'm greatly concerned with the damaging changes already introduced by this government that weaken environmental protection, remove greenbelt regions and relax regulations designed to minimize urban sprawl. This severely handicaps effective action on some of the key mandates for a Greater Toronto Services Board as laid down by the Crombie panel.

There have been some good Tory governments in this province in the past, but this is not one of them. Quite frankly, I'm tempted to suggest to this government that it resign and that the Tories try to win re-election on a campaign where they clearly state that their main platform is to provide tax reductions and that they interpret a win, even if based on a minority of electoral votes, to empower them to do anything to achieve this objective, with little regard to democratic process, much as the Tory government is doing now. Those of us who like to gamble may go for it; the rest of us who do not believe in dictatorial governments will not.

The Honourable Mr Leach stated at the opening of these hearings, "We have a one-time opportunity ahead of us to take advantage of the best ideas in government and planning." I say that we already have one of the best cities in the world and that this is to a large extent because of good, effective municipal governments that we enjoy, respect and do not want to lose. Mr Leach sounds like a fly-by-night penny stock salesman: "This is your opportunity of a lifetime." I refuse his offer with disdain. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Hellebust. You've exhausted your time. We appreciate you coming before the committee today.

DON YOUNG

The Chair: Would Don Young please come forward. Good morning, Mr Young. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Don Young: I wish to thank the committee and the clerk for making it possible for me to speak today. I appreciate that there have been many requests, many presentations. I hope mine will offer a fresh perspective.

My name is Don Young. I've lived in and worked in Toronto for 17 years now. I'm originally from Quebec, a reluctant émigré. It took a while to adjust to TO, but I've settled down. Local government had a lot to do with my decision. I've always been politically active but in Quebec, despite sympathy for many of the social objectives, I felt like an outsider. In Toronto, with its accessible political system, I found, like other immigrants before me, that everyone can get involved in building a mutually beneficial future. Toronto is a special place, a meeting place for diverse cultures, and its political system has been the key.

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Premier Harris would probably classify me as a lefty, just the kind of person he would like to get rid of with this legislation. But again he is showing how dated his thinking really is. Post-modern politics, especially that which is close to the people, has gone way beyond the old dualistic battles between left and right. Unfortunately, yesterday's men can't see that. I only hope you are men and women of vision.

I try to approach every issue with an open mind. I don't like party politics because it forces people into camps, to toe the party line and support things that one really doesn't believe in. I'm sure many of you know what I mean. That's why I like local politics. In city government, it is possible to come face to face with people who have different beliefs and to work together to find compromises to problems that really affect one's community.

I am familiar with municipal politics in Toronto and I have worked hard to share my knowledge with others. The closeness which local government has with its constituents is very important to me and, I believe, very much worth preserving. If people can't work in the system, they will be forced to put their efforts into undermining it. Instead of compromising with people who think differently, they will become the enemy.

There are many things that disturb me about Bill 103. I have obtained a copy. I have read it. I have listened to interpretations of it. I have thought carefully about it. I would welcome the opportunity to work on an alternative to this bad legislation, but citizens are not being given a chance. I can only cover a fraction of my concerns in the 10 minutes allotted. Therefore, I will approach it at the level of principle.

The most disturbing aspect of 103 for me is not amalgamation itself. For a long time, there has been need for a change. There are too many fiefdoms, overlapping jurisdictions and unclear areas of responsibility. There is need for disentanglement, more cooperation between the various bureaucracies and new divisions of authority for our elected representatives.

The most serious problems exist in the GTA. The Metro government is too small to deal with the bioregional problems and too large to deal with local problems. A new integrated structure is needed for all of southern Ontario.

Everyone agrees that reform is necessary, but what philosophy should guide the process of reform? One of the most attractive elements of Conservative philosophy is its adherence to the notions of decentralization and demassification, something that it shares with the counterculture and green movements. I thought big government was the enemy for Conservatives. Then why a megacity with the inevitable mega-bureaucracy?

The principle which I thought Conservatives would follow in this process of reform was that of self-reliance. Self-reliance is first and foremost a Conservative outlook, which this government is certainly applying to individuals and households. One only has to look at its welfare reforms for evidence. So why is it not being consistent in its mega-amalgamations of both municipalities and the school boards?

Self-reliance is even more appropriate for levels of government. Self-reliance in government is also known as the principle of subsidiarity, where the ideal is a network of self-contained and equal systems within other, larger self-contained systems. Within this cellular network, the one rule of thumb for self-reliant development is that what can be produced or worked out at local levels is what should be produced or worked out at local levels. If anything, there should have been a devolution of powers to the lowest level, not a monopolization of power at the highest. The objective should be the creation of equal entities, not one unwieldy monster.

No one with any ounce of honesty can say that this is not a massive power grab by the province. The trustee provisions pale in comparison to the absolute powers of the transition team, who will be appointed by and be responsible only to the minister for an indefinite period. With this precedent, the minister and cabinet will continue to have substantial powers over municipalities well into the 21st century.

Crippling municipalities with downloading and then dangling a carrot of possible rescue if they head in the right direction certainly rules out self-reliance. Have Conservatives thought of what this will mean for themselves when they are trounced in the next election because of the mega-mistakes they have made?

"Why this philosophical inconsistency?" one asks. The answer was obvious after the mega-dumping. The new tax base had to be large enough to download most of the province's social responsibilities, but none of the power. With billions in liabilities shifted to municipal property owners, the provincial government could then fund its tax breaks to its corporate friends. Stripped of its reserves, crippled Metro will then have to sell off all of its assets to the privateers. It isn't the principle, it's the money which is important to the Harris government and its friends.

None of this reform will solve the major bioregional problems facing the greater Toronto area. Furthermore, once the megopolis is formed, all future democratic reforms will be impossible. The problems facing the GTA will never be solved in any democratic way because there can no longer be a discussion between equals. The only solution left will involve a similar coup by the provincial government, with the Toronto megasaurus eating everyone else. If the 905ers don't see the writing on the wall, they should. Of course, the crippled, powerless monster which the Tories create could simply be left to starve in isolation from its natural hinterland, but what would this do to Ontario's economy?

Because Conservative principles have been abandoned for the almighty buck, a scary new logic is driving this rationalization. Democracy is expensive and therefore must be replaced for the sake of the economy. Where will this lead? The mega-state? Unless you Conservatives plan not to hold another election because it's too expensive, you will be left to bear the brunt of your leader's mega-madness.

I have many words that I would like to leave you with, but there is only time for one more, and that word is "effective."

The Premier is fond of reducing everything to a question of what is efficient. There is something very wrong with the word "efficient." The Fascists were efficient. They made the trains run on time. The Nazis were so efficient that they systematically exterminated over six million people. The word that truly progressive Conservatives should use is "effective." "Effective" sums up the very purpose of government. Government should relate to the people, not to the balance sheet.

Thank you very much for allowing me to speak.

The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward today.

JILL SHEFRIN

The Chair: Would Jill Shefrin please quickly come forward. Welcome, Ms Shefrin. I'm glad I could get you in under the wire. You have 10 minutes this morning for your presentation.

Ms Jill Shefrin: Thank you for allowing me to speak to you today. I am a citizen of Toronto, a homeowner and a taxpayer.

I wish to express my concerns regarding the intentions of this proposed legislation. I am here because I am disturbed by the speed with which this bill and the others which are part of the same package of radical changes are being passed into law. Whether or not you agree with the changes proposed, and many of us, as you will have gathered, do not agree, there can be no justification for either the deadlines or the imposition of unelected trustees and an unelected transition team. These measures argue a lack of trust in and respect for both the electorate and the existing civic governments. Nothing I have heard or read justifies this lack of faith in either the fiscal or ethical practices of those elected municipal officials. If municipal government is to be substantially restructured, that work should be the responsibility of those elected municipal officials.

During the last provincial election campaign, Premier Harris said he would not eliminate local governments and spoke out in support of referenda as a form of public participation in decision-making. In Your Ontario, Your Choice, the government claimed to be firmly committed to using the referendum as a tool of increased accountability and improved public participation in the decision-making process. The Premier appears to have changed his mind on both these issues and has now put forward legislation for which this government has no mandate.

This government claims to be more responsive to the public, claims that eliminating civil service bureaucrats will both cut costs and open channels of communication, yet it is only after a major public outcry that the government has even agreed to full committee hearings on this bill. Again, referenda are surely a manifestation of direct government, yet when the citizens demand a referendum, their answer is that the results of such a referendum will not make any difference to the government's actions.

1200

I don't want to be one of 50,000-odd voters in one ward trying to get the attention of my not-so-local councillor over urgent neighbourhood issues like street lighting, dangerous dogs, the acceptable size and noise level for planes flying overhead to the Island Airport. I don't want more expensive election campaigns which result in overt party politics at the municipal level.

Al Leach claims that the same services will still be available, but he's not saying they will be available at the same level or free of charge. The different cities within the Metropolitan region have different priorities. I live in Toronto rather than in one of the other four cities partly because, as a community, its priorities are closer to my own than those of, say, Etobicoke or York. The residents of those communities presumably prefer the priorities of their local governments. Local government should be just that -- local -- and able to respond to the needs of a manageable community.

I also live in a country which has chosen to provide certain services to the entire population. By putting the cost of any social welfare on the level of government with the least revenues, this government is threatening the universality of those services and creating a system which will require greatly increased property taxes. Property-related services should be funded from property taxes, and income-related services should be funded from income tax. The application of property taxes to income-related services is retrogressive, not progressive, taxation.

Increased property taxes will drive many people away from the urban core. When I bought my house, the property taxes were a major factor in my decision. I ruled out certain neighbourhoods because the taxes were too high. Now taxes will go up, and go up substantially.

There are a number of flaws in the assumption that amalgamation will save money. For example, collective agreements will have to be harmonized. This will be a matter for bargaining, and until negotiations are completed, it is impossible to know what the costs will be. Civic employees are also residents of the city. They work hard, earn, by and large, a reasonable wage, and pay taxes to all levels of government just like the rest of us. Like the rest of us, they will try to maintain the best possible wages and working conditions.

The harmonization of computerized systems and services throughout the Metropolitan area will involve enormous capital outlay for either software conversion or the transfer of records from six computer systems to one new system.

Anyway, if this government is determined to make a priority of cutting costs and saving money to the extent of hailing the municipal referenda -- the democratic process -- as a waste of money, what justification can they have for spending $8 million to publicize Bill 103 before it has passed into law, on top of the $100,000 to KPMG for their study on the effects of amalgamation?

In 1996, the Legislature passed the Savings and Restructuring Act, which "gave authority to municipalities in northern Ontario, counties, and cities to decide how they are structured, their boundaries, and how many levels of government they need." Why, if the cities of northern Ontario were able to make their own decisions on structure, boundaries and levels of government, should the cities of Metropolitan Toronto have structure, boundaries and levels of government imposed on us?

I have visited New York and Chicago, and I have no desire to live in a city where poverty and crime are rampant, where people are afraid to go into some areas not just late at night but in the middle of the day. There is a reason Toronto keeps being rated as one of the most livable cities in the world. Why change it if it works? The municipalities are not in debt. They have already, over the last recession, cut costs and services.

A government that allows economic requirements an unconditional priority will end up with a community in which all humanitarian values are judged for cost-effectiveness. This is an embarrassment in a civilized western country which has no excuse for the numbers who live in poverty, greater poverty than can be cured by a provincial tax cut, especially when this will be more than offset by the municipal tax increase required by the increased burden of services downloaded from the province.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Shefrin. We have time for questions from Mr Gilchrist.

Mr Gilchrist: Thank you, Ms Shefrin, for coming before us here this morning. We appreciate your time preparing and delivering the presentation. I have just a couple of things that your presentation raises. I'd be the first to agree that one of the benefits of committee hearings is the opportunity to have a bit of a dialogue and to make sure the opportunity to share information is there.

One of your points near the end of your presentation is, "The municipalities are not in debt." You may be surprised to know that the city of Toronto alone, as of their 1995 financial information return, is $498,787,000 in debt. Contrast that with the city of Scarborough, which is $3.9 million in debt.

Almost identical population, less than a 20% differential, yet somehow the citizens of Toronto -- you clearly have come here today under the impression that there is no debt, yet you are carrying a debt burden that is over 160 times as great as the citizens of Scarborough. Yet the streets and the parks and the snowplowing, presumably, are the same. How can you rationalize the extraordinary difference in debt, which at the same time has led you to be taxed at twice the level of a citizen in Scarborough? Do you believe you're getting twice the quality of snowplowing and parks maintenance and that sort of thing as the other citizens of Metro?

Ms Shefrin: It's my understanding that under the legislation, municipalities aren't allowed to carry a deficit.

Mr Gilchrist: That's not correct, unfortunately. They can't on the operating side, but on capital projects they can carry up to 20%. Toronto has now built that up to half a billion dollars. Scarborough, on the flip side, will be debt-free by 1999. But Toronto, unfortunately, is half a billion dollars in debt, and that's one of the myths that's unfortunately confusing people.

At the same time, when they talk about the reserves and the prospect that's been raised in some quarters that the province will get that, let me tell you categorically, nobody is going to touch those reserves. The reserves are in place to address the existing debt. The province can't take it, and one of the tasks of the trustees is to make sure the reserves are not squandered or misspent and that they are kept associated to the debt obligation. So that's the reality.

The other quick point I'd like to raise with you: Early in your presentation you talked about referenda. The fact of the matter is, we still are quite committed to a province-wide, citizen-initiated referendum process. The hearings are going on right now. Both the two opposition parties on December 4 came out and said it was inappropriate to ever have referenda dealing with any municipal issue. They stated that in Hansard, and Mr Christopherson for the NDP, Mr Agostino for the Liberals, stated it to the Hamilton Spectator on December 4.

So that's the reality out there right now. The bottom line is that the referendum process will proceed.

Interruption.

The Chair: Order, please. Order, ladies and gentlemen.

Mr Gilchrist: I hope you'll take the time to share your views before those committee hearings when the bill on referendum is finally introduced as well.

Interjections.

The Chair: Order, please. Ms Shefrin has the floor if she so chooses. You have about a minute remaining if you want to use it. If not, that's fine too.

Ms Shefrin: All I would say is that I don't have to agree on referendums with what any party in the House says. I'm telling you my opinion on referendums, and this referendum.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Shefrin, for coming forward today and making your presentation.

The committee is in recess until 3:30 this afternoon.

The committee recessed from 1207 to 1540.

DAVID FARRANT

The Chair: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Would David Farrant please come forward. Welcome to the committee.

Mr David Farrant: Thank you very much. I thank the committee for this chance to speak about the very important matter of Bill 103. I direct my comments especially to the Conservative members of this committee and of the Legislature. My focus here today will be on how Bill 103 and other related government actions affect me and my family personally and how I believe they affect you and your families and your political party.

First, an introduction: I am 33 years old and work as a computer programmer for a private company here in Toronto. My wife is here also, Liliana Diaz, who works as a financial analyst for one of the major banks. We have a 9-month-old son named Nathan, who isn't here, but you must accept my assurance that he is the best baby the human species could possibly produce.

Last month we bought a house. That's actually a big deal for us. Liliana came to Canada 8 years ago without speaking English and had to start all over again in a new city and country. I grew up in a suburban neighbourhood near Yonge and Steeles, where houses were big and home ownership was important, one of those sprawling suburban areas where a kid without a car had to walk 20 minutes to buy a chocolate bar and 20 minutes back.

I always denied the appeal of buying a house, perhaps because it was always out of reach. But we've worked hard and we've been fortunate. Last year we chose to settle in a house and neighbourhood very different from the one I grew up in. We bought a modest 12.5-foot wide home on Gough Avenue, near Pape and Danforth in the east end of Toronto. We're a one-minute walk to the subway and we can bike downtown.

But what we really love is the neighbourhood. We're on a quiet residential street with maple trees and houses and families. We can walk in a few minutes to parks and schools and to the Danforth with its wide sidewalks, bakeries, bagels and baklava, hardware stores and hair salons, groceries, fruit and vegetable stores, sidewalk cafés, bars, pubs and dozens of restaurants. Everything we need and enjoy is a pleasant walk away, and all of it in a place that's as clean and safe and feels as much like home as a small town, and all of it within one of the world's great cities. We were amazed by this place and decided that it was exactly where we wanted to build our lives and raise our child.

I'm here today because the life we've chosen is threatened by Bill 103 and by other actions of this government. I will not review the evidence presented by other speakers, but I ask you to keep in mind the experts you've heard from, the studies of other cities, the examples of failed large-scale amalgamations elsewhere and also the disastrous effects of dumping social service costs on to local taxpayers.

I ask you to consider the possibility that the experts are right and Al Leach is wrong. It seems to me that if you're concerned about your health, you go to a doctor; if your car's engine needs a tuneup, you go to a mechanic; and if your city needs restructuring, you go to experts in urban studies like Jane Jacobs, Andrew Sancton and Wendell Cox.

Please listen to the experts, look at the studies and the statistics, but do not see this as an academic exercise. Think of the effect on places people love. Think of people like me and Liliana and Nathan choosing to leave or choosing to stay while neighbours move away and taxes go up and shopkeepers go bankrupt and services decline and the place we now love becomes a memory. We know it can happen here, because it has happened elsewhere. Please think of the harm to people's lives.

I hope I've given you some sense of how this restructuring affects me and my family, and I'll turn my attention now to how this bill affects you, the Conservative members of this committee and Legislature.

What if the experts are right and Al Leach is wrong? Those of you from Metro and your families will not be immune from reduced services, higher taxes and declining communities. Those of you from elsewhere gain nothing if the engine of Ontario's economy is sputtering. To what city might your children or grandchildren go to study or make a living? What will they find here in a few years or 10 or 20? If the experts are right and Al Leach is wrong, it will be less like the Toronto we now know and more like Indianapolis or Detroit or New York, cities damaged by policies very much like these. We will all pay the price of a Metro Toronto in decline.

I appeal to you also as MPPs who I assume wish to be re-elected. Consider the administrative complexity and the speed of this amalgamation and compare it to the family support plan merger. In this case, we're dealing with 54,000 employees and dozens of collective agreements, seven budgets totalling $7 billion, seven different corporate cultures and practices, six different sets of zoning bylaws and levels of service. We'll be dealing with not one task, as in the case of the family support plan, but dozens that are essential to the lives of 2.3 million people living in areas as vastly different as my childhood neighbourhood and my current one, and you're going to ram it all through as fast as possible, whether the people affected like it or not.

Take the family support plan fiasco, multiply by 1,000, and you'll begin to understand the political cost to you of this move. By the time of the next provincial election, there will be cost overruns, tax increases, administrative bungles and gaps in services. Good luck to you if you're running as a Tory, one of 22 to run and lose in Metro, and just try blaming it on the hapless new megacity council. Even those of you outside Metro will not enjoy defending the creators of this embarrassing mess.

I appeal to you also as members of the Progressive Conservative Party, whose past governments tried to be progressive about what needed progressing and conservative about what needed conserving. They were conservative in another sense: They were cautious and thoughtful. They did not try to turn the province upside down in one week. They tried to consider what was right and for the benefit of all Ontarians. Perhaps that's why they held power for 40 years.

That is the tradition of the party of Leslie Frost, Bill Davis and of John Robarts, whose 1977 commission on this same issue said:

"The conclusion is that amalgamation inevitably would decrease the sensitivity of the entire system to issues and concerns of a very local nature. Since there are no strong arguments for administrative savings to be realized from such a move, the commission has decided to discard the amalgamation option."

I would like to make two recommendations. The first is to the inner cabinet: Withdraw Bill 103 and slow down. Avoid the political, financial and human cost of reckless change. Build on the emerging consensus, listen to the experts and get it right. Seek out the best ideas among the reports of Anne Golden and your own David Crombie and Joyce Trimmer. Let's have strong local councils that are truly local and responsive and democratic, and a GTA-wide coordinating body that is truly regional, like the original Metro. And let's do it within the next few years, not the next few weeks.

Why insist on the disastrous current plan when you can actually gain some political credit for saying, "We were mistaken; we now have more information; we have listened to the people and we want to do this right"? You would look human and democratic and concerned about doing the right thing. Imagine that.

My second recommendation is to all the Progressive Conservative MPPs outside of that inner cabinet. Insist that Messrs Harris, Eves and Leach follow the recommendation I just outlined, and if they do not, then stand against them. That is not unthinkable. I believe the Progressive Conservative member for Wentworth North is doing exactly that in the case of the Hamilton-area amalgamation.

But if the inner cabinet will not do the right thing, please consider voting against Bill 103 and against the downloading of social service costs. You would not be a renegade or a radical; you would be standing along with me and my family and neighbours, with your own constituents and your own personal best interests, with the experts, and with both the traditions of your party and its prospects for re-election. What a deal. You would be against only the inner cabinet, who are the true renegades and radicals. Do a great service for them and your party and yourselves: Examine the evidence, examine your conscience and do what is truly progressive and conservative and right.

I thank you for your time and attention here today.

Mr Colle: Thank you very much, Mr Farrant. Thanks to your wife for being here too. I think the courageous member for Wentworth North put it all in a nutshell when he said there is more investigation done in the purchase of socks than there was in the Tory proposal for amalgamation.

I think you really point to the potential disaster here when you compare the fallout from the disastrous family support program, where they basically dismantled everything and then put in something totally new. You made that analogy to the amalgamation thing. It's sort of a harbinger of things to come.

Mr Farrant: And this is on a much, much larger scale. Even where this kind of thing has been tried elsewhere and failed, it has generally been done at a slower pace and in a more reasoned way. This is a recipe for disaster.

The Chair: Thank you, sir, for coming forward this afternoon.

1550

JOHN KLASSEN

The Chair: Would John Klassen please come forward? Good afternoon, Mr Klassen. Welcome to the committee.

Mr John Klassen: Thank you very much. Although raised in Manitoba, I've lived most of my life in Ontario and what happens here in this province matters a great deal to me. You might ask the question, why? I ask myself that question and I answer it by saying, "Because I like to read children's stories to my children and to my grandchildren and their friends." One of our very favourites, of course, is Robert Munsch's Love You Forever: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you always, for as long as I live." You add the next line: "My children you will be, my critic or your critic I will be."

The reason this becomes so important for me is because Robert Munsch ends up by saying that people are really what matters. I believe life means people, and people mean friendship and sustenance and love and hearing one another, not words, words, words, profits, profits, profits, rich against poor, pitting people against one another. That's not what life's about for me, and my guess is that that's not true for any of us here.

My decision to come to speak to you today arises from three communications I've had recently, one from Mr Harris, one from Mr Leach, one from Ms Bassett, and in all these three communications comes a phrase that's like a recording that comes from each of them, but I'm going to quote just directly from one, "We will make a decision according to what is best for the taxpayer."

Now, the communications also go on to tell me that amalgamation did not come out of the blue, that it's not a new issue, that, "We have consulted and done studies," but the way these words are used are like words used in polls. Let's remember, they are not value-free and they are very blunt instruments to do, in the words of these government spokespeople, very radical surgery.

I concede that amalgamation is not a new issue, so I want to talk about another amalgamation in this province that works. Some 30 years ago, the cities of Fort William and Port Arthur entered into a process that led to amalgamation: indeed, Thunder Bay. I was there. I worked for more than 18 months in a program that was called Town Talk, a model, by the way, that was used when the twin cities of Minneapolis-St Paul came together.

We worked hard and we provided a process for citizens of these cities to bring about an environment that was conducive to their needs as a caring and a growing people. We didn't know when we began what the outcome would be. I think that's slightly different from where we are at the moment.

Let me go back to that phrase again that comes in these three letters, "We will do what is best for the taxpayer." Well, way back then, 30 years ago, what we discovered was that people in communities do not want someone else to impose on them what is best for them. As a matter of fact, they get very uneasy when someone wants to do what's best for them without being in dialogue and hoarding information.

This kind of sales approach doesn't really work for me. I get very uneasy when I am no longer a person, but a customer, a taxpayer, a voter. My sense is that if I can be reduced to those categories -- a statistic, a vote -- then I am no longer a valid person. I'm only a statistic and my energy dissipates, that is, it dissipates until you push me to the point where I am now.

To go back to my experience again of 30 years ago, we held hundreds of meetings in the Town Talk process: meetings in schools, meetings in community halls, churches and homes. We discovered that people could speak and could listen to each other, could find voice to speak to those in various communities, some who wanted to build a city that would be attractive to business, others who wanted a place for people.

What we discovered was that such interests need not always be at cross-purposes. If that's true, what then are the factors that foster groups to make common decisions? I would like to suggest that a large factor is the process. Of course, that also is not a new concept. Many have argued that the end never justifies the means but rather is a culmination of a vision based on values and necessities that invite participation of all.

You can see why I am having a great deal of difficulty with what's happening in the process that's being employed by the present government. You have used consultants to inform your notion of what will work. They seem to be telling you, "Move quickly, massively, with broad strokes," lots of promotional material containing few facts and in a style that divides people against people rather than supporting meaningful dialogue and cooperation.

The complex and real issues facing us can be dealt with democratically, in its own slow way. My understanding of representative democracy is that a people chooses leaders -- usually majorities but not always -- to provide a forum where meaningful conversation can be had and where people are participants and contribute to the vision.

That's why the assumptions in the communications from this government are so disturbing to me. I am more than a taxpayer, even though I have done that, sometimes grumblingly, for 40 years in this province. But when I am cast aside by words like "No matter what you say, we'll not be swayed from our agenda," I feel alienated, I feel angry and sometimes helpless and displaced. When you reduce me to being a taxpayer and I become less than a person with civic responsibility, then there is only one cost and usually that's referred to as the "bottom line" or "profits" or being "globally competitive." In that scenario you tell me how bad the economics situation is so that I can't afford something or I will pay more.

What a shame that we are being led to believe that the only way to change is to alienate, negate and demean. I know and I've experienced: The values that unite are more than dollars. They include human worth, creativity, trust and respect. On the street where I live I am made daily aware that there are many more costs than profits or dollars: the social costs, the human costs, the moral costs.

I call upon you, my elected leaders, regardless of the level of government, regardless of the party, to be representative of values that cannot be bought with dollars. I call upon you to be greater than those of us who voted for you and even now are becoming apprehensive about being bought by what I believe are false, or at least not proven, promises of tax refunds and reductions. I am more than a taxpayer. I want you to represent me as a person who cares for others, even as I believe you do, with all our diversity.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Klassen, for coming forward this morning. You've just gone a little bit beyond the allotted time, but I want to thank you for making your presentation.

1600

JACK SNELL

The Chair: Would Jack Snell please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Snell.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please, ladies and gentlemen. Mr Snell has the floor.

Mr Jack Snell: Mr Chairman, members of the committee, I had a presentation typed out in full but I decided a few hours ago to change it. So I only have one page now and that consists of a recommendation, a request that I would like to make of the committee.

A request I would like to make of the committee is that you make a recommendation to the government of Ontario to withdraw all the legislation that they have tabled in connection with amalgamation. That's Bill 103 and Bill 104 and all the other legislation, if any of it has been tabled, that was announced during mega-week. Withdraw it for a period of time, and I suggest -- this may seem excessive but I don't think it is -- we need two or three years. I'm suggesting that the legislation be withdrawn and that no further legislation be introduced concerning these matters until January 3, 2000, and certainly not before a future general election has been held in Ontario.

I'm referring to anything having to do with amalgamation and anything having to do with education and Bill 104, anything having to do with compelling any municipality to adopt a system of market value assessment or actual value assessment, eliminating the business occupancy tax, reducing development charges and then the whole Who Does What package of general welfare assistance, social services, police services and so on.

I ask you and the members of the committee to submit the above recommendation to the Ontario government for several reasons. I and other people need time to deal with these matters, to get the information we need to formulate viable positions pertaining to these matters, to talk to other people in our city, in neighbouring cities and in some instances throughout the GTA.

A lot of work has been done, and where that is the case, any reports and studies that have been produced need to be made readily available to all people throughout the GTA so that all of us can have an opportunity to search for commonsense solutions to the problems that confront us and the differences that divide us. Our elected representatives at the municipal level, I'll acknowledge, have not done that great a job of doing that, but now I think the citizens are ready to pick up the ball and run with it and the local politicians are going to have to go with them.

My second point is that although these hearings are on Bill 103, the question of amalgamating the six area municipalities within Metropolitan Toronto into one large city absolutely must be considered in conjunction with and simultaneously with certain other questions that must be resolved.

In that regard, it makes no sense to me to have one giant English-speaking public school board for Metropolitan Toronto if the present Metropolitan Toronto were going to be eliminated but were not going to be replaced by one large city as proposed in Bill 103. It seems clear to me that eliminating Metro without replacing it with one large city is an option that will have to be considered. After all, that is precisely what the Golden report recommended. So although it may not be the best solution or part of the best solution, it is certainly an arrangement that we have to take a close look at.

On the other hand, if it does make sense to some people to have one giant English-speaking public school board for the present Metropolitan Toronto geographic area, without having either the present regional government of Metropolitan Toronto or a new city covering that area as proposed in Bill 103, I'd like those people to make their case so I can have an opportunity to hear what they have to say and respond to their proposal, talk with other people about it, read what the newspaper columnists have to say about it and so on.

But the question of who pays what portion of welfare assistance costs, and this is a further argument about why these things have to be considered in conjunction and simultaneously with each other, and other social service costs, which must be considered in conjunction with the question of who pays what portion of education costs, should be obvious. Crombie told the province to keep welfare and to let the municipalities pay for education, but the province has decided to do the opposite. You've seen how much newsprint has been used up on that issue. The answer to that should be obvious. These things have to be considered together.

I could go on and on. There are a host of points that could be made to argue why it is important that a decision about municipal boundaries within the present metropolitan area be delayed and there are a host of points that could be made to argue why decisions pertaining to all the matters set out above must be made in conjunction with each other and simultaneously with each other. But I don't have the time to make all of those arguments today. I will attempt to put some of those points down on paper, organize them into a coherent statement, add them to the recommendation that you have in your hands and submit them to the clerk of the committee before the end of February.

During the very short time I have remaining, there are two or three very important points I would like to make:

First, your government has launched a juggernaut against us. In doing so, your government has treated us with contempt, that is, according to my dictionary, as worthless, as despicable characters. Is that your attitude? Is that the Premier's attitude? Even if it is, is that what he wants the historians to say about him: that he looked upon the people of Toronto as worthless; that he viewed us as despicable characters?

The second point, on the other side of the coin, is that although your government has launched a juggernaut against us and is treating us in a despicable manner, in doing so you have wakened us up, and we thank you for that. I personally appreciate that very much. I have been having more fun during the past five or six weeks, during which time I have been participating in the Monday night meetings of Citizens for Local Democracy, together with at least 1,500 other people, than I have had for a long time.

John Ralston Saul says that working with one's fellow citizens for the public good is the highest activity, the most meaningful endeavour that a human being has available to him in this life. He's absolutely right. There are thousands and thousands of people within a five-mile radius of this building who are involved in this project of working for the public good and who are really turned on by it.

The 1,500 people who come out to the Monday night meetings are just the tip of the iceberg. Each person who participates in those meetings is in touch with a whole lot of other people back in her own residential neighbourhood or in her workplace or in his social circle. Then there are other groups working independently of Citizens for Local Democracy, spreading all over Metropolitan Toronto and out into the GTA. Now we've started to have people coming in from other parts of Ontario.

That leads us to a critical question: Is the Harris government going to withdraw the bills that have been introduced to date and postpone the introduction of any further bills until the beginning of the year 2000, thereby harnessing the creative energies of thousands of people as we reach out to our neighbours in our own cities, in our neighbouring cities and right across the GTA in search of those commonsense solutions to the problems that confront us and the differences that divide us; or alternatively, is the Harris government going to continue to treat us with contempt and ram all this rotten garbage down our throats? If you do that, you do so at your peril, because this movement that I'm part of is not going to go away. It's going to grow and grow and will run right over you and your government.

The Chair: On that note, Mr Snell, we've already exceeded your allotted time. I want to thank you for coming forward and making your presentation this afternoon.

Mr Snell: A good note to finish on, Mr Chairman.

The Chair: Sorry that you were interrupted. I've asked for cooperation from the audience and I'm not getting it today as I have in the past.

1610

DOUG CARROLL

The Chair: Would Doug Carroll please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Carroll, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Doug Carroll: My name is Doug Carroll. I'm a software developer and I have lived in Toronto for 39 years. I've mostly ignored political issues prior to this bill and this government. I've become active because Bill 103 would infringe on basic civil rights and is rife with problems, both technical and democratic.

My first point is that the bill solves a problem that does not exist. The problem being solved is described as excess municipal taxes, but those are set, collected and spent by elected councillors over whom we have direct control. If we wanted lower municipal taxes, we could demand them and accept the resulting loss of service levels. We have not asked for lower taxes and it is odd that the province would intervene to fix a non-existent municipal spending problem when we can fix it ourselves at a local level.

Regulatory overhead is supposedly a barrier to global trade, and to our useless status as a world-class city. We're expected to believe this problem is so bad it requires the complete removal of seven elected governments instead of a friendly push to fix minor differences, with any legal frameworks required available as requested from the province -- requested, not forced.

If the Bill 103 approach made sense, a dirty kitchen would be cause to burn the house down. Minor regulatory issues can be fixed with a few calls anyway. There are no serious obstructions to business here, except where the intended business is harmful to the residents, in which case barriers are endless, many thanks to our councillors and staff.

The bill is not in agreement with expert opinion. What support exists for Bill 103 is from the KPMG report, which I hear was commissioned after the bill was under way. Clearly, its carefully disclaimed estimates did not motivate the bill, and the savings predicted, if realized, would be less than 5% of the combined operating budgets of the cities. This amount could be saved without a massive reorganization and would have been less if current 1996 figures were used instead of 1995. Staffing reductions form the main basis and that means lower service levels. Politicians cost a minute fraction of the total, far less than one serious mistake might if we had fewer full-time guardians of the public interest. KPMG notes that they were not asked if Metro Toronto should amalgamate.

The Trimmer report recommended strengthening local neighbourhoods and Joyce Trimmer herself disavowed any support for amalgamation. Al Leach sat on that panel. I'm not sure whether Derwyn Shea was also there.

The Golden report recommended a GTA-wide replacement for Metro Toronto, and definitely not amalgamation within Metro.

Wendell Cox, a leading US expert on amalgamation, has said it will cost us much more and damage our cities.

Professor Andrew Sancton has criticized KPMG, saying its assumptions did not include many additional factors that would cost us more, not less, in taxes.

Voter-per-capita representation would be reduced and costs of an election campaign increased, making corporate sponsors or party support likely. The neighbourhood councils would have no power to spend or make bylaws.

There are no successful examples of amalgamation anywhere in the world. Al Leach, asked yesterday in the Rosedale United Church, was only able to name Metro Toronto as an example, which it definitely is not, since this is a two-tier government, with all its advantages. If he were right, it would suggest changing nothing.

Amalgamation is like hearing that people have been jumping off a bridge all day, trying to fly, and they are all dead at the bottom. "But," says Leach, "We have this theory that if you flap your hands on the way down, you'll become a bird. We've booked a jumping for you. Trust us."

We have a bill solving a non-problem by a method that doesn't work. What could be the real reason for this bill, since the PC members are not stupid and seem so well versed in arguments against it that I could quote Mike Harris or Al Leach in times past to make my case today?

What does the bill do well? The bill puts total control of seven thriving and responsible governments in the hands of the province for at least three years -- I understand that to be about right -- with the transition team. The appointed trustees have absolute power and are not subject to public review or recourse. They can hire and fire, set, amend or refuse all budgets, make binding contracts and appoint board members. They operate in secrecy and are directed by the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Al Leach, exclusively. They are not elected.

Who here would undergo a similar reorganization at a personal level? Can you imagine? All your cash, your car, your house, not controlled by you. Binding contracts you had to live with, executed without a chance to speak. It would be called slavery at a personal level, or confiscation.

Why would the province want this outcome? The province has struggled with the city of Toronto over many issues, such as rent control, reduced transit funding, hospital closures, workfare and unfair changes to provincial riding boundaries. The Metro cities are major centres of political resistance to the Tory agenda. In each case the cities have upheld core social values, and protected the people.

If the trustees control Metro, they can direct staff to implement Tory changes without delay, on fear of termination. Contracts can place core city functions in friendly hands, on profitable terms, and key staff can be replaced with more amenable personnel. The dreaded lefties can be excised in the sweep of reorganization. All this can be done in secret, without recourse.

The Metro cities have $1 billion in reserve funds and, by downloading costs to the municipalities, the money will be needed to meet them. It will have been spent on provincial responsibilities without a need to actually steal it. Few objections will be voiced by a reorganized Metro as a series of new outrages are perpetrated if our democratic voices are silenced. The discretionary funds available to offset downloading costs can dished out to good cities, while uncooperative cities starve. The provincial agenda will be threatening to oppose, and all power will be provincial power.

What is the real purpose of this bill? First, it dissolves seven governments considered to be among the best and most politically active on the planet, and second, it puts complete control of the cities dissolved, along with all their assets and staff, in the hands of exactly three people appointed by Al Leach. It delivers the cities into the hands of their frequent political adversary, with all their money ready to spend on funding the tax cut.

It suppresses public participation and confiscates public assets, ordinarily directed as part of an understanding that they will be directed by their elected representatives to things that should be spent on, and certainly not by trustees who operate in secret. It imposes secrecy and denies recourse on any basis. These opportunities all go by the common name of democratic participation. The bill, in all its clauses, denies common public access to essential processes we all must live with.

In short, the real problem Bill 103 solves is the right of the people to decide how their collective lives will be lived, known as democracy. It solves it for a government intent on repressive measures and a flood of ill-advised right-wing measures we will surely find objectionable. The bill is designed to make it difficult or impossible to focus our objections and to deny staff, time and funding to opponents. The bill is reprehensible and I advise its absolute rejection in the name of all we value here in Canada. Thank you.

Mr Marchese: Mr Carroll, thank you for taking the time to come and make this presentation today.

Mr Carroll: My definite pleasure.

Mr Marchese: Mr Leach says that all he has heard so far is that's it's a bad thing, this amalgamation, and that nobody has given him any evidence that it's bad. He's quoted as saying that in the Toronto Sun. You quoted a number of people who have spoken against it: The Golden report didn't recommend this; the Trimmer report authors are friends of his.

Mr Carroll: In any event, they didn't recommend it, either. Joyce Trimmer herself spoke out against it at the North York council hearings where Mel Lastman first came out against amalgamation.

Mr Marchese: You mentioned Professor Sancton; I referred to him as well. Professor Kitchen spoke to that. Wendell Cox, who I understand is not a very liberal type of person but a very conservative type of man, says this is a bad thing. What are we to make of this? The minister says there is no evidence to prove him wrong, yet all the evidence that we are witnessing and hearing says that it's bad thing. What are we to make of his response?

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Mr Carroll: The bill is not actually framed to meet the objectives that are stated as its purpose. Its actual purposes are to put Metro Toronto in the hands of the trustees for the better part of this entire reorganization phase so that their assets can be realigned and so that democratic control can be suppressed within the cities and so that major political opponents can be effectively shut out.

The expert opinions have nothing to do with the way the bill was formed because they have all been ignored. There is no expert support for this bill, as framed. It's exactly like the bridge analogy: We're being invited to take a terrific chance with the entire quality of life that we've enjoyed in this city for as long as I've been alive, with no basis whatsoever.

Mr Marchese: We've seen some of the referendum results of the communities surrounding Hamilton.

Mr Carroll: Over 90% opposed.

Mr Marchese: A high turnout, I understand, higher than the general rate of municipal elections, and they've said clearly that they don't want to be subjugated. I'm not quite sure what this government is going to do, but listening to one of the parliamentary assistants, Mr Clement, he says, "Well, we've heard them, but there are a lot of other considerations that have to be put into the hopper."

Mr Carroll: Maybe a brick in the hopper would help. That's just a joke. In any event, what I mean is that the situation is they've had plenty of input from all of the people so far. The consensus in Flamboro and other areas was that they were faced with a combination of intimidation and unsuitable alternatives. The facilitators were essentially using Bill 26 as a basis for the threat of reorganization without their participation. They were brought to the bargaining table whether they wanted it or not, and they formed a consensus clearly against any public method to do so. They've actually acted entirely on their own, strictly on a democratic basis, to say an absolutely flat-out no, to amalgamation.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Carroll, for coming forward to make your presentation today.

FRANCES GLADSTONE

The Chair: Would Frances Gladstone please come forward. Welcome, Ms Gladstone.

Ms Frances Gladstone: What I have to say regarding Bill 103 has been said many times by many people and many organizations. Journalists, politicians, social scientists, including town planners, have all spoken rationally and logically against the concept of amalgamation. The only people who seem to favour this concept are those who stand to reap personal financial rewards.

It has been said by many experts that amalgamation will not save money. In fact, many cities which were amalgamated, such as Halifax, have shown that it is more costly. It has also been said repeatedly that amalgamation will destroy the quality of life as it now exists. I am here to state yet again the concerns shared by very large numbers of people in Metropolitan Toronto.

Should this bill pass, we have grave concerns for what will happen to this city and the quality of life that has been possible here. This is not to say that we experience perfection in Toronto -- far from it. In a country as wealthy as Canada, there should be no hungry people and no one without housing. That is equally true for the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto within it. But what you are planning now will greatly exacerbate an already untenable situation.

Bill 103, with its proposal for a megacity, is a misguided concept. It is not known at this time if changes are necessary, and if they are, it is not known what form they should take. This government has employed many experts to study amalgamation of the six municipalities. Despite unanimous reports from all of them that there will be no cost savings, this government plans to proceed with amalgamation. Why? What do you hope to gain?

Many of your claims for improvement have been shown to be blatantly false. Such arguments as too many local politicians, reduction of taxes, a previous promise to create a megacity and cost reduction are all inaccurate at best. Toronto has the highest number of residents per councillor in the province: 1 to 40,000, compared to 1 to 5,300 in North Bay, the Premier's home town. No promise for a megacity was ever made, and in any case this government was not elected to run local politics. In addition, property taxes in Metro Toronto will increase dramatically with downloading of social services unless money is saved through unacceptable reductions in these services.

Both the Crombie and Golden reports identified economic and administrative issues that are the biggest problem facing Toronto. Both recommended a single council for the greater Toronto area that could unify the region. Mr. Crombie stated that amalgamation without a proper regional structure was the worst possible choice to make. The government ignored Crombie's findings and went its own stubborn way.

There can be no effective cooperation or coordination among the municipalities and the regions without a regional structure. If anything is to be done -- and it is not clear at this time that anything needs to be done -- it must include all of the greater Toronto area and not just Metro.

But this government has made a destructive move even worse with its downloading package. Why would anyone outside Metro even consider working with us under the circumstances? Who in their right minds would choose to pick up a share of so onerous a burden?

Democracy in Toronto ended when Bill 103 was brought forward. From the day it was introduced, Metro Toronto has been under trusteeship. The largest locally elected municipal councils can now do nothing without the approval of a provincially appointed board of trustees. There was no consultation, no discussion, no approval, and the residents of Metro have been told that a referendum on the issue of amalgamation will be ignored.

The appointment of trustees was an entirely unnecessary move. Local government in Metro Toronto is a completely open process, with adequate checks and balances to prevent any form of thievery this government might have imagined. How would this government react if the federal government suddenly suspended its activities and appointed trustees to oversee its spending? I suggest to you that not only would you see it as a total denial of the democratic process but also as highly personally insulting. We are seeing, perhaps more clearly than ever before, just how fragile a concept democracy is. Lest we were in any doubt at all about this government's intentions, Bill 104 killed any uncertainty by placing the boards of education under trusteeship as well.

These draconian measures were taken for only one reason: The government knew that there would be strong opposition to these plans. To avoid this possibility, democracy was destroyed. The government-appointed trustees have the power to override any decisions made by either local or Metro councillors. This is neither right nor just.

This government has put forward a policy for which there is no rationale. There have been no cost-effective studies, no expert opinions to say that amalgamation will save money or be more efficient. In fact, in regard to the latter point, the opposite has been stated: that amalgamation will not save money or be more efficient, certainly not in the way this government is proposing to implement it.

Further, this government does not understand the magnitude of the change it is planning to implement. You seem to believe that at the end of the year a merger of 54,000 employees with different work practices, under new management, with a new board of directors will simply fall into place. But if this government thinks the transition will be either smooth or simple, it is seriously mistaken. The city council in London, Ontario, still has problems after three years with a much simpler merger of its public utilities into its civic government.

In Metro Toronto the task is far more vast and of much greater complexity. There are different needs, different cultures, different structures that will be difficult to consolidate. There are 116,000 bylaws and 60 collective agreements that will need to be unified. Selecting people for a transition team will create disharmony and increase vulnerability among people who then will have to continue to work together. This is a recipe for chaos. Metro will simply fall apart and nothing will function. Issues will be neglected, investment opportunities will go elsewhere and the public will have no one to turn to who can respond to their needs. Credibility will be lost.

It would be a sad mistake to believe that the decline in Ontario's capital city will not affect its credit rating. There will be tremendous anxiety and huge waste, and for what? To create a monster of a city that will be less effective than what it replaces, that will be more costly and require more management. This is a concept that has no rational basis.

By far the most destructive aspect of the government's proposals is that of downloading the cost of social services on to the municipalities. What will be the result of this ill-conceived plan? For Metro Toronto, it means financial disaster. As one example, family benefits are to be shared 50-50 with the province, half of a $3.4-billion program. For this municipality it will be a dramatically increased burden. As well, hospital care has already suffered as a result of government cuts. People too sick to be moved are being sent home, often only to return to hospital again or sometimes to die. There are insufficient beds, there is inadequate nursing care and general decay of the health care system. Now the government wants to transfer all soft services on to the municipalities.

Over and over again you have been advised that this is not responsible behaviour. You have thus far chosen to ignore the opinions of even your trusted advisors. These costs do not belong to the municipalities. They must continue to be shared throughout the province. Metro Toronto cannot survive the new regime. The social services burden here is too great and would require the city to carry an additional cost of $400 million.

Despite your assurances that this structure will benefit the municipalities, it is very clear that it will be extremely detrimental. Either taxes will have to be raised dramatically or Metro will go into bankruptcy. This city will suffer from a higher crime rate, empty office buildings as people leave to escape crippling taxes, greater crowding, fewer repairs and services, and it will become dingy and dirty and dilapidated, as so many of its American counterparts.

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Small businesses, which are already barely making ends meet, will have to close their doors. More people will be unemployed; more will require welfare. We will also see user fees, gutted recreation and social programs, darkened community centres, higher taxes and fewer jobs.

We have one of the most vibrant, healthy cities in the world and this government wishes to destroy it. We in Metro will not only sink under the imposed burden but will subsidize the rest of the province while doing so.

To further aggravate the situation, I understand that you now plan to replace most of the elected, paid municipal politicians with a volunteer council that will determine the needs and functions of this city. Many organizations function through the involvement of volunteers. However, they are not usually responsible for 2.5 million people and the huge variety of responsibilities that management of such a vast, complex structure would entail. In particular, a non-elected body of people should not have control of public funds.

Your resentment and hostility towards the city are incomprehensible but must be overwhelming for you to have chosen to implement such measures. It is obvious that the volunteers will be merely puppets of those who have the actual power to make decisions. Plainly you are out to destroy this city.

We are asking that you re-examine the concepts you have put forward in Bill 103 and reconsider its passage. Metro functions well as it currently exists. There is no need to amalgamate the six municipalities. This bill is not about greater efficiency or cost saving. Amalgamation of the six municipalities will not save the taxpayers money; on the contrary, in Metro Toronto and other municipalities the costs will be much higher.

This bill is about the change from a democratic society to a corporate-dictated society, in other words, a plutocracy. The goal of this government is to privatize publicly owned and run organizations: schools, parks, community services. The corporations are dictating this government's moves and you are following instructions well. The writing has been on the wall for a long time but no one has chosen to heed the message.

If this bill succeeds, we will see the impoverishment of our cities as the corporate structure grows ever richer. Make no mistake, this will happen. All you have to do is look at any large American city to see the end results of policies such as this government is promoting. This government was not given carte blanche when it was elected to mow its way through the province, destroying everything in its path. That is not what a majority means.

The only rational decision you can possibly make is to shelve Bill 103 and do a careful study to determine which, if any, changes are absolutely necessary. Before any are made, attention must be given to the reports you have already commissioned. Appropriate and adequate examination of them must be made and the people of this city must be privy to the findings. If the populace then believes it is necessary to implement change, the transition must be gradual and carefully thought out. For the moment nothing is broken; there is nothing that you need to fix. Thank you.

Applause.

The Chair: Order, please, ladies and gentlemen. You've gone beyond your allotted time. I want to thank you for coming forward and making your presentation to the committee today.

JANE ROUNTHWAITE

The Chair: Would Jane Rounthwaite come forward, and would the lady in green on my left please refrain from interjecting, just as I asked a gentleman this morning who was doing some cheerleading, albeit almost unhearable. I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from doing the same thing. It's the rules of the Legislature. They're not my rules. Thank you.

Ms Rounthwaite, welcome to the committee.

Ms Jane Rounthwaite: My name is Jane Rounthwaite. I'm going to begin by telling you something about my background, as I believe it's relevant to why I'm here today to speak against the imposition of Bill 103. Like many of the people you have heard from in the past few weeks, I have never done anything like this before, as I have taken good governance for granted in this city and in this province.

First you need to know that I am a long-term citizen of the city of Toronto. I was born down the street at the Toronto General Hospital and I have lived here for my whole life, except for the three years that I attended Queen's University in Kingston. I have been a homeowner since 1979 and have lived in many different neighbourhoods in this city, including the Annex, Forest Hill, Summerhill, Rosedale, North Toronto, College and Brunswick. I understand the difference amongst these communities and what makes each of them special to their residents. I have also lived in the 905 area and I understand how it differs from the city.

Second, I would like to tell you that I am not a member of any political party, nor am I an opponent of true Progressive Conservatism. In fact, my roots are very blue and some of the most influential people in my life were old-fashioned Tories who believed in social responsibility as being part of their duty as Christians. My great-uncle was a minister in John Diefenbaker's cabinet, my great-grandfather articled in Sir John A. Macdonald's law office in Kingston and my grandfather, a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, loved and lived politics his whole life. At the end of his life he was totally absorbed by the coverage of the Watergate hearings. I remember clearly his outrage, dismay and disbelief about the way Richard Nixon and his gang of thugs had behaved because they thought they were above the law.

I understand in my heart that being a good Tory has nothing to do with going along with the high-handed arrogance of this particular government, which has the audacity to tell the people of Toronto and other municipalities who are fighting forced amalgamation that it will not heed their voices in this matter.

Third, I am a businessperson. I have an MBA from the University of Toronto, I am a former vice-president of a major Canadian life insurance company and I am currently the executive director of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, a well-established and highly respected national non-profit organization. While I am outraged at the perversion of tried and true democratic process that has been forced on us with Bill 103, it is as a professional business manager for over 20 years that I am going to speak to you today.

As some of you may know, business schools make extensive use of case studies as a way to demonstrate good and bad management practice. Often the cases are quite a mixed bag of both good and bad, as that's usually what life looks like. However, sometimes one reads a case which, after careful analysis, leads the rational person to wonder, "What were these people thinking and why did they do this?" I believe that if Bill 103 is passed, it is exactly what analysts will wonder about this government and their mega-mess.

Many members of this government pride themselves in being businessmen, yet with each new barrage of legislation they demonstrate that they do not understand the complexities of managing a huge corporate entity. Business schools set up special courses for small business because the practice of sound business management in a large organization, where one of the signs of success is the minimization of uncertainty and confusion, is not the same as the rough-and-tumble of entrepreneurialism. Large institutions, like large ships, cannot manoeuvre in the way that a small business, let's say a car dealership or a Laser sailboat, can. That's a good thing because the consequences of bad decisions in a big organization are much larger, impact far more people and are much more expensive to fix.

Based on my understanding of the recent package of bills and proposed bills that this government has dropped on us in the last few months, I can only conclude that there are some fundamental principles of good governance in a large organization that this government obviously does not understand.

The first basic principle is understanding one's responsibility and accountability. In most large public corporations the top managers must answer to the shareholders, who exercise their power through a board of directors which has legal responsibilities for ensuring that things are done in a certain way. These top managers know that they are merely the custodians of the assets of the enterprise. In privately held companies, which are usually much smaller, top managers are often the founders and the owners, but even they are ultimately answerable to their customers.

It seems that this government thinks it owns the province and that by winning a majority in the last election they somehow bought the "company" and it's now theirs to do with what they will. Because many in this government have been owners of small businesses, they seem to be confused about their new job, which is to be a good custodian. In Bill 103 this government gives the top managers of the new amalgamated city of Toronto, who are their appointees and not our elected officials, the right to be answerable to no one, as actions and decisions of both the public trustees and the transition team cannot be questioned or reviewed, even by a court.

The second point about the proposed amalgamation which defies conventional business analysis relates to the financial aspects of the deal. From start to finish, the numerical analysis just does not cut it. To begin with, any business student taking Corporate Finance 101 can tell you the importance of matching the volume, seasonality and quality of revenues and expenditures as closely as possible. While I know I am alluding to changes proposed in other legislation, the entire package is hard to separate, as each impacts on the other, which is yet another fundamental principle of good management practice. You can't fix up salaries in the sales department by tearing the guts out of accounting or production.

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The one-time cost of implementation of Bill 103 has been estimated at $500 million. In my last corporate job I was the vice-president and project manager for an operation which moved the operations of one company of 1,200 people from Toronto to a western city. That project cost $50 million for severance, recruiting, emptying office buildings and then having to leave them empty because there's a glut of real estate in Toronto, moving furniture and people from one location to another and fixing any problems that arose along the way. That project took a full year to plan and another year and a half to execute. It was planned and thought out by the people who were actually doing the front-line work in each department, which meant that all those little details which keep the wheels moving were understood and taken into account by the planners.

Based on my experience with the planning and implementation of that very successful operation, I do not believe that the proposed amalgamation of six cities and one borough will be done for only 10 times the cost of moving one company, for a number of reasons.

First, none of the municipalities wants this, which means that unwilling people will be pressed into making this happen. Second, the speed with which this government is proposing to make these changes precludes the type of careful planning that is needed for a smooth transition. Mistakes in an operation of this magnitude are very expensive to correct. Third, the hidden costs associated with the confusion of merging seven entities will be huge. Low staff morale can take the wind out of the best-run organization. Imagine what it will do to one or seven in chaos. Remember what SkyDome ended up costing us in the end, and it wasn't nearly as complicated as what's being proposed here.

Lastly, this government cannot even make a solid business case to support all these changes. There is no empirical or expert evidence that can assure us that this will save the taxpayer any money at all, but rather a mass of examples of exactly the opposite. Further, I was not at all surprised this morning when I opened my Globe and Mail to read that the province has seriously underestimated the ongoing increase in costs to the municipalities of these changes. It appears that a cost-neutral program is now going to cost us nearly $900 million more a year. If any employee of mine had ever made that type of error in his or her cost-benefit analysis, they would never have had their proposal approved.

It is because the empirical evidence does not support Mr Leach's claims of improved effectiveness and the fact that this government cannot get their numbers right that I must question what they are really doing and why. This is where this government breaks the final rule: They are not being honest with us. That is why the decisions of the trustees and the transition team must be above the law, because good governance can easily withstand the test of scrutiny.

As a manager I must be prepared to have my staff and board question each and every decision I make and I must be able to explain why, and "because" is not good enough as an answer when one is dealing with issues that have such a far-reaching impact on so many people's lives.

I love this city. I am proud of being a Canadian. I am dismayed by the actions of this government in their disregard for the democratic process that has made this country great and that has made this city the envy of the world. I implore this committee to listen to what hundreds of people like me, who have never done this before, are telling you when they say that something is rotten in Bill 103. It's too much at once, it's too fast, no one wants it, and most important, it's bad government. Please help the citizens of these municipalities stop Bill 103.

The Chair: You've exceeded your allotted time. I want to thank you for making your presentation today.

MARC COLLISTER

The Chair: Would Marc Collister please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Collister. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Marc Collister: I would like to thank the committee for allowing me to speak today on Bill 103. I am here today to ask the committee to stop the passage of this bill; that the committee not allow it to go on to a third reading; and that the committee will, instead, let Bill 103 die. I believe there will be no benefits brought about by Bill 103 for the citizens of Metro Toronto, only drawbacks. I also believe that Bill 103 is a direct assault on the democratic style of government that Canada was built on.

I question the motives behind the provincial government's push to amalgamate the municipalities in Metro Toronto. I understand that Al Leach did not even commission any reports on amalgamation until after he had made the decision to go ahead with the megacity. He cited saving money and ending duplication as his reasons. The report that Al Leach did commission after he announced his plans did not corroborate this reasoning. The Globe and Mail reported that the chief author of this report said, "There has been no amalgamation, of which I am aware, in the current fiscal environment that would demonstrate the certainty of savings in Metro Toronto."

Am I to understand that the only certainty with the megacity is that it will cost taxpayers $200 million to implement, with zero guaranteed savings? In fact, from what I have read, it will cost more to run an amalgamated city of this size than it currently costs to run the individual cities. Al Leach and his staff have used Chicago and New York City as models for amalgamation. Well, US census data indicate that it costs more per capita to run a large amalgamated city than a smaller city.

If there are savings to be found through the reduction of inefficiencies, why do we need an amalgamated city to eliminate them? Our city councils are quite capable of doing this independently of the megacity. It's a function of the job they were elected to do. Literature I have seen suggests that the councils have been eliminating inefficiencies and continue to do so.

On the issue of duplication, perhaps you can explain to me how the Scarborough fire department duplicates the work of the Etobicoke fire department or how the North York sanitation department duplicates the work of the Toronto sanitation department. As none of their jurisdictions overlap, I cannot see where the duplication would come from.

I voted for the Tory party in the last election. I don't admit that often any more. At that time I understood them to be committed to stronger local government. I can now see that this is not the case. I fail to see how making elected representatives further removed from the people they represent makes a democratic government stronger. I fail to see how increasing the average number of constituents a councillor is responsible for from 32,000 to 52,000 will strengthen a democratic government. This will only increase the responsibilities of each councillor, giving them less time to deal with specific issues within their communities.

The new city council will set up neighbourhood committees, but Bill 103 does not indicate what role these committees will serve. Will they be elected? If not, who will appoint these committees? Whom will they be accountable to: the members of the community or the councillors? Bill 103 does not indicate whether these committees will be effective, will have any power to make binding decisions, or whether they simply make recommendations to city council that the councillors will be under no obligation to follow. This simply seems to add an ineffectual layer between the citizens of the community and the councillor who is supposed to represent them. Again, I fail to see how a democratic government will be made stronger by this.

The six municipalities are very diverse, with many distinct communities within each. How can an amalgamated city, with only 44 councillors for 2.3 million people, address each community's specific needs? The higher-density municipalities of Toronto, East York and York have different needs from the lower-density municipalities of North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough. Can we be certain that within an amalgamated city the concerns of both urban styles will be equally addressed?

The current local councils were elected to run the affairs of the cities. A part of running cities is preparing budgets as the councils see fit. These councils are accountable to the people who elected them and are aware of this as they put these budgets together. If citizens do not approve of how city council spent their money, they have an option of not re-electing them.

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There is a problem with appointed trustees being given the power to amend these budgets and have the final say in these budgets. The trustees, being appointed, not elected, are not accountable to the people of these communities. Therefore, as they don't have to worry about being re-elected, they have no incentive to keep the best interests of the citizens in mind. The trustees are accountable to the Minister of Municipal Affairs, therefore they will have the best interests of the minister in mind.

With this situation the Minister of Municipal Affairs will have control of the cities. The city councillors will not even have the power to promote an existing employee. I ask you, how is this democratic? Al Leach was elected to the provincial government, not the municipal government. He has just decided he would run the cities without the consent of the citizens.

Metropolitan Toronto will have to incur the expenses of the board of trustees as directed by the board of trustees. Our own elected officials need to obtain approval for their budgets, but the board of trustees is being given a blank cheque to be approved of by themselves. What is even more disturbing than that is that decisions made by the trustees cannot even be challenged in the courts. They will, in effect, be above the law.

This sounds like the democratic process is being ripped out of Metropolitan Toronto and control of the municipalities is being given over to the provincial government. While there may be nothing legally or constitutionally wrong with this, morally and ethically it is wrong. How can the minister's conscience allow him to destroy democracy like this?

If Al Leach is determined to exercise his control over some level of democratically elected local government, perhaps the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto could be his target. It would be easier and more cost-efficient to dismantle a single municipality than to consolidate seven. It could be turned into a coordinating body as opposed to a governing body. The individual cities would remain intact, with a proper amount of representation, and the Metro board could coordinate joint responsibilities to ensure there is no duplication present.

In conclusion, the passage of Bill 103 is not in the best interests of the citizens of Metro Toronto. It will increase the cost of running the city while destroying their communities at the same time. It will also set a precedent for the dismantling of our democratic processes with blatant disregard for the citizens these processes are in place to serve. For these reasons I beseech you to stop the passage of Bill 103 now. I thank you again for the opportunity to speak.

Mr John L. Parker (York East): Thank you very much, Mr Collister. It's very clear that the minister has not persuaded you of the merits of the proposal in Bill 103. What we have heard throughout the last year or so, leading up to this moment, is that the status quo is not an option, so this government has to make a choice. We have to do something. We have to make a change. Can you help us out with your thoughts as to what direction that change should take?

Mr Collister: Changes within the municipality I believe should be the responsibility of the municipalities. We elect municipal government and it's their decisions that can bring about changes within the municipality. I don't necessarily think it's incumbent upon the minister to dictate to the municipalities what those changes should be. He could work with them to try and find a common ground, but I don't think he should be telling them what to do.

Mr Parker: If the municipalities, on their own, developed a plan that was similar to Bill 103, would that be reason to go ahead with it?

Mr Collister: It would be more of a reason because that would be our elected representatives on a municipal level deciding how to deal with municipal issues. So yes, that would be more of a reason to go with it, but not being forced to do it.

Mr Parker: Is your concern then with the process more than with the form? If the municipalities liked it, would it be okay to go ahead?

Mr Collister: Not necessarily. My biggest issue, I have to admit, is the process, is the fact it's being forced on to the municipalities. I have just recently begun to look at the actual specifics of what amalgamation would mean. What I have seen so far, I don't agree with. While they haven't agreed with it, if it was a good thing, if there were pros to it, I feel they would agree with it. I don't know if that's necessarily an issue, because they obviously don't agree with it.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Collister.

RORY SINCLAIR

The Chair: Would Rory Sinclair please come forward. Good afternoon, Mr Sinclair. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Rory Sinclair: Thank you very much. My name is Rory Gus Sinclair. I'm so new at this, I didn't even know I was supposed to give you all a copy or that it was my option.

I live in the Major-Harbord Street area. I am a small-time contractor. I moved into a derelict house six years ago and revivified it, keeping its original character and much of its interior character. I say this not to tell you what kind of a hero I am but to let you know that I might be bold enough to say to you that this city needs people like me, and I dare say the province needs people like me, if the city is to remain a viable entity.

Knowing what I know now, I would like to be able to say that I thought this whole amalgamation idea was a terrible one from the start, but I didn't. The truth is, I was grudgingly sympathetic to the notion when it was first broached. I was, in short, one of the silent majority this government claims to represent, and therefore am someone whom this government has lost in its subsequent haste, its extraordinary clumsiness and what I can only call disrespect of me as a resident of this city. I'm not here to yell at you. I'm just telling you how I feel.

The province appears to be saying to me something like this: "We're going to change where and how you live with this blueprint here that we cooked up in three weeks or so and you're going to like it; just wait and see." I have never before engaged in political actions of this nature. I have never felt compelled until now.

If some members of this government have been able to discount some of the protest about these measures because such protest emanates from a so-called usual gang of suspects, you should know that I am not one of the usual gang, although let me add parenthetically that it was the usual gang, if I may call them that, who signalled the clear and present danger, to me anyway, about the concerns I should have about this. I'll be eternally grateful to the Citizens for Local Democracy for that.

Let me say off the top that if what I am about to say covers some ground already covered by others, I apologize. No one has told me what to say, so if it is repetitive, perhaps it means that quite a few people have these same concerns. I want to emphasize that I appreciate the opportunity to address you, but I have some fears on that score as well. I know that my voice is mouthing some words, but am I being heard? Why do I have this awful feeling that I am talking about the weather on the Titanic?

A little illustration: Back in the late 1970s -- this is a little departure -- after Urban Cowboy came out, there was an enormous number of country music knock-off artists, some of whom, in country music's desire to become homogenized and make it in the big music world, even got country music awards. Some, like Olivia Newton-John -- remember her? I Honestly Love You -- even came out and said they hated the old nasal country music, while continuing to accept awards from a group that had been singing nasal songs all their lives and who, in my opinion, had their fingers on the pulse of who their real listeners were, nose or no nose. It seemed ungrateful at minimum.

I remember the response of barely concealed rage of the old-line Grand Ole Opry lineup and the cheers that greeted Justin Tubb, the son of the great Ernest Tubb, as he sang the anthem What's Wrong with the Way that We're Doing it Now? That, dear members of the committee, is the refrain with which I want to characterize my submission.

That this government proposes to make changes of astonishing breadth and depth is of no debate. I personally might characterize these proposals as ill conceived, illogical and that they will forever change for the worse the city I love. Although I came to these opinions slowly, giving the government the benefit of the doubt many times before full fear struck, I will put those characterizations aside for the moment. Might I make some observations on the fear that has been engendered in me by the unseemly haste with which this government has made these proposals?

First it seems to be a given, as the honourable member Mr Parker has said, that the status quo is not an option. I don't remember the question being asked, especially when Fortune magazine -- I'm sure people have told you this -- says it's the most livable city on the planet. The status quo is working pretty fine. What's wrong with the way we're doing it now? Thank you, Justin Tubb.

I am sure the committee, whether or not individually they carry any animus to the city, has to recognize that the city is quite simply the envy of the world. It is a city that works, and it works, in my humble little opinion, because it has found an absolutely wonderful way to mix the overview of a Metro council with the local metre-by-metre attention to details of the local council system. Yes, it's a little messy, but that's the nature of democracy.

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May I remind you that Winston Churchill, a Tory, in case you need reminding, thought messiness was the nature of democracy, while I am also sure you can remember that Mussolini got the trains to run on time. By this I do not mean to take a cheap shot at you guys. This does not mean to imply that you are Mussolini or much less that I am Churchill. Arguing by analogy is essentially flawed. All I mean to say is that efficiency is only part of the equation. Sorry, honourable members of the committee, the status quo is fine with me. What is wrong with the way we're doing it now, really?

Merely saying that it needs changing doesn't cut it. I would have thought there are members of this government for whom the well-worn phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" might mean something. The proof that it works is in the accolades this city wins and the envy with which it is viewed throughout the world. Why on earth are you messing with it? Might I suggest that you go find something that really needs fixing.

Second, given that the proponents of these measures want to make such far-reaching changes, one would have thought that a fundamental principle that has evolved in the Canadian way, which is a pragmatic, and I'll use the word "commonsensical," approach to politics -- this has been the Canadian way of doing things since Confederation -- would be something like this: that the people being affected by such far-reaching measures should have some pretty serious input into the process. The people being affected are I and my brother and sister citizens of Metro, and this is pretty fearsome stuff emanating from a legitimately elected government of this province. I emphasize "legitimate" and I emphasize that I agree that the government is charged with the overview of municipal affairs.

If I were to leave you with one abiding thought from my little two cents' worth, it's this: It's little guys like me you have scared silly by these tactics and it is a fear I have never felt before in my life. Recognize that you have that power to scare me and that it doesn't soothe that fear to realize that you are probably really nice guys at home and nice to your kids. I cannot believe that it's your intention to scare the hell out of me. Know that I will never be a party to that kind of demonization. I don't mean to demonize you, but recognize there are a lot more like me out there, and it's this constituent's visceral fear of his government and it's not conducive to civil dialogue, let alone the exchange of considered opinions. This is a situation that should not be encouraged by any government if it values civility and respect and democratic values.

Worse, I worry that somehow it doesn't matter to you. I know it matters; it's got to matter to you but I feel that it doesn't. Convince me otherwise. To hear a government put into law a bill that encourages referenda in the municipal arena and then say to me and my fellow citizens that although this government likes referenda, it doesn't like Metro referenda, and even if we did hold one it wouldn't affect this government, I feel like the Grand Ole Oprey lineup. I feel disrespected.

Third, my feeling is that if this government is serious about making Metro stronger, then it will need guys like me on board to help with those changes. In other words, if this is going to fly, you are first going to have to recognize that little guys like me are feeling that their city is being torn out from under them on what appears to be a whim. For you to succeed, you have to carefully bring us along and you've got to give us a chance to have meaningful input. In that respect, these hearings cannot be seen as an end. This is far too serious and big to merely hold hearings here and then go on -- excuse me again -- and blunderingly implement. I don't want to believe this, so I am saying to you that just as you are not demons, we are not demons for wanting to participate in how our city is configured.

Fourth, where on earth is the fire? Surely this is Rome built in a day. Where did this timetable come from? By whom are we being invaded? Are the Fenians at the border again? One of the big contributing factors to the fear I carry with regard to this is that my elected municipal representatives are no longer ultimately responsible for what they were elected for by me and my brother and sister citizens, and it was, I'm sorry, the provincial government that chose to do this to me.

The government may again attempt to assuage the troubled waters by saying, "Well, the trustees are really nice guys and they won't really be interested in meddling in the petty affairs of how council works," but this being peacetime and all, and that there has never been a soupçon of malfeasance of an individual, let alone mass scale, on any of the councils that would warrant such a move, and that the councils of all the cities and one borough have not been fomenting insurrection, you've got to admit that the trustee, in a fundamental way, abrogated a fundamental democratic process. It's a fact. The government may not have taken this decision lightly, but they never told me so. Surely when the timetable is viewed as a two-year process, such as when Metro was first set up in the 1950s, then such abrogation would never have been necessary. QED.

So much for the backdrop of bad feeling. Now to a little substance --

The Vice-Chair: Would you close off now. You've exceeded your time. Could you just close off now, please.

Mr Sinclair: I apologize. I end with the last three sentences. This is to you, Mr Parker. To those who would say to me, "All you ever do is knock down plans of this well-intentioned government; if you're so smart, what's your alternative?" I would answer with two observations.

It is the government's unseemly haste that has placed opponents of these proposals in a reactive posture, and all I can say is, "For God's sake, slow down." Coming up with an alternative to these whirlwind measures on the spot is to play the same game the government appears to be playing: some kind of race to beat the Jeopardy clock to see who can come up with a city governance plan in two minutes.

I believe that this is a mug's game, and if changes must come, then this isn't the way to go about it, for changes of this nature require patience and a will to bring everyone affected on board.

The Vice-Chair: I'm sorry, I must interrupt you. You've gone well past 10 minutes. Thank you very much for being here this evening.

MARY NEWBERRY

The Vice-Chair: Can I have Mary Newberry, please. Welcome to the committee, Ms Newberry. You have 10 minutes in which to make your presentation.

Ms Mary Newberry: My name is Mary Newberry and I'm a long-time resident of downtown Toronto. Thank you for giving me the chance to speak. This weekend I attended a neighbour's informal gathering and found myself in conversation with an elected politician who offered me some advice in anticipation of appearing before this committee.

He suggested that I find what he called a constructive approach. He advised me that although I may feel differently, the members of the government who are bringing in these changes do not want to hurt me, ie, the person on the street. They might want to hurt other politicians, he particularly suggested Sewell, but besides them -- he's not really a politician, is he? -- I am not the target.

He advised me to consider my concerns and attempt to present them in a manner which could be addressed within the megacity blueprints, since in his opinion it was a fait accompli. So I thought about my major problems with Bill 103, and I think there are two, out of which others spring. The first is the severe reduction in local municipal politicians and the second is the manner in which it's being implemented. I have difficulties with other aspects of the package, Bill 104 and the changing of taxation, but I am sticking to the amalgamation.

I have been reading some of the reports in the paper and listening to people here today, and I understand that a lot of my concerns have been expressed by other people, so I'm not going to reiterate the same things that other people have done very well. I thought, as my friend suggested, I'd think of ways to address the lack of representation.

The first thing, which somebody else has mentioned, is the idea of the volunteer neighbourhood committees, similar to existing ratepayers' associations. I like ratepayers' associations. My partner, who runs a small business in the neighbourhood and feels that the community mostly supports his business, belongs to the ratepayers' association as a way to pay this back, but he notes that this ratepayers' association is emphatically not representative of the ratepayers, let alone of the community as a whole.

An elected politician must please many more people than the small number represented by a ratepayers association, and it is the influence of all, or at least a lot of these people, that helps to make the decisions which shape the neighbourhood. The people who are local politicians are concerned with details, little things like how many parking spaces are on a given street, which way does the traffic run, how much is there, what level of noise is acceptable, and is the current zoning still appropriate for the community? These are messy, untidy little issues which never go away. They change from time to time and it's the job, and I mean job, of the municipal politician to be sensitive to all these and other tiny details which are really important to the people whose daily lives are touched by them.

The point of all this is that the payback for an elected official who represents a community well is that she or he is re-elected. Volunteers have their own agenda for being there. These other details are time-consuming, and few of us would be willing or able to put in the amount of time that would be needed to take care of all these things and to take care of other people's concerns properly. That's why we pay our municipal councillors to do it, and a committee of volunteers cannot replace an elected representative.

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That brings me round to my second difficulty with the amalgamation and that's the provincial government's method. I said we pay the municipal and city councillors to do a job which we elect them to do. The trustees we have placed above them are also paid by me, but I didn't elect them. Then I hear that the government has been censured twice for ignoring proper parliamentary procedure: once for printing pamphlets that implied that Bill 103, and also Bill 104 but basically the package, was already law and another time for a similar offence involving a fax campaign.

To top it all off, we are told they will ignore the results of the referendum, and as I understand it, it is only a law introduced by this government that allows us to have a referendum. It seems only fair to assume that they did so because they believed in process, but not in this case. That's the big deal, process is the big deal, process is troublesome, time-consuming, messy and full of stumbling blocks, and that is right. If you don't like process, then you don't become a politician in a democratic country.

Another aspect of the reduction in the number of elected politicians is the changing cost to run for election in the new and larger municipalities. My understanding is that at the moment you can run an effective election and be elected for around $30,000. I've bumped into some of these people in my community and adjacent communities, and they often drive now -- I didn't bump into them in that aspect -- but they often drive secondhand cars or bicycles like me. Income isn't the only factor of course in determining like-mindedness, although it isn't like-mindedness in this situation, but income often plays a large part in what concerns us on a day-to-day basis, and that's what municipal politicians look after.

I like the idea that these people of influence are not people of affluence. The new configuration puts my friends out of the running, ever. So I haven't exactly been able to do what my friends have urged me to do. I can't think of a better alternative to democracy and elected officials. But I don't mean to totally discredit what my friend said to me. His words did make me realize that you on this committee and in the provincial government may be listening, so I said what I thought was important.

One last thought: I have a friend, another one, who came by the other day. He has a small child and he was very concerned with what will happen as a result of Bill 104. He said it was very hard to convince people that things could ever change so drastically that they would have such what he considered would be severe and drastic results, and I'm one of those people that find it hard to believe that there's change. I have an easy personality and find that solutions to my own problems, generally speaking, come fairly easily.

Like the people he was attempting to convince, I think that things will work out, but I know that is not always true. Maybe I will find a way to live with the changes. If my neighbourhood changes and I'm forced to leave -- and I plan to live in my house and grow old and die there, as my partner's mother did -- then the likelihood is that I will find another place to live and be happy, but I don't want to do that and I can't believe I said it. But what a terrible thing and how many others will not survive, and who am I to think that I'm immune.

As society changes, or my city changes so radically around me, will I still keep my composure? As Frances Gladstone pointed out earlier, it's not as if there aren't already people that are suffering badly in our city, and these changes don't address those issues. There are still going to be people suffering and suffering, in some cases, even worse.

Neighbourhoods, communities and cities are delicate things. I love Toronto. I've loved it since my family moved here when I was eight. It was so exciting. I heard the runup to a recent CBC Radio program about the transformation of medieval Spain from a society renowned for its openness and religious toleration to one torn apart by religious intolerance. It must have seemed impossible to the community at the time that such changes could happen, and that took a long time. You didn't recognize it even as it happened. It's not that all change is bad but it is always a good thing to listen to the people who are going to be affected and it's not a good thing to scare them. That is me, that is us.

Mr Colle: Your last comment -- I'm not sure whether you said you were afraid.

Ms Newberry: Well, there's fear that comes out of the process, I think, more than the actual proposals. It's not that I think the proposals aren't dangerous, they are, but the process is what actually raises the fear, when you feel that the government that is proposing these ignores official procedure and is not cognizant or respectful of the parliamentary procedure. That I think is where the fear comes from, and the quickness and the trustees.

The idea of the trustees reminds me of the way large corporations tend to behave when they want to fire somebody. People recommend that they go in and close off the office and escort the person out of the building, and they often do that with people who are long-time employees and it develops an enormous amount of resentment, and that seems to me what the trustees are doing, for the municipalities. I think it said in the paper yesterday that it was just something like, Leach didn't want to take any chances. Well, that seems very disingenuous and it raises fear on my part. What is he afraid of?

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much for appearing before us today.

LYBA SPRING

The Vice-Chair: I call on Lyba Spring, please. Welcome to the hearings.

Ms Lyba Spring: Good afternoon. I realize that I'm addressing you at the end of a long day. I also realize that you have probably been listening to the same arguments, stated somewhat differently, over and over again. At first I thought I would be innovative -- a poem, perhaps a song to brighten up your day? But the risk of being seen as frivolous was too great and the stakes are much too high.

What are the stakes for me? Let me tell you a little about myself. I am a middle-class person living in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood in a 28-year-old marriage. Pretty straight, eh? But I am also one of those citizens who would be prepared to pay higher taxes if it meant that the services that have been available to the people of Metropolitan Toronto could be salvaged. In other words, I don't want this government's tax break if it means that everything I was raised with will no longer exist -- not for me and not for my children. So there are my politics on the table.

Regarding Bill 103, again let me begin with the personal. Although we have been living in the city of York for the past 16 years, we have always sent our children to city of Toronto schools, taken them to a city of Toronto library. We've swum in Toronto pools and eaten in Toronto restaurants. I have no allegiance to the city of York. I do not think it is a viable entity, because its tax base is so pitifully small. You are aware, I am sure, that York taxpayers pay the highest property taxes in Metro. So you can see that it would mean little to me to lose the city of York.

Nevertheless, I want the opportunity to say so at a public meeting in front of my friends and neighbours in said city of York. I want to say this to my local councillor. I want to vote on this matter. I was rather hoping before Minister Leach proposed that all the municipalities amalgamate that there would be an opportunity to have a referendum over amalgamating the city of York with the city of Toronto. Some York councillors actually ran on that platform in the last election.

In other words, I want a voice. Bill 103 is taking away that voice. More insidious still, it takes away our elected voices. You have already heard other citizens decrying the lack of democracy in your naming trustees to oversee local moneys spent before even passing this legislation. In naming a transition team, ie, an appointed group of individuals, you are effectively superseding our elected representatives. We eagerly await Lloyd Axworthy's stiff note of protest to the Ontario government. This type of Hong Konging is undemocratic to the point of benevolent dictatorship.

Perhaps if I tell you about my work, you can put my anger into context. I work for the city of Toronto in the department of public health. I'm a sexuality educator. This means that I see people from all walks of life who need information and/or help. For example, I work with prostitutes, both in my office and in the streets. I counsel young people in a sexual health clinic. I teach children in school about their changing bodies. I teach high school students how to avoid the pitfalls of early sexual experimentation. I distribute condoms. I listen to sexual abuse disclosures and report them. I write pamphlets. In short, the taxpayers of Ontario currently pay me to do what I consider to be very important work.

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What does my work have to do with Bill 103? You probably do not want people to address this committee on any other issue but the amalgamation of the municipalities. But it is impossible to address amalgamation out of context, namely, ignoring the announcements from what is now known as mega-week. If the new megacity has to pay for the public health work that I do, they will have to strip it down to its bare bones. The bare bones will be programs that are designated by law, for example, sexually transmitted disease follow-up. The health promotion work that I do will very likely fall by the wayside, and my job along with it. "Oho," you are thinking, "this woman wants to save her job." Well, of course, and not only because we have a family to support, but also because of the devastating loss to the public if these crucial programs are cut.

Take the example of puberty and other sexuality programs taught by public health staff in schools. If they go by the wayside or are taught by board of education staff, children may not continue to come forward as they do now to tell of adults or older teenagers who are molesting them. Say a child does not disclose the abuse. Although some children do manage to heal without any intervention once the abuse stops, others do not. Most of the prostitutes I work with, for example, have indeed been sexually abused. Several young people I have worked with in the past 15 years have, as a result of their abuse, been sexually assaulted as teens and adults, become anorexic or bulimic, attempted suicide or mutilated themselves to diminish the psychological pain.

What will happen to those really troubled 13-year-old kids I see in school who trust me and then come to my office for help? Right now I help them by sending them to clinic: for the morning after pill, for birth control pills, for an HIV test or for a pregnancy test. When there is no longer a public health presence in Toronto schools, these and other serious health issues are unlikely to receive the attention they do now.

Yesterday's Globe and Mail said about HIV infection that a "significant number of people must have been infected as teenagers" because the median age for new infections is now 23. That is, half of all new cases occur in people 23 and younger. They were infected in their teens and it takes something like 10 years for the virus to show up. We need to give the message from puberty on about postponing intercourse. If they do have sex, we need to hammer home the message about consistent condom use. My fear is that one big Toronto will not be able to afford to pay for this work. But we will all end up paying for it in the end, as we lose the battle against teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and sexual violence.

Let's get back to the more mundane business of enumerating the arguments you have been hearing day after day since February 3: Not one of the 25 recent reports on governance in the Toronto area supports amalgamation. With the offloading of soft services to the municipalities, taxes will inevitably increase while services are reduced. The megacity paves the way for the downloading of soft services. You could never stick it to smaller municipalities; they would quickly go bankrupt.

The new megacity's politicians won't squawk. The opposition will have been removed and/or silenced. Amalgamation itself will cost a fortune in time and money. It will not save the taxpayers money because the bureaucracy needed to run it will have burgeoned. The inner core of Toronto will wither and die as business flees. Even the board of trade said so, for heaven's sake. But you've heard it all before, so why should I bother?

To be frank, I have no reason to respect the Conservative government of Ontario. They pretend to have the best interests of citizens at heart but in fact trample over their rights, pitting the rich against the poor. I have watched services shrink and seen people shrink with them as they line up for the food bank behind my office. I have no illusions about what you are doing here today; you are going through the motions. The day these hearings opened Minister Leach said "unless there is some information that we are totally unaware of, and I don't believe that there is, then we will be moving forward with our agenda." In other words, it's a done deal. So who done it? Who profits?

If taxpayers in the big Toronto cannot pay for the soft services, the surviving services will of course be privatized, which is what this game is all about anyway. Friendly tenders will stand to make big money. The union employees and the benefits that they fought for will be history. What have we seen as the hospitals shrink their staff and sell off hospital services one by one? Has any of you had a relative in the hospital recently? I have. It has become a dangerous place to be.

Let me just conclude by saying that I wanted my day in court despite the clear message that I would not be heard. I have felt too much anger with nowhere to put it. But I should give the last word to my mother. She's 88 and she has never been a political person. That was my dad's place. My mother has a friend who requires 24-hour care. Her weekend caregiver was a single woman raising two teenagers. She was just getting by on welfare. She was a nurse in her native country. When she was accepted into a gerontology course she was ecstatic. But when her welfare was cut by 21.6%, her dream of becoming a professional in Canada evaporated. My mother's friend reported that the woman spent that whole weekend in tears. My mother's comment: "That Harris, I hate him." She hates him for the waste of human potential. She hates him for his inhumanity.

Bill 103, like the omnibus bill before it, allows the Harris government to finish the job of dismantling the "I help you/you help me" way of life that was so painstakingly built, so that everyone could have access to the basic necessities of life. If Bill 103 is passed in its present form, life as we have known it in this city will lie in tatters at our feet.

Mr Marchese: I appreciate your taking the time to come and make this presentation. I appreciate the link you're making with the downloading. A number of people of course aren't talking about it because we're dealing with this particular bill, but the interlinking of the two is very much there, and you're just one of many who obviously understands that.

You also raise another important point that I raised, and that is that Monsieur Leach says he's not been convinced by any evidence because he hasn't seen it, yet deputant after deputant brings forth evidence, built around experience and referring to other experts who say there is no evidence that this is a good thing, and he's disregarding it. What's he looking for?

Ms Spring: As the French say, Il s'en fout pas mal -- he doesn't give up flying.

LINDA SHEPPARD

The Vice-Chair: Good afternoon, Ms Sheppard.

Ms Linda Sheppard: I'd like to say that I really appreciate having the opportunity to come down here this afternoon and make my comments to you about Bill 103.

My name is Linda Sheppard and I have been an active resident of the Beach area of the city of Toronto for over 20 years. While I have been close to local politics from time to time since about 1972, I don't usually involve myself in such a public way as speaking at committee hearings. However, I was so dismayed by the actions of the Harris government in introducing Bill 103 that I felt compelled to place my name on the list of speakers, and here I am. The main reason I did this was because, in my view, we are not facing an ordinary political situation but one where a line has been crossed that I am really very concerned about.

The line I refer to is one where a political action has been taken that flies directly in the face of fundamental democratic principles. I feel that Bill 103 is a direct attack on the basic nature of democratic process and, frankly, I was enraged by it. I find it absolutely astonishing that one level of government would presume to destroy the existing form of local government in six municipalities plus Metro, an area with a total population of over 2.3 million people, without any, and I repeat, any, consultation with those citizens affected by these changes. In my view, this action strikes at the very basic fundamentals of how change should be brought about in a democracy.

While my appearance here today stems mainly from my concern about the need for democratic process, I am also aware of other reasons to be opposing Bill 103, and while I know you've heard many of them over and over, I wanted to just note the few that had resonance for me.

First, not one study to date, to my knowledge, has recommended amalgamation of the six local governments. Second, most knowledgeable critics state that 2.3 million people is not an efficient or cost-effective size for an administrative unit of local government.

Then there is the anti-democratic nature of the trusteeship and the transition team. There is the lack of attention to governance where it is really needed, in my view, and that's between the municipalities of Metro and the rest of the GTA.

Last is the measures the government is enacting at the same time as Bill 103, namely, the downloading of inappropriate services to the municipal level, as well as the establishment of AVA, both measures that experts argue will increase the local property tax burden of the citizens.

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I know that I needn't go on and that you are well aware of the concerns of the opponents who have appeared here to date, but there were one or two other things I did want to say.

I come from an area of the city that is well served by its local councillors. The citizens where I live know they can depend on their councillors to call regular neighbourhood meetings, especially if there is an issue of local concern. The residents know that these councillors will come to these meetings with real information and that they will listen to the concerns.

I have heard vigorous debates in my neighbourhood about stop signs, traffic flows, restricted turns, the boardwalk, holding tanks etc. Of course, everyone doesn't win their position, but everyone who wants to, does get heard. This is a quality of life in our city that we don't want to lose and, more important, I firmly believe this is the essence of local democracy in Metro and the reason Toronto works as well as it does as a city. People care about the details.

There's one last point I wanted to make this afternoon, and that is that I am not opposed to change and I am not committed to the status quo. But I am committed to change that is brought about by democratic process. So I have the following suggestions to make to the Tory members of this committee and I hope you might take them back to your caucus and Mike Harris, and especially Al Leach.

The first is to put Bill 103 on hold and extend the terms of our current municipal politicians for a year. Appoint a public committee to hold hearings into alternatives for delivering good, efficient, cost-effective and responsive local government in Metro, and also to look at how to link our local governments to the rest of the GTA. Mandate the committee to have hearings across Metro and to hear from all interested parties, individuals, community groups etc.

Also, mandate this committee to commission research from recognized academics in the field of municipal public policy. Ask this committee to come forward with at least two viable alternatives, put these options to the public for debate and then a vote, because it seems to me that if you instituted a process like this, you would end up with a system of local governance that the majority of the citizens of Metro could accept. You would have been true to the fundamental principles of democratic process and, who knows, maybe some of your local Tory MPPs might even get re-elected.

Those are the end of my comments. Again, I thank you for the opportunity to come down here this afternoon.

Mr Parker: Thank you very much for appearing here this afternoon. I take your point that most knowledgeable critics state that 2.3 million people is not an efficient or cost-effective size for an administrative unit of government, and I want to follow up on that. In Metro, for some time now, we've lived with the Metropolitan level of government. That now represents about 2.3 million people and carries out about 72% of the municipal spending in the Metro area, and I'll say it does 72% of the municipal business in this area.

That's a number that has grown over time; the size has grown and the share of the municipal business conducted at that level has grown over time. Have we been doing the wrong thing in moving in that direction? Should we get some of that out of Metro and back into the municipalities?

Ms Sheppard: Mr Parker, I don't really feel I have adequate knowledge to answer that question, but I have been following all the information as it becomes available in the press and elsewhere, and I would see that as something that would have to be looked at really carefully. Maybe you're right. Maybe it has been a mistake. But none of us knows at this point because we haven't had any public discussion around those kinds of issues.

Mr Parker: We did carry out public hearings last spring in the aftermath of the Golden report. We went out to various communities and sought some guidance as to what people thought of the Golden report and what they thought the future should be. The result that tended to come in was that most people said, "The status quo is not an option," but they wanted to keep their particular piece of the status quo. So that whole process was not very effective in leading us to any sort of conclusion, other than we had to do something and that leaving things as they were was not satisfactory.

That led us to the Crombie Who Does What process, which was an exercise in bringing together some of the best thinking we could find, to delve into these questions and the result of that was the recommendation that goes into Bill 103. How is that process flawed?

Ms Sheppard: I think it was flawed because I, for one, was not aware that, after the Golden commission's report, you were having public hearings. I don't recall my councillor ever coming to my area and setting up a meeting and saying, "Look, this is what Golden recommends." My recollection from Golden is that the recommendation was that Metro be abolished and what was to follow that was not really clear. But I'm not really aware that happened in my community and I'd be very interested if other people in this room and other speakers were aware that process had actually happened in their neighbourhoods.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Sheppard, for appearing here today.

JENNIFER LICHT

The Vice-Chair: I'd like to call upon Jennifer Licht, please. Welcome, Ms Licht.

Ms Jennifer Licht: I would like to thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to speak on the subject of Bill 103. My name is Jennifer Licht, and I have lived and worked in the city of Toronto for over five and a half years now. I have just recently gone back to university to pursue a second degree in sociology and urban studies.

I want to tell you that I am a person who shies away from public speaking and getting involved in political issues, yet over the past three months I have gone from discussing Bill 103 with professors, students, friends and family, to writing letters to my elected representatives at all levels of government, to attending public meetings every week, to sitting in the visitors' gallery in the Legislature, to sitting here in front of this committee today, and all for one reason: to find some way to stop the passage of Bill 103.

I would like to recommend to the committee that this bill be stopped. Bill 103 is anti-democratic by nature and implication, and its impact would mean a far-reaching and irreversible downward spiral for this city.

I would like to take this opportunity to tell you a bit more in detail about how and why I came to Toronto, because I think details can be essential in creating a bigger picture.

Before Toronto, I had been living in Montreal, precisely for the reason of attending university. Having come from the United States, I was struck by many things about Canada, in general, which I experienced through Montreal: the different languages and cultures of the city, the vibrant street life with its many cafés and bars, and the comparative safety of the city streets.

While at university, I met my partner and after graduating we decided to move to the Toronto area where his family lived and there were better employment prospects. Now, I have to say many people in Montreal warned me about Toronto. They said that Toronto was just like an American city, that you could hardly tell the difference.

Immediately, I had images of New York, a city I had often visited and had also been born in. I remembered the garbage all over the streets and sidewalks; the lack of trees and greenery; iron bars over windows and doors; boarded-up, abandoned businesses; old, broken-down buildings, city blocks, and sometimes whole neighbourhoods; and especially my apprehension in walking through unsafe areas of the city, which seemed to switch back and forth from block to block.

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But when I got to Toronto, this was certainly not what I found. Instead I found clean, safe streets, many multi-ethnic residential neighbourhoods sprinkled with trees and parks, all within walking or bicycling distance to a great mix of small shops and restaurants representing all different cultures as well as socioeconomic backgrounds. Being a bicyclist myself, I was excited to see bicycle lanes and more bicyclists on the streets than I'd seen in other American cities. In short, Toronto was nothing like what people had said, and over these past years I have found Toronto to be a very comfortable and livable city, just like Fortune magazine said.

At this point I could give you facts and figures from numerous studies and authorities, none of which have indicated that amalgamation of the seven municipal governments in Metropolitan Toronto would be a good thing.

I could bring your attention to the fact that the only real detail in this bill is in the 15 out of 23 pages which deal with the sweeping and undemocratic powers bestowed upon the trustees and transition team, powers which are outside the jurisdiction of the courts, powers which make a mockery of accountability by giving these appointed officials, paid by municipal taxpayers, directive power over elected representatives for over a year.

I could direct you to the contempt this bill has for the legislative process as it establishes the powers of the trustees over the financial affairs of the municipal governments effective retroactive to the date of Bill 103's introduction, not the date of its passage.

I could bring your attention to the loosely defined powers given to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, powers which are subject to interpretation outside of local democratic processes and wholly without accountability.

I could bring your attention to the lack of detail in the description of how the amalgamated city would actually function, the one-sentence line referring to another tier of government, the neighbourhood councils, but failing to describe whether these councils would be appointed or elected, what their powers would be or what was even meant by a neighbourhood.

I am sure you already have all this information, so instead I would like to tell you a story as told to me by my father.

This story is about another city, the city my father was born in, grew up in and lived in until he was just about my age. The story begins with a large city which had a mayor and council for the entire city, and five boroughs, each with its own locally elected borough president who took care of local borough issues and finances. Each of the five boroughs had its own division of the departments of public works and parks and other such authorities.

In the early 1970s this city decided to centralize these departments and remove administrative powers from the boroughs to the city. At the same time, borough presidents were given dramatically less power, that is, financial decision-making power, over their local areas. Very soon people like my father noticed changes in their services. For example, if there was a pothole on your street, whereas before it would have taken about a week to fix, with the new centralized system it could take up to one, two or even three months to fix, as long as you made enough noise, that is.

At the same time, because there weren't sufficient state and federal funds to cope with social inequities within the city and there was no access to resources beyond the city limits, the city was forced to use its municipal tax base to address these inequities. You see, taxes began to go up across the entire city but only certain areas benefited, and only somewhat, while many boroughs, like where my father lived, were largely ignored. There was an increasing resentment which grew. People began to feel as though they were paying more and more taxes but getting fewer and fewer services in their own neighbourhoods.

Transit fares would increase on some routes but not others; some neighbourhoods all the way across the city in another borough would get funds, but not others. There was nothing the citizens of the boroughs could do, because they had lost local budgetary control and the centralized bureaucratic system would not listen to their concerns.

My father remembers the increasing anger he felt at the city he had grown up in, the disenfranchisement he felt, as though the city had turned its back on him and many others who had helped to build it. People started to leave in great numbers -- urban flight, as it has been called -- and as people left the tax base shrank even more, but the need for funds continued to grow, as those who remained were increasingly poorer. Taxes went up but people were getting less and less. Finally my father and his new family left too. He left behind his relatives and his roots because he just couldn't afford to live there any longer.

It took five to 10 years for this city to go from a decent bond rating to zero, and nearly bankrupt. In a large megalopolis with neighbourhoods which varied across all lines, overcentralization resulted in an unhappy, frustrated citizenry because the city did what it thought was expedient overall without listening to the various local needs in all the neighbourhoods in each of the boroughs.

Many of you probably know by now that the city of which I speak is New York. Many of you might be thinking, "But New York is a great global, cultural and economic hub, a great place to visit," and I would agree with you. But let me tell you, as great as New York is to visit, I would never want to live there, and this is something I never want to have to say about Toronto.

I don't want my city to be taken away from me as my father's was from him. You might say it will never happen to Toronto, but it's funny how easy it is to lose sight of details, and before you know it the big picture doesn't look the same any more. It's funny how a few unattended potholes here and there can turn into huge, gaping holes throughout the city. I don't want this to happen and I don't think anyone else does either.

I don't want to look back in five or 10 years and point to Bill 103 as the beginning of the end of local democracy, accessibility and accountability in Toronto, the beginning of the end of a vibrant, livable city. Do you want to remember, yourself or your children, how you had the opportunity to stop the passage of this bill but didn't? I don't, and that is why I am here speaking to this committee today.

I ask you once again, please take your opportunity to stop Bill 103. If you won't do that, at least let the people who live in this great city have a say in its fate. Let the people decide.

The Chair: You've used up your allotted time. I want to thank you for coming before the committee this afternoon.

LEE ZASLOFSKY

The Chair: Would Lee Zaslofsky please come forward. Good afternoon, sir. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Lee Zaslofsky: Let me begin by saying that I strongly oppose Bill 103. I'm here to urge you to recommend to the Legislature that the bill be scrapped immediately. I urge you also to recommend to the Premier that Al Leach be immediately relieved of his duties as Minister of Municipal Affairs. He should be replaced by a minister whose mandate is to work in a democratic, respectful manner with the people of Toronto and surrounding municipalities to come up with a well-thought-out plan for the future that has broad support among the citizens of the area.

I realize that this would constitute a major retreat by the Harris government. That is because the government has recklessly committed itself to an unworkable plan and then resorted to a strategy of bullying and bluff to push it through.

Nevertheless past governments, including Tory governments, have sometimes recognized that they have ventured into a blind alley and have had the courage and common sense to come back out of it.

I'm not going to rehash for you the glaring faults and mistaken premises that mar Bill 103. Many others have already done that and no doubt many others will do it again. Nor am I going to indulge my wish to characterize in detail the sinister, undemocratic aspects of the bill and its presentation that first shocked and then enraged so many people.

Suffice it to say that in regard to Bill 103, as in so many other initiatives, the Harris government has acted more like a would-be dictatorship than like a democratic government. Rather, I would like to invite you to accompany me as I make my rounds visiting the various community organizations and institutions with which I'm involved. Each of them will be affected by Bill 103 and the other bills introduced around the same time in an orgy of legislative activity that was clearly designed to baffle and intimidate the people of Ontario.

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Before I begin my rounds, a word about myself: I have lived in downtown Toronto since I arrived in Canada 27 years ago. I have been a tenant in Cityhome, the city of Toronto's non-profit housing, for the past 10 years. I have been employed for the past seven years as a community health worker at a community health centre serving the downtown area. I want to add also that I am a gay man, but I was counting all the years, and I don't know how many years I've been a gay man. I just want to throw that in.

I have a large number of community involvements and I want you to accompany me, if you will, and only in a virtual sense, to three of them. The first is Scadding Court Community Centre where for the past six years I have been chair of the board of management. Receiving its core funding from the city of Toronto, the centre is owned by the city. None the less the city does not administer it directly but rather delegates that job to the board, which is composed of community members elected at an annual general meeting of the centre's members.

At our last board meeting we discussed the megacity proposal. We decided to oppose it. We believe that the megacity will not be nearly as responsive to the needs of our community and to Scadding Court as the city of Toronto is now. We believe that we can expect cuts to our budget. We fear that our reserve fund, accumulated patiently over the years, will be seized by a megacity desperate for money because of the immense costs of downloading. We fear we will be accused of that dread condition known as duplication, since the downtown area has a number of community facilities, all of them heavily used, and bullied into some form of downsizing.

We cherish our relationship with the city. We have good access to our local elected officials, two of whom sit on our board. We are concerned that our future will be gravely compromised if the megacity goes through. Most of all we are concerned that our community will be devastated by the effects of downloading and that many more of our neighbours will be impoverished by them.

As we leave Scadding Court, I hope you will walk with me up through Kensington market to Doctors Hospital, where I am the chair of the community advisory committee and, as such, a member of the hospital board. Although the megacity proposal does not touch directly on that hospital's future, it is part of a series of measures that, taken together, seem like a murderous attack on our community, because as at Scadding Court, the future of this community institution is in grave doubt.

Recently the community advisory committee arranged to develop a plan to mobilize the community in the event of the hospital's being ordered out of existence. We have good reason to believe that the Health Services Restructuring Commission will issue such a direction. We believe that such a decision would be a mistake since it would destroy the only community hospital left in the western part of the city.

The destruction of the hospital would be a serious blow to our community in other ways as well: jobs lost, excellent programs done away with, a unique approach to our diverse community lost in the shuffle. Megacity is of a piece with this threat to our community. It will bring homogenization, downsizing and destruction.

Finally, please join me as I catch a streetcar and then a bus on my way to city hall. We're having a meeting of the downtown community health board and we've invited the AIDS prevention groups that the city funds to join us for a discussion of the megacity. I've been a member of the community health board, and its representative on the city of Toronto board of health, since 1992. Elected at an annual meeting, the community health board's eight members and four associates are residents of the downtown who are interested in health issues.

AIDS is issue number one. Thousands of our neighbours are HIV-positive. All the rest of us are affected in one way or another, or in many ways, by AIDS.

The city of Toronto has done something about AIDS. Through the public health department, the city runs a whole series of programs with funding from the province. Most innovative among them is the more than $1 million of city money -- property tax money -- the city spends yearly to fund AIDS prevention. The program was developed in the 1980s as part of a city AIDS strategy. It enlists community members from almost all of Toronto's diverse communities in the fight to prevent the spread of AIDS. It supports them in developing and implementing strategies that are tailored to the needs of particular communities so that they can get the word out in the most appropriate ways.

This program, together with others like needle exchange, work. They have played a major role in holding the spread of AIDS to levels far below comparable cities in the US.

At our meeting with the groups that do this work, the message was clear: Megacity would never take on the funding of such a program. No other municipality in Metro has such a program, though the city has repeatedly urged them to initiate it. The decision of the meeting was to oppose the megacity because it would likely mean the death of the city's AIDS program and therefore the illness and death of more of our neighbours.

Thank you for accompanying me on my rounds. Everywhere I go, in every meeting I attend -- and I attend quite a few, although I stay home and watch TV sometimes too, just like Mr Leach -- the message is similar: The Harris government is waging a kind of war on us in Toronto, stripping us of our institutions, our community programs, our democratic rights.

At every meeting the mood has gone from one of shock, past fear and despair, to sheer determination. We know we are up against powerful forces, that for some reason the government of Ontario has decided to attack us. We are not sure we can save what we hold dear in the city of Toronto, but we won't let it go easily, we won't give up without a fight, because it's important to us. We love it too much.

This fight did not need to happen. It can be ended any time. Please do what I recommended above and bring peace to our city.

Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview): Thanks for coming down and making a presentation to our committee here. Mr Leach on the government side, in order to promote Bill 103, has been saying that this will save us money, will be a more efficient system, will have better representation, that taxes will be lowered, as a matter of fact. We, as the opposition in the House, have been saying: "This is not so, but if you have that information to prove what you're saying, let's have it. Give it to us so that people can be apprised of that information." Agencies have also been saying what we've been saying, that this is not the case. Now we have a ministry employee saying that the government didn't give you the full facts, up to $900 million.

Do you believe that until the government comes clear with this it should abandon this idea, withdraw the bill and really go to the people, have a referendum on the issue? Do you feel it's important enough to have a real, binding referendum on this issue?

Mr Zaslofsky: Yes, I do. I think we saw today in the Globe and Mail -- you allude to the $911 million that someone in the government seems to have forgotten to mention as they talk about the savings that are going to be brought about by amalgamation. I think there are other grotesque lies and evasions and concealments in the megacity plan and that the people of the city and the people of Metro have seen through it, that they want to come forward and say no to megacity. Their only concern is that they've been told by the government they elected that no matter what they say, they're going to be ignored.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Zaslofsky, for coming forward this evening.

JON SHORT

The Chair: Would Jon Short please come forward. Good evening, Mr Short. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Jon Short: Thank you. My name is Jon Short. I am a student at York University. I have prepared a few, as it turns out, probably quite brief remarks to make about the amalgamation of the cities of Metropolitan Toronto.

First I'd like to make it clear that I am not opposed in principle to the idea of amalgamating the current cities of Metro Toronto under a single government, particularly if it were to include the current 905 areas surrounding Metro Toronto. However, I have a number of serious concerns about the way this government has proceeded with its version of a megacity and about certain provisions in Bill 103.

Some weeks ago I received the provincial government's pamphlet One Toronto, in which Metro Torontonians were assured that amalgamation would "make it easier to do what we do best: live and work together in a modern, safe, prosperous community." The government wants to give residents of Metropolitan Toronto the feeling that they have nothing to fear from Bill 103 and that they will be net beneficiaries of the amalgamation process.

However, in my view the behaviour of the government belies any such assurances. If I am sceptical regarding the government's intentions, it is due to the contempt for democracy the government has shown in the process of passing this legislation. This government has given the impression that it has something to hide in the speed with which it has acted. Rather than a careful and open approach, the legislation has been hurried through the Legislature as if to avoid public scrutiny.

The government first announced that it would oppose municipal referenda on Bill 103, then later decided that it would allow them, but stated that the results would have no impact on its behaviour. Likewise, although the government has allowed for public hearings, it has declared, through its representatives, that it will not be influenced by what is said, putting my presentation today in the strange position of appearing irrelevant before it was ever made.

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The citizens who appear before this committee are being asked to give the government reasons why it should not go ahead with this legislation as currently formulated, when ironically the scope of the legislation and the apparent urgency with which it is being moved through the Legislature suggest that the government wants at all costs to avoid justifying its actions to the citizens and residents whom it will allegedly benefit. If this legislation is essentially benign, the government has certainly given the opposite impression in its choice of tactics.

Beyond the procedural issue, I have related concerns about the substantive provisions of Bill 103. First, the appointment of trustees, who, unelected, have the power to oversee and reverse the decisions of municipal governments, represents a direct contradiction of the will of the citizens. Second, the fact that Bill 103 says virtually nothing about what the new city's government structure will took like, instead providing for another entirely appointed transition team to flesh out all the details, is alarming to anyone who cares about democracy.

The fact that the citizens being affected by this legislation will have no input into, or recourse from, its decisions, shows utter contempt for the people who will live in the city of Metro Toronto. Further, Bill 103 will reduce the number of elected representatives from 106 to 44. This creates a ratio of one elected representative for every 50,000 residents.

If we combine this measure with the rearranging and downloading of services in the Metro area, and I don't think we should in any way believe that these two things are separate issues really, it means that although more services are being paid for out of property taxes, the citizens paying those taxes for services that affect them directly will have much less access to elected officials.

This represents a violation of the principle of no taxation without representation, and a betrayal by this government of the taxpayer, in whose interest it claims to act. Finally, this legislation creates a larger, more distant level of government, which will be less responsible to local citizens and yet have more power over their lives. This is a fundamental reversal of the idea that government close to the people is better government because it is more responsive and because it is more responsive to local needs.

In conclusion, I'd like to say that the main idea of my remarks has been that Bill 103 is a threat to the ability of citizens to responsibly govern themselves. Although municipalities are creatures of the provincial government by law, there is nothing that prevents the provincial government from acting in a way which respects the rights of local citizens to democratically govern themselves.

There are alternatives to this particular version of amalgamation, which seems intent, in the various ways I described above, on making it extremely hard for citizens to preserve the mechanisms of local democratic government. Small increases in efficiency are not worth the larger sacrifice of democratic government. I would like to appeal to the members of this committee, if you care about democracy, to vote with your conscience on the final reading of this piece of legislation.

Mr Marchese: Thank you, Mr Short, for taking the time to come today. You and many others who have preceded you feel very strongly about what is taking place and how that affects their local government, and they obviously have come with a great deal of passion to defend it, and you're one of them and I thank you for that.

How do you feel about the fact that this government -- particularly Mr Harris, because it's really his decision and Mr Leach is simply the instrument of that agenda -- has decided that Metro is incapable really of solving its own problems and that you really shouldn't have much of a say in that regard, and that you too probably by direct inference are incapable of coming to terms with some of the problems that we're facing? How do you respond to that?

Mr Short: I think, pretty obviously, that's consistent with the whole approach of the Harris government up to this point. They are behaving since they took office, and I should also add that nothing in their election platform suggested they were going to do anything like this, and everything they've done has suggested that they are the only people who have any real ability to make decisions. They're doing everything in the name of efficiency, and efficiency in this particular case means democracy can effectively fall by the wayside.

Unfortunately, we all know that the most effective form of government, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship. However, in democratic societies such as ours we believe that it's reasonable to limit efficiency in certain cases and this is clearly one of them.

I would say to Mr Harris that he is very mistaken when he believes that he alone is able to make intelligent decisions about this, and I would even debate that he is making an intelligent decision because I think there is very little evidence in other reports supporting what he's doing except for the one he had specially commissioned.

Mr Marchese: How do you respond to the fact that Monsieur Leach says he has seen no evidence to convince him he's on the wrong course, yet every deputant comes forth with many ideas and they cite the very sources we cite to show that from an economic point of view there is no evidence to suggest they're going to solve anything or that there are any savings, and that the issue as it relates to values and what people value in their own communities is that there are great dangers, that they will affect those values they hold dear? How do you respond to the fact that Leach says there's no evidence to convince him they're on the wrong course?

Mr Short: I think there's no evidence because Mr Leach doesn't want to see any evidence. There's plenty of evidence out there. If I can go beyond my prepared remarks I would say the agenda of this government is to download and privatize as much as possible, so they're pursuing a particular agenda here which will benefit certain segments of this society and hurt others very badly.

Unfortunately, it's quite cynical because when the real effects of this bill start to make themselves felt, when the downtown core of Toronto turns into cities like Chicago and Detroit with a lot of urban problems, this government probably will not be in power and will not be responsible at that time for any of the things that happen.

Mr Marchese: Another response to the whole issue of the referendum: You've heard that around Hamilton there are a number of communities that have recently voted against being amalgamated or subjugated by the city and that the vote there was quite high, in fact higher than most municipal election turnouts. It appears to me that Leach is going to disregard that. I've heard nothing from either Monsieur Leach or Harris saying, "We're going to respect that." We're worried about what they're going to do there and that they won't listen to the referendum here. How do you react to that?

Mr Short: I'm not surprised, for the reasons I've already stated. It makes me quite angry, although what this government has done since the day it was elected and the various measures it's put in place have shown absolute disregard for anything except its agenda, and yet it hasn't produced any evidence that it in fact has the answers it claims to have. They haven't created jobs. They haven't made living conditions better --

The Chair: Mr Short, you've gone beyond your allotted time. I'm sorry to interrupt but thank you for coming forward this evening and making your presentation.

TOM SMARDA

The Chair: Would Tom Smarda please come forward. Good evening, Mr Smarda and welcome to the committee.

Mr Tom Smarda: Greetings. I'm Tom Smarda. Thank you for your time here. I am a volunteer coordinator at Eastminster church, which provides an Out of the Cold program, which is an emergency shelter for the homeless.

Since the Mike Harris government has been in, helping to make our government more efficient, I guess there's no evidence of increased homelessness or increased poverty or increased people in sleeping bags on Yonge Street either if you happen to be driving a limo down by the Hummingbird Centre and checking out some of the exclusive art exhibits priced at $4,000.

This is the Toronto city I love. This is the Toronto city I was born in. The Canada Life building was the biggest building in the city when I was born, so there have been a lot of rapid changes in the last few decades that people from far and wide have noticed, including the CN Tower, as we become a world-class city.

My question around some of this is, what does being a world-class city entail? Does it mean we need wall-to-wall slums except for people who are living in exclusive neighbourhoods where there are walls and security systems? There's a booming business in security systems.

If that kind of world-class city is what Toronto is going to be touted to be, then maybe people need to carry a gun. I hope we don't have to go to those extremes because I certainly don't want to feel unsafe.

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However, I feel that governments have some responsibility in creating the conditions for people to be empowered themselves in order to prosper, and for people to feel empowered and to prosper entails a certain amount of democracy so that people have the freedom to do that.

One of the ethical things I see is that the Harris government is saying they are going to create an opportunity for people to make money without having the government then remove what it is they have produced, and that would come in the form of a tax break and that would create a greater prosperity and eventually Toronto would be better off.

Well, I feel also this would take away people's public input into certain things, such as if we have water privatized, so then situations like that would take away people's direct participation in circumstances that affect them. I feel the creation of this megacity is one step in disempowering people in order to start to privatize the resources in the city and the resources planet-wide by corporate control, where through free trade agreements and NAFTA, corporations are able to come in and start removing resources. So Canada becomes, and Toronto in a sense becomes, a little piece in the puzzle of a domination on the planet.

We cannot continue to have 20% of the world's population using 80% of the world's resources, logging off an area the size of England each year and continue to do this ad infinitum and expect growth, because we can't expect the rest of the Third World to develop, to become like us, a consumer society of that intensity producing garbage and at the same time call that equality.

It's just going to fall apart like a house of cards. What I feel is happening is that people in Toronto are starting to wake up to acting locally and thinking globally, seeing some of these paradigms of how we can exploit the earth and leave garbage and just continue to produce, using resources and producing garbage and calling that jobs, at the same time with people making profits and downsizing and laying people off.

Where are the jobs? In this efficient city that might be visualized, we might end up with one person pushes a button and everything gets done, and you're going to have the other 99.99% of the people unemployed. Where are they going to get their income from?

It becomes the interaction of people on a neighbourhood basis creating their services and support networks for each other in order to empower themselves so they can raise their children in a caring, safe environment, with an educational system that works, with clean air, clean water and jobs that facilitate creating that kind of environment.

If we're going to remove a basis, for instance, in the city of Toronto, where people can do that and they're not going to get government support and in fact are going to be told that if they don't like it, they have no recourse through the courts of law -- who voted that in? -- all of a sudden it becomes this grab and I start to question, what kind of an agenda is going on here?

These are things that people are thinking about. I know there are volunteers who are captains at the Royal Bank Tower downtown and they volunteer at the Out of the Cold program. They come out and they help out to feed the hungry and to offer the homeless a warm place to stay.

This situation is across the board. I know that people in Ontario are sick and tired of paying taxes for programs that don't work. Great. I agree with that too. We all agree with that. So how are we going to implement that? And if we're going to talk about special interest groups, what is the agenda of those 300 people on the planet who have more than a billion dollars of their own resources in terms of cash? And when we're looking at transnational companies that are larger than most nation states on the planet, that is a lot of power.

That is a lot of power concentrated in the media. That is a lot of power that if I want to build a megaproject worth $900 million, I can blow a measly $3 million or $4 million on lawyers' fees to make it a bit more legal and it's a tax write-off, a cost of business -- $2 million or $3 million out of $900 million is less than 1%. That's peanuts. But $3 million put into a law firm to lobby a government is an immense amount of power being put legally to obtain a result.

For people who are scrambling, who are now being cut off social assistance or losing in a 20% cut, so women with children are finding they're no longer feeding their kids but going to food banks, and now they're needing is spend their money on rent as a result of the cutbacks, how can they organize to have power, to have a say in their life?

This is the problem, because when people are at that point of desperation, hungry, and companies are laying off people so you have unemployment, you're going to have anger, you're going to have crime, you're going to have cutbacks to education. You can be building more prisons. Is this the type of agenda the people of Ontario have voted for? And if they say no, they are going to be disregarded. The referendum is nice but we have no evidence that amalgamation won't work. Like the speaker before me said, when it's implemented and things fall in, maybe the Harris government won't be here to be responsible for that and how are we going to put it back together again?

These are valid questions that need to be looked at. I know there are little bits and hints of it in the mainstream papers, but it doesn't seem to come together, to all gel. I really am glad that what the Mike Harris government is doing is at least building structures for community people to take a look, "Hey, this is really happening." Now they're talking to their neighbours. Now they're going out to rallies. Now they're becoming involved. Now they're starting to say: "Participatory democracy is something that's important to me. It doesn't mean just sitting at home and watching TV."

The Chair: Mr Smarda, we are coming to the end of your time. I wonder if you could wrap up.

Mr Smarda: Okay. So those are the kinds of things I find important, that are opportunities for growth in the true sense of community building. Like I once heard, if you're entertaining and you're wrong, people will forgive you, but if you're right and you bore people, they never will.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Smarda, for coming forward this evening. We're in recess until 7 pm.

The committee recessed from 1818 to 1903.

ROGER GREENWALD

The Chair: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Would Roger Greenwald please come forward. Good evening, Mr Greenwald, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Roger Greenwald: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I will divide my presentation into three parts. The first is a statement.

I have lived in the city of Toronto for almost 30 years. About eight years ago I managed to buy a house. I pay taxes; I am a citizen; I vote; from time to time I write to my elected representatives at Toronto city council, in this Legislative Assembly or in Parliament. I have never written a letter to any member of Metro council. On a few occasions I have attended meetings in my neighbourhood, and I have been glad to see my city councillor at those meetings, even when I disagreed with him.

I am here to urge you to let this bill die in committee or to table it so that the people of Metro Toronto and their elected representatives in municipalities, in Metro council, and in the Legislative Assembly can work together to find acceptable solutions to whatever problems can be shown to afflict our present system. These must be the real problems, not ostensible ones, and the solutions must take into account the diverse population of this urban region and must have the consent of those whose governing structures are to be changed.

The issue of democracy is for me the single most important one in this debate. I want those who make decisions about the fabric of my and my neighbours' everyday life to be accessible and accountable. I and every person I know care very deeply about the ability of our community to make its own choices about maintaining its artistic life as well as its libraries, its museums, its parks, and all the other facilities that are the oxygen that keeps this city alive. Democracy on the local level is the lifeblood that carries that oxygen. Bill 103 would strip this city and the five others in Metro of the ability to make those choices. It would drain the lifeblood of local democracy from this region, and oxygen starvation would not take long to set in. I guess that's one way to turn this city blue, but it's not a way that will benefit anyone.

The government of Ontario maintains a site on the World Wide Web in order to inform the citizens of this province. Among the very first statements at that site are the following:

"Our parliamentary system of responsible government is based largely on Great Britain's. At its root is the principle that no government can rule without the consent of the people. That principle has a long and honourable history, dating back nearly 800 years."

Bill 103 does not respect that basic principle and is not honourable. The bill's provisions may be legal, but they are not democratic. As Professor Peter Russell explained to this committee more ably than I can, much of our democracy resides in traditions that are not embodied in written laws, and this bill violates those traditions. It is not based on full, open, informed, rational debate; it does not seek to take account of the views of diverse groups; and, above all, it does not seek the consent of the governed.

Choose almost any aspect of Bill 103. Take the appointed trustees and transition officials who are to control the budgets of elected bodies and whose actions are to be above the law, not subject to review by the courts. Take the single 44-member council that is to govern 2.3 million people, as if that were just as good as having six councils of even as few as eight members each to govern areas of manageable size and distinct identities. Take the neighbourhood committees, which may or may not be elected -- the bill doesn't say -- but which will in any case have no power to tax or spend, only to advise.

In these and many other aspects of the bill, the overarching question is, who is the Minister of Municipal Affairs to dictate our form of government? I know that sounds like a rhetorical question, but I think it is worth answering. Only one who regards himself as a master ventures to appoint underlings to rule over subjects. Minister Leach seems to have forgotten what the term "public servant" means, or even that it exists -- both the "servant" word and the "public" word, which refers to the whole public. Trickle-down economics, for all its counterproductivity and destructiveness, is still some sort of economics. Trickle-down democracy is no democracy at all; rights granted as favours are not rights.

When I received the clerk's response to my request to speak here, I discovered that the assembly has a heraldic device that appears on its letterhead, and that the device includes a motto. It says "Audi alteram partem." That means "Hear the other side," and not only hear, because "audi" means listen to, learn from, heed. This is the motto of democracy. The other side does not mean only the opposition parties; it means all those who hold different views, even if they are a minority. Democracies do not trample the rights of minorities; if they do so, they are not democracies in our modern sense.

This government must not enact legislation that destroys democratic institutions. Bill 103 does that. In closing my statement, I would like to remind you that your votes on this bill will be a matter of public record and of history. The black mark of a vote in favour of Bill 103 can never be rubbed out. If you vote for this bill, that vote will follow you for the rest of your careers and the rest of your lives.

Stop and reflect on recent revelations in Quebec that have forced certain officials to resign their posts. Why did they have to resign? They committed no crimes; they did nothing that was, strictly speaking, illegal. What they did was to attend rallies and support causes that were, to put it very politely, anti-democratic, and that has come back to haunt them, as this bill will come back to haunt you if you vote in favour of it.

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The second part of my presentation consists of three questions I've derived from these hearings, with my answers.

Question: Why do you think the government is doing this?

Answer: This seems to call for speculation about motives, but what I think it is really asking for is an analysis that might help citizens, and also Tory members of the assembly, to understand what on earth the government is up to, if indeed this bill has any rational underpinnings at all. One could ask many well-known questions -- starting with "Who benefits?" -- and arrive at useful answers, but not in a few minutes. So I would like simply to state a description rather than an analysis.

What this bill does, as William Archer has pointed out, is to remove opposition. It does not do so by jailing opponents or by nullifying the results of elections but by wiping out the electoral structure that permitted the election of people opposed to some of this government's policies. Removal of the opposition is not what is supposed to happen in this democracy, except by choice of the voters.

Question: How might we amend this bill to make it better?

Answer: To echo Professor Russell, that cannot be done, because the bill is wrong in its essence in that it does not seek the consent of the governed. To put it more graphically, if I am about to drop a 10-ton boulder on your house, I don't think you are going to be impressed by an offer from me to chip off a ton or two so that I will be dropping only an eight-ton boulder on your house.

A last question, one I have not heard posed but have read in some faces: Why are so many citizens denouncing me, calling me nasty names, comparing me to odious historical figures and so on, just because they disagree with the policies I favour? And how can they do that when in private life I am really a rather nice and reasonable person?

Answer: Your public functions and your private lives are separate items to everyone but you, inside whom the two meet. You will be denounced if what you do as legislators is reprehensible, even if no one doubts you are kind to dogs and children. Bill 103 is reprehensible not because it happens to pursue a policy different from that of your opponents, but because it is fundamentally and profoundly destructive of democracy.

The third and final part of my presentation consists of two recommendations:

(1) I urge this committee to conclude that Bill 103 is wrong, I urge you to admit that it is wrong and I urge you to kill this bill. Withdraw it, table it, vote against it, and if necessary, drive a wooden stake through its heart, but kill it so that democratic processes may determine how the Toronto urban area can best be governed and so that democratic institutions may be preserved.

(2) I suggest to the Progressive Conservative members of this committee, in all seriousness, that in view of the acute embarrassment he is causing you, it would be appropriate for you to ask Minister Leach to resign his portfolio. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr Greenwald. You've used up your allotted time, but I want to thank you for coming forward before the committee tonight.

JACK LAYTON

The Chair: Would Jack Layton please come forward. Good evening, Mr Layton, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Jack Layton: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman, and members of the committee. It's good to be here. Thank you for holding these hearings.

My background is as a professor of urban government in our various universities around the city for the last 25 years or so, so I've had a chance to read pretty well every book that has ever been written on this topic and made submissions to the Robarts commission way back when; so there's a bit of a history there. I've been a member of city and/or Metro council since 1982 and spent a little bit of time, after the voters relegated me to second spot when I ran for mayor, in the business world.

When I came back to Metro council this last time, I ran on the proposition that my job should be abolished, Metro council should be abolished and it should be replaced with a GTA council with either indirectly selected or double-directly selected representation from the area municipalities. I still think this is the best system. I had a chance to work with your Minister of Municipal Affairs when he ran the TTC, during a period when we had double-direct election in the city, and in conversation we both agreed it was an excellent arrangement, perhaps the best. I want to turn to just a little background as to why I'm here and why I think hearings are very important.

My dad, as some of you may know, was a chair of Brian Mulroney's caucus and was the Minister of Mines in that government. They proposed at one time that radioactive waste should be disposed of near a certain community, and it was his job to go out and hear the community on that. He said to me: "We thought we were right. We had done the engineering, we'd figured it out. We thought we were right and we were intent on going ahead. We thought we'd sort of take it on the chin and that would be the end of it." And he had a big chin, not unlike his leader. In any event, by the end of the hearings they actually decided to withdraw and look somewhere else because enough reasoned arguments were put in front of them, of a wide variety of kinds, that they thought they'd better take a second look.

I think that's good advice. Even though you may start sometimes with a really clear intention of where you want to go, hearings can make a difference, and that's why the public is down here, not just to fill up time. It's certainly why I'm here, in the hope that our arguments might persuade you that a change of course is the appropriate thing. I'm not going to repeat the incredibly eloquent testimony, much of which I agree with, that you've heard already. I'm just going to focus on two things.

First of all, it would be a big mistake, in my view, to create instability, insecurity, confusion and uncertainty in the governance of our largest city. It's absolutely critical that whatever we do is seen by the world, by the investment community and by our residents as being reasonable, carefully thought out and moving forward in a fashion that doesn't make anybody particularly nervous; in other words, an ordered process of change. I don't believe that is what's happening under Bill 103 and I've prepared a list of some of the aspects that are really quite fundamentally unsettling and create deep levels of insecurity.

The first one is that we are eliminating seven governments that we know work reasonably well but just about everybody feels could be fine-tuned, could be adjusted, and perhaps that ought to happen. We've had many good studies that point in certain directions, none of which directions have been adopted by the current bill though. What we have is a series of governments being eliminated but we don't know what's going to replace them. If I could just refer you to this list, if you've got it. I'm sorry for the quality of the Xeroxing on our Metro machine down there. C'est la vie today.

The municipal structure is not spelled out. This is a government which is going to take office in about 10 months and the structure of that government is not known. The departments and their responsibilities are not spelled out. These are really basic items. I were investing in a community or judging its stability, I would certainly want to know that there was a plan.

Dozens of well-functioning agencies and boards are being abolished or put into limbo and no replacements are being established in the bill. We're told what's being taken away but we're not told what's replacing it, and I see this as a big problem. In fact, I don't believe it has ever happened in Canadian municipal history before that when a major restructuring has happened without spelling out what the new structure is. I think it's a serious problem. Instead what's proposed is a transition team which will determine all of these elements, and I don't see that as a wise course of action, particularly because that team will not be making recommendations that come back to an elected body like yourselves or to a council in many, many cases.

We don't know how the various bylaws are going to be knitted together to form a cohesive legislative framework. That's a serious foundation of government that will be missing. There's no specification of the department structure. The heads of the departments aren't known at this time and they'll be appointed by somebody that we don't even know yet.

We don't know whether there will be provincially imposed spending limits or taxation policies on municipal government. That power is given to the minister and to the transition team in the bill, but we don't know if it's going to be exercised. So in a sense we don't know who's going to be making the financial decisions that are going to stick, and this is a very confusing and quite unprecedented situation.

Bond rating agencies do not know the impacts of the downloading that's going on, or the reorganization. There's so much debate about whether it's going to have this effect or that effect, and I think there's a growing consensus about the nature of those effects and they're very disturbing.

A new property tax assessment is coming in at the same time, the impact of which on certain businesses or on areas of business is not known. So there's another fundamental of urban governance that's now been surrounded with question marks.

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Community councils are not mentioned in the bill. In the rationale, they're offered as the prime linkage, or one of them, between the people and the new government and the way we can maintain the terrific community involvement and decision-making that we've had in Toronto and that many people from around the world have come and studied, yet they're not provided for in the legislation.

Neighbourhood councils are mentioned but that's all that happens; they're just mentioned.

The elected positions are not defined. Even at this date we don't know what positions are going to be available for election to the new council. If you put yourselves in that position and imagine that happening to you, I think you can see why that would cause a lot of problems. The boundaries aren't drawn yet and they're not going to be drawn by an arm's-length process, which is another fundamental of democracy.

The process and timing of municipal budgets and striking the mill rates aren't determined. We're going to adopt our budget and mill rate in two weeks, like a responsible urban government should. So have all the other area municipal councils. But our solicitor is telling us that because of Bill 103, our budget and mill rate can't come into force until the trustees have reviewed them. They won't be appointed until April. They've got a $5-billion budget to study, and I know they're conscientious people. It will take them a minimum of a month, probably a little more. So our mill rate won't be struck until later in May. That means investors don't know the lay of the land. We've worked hard to bring our mill rate setting right back to the earliest point in the year we could, and that's now all thrown into jeopardy.

I suggest it's not good government. You should exempt our budgets, which are now reasonably well known to all of you, because they're in their final approval stage. You should exempt those from the board of trustees, otherwise it's hard for people to really accept what's going on.

My second area of concern is that the bill is really an unprecedented assault on local democracy. I know that sounds like harsh words, but I've listed six basic principles of democracy that are violated in this bill.

(1) No taxation should ever be permitted without representation, yet the board of trustees and the transition team can set the tax rates and approve or not approve the budgets. They can unilaterally cut or increase spending. In fact, one part of spending they will be increasing is their own costs, which we don't even yet know. We're trying to set our budget, and I hope you'd ask your minister somehow for us to get at least an estimate to put in our budget so we'll know what to put aside for these bodies that are being created over which we have no authority and over which the voters have absolutely no say.

Probably the most fundamental principle in the modern democratic world is taxation and representation, and their connection. It's being violated for probably a two-year period, effectively affecting $10 billion worth of budgets over two years that will be decided upon by people who are not elected -- the transition team -- and who are not subject to the approval of the minister. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. I think it's a very serious problem.

(2) The salaries of public officials should be set by those who can be held accountable. The trustees, and in particular the transition team, are given the power to set their own salaries. This is outrageous. This is just simply wrong. At least those people or those who appoint them have to be somehow subjected to some sort of account. I don't think you want to turn over that responsibility to the trustees.

It's typical of the way the bill has been constructed, frankly. It's as though it were written by a consultant to a private firm or something who isn't in the public sector. We have different rules in the public sector and they're really basic.

(3) Public employees should be hired by elected officials, because the elected officials will be held accountable for their actions. Suppose I'm a member of the new council and the commissioner of whatever department does something outrageous, makes an outrageous decision. I'll be held accountable by the voters for that commissioner's actions, you can count on that, yet he's being appointed by a transition team that's never accountable to the public, ever; walks away from it at the end of the job. That's really not an acceptable arrangement. I don't think you would accept it in any of your agencies and boards, and I don't think you should put it in place here. You could say, "Well, you could fire that commissioner," but there may even be some restrictions on that. Besides, it's not good government to set up that kind of framework. The new council should hire the commissioners, and it's typical of the philosophy of the bill that that's violated.

(4) There are just three more violations I'd like to mention of the basic democratic officials. Officials, including appointed officials, should never be placed above the law. This is violated in sections 12, 13 and 16(4)(d) of your bill. It's not right to place elected or appointed officials above the law, and this is simply being done here. The only protection anyone should ever have is that, as a legislator in the Legislature during debate, certain protections are there, but I don't believe we should exempt people from the law.

(5) Government business should be conducted in public. The transition team and the board of trustees are not directed to hold their business in public. Indeed, the trustees are told to conduct their business in private. After we've had hundreds of hours of public submissions on our budget, for example, they're going to sit in a room without anybody who was involved in that budget-setting present and without the eyes of the public watching them make their decision and decide whether to cut a couple of hundred million more dollars out of our municipal budget. This is completely unacceptable.

You would never allow such a thing in your Legislature. Your estimates are debated in public, defended in public. There are hearings around them in public and the media watches every step of the way. But you're setting up a process here which will put the entire budget process of seven major councils into secret. I can't believe the members of this committee would accept such a proposition.

The Chair: Mr Layton, you are nearing the end of your time.

Mr Layton: Very good. I just have one last comment, which is that public access and input are a basic principle of democracy. You've accepted it to the extent of having these hearings, and we appreciate that. That means when the trustees deal with our budget, they should have to do so in the same way we did and hear from the public we heard from who helped us shape our decision-making. They helped us decide what to cut and what not to cut. The trustees were not there. They haven't been appointed. They haven't heard those arguments. You should put them there. You should insist they have hearings on our $5 billion worth of budgets. Frankly, that would begin to get absurd. We've just done all that, and I think you should tell the trustees to move on to other things.

In summary, there are fundamental uncertainties created in this legislation and I've listed about 13 of them which I think are going to damage our community. Second, there are basic principles of democracy that are violated that have to be addressed. I believe this particular bill should be withdrawn and a process of developing a reform of urban governance should be developed that matches these kinds of criteria and others. Thank you very much.

Mr John Gerretsen (Kingston and The Islands): On a point of order, Mr Chair: I would request unanimous consent that each caucus could ask the presenter a question.

The Chair: We've got very specific agreements from the subcommittee and the committee about groups which get extra time -- mayors get extra time -- and I'm loath to --

Mr Gerretsen: Well, this gentleman is involved --

The Chair: I understand that, Mr Gerretsen. You can say that about a lot of people who have appeared and will appear before the committee.

Mr Gerretsen: I realize that.

Mr Colle: Mr Chairman, on a point of order: I think the presenter has raised some critical points about the budgets of the six local governments and Metro government that are going to be impacting on people in the next couple of weeks. There's a definite problem here because of the approval and the time frame for setting mill rates.

The Chair: This really isn't a point of order.

Mr Colle: But I think we should have a report from the ministry on this. We're talking about a $7-billion budget here that's got a serious flaw if you fold it into this act. I would like a report on Mr Layton's questions in terms of how this can affect those budgets. Could we bring that forward?

Mr Ernie Hardeman (Oxford): Mr Chairman, I have no objection to bringing forward information for the opposition to deal with the issue that was brought up by Mr Layton, but I don't believe this is a point of order or that that information is required for the committee's deliberation on this document. I recognize it needs to be answered and it should be done to alleviate the concerns, but it has no bearing on the hearings we're having here.

The Chair: You would like me to ask research to --

Mr Colle: I'd like research, in conjunction with ministry officials, to just answer some of those significant questions in terms of the impact on the budgets of the seven governments. This is part of why we're deliberating on this bill, whether this bill works or not. I think the presenter has demonstrated there's a major flaw in this bill in that it basically circumvents the budgetary process of the government. So we need some information.

The Chair: We're now getting into debating the bill, and I'm not --

Mr Gerretsen: Mr Chairman, on a further point of order: It is absolutely essential that the new council that takes over, which undoubtedly it will, will have to know how to go into its budgeting process.

The Chair: That's not a point of order. Mr Layton, we're way behind. That's all the time we have for you. I want to thank you for coming before the committee this evening.

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ERIC FAWCETT

The Chair: Would Eric Fawcett please come forward. Good evening, and welcome to the committee.

Mr Eric Fawcett: My name is Eric Fawcett. I'm a retired professor of physics at the University of Toronto. I'd like to thank the committee for giving me this opportunity to speak to them about Bill 103.

I was born and educated in England, a scholarship boy at Cambridge University, and after a few years of employment as a government research scientist in the UK, I went to Bell Telephone labs in New Jersey. I lived in New Jersey for 10 years, so I know what that government is all about.

I know also what happens to a city after many years of bad government. I was there when Newark, New Jersey, went up in flames in the race riots in 1968. When I came to Toronto in 1970 and became a Canadian citizen, the city was in the throes of the campaign to stop the Spadina expressway. Common sense prevailed in that dispute, as well as in the dispute raging then about ward boundaries that resulted in the present political structure of the city.

The fundamental point raised at that time by citizens at hearings like this was that the long, so-called strip wards lumped people with very diverse interests together in electoral groups and thus prevented effective representation. The Ontario Municipal Board decided that the compact block wards that the citizens were urging would provide a better opportunity for effective democracy.

That decision should be recalled today when Bill 103 proposes to change electoral boundaries drastically to create 44 wards out of 22 federal ridings. These ridings were devised for effective representation at the federal level. They're quite unsatisfactory and would seriously weaken local democracy.

It's been possible for people to involve themselves in determining the city's future because the urban political structure that exists today makes politicians responsive to the importunities of noisy voters, and because politicians think it wise to listen, city civil servants respond to direction by following suit.

Much that is still good about Toronto and makes it one of the few really livable cities in the world is a result of the close interaction between residents and officials over the past 25 years. From a position of confrontation and argument in the 1960s, the relationship between officialdom and citizenry shifted to one of a remarkable degree of cooperation, in which inevitable disagreements were very often resolved with satisfaction.

Many members of the U of T community have been involved in creating the Toronto of today, both in matters that pertain directly to the university and those affecting the city as a whole. The success of this interaction is one of the reasons so many Torontonians oppose the current amalgamation proposal.

The changes likely to occur as a result of amalgamation will not only prejudice the lives of U of T people as citizens, but will affect the university as an institution. Such enterprises as the renovations on St George Street, carried out with speed, efficiency and amity, will be very difficult to move so smoothly through a planning and development staff which also deals with North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke issues.

But there are broader issues facing the university as well. We all know that Toronto is an expensive city in which to live, but even so, many academic staff members can afford housing in the streets immediately to the west of the university complex. The preservation of neighbourhoods, a high priority accepted by the city, has made this possible. These reasonable housing costs and absence of commuting relate to salary costs. What does it cost to live in the suburbs of New York City and teach at Columbia? How would an amalgamated city deal with neighbourhood and street issues?

It's not only faculty housing that makes the preservation of a vigorous downtown core so important to the university, because students depend on a public transportation network that's only economically viable when there's a heavy use of the components of the system. The rapidly increasing interaction between the business community and the university works well in a dense, alive urban environment.

There's no guarantee that the twin roses of the University of Toronto and Queen's Park will ensure that the urban air around us will forever remain sweet-smelling. Just go and look at the streets near the University of Chicago -- you'd better be careful, though -- or near the US Congress. Many people fear the impending amalgamation will tip the balance to militate against the survival of the downtown core as a viable, productive urban environment.

When the political interests of 2.3 million amalgamated people must be considered by 44 politicians, and the city officials must answer to a blending of needs of communities stretching from Pickering to Mississauga, how will the peculiar but vital needs of the core be respected?

There is, however, much more than the defence of our physical environment that should call University of Toronto faculty and students to the lists against the legislation as proposed. We have been told, and I suppose it's true, that cities are mere creatures of the province. They have no institutional or constitutional rights in themselves and they are totally subject to the will of the Legislature.

All that is true of universities as well. If the major city of the province can be arbitrarily treated, so can every municipality or university. That the legislation is arbitrary can hardly be denied. At no time in the history of the province have governments dealt with municipalities in the manner set forth in this act.

Whatever defenders of the legislation may say, the words of the text, which have been quoted already but I'll say them again, some of them, are very clear. For the year 1997, appointed trustees and a transition team have complete control over budgeting, hiring, month-by-month expenditures and -- I can hardly believe this -- "decisions of the board are final and shall not be reviewed or questioned by a court of law."

These trustees are not in place merely to guard against irrational and perverse actions by disgruntled politicians; the legislation says they "shall monitor the actions of the old councils and their local boards, to ensure compliance with this act...review 1997 operating capital budgets under section 11, and amend and approve them when the board considers it appropriate...establish and publish guidelines with respect to appointments, hiring and promotion."

The old council "shall not...appoint a person to a position, hire a new employee, or promote an existing employee" unless it is done with prior approval of the board.

Jack Layton spoke with more authority than I on the ways in which this legislation violates fundamental democratic principles, but I was born before him -- that was in 1927 -- so I'm not quite old enough to say that I remember the election in 1933 of Adolf Hitler to Chancellor of Germany, but I do remember my father's horror at the destruction of democracy that the National Socialists wrought. They called them gauleiters then, not commissioners. The latter is more in the flavour of George Orwell's 1984 Newspeak.

Mike Harris's Common Sense Revolution has some terrible antecedents. But the overturning of democracy in Germany and Italy and other countries happened in a continent still reeling from the Great War of 1914-18, from hyperinflation, massive unemployment and in the throes of the Great Depression. God only knows why Premier Harris would introduce this neo-Fascist legislation in the province of Ontario in 1997.

I should like to endorse the recommendations of my predecessor this evening, Roger Greenwald. He spelled them out more eloquently than I can. First, withdraw your personal support, members of this committee, from this Bill 103. Those of you who are Tory MPPs, make known to your party leaders the advisability of asking Minister Leach to resign forthwith.

Mrs Munro: Thank you very much for appearing here. When I look at the comments you have given us here, it seems that most of your comments are directed towards criticism of the process.

Mr Fawcett: Yes.

Mrs Munro: I'm just wondering if you could comment for us on the issue of your support for, for instance, the maintenance of the status quo. Do you see a need to move in some direction different from the present municipal structure we have?

Mr Fawcett: It's a difficult question for me because I'm busy with many other things and I don't pay an awful lot of attention to how the city works. I'm very concerned about how democracy works. It's quite clear that we need to change things. Metro wasn't working. We need to change things with a democratic process, with due consultation and so on. So we need to change, but we shouldn't change in this manner.

The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward and making your presentation this evening.

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JULIA ALDUS

The Chair: Would Julia Aldus please come forward. Good evening. You have 10 minutes this evening to make your presentation. If there's some time remaining, I'll ask the Liberal caucus to ask questions.

Ms Julia Aldus: That's fine. Actually, it'll probably be shorter than the last one, so you can catch up on your time.

I would like to start off by saying that I'm not a political person, but I have never in my life been so outraged or moved to political action as I have been by the issue of amalgamation and the way it's being attempted to be brought about in this city and in this province.

Our current local elected politicians are approachable and they're available. They listen and they have the power to make changes. They understand the important community issues that make a neighbourhood what it is because they are part of the community. Our various communities and neighbourhoods are what make this city a very great city and what make the city, I think, a place where everybody wants to live, the people who are downtowners.

Losing local representation means losing a community and neighbourhood voice. It seems to be the last level, the last voice that we have, particularly since Mr Harris doesn't seem to want to listen to too many people. I think once the boundaries are increased and the ratio of voters to elected official increases, this voice is lost forever.

The neighbourhood is everything. Every city and every municipality has its own concerns. It has its own issues, and rightly so. Every area is slightly different. North York and Don Mills don't really care about the hookers on my street in Cabbagetown, and I in turn don't really care about strip joints in Etobicoke. But all of these issues are very important to individuals if you happen to live in those communities.

I think if you take all these issues from the existing municipalities and put them under one roof and one bureaucracy, no one is really going to get looked after efficiently. I think it's the Metro level that has to go, not the local level where we can still make something happen in our communities and our neighbourhoods.

This government wasn't elected on a platform to remove elected officials at the municipal level, nor was it elected on a platform of creating a megacity by amalgamation. Everything we have learned from the disasters of American cities seems to be ignored: empty, forgotten downtown city cores, incredible violence, cores that empty at 5 o'clock, places that are only fit for very rich and very poor people and the homeless.

The downloading of social welfare to the lowest level of government that can't possibly support the cost is a deliberate move to phase out social welfare altogether. In a city where huge numbers of people have a real need for assistance, where the only revenue is property taxes, property taxes are going to have to go up. Funding a small and meaningless tax cut to individuals benefits no one, but in the larger picture it costs the government huge dollars and must be funded somehow. You know, we're not stupid.

Lastly, what I'm witnessing and what I find most frightening are the dangerous attitudes and policies that seem to be governed by simplistic and narrow thinking. They're blatantly undemocratic and, I think, astoundingly un-Canadian. To remove elected officials and to give power to appointed ones, to refuse to listen to public wishes, to deliberately attempt to confuse the public with an overload of changes so no one can possibly clearly understand what is really happening until it's too late, the consequences too enormous, is blatantly underhanded.

No one questions that change is needed, but government must be responsible and change must happen with thought, intelligence and research, not by political whim. It has to happen by our history of democratic process, which means that the debating and the amending process, issue by issue, not everything all at once, must be taken into consideration.

I think it's really quite funny how Mr Harris seemed to be very quick in defending his own community when it's been threatened recently by the feds. Maybe it will give him a little insight into what it's like to live in the downtown core of Toronto and be threatened by his very undemocratic provincial policies.

Mr Gerretsen: I would just like to pick up on your sense and notion of neighbourhood. It's certainly a concept I've felt very strongly about for the last 20 years or so, because it's basically the neighbourhoods that shape our individual lives, to a large extent, outside of our working environments, I suppose.

What this government is really saying is that if we just got rid of two thirds of the politicians, whether it's in Metro Toronto or whether it's outside of Toronto, we'd all be better off, we'd all be cheaper off. I think a lot of us feel the fact that a politician is no further away than the next concession line or two or three blocks down the street etc and that you can have some direct contact with them is very important. I wonder if you could just address that issue as to what would happen in a Metro Toronto that in effect would get rid of two thirds of its local and Metro politicians.

Ms Aldus: If you lose the local person we have right now who you can approach -- I live in Cabbagetown and it's always had, I think, a very good history of local politicians who have always been very approachable and where changes can happen. When there's going to be this bigger picture, I think we're going to essentially be forgotten. Particularly in the areas where -- I don't live in a wealthy neighbourhood; I live in a lovely renovated area, but I'm right next to Moss Park. As I mentioned in my speech, if it happens to be a representative who also looks after Don Mills or North York, they are not going to be concerned what happens on my tiny little street in the downtown core. That's what we're going to lose. That's where I live, that's where I go home every night, that's my house and it has been my house for 10, 15 years. That's going to be gone. I hate to think what will happen. We'll get the American picture.

Mr Sergio: Just quickly, thanks for coming down to make your presentation to our committee, first of all. On February 3, I believe, Mr Leach came down and, addressing our committee he said, among many other things: "There are a great many people who wish to speak to one Toronto, and we want to hear as many as possible."

Other than perhaps a handful of people who have already made submissions to us, most of them are from the actual city of Toronto. We have been trying to have the committee hear the people in Etobicoke, in North York, in Scarborough and so forth. Do you think that democracy is being shortchanged here when we have a minister who says we'd like to hear from as many people as possible and the people who are being affected are not given the opportunity to be heard?

Ms Aldus: I can't speak for someone who isn't in the downtown core. Maybe the information isn't getting out to them. I am not sure I can --

Mr Sergio: But do you think the committee should have gone to Scarborough city hall, let's say, to get closer to the people, or to Etobicoke?

Ms Aldus: Oh, absolutely, yes. I think we have more to lose in the downtown core than the other communities. We stand to face far more changes in the downtown core than a lot of the other areas.

Mr Sergio: I come from the Islington and Steeles area. That's quite a bit away. It's very difficult for working people in that area to come down to Queen's Park and be heard by this committee. I think this would have been an issue big enough, important enough.

Ms Aldus: It's also very scary. It's very intimidating to sit in front of this many people and say what you think when it's not what do you do for a living.

Mr Sergio: Important enough to have a binding referendum on it?

Ms Aldus: I believe so. I would say the majority of people I speak to and work with on a daily basis, and I've talked to them about coming to speak as well, are simply too frightened. It takes a bold person, I think, to have the nerve, and I have been touched so much by this that it has given me the courage to be able to do this. As I say, normally I would not be able to, but it has touched me that deeply and has disturbed me that much.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Aldus, for coming forward and making your presentation this evening.

JOHN WELLNER

The Chair: Would John Wellner please come forward. Good evening, Mr Wellner. Welcome to the committee.

Mr John Wellner: Good evening. It's a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak before you this evening. My name is John Wellner. I work with the Toronto Environmental Alliance. We're a local non-profit citizens' group that works on issues concerning the urban environment. In most cases these environmental concerns relate directly to the health of citizens of the Toronto region.

I think it's appropriate in this short presentation to use a visual aid to focus attention on what Toronto is likely to look like once megafied. Although I'm here to speak to Bill 103, I think it's important to be aware of other influences connected to the amalgamation bill that will have a profound and long-lasting effect on our city and what it's going to look like in the future. The transfer of financial responsibility for social services, public transit and the actual value assessment property tax will combine with Bill 103 to wreak havoc in the Toronto region.

I believe that a suburban strip mall influence is winning out here and I'd like to add a little visual representation, if I may. The GTA, the economic engine of the province, the land of opportunity, the apple of Canada's eye, is slowly but surely being turned into a big doughnut. We're not talking about a Dutchie here, or a Boston cream or a cruller. We're talking about an old-fashioned doughnut with a big hole in the middle of it.

"Why a doughnut?" you ask. I'd like to answer that, if I may. Increased tax pressure on homeowners and subsequently renters in much of Metro, but definitely in Toronto, will drive people into the suburbs. All the progressive mixed-use development that is being promoted by the Toronto city hall will be for naught because of the increased property tax burden.

What will happen next is much like what has happened in many cities in the United States: reduced services, increased crime, higher taxes etc equal exodus. As Ross Perot once said, and I'll quote him here, "I hear a giant sucking sound," but this time it's the sound of homeowners and businesses moving to the suburbs. Exodus equals an even smaller tax base, more pressure on social services, the police etc, which means more crime, urban decay etc.

1950

Why is an environmentalist interested in this doughnut-making exercise? Remember that urban environmental concerns are essentially health concerns; that is to say, concerns for the health of the citizens of the Toronto region, both those who decide to move to the suburbs and those who decide to stay. Over the past year we at the Toronto Environmental Alliance have been doing our part to improve the air quality of the region. As you have probably heard, Metro Toronto is the smog capital of Canada. You've probably also heard that on average between one and three people die prematurely every day because of smog.

The problem is not just the occasional hot, humid August day when the air quality reaches such extremes that an official warning has to be issued. The problem of deteriorating air quality is with us all the time. I have participated in the Ministry of Environment and Energy's smog plan, presently under way, a partnership of public and private concerns and a few environmental non-profits like us. I am privy to what the ministry believes to be the primary causes of smog and the solutions they have found to the problem.

There are two keys to our worsening air quality problem that this bill and subsequent legislation go directly against: One is urban sprawl, hence the outside of the doughnut analogy; the second is public transportation, which is being downloaded to the megacity. They are both very directly connected to the car and the way we use it.

Some 50% of people living in downtown Toronto don't even own a car. They rely on other modes of transportation to get around, the TTC for example. With urban sprawl, a city that goes on and on forever, those who choose to live further out need a car and use it more than those who live in mixed-use urban centre developments. Endless subdivisions, the great expanse between home, the workplace and even shopping facilities make the car essential.

The TTC is the most efficient urban mass transit system in North America for one reason alone: Between 75% and 80% of the budget comes from the fare box. That is, you and I, the users, pay for it. This is not the case in other urban centres in North America, or for that matter in the regions around Toronto. Regional transit in the GTA -- I think there are 14 different regional transit authorities -- is only able to raise about 50%, on average, from the fare box, requiring much larger government subsidies. This will now be the responsibility of these regional municipalities. They will only be able to afford the most lucrative routes and will cancel the lesser ones. Ridership will decline.

In Metro the same decrease in services is imminent. The hole in the doughnut will mean fewer riders and fewer businesses in the core of the city, hence more need for the car. Remember, the car is the single largest source of the emissions that make up smog; they're called smog precursors. Even without megacity, it is projected that the number of cars in the GTA will grow by more than a million by the year 2010; that's from 2.4 million now to 3.5 million in 2010. Car populations are growing faster than human populations. Bill 103 will make the problem considerably worse. As Toronto empties and the hole in the doughnut gets bigger, the distances these million more cars will travel will increase. More kilometres equal more pollution.

I urge the government and the opposition parties to further examine the environmental impacts of Bill 103 and its accompanying legislation.

If I may use another image to help along with this, urban sprawl and the decrease in transit services are going to make the GTA look like a doughnut with a cigarette burning in the middle of it. Please pay attention to the air we all breathe and the other environmental implications of your actions. These decisions affect the health of us all.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. I'm well under 10 minutes, but I don't know if anyone has any questions.

Mrs Marion Boyd (London Centre): Thank you very much for coming. I certainly think you're right; that is what we're looking at. We've certainly seen it happen in other cities, haven't we?

Mr Wellner: Absolutely.

Mrs Boyd: Wouldn't you think we could learn from the mistakes others have made?

Mr Wellner: I would hope so.

Mrs Boyd: One of the things you're talking about is the sort of domino effect that's happening with all these changes.

Mr Wellner: Absolutely. It's not the bill alone. It's other things that go with it. My understanding is that the announcement by the Minister of Transportation on transit, for instance, has not even been assigned a bill number. It's just one of those things in the ether at the moment. But I feel very connected to this.

Mrs Boyd: I think a lot of the downloading hasn't actually been a bill yet either, so we don't really know until we see the detail what is going to happen. We say the devil is in the detail, in many cases.

One issue is the whole issue of privatization of water and sewage. I would think that would be another aspect to this whole issue around environment. That could be a real problem with the downloading.

Mr Wellner: Certainly the possibility of the privatization of transit systems is also, well, not necessarily on the table; it hasn't been put there but it's an option, particularly if the government, as it says now, is going to guarantee no provincial tax increases.

One would wonder how some of these municipalities are going to pay for transit. Offloading transit to the private sector might be an option, but it's certainly going to be a very different-looking transit system. The roads are going to be much more full of cars and obviously the air is going to be a lot worse.

Mrs Boyd: Of course the condition of the roads may be quite different, because that's another download that is really going to cause us a lot of problems. If our roads are in bad shape, it creates more and more problems with the pollution you're talking about, doesn't it?

Mr Wellner: Absolutely.

Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much for coming.

SHELLEY PETRIE

The Chair: Would Shelley Petrie please come forward. Good evening, Ms Petrie. Welcome to the committee.

Ms Shelley Petrie: Mr Chair and members of committee, more garbage created in a megacity. As an environmentalist who has worked on waste issues for six years, I fear a new mega-council, faced with an increase in the generation of garbage, will not be able to manage local waste diversion programs in our communities and neighbourhoods and that this will threaten the health of our communities.

I submit to you that history shows accessible local governments are important to the success of the many reduction, reuse and even recycling programs residents now participate in. Local municipalities responsible for the collection of garbage have operated and funded programs that help citizens reduce the amount of waste they set on the curb and have initiated many of the programs that Metro is now committed to.

For years, cities have worked with numerous community groups and volunteers to implement and administer waste diversion programs in communities. Being closer to citizens, together they have identified what messages are missing in communities that present barriers to high diversion. Cities also recognize the value of advertising in local newspapers and recognize that our diverse communities provide unique and valuable input necessary to ensuring the success of any program.

I have a few examples. One of them is recycling programs. Annual city festivals and advertising in community newspapers are used to promote diversion to local residents. Last year, for instance, the city of East York set up a competition among students in East York, North York and Scarborough. They decorated a city-owned recycling truck highlighting Waste Reduction Week. East York has established a link between its community development and environment departments to recognize the value in establishing visible educational and promotional opportunities directly in their communities.

Scarborough operates a program for bulk collection of recyclables in apartments. Although Metro is now involved in this program, again the initiative sprung from the local government by listening to its citizens.

Commercial composting programs: The city of Toronto has been attentive to the needs of unique commercial areas in its boundaries, notably east Chinatown, Kensington market and west Chinatown. Due to the nature of these businesses, the amount of garbage set out on the curb each night is well above the average. Residents and businesses have been discussing solutions for years, with pilot projects being funded by the city, such as the greengrocers waste reduction program and a west Chinatown organic waste audit survey. Today Metro and the city are funding a vermi-composter pilot in the market and the city would like to do more. The existence of these projects is largely credited to support from the city initially given to businesses and community groups involved in the projects today.

Reuse programs for clothes, furniture, and sports equipment are operated by most municipalities -- not Metro -- by establishing local depots or organizing community swap days. Scarborough has an annual reuse sports equipment event. Toronto has donated warehouse space to Access to Excess, a local group that collects furniture for reuse, and has created a Toronto Reuse It directory. Cities often donate space and vehicles for these programs.

White goods collections: Each municipality operates a white goods collection -- these are large appliances -- for residents outside Metro programs. Scarborough and the city of York even repair and donate some of these goods back into the community.

Metro is currently stalled at a 21% diversion rate from the residential waste stream. Many of the above programs are unique and offer lessons to be learned to their neighbouring municipalities.

2000

Although Metro does have a communications plan to accompany these diversion programs, all six local municipalities identify a strong need within their communities for additional education and promotional materials. These needs arise from differences among communities, addressing diversity in language and culture unique to neighbourhoods throughout Metro and the need to bring waste diversion messages closer to people's communities and lives by utilizing specific opportunities in each community.

Disposal: The municipality of Metro Toronto is responsible for garbage disposal. However, this has not stopped area municipalities from expressing objections or supports for particular disposal facilities and their locations. The city of Toronto banned the construction and operation of garbage incinerators within its city limits. The adopted bylaw was supported due to overwhelming past and present public opposition to incineration as a polluting technology. Metro Toronto will be inviting proposals from incinerator companies to potentially burn Metro's garbage in the future. The Metro government is also appealing the city of Toronto ban on incineration at the Ontario Municipal Board.

The temptation to solve the garbage crisis by sending useful materials like paper to a huge incinerator will increase, and the city of Toronto's ban on garbage incinerators will no doubt be overturned in a new megacity. Residents' health and environmental concerns will evaporate up the smokestack and our children will see increased health risks from dioxin and furans emissions from incinerators in the new Toronto.

To ensure the loss of these successful programs does not become a reality in the new megacity, the Ontario government could provide legislation that encourages the best use of materials and environmentally superior waste diversion programs. The highly respected blue box program is an everyday fixture across our cities, but with our generation of garbage still on the rise, recycling programs are not enough. Reusing goods reduces the extraction of our resources and the use of additional materials in the manufacturing or recycling of goods.

Unfortunately, to date, our provincial government has not shown leadership on this issue. A recent example is the recommendations released by the Red Tape Review Commission. The report recommends dropping regulation 340, requiring 30% of soft drinks to be sold in reusable or refillable containers. This action disregards the environmental and health threats posed by the continuing increase in our generation of garbage.

By dropping the legislation on refillable bottles for soft drinks containers, the government is turning the 3Rs -- reduce, reuse and recycle -- hierarchy upside down and it's legislating pollution. Recycling plastic bottles is a toxic process and burdens blue box programs with high collection costs. As the rest of the world moves forward, reducing their generation of garbage, Ontario is moving backwards and relying solely on recycling. Without this leadership, the new megacity will too. Ignoring the environmental merits of reuse will create a new mess in Toronto.

Without provincial leadership, the new Toronto will only succeed in creating more garbage and our beautiful, clean city will look like New York.

Mr Dan Newman (Scarborough Centre): Thank you, Ms Petrie, for coming here this evening. I have a question, and that is, have you had the opportunity to assess the environmental impacts of, say, the Golden report or the six mayors' report, where Scarborough was responsible for the removal and disposal of garbage not only in Scarborough but North York, Etobicoke, East York and York?

Ms Petrie: I don't think I understood the question.

Mr Newman: There have been other reports that have come forward. The six mayors had a report and in that report they charged each of the six municipalities with a certain responsibility. Scarborough was given the responsibility of collecting and disposing of all the garbage throughout present-day Metro.

Ms Petrie: The way I see the garbage problem as it stands with a new megacity is that we will lose a lot of our diversion programs, that we will not go beyond the 21% we're established at right now. There is so much opportunity out there to go beyond this and those creative waste reduction ideas are coming from local communities; they're not coming from Metro Hall.

Disposal is a different question. I don't think each municipality -- because we don't have any land -- can go out and site their own disposal facility. I think that's better done even in a GTA sense than anything else.

The fear I see with a new megacity is that it will continue in the route that Metro has taken and start either shipping our garbage to the States and laying our problem on other communities that do not want it, and have clearly stated that, or it will turn to incineration within our own communities, where we have seen mass opposition to it and tons of studies that this technology is polluting.

Disposal has to be revisited as maybe a GTA issue where communities that work to achieve maximum diversion -- and that is shown in even large urban areas to be able to achieve 60% to 80%; you get organics out of the waste stream and you've got a landfill with a lot fewer problems because they contribute to a lot of the methane and leaks of hazardous waste -- could come up with a site that is local so that we take care of our own garbage and it's a safer landfill because you're achieving such high diversion. These landfills last longer, so they're not costing taxpayers as much money because of not having to site so many landfills within a 50-year span or something.

The Chair: I'm sorry, we've exhausted the allotted time. Thank you very much, Ms Petrie, for coming forward and making your presentation.

NELLY YOUNG

The Chair: Would Nelly Young please come forward. Good evening and welcome to the committee.

Ms Nelly Young: Thank you for the opportunity to speak at these hearings. My name is Nelly Auster Young. I'm a citizen of Toronto, an active member in my neighbourhood residents' association, a partner in a small consulting business and a property owner. Until the Harris government decided the environment was not important, I worked for the Ministry of Environment and Energy.

I have lived and worked in this city since 1981 and it's been an eye-opener for me. I grew up in Montreal when it was run by Drapeau's political machine. Municipal politics never struck me as something within my reach. Even when reforms became possible, it still seemed closed off to ordinary citizens except at election time. Over the years, living in Toronto, I learned to appreciate the accessibility of municipal government. I never realized how much until Mike Harris and Al Leach launched this mega-disaster, this attempt to globalize Toronto at the expense of its citizens.

Bill 103 threatens the closest thing we have to democracy. Democratic government is frustrating and slow-moving. Different voices have to be respected and a viable consensus reached whenever possible, after full and open public consultation and debate. What often feels like a snail-like process in this rapidly moving new world order has an important, long-term advantage. When many different people and special interests are involved in the decision-making process, they have a stake in making those decisions work.

This government, its arrogant leaders and misguided supporters have systematically cut the people out of the process. That exclusion, the condescending disrespect this government has for the people it purports to govern, is responsible for the groundswell of popular opposition it seeks to discredit. If this government is legitimate, it must speak to and listen to all of its citizens, not just the hidden circle of powerful friends.

As with so many others speaking at these hearings, this is the first time I've exercised this democratic right. While it is an intimidating experience, I guess this government is to be recognized for creating a climate where citizens have been compelled to ask themselves what democracy means to them and to act accordingly.

I am unequivocally opposed to Bill 103. It is a reprehensible piece of legislation which would deny people in the six cities effective elected representation at the municipal level, first by giving retroactive control to appointed trustees unaccountable to the law and then by handing the reins to a transition team, equally immune to legal challenges.

To add insult to injury, we get screwed twice because municipal taxes will pay for all their salaries. Will elected officials run the proposed megacity? No. They will be a puppet government. According to Bill 103, dissolution of the board of trustees and of the transition team is left to the discretion of the Minister of Municipal Affairs. Did the election of Al Leach and Mike Harris make them gods of Ontario?

2010

I have attended a good number of meetings in different communities and am encouraged by the many Tory supporters who have turned against the unprogressive, radically surgical tactics of this government. Others have spoken eloquently on how this Tory government's policies and procedures go against the Progressive Conservative philosophy.

I'm concerned about the casual disregard Al Leach, Mike Harris and their spokespeople have for honesty. Steve Gilchrist has been the mega-madness point man at some of those meetings. Confronted with direct questions, he has been astonishingly short on facts and figures but long on rhetoric and evasive ploys.

Most people aren't fooled. Does Mr Gilchrist think, for example, that the six mayors' hasty and ill-conceived compromise proposal back in December would have received any more support from Metro citizens than Bill 103? Had it not been consigned to the scrap heap of history when Crombie's Who Does What committee came out with its recommendations, Metro residents would have trashed it precisely because it conceded a substantial reduction in elected municipal representatives.

Mr Gilchrist likes to cite a Scarborough poll which he claims was 80% in favour of amalgamation. According to Mayor Faubert, the question was never asked. The poll asked "(1) Are you in favour of lower taxes? (2) Are you in favour of actual value assessment? and (3) Are you in favour of fewer politicians?"

This twisting of the truth is typical of Harris government strategy. The poll taken to determine where the welfare recipients have gone they consider valid, although only those with phones could be polled. They consider the KPMG report valid even though the consultants were forbidden to contact the municipal governments. Yet they discredit the referenda taking place in the six municipalities, most of which follow the guidelines in their own legislation.

Lest we forget, this government ignored all pleas for the province to hold one official referendum throughout Metro. Because they refused, the municipalities had to do so. Their citizens demanded it. Each went a different way because the culture and politics of each municipality are different. That's the whole point, isn't it? The amalgamation is a shotgun wedding. What kind of a marriage will that be?

Much has already been said and more will be said about Bill 103: about its failure to deal with the GTA; about its frightening parallel for public education in Bill 104; about the regressive offloading on to property taxes of services which should be funded more equitably through the income tax; about the privatization of services which will be forced on an increasingly bankrupt megacity. Considering all the added responsibilities and costs dumped on the municipal level, will a new megacity be free to set policy? No. As is the case with the board of trustees and transition team, the city will pay the bills but the province will call the shots.

People shouldn't be deluded by the billion-dollar carrot we keep hearing will be available to save the megacity from bankruptcy. It doesn't come without a price and there are conditions attached -- nothing short of blackmail -- to ensure the megacity moves in the direction the province wants. They'll make sure this time workfare will work. The stage is being set for privatization of public resources and public services. Is this for the public good? No. It's for the profit of influential Tory friends.

Strong popular opposition to this mega-mania, not only in Metro but all over the province, is growing every day. More and more people are seeing through the simplistic, sound-bite propaganda and the slick, deceptive ads paid for by taxpayers without their permission. No one opposed to this government's agenda is advocating the status quo, and in your heart of hearts you know it. We want reforms too, but you don't have to create a monster city to ensure that a single parks department cuts the grass.

Let's face it, this is not about rationalizing services; quite the opposite. This is clearly a grab for power and money. It's an efficient but immoral way for Premier Harris to keep his promise of a tax cut. What about all the other promises he's broken?

Bill 103 is a totally anti-democratic bill being pushed through by sheer demagoguery. It must be scrapped. Yes, the time for change is here and this government has engineered it. The means it has employed are utterly repulsive. But the outcome can still be positive.

Right now, people are coming to meetings and sharing their many concerns. They're sickened, saddened and angry. But their energies are focused on the referendum. If this government were to do the honourable thing, the courageous thing, admit this legislation is a mega-mistake and scrap it, it's not too late to turn things around. If you want to change governance to meet the new realities, involve the people who have to live with the changes. If you don't let them work with you, they'll work against you and what kind of future is that?

Call for a constituent assembly. We're ready to talk. Start the process. We're ready to work together. But you've got to listen. The battleground is drawn. On one side stands democracy, on the other demagoguery. The choice is yours.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Young, for your presentation. We've now effectively used up all of your time. We appreciate you coming forward tonight.

NORMAN WILSON

The Chair: Would Norman Wilson please come forward. Good evening, sir. Welcome to the committee.

Mr Norman Wilson: Just so everyone won't be disappointed, I should point out that I'm like the previous three or four speakers: I'm not a professional environmentalist and never have been. What I am is someone who lives in Toronto because I like Toronto and that's more or less why I'm here.

It's not just me who likes Toronto. Toronto is world famous as being kind of a special place where people are comfortable living and working. According to Fortune magazine, it's the best place in the world. Who wants to argue with them?

That doesn't mean we can stand still. There are problems with the current, two-level Metro government. There are things that are being done twice. There's far too much energy being lost in turf squabbles. Much more importantly, we badly need better coordination of municipal services and better sharing of resources among the municipalities in the whole greater Toronto area. The old Metro boundaries are just obsolete and it's time we faced that. We've known about this for quite a while, certainly since the GTA task force report came out a year ago, and it's time to do something about all this.

What does the government propose to do? The government proposes to do something about this through Bill 103, by discarding the existing municipal governments within Metro and replacing them with a single city of Toronto government.

This bill is badly flawed. It asserts that a single city government is the right answer, but there's been no clear case made that that's so. The citizens' concerns about that are being utterly ignored. It also completely ignores the real issue, which is finding a way for the entire GTA to work together better. In fact, it looks like Bill 103 may make that much harder. It's also just a badly written law. It's full of holes that invite uncontrolled government waste and abuse of power. The people of Ontario deserve something better than this.

The biggest problem with the proposal for a single Toronto city government is that it's the only proposal on the table. The government just hasn't been willing to discuss the alternatives. It hasn't even given clear reasons why its proposal is best. All we hear are bald assertions with no facts to back them up.

For example, when the East York Mirror asked the minister to name a single study supporting amalgamation, he couldn't name one. Even the claim that a single city government will save money is suspect. On the front page of the government's own One Toronto for All of Us flyer, the thing that got stuck in everyone's mailboxes, the thing that became somewhat famous in the paper a few weeks for other reasons, it's admitted right there that the savings estimates for the proposed megacity, according to the KPMG study, are "consistent with others we have heard recently from the six mayors in Metro."

What were the six mayors proposing? The six mayors were proposing replacing the existing Metro level of government with a lightweight coordinating council, leaving the six individual municipal governments in place and redistributing services. In other words, what the One Toronto flyer says outright is that it's possible to save just as much money without amalgamation.

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What's wrong with a single city government? Here are some of my concerns.

In the first place, it just seems common sense that local concerns should be addressed locally. If my city councillor belongs only to a Metro-wide government, his attention's not going to be focused on my local ward; it's going to be focused on Metro-wide issues. That's what all his peers are going to be talking about. So how can he be expected to address local issues? He's not going to have time for it.

Second, Toronto works as well as it does, and certainly I find Toronto as pleasant a place to live as it is, because it's not all the same. People living in different parts of Metro and of the GTA can live in different ways. They can choose to pay for different mixes of local services, and because it isn't all one government that can be arranged.

I could choose to live in North York and have some of my property taxes go for clearing snow off my sidewalk or I could choose to live in Toronto and shovel my own walk and have the money go to the library system or the parks. I could choose to live in a spread-out suburb in Etobicoke, or in a dense single-family neighbourhood in East York or in a shiny condo or apartment in downtown. How can we be sure that this important diversity will be preserved under a single government with a single set of bylaws, a single set of planners and a single set of zoning policies?

Similarly, the fact that Toronto is made of independent pieces makes it a lot easier to try experiments. A single municipality can try a new kind of zoning or a controversial bylaw like restricting smoking or, for that matter, some of the waste diversion programs we heard about earlier. If a single municipality can try it, then if it works out, the rest of the region can follow, and if it doesn't work out, the damage is limited. Even if it's a big disaster, it's just one municipality that has to clean up.

I think this kind of experimentation's crucial if Toronto is going to remain alive and is going to continue to evolve and change the way it's going to have to as time goes on. Won't having a single city government make that a lot harder?

In a single government, representatives from the downtown core are going to be outnumbered by representatives from the suburbs, and as we've heard earlier tonight, that's just been a disaster in other North American cities. What often happens is that, on the one hand, no one wants to spend the money for the services downtown needs and, on the other hand, the downtown tax base gets robbed to pay for the cost of the suburbs.

Downtown Toronto is unique in North America and I think it's key to the entire region and the entire province. A single city government will inevitably be dominated by non-downtowners who don't understand downtown. How do we assure that government won't damage downtown just because the majority doesn't understand how to deal with it?

Finally, as two taxpayer-funded studies, the Golden task force and the Crombie committee, have said in fairly forceful terms, the real problem here isn't Metro, it's the GTA; it's coordinating the municipal governments throughout the region. Right now there's already enough rivalry between Metro and the surrounding governments to make that difficult. Won't having a big, monolithic government in the middle make that even harder? Won't it give the surrounding governments even more to be scared of, that they're going to be swallowed by this single entity that has half the population and the bulk of the economic activity?

Beyond that, Bill 103 creates a board of trustees and a transition team to oversee and manage the creation of the new government. These boards are given sweeping powers with essentially no checks. This just invites abuse of power and waste of my tax money. For example, the trustees' and transition team's decisions are declared final and not subject to judicial review. Why is that appropriate? What's the emergency that justifies that?

The trustees' and transition team's expenses, including their salaries, are to be paid by Metro. That means paid by my property tax dollars. There's no process provided to review or even control those expenses. As the proposed law stands, the trustees could award themselves six-digit salaries or the transition team could decide to hold all their meetings in the Bahamas at my expense. Where are the controls to prevent that?

The bill provides that the minister may dissolve the two boards on or after January 31, 1998, but there's no requirement for him to do that then or at any other time. As the proposed law stands, the province could just refuse to allow the new city government to function independently and leave the trustees in place indefinitely.

This lack of control is frightening. It leaves the trustees and transition team no clear incentive to behave reasonably, and it leaves us ordinary Ontarians no reason to believe they will. Since nearly every detail of the new city's structure and function is left to the trustees and the transition team, or the minister, this lack of accountability is just unacceptable.

If the government wants to propose a new structure for Toronto, it should make its proposals up front; it should spell things out. It shouldn't just pass legislation that appoints someone to figure it out later and gives them carte blanche. The people of Ontario deserve better protection against bad policy and wasted tax dollars and there just isn't any in Bill 103.

The proposed bill presents a solution of the wrong problem: Metro rather than the GTA. It asserts that a particular solution is the right one when the government can't present coherent evidence for that, and in general it raises concerns rather than inspiring confidence. It looks half-baked, as if the government just didn't do its homework before submitting the legislation.

Ontario shouldn't have half-baked laws, should it? More important, Ontarians just can't afford the risk of screwing up Toronto. If the new city structure doesn't work right, the economy of the whole province is at risk. With stakes so high, it's fair to expect the government to lay out a clear and complete plan, not just to assert vague principles and appoint someone to work out the details later. Bill 103 just isn't complete enough to trust.

If the government is serious about solving Toronto's problems, they should admit their error, withdraw the present bill and produce a replacement which attacks the real problem -- GTA coordination, not just Metro -- which comprises a complete plan so that the Legislature and all Ontarians can see clearly just what is intended before a decision is made; which the government's prepared to support with hard facts and citations, not just the present vague, feel-good statements, hand-waving and TV commercials about electricians; and which draws on the current public debate to try to find an answer which can be accepted through consensus, which people can feel comfortable with, rather than imposing something by fiat.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr Wilson, for coming forward and making your presentation this evening.

ANNE BERMONTE

The Chair: Would Anne Bermonte please come forward. Good evening, Ms Bermonte. Welcome to the committee.

Interjections.

The Chair: Order, please. Order. Gentlemen, you're infringing on the time of the presenter. The presenter has taken the time to prepare a presentation tonight, may I remind you all, and let's just have some respect for that.

Mr Colle: It's those Etobicoke people.

The Chair: Mr Colle. Go ahead.

Ms Anne Bermonte: Thank you, Mr Chair. We understand the time is getting late and I'm sure you're all very tired.

Interjections.

The Chair: Order, please, gentlemen. Have some respect for the witness, please. She's taken time to come to make her presentation.

Ms Bermonte: Good evening, all. My name is Anne Bermonte and I'm here tonight to communicate a message which has been repeated by many others. I too am concerned about Bill 103 and the related megacity legislation, which I believe will result in Toronto's downfall. A livable, vibrant, exciting, economically and culturally important city will wither away.

I am also concerned that by extension it will have equally damaging effects on the quality of life across this province. Individuals from all across Ontario, cities and towns like Terrace Bay, Elora, Dundas, Ancaster, Kingston and Ottawa, echo the same concern: Amalgamation will have irreversible and devastating consequences on all our respective communities.

You have heard from the experts -- Jane Jacobs, David Crombie, Anne Golden, Jack Diamond, Eb Zeidler -- who have outlined the numerous problems with Bill 103 and its legislative menagerie. The government is playing a shell game with its numbers. Amalgamation, as it is currently being proposed, will be very expensive.

The true costs of Bill 103 and related megacity legislation, in terms of a seriously diminished quality of life, loss of opportunities and the erosion of the democratic process for citizens of this area, are starting to reveal themselves. For example, the numbers the government is using to sell amalgamation are an optical illusion. The per capita cost of maintaining 106 representatives across Metro Toronto is $5. Compare this to the $6 per capita cost resulting from reducing the number of representatives to 45 while doubling the size of their constituency and increasing their responsibilities.

The average cost of running a Toronto-based provincial member's office is $300,000 while the average cost of running a local councillor's office is $113,000. Perhaps you think $300,000 is too high. I'm sure the average citizen in East York will agree with me that $62,000, their average cost per politician, financially makes more sense than the $311,000 which will result when you have 44 local politicians and one mega-mayor representing 2.3 million people.

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This $2.3-million error is just the beginning. Even more disturbing, the costs continue to increase. Two weeks ago unaccounted-for costs were approximately $390 million, last week the figure rose to $500 million and today reports reveal that senior staff at the finance ministry put the number at $866 million. Also, the estimated costs of amalgamation alone will result in an amount somewhere between $200 million and $400 million which has to paid up front. Where is this money going to come from? Once amalgamation happens it will be too late to make the necessary adjustments, resulting in even more costs and trauma to our city and citizens. I agree that change is required. I believe that as citizens of Toronto and Ontario we want to continue to be recognized as the best place in the world in which to work and live. As Mayor Hall said to you last week, "Slow down and get it right."

In reducing the number of representatives from 106 to 45, you are effectively silencing the voice of the people. Each representative will be responsible for a constituency averaging 53,000, doubling the ratio between number of constituents to politician, whereas in the Premier's home town municipal representation is one politician to 5,300 people. Perhaps cost savings could happen there first. Perhaps North Bay doesn't even need a town council. Why not just appoint a trustee?

The government's afterthought of establishing neighbourhood committees is not the answer. Look to New York City, which has been held up by this government as the model Toronto ought to emulate. The existence of borough councils entrenches the divergent interests of citizens from Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. By comparison, the current Metropolitan Toronto structure is practically seamless. Also, do any of you recall that in 1975 New York City had to be rescued from the brink of bankruptcy?

Why are you dismissing the recommendations and findings from provincially commissioned task forces like the Fair Tax Commission, the GTA Task Force, the Trimmer panel and most recently the Who Does What panel?

Both the GTA Task Force and the Crombie panel recommended that the greater Toronto area's five regions be disbanded and replaced with a GTA-wide service body with limited taxing powers in order to redress the inequities that currently exist between the 905 and 416 areas. The GTA Task Force also emphasized the need to strengthen Metro's six municipalities, yet in drafting Bill 103, Mr Leach has done the exact opposite.

The Who Does What panel recommended implementation of actual value assessment in which current value is to be determined by current use. Yet your government is proposing that it be implemented on the basis of best and highest use. Of all the options Crombie's group presented to your government, he made it very clear that the worst scenario was amalgamation of the Metro municipalities without addressing the regional economic disparities and the need for management of certain services on a regional basis, like economic development, watershed management, waste disposal and transportation. Where did Bill 103 come from? Where is your research and analysis? The $100,000 KPMG report you commissioned has been dismissed by urban experts and planners like Andrew Sancton and Wendell Cox.

I am proud to live in the city of Toronto. I am proud to show it off to friends, family and strangers, to take them to the numerous arts and culture festivals occurring throughout our too short summer. As somebody who works in Toronto's non-profit arts community, I love to boast about the fact that we're the third-largest theatre city in the English-speaking world, that the Toronto International Film Festival is on par with Cannes, that because of the incredible critical mass of artists and arts organizations, Toronto is on the leading edge of the new knowledge-based economy.

Internationally renowned playwright Tomson Highway says it best: The choices are making Toronto into a world-class centre easily on par with such luminous, thriving centres as Barcelona, Rome or Paris or making it into an insignificant backwater culturally, economically, politically, a place that nobody visits.

Mr Colle: Thank you very much for a very incisive presentation. There have been a number before you. I think the quality is superb, and certainly they're all very heartfelt, which I think makes them even more compelling.

The real dilemma we have here is that a lot of persons like yourself and others who have spoken tonight live in the general downtown of Toronto and you've made it work, you find it very friendly and you find it a good place to work and be proud of.

The government is saying: "That's all going to remain the same. We make the megacity. You people who are concerned are overreacting." Your life experience, your work experience that makes the downtown work basically is what they're saying is irrelevant because they have this master plan for the megacity.

Are you overreacting? Why are you so concerned that the megacity might jeopardize your live-and-work place?

Ms Bermonte: I think the one word is "access," and the fact that Toronto works is because our local politicians are accessible, because there are individuals who give of their time in an incredible way. I work with an organization where we have over 70 volunteers who provide us with incredible advice and expertise.

I think we're accessible, we're grass-roots, we're hands on, and that is the difference. When you get into a city the size of the proposed megacity, 2.3 million people, when you have a politician who has to respond the needs of 53,000 people -- Mr Colle, I know your constituency is around 73,000. I'm sure you do your best. You all do your best, I'm sure, to be an effective representative, but it is hard.

The fact is that this provincial government is set up very differently from local government. Certain checks and balances are in place at the provincial level that are not in place at the local level.

If you're going to go to a city on that level, you have to look at the whole governance structure. You have to start looking at perhaps a more parliamentary system rather than the current municipal system.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms Bermonte.

Ms Bermonte: It's two different structures. Here you are trying --

The Vice-Chair: We appreciate your coming. Thank you for your presentation.

STEPHEN KERR

The Vice-Chair: I'd like Stephen Kerr to come forward. Good evening, and welcome to the standing committee.

Mr Stephen Kerr: My name is Stephen Kerr. I live in Cabbagetown. Like the previous presenter, I'm a practising artist, and I work for a local telephone company.

I have a great concern that there has been no effort to expand these hearings across the province. I would urge the committee to please take into consideration the overwhelming opposition to this bill that has been heard in testimony to date.

The issues that Bill 103 represents are much larger than the mere unwanted elimination of local governments which are not only popular with their electors but are the very model for municipalities all over the continent. The forced amalgamation without reference to a binding referendum indicates the policy of a government that does not care about the effect of its actions on the public.

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As governed today, Toronto not only works but is the model for other municipal governments in North America. Have we forgotten that the UN has judged ours the most livable city in the world? When I hear Ontario government spokespeople singing the praises of New York and Chicago, it makes me ill. I travel in these cities on business, and Americans there always tell me how lucky I am to live here in Toronto. Last time I was there I met a couple from Long Island who told me that Toronto is a clean, safe city. They said I was lucky to live here, and it's no joke.

Where Toronto is number one in the world in terms of livability, New York is number one in terms of the gap between the lowest and highest income earners. Where Toronto is clean, New York is covered with graffiti and garbage. Where Toronto offers creative mixed-use neighbourhoods and progressive zoning regulations, Chicago offers burned-out industrial parks, gated communities, gutted slums and no hope -- oh yes, and art deco. This is not the "world class" we want for ourselves, I think.

Why is our government rushing to dump 200 years of tradition and much innovation for an American model that has proven so faulty, so inefficient and so damaging to so many lives?

The answer is twofold: First of all their corporate supporters stand to make a great deal of money from the privatization of public property, utilities and services. The proposed amalgamation is driven by an extreme idea that is opposed to citizen input and in favour of uploading all profitable public venture into private hands where money can be made, and downloading all social costs on to municipalities and therefore off the provincial government's balance sheet so as to reduce the deficit on paper, at least. As of today it doesn't even seem that the government has informed the public of all the costs involved. There seem to be another billion dollars of social costs that have suddenly appeared, according to people in the finance ministry. The removal of the current local government that speaks for the citizens is crucial to the imposition of that agenda upon an unwilling public.

The transfer of social costs and services on to a level of government that has no legitimate tax base from which to fund them is a profound mistake. The government should not realistically expect the municipalities to exclusively or even partially support these programs and has presented not one shred of evidence that it is possible on the existing tax base. Municipal property taxes will increase dramatically when actual value assessment is combined with the increased burden of funding old age homes, public housing, welfare and other services. We don't know what those costs are going to be and no one has come up with a figure to date.

The transfer is also too complex to manage within the government's current timetable. When responsibility is handed over, the scene will resemble, if not mirror, the current situation with the provincial family benefits program: files lost, cheques late, and no recourse for the public but to a monotone recording saying, "All our lines are busy, please try again." I don't think this is the kind of situation we want for ourselves. This is probably a great curtain behind which to hide.

I will never forget Mr Snobelen's remarks that the goal of the government is to create a "useful crisis." Well, it certainly has done that. This is not the attitude of a democrat nor, curiously, is it the attitude of a serious businessperson. For a government that rests legitimacy not on the support of the public but on its slavish following of current fashion in management theory, the whole amalgamation idea is a non-starter. If the company I worked for tried to carp together so many lose ends so quickly, we would be out of business in six weeks.

The notion of the property tax base as a support for welfare and social assistance costs is sadly misguided. These taxes exist to service property owners in their specific neighbourhoods with their specific needs. This is what the six city governments currently do. This is the responsible way to spend such revenue, because any misapplication of funds can be closely monitored by those who pay for and benefit from the services so funded.

We have responsible government today. The five cities and one borough are not broken. Even KPMG, the government's paid agent, could speak of nothing other than "possible" savings resulting from amalgamation -- not "probable" but "possible." It is also possible that the earth is flat, but of course this is contrary to all available evidence, not unlike Bill 103. In this respect we are being governed by the Flat Earth Society.

The Harris government's plan to fund welfare with the property tax will never be supported by the ratepayers. If this plan is carried out, it will sow the seeds of a tax revolt that will virtually end the social safety net in Toronto. But it will be the municipalities that are forced to make the cuts so the provincial government doesn't get any political blood on its hands. That's very convenient. But the public is not fooled. I'm not fooled. We see the hand that holds the knife very well.

Welfare should be funded from income tax. Income tax is there to redistribute income, but the provincial government's income tax revenues, after the unwise proposed tax cut, will fall far short of the level needed to sustain current programs. I think everyone agrees on that. The government has cut as far as it can, and so now must find others to do the cutting and, of course, pay the political price. Getting one's political enemies to unwittingly fulfil one's secret agenda and at the same time assassinate themselves politically must seem like a real smart coup. The problem is that the public, given proper input, would not stand for it, and so the government needs to control the megacity council through unelected trustees to ensure that it has the power to make those unwanted changes and to make them stick.

A reduction in representation for Metro Toronto will keep the citizen at arm's length from her or his government. It will increase the likelihood of corruption as city-wide contracts become more lucrative for private interests able to exploit economies of scale. I'm sure the special relationship that some developers have on occasion enjoyed with a few municipal politicians will become even more special. The most effective check on such corruption is citizen activism and participation in the political process, which is easiest when government is close to a person's life, when you can walk to city hall and when you don't have to penetrate layers of security to talk to municipal politicians.

Go try talking to Mayor Rudolph Guiliani of New York City. You won't be able to just walk up to the guy. My mayor, Barbara Hall, is my neighbour in Cabbagetown. It's an area where many classes of people from middle-class homeowners to immigrants to members of the gay and lesbian community mix and there help to create a very special and vibrant kind of living environment. There are few dividing lines of class that mark off where people live, work and play. That's not the case in New York. I know that I have a voice in this kind of a city, and in a place of 2.3 million people, such accessibility and informality is a treasure which we should be very loath to throw away.

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I have never met one of the trustees that has usurped power in Toronto. I have never seen them portrayed in the press or interviewed on TV. Their views have not been held up to public scrutiny. There was no election that brought them to power, no public process for selection of candidates, just a stroke of the pen from the executive branch; in short, no public accountability. Now we find out it's the public's representatives who must be accountable to these so-called trustees. They don't have my trust. I voted for my representatives to have power until the next election. The creation and empowerment by the Harris government of those trustees, whose decisions shall not be challenged by a court, negates the value of my vote and the authority of my elected representatives. This is not acceptable and this is not democracy. The only precedents I can find in history are in Germany, Italy, Spain and South America.

The process here is not only flawed, as is the legislation, it is an insult to the institutions of Parliament and the ideas that are sacred to democracy and to our Canadian society. It is a personal assault on every citizen and his or her intelligence as well as an assault on our communities. Bill 103 and the corporate ideology it stands for must not pass in Ontario. The results will be chaos and a loss of our heritage.

Finally, a megacity government in Toronto would be every Torontonian's worst nightmare: Metro council with a budget and no real power except that imparted to it by unelected officials. This is much worse than any imagined ill represented by the status quo. The Tory process so far has been one of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, secrecy and deliberate obfuscation. It is an insult and a farce, and we can only expect that the end result of such a process will be at least as bad. Therefore, I demand of you, the committee, to urge the minister to withdraw Bill 103 and promptly resign. Thank you.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much. You've effectively used up your time. I appreciate your coming before the committee tonight.

LIZ WHITE

The Vice-Chair: I'd like to call on Liz White for our final presentation. Welcome to the committee this evening. You have 10 minutes in which to make your presentation and if there's time remaining, it will be Ms Boyd from the NDP caucus who will provide the questions.

Ms Liz White: I don't think I'll take the 10 minutes. I would just like to point out that there are a number of people from my community who are here to listen to the presentation and to answer any questions at the end, if anybody wishes to come out of the committee and ask questions.

My name is Liz White and I'm a resident of ward 7. I'm also chair of the local anti-amalgamation committee in my area and I'm a co-owner of a small business in the city of Toronto. I'm here with several members of my community who represent the diverse neighbourhoods that I come from and that make up our community and upon whose behalf I'm speaking with regard to the megacity. We are very concerned with the effects that Bill 103 will have on our community.

I come from a community that is represented by Mr Leach, so I just want to take a bit of time to describe what my community is like. St James Town, part of my community, is the size of Lindsay, Ontario. It's comprised of 20 buildings and it is in a very small geographic area, but it is also very multicultural. There are five significant languages other than English in that area, and many, many different types of cultures that reside within that very self-contained community.

To the south of the area where I live in, which is Cabbagetown, are Regent Park and Moss Park, which are the largest public housing facilities, I think in Canada, certainly in Ontario. I live in the area of Cabbagetown, but we also have other low-rise communities, such as Winchester Park, Seaton-Ontario-Berkeley, Trefann Court and Corktown. All of those communities sit on the committee that is now discussing the amalgamation, Bill 103. All of those communities are represented on that committee, as are members of all three political parties and a number of other community people.

Let me summarize what our concerns are. I think you have the presentation in front of you but I'll be fairly quick. We are shocked and angry, really, at the unseemly haste and lack of process and disregard for the views of those who live in the affected municipalities that will be forever changed by Bill 103. Our ward in its entirety is included in Mr Leach's riding and yet he has not attended a single community meeting on his megacity proposal in ward 7, nor has he contacted the offices of local councillors, to my knowledge, at least to date, to inquire about any local community meetings that he might attend.

Our second concern is that the government, having hired David Crombie and his committee to decide how to best deal with Toronto and the regions surrounding Toronto, as I read it, has taken exactly the opposite tack to that recommended, ultimately, by Crombie in his final report to the government. If it was our preference, we would recommend that the government take a closer look at Crombie's final report.

We are also opposed to the government's establishment of a board of trustees that oversee what I consider seven duly elected and responsible local government officials. We are also concerned about the transition team that has been set up to set up ward boundaries and to hire top staff for the new megacity. Frankly, we find that process both anti-democratic and highly offensive. We have voted for many, many years in the city of Toronto and have a long, long history of responsible government and local democracy and responsible democracy, and we find it quite offensive to have that removed.

The next area we're concerned about is the offloading. Quite clearly, that is a big concern for our community because we have very poor people in our community. We have a lot of public housing in our community and we feel we're going to end up with the brunt of the problem, certainly within our community, obviously within the city of Toronto and within the Metro area. We feel there is going to be an increasing inequity between the 416 area code locations and the 905 exchange, in which there has been inequity for some time already.

We are also joining with other people in speaking out against putting health care services, welfare and subsidized housing on to the property tax base, which is a regressive taxing system. We think that even the rural communities, where there are retirement communities and aging populations, are going to be greatly concerned by the offloading of these particular programs.

It's our view that we cannot cope with a municipal download of about half a billion dollars, which represents, in our estimation, about a 15% increase in property tax. Many of my neighbours are of modest and low incomes, and some of our small businesses in our communities will be badly hurt.

I also want to speak as a small business person in the city of Toronto. We built a business starting in 1990 at the time of the recession. We built it in the worst time possible to try to build a business. We built it to a point where we now employ five people and one part-time person and we offer extensive volunteer services to people who are doing community time and others who find difficult placement for volunteer work. We are exactly the kind of business that the government talks about as being a good business. It is our view that we are facing, by the very stroke of a pen of this government, property tax increases that will possibly crush our business.

In talking both as a businessperson and somebody who is a resident in ward 7 and somebody who sits on the committee dealing with the amalgamation issue, we ask you and strongly advise you not to implement Bill 103. It is our view that once the rot starts on the inside, it will grow to the outside, and people who live outside of the city of Toronto cannot escape the rot that will occur as a result of the destruction of the city.

We don't want to live in an American-type city, with a rotting core and a suburban population that's desperate to escape. We want people to come to the city and enjoy the city, be part of a healthy community. Thank you.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Ms White. Mrs Boyd, three and a half minutes.

Mrs Boyd: Thank you very much for coming and for bringing so many of your neighbours with you. I think it is a shame that this is the way people get politically involved, but obviously it has struck a chord with a large number of people in the Metro area, this whole issue about the real destruction of the democratic system as they see it. I think your ward is probably a really good example of people coming together around what concerns them most.

It may sound like a silly question, but can you tell me what your group thinks the government thinks it's doing with this? You've pointed out so many drawbacks. What possible reason would a government have to go ahead with a bill like this, given the opposition to it?

Ms White: Even though it sounds like a simple question, I find it a difficult question to answer. In listening to Mr Leach on the radio this morning being angry at the audience who accused him of not loving the city of Toronto and saying that he did love the city of Toronto, I don't know how he can possibly say that and do what he's doing, because I truly believe the kinds of activities that the government is proposing in terms of Metropolitan Toronto itself will destroy the city.

I don't know whether the government is setting up a kind of contest between the 905 people and the 416 people, whether they think that contest is somehow going to get them votes. I don't know. All I know is I have a lot of poor people in my community -- and I like them there; I don't mind them being there -- but I know those poor people don't all come from my community; they come from many of your communities and they come to my city. You're asking me in the end to pay for the people who come from your community, who come to the city thinking they can get work and ultimately become unemployed or on welfare or mother's allowance.

I don't resent having those people in my community; in fact I very much support them being there. But what I do resent is being left with the total bill. That's what the residents in my community are saying. That's what the businesses in the greater community that I've been dealing with are saying. That's what my business is saying. We will share the burden, we will absolutely take a lot of responsibility for the people who are in our community, but we don't want to have the whole burden, and you can't escape it.

People who are poor come from all over Ontario to the city of Toronto and we're left with the burden. That's what you're saying. That's what is being said in this particular piece of legislation, and I don't know why that's being done. I don't know whether people in northern Ontario feel that they're not responsible for their poor and women who come to the city to try find work and people who have to come to my municipality because there's subsidized housing. That's why people come to my communities: because they can get housing they can afford.

The Vice-Chair: Thank you very much, Ms White. We appreciate your making your presentation.

That concludes this evening. We stand adjourned until 9 o'clock tomorrow morning.

The committee adjourned at 2100.