Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICES

CONTENTS

Tuesday 13 September 1994

Ministry of Community and Social Services

Hon Tony Silipo, minister

Rosemary Proctor, deputy minister

Kevin Costante, assistant deputy minister, social assistance and employment opportunities

Sue Herbert, assistant deputy minister, program management

Lynn MacDonald, assistant deputy minister, corporate services division

Lucille Roch, assistant deputy minister, children, family and community services

Brian Low, director, developmental services branch

David Cope, manager, estimates and allocations

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ESTIMATES

*Chair / Président: Jackson, Cameron (Burlington South/-Sud PC)

Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Arnott, Ted (Wellington PC)

Acting Chairs / Présidents suppléants:

*Elston, Murray J. (Bruce L)

*Johnson, David (Don Mills PC)

Abel, Donald (Wentworth North/-Nord ND)

Carr, Gary (Oakville South/-Sud PC)

*Duignan, Noel (Halton North/-Nord ND)

Fletcher, Derek (Guelph ND)

Hayes, Pat (Essex-Kent ND)

*Lessard, Wayne (Windsor-Walkerville ND)

Mahoney, Steven W. (Mississauga West/-Ouest L)

*Ramsay, David (Timiskaming L)

*Wiseman, Jim (Durham West/-Ouest ND)

*In attendance / présents

Substitutions present/ Membres remplaçants présents:

Hope, Randy R. (Chatham-Kent ND) for Mr Abel

Johnson, David (Don Mills PC) for Mr Arnott

Klopp, Paul (Huron ND) for Mr Hayes

MacKinnon, Ellen (Lambton ND) for Mr Fletcher

O'Neill, Yvonne (Ottawa-Rideau L) for Mr Mahoney

Clerk / Greffière: Grannum, Tonia

Staff / Personnel: McLellan, Ray, research officer, Legislative Research Service

The committee met at 1011 in room 228.

MINISTRY OF COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SERVICES

The Acting Chair (Mr David Johnson): Ladies and gentlemen, we're beginning with the minister's statement. Minister, you have up to half an hour for your opening remarks.

Hon Tony Silipo (Minister of Community and Social Services): Thank you very much, Mr Chair and members of the committee. Good morning. Although I've had the pleasure to appear before the estimates committee before, this is the first time that I've been here in my capacity as Minister of Community and Social Services. I think we've distributed copies of my statement to hopefully assist members of the committee as we go through. Let me just say that I look upon our time together over the next two days as an opportunity both for me to bring you up to date on the advances that we've made as a ministry and for us to engage in a positive exchange of ideas about our work.

The last time a Minister of Community and Social Services appeared before the standing committee on estimates was on October 6, 1992. Clearly, a lot has happened since then and many changes have been made in the way in which this ministry conducts its business.

This ministry is indeed large and complex. As any previous minister can tell you, it's a tough ministry to run at the best of times. The services we offer are as diverse as the individuals who need them.

We serve about one person in nine in Ontario on a daily basis through social assistance alone. On top of this, we also help tens of thousands of others, whom we serve either directly or through 3,449 partnership agencies in the community.

To do this again in fiscal year 1994-95 will cost $9.49 billion, or 3.5% more than we spent in 1993-94. This is the lowest increase in the ministry's spending for more than 20 years. It is also the second-largest operating budget in the Ontario government.

The people we serve come from the four corners of the province, from every walk of life, and from all racial and cultural groups. They are the people with physical and developmental disabilities, children at risk who need protection, women who seek shelter from their abusive spouses, children attending child care and their parents, and people who need social assistance.

Our challenge as a ministry is to ensure that there are systems in place which effectively provide people with the services and supports they need to take care of themselves and their families. That challenge has never been greater than during these difficult financial times.

For more than four years, this government has had to cope with the implications of a serious recession, which has hurt thousands of people across the province. And, of course, the government's revenues during this same period have been reduced -- in part due to the jobs lost, in part due to the actions of the federal government, which, by capping the Canada assistance program, shifted $6.7 billion to Ontario taxpayers since 1990-91, and continues this to the tune of $1.7 billion a year.

Despite these odds, we have moved forward to meet the challenge of providing much-needed help and support to hundreds of thousands of people across the province who are anxious to help themselves.

Today, there are encouraging signs that the worst of the recession is behind us. There are signs of hope.

Jobs are being created, public services are being preserved and spending is under control. Unemployment was down to a seasonably adjusted provincial rate of 9.4% last month, the lowest it's been since September 1991.

Social assistance case loads have decreased each month for the last five consecutive months and the figures indicate that we have just experienced the most significant month-to-month decrease in the social assistance case load since July 1989.

This is good news. But we must continue to improve on these gains and work towards better management of the social service system, more responsive and individualized services, greater effectiveness and efficiency, and greater affordability for everyone involved, including the taxpayer.

Before I address specific areas of the ministry's expenditures, policies and services relating to social assistance, child care, developmental services, children's services and anti-violence initiatives, I want to set before you the broad new directions that this ministry has undertaken.

First, we had to get our own house in order. At the corporate level we have reorganized to provide better coordination between policy and program management.

We have closed our four regional offices and established a direct relationship between the central office and the area offices. This is resulting in better decision-making at both the central office and the area office levels and has improved service to our community partners and the individuals we serve, and has made for a better-managed social service delivery system.

In 1990-91, the ministry employed 11,267 people. Today our staff stands at 9,865, down almost 800 from last year alone. This smaller workforce is better managed, more efficient and more responsive to the needs of our clients and service providers. Also, it is more reflective of Ontario's diversity. We have successfully redeployed over 90% of the people affected in this ministry.

Last month we released the ministry's MCSS Restructuring Framework: A Work in Progress to all our ministry's transfer payment agencies as a work in progress intended to guide the work of the ministry and its partners over the next several years. This framework will be refined, based on our experience with restructuring initiatives over the coming months.

Restructuring is about addressing the potential for realigning resources for supports and services within a community. It's about developing new management skills to help us learn to live within our means and reinvesting in our communities and in the system as a whole.

It's also about seizing opportunities to provide better services for people and, most important, to involve those people who use the system in each step of the community planning process. Their participation is vital, because they are the best people in the community to provide the advice and leadership necessary for change, and to know what services are needed.

Where priority service needs have been met and expenditure reductions managed in a community, any net savings realized will be reinvested back into that community.

One of the ways we are encouraging this restructuring is with the $6.8-million community innovation fund I announced last spring. It will be used to enhance projects that are creative and demonstrate a cooperative and collaborative approach between and among community agencies, while making a significant and positive difference to the people we serve.

This restructuring of the ministry and delivery of ministry services through greater efficiency, effectiveness and better management will affect both providers of service and those who receive service. The end result will be a better social service system in Ontario, one that meets community needs and one that the people of Ontario can afford.

Further, restructuring was one of the key goals of the social contract. There are a number of provisions in the community services sector agreement that encourage and support restructuring.

Key among these are the provisions related to retraining and redeployment within the sector. In the next few weeks, the ministry, working with its sector partners, is expecting approval from the Public Sector Labour Market and Productivity Commission in the Ministry of Finance for the establishment of the community services sector training and adjustment council.

This council will provide a broadly based labour adjustment strategy for the sector, including a job registry, matching funds for employers to encourage training, and the administration of the job security fund to assist displaced workers in approved training programs.

The first of the specific areas of the ministry mandate that I want to address is social assistance.

This ministry is determined to give people on social assistance the help and opportunities that they need to exit the system. This is in the best interests of everyone concerned.

We are succeeding in our goal. For the fifth consecutive month, we have seen a decline in the number of people who receive social assistance. Since March, there are almost 23,000 fewer households, or almost 37,000 fewer people, receiving social assistance in Ontario today. These figures represent a decline of 3.3% over the five-month period. In human terms, it means that the quality of life for thousands of Ontarians has improved.

I am cautiously optimistic that this encouraging downward trend in the number of social assistance recipients will continue as the general economy strengthens.

But this hasn't happened by itself. This government and this ministry have been at the forefront of getting people off social assistance and back to work. Jobs Ontario Training alone has created more than 50,000 jobs, including 19,000 for people who were on social assistance. To this can be added the success of our supports to employment program, which helps 97,630 people rejoin the workforce and have their wages topped up to a predetermined level.

JobLink Ontario, which I announced this past spring, adds significantly to these efforts. It realigns numerous programs into one and mobilizes communities to focus efforts to address people's needs as they move from the social assistance system into mainstream employment opportunities. JobLink Ontario will be sensitive to the racial and cultural needs of the individual, as well as to the short-term and longer-term needs of the people we serve.

It is designed to make existing training and job creation programs more accessible to social assistance recipients and to centralize information and resources into one-stop shopping places to make it easier for people to help themselves.

All of the employment programs funded by the ministry will eventually be integrated into JobLink Ontario. We are adding $25 million to the already more than $200 million that this government has committed to help people on social assistance enter the labour force.

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Even the federal government has recognized the significance of JobLink Ontario by joining with us through their $25 million contribution, which doubles the money set aside by Ontario for this fiscal year alone. We are now able to move forward with confidence to establish initial JobLink Ontario centres in about a dozen communities throughout the province over the coming months.

Almost half of the $50-million JobLink budget this year will go towards creating about 10,000 additional training spaces to help prepare social assistance recipients for the new jobs that will be created by our expanding economy.

Also, the JobLink Ontario innovations fund which I announced on June 21 will create access to training and employment opportunities for social assistance recipients through community economic development, and we have introduced incentives into JobLink that will support individuals who want to set up their own businesses, as well as the needs of first nations. We are confident that this initiative will go a long way towards getting Ontario back to work and back on the road to prosperity.

I regret that we have not been able to proceed with full reform of social assistance at this time. As members of this committee can appreciate, it was not possible to move forward in the way that we wanted because of the fiscal hardship facing the government and the lack of support from the federal government.

We had hoped that a new government in Ottawa would have been more responsive to our needs. However, the Liberal government has not only continued the cap on CAP authored by their Conservative predecessors, but they have added to our burden by tightening eligibility to unemployment insurance and shifting the cost to Ontario taxpayers to the tune of $100 million in this fiscal year. They have also cut support to refugee claimants, costing us a further $16.5 million annually.

Total reform of social assistance in Ontario remains our goal. However, we are moving forward. We will continue to make improvements, including:

-- Providing better service and protection for people through a more effective appeal system.

-- Clarification of client rights and responsibilities.

-- Policies with respect to the treatment of victims of family violence.

-- Assisting individuals towards employment by marketing the supports to employment program to ensure that all recipients are aware of the supports that are in place for them.

-- Working with first nations to create a system that is sensitive to their unique needs.

The insights and knowledge that we have gained in the reform process will stand us in good stead as the federal government brings forward its discussion paper on social security reform.

We have already approached the federal government with our proposal for an Ontario child benefit program. We feel that this is a progressive social policy initiative designed to help deal with child poverty not only in Ontario but across the country.

All of what we are doing in the area of social assistance, everything I've just outlined, has to be done within the parameters of a well-managed, responsible and responsive system.

In 1994-95, social assistance expenditures are estimated at $6.8 billion. This is the largest single budget item within the ministry, and Ontarians demand prudent management of that amount of money.

We know that most people on social assistance need it. The challenge we face is to provide that balance between providing good service for those who are in need, and trying to give them the opportunity to exit the system, while stemming abuse where it does exist.

Last spring we began hiring 270 extra staff to minimize irregularities and better manage the system. These people will help re-examine every welfare case the province administers, to make sure that all of the needed information is correct.

In 1993-94, we allocated approximately $4 million to over 50 municipalities so that they could improve their management of the system. We also allocated annual provincial funding in the amount of $10 million in 1994-95 and another $10 million in 1995-96 to municipalities throughout the province so they can conduct their own case file investigations.

Outside of Ontario, we are moving ahead with agreements with the western provinces and Quebec to ensure that no one is getting social assistance payments from more than one source and that the integrity of the system remains intact.

In order to prevent overlaps in payments, we are also working on a direct interface with federal support programs such as the Canada pension plan, unemployment insurance and workers' compensation.

Within Ontario we have developed a new case load computer system for income maintenance workers which will be used by municipalities and the province. It will go a long way in helping both levels of government to streamline and improve their service delivery to those in need. It will also alert us quickly to any irregularities in the program. It will further ensure that workers have more time to spend helping people on social assistance to obtain training and employment opportunities.

This automated application process is already under way as a pilot project in Metropolitan Toronto and is being conducted by Metro social services. A second pilot will begin in Brantford by early this fall, and by the end of this fiscal year we will have up to 30 sites using case worker technology across the province.

But there is still more for us to do. We have been making, and will continue to make, steady progress in improving Ontario's social assistance system. Many of the changes that we saw outlined in the Social Assistance Review Committee's report, Time for Action, in the Back on Track paper and in Turning Point have been or are in the process of being implemented.

The second area that I want to address is child care. The government is well aware of the key role that child care plays in supporting families. The ministry is proud of the positive changes it has made in the child care system in this province, despite the lack of funding from Ottawa and with the odds of recessionary times ranged against us.

Let me detail some of the accomplishments since 1990-91.

In 1990-91, the budget for child care was $350 million. This fiscal year that amount has risen to $565.6 million, which is a 62% increase.

We've added 21,000 new child care fee subsidies to the system, 14,000 through Jobs Ontario with 100% provincial support, which is a 45% increase over 1990-91.

We were able to provide wage subsidy funding to child care staff amounting to $116 million per year in 1993-94, which is an 85% increase over three years ago.

Through the conversion initiative, the government's commitment to supporting the transition of commercial operators to non-profit status has expanded the not-for-profit system by 3,500 spaces. It is our goal that half of the existing 30,600 commercial spaces will become non-profit by the end of fiscal year 1996-97.

I think we can be proud of these accomplishments. The system is now more responsive to the needs of parents who are out seeking work or improving their skills through training courses. Also, more teenaged single mothers are able to return to school.

And our interlocking strategy between child care and employment is working. We are creating the jobs, more people can take those jobs because of our fee subsidy program, and more people are able to live productive and dignified lives, knowing that their children are being well cared for in the best child care system in this country.

And to ensure that we can do significantly more, we have been pursuing our fair share of funding from the federal government. We submitted a proposal to them last June requesting funding which would move child care towards a public service model, making it more affordable and accessible.

Our discussions at the ministerial level have been positive. We will be pursuing these discussions at the official's level later this week with a view to accessing Ontario's fair share of both the strategic initiatives funds and the child care dollars outlined in the federal Liberal Party's Red Book at the time of the last federal election.

In the meantime, we're moving ahead with other progressive changes. These include developing consistent rules for subsidy eligibility determination, improving access to fee subsidies through the strategic use of approved corporations, developing strategies to strengthen child care-school relationships jointly with the Ministry of Education and Training and continuing policy development to help first nations and aboriginal communities design, plan, manage and control their own child care services.

Earlier I said that this ministry touches the lives of people who might not be able to help themselves. Perhaps there's no better example of this than the supports that we provide to people with developmental disabilities.

A few months ago the ministry completed the seven years of the multi-year plan for people with developmental disabilities. During this time we furthered the ministry's strategic vision for the developmental service system as outlined in the 1987 document Challenges and Opportunities.

Since 1987, we've continued the development of a system of community-based services and we've provided opportunities for thousands of people to move back into the community. We've maintained, or improved, the quality of support for those continuing to live in the ministry's directly operated facility system.

Our total spending on these services went from a total of $796.8 million in 1990-91 to just under $914 million at the end of last fiscal year. This is the largest single budget in the ministry, next to social assistance.

Our financial support to transfer payment agencies during this time went from $488.9 million to $633.2 million, while dollars for the directly operated facilities declined from $308.1 million to $281.1 million. This move from facility care to community living has created an additional 10,000 spaces in the community living sector and an estimated 3,800 jobs to support them.

Two months ago I announced that a further $29 million was being diverted from facility budgets into community living opportunities for people with developmental disabilities.

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Three million dollars of that money will be added to our popular special services at home initiative, which is designed to allow families to keep members at home with an appropriate support system. A further $3.2 million will go towards moving people into the community from nursing homes and ministry facilities.

What concerns this ministry, however, are not so much the numbers as the real people represented by those numbers.

We are helping about 30,000 people with developmental disabilities throughout the province whose quality of life depends to no small degree on the caring support of this ministry.

Our primary concern is for those people and their families. It is also the concern of some 380 volunteer, non-profit agencies that join with us in community partnerships. Together, our goal is to make community living alternatives a reality for every person with a developmental disability in this province.

The ministry and its community partners can be proud of the many accomplishments that have been made. However, we know we can still do better.

That is why we are in the process of bringing together the separate and distinct resources we've built up over the years into a more collaborative responsive system for those who need it.

It means greater community cooperation and partnerships in the future, and it means a better-managed system and a system that promotes the dignity of the individual, and empowers that individual.

This is being done, in part, through three major initiatives that will form the basis of the new policy framework for developmental service in Ontario.

The first of these is the accountability project that is designed to improve accountability in both directly operated and ministry-funded community services.

The second major direction for the future is the quality of life project. This initiative is designed to evaluate the impact of the ministry-funded programs on the day-to-day lives of people with developmental disabilities.

The third initiative, which we are presently researching and evaluating, is the levels of support project. Through this, we hope to ensure a more consistent and reliable assessment of the type and amount of support which an individual requires.

Our developmental services framework will guide our work into the future. Challenges and Opportunities encouraged the movement of people from institutions into the community. The framework will build on that process and support more individuals to live at home with their families.

The next general mandate I want to address is this ministry's responsibility for the health and wellbeing of children.

In 1993 the ministry established the policy framework for services funded under the Child and Family Services Act. This was based on extensive policy work over the previous three years in conjunction with unions, transfer payment agencies and our other community partners.

The framework calls for more creative and responsive ways to better manage the complex array of services that we have for children in need.

Our aim is to remove barriers that have previously impeded satisfactory access to services and to encourage a more effective partnership with local communities in both the planning and allocation of resources.

We have also moved forward to better target services for those children who are vulnerable and most in need of support, and we are currently developing with our stakeholders options around more equitable funding mechanisms across all areas of the province.

And, most importantly, we are focusing on accountability on the outcomes of our services to children and youth and their families.

As we proceed to implement the framework, we will be working very closely with parents and youth who will be most affected by service delivery. We will be relying on their input into these services and we are aiming to have a third of the membership of local community planning committees made up with parents and youth.

One of our main objectives with children's services is to try to identify early symptoms and environmental factors that might indicate a risk for children and their families in the future.

As members of this committee are aware, the ministry's highly respected Better Beginnings, Better Futures project is based on identifying potential problems and promoting prevention and early intervention so that children can have a more solid start in life.

It shows what can be done when community groups come together with professionals in the social services field to work collaboratively for the future wellbeing of children.

It also shows the worth of interministry partnerships. The Better Beginnings, Better Futures project joins this ministry with the ministries of Health and Education and Training so that the government, as a whole, can bring unified direction and purpose to an important segment of the overall social service needs of Ontarians.

In keeping with the principle of helping children early in life, the ministry took two important initiatives this year to give children and young adults the support they need to face the future.

The first initiative was to make an additional $3 million available so that all eligible crown wards, once they reach 18, could receive a common minimum of $663 a month until they reached the age of 21.

This applies to all youth in Ontario who entered into an agreement with their children's aid society to work towards specified, individual career goals.

When I made this announcement last May at the OACAS annual conference and bursary awards dinner, this ministry was applauded by the crown wards for its understanding and support for a group of youth who had often been forgotten.

The real credit, though, goes to those young men and women who helped us, through their experiences and insights, to arrive at this policy. We listened very carefully to what they had to tell us, and their reaction to my announcement was confirmation that this ministry does care about their future endeavours.

The second important announcement we made in recent months was the introduction of the child nutrition initiative. Its goal is to promote healthy development for children, primarily between the ages of four and 13, and it will support communities at risk of experiencing problems with child nutrition.

When I made the announcement in the House, the Coalition for Student Nutrition welcomed the announcement and stated that by implementing this community-based program, the government has shown that it understands that student nutrition programs work best when parents, teachers and the broader community are involved in a delivery model based on partnership.

With funding of $1 million every year, we will help community-based groups, including schools, to launch or improve a range of child nutrition programs.

We will announce, in the next few weeks, the organization chosen to administer and promote the program. It will be supported by an advisory committee and will encourage the community and private sectors to contribute to the various projects taking place within their communities.

The last major area of children's services I would like to address is the young offenders program.

Although the Young Offenders Act is a federal one, the provinces are responsible for administering the act and this ministry is responsible for providing young offender services for children between the ages of 12 and 15. Offenders who are 16 and 17 years old have services provided to them by the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services. Both these ministries work collaboratively with the Ministry of the Attorney General.

An office of youth justice has been established so that these ministries can work together more closely in matters concerning young offenders.

To further address our responsibilities under the Young Offenders Act, we have taken a number of steps to make the system more responsive to those it serves, and to improve the overall management and effectiveness.

The policy framework for children's services, which I addressed in some detail earlier, contains the basic groundwork and direction that we need on which to base our current and future planning.

The ministry has established an operational plan for young offender services which focuses on: an improved range and appropriateness of services; an improved use of services, within the limits of available resources; reduced reliance on residential care; and more effective interventions with each of the clients we serve.

What all this means is that we've looked at the changing volumes of young people we are dealing with, and how we can manage their needs during a time when we have limited resources available to us. We are doing this in a way that is mindful of the cultural diversity of the youth population and with an awareness that racism might play a part in the system.

You might recall, Mr Chair, that the Provincial Auditor addressed the young offenders program in his last report to the people of Ontario. We welcomed his thoughtful recommendations, and the public accounts committee reviewed the findings with us during a two-day meeting last February.

This discussion went well and we are confident that the steps we have taken have addressed all of the Provincial Auditor's concerns. Indeed, many of the points raised in his report had already been identified by the ministry, and corrective action was already in hand when the report was released.

The last matter I want to address with regard to children's services concerns the standing committee on social development's report Children at Risk which was tabled in July.

Although I will be responding directly to the committee's report, I think I have covered today most of the major points that were raised in that document.

We were already addressing and acting upon many of the recommendations in the report. However, it was gratifying to see that the committee's work had paralleled our own in identifying those areas that needed improvement.

The last subject I want to address today is family violence.

It is a sad fact that violence within the family circle is all too common today, and it's part of this ministry's mandate to offer protection to vulnerable family members.

Since 1990-91, we have increased our spending on shelters for battered women by 39%, from $49.9 million four years ago to $69.5 million this fiscal year. This reflects a 25% increase in shelter beds, as well as an increase in the diversity of services offered to abused women.

Included in these expenditures is a $10-million wife assault enhancement fund created in 1991-92 to increase the accessibility to services for women from disadvantaged groups such as visible minorities, native, francophone, rural and people with disabilities.

We continue to be challenged by the lack of stability in shelter revenues which creates pressures on shelters to charge the residents a fee. Under the General Welfare Assistance Act, municipalities have the discretion to contribute hostel per diems to shelters under the 50-30-20 formula among the three levels of government.

Five municipalities have withdrawn their per diem support agreement with hostel operators. A few others have capped their contributions, either through limiting the amount of per diems paid or the length of stay that they will recognize. We are concerned about the situation and its impact on the ability of some shelters to meet women's needs. To address the situation, our area offices are working with individual shelters to ensure that the basic needs of abused women and their children are being met.

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We are also working closely with women's advocates, service providers and abused women to make the male batterer program more effective. This ministry funds 33 community programs for male batterers. Thirteen of these are cofunded by the Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services. This government is very committed to supporting efforts to end violence against women. Male batterer programs are one approach for eliminating this violence. We want to ensure that these programs are effective. We are working closely with other ministries and directorates within this government and with the Solicitor General of Canada to evaluate and improve these services.

I said at the beginning of my remarks that this is a tough ministry to run. During the last half-hour, I have tried to touch only briefly on some of the challenges this ministry faces, and on only some of the views that we have heard expressed. I've tried to set before this committee an impressive list of things that we have done to help well over a million people in their time of need during almost impossible economic times. I've also outlined for you the directions in which this ministry has chosen to go, directions that reflect a better managed system of social services in Ontario and systems that are effective and affordable.

In conclusion, I want to publicly thank everyone in the ministry as well as all the professionals who work together with us in the agency system and the volunteers across Ontario who devote so much of their time to helping others. The dedication all of these people have shown during some stressful and uncertain times has made Ontario a better place for everyone.

The Acting Chair: Who will be responding for the Liberal Party? The member for Ottawa-Rideau, you have up to half an hour for the response.

Mrs Yvonne O'Neill (Ottawa-Rideau): I don't think I'll need that long, Mr Chairman. This ministry, as the minister has stated, is about lives and I'm sure he gets likely ten times as many letters as I do and I don't think they all reflect exactly his perspective that I saw this morning. I think the ministry provides many challenges, and I guess I hear the minister's accounting of what I feel has been foot-dragging in the ministry on some very significant initiatives.

I want to congratulate him, however, on his own personal efforts to cooperate with municipalities. I think that is key to this ministry being as effective as possible. In the administration of social assistance, I was very pleased when we talked about the better and more effective distribution of funds that involved actual allocations to the ministry to help that happen. I hope the municipalities will continue to take a very high profile with JobLink and also with the shelters.

There is an awful lot of uncertainty still surrounding the direction of the ministry even though the minister makes some significant statements this morning. There is a lot of misunderstanding yet about where social assistance reform is going to go, and as I've sat on the social development committee in our most recent set of hearings, there is still a lot of confusion about the role in long-term care. They saw three ministers appearing together in the beginning of the long-term care reform, and now we have only one minister speaking.

I'm quite concerned that the main area, I still feel -- and it may be a perception, but certainly even in this morning's presentation -- that the conversion of child care still has such a very high profile in children's services. I tend to feel that the Children at Risk report is not as far along in its recommendations being implemented as the minister indicated this morning. I do feel there has been a great deal of uncertainty surrounding children's services, and that has really disrupted a lot of lives, whether they be front-line workers, parents of children at risk or, indeed, the children themselves.

I am pleased that the crown wards have gained some successes and they have actually come before us in social development to tell us how that has changed their outlook. Child care will certainly be part of my questioning as we proceed through this section of hearings. The adoption reform is totally lacking this morning and that confuses me, because the minister has on other occasions personally talked about that with quite a deal of fervour.

Children, then, in my mind, are certainly not one of the main priorities as far as expenditures go, and I know that ministry has a lot of strings on it. I guess I'd like to see much more said about preventive programs for children. I'd like to see us clarify that criteria for subsidy, and I know the minister did indicate that's an area he's working on because that too changes lives, and sometimes the parents that I'm talking about are almost young people themselves or are young people. Many of them come to me and are confused that the only way they can get a subsidy now is if they're on social assistance. Some of them are only trying to enter the workforce and they're not yet on social assistance and certainly some people who are really at very minimal levels of employment and coming off UI are still mixed in that criteria maze as well.

The social assistance reform that I mentioned -- again, I do not have exactly the same rose-coloured glasses as the minister about the recommendations of Back on Track and Time for Action being implemented. The reason I say that is, I have assessed them and I do think the most significant reform, the reform of the unification of the social assistance system, is not yet even in motion. I think that has to be tackled. I think the people, both recipients and certainly front-line workers, think that would ease their lives a lot.

I guess I'd have to say at this moment that I think there is some misunderstanding over the summer of those figures that are coming. I'm glad the figures are coming but I don't think they're totally understood because many people are going on to FBA and they still are going on to FBA and I'm not sure that the STEP program and the other, whether it be Win, the more outdated program, but STEP in particular, are yet being seen as the alternative to these people, particularly the young people who are going on FBA, the single mothers.

The STEP program: From the very beginning of the mandate of this government, people in the municipalities, the people who are using the program have said over and over again that they want to know more about it, that it must be simplified, and yet again this morning the minister is putting that in the future tense. I checked that. He said "will." I hope it is being done as we speak. It is still, in my mind, a program that has an awful lot of merit. The setback to the program -- I think it was in the summer of 1993 with the changes through the expenditure control plan -- did confuse people about the commitment of the government to that particular initiative, which I think is universally accepted as an excellent alternative to people on assistance.

I'd like to know a little more, and I hope we will as we proceed through this, what the results of your initiative to curtail the welfare fraud have been. You must have some initial results, some of the figures that have come forward over the summer. Some people are indicating there's a direct relationship. I tend to think the municipalities, as I say, were encouraged by your initiative and their ability to cooperate in that. Student welfare is one area that I think municipalities have got more courageous about and some of the leadership you've shown in understanding that issue -- and it is a very sensitive one -- I also feel I must commend you for.

I'm hearing news again this morning about identification cards. I don't know how authentic that news is. You didn't mention anything about that this morning. I'd like to pursue that a little more. I do feel the computerization is -- and I'm glad you mentioned this morning that you are very concerned with hooking up with the feds as well in their plans and I hope your talks continue to be what you consider fruitful.

I am confused by the budget, all of that being said, in that you continue to project growth in social assistance. Whether that is going to change in quarterly reports, I don't know, but the projection of growth in social assistance, when we do seem to have at least a small corner turned, I would like to have you talk a little bit more about that as the week progresses.

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You talked about your commitment to the developmentally handicapped, and as you know, on the floor of the Legislature that is not accepted as you see it. I was in Thunder Bay very recently, and certainly on that occasion the effect of the closure of the Northwestern Regional Centre was brought very close to our minds and indeed to our hearts. It was brought to us by the doctors in public practice. They indicated to us that in the north in particular, and particularly in that centre, the supports just aren't in the community, and we get that from several parts of the province, but this was a particularly poignant presentation. They can actually trace some of these individuals now to the emergency wards of the acute care hospitals as well as to the correctional institutions.

That was certainly not the kind of news we wanted to hear. I don't know how much of that you've heard, but I do think that the elderly parents who write me are still quite frightened. They still feel that they can't carry on. They still have fears about what is out there for their son and daughter. No matter what their age, they are still in need of care.

I thought your figures this morning, regarding the jobs that had been created for the developmentally handicapped, were rather generous and I certainly would like to know what that program involves. I know that Kingston seems to have some excellent efforts in that regard and I'd like to know a little bit more about that.

I want to ask a few more things about the ministry's expenditures within itself. Restructuring and refining, you see all the up sides. There seems to still be a lot of feeling that there have been cutbacks in service, cutbacks in support, even to employees. Some of them talk to me about the thousand small cuts or whatever that phrase is; I'm not familiar enough with it. I'd like to know a bit more about the employee benefits because in almost every category, in every vote, the employee benefits seem to exceed what your projections were and that's confusing. The social contract, though it is designed as a saving mechanism, is very expensive for many agencies to administer, and you likely know that. There were legal fees involved, there were mediation fees, there was time, there was overtime and many of them have brought to my attention the difficulty they are having in absorbing those costs in their regular budget.

They are also bringing to my mind, and I am confused, as I was last December, the third-party payment that is coming forward from changes in the regulations around expenditures of the Ministry of Health that are ordered through the Ministry of Community and Social Services Act and other acts that are administered through your ministry.

Those are my comments. I guess I feel we have been through tough times. They are depressing times. I think our role as legislators is to lead people to another level of hopefulness. So what I guess I'm asking of the ministry is that we see more about prevention, and Better Beginnings, Better Futures is your best example and you used it and I'm happy about that, because it's certainly one of the favourites of mine and many people across the province, the STEP program, the programs that really do move directly into people to give them a new look on life and a new hope and the supports that are needed to make that hope be fulfilled.

Those are my remarks this morning. I'm very anxious to get down to the nitty-gritty of the votes.

The Acting Chair: Thank you for those remarks. That brings us then to the Progressive Conservatives and the member for Burlington South.

Mr Cameron Jackson (Burlington South): Thank you --

Mr Murray J. Elston (Bruce): Do we still have Progressive Conservatives? I thought we'd taken "Progressive" off that.

Mr Jackson: It's like a rude label. I use the word the odd time.

The Acting Chair: I see the member for Bruce has joined us. Welcome.

Mr Jackson: We're not all rude. Just the odd one.

Mr Elston: I'm back.

Mr Jackson: You're back. How are you doing, Murray?

Mr Elston: Fine.

Mr Jackson: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. I want to welcome the minister here to his first Comsoc estimates, to thank him for providing us with his opening comments and to share with us in more matter-of-fact terms than in future or vision terms definitions around his role as minister and his ministry within the Bob Rae government at this period in time.

I couldn't help but be struck by a couple of themes that I felt were running through the minister's opening comments today, by a reference in about four places, the notion that, "We would like to be doing more, or we have been unable to do anything substantive by virtue of some other level of government either not agreeing with our timetable or agreeing with our approach or simply having to live with the fiscal realities of the day."

I think that causes me a bit of concern because, taken one step further, if that is the sort of reception the minister gets when talking to AMO or when talking to his provincial counterparts before the federal government, it may also, I think, which is the second theme, be the kind of reaction he gets at the cabinet table.

That has not always been the case. I think it was very clear at the beginning of this government's mandate that social issues and the reform and the commitment thereto were rather high on Bob Rae's agenda, Bob Rae's vision for Ontario. I think that many people, as a result, came to the table, particularly municipalities, with a belief that the social democratic conscience would translate itself to substantive reforms.

I honestly have to say, Minister, with the exception of reconfiguring day care services in this province and the careful avoidance of talking about actual numbers instead of target numbers -- every number you gave us was target; I suspect we will explore that in a little more detail -- in my view, that is the substantive reform of the Bob Rae government in the last four years.

I won't get into the ideological debate around that. I'd rather specifically look at the most significant and important outcomes to analyse the issue of child care, and that is, how many additional children have we been able to serve in this province and have we done it in a fiscally responsible manner? I think that ultimately has to be the measure in which all three political parties should be viewing that issue.

The third theme that I saw running through this was what I didn't see running through your opening commentary. I was concerned that, given 40 pages of text, we would have had an opportunity for you to have mentioned a few other areas. Certainly, there were enough pages to do that, and this committee would have indulged you additional time in order to do that.

But there was no clear reference to or update of the relationships with AMO in terms of substantive reforms in terms of municipal social service infrastructure restructuring. There was no direct reference to children's aid funding, which was of concern to me, or the declining exceptional circumstances review funding. Life in the GTA and in other sectors of this province creates enormous challenges for children's aid societies, and the atypical children's aid society is reducing access to service in order to respond to the reduction of this time-honoured funding vehicle of a provincial government to ensure that the safety net for children is secure and captures as many if not all of those who from time to time slip through the net.

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I was concerned there was no direct reference to children's mental health services. For us as legislators now simply to be referring to this new phraseology of "children at risk" without -- we have to be careful doing that. I think we have a right to be very specific because children's needs in this province are very specific and programs are very specific and the number of children on waiting lists for children's mental health services are rather acute.

As several members of this estimates committee have had the Minister of Health before us, we were exposed to case after case where paediatric mental health programs were being cut in hospitals. There was this triministry game that goes on, and it's been going on for a long time, Minister, between Health and Education and Comsoc with its very direct responsibilities for children's services, where we're not getting a ministry reacting to another ministry's cutting off the service.

I give the classic example that I have in my own community in speech-language pathology services, where the hospital just killed the program, threw 120 children under the age of five out into the community. The person who was laid off at the hospital on the Friday had her shingle out on Monday at $75 an hour and the school board coterminously withdrew its support of preschool supports for these children.

The universal response was, "We can't find a ministry to take responsibility." But we have been studying it for two years and I certainly hope that you would, even if not for those children and families that are considering social assistance as their only access to speech-language services, which is a really stupid way for people to try and access a service, simply because the costs of meeting the legitimate needs of their children can only be met without bankrupting the family.

This argument, as you know, comes up on the Ontario drug benefit program, which you also didn't mention. That was an area of reform for the working poor in our province and it failed to somehow receive any mention.

There was no mention of two initiatives from within your own caucus, and that concerns me because I'm almost afraid to think I'm a bigger fan of these reforms than you are as the minister. I fully support your two colleagues, one seeking legislative entrenchment of professional accreditation for social workers in this province, and the adoption reform my colleague in the Liberal caucus has already referred to. We enthusiastically embrace these private members' bills.

We limited our public criticisms that these were not the priorities of your government. At least you're consistent, because they weren't even a priority to receive a side-bar mention in your opening comments. However, I continue to support the two members of your caucus who still believe in those initiatives and I had hoped that we would have had, quite frankly, some political lipservice at best for a member of your own caucus. But again of concern to me is that we could have seen more identification.

I have three or four other items that I didn't hear about, but I would like to address rather directly some of your opening comments now that you did include, for the benefit of assisting us through the next two days in our hearings.

I was concerned that you made references to your reduction in staff complement without making it abundantly clear to many of us in the know that much of the transfer and reduction came as a result of transferring the homes for the aged under Bill 101, responsibilities that have kicked in in your ministry, the reassignments under long-term care, and as a side request -- make this my first request -- we would traditionally always ask for the number of contract positions currently that are not included in that, and for that to be a relevant number, to show them over the last three years, so if we could get a more fulsome explanation of your decline. I'm led to believe there haven't been the layoffs, just the transfers. I think it would be fairer and more helpful if we could get what I suspect is the real truth of those numbers.

You talked about social assistance reform, using the word "irregularities" when you were careful not to use the word "fraud." Now I know the word "fraud" has come out of your mouth. I know you've uttered it at least once or twice while you've been the minister. Many of us know it exists and many of us get routine reports from municipalities about the extent of it. I suspected that when you promised before the public accounts committee and in the House that we would get some actual numbers on that, that would be forthcoming during the course of these estimates as well.

You made a reference about the refugee claimants and the cutting of support. I recall, in joining you in the House, much to the confusion of everybody, with a bit of understanding for the difficult nature in which your government was placed when the federal government made that decision, I was not critical of that outcome. I'm concerned about the manner in which you've conveyed it here in this report. Has there been a change in attitude that this was a welcome tightening up of the system or that it was an unwelcome tightening up of the system? It doesn't seem to square with the manner in which you've conveyed it on the floor of the Legislature, because what's at the root of that is how your government quite clearly defines the appropriate role of social assistance and the scope of social assistance for this province. Maybe we can have some time to discuss that, Minister.

On page 18 you referred to the three reports, which I appreciate your mentioning, and then you indicate that they are being implemented. May I make my third request for information an update? There is an old one, because this is a traditional request of mine. Your predecessor, Ms Boyd, and the appropriate staff prepared a report on which recommendations were being implemented. If you could dust that one off and update it for us, I think it would be extremely helpful for us to measure the power of your commentary that they were being implemented. That would be helpful for us to be made aware.

I certainly would like within that, once that document arrives, to discuss the issue of young persons on social assistance who are attending school. My colleague the member for Wellington has raised it and I have raised it with you, and there has been some disturbing news coming out of the Niagara Peninsula of an alderman down there who happens to also be a school teacher who has been doing some independent analysis in his own jurisdiction. Council has been reacting to this document, and hopefully we'll have time during estimates in which, Minister, you can share with us how that issue is being dealt with.

You mentioned child care, and again dealing in gross numbers and spaces, but I understand that we're showing a rather huge increase for the capital commitment. So I think to be fair, with the thousands of vacant spaces in Ontario -- and again, regardless of auspice; this has nothing to do with private sector and not-for-profit, but the government has the right to use the Jobs Ontario job creation to build facility infrastructure. But when there are thousands of built spaces in Ontario, perhaps you could have built two more women's shelters for the same money with which you are going to build four or five day care centres.

Clearly, when I look at page 109 of the estimates, the violence-against-women entry, these people have received a slap in the face with a reduction of over $1,026,000, and yet we've got all sorts of bricks and mortar for, frankly, in many cases, redundant space for child care initiatives. The very fact that we may have all sorts of choice for a battered mother, for her child, but she only has 24 days in which she can find safety and security in a shelter before she's shown the front door in my view means perhaps somebody's paid a little less attention to this appropriately necessary social planning of the continuum of service for families in conflict and families who are victimized by violence, how their services are rendered.

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Frankly, with the references to municipalities bailing out, we could spend a considerable amount of time -- and I'm not watching the clock so I don't know how much time I'm going to have left -- about municipalities who sat down with David Cooke, who sat down with the Ron Book commission, various subcommittees of AMO, who have been looking at ways of streamlining delivery systems so that we can embrace shelters as an essential service in this province and not put them to the uncertain and subjective funding base to which they are now applied. Either we deem it to be an essential service and either your government believes it's an essential service and therefore we shouldn't be arguing with any level of government, we should be trading off, as it were -- as the committee to look at municipal social service relationships, we should have been looking at making these essential services fully accountable to a funding base from some level of government so that the essential service is in place.

That has not happened, and therefore the most significant statement is, "What are we doing about it?" rather than simply to lament that the municipalities are doing to shelters what they were doing to day care subsidized spaces when they said, "We can't even afford our 25 cents on the dollar, so you pay 100-cent dollars."

Before I leave the child care, my fourth and fifth questions have to do with an update on the conversions by location. Again, I've made this request in the past and I've seen the initial conversion list. Keith Baird got me a copy of it. But could we get that updated? In a longitudinal exposé of that, you indicate conversions by 1996-97, so I understand that you've got a whack of day care centres that have signed off and are converted, there are those that have signed off on a schedule to be converted, and there are those who have simply signed off and are in limbo. So I would certainly like to know all the bytes of information here with respect to the location and community, number of spaces, number of spaces subsidy, and which of those three statuses it's in and which are now fully brought over with a non-profit board etc.

I would like to ask the minister as well how many child care centres are experiencing difficulties, and again, how much of the millions of additional dollars you're pumping in are going into existing day care centres that are in financial difficulty. Marion Boyd, your predecessor, gave me a list at one point that showed that as many as 98 were in serious deficit and that rather than see them close their doors at the alarming rate they were doing in 1991-92 and the very early part of 1993, there were substantive bailouts. Certainly, I think it would be fair to share with this committee how many of those bailouts are continuing and to what extent the ministry's plans to assist the non-profit boards with some management skills and some people skills to ensure that the boards function more effectively -- to what degree that program has been successful to mitigate some of those early problems of expansion.

I would commend you for your response to the crown wards and I want to thank you for a letter that you got to me, timely, prior to the hearings today with respect to the correlation between young offenders and crown wards, an issue which has unfortunately surfaced in the media.

I want to commend you for your child nutrition program. I listened carefully to your words. I get a strong sense that the $1 million hasn't even nearly been spent, but we are building an infrastructure here and an advisory group and some staff positions and an information network. Perhaps you could enlighten us as to any pilots that have actually -- let me put it to you in absolute terms. Is any of this $1 million finding its way into the classrooms of our schools at this early juncture? That's not to say, Minister, that a program can be announced on Monday and by Friday it's found its way into our schools. I know that. But this was announced some time ago, and so if you would share with us who's in charge of the project, how far it's evolved, how much of the $1 million is being allocated.

As I say, I've developed these nutritional programs in my own community with very, very limited resources, using bingo money and all sorts of innovations. We're getting a lot of programs started and we're now expanding that into women's alcohol treatment centres and into shelters, I must admit, but we're taking community resources and applying them to people in need. So it strikes me that if we're able to succeed just as a small community of Burlington, the ministry could be implementing in a much more timely fashion.

I've made my concerns known to you about family violence, and again the reference to the cuts or the reduction in that money. What I suspect is that the shortfall to family violence initiatives, as contained on page 109, is a smaller amount of money than the money spent on television and print media advertising the fact that family violence is a social ill. Although I support awareness, I think we've moved beyond the issue of awareness and we really have to talk about front-line delivery and early intervention for those children who are at risk.

For those reasons, those are some of the issues that I hope to raise in a little more detail with you. I do want to deal with several issues which were not contained in your opening commentary and, as always, I would appreciate being given the hard statistics which can assist us to determine where the areas of reform could best be targeted.

Minister, you have an immense responsibility to manage probably the most important ministry in government by virtue of you being there to address the most vulnerable in society. You will always have the support of Parliament if we can be satisfied that the kinds of initiatives of your government are being developed and they are client-centred, that in fact we're getting value for our dollars and that those moneys are being directly put into programs for our needy in the community. So to that end, Minister, I welcome you to estimates. I look forward to the next two full days and I look forward to your response and then more lively exchanges during the questioning period. Thank you very much.

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The Acting Chair: As I understand the procedure, there have been a number of questions and comments that have been raised by both opposition parties and, Mr Minister, you have up to half an hour in terms of a reply.

Hon Mr Silipo: What I will do is try to provide some overall response. I'm sure that both of my critics would prefer that we get into some of these areas in greater detail one by one, so perhaps I will limit my comments at this point to just picking up on some of the points that they addressed.

First of all, I obviously appreciate very much the comments, recognition of some of the good things that we've done. I want to start perhaps with that issue of whether what we've done matches everyone's expectations, including those of us in the room, or how we explain and justify that we haven't done more and how we keep balancing what we've done and our views about what we've done with what we haven't managed to do.

I think we have to be, and I've tried to be, very practical about this, which is to say that I don't see any shame or problem with on the one hand identifying what it is that we would like to do, and on the other hand being clear about what we have done and what remains to be done and explaining to the best of our ability why we haven't managed to do some of those things.

I think we can look at the budget of this ministry in many ways, but one of the ways in which we can look at it is to indicate that when you look at just how much more money we are spending and where that money is being spent than we were spending a number of years ago, particularly if you compare this year's figures with those of three or four years ago, I don't know how anyone could come to any conclusion other than the fact that we have continued, very seriously, our commitment to people, whether that's in social assistance, in child care, in developmental services and so on and so forth.

We have responded, through those additional dollars, to those very real additional needs that have come to the fore in a very significant way during this recession. So I think it's a question of where, I suppose, we want to leave the balance and where we want to lean on, whether it's on what we haven't yet done or on how much we've actually managed to do. I think the only way in which we can deal appropriately with that balance is by, in effect, talking clearly about both pieces.

I appreciate very much the reminders from my two critics about what I didn't mention. Let me just say that what I tried to do in my opening statement is to indicate some of the broad directions and accomplishments that we have been involved in. I certainly see, as we go through the discussion, that we'll have an opportunity to talk about all of the issues that were raised, even ones that I didn't raise and that my critics did. Certainly my own commitment and I think that of our caucus on such issues as the adoption reform, for example, is still there. I look forward to the discussion on that issue and many of the others. One of the other particular ones that was raised was the children's services area, the expenditure control plan measures and the exceptional circumstances review. Again, I hope that we can get into some of those areas in more detail.

Our efforts in that area have been, as in all other areas, to try to get a much greater involvement by agencies, by users of the system, in coming to grips with the fiscal realities, not as a way to simply claw money out of the system but as a way to say, if we don't have all of the money that we would like to have, how can we be making sure that the money that we are spending, we are spending in the most effective manner?

Even, for example, in our efforts on the children's expenditure control plan measures, we have shown our understanding of the difficulties that children's agencies have been going through by reducing the initial reduction to about half of it for this current year and indicating to agencies that we want to work very hard with them to identify ways of meeting those targets.

Let me just say on the issue of social assistance, which obviously continues to be the largest area of expenditure of this ministry, that again our efforts have been to continue to balance very much the supports that we need to put into the system in a more significant way, building on many of the things. I'll be happy to get into detail on some of those areas to be able to show what specific steps we are taking as we go through the votes, but let me say that our efforts have been to balance those efforts to put into place better supports for people who want to exit the system with the fact that we need to be better managing a system that has been growing at a tremendous pace over the last three years in particular and that within that -- I think I used the word "abuse." One could use the word "fraud," or any other word, as Mr Jackson has indicated --

Mr Jackson: Irregularity.

Hon Mr Silipo: The irregularities. I think any of those are good synonyms, but they all mean the same thing, which is that we have a responsibility to also ensure that the system is well run and as free of abuse, fraud, as we can make it. That is also part of our responsibility, and again we'll be able to share, I think, some initial results of those steps.

One of the points that I would like to just touch on again as we go through the specific numbers -- we can perhaps answer those concerns in greater detail, but I think that it's understandable, because I've asked and gone through this same process. When we look at what we are saying and seeing now is happening in the area of social assistance in terms of reductions in case loads, and compare that with the numbers that are in the estimates, one asks why then we are projecting to spend more. It's a very logical question, and I think again we can account very clearly for each of those.

The first is that what we are seeing now is first of all better than the projections that are in the estimates, so there will be some savings over the those numbers that are in the estimates book. We are now working through the numbers to see exactly how much of an additional saving that will result in.

Secondly, we know that of the increases, of the remaining amounts of the increases, we can point to large amounts of those, as I mentioned in my opening comments, being attributable to actions which the federal government has taken around the unemployment insurance provisions, accounting for over $100 million of those additional costs. Again, we can break those down in greater detail.

Some of the additional costs are in fact the initial costs of reforming the system through the additional costs of JobLink and the additional costs of other changes that we are making to the system. So those are all accounted within the additional costs that show up in the estimates book against the figures from last year.

I could go through a number of other points and respond in a general way, but I think what I would prefer to do is to take advantage of the process that's available here in the committee and in fact allow us to get right into the areas that I'm sure people want to talk about in greater detail so that we can give fuller answers to the questions that people undoubtedly want to raise and deal with a number of the other points that were raised by my two critics as we do that.

The Acting Chair: Thank you, Mr Minister. Then to take advantage of the process, as I understand the process now, we split the time in rotation. Is 20 minutes satisfactory to the various parties?

Mrs O'Neill: Are you suggesting, Mr Chairman, we'll take it in 20-minute blocks in rotation?

The Acting Chair: Yes, if that's acceptable.

Mrs O'Neill: And are you suggesting 20 minutes on each vote or 20 minutes as long as we want to stay on a vote?

Interjection.

Mrs O'Neill: That sounds fine with me, then.

The Acting Chair: Is that okay?

Mr Jackson: Why don't we just stack the votes?

Mrs O'Neill: Okay, that's a good idea. Let's do it that way.

The Acting Chair: Then it's over to the Liberal Party.

Mrs O'Neill: Well, I think I'll begin at the beginning. I just wanted to go, if I may, to the organizational charge of the ministry. I wanted to ask a question about one area there, the director of social assistance and the director of JobLink, because as we know at the moment, the only reform, or the only part of the reform, is JobLink. Is that position being held, or what's being done in that position, the one that isn't connected with JobLink?

Hon Mr Silipo: Again, perhaps just as a way of proceeding, I will say that I will try to the extent that I can to answer what I'm sure will be very detailed questions as we go through the process, and I will rely on Deputy Minister Rosemary Proctor, who is with me, and other members of the officials to assist in that process.

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This chart I think is at this point still in effect, although we are looking at some of those particular responsibilities. There are, in addition to the JobLink initiatives, as I outlined in my opening statement, other pieces of the reform initiatives that are continuing. We are looking, for example, at what we can do with respect to some consolidation on a voluntary basis of general welfare assistance. We are looking at, obviously, our continuing efforts with the federal government. We have significant pieces of changes that we are making, as was noted earlier, with the case work technology. So all of those pieces at this point in time still warrant those positions being in the system.

Ms Rosemary Proctor: Just to add a brief point to that, in terms of the April 1994 organizational chart that is in the estimates book, because we are doing many other things but we're concentrating on the JobLink part of the reform, at this point the work is being handled in two main areas; one is the JobLink program area, and the second is the social assistance program area, where a lot of the other work on the reform is also going on. So that's a change from the way we have it listed in this book.

Mrs O'Neill: I suppose they can be considered hopeful if the position remains. I just hope that you still have Back on Track and Time for Action on your desk, as I have them on mine, and that you review their recommendations regularly, because I think that's what people expect. They don't want us to reinvent that wheel.

The first vote, 701, of course goes over several pages, and my first concern is one that's come to the House several times, and that is the Social Assistance Review Board. So I guess it's introduced on page 7, but I think it's actually talked about more on page 24, and I would really like to go to that page. Actually, that was my last question to you in the House as the session closed, as you know, on this particular area of your operation.

The figures that appear on page 24 are very confusing. Every one of the figures seems to be confusing to me, particularly if you're suggesting improvement in appeals and in the appeals process, because I presume this is what you're talking about. This is the most significant of the appeals in your ministry that I know of in this area. "Requests for hearings" look like they're going up significantly. "Hearings held" look like they're going down. "Appeals closed without a hearing" are going up, and I don't know how you're projecting that, whether there's a new process of mediation or whatever else you may use there. "Interim assistance requests processed" are going up.

So these figures do not project, to me, that either the system is improving or you expect it to improve, the municipalities and all of their concerns surrounding this whole area of operation are being heard or that we're going to make it more effective. The whole thing looks very discouraging to me, and this is kind of key to the way we administer the system.

Hon Mr Silipo: Let me start in replying, and I think that our ADM responsible, Kevin Costante, may want to add some comments to this, and if need be we also have the chair of SARB available -- not here in the room. But if you feel that you want some more specific information, she can also be asked to attend during the course of these estimates to provide more information.

Essentially, what the figures I think indicate is that there is a problem with increased demand on the Social Assistance Review Board. That has come about both as just a natural result of the increase in the case load and I think, to be fair, also as a result of changes that we've made to eligibility requirements, which have resulted in additional appeals.

Mrs O'Neill: Actually, the expenditure control plan helped it.

Hon Mr Silipo: That's right.

Mrs O'Neill: Helped or hindered.

Hon Mr Silipo: What we have been doing to assist the board in coping with that is that, first of all, the board itself, I have to say, has done a significant amount of work to try to handle the hearings better. Those figures in the 1994-95 forecast I think tell some of that story in terms of some of the pre-hearing approaches that they are putting into the system and have put into the system which they believe -- in fact I think can demonstrate from the work that they've done so far -- actually result in fewer hearings having to be looked at proportionally to what was the case before. So there is a whole process going on that looks at how that whole system can be better managed, and I think that the Social Assistance Review Board has done a relatively good job on that front.

The other way that we are trying to be of help to them is by recognizing that in effect there is a significant increase in case load here and that this also can only be truly addressed with some additional help, both in terms of filling the complement of members of the board, which we have been working hard to do and we are now only about three members short of the full complement of SARB members, as well as providing them some additional support staff to again help in the kind of process that I've described. That is also going to pay its dividends in terms of the ability of the board to look at that.

The other is by looking at a closer relationship, in an administrative sense, between the board and our ministry. That is to say that if we have, for example, as we do, a number of very similar cases that are before the board, part of what we are trying to work out in a more systematic way with the board as a way of handling both those individual cases and the overall case load problem is to say that there ought to be ways in which we can address those cases, so the board can address those cases in a way that certainly balances the right of every individual to have their appeal heard but also in a way that if we see that very similar case situations or identical case situations are determined by the board after a number of hearings in a particular way, then we have an obligation as a ministry to take a look at those and either make some changes administratively that rectify those issues, and thus remove hopefully a number of cases from the board's workload, or decide, if we don't agree with the decisions of the board, to appeal and then deal with the issues in that way.

I think there has been certainly a much better relationship struck between the board and our ministry on the whole array of those issues in approaching these problems in that way, which I think is making an improvement, and I think that we're seeing some of those. But again, the numbers are significant because there have been those increases for the two reasons that I've given.

Mr Kevin Costante: May we just provide one piece of information?

The Acting Chair (Mr Murray J. Elston): Identify yourself, please, for the record.

Mr Costante: My name is Kevin Costante. I'm the assistant deputy minister of social assistance and employment opportunities.

I think you had asked or were curious about the number of appeals closed without a hearing. This is a number that is a compendium of things, I guess, where there are a lot of cases that are settled before the actual appeal is heard, the appellant withdraws before it goes to the board or doesn't show up.

I think the other piece would be where the board has made a decision on a similar case and then the other cases may get withdrawn because there's no sense continuing with the appeal given that we know the direction the board is going. It's all those things that are settled before an actual formal hearing has taken place.

Mrs O'Neill: It just seems that it looked like you were going to double that number, and I wondered if you were going to use some new interventions. I do feel that the Social Assistance Review Board's annual report is quite helpful to clustering where problems lie, and I'm hoping that you will see that. You seemed to indicate you are studying that. I hope so.

I just don't know whether these figures are going to be able to be met with the resources you've suggested, because it's almost a two-thirds increase in hearings; the number of appeals being closed without a hearing is almost double. I don't know how all of that will relate as it plays out.

Then you've got a whole lot of people who are in training, who cannot hear cases alone. This to me is still a very uncertain area and, as we know, it can become a very costly boondoggle. That's what concerns me about this particular area of the operation.

Again, prevention -- and maybe we have begun a prevention scheme with your suggestions of increasing membership and resources -- but I really hope that you, as minister, will see this: This causes a lot of problems and misunderstandings on both sides, and it certainly gets the ire of case workers up and also the municipalities. So I think that's an area that really needs strong attention.

1140

If I may go to page 9 now, this is the overview of the ministry's operations as you know them. As I indicated in my opening remarks, I found it very confusing as I went through each of the votes to see that the employee benefits in most cases were much larger than the projection. There has to be an explanation of that trend, and I'm wondering what you're offering as an explanation.

Hon Mr Silipo: I think I'll ask the deputy to address that.

Ms Proctor: I think the situation can be explained, because that will show up right through the program budget as well as in the ministry's summary on this page, in that the actual costs associated with the benefits for a whole range of things, for everything from the insurance payments to other aspects of the benefit package, have gone up over the last number of years and the ministry has not been allocated additional resources with which to fund those new costs.

So what you see here are some shortfalls associated with that this year. We continue to work on how we can bring our general direct operating costs down so that we can redress that problem, but there are costs simply that we were not allocated new resources to provide for, and so we've shown some overexpenditure last year in those lines.

Mrs O'Neill: Well, it's very confusing, and it's certainly confusing to explain to the general public, when we're talking about social contracts, 800 fewer employees and employee benefits -- I don't know where they're at now. What are they, 10% or 12% of the net expenditure for employees? I just find that whole package still very confusing, and I'm wondering if there are severance packages involved in there. Are there adjustment programs in that? I mean, you said insurance; you gave one single explanation. Don't forget that your agencies are also suffering from those same increases, and that's what they're talking to me about. So to have the ministry show this as a trend, and an acceptable trend -- it's a 20% increase and $1 million more than you projected. That's an awful lot of money. So can we get any more on that?

Ms Proctor: A number of other issues that are in those numbers include the fact that, yes, there are severance payments in particular for a large factor 80 takeup in the previous fiscal year. So that was a labour adjustment cost.

Mrs O'Neill: Do you have any numbers on that?

Ms Proctor: We can provide you some additional --

Mrs O'Neill: I think that would be very important.

Ms Proctor: -- and then also increases in UI, and we can provide you some additional numbers with respect to that.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay, and what about adjustment packages?

Ms Proctor: We can put that into the package overall.

Mrs O'Neill: Now, also on page 9, the services, does that word "services" mean direct service?

Ms Proctor: That's contract services and anything that we purchase as a service.

Mr Jackson: Are those contract salaries?

Ms Proctor: Not direct salaries of staff.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay, so, again, you had a very much underbudget estimate there. Can you tell us a little bit of why that would be so much over budget?

Ms Proctor: You mean, why that has gone up?

Mrs O'Neill: Well, I'm looking at the actual and the estimates for 1993-94. Those are the figures I'm looking at.

Ms Proctor: I'm sorry, I'm not really clear on which one we're looking at.

Mrs O'Neill: Page 9.

Ms Proctor: Yes.

Mrs O'Neill: We're talking about services.

Ms Proctor: The fact that the change has gone up from 1993-94 to 1994-95.

Mrs O'Neill: Well, I don't want to talk about the 1994-95 figures, because they're estimates. That's what I find very difficult about this whole package, that the whole emphasis on this package is estimates. I know this is the estimates committee, but the actuals are really quite important. I find the actuals, in reference to the estimates of 1993-94 in that area of services -- you know, it's $1.5 million difference. That's kind of a lot of money.

Ms Proctor: I'm going to need to follow up and provide a specific answer on that because most of the numbers are lower, so our overall picture wasn't the same. I can get you further information on that one.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay, that's fine. Now, if I could go to the human resources section, which is page 15. Again, I'm looking at the actuals, and some of this I guess you're telling me is severance packages and the costs of redeployment.

Ms Proctor: Yes, some of it is redeployment costs that were not reimbursed and some of it is realignments within the ministry -- and benefits packages, that's correct.

Mrs O'Neill: I don't know whether this is the exact category of budget this would fall under, but when you've got recoveries from other ministries, we were told in December when we were talking about the changes and Bill 50, which was, as you know, the expenditure control plan of the Ministry of Health, that there would be some recoveries and that the ministries would be able to collect from each other. Are those negotiations going on? Where are we at with that third-party payment scheme between ministries with one ministry no longer picking up all the costs from the other ministry regarding mandatory testing or medicals or physicals? Where are we with that?

Ms Proctor: That's an issue that doesn't show up in the current estimates. The development of the policy with respect to charges for mandatory third-party testing or requirements in that area is still being discussed with the Ministry of Health with respect to what kind of an approach would be used and so forth. So that isn't something that shows up in the current-year estimates but is under some general discussion. I'm looking to see if there's any further detail.

Mrs O'Neill: I think it should be more than general discussion if you realize how it's affecting the agencies. The agencies have got social contract, expenditure control, third-party agreement and then all of the increases that you're suffering with the increased benefit packages. Those are really limiting what they can do for their clients and that must be being brought to your attention as it is to mine.

Ms Proctor: I would like to ask Sue Herbert, who's our ADM for program management, to speak to that area as well.

Mrs Sue Herbert: Sue Herbert, the ADM for program management. Just to add to what the deputy said, we are trying at this point to identify all of the costs for our own ministry, the implications for our own ministry and our own direct services and also for our agencies. We've had some discussion with our provincial associations around that and we are in the process of discussions with the Ministry of Health right now.

Mrs O'Neill: I really think that your ministry in particular needs to take a high profile in those discussions because the agencies just don't have a lot of latitude in that whole area.

I guess if I go to the next one, 23, the information systems, I'm just wondering if you could give us an update of where you're at with that. If I look at services and I look at an over 1,000% increase, can you tell us a little bit about where you're at, and I'm wondering where the municipalities are at. Are they cooperating fully? I presume it's to their advantage. I'm glad you have the pilot project in Metro. Those agencies in the feds that you have the compatibility with, are you thinking of other parts of the federal government operation that you could move into? There doesn't seem to be an awful lot, for instance, in with the immigrants and the Department of Human Resources Development, which I think includes that now. Could you say a little bit about where you're at with the actual implementation? You seem to be putting an awful lot of resources -- I mean, we're talking $12 million, up from $3 million. Where are we with all of that?

1150

The Acting Chair: May I just interrupt? We're right at the end of the 20 minutes. You may want to take those under advisement and be ready with some answers at the beginning of the next session with the Liberals.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay, that's fine with me.

Mr Jim Wiseman (Durham West): Could I just make a suggestion? Since there's 10 minutes, you might want to let her finish for half an hour and let Mr Jackson go for half an hour this afternoon.

Mr Jackson: Half-hour modules are probably better anyway. Then we've got more notice.

The Acting Chair: How does the committee feel?

Mr Wiseman: We have no problem with that.

Mr Jackson: That was a good question. It saved me asking it this afternoon.

The Acting Chair: Okay. Let's do the half-hour modules then. I'm prepared to accept that if the committee's okaying it.

Mr Jackson: Thank you, Mr Chairman.

Mrs O'Neill: So we're going to go for this one right now?

Hon Mr Silipo: We'll do that right now.

Mrs O'Neill: Can you talk in pretty specific time lines or specific issues?

Hon Mr Silipo: Yes, again, I'll rely on our officials to give you more precise dates, but the overall increase here in the dollars relates to the case worker technology project; that's the big change in the expenditures. That, as I mentioned in my opening comments, is something that we expect to see implemented in about 30 communities across the province by the end of this calendar year and then to continue the work over the next couple of years to implement fully throughout the province.

We estimate it will take three years, I believe, for full implementation, if memory serves me correctly. Obviously it is going to give us an opportunity to both better manage the system as well as divert some of our resources and attention of the people who work in the system to working more with people around helping them to be able to exit the system in a more consistent fashion. We can provide, if you wish, Mrs O'Neill, some further details of specifically what we are doing in that area.

In terms of the agreements with both the federal government and other provinces, we are well on our way in terms of an initial agreement with the immigration authorities in Ottawa; there's something that's virtually ready to be signed there. There's some more work that's going to be done with them and with other of the federal counterparts. We also have been and are, I hope still are, with yesterday's election in Quebec, very close to an agreement being signed with the province of Quebec in terms of information-sharing between those two provinces and we have made some initial progress with respect to other provinces.

Mrs O'Neill: I suppose the rumour in the Ottawa-Carleton area is that it's the Ontario government that's dragging its feet and that the Quebec system is much more improved, much more accurate. I don't know how authentic that criticism is, but it's certainly what I'm hearing at home.

I want to make one other comment about the 30 communities. We have over 800 municipalities. Are these the 30 largest communities? Will it then be done on a county and township basis? How do you expect to implement this in three years? What kind of subsidizations are the municipalities getting? Are they getting any to hook into this much more sophisticated system than many of them have, or do they have to budget for that themselves?

Hon Mr Silipo: This is money that we are putting into the system. Perhaps what we'll do is ask one of our ADMs to take you through this in much more detail, but the initial communities include the larger communities across the province and we will see a significant increase in our capacity across the province to use technology in a more systematic way to run the system so that we can eliminate a lot of the paperwork that just means that we're not providing the level of service that we can.

Ms Proctor: I think we could also get Lynn in this afternoon to speak more to it, but as Tony is saying, the substantive thing here is a substantial increase in the technology that would be available. The first site and a lot of the development work has been done through Metro Toronto and its leadership has been very much appreciated in the whole area. So that's the first test site, our Metro offices and Toronto area offices.

We're, I think, ready to start Brantford in the fall and then there are a number of other sites that are under discussion. So we are starting with some of the larger sites and would plan to carry that out through the province. There have been a lot of conversations. There's an advisory group with the municipalities. There are a lot of participation and involvement there as well and very close and collaborative work. This will take a lot of cooperation among everyone and hard work in terms of design and implementation.

We're talking a major shift in really moving from a paper-driven system to a much more automated system which carries with it many benefits for workers in terms of how they can use their time and how they can use their time more effectively with clients rather than having to fill out so many forms, but also it means real changes in processes and so forth. So that piece of it needs to be thought about as well. But I'm hopeful we'll begin as well to address the work quality for front-line workers in the system, whether they're provincial or municipal.

Mrs O'Neill: If I may look at page 17, to the Canada pension plan, the UIC and the workers' compensation we can add refugees and immigration. I would think that if those were really key places that you're working on you'd have put them in your remarks.

Ms Proctor: That is in the whole question of agreements, and I think Kevin Costante --

Mrs O'Neill: The interface with the feds is very important, and I'd like to know exactly where we're at with it.

Mr Costante: We are currently working with them on agreements on immigration and on the issue of UIC. We're also working on Canada pension plan. As well, we are working on an agreement with Quebec and the western provinces. We have opened up discussions with them on information-sharing agreements and the data that can be shared. Of course, we have to be very conscious of the freedom of information aspects, both their particular legislation and our particular legislation. So those pieces of work are under way.

Those are likely our highest priorities. Behind that, we have a whole list of others that we would also like to pursue; things like looking at the registrar general for births and deaths and having that automatically into our system; the Atlantic provinces as well. Sorry, I don't have the complete list with me, but there are a number of other agreements that we will pursue once we get these initial key ones with the federal government and our neighbouring provinces.

Mrs O'Neill: Are you working with corrections at all, the court systems?

Mr Costante: No, we're not. We're working with Housing on the rent registry; that's another one that we're actively pursuing.

Mrs O'Neill: The community colleges regarding student registration?

Mr Costante: We will likely be hooking into the community colleges because we are also negotiating with the federal government as part of our JobLink initiative for an employment system which we will need to complement the JobLink program. I think when we do that, there will have to be some hookup with the community colleges and the people who will provide the training spaces. That may occur through OTAB because OTAB is the organization that will actually be procuring it. How we, OTAB and the trainers will get hooked up, I can't say I have detail on that.

Mrs O'Neill: Are you doing anything with the municipalities regarding the public housing aspect? Landlord-tenant agreements and that kind of thing, I guess is my final piece on that, because it does seem to also tie in regarding eligibility.

Hon Mr Silipo: Are you talking now on the issue of the technology or just --

Mrs O'Neill: Technology. Where are you with the housing authorities?

Mr Costante: I would have to ask. I don't think at this stage we're talking with the housing authorities on that.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay. That may be another area to examine.

The Acting Chair: Thank you, Mrs O'Neill. We have reached 12 o'clock and when we come back at 2 we will begin with Cam and his questions.

The committee recessed from 1159 to 1408.

The Acting Chair (Mr David Johnson): We'll bring the meeting to order. I understand we're now using half-hour question segments.

Mr Paul Klopp (Huron): Thirty minutes.

The Acting Chair: That's very adept of you. Mr Jackson, it's over to you.

Mr Jackson: I want to follow along on some of the questions that my colleague Ms O'Neill had raised. She raised the issue of benefits packages and the sort of ballooning of that, and I wanted to ask if in fact the government had implemented any additional benefits packages.

Not for this to cause any form of debate or controversy, I just wanted to ask the question if your ministry has the practice now of paying benefits for same-sex couples, or is that something that will be done through the negotiated process? I'm hearing some organizations in the social service community are providing these services, which is their right in a free society, to extend benefits to whomever they wish. I'm just wondering if that is something that occurred.

It's not the kind of thing I suspect your government would go out and call a press conference over, but it doesn't mean you're not considering or have done it. You don't necessarily need legislation to do it. I don't wish to make that a debate. I just wanted to know if in fact this ministry was doing it or considering it, that's all.

Hon Mr Silipo: We're not considering anything outside of what the rest of the government has been doing, which is, as you know -- in fact, back I believe in 1991, through Management Board, we made as a government some changes to our policies as employer related to our policy as employer around, I believe, pension entitlements and some other general benefits. Whatever we are doing as a ministry, subject to any other details that any of our officials might have, would be consistent and the same as what is being done by other ministries. There's nothing particularly unusual.

Mr Jackson: So are you or aren't you, to your knowledge?

Hon Mr Silipo: We would be only as a result of that directive of the government back in 1991, but, as I say, I think that dealt with essentially the pension eligibility, if I recall.

Mr Jackson: I understand the consistency. I just wanted to know if in fact that is a benefit that we're extending to the employees of the government. I've never asked the question and I honestly don't know the answer. I'm asking because I just wondered if that was inside or outside and if the implementation date was -- it was only triggered by Ms O'Neill saying benefits packages have gone up.

Hon Mr Silipo: Whether or not the benefit packages have gone up, that wouldn't be a factor in that equation. But again, perhaps -- I don't know if --

Mr Jackson: Is there somebody from human resources? Are we paying that benefit, yes or no?

Ms Lynn MacDonald: No, we're not.

Mr Jackson: We're not. Okay. So that memo from 1991 doesn't go that far?

Hon Mr Silipo: No, it just deals essentially with entitlement to pension benefits.

Mr Jackson: Okay. It's just something that Ms O'Neill had raised and that caused me to ask it another way.

If I could go back to the Social Assistance Review Board and just if we could examine that in a little more detail, I wanted to ask the minister or the appropriate staff. We have the statistics, which are on page 24, I believe, which are alarming, depending on how you read them. But also last week, as a member of the government agencies review committee, we had the occasion to interview the new vice-chair of the Social Assistance Review Board, who herself was a legal aid lawyer who had been assigned to the Social Assistance Review Board.

She enlightened the committee on several points with respect to the placement of legal aid services as a permanent service at the review board process and that in fact she had successfully interceded in appeals and caused sufficient postponements to then refer these people for further legal aid advice and referred them to the various clinics, much of which dealt with immigration matters and subsequent immigration appeals, refugee claimants and landed immigrant questions. She went on to indicate that this was considered the norm as the practice and that in fact it had resulted in about a 50% reversal of decisions. So there were the two elements of this policy or strategy which caused a delay of the appeal and subsequently a reversal of the original decision.

I guess you can look at this from a variety of ways, and I wondered if the minister was familiar with the legal aid adjunct to the social assistance review process, if your ministry has been studying it. When I checked with legal aid, upwards of anywhere from $20 million to $26 million is being put into this component of ancillary tribunal work.

I wonder if you're analysing it in any fashion in terms of its impact on either the delaying process in social assistance review, the potential saving if decisions are reversed one way versus the other, or knowing that if legal aid is an entitlement, if all entitlements are retroactive, then there's no cost savings, but if they're not retroactive, then that could be a substantive savings to social assistance if their sort of appeal is delayed through this judicial process.

If the minister could share with us any additional information around this area, since I know your own Attorney General has recently indicated that she is concerned about the overextended usage of legal aid. It would appear that it's being used at an increasing and alarming rate by this component of your ministerial responsibility. I'm not saying you personally are directing this, but perhaps you could enlighten us as to that process.

Hon Mr Silipo: As I indicated to some extent this morning, we are doing a number of things that we know will streamline the operations of the Social Assistance Review Board and the whole process around decision-making. One of the effects of that is to shorten the time between the initial application being lodged at SARB and the point of decision, which is in everyone's interest, from the individual to the systems and the taxpayers in terms of getting decisions rendered as soon as possible.

The issue of legal aid in terms of eligibility and continuing entitlements to that is something that I think, to be fair, we're not involved in in terms of making directly decisions about what should happen or shouldn't happen. There are, as I'm sure you know, serious discussions going on now between the Attorney General and the law society on better management of the legal aid problems and the issues within that in terms of the demands upon the system.

Mr Jackson: Maybe I wasn't specific enough, Minister. This was a pilot project a year and a half ago. Are you still currently working in a system where legal aid is resident at all the appeals and they are examining the cases prior to the commencement of the appeal, which is what I understand was the basic look of the pilot project? What was the purpose of the pilot project? Was it deemed successful, unsuccessful? Are these people still there?

Are we simply telling people, "You have legal representation," and then they can go to their own legal clinic? Or are we in fact, as was explained to us by the new vice-chair of the Social Assistance Review Board, that in fact she was resident onsite and was examining the files prior to them going in and routinely advising people: "I don't think you're ready. I think you need legal advice. Please call our legal aid clinic."

Hon Mr Silipo: This was specifically with issues before the Social Assistance Review Board that you're asking?

Mr Jackson: We were interviewing your government's nominee for the vice-chair whose expertise was that she was a legal aid lawyer, working for that, and only through my examination did I trip onto it. That's all.

Hon Mr Silipo: Where I'm having some trouble with your question is whether, and I guess I'm not clear, what you're probing has to do with the functioning of the legal aid system or a particular piece of that that relates to the Social Assistance Review Board.

Mr Jackson: I was specifically asking about a pilot project, if it is still in existence, and what were the reasons for its termination. What is the procedure now in place? Is there a staff person assigned to the Social Assistance Review Board to explain what, if any, impact legal aid assistance has had on the process of the appeals, and is this pilot project, by the very individual assigned to the board, still in existence?

Mr Costante: Sorry, I'm not aware of the pilot project you're referring to. We can inquire of staff back. We do have fairly frequent contact with the legal aid clinics, both in terms of cases and getting advice in terms of policy. The legal aid system we've had some contacts with but, I'm sorry, I'd have to check on this particular pilot project that you're talking about.

1420

Mr Jackson: I have statistics that have been provided to me from legal aid and some from the Social Assistance Review Board in the varying categories, indicating where accompaniment by a lawyer and where not and where decisions were reversed.

Perhaps then I could leave the legal aid component of it and ask the minister, have you done any analysis or has the board reported to you concerns around the fact that, on average in the last two years, they have been reversing almost as much as half of all the appeals presented to them?

You can look at that in two ways. One is that we've not handled them appropriately at the front end, whether it was done by a municipality or by Community and Social Services staff, which necessitated a reversal of the decision, or circumstances are in such tremendous flux and the time delays so severe that by virtue of those two factors we're seeing a high incidence of reversal. But in terms of an appellant mechanism, we're clearly giving a signal out there that you simply have to go and you've got a 50% chance of getting the decision reversed to your benefit.

I think, were I the minister, I would want to look at that to determine what was essentially the component factor, and what was our staff or, through the legislation, municipal staff doing wrong that was causing such a high turnover.

The third factor, I've been told, is that it's an open-ended appellant mechanism, that you can again reapply and that you're not cut off indefinitely or for a period of time as you are, say, for the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board or other boards where you are given one right of appeal or maybe two but certainly not open-ended.

Could the minister share with the committee any concerns, or are you currently undertaking to review any aspects of the points I've raised?

Hon Mr Silipo: We're very much involved in discussing with the chair of SARB exactly those issues. We talked earlier, Mr Jackson, about some of those pieces.

One of the things we know has to happen, and I think already some of the steps that have been taken are helping in this, is that in fact there has to be greater knowledge and consistency throughout the system, whether it's the FBA system or the GWA system, about the nature of the decisions that are made by SARB, so that we are not in a situation in which we are, either through our staff or through the municipal staff, continuing to take forward cases that have been determined in a particular way by the board.

Part of the streamlining of the system, in our view, includes having to then look at what administrative practices we need to straighten out and improve as we get a better handle on those decisions. That's something that, in the kind of closer working relationship that has been established, I have to say, particularly over the last year, between senior management of the ministry and SARB, I think is resulting and will result even more so in some of those practices changing within the ministry and within the municipal sector that administers the GWA system.

Mr Jackson: Is it possible for the chair of SARB to be present for these hearings tomorrow?

Hon Mr Silipo: Absolutely. We had indicated earlier that if you wanted to probe any of these issues further, we would be quite happy to have her come.

Mr Jackson: For their convenience, if we were to advise them we could only limit those to either the morning or the afternoon, so we're not taking up an entire day.

Hon Mr Silipo: What we can do if you wish is to check. I know the chair of SARB is on standby, and we could sort out whether that's the morning or the afternoon.

Mr Jackson: Thank you. I have had occasion to sit in on several review board decisions and I have noticed that the numbers of voc rehab cases do not result in the same sort of favourable reversal of decision, and that causes me cause for concern. One particular case involved a provincial employee who I thought, with her disability, had been severely done by the ministry for which she had been working for many years.

I wonder if we could get a breakout of the voc rehab components. It's unfair to be talking about social assistance review and everybody's thinking in their own minds that these are welfare recipients disproportionately with refugee claimants. I certainly don't wish to add to that debate. I really would like to explore some of the more detailed analysis and review of those seeking the FBA and voc rehab as part of their appeals. I'd like to see what kind of numbers they're faring when they go through appeals. I think that's a fair question since equity, I understand, is one of the major themes for the ministry for the coming --

Hon Mr Silipo: We can ensure that this is addressed as well when the chair of SARB is present.

Mr Jackson: I will set aside those areas, if I can, for a moment.

Perhaps the only other area around that might be if we can get some statistics on the average delay and if those delays for a review hearing are particularly acute by type of application and/or location in the province. I have had some concerns about the notion that in some instances social assistance is automatic and the state appeals the decision, and the case in point would be social assistance for students, where they have the right to have access because of the nature of the reasons being submitted for student welfare, and then appeals and how many of these no-shows nine or 10 or 12 months later there are that are attributed to this component factor. Again, were I the minister, I would want to be monitoring that aspect of it, because not all social assistance is automatic. At least that's the way I understand it.

Perhaps the minister could advise us if there have been any changes around the processes for application for what has been loosely called student welfare. I've seen the numbers around the 30,000 mark, and that should be cause for concern.

Hon Mr Silipo: Again, on your request for more statistical information, we can certainly make sure that's available. We have that information, and if the chair of SARB is going to come forward, she can provide and speak to that information.

Specifically on the issue of 16 and 17-year olds, as you know, we've had the chance to discuss this issue in the House a couple of times as a result of questions, and we are looking at that very much now. One of the things we are trying to do, and we hope to have something in place very soon, but the direction we're moving in is to try to first of all establish a clear description of the criteria under which young people would be eligible to receive social assistance, the sort of special circumstances, which is the catch phrase that's in the legislation. We think there is a need to define that more closely than it has been defined so far, and then to move from there to establish some greater clarity around the issue of expectations of young people around school attendance or fulfilling the job search requirements, as other people under the system have to fulfil, and how all those pieces would fit together. That's something we are working hard on now and we hope to have something very soon that we can make public.

I think then the issue that is obviously connected to that from your question is the issue of appeals to SARB by young people. As I recall the figures, I don't think there's anything proportionately inordinate about that in terms of any of the figures I've seen. But again that's something we can look at perhaps further when we have the statistical breakdown from SARB.

Mr Jackson: Well, has the policy not changed from -- I believe the implementation date for the SARC recommendation on student welfare, student social assistance, was to kick in around 1991 or 1992, and enough of a fuss was kicked up about it that the government didn't proceed fully, but it left it in this state of semi-limbo, and of course the worst thing we can give as direction to bureaucrats at any level of government is to put it in that state, and we've done that.

Interjection.

Mr Jackson: Semi-limbo, for Mr Elston, himself a former Health minister. The desire to use a health example would be wonderful, but you're not to proceed but then again you can't deny is what I class as semi-limbo, for want of an explanation.

So you put staff in a terrible position here, and around the very sensitive issue around children's safety, where depending on what mood you're in when you get out of bed at a children's aid society determines whether it's a necessary and appropriate intervention, and now you unleash a whole other host of services within the ministry. It may or may not necessarily be appropriate, but at least that's what's on the street as the appropriate lexicon to use in order to get automatic unfettered access, and it may take them nine months to a year to prove that you're not being physically abused by your family.

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Certainly when I read the St Catharines Standard, we have a Thorold councillor, himself a teacher in the public system down there, who's done some extensive research, longitudinal studies of students and their attendance records and their graduating outcome records, and to the extent that this is believable -- and I suspect it must be, since a teacher prepared it and tabled it with his council -- this is extremely disturbing material. I wonder if it has been brought to the minister's attention in any briefing fashion and if he's aware that the student achievement rates tied to access to social assistance are extremely -- not only in terms of poor attendance but in terms of graduate outcome and dropping of credits and a variety of other things.

I wonder if the minister could share with the committee that his commitment to resolve this semi state of limbo on student welfare is a rather direct commitment and will be dealt with fairly soon. I'm hearing from a lot of guidance counsellors and a lot of school boards, and the minister himself has an extensive background on school boards. He would no doubt understand the context in which this report has implications for educating our young people.

Hon Mr Silipo: I certainly do, Mr Jackson. I think we can tell you first of all -- and this may be a good or a bad sign, I'm not entirely sure, to be quite honest with you -- that the number of young people, if by young people we're talking essentially now about 16- and 17-year-olds, who are on welfare is actually lower this year than it was this time last year. I think that's a good sign on the one hand, because I think it tells us that either the efforts, the discussion around this issue or any number of other factors have contributed to that to drop. The reason I hesitated as well and said maybe it's not an entirely positive thing is because I'm not sure what that says about whether we are necessarily picking up all young people who really are particularly in need.

But be that as it may, the issue of limbo, as you've described it, I think is not -- I'm not sure that I would describe it much differently than that. Certainly as I've looked at this issue -- and again, I've had the chance to comment on this a number of times, publicly in the Legislature and other places -- I've been struck by how in this area, I think certainly with all good intentions, we have managed to get to a point where we have provisions and guidelines that are so broad they then can be interpreted in any number of ways. Often I think they're well interpreted and well applied, and sometimes they're not, and I think, as I've indicated before and reiterated here today, what we have to do is to give not only greater clarity but greater detail to those provisions.

Mr Jackson: Minister, I tried to make it abundantly clear when I suggested the time lines of 1992. I know I was an outspoken critic of this SARC amendment. I now feel badly that that public debate has set in motion such uncertainty. You'd have been better off to make the decision, "You've got unfettered access," and defend the damn decision.

But this is not acceptable. You've been the minister well in excess of a year and a half. Your predecessor made the initial decision, and I'm sorry, but the concept of, "We're coming together and resolving" -- this is not a major undertaking to resolve this issue in very clear language without in any way impeding access for a 16-year-old unwed mother who wishes to continue her education and not seek an abortion, or in any way inhibit the right of a child to leave an abusive situation without, in that decision, abandoning their chances of a secondary education. In no way would these essential components of this element of social assistance be damaged.

Finally, my point is, I've read the stats you've just shared with me. If you compare the June stats to the August stats, Minister, you're spot on. They've declined. But every summer student welfare drops, and it drops for a variety of reasons. They're relocating to a university, the family has moved, there's high transience in lower-income families; there's a whole series of factors, but you've not told this committee one thing we haven't known by looking at these same statistics. But if you compare the September entry numbers to last year's September entry numbers, we're still up.

The final point: I know I'm running out of time, but in the framework of greater accountability, accountability will only work if we've got the policy guidelines and the parameters very clearly set out. And we have those in many aspects of how we tell people who's eligible and not eligible. This is separate from people who don't always tell us all the information we need to know. But we are very clearly unsure of what we're doing in this area. We can't be clear enough, and we put our staff in terrible positions and they have to err on the side of the applicant.

This is coming at a huge cost, not only to the taxpayers, but as would be suggested by clear empirical evidence by Councillor Tim Kenny, with the support of the council down in the Niagara region, this is having an impact on the educational outcomes of a whole group of kids who are seeing this as a ticket and not necessarily as the atypical case, for which the vision for this was so a young girl could raise her child and complete her education, so people could escape an abusive situation and so on.

There are not 35,000 young people in this province being abused at home or bringing a child into the world, and that's really what I'm trying to get at, and I can't understand why it's taken two years for us to resolve this. Why can't we bite the bullet and make a decision and make our guidelines clear, and not get involved with SARB going into lengthy appeals without going back. I mean, you're not going to take a 19-year-old to court and say, "Look, you owe us this back pay for all the money you got on social assistance you shouldn't have got." That's a write-off. But we've written off some element of their dignity and their ability to look at society as a contributing member and not to see society as a great game and an opportunity to take advantage of the weaknesses of a system that we ourselves are the architects of. That's my concern, and I don't want to hear that we're still studying it and we're coming together. This is not a tough area for a tough decision to be made.

Hon Mr Silipo: Maybe not, Mr Jackson, but I can tell you, having been privy to some of the reports and the discussions around this issue, that if you're able to figure out a way to get more agreement on this area than we've managed to get to so far, then you're a better person than I am, because there are as many views on this issue as there are people that you can get together in a room to discuss it, and that has been, quite frankly, the difficulty with this.

I don't disagree with you one iota about the need for us to clarify this issue, but I don't think what we want is either a situation in which we get to the point where we assume that every young person who comes to the welfare office is trying to cheat the system or, on the other hand, a situation in which we assume that every one of them is absolutely in every case telling the truth about everything that is happening.

I think what we have to do is to have a policy that is much more detailed than the one we have now, that says to young people, "Yes, in these particular issues, these particular circumstances, you have a legitimate right to get help," and the help is not just the social assistance benefit, mind you, but also the direction towards getting some help around dealing with it if the problem is one of abuse, for example.

And yes, I wish that it wasn't taking as long as it is taking to get that perspective put together and to get those decisions made, but it's taking as long as it has because we know there are huge disparities in perspectives on this across the province and what we're trying to do is to pull them together and see if we can come up with a policy that makes more sense than the ones we've been having in the system for many years.

The Acting Chair: As you've noted, your time is running out and has run out. We're over to the NDP member, and I gather the member for Huron is next. Just for your own ease of timing, you're looking at the clock, and you can see that it's 20 to. Your caucus has until 10 after, so you can sort of judge accordingly.

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Mr Klopp: I'll try to talk real slow.

Now that we're in semi-limbo or whatever -- that wasn't a very good definition. He has a better one, but I'll let Wayne do that one. Tony, it's great to be here. In fact, I have a couple of questions, I guess one from the village of Zurich, actually. It's an issue that they bring up, but it's one that I think has come around on a number of occasions that I hear back in my constituency, and that's a feeling out there, whether it's real or not, and I'd like you to clarify, if you can, the issue around people who do receive welfare.

The issue that we hear from time to time is, "Well, I should quit my job." We can all remember a case in this city where someone quit, and she quit a $40,000-a-year job. I don't know where she's at now, if the press is following her, but that's the kind of feeling out there. I've tried to come to grips with it and I'd like at this time if you can clarify.

In their particular case, they cite an example of a family of four. They based it on a weekly income of $412 a week, and they said that's what they're receiving in welfare, and including free medical and medication benefits, where other people in the community are making around $15 an hour or less before deductions and taking home a weekly income of $391.

We all realize you can use examples and pull numbers. I just wonder if you could clarify at this time today, or tomorrow, if it's too detailed, but if you could clarify for me for people like Bob Fisher and others in my community that welfare is not something that, it's better to be on welfare than working.

Hon Mr Silipo: This is an issue that we continue to hear a fair amount about. We can say, I think, that it is better for people to be working than it is to be on welfare, although when people do compare the numbers, you sometimes can see why people come to those conclusions.

As I'm sure you know, we have in the system a number of ways in which we are trying to assist people in re-entering the workforce. One of those, as I mentioned earlier in my opening comments, is the STEP program. Sometimes what happens is that there is a bit of a confusion, and I don't know if this is what's happened in this particular instance or not, when people look at the fact that it's possible for people to earn some money and still retain some level of benefits and somehow then people put together the money that people are earning as well as what they might be eligible for on social assistance if they were not earning anything and come up with sums that are a little bit exaggerated relative to what actually is possible. I don't know if that addresses the issue. I'd be happy to address it further, if that's necessary.

Mr Klopp: Okay. Another issue which you deal with is child care. You've talked about it in your comments and it has been mentioned by colleagues across the way.

I want to deal directly I guess more with the rural child care. What steps have you been undertaking with people out in the countryside? When you get away from the Londons and the Owen Sounds and the Hamiltons, we really have a lot of people out there who are being missed. Could you update us on what you have done, what your ministry has done? I know at the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs we've been doing some things, but could you maybe give an update here at this time of where you're at, and if there are even some dollars or whatever, that would be fine to hear what's going on.

Hon Mr Silipo: As you know, there was earlier this year a conference that was in fact cosponsored by this ministry and the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs that dealt specifically with issues of child care as they affected rural and small communities. One of the things that came out of that conference was in fact a group of people who have been working essentially on a number of improvements, a number of projects that would strengthen the child care provisions in rural and small communities.

We have been working with them to not only support their activities around changes to policies, but also to implement some of those through some pilot projects. I guess it was just before the beginning of the summer I had a chance to meet with some of them and reiterated my support for including some funding requests they made to us to be able to continue some of that work.

We know that in some of the smaller communities one of the things that people have said to us works well is, in effect, the development of child care in a way that allows a combination of care to be provided in homes, so through the home child care system, and with then support being given to those child care providers, usually through the resource centres, so that kind of a hub model is established through which both the ongoing support services as well as, in some cases, toy-lending libraries and a whole array of other support services are linked into the resource centre. That supports the provision of child care in the home, through people again who become better qualified to be able to provide that and better supported in doing that.

That's something I think we have to continue to expand as a direction. There's a particular resonance of this in rural and small communities, but as we talk more and as we do more with respect to child care and the future of child care, I think that even in some larger centres there's a sense that this is also something that is a viable option and something that we need to continue to support, while obviously continuing to support just as much the centre-based child care that we provide.

Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Walkerville): Mr Minister, I certainly appreciated your opening comments, especially those which reflected upon our relationship with the federal government. Of course, that is an important relationship, especially when it comes to dealing with programs like health and education and social assistance. You mentioned that even the Liberal government in Ottawa is continuing to maintain the cap on CAP and you continued in your remarks to say that it has tightened its eligibility on unemployment insurance and that there's been a big shift to Ontario taxpayers as a result of that.

There are areas where I know we're trying to get some cooperation with the federal government with respect to child care reforms, and I have been provided with a copy of a letter that we sent to Lloyd Axworthy, the Minister of Human Resources Development, in May with respect to our proposal for federal cooperation with respect to child care. I wonder if we've received any feedback or any response with respect to that proposal up until this time.

Hon Mr Silipo: I indicated in my opening statement this morning that there had been what I would categorize as some very good discussions on the issue of child care and the question of support by the federal government for our interest in moving beyond the very significant improvements that we've already made in the system. I have been having a number of discussions with Mr Axworthy, certainly going back as early as, if not before, February of this year at the provincial ministers' meeting that we had with him on the whole social security reform process, and following that up with a number of specific conversations that he and I have had, the most recent of those being towards the end of July.

I don't want to get into the details of those conversations, but suffice it to say that I am quite optimistic that there is both an interest and a willingness on his part to look quite seriously at some of the aspects that are in our proposal that we put to the federal government before the summer, particularly the issue of funding reform, that is, of changing the way in which we fund child care in the province to be able to allow us to move the system from a welfare-based system and to provide it much more as a broad social service across the province.

We know that's a direction that not only we as a government believe in, but I think indeed there's general support; certainly something that many child care advocates have told us we need to do. Again, it's been useful for me to hear those kind of positive responses from the federal minister.

What we have yet to see are some actual dollars. We are following up on those discussions at the officials' level -- in fact, there are meetings scheduled for later this week -- and our approach is going to be very much to try to get some money from the federal government, both from its strategic initiatives funding, which it has targeted to be a fund of some $800 million over the next few years to be able to fund a number of initiatives, from things like JobLink, for which we are getting some money, as I mentioned earlier, to issues like child care, and then we are also going to be talking very much with the federal government around the commitment that it had in its red book to money for additional spaces and expansion of child care into the future.

Our approach is going to continue to be very clear in requesting our fair share of that funding as a province and we'll see whether in effect the kind of positive responses that we've had so far will translate into dollars from the federal government. I hope that they do, because I think, partisanship aside, if that happens it will allow us to move forward fairly significantly with some very important changes and improvements in the child care system of the province.

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Mr Lessard: One area that I'm interested in as far as expansion of child care services is concerned deals with resource centre services, and that's part of the proposal. I don't know if you have a copy of this proposal in front of you, but I was wondering whether the expectation of increased expenditures when it deals with resource centres would include operating or capital, or a combination of both.

Hon Mr Silipo: I think realistically it would have to be a combination of both. We have already a number of resource centres, as you know, across the province. We all believe we could probably use many more. Again, I think part of the balancing act we have been trying to do has been to make sure that as we build new centres -- and I think Mr Jackson was talking about this earlier -- we also have the money to be able to run them and operate them, and I think the same applies to resource centres as it does to child care centres themselves.

We think that resource centres will probably play an even greater role in the future because they do provide not only a hub of services but they also provide a very useful place where parents can get a lot of help, from straightforward information about what exists in a whole array of information and supports around child rearing to in effect providing the kind of support we were discussing earlier around Mr Klopp's question to home-based child care. I think there's that whole combination of issues and supports that really makes the resource centre a very viable part of the expansion of child care in the province.

Mr Lessard: Of course, you're aware of one resource centre in my riding, the St Mary's Family Learning Centre. They're quite interested in this proposal to the federal government because they're not just interested in making sure they have funds for operating but they're interested in the availability of funds for maintenance or purchase of a building.

They've run into problems in the past because of the fact that they don't provide child care services on site, so they don't really have access to any capital programs. They're faced with rent increases on the building they're currently in, without any ability to meet those increases or to make application for funding to purchase a new building. So they're quite interested in this proposal and they're also interested in what might happen if we don't have any cooperation with the federal government, what that's going to mean for them.

Hon Mr Silipo: I certainly remember the centre because of a visit that I had there with you, as you recall, some months ago.

One of the things we have done is to put out into the system an interim policy on resource centres, which I think is a first for the ministry. Again, we purposely put it out there as an interim policy because we knew there had to be more discussion around it, but we wanted to make sure that we put it out to indicate the importance that we place as a ministry on resource centres. I think there is an issue of legitimacy here that we need to make sure is addressed; that is, I think it's important for the ministry, in its capital allocation and in its operating allocation, to be placing resource centres very much as an important part of the array of services. So putting out the policy was our way of indicating that's the case. We will be adding to that as we look at the issue of capital to whatever extent we will have additional dollars to spend on further expansion, and then how we deal with it in the whole array of operating dollars.

In order for us to truly do the kinds of things to the extent that we think they need to be done, we really need to be able to address the big dollar issue, and the only way in which we can effectively address that is if we are successful with the federal government in getting some dollars from it that brings its level of support for child care back up to the level that it was several years ago. It has been deteriorating. It hasn't got as bad as the 29-cent dollars that we get for social assistance, but it's also decreased. Of course, all the funding we get from the federal government comes under the Canada assistance program, and that is something that also has been suffering as a result of the reductions by the federal government.

Mr Wiseman: I have a number of questions. I'd like to begin with a question with regard to programs run by children's aid societies with respect to children who are the victims of sexual abuse and what kind of treatments are available to children in that regard.

My understanding is that there's nothing in the Child and Family Services Act that requires children's aid societies to run group therapy sessions. This is becoming a rather interesting issue in my part of the world in that the children's aid society is asking the local groups, the Rotary Clubs, Lions and so on, to find the money so that it can continue a program of running group therapy sessions. Could somebody help me out here in terms of giving me some information about what the government is prepared to put into group therapy sessions for children affected by sexual abuse?

Mr Jackson: Who's legally responsible?

Mr Wiseman: Yes, who's legally responsible and how that funding would work out.

Hon Mr Silipo: If there's an issue of child protection there, then obviously the society does have that responsibility. Now, how it carries out that responsibility, there probably is a fair amount of room, so it may be a question of the discretion that the society exercises in how to best provide that support. I wonder if any of our officials can add some more specifics to that reply.

Mrs Herbert: To go back to the original question you made, children's aid societies have a legal mandate to provide protection services, and inherent in that is to develop, then, case plans for individual children, which may or may not include therapy. Who provides the therapy is then a matter of negotiation and community planning. Some of our CASs do provide their own fairly extensive services that they run and are responsible for; in other parts of the province, other CASs have negotiated what you might call protocols with other treatment centres, child treatment centres or children's mental health centres, to provide services on behalf of their clients.

It very much depends on what services are available in a community and what services the individual child needs, how they're configured around an individual child's plan. Some of our children's aid societies actually are approved to provide formally children's mental health services and other services -- they're designated under the act for a number of services -- and other CASs have fairly narrow designations, but they do have primary accountability both for protection and then for case planning for those children.

I don't know the particular agency you're referring to. We do know that there have been CASs that have provided very innovative pilot programs themselves that have decided now that those are programs they either no longer are able to or no longer wish to actually carry on themselves and have looked for additional funding from their community and other service providers to do. That may be the case in this example. But if you want to provide me with that after the session I'd be glad to follow up on the particular example.

Mr Wiseman: Okay. So if they had decided they didn't want to continue the program within their budgets and wanted to fund something else, then that would be a decision of their priorities?

Mrs Herbert: Yes, as long as they're meeting their mandate to do protection work and also to do case management planning for the child.

Mr Wiseman: Well, in Durham that's a question too. If they have decided within their own budgets not to continue with this group therapy program, then they can go out to the community service clubs and ask them to kick in $60,000 so that they can continue this?

Mrs Herbert: Different CASs do different fund-raising, and many of our CASs have foundations. Many of you will know, for example, the Metro CAS, with its Metro CAS foundation, which does very extensive and sophisticated fund-raising to fund its own programs outside of the ministry's funding. So it's not unusual for some of our CASs to do fund-raising to establish their own priorities outside of the ministry's funding.

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Mr Wiseman: The next question I have has to do with children as well. It has to do with where best to allocate resources in order to maximize the effect in terms of helping children. As you know, I come from an education background. There is nothing currently that mandates the boards of education -- as I understand it; I may be wrong -- but there's nothing there that mandates that they have to have counsellors and people who can actually intervene with family problems and work on protection of children.

I was just going through the statistics in the Children at Risk submission and they're quite startling when you start to think about the number of children who are abused, the number of children who come from families that are below the poverty level who need help. So my first question is, has your ministry worked at all and made any submissions to the Royal Commission on Learning that would give that commission some kind of ability to evaluate whether it should in fact recommend that counselling become a permanent part of the educational system?

Hon Mr Silipo: I was just checking to see to what extent there have been discussions specifically with the members of the royal commission. I know that there have been some general discussions; I don't know to what extent they broached those topics. This is not an area that we are not aware of as being a problem. Secondly, it's an area in which we have been doing some useful work.

We talked earlier about the Better Beginnings projects. There is an incredible coming together there through those projects that I think is teaching us a lot, not just as a ministry but I think as all of us responsible in whatever way for serving children, what needs to be done to be able to look at those needs without the constraints of the ministry limitations. There is in our own children's policy framework very much an approach that says to people that locally what we want is for children's agencies, school boards and others to be working together to be looking at particularly how they can address problems with children at risk.

A sizeable amount of the community innovation fund that I also mentioned this morning we expect to spend encouraging, funding a number of initiatives in the children's services area which do exactly what you're saying, which is to get people to work very much at the local level in pooling together their resources and moving away from the traditional approach that's been there, which is that is that a school looks at a young person as being its business for particular hours of the day, and then a children's aid society intervenes in certain situations, and another children's services agency would get involved in other particular kinds of instances.

We need to say, "What are the common characteristics that all of these young people have that we have to deal with, and how can we do that in a way that we're not stepping on each other's toes and not doing the same thing twice and three times over and therefore using the dollars that we have in a more effective manner?"

I think we've learned a lot from the initial development and implementation of the children's policy framework. What I can tell you that we're doing now with it is that we have set, area by area of the province, some clear expectations about some good next steps that have to be implemented. Part of that involves very much ensuring that the consumers' organizations and the people who advocate on behalf of children are also at the table in implementing those approaches, but the other is a very clear expectation on our area offices that they take the initiative to make sure that all the players are around the table and that those issues are addressed in that way.

I think we can see some improvement, and we are seeing some improvement as a result of that. Whether that gets us, as I am assuming your question alludes, to the need for some broader policy and perhaps even legislative changes that need to come down the line I think is really where ultimately we need to be heading and I suspect that, as we get the report from the royal commission, it's an issue that's going to again be very much on the public table for discussion in terms of what we do in that area.

Mr Wiseman: From what you were saying you didn't really indicate whether you'd made a submission to the royal commission or not. From my experience, the whole attendance question and whether a child is in the classroom or not really does reflect some of the problems that are going on in the home or in the life of the child. Yet when we have attendance counsellors, they're not trained to deal with the problem; they're trained to deal with running down kids who are out of class. It becomes, in my view, a circular chase: They're not there, so you send the attendance counsellor; the attendance counsellor catches them and brings them back, but then they're not there again and you send them again. But it doesn't slice through the issue and deal with the reason they're not there.

It seems to me that the dynamic that's happening in the boards that were farsighted enough just to begin to move in the direction of hiring counsellors, because of the Education Act and because of the dynamics of the way the negotiations take place in these boards, there's no protection for them. So they're out, with our cost cutting and what we have done, what they're doing and so on. These are the first people who are gone. The problem is that you don't have any solution to this. These children continue to be lost in this kind of a vacuum of policy and the lack of requirements that --

Hon Mr Silipo: First of all, specifically to your question, the royal commission has had access to all of the work of this ministry, as it has to all of the other ministries that deal with children in any way, so they've had as much access to any of the information and the work we do as they've wanted to. As with any commission, it's up to them to determine what of that they want to use and what they want to probe.

I want to come back to the issue of how you make change happen, which I think is at the heart, if I've understood correctly, of what you're asking, which is that I think there may very well be a need for some changes, both in legislation and in policies at the provincial level. Even with that, it seems to me, and I can tell you from my own experience in working on a school board for a number of years, that the only way that kind of change -- and I'm sure you would know yourself, from your own days in the classroom -- that the only way in which these changes can actually come about is if there is that kind of process locally to get the different players together and to get them to each put their pieces of the responsibility on the table, and to step away from the kind of traditional turf protection that's been there and to say, "If we've got a particular set of problems that we see recurringly in certain young people, then how do we address them in a way that allows each of us to do our part?"

The Acting Chair: I see by the clock on the wall it's 10 after. Mr Hope, I'll have to put you down for first next time.

Mr Randy R. Hope (Chatham-Kent): No problem.

The Acting Chair: Back to the Liberals.

Mr Elston: Just a couple of questions, although I would like to pursue, just for a moment, a couple of lines that Mr Wiseman opened up because they have been of interest to me.

First is the coordination of children's services in the classroom where there are requirements for attendant care. Boards of education, mine locally and I think probably everybody's board, have hired people, and you may get one and a half attendants in a classroom but you may have five children who have special needs. These people move back and forth from one room to another and in the end may not be able to look after anybody really very well. In one circumstance that I know, a very severely handicapped child requires almost full-time attendance from one full-time person, so that leaves a half person to run around to others.

I guess I wonder, with the concern expressed in your answers earlier about the needs of the child, will Community and Social Services guarantee that the child's needs will be met if the board of education does not meet it? You were talking about the issue of passing it around. I think that at the end of the day the welfare of the child falls to your ministry. Why don't you pick up the needs of the child and then let the bureaucracies work out the journal entries?

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Hon Mr Silipo: I wish it were that easy. It's not just a question of journal entry, it's a question of what exists in legislation in terms of who's responsible for what and sometimes, at the end of the day, that may not be the important thing, but it is also, unfortunately, the reality under which each of the ministries function and has to function.

I think what we've been trying to do again in this area is, rather than concentrate all of our efforts on structural changes at the provincial level, we've been trying very hard to concentrate our efforts on what changes we can practically bring about at the local level.

Mr Elston: But at the end of the day, structural changes, wherever implemented, are leaving people without the attendant care in the classroom. Young girls and young boys are left to fend for themselves. There is no role that is allowed by most boards for people to come in unless they have a particular, special appointment from one part of a program. I, for instance, in many boards -- I don't know about all boards -- can't go in and be an attendant in full-time attendance with my child unless I have some kind of special designation other than parent. I could be charged with trespass and ejected by just being there to look after my child when I find that there isn't enough care available to assist my child's needs through the day.

So while you talk about the paramount requirements of looking after the child's needs, your ministry, the Ministry of Health in some cases and the Ministry of Education and Training, are so structured as to leave only one person or maybe one group of people at wit's end, and that is the child in the classroom and the parents, who can't even volunteer to be the attendant in full-time attendance because they have no special status in those schools. Why can't you get over this problem, the bureaucracy of it all, make sure the needs are met and then fight about who picks up the tab?

Hon Mr Silipo: Again, I think what we're trying to do is deal with that through some planning at the local level, because in that process we've been discussing there are not only the different community agencies but also in fact people from the three ministries, Health, Education and our own ministry. It's really been through those efforts that we've felt it's been more useful to try to get at some of these issues. The attendant care problems that you've identified are issues that do fall more particularly within the responsibilities of the Ministry of Health, but I appreciate the point you're raising, which is that at the end of the day we're talking about kids who have needs. It's really not an issue of turf here, it really is an issue of sorting out the legal responsibilities that each of the ministries have.

Mr Elston: Isn't the big issue here not so much responsibility areas but, as a result of the exercises of finding money, it has been discovered that they cannot meet the needs of children whether they are in Community and Social Services care, whether they are in the Ministry of Education and Training's mandate to care for or whether or not they are under the aegis of the Ministry of Health's programs? Isn't that the real issue now?

Hon Mr Silipo: I think that's a part of it. I think it's fair to say that the fiscal crunch we've been going through has put even greater onus on everyone working with children to look at how we're spending money and what we can do, and some of what's happened initially in that has been a sense that perhaps programs have been lost.

But I think what will come out of it, if we do the work that we are doing is, in effect, a better way to serve kids, and in doing it that can emerge. We have to be sure we don't simply remove funding for programs until and unless this planning goes on and until and unless we have something that can pick up the pieces.

Mr Elston: But that last statement is much too late, because you know and I know that money has gone from programs, whether it be directly under your ministry's aegis or not. Whether it be under Education or Health, money has gone, programs have been reduced in size.

The question I have for you is this: If a parent with a child in need of special supports has a child whose needs are not met, would you advise them and would you authorize your local authorities to provide the support for that child while the problems are being sorted out?

Hon Mr Silipo: That's been the approach we've taken on our individual cases, generally, yes, where in fact --

Mr Elston: So they should apply through your area offices.

Hon Mr Silipo: We try very much to make sure that no one falls through the cracks and if there's an issue of some funding needed until the appropriate ongoing funding mechanism has to be sorted out, then that's what we try to do. We do that in a number of instances. To go back to use your words earlier, then we'll fight with the other ministries later.

Mr Elston: How many of those instances have you done? These are special authorizations or minister approvals or whatever.

Hon Mr Silipo: They're not even necessarily ministerial approval. I think they've happened and I've been aware of a number of them as a result of actions that our officials have taken. I guess the most common is where there's an issue about placement of children and moving young people from one place to another. What we've generally done is to work with the particular agencies to say the young person stays where they are until another appropriate placement is found and the funding just continues to be worked out.

Mr Elston: But likewise, the situation could be one where lack of attendant care in a school may preclude somebody from actually attending class. In that situation would you advise the parents to apply to your ministry for support until appropriate placement arrangements can be made?

Hon Mr Silipo: If that seems to be the way in which -- in other words, if there is no support being provided elsewhere then, yes, we take our responsibility to do what we can in the meantime.

Mr Elston: What about the situation where programs that are designed to assist a child in need of special services are not available to an individual? I have a particular case in my own town where a young girl having suffered a head injury is in need of special rehab attendants. She's gone to school. She may not be able to go to school full-time because of the intensive need of assistance. Her mother, for instance, now is prepared to leave work and come home and actually administer the rehab program herself. Is there a way that mother, for instance, can get some financial support because there is a low-income situation at home? If she does stop she's going to suffer, the whole family suffers as a result. Is there a program or is there a special authorization that can be made for that family so the mother doesn't have to choose between economic -- at least tentative economic security by continuing to work, or her daughter's rehabilitation services?

Hon Mr Silipo: If it's a question of rehabilitation, I'm not sure where that falls, whether in fact it even falls necessarily within our mandate or what. If there are some issues related to that, what you were describing, I almost -- I will jump into the issue of the special services at home as being very parallel to what you were just describing. I'm not sure that particular issue, though, is one that fits into it. I don't know in terms of rehabilitative services what would happen in that case.

Mrs Herbert: A little difficult -- sorry. Sue Herbert, ADM, program management -- without knowing the particulars of the case, but we have done rehabilitation programs through voc rehab for brain-injured adults, young adults. That's one kind of support, but without knowing --

Mr Elston: This young lady's 13, 14.

Mrs Herbert: Then I think, again without knowing the details, probably there would be some -- if there aren't available other community supports which can support her, then probably special services at home would be the first avenue that might offer some support to the family. But it's a little difficult without knowing the details around the case.

Mr Elston: I'll certainly make those available. In fact, we are now trying to make some contacts to see how it will work anyway. But the difficulty, you see, here is while there seems to be a willingness to provide the need, if it doesn't fit a program, for most people out there looking for services for those special-needs individuals, it is a real morass, it is a minefield. If it's a minefield for people working in the professional areas, you've got to understand what it's like for someone who had a healthy eight-year-old and then within a few minutes has an unhealthy, very dependent child on their hands and has had that child living with them now for some four years, and saying: "I now have to decide whether I can quit my job, because if I don't quit my job I don't think my child will get any help. Some people say the child can recover more fully, some can't, but if I quit my job, we have no money at all."

There's a monthly payment of $370-some, I think, for a disabled child benefit or something, but you know how far $372 goes over a month. This is a person who is totally dependent. You have to turn the child, for instance. They're working with their hands and they're working with their limbs and things.

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Can you understand in the community how people say: "Obviously you people in Toronto" -- and when I say "you," that's me as well -- "you people who are in charge of this area have really missed out on what's going on. While you squabble over whether it's the Ministry of Education that provides attendant care or while you squabble over whether it's Health that goes into the home, my child is atrophying in terms of the skills they were about to embark on just before they got moved from one place to another or as the money runs out"?

There has been a request, but you can't count on volunteers to come in and deliver special-needs rehab. So the children's service end of it is so desperately in need of somebody to pick up the mantle and I guess because of the requirements, it seems to me the mandate of Community and Social Services in so many areas to have the child at the centre of their service delivery and almost their legislative situation -- for instance, if I left my child at home sitting in a chair unattended, or something similar to that, you would have the children's aid society go in and say I'd abandoned that child. But when the parent can't provide those services for the child, isn't that child in need of protection, in a sense? It's not that they've abandoned the child, it's just that nothing is happening for that child, and that's problematic for the mother in this case; well, the parents and her brothers and sisters.

Hon Mr Silipo: I think the situation you've just described has got to be one of the most frightening and frustrating kinds of situations. I tell you that there are days on which I feel that in a very, very real way because I know, and I think we all know as legislators and as people who one way or another have been dealing with these kinds of issues, what needs to happen.

We say the commonsense approach would be to say you just provide the service and that's it. That's the direction again that I think all of us -- I'm not talking now even about ministries but just generally, we're seeing that people are at least opening their minds to the fact that this is the way in which the system overall in terms of providing services for children has to work. We have a long way to go and I think we have to just be clear about that. We haven't resolved all of these problems yet.

They're problems that clearly have become perhaps even more acute over the last few years as a result again of the lack of the finances that we had in the past. It just means that all of the work we're doing, whether it's in the children's policy framework, whether it's in the developmental services framework, all of that, these are all nice-sounding words and important words, but really what we're talking about through all of these is saying, "We've got to strip some of these labels away and we've got to provide a lot more flexibility to be able to assist parents to take care of their kids if that's the way in which they believe they can do the job."

It's the same situation we have when we're dealing with developmental services or people who have a need as a result of an accident. It's one and the same in terms of saying there's got to be a whole array of services there, and then the system's got to be flexible enough to say to the parent: "Okay, what is it that you need? How can we be of some help to you within that?"

Mr Elston: Minister, maybe it's not even the need to have a whole array of services available, maybe it's having a policy of having financial support available to access services. It seems to me there are a number of areas out there in which your ministry doesn't have to have an array of services available, but you do have to have a support mechanism, because there are a whole series of deliverers out there.

These people, if they had more money, probably could afford to bring someone in. You know what I mean? But they don't have more money, and the real world for them is, "We don't have money and our daughter isn't getting care," and they don't want to abandon her and they don't want to see her go into an institution, and what's happening?

Well, what's happening is right now they are very exhausted by the process that they've been trying to administer themselves. They're very concerned that they're losing a struggle to help reinvigorate their daughter's life, and I think we shouldn't worry so much about the programs so much as we worry about the application of funding to support a good outcome, and if we could look at it more from that way, I think that might be quite helpful for us.

Hon Mr Silipo: I don't disagree with you but the problem that we also have is that we also don't always have the money, and I think that's -- we need to be very honest about that as well.

Mr Elston: That sort of takes me to my next question which --

Hon Mr Silipo: We all would like to have more money but we don't.

Mr Elston: -- which in a way is a bit of a tease, I guess, but basically my one question really is, and it comes out of the description of the operation of children's services. For instance, the mandates, if I'm at a CAS office, I am required to do (a), (b), (c), (d). I've been to meetings with the societies up home, and they say "We can't get to (e) because we run out halfway through (c), and we're being asked to do our mandate."

What do they do? Do they go to your various district offices and say -- because they have tried to do this in terms of budgets. Last year's budget approval system was abysmal in the sense of turnaround times and things, and people didn't have the money to carry out all of their legislated mandates. Do they come to you and say, "We don't have the money for our legislated mandate"?

They were holding their fund raisers. They were having bake sales, by the way. They were baking tea biscuits and they were selling cookies.

Mr Jackson: Collecting Club Z points like one of mine was?

Mr Elston: They were doing the whole thing, but you know you can't run it on that, and you can't wait for the bingo money to come in because they do have to apprehend children in need, and they do have to provide surveillance because when the judges in the family courts, provincial court (family division), make their request to have somebody intervene, you got to do it. What do they do?

Hon Mr Silipo: Again it depends on the particular situation. Certainly there is, as you know, beyond the base funding that societies have, there is a fund of money that we have which provides annualized funding to societies under the exceptional circumstances review that goes on, in which we try to deal year by year with these kinds of particular problems and situations that exist. Beyond even that, part of the answer has to be in the way in which societies in this case fulfil even their legal obligations, and there is no one fixed way in which they do that.

What we're trying to do is to get societies, and I think we've done some good work with the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies, to look even at what can be done through better training of workers in the system, through for example, how do you provide in a better way such things as foster care? As one director of a society I recall was telling me, we have a problem in the way in which we have some requirements in the system which is that we don't fund those services sometimes until the young person is actually in foster care, whereas what they were proposing in that instance was if they had the flexibility to be able to have one of their foster parents work with the birth parents of the kids in their own homes, they felt that they could actually get further.

Our job, I think, is to make those things possible, so that the society is able to fulfil its legal obligations but do it in a way that costs everybody less money and gets the job done as effectively, if not better in fact in some of these cases. So I think that there's a great deal of learning that's going on on both ends, both from our side as a ministry in terms of what we have to do around providing more flexibility in the rules that we have, and the expectations that we set for societies and how they fulfil their legal obligations, and also the way in which societies go about doing their job.

I don't pretend that the answers are easy or that we've got them all. We don't, but those are the efforts that we're trying to make.

Mr Elston: Have any societies written to you to advise that their ability to fulfil their legal, mandated obligations have been compromised?

Hon Mr Silipo: I think that there have been a number of societies who have made that argument to us. I think that I don't --

Mr Elston: And you disagreed?

Hon Mr Silipo: Well, I think that there's been some level of disagreement in terms of the discussions that have gone on between our officials and those particular societies, and that gets worked out.

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Mr Elston: So basically you're telling us, while they take a look at their budgeting, your decision, ie, the ministry's central decision, is going to override what they do in terms of their priority-setting and their application of the money to the areas that they feel they need service.

Hon Mr Silipo: Yes and no, because at the end of the day, we haven't had a society yet that has said to us, "Here are the keys; we can't do the job." What we've had are a number of societies that have said, "We're having a hard time with this," but then I think you and I know that we have a lot of organizations, whether they're dealing with children or anyone else in our society, that are saying, "We have a hard time dealing with this." As a ministry, we have a hard time dealing with any number of issues.

Mr Elston: Minister, what you've described, these are classical, difficult public policy questions where a little bit more money would help, although a little bit more money would probably mean you'd have a little bit more paper on your desk asking for a little more flexibility. What's your view right now on the adequacy of the level of funding in community and social services to carry out your mandates? Are you happy with the budget?

Hon Mr Silipo: What a question.

Mr Elston: That's what I thought.

Hon Mr Silipo: I'm not sure that I've ever had enough money to do all the things that I would have wanted to do, whether it's in this ministry or other ministries or even in anything else that I've done. More seriously: Sure, we could all use more money, but we don't have it, and what that means is that we have to do the very best that we can with the money that we do have. I think, also, if I can just for a second --

Mr Elston: Sure.

Hon Mr Silipo: You said something close to this earlier on, which is that I'm not sure that just having a little bit more money would necessarily resolve our problems, because I think that we do have -- and in a way, it's kind of ironic that it's taken the fiscal situation that we've been going through to really bring to the fore problems that we know have existed in the system for many years. And whoever of us has been in government, I think, has tried to deal with these. We can argue about whether we've done an effective job or not, but I think we probably all agree that there's a lot more that we can do. We can have an argument about whether having a little bit more money would help. Sure, it would help. But would it resolve the big, fundamental problems that we have, whether it's in children's services or anywhere else? I don't think so, not by itself.

Mr Elston: So looking at this subjectively, from the outside in, obviously it would make your job easier as minister; it would make anybody's job easier. But in any event, the work that you do is in my view extremely essential. I guess a question that every ministry asks themselves these days is, how do we do it better and how do we tighten up?

But in looking at a couple of proposals for government application of funding to this ministry, one in particular which has said that they will cut 20% off overall government spending, but no expenditure cuts in health care, no expenditure cuts in law enforcement and no expenditure cuts in classroom education, which sort of exempts about, we'll say, 65% of the provincial budget, it means for community and social services probably a cut of about 60% in your operating budget and in your transfer budgets. Can you live with that and get anywhere close to doing your work?

Hon Mr Silipo: No, this is actually one of the areas where you and I would agree that the view expressed by our Conservative colleagues on that front would only make the situation that we have much, much worse.

Mr Elston: In fact, intolerable for people with disabled children, for people who are working in the child protection end of your mandate, for people who do the review of welfare assistance and other programs. Isn't that right?

Hon Mr Silipo: That's right.

Mr Elston: So in actual fact, the Ministry of Community and Social Services would cease effectively to operate if you had to go through a rigorous slashing of your budget like that?

Hon Mr Silipo: It would put us, I think, in a pretty serious straitjacket. We have been, as a government, I think, very sensitive to the needs, not of the ministry, but of the people that we serve in this ministry. And I think if you look proportionately at where we've made the cuts, we have tried -- and I haven't had to argue very hard with my cabinet colleagues on this -- to protect very much the services that we provide and the funding that we have therefore as a ministry. So to be looking at those kinds of cuts, we know would cause havoc in the system.

Mr Elston: I'm interested, I guess, overall, in the long-term health of this particular ministry, and obviously there are some really crucial things that have to be done to make sure that you can stabilize a whole series of concerns. I was the Minister of Health when we had a very difficult discussion, I think maybe Mr Jackson was involved in it in a couple of places, where we were talking about children's mental health, an issue where the Ministry of Health couldn't, with the Ministry of Community and Social Services, deal with the problem effectively, and we lost people. We effectively did not provide service. We just went through the children-with-special-needs issue, where children are losing out on services now.

I can recite the long-term care proposal in which we tried, as result of some disagreements, to bridge that gap by making one person with a position in two ministries to try and overcome that. We haven't effectively done that yet.

Can you tell us, in the short term, what you're doing to try and eliminate those gaps or those inabilities of government to bridge the gaps in both philosophy and in service? Again, when we get right down to it, it's actually service that we're sacrificing, and men and women, boys and girls, who actually go without the needs that are required, while we fight internally.

Hon Mr Silipo: In the short term the vehicle, and I think even in the longer term, is through the children's policy framework. I know that sometimes that just sounds like we're just laying down another piece of bureaucratese into the system. But it really is, from what I've seen and from the discussions that I've had with people locally across the province on this, a useful vehicle to get people together and to start to break some of those barriers that have been built up over the years.

Over the longer term what I would add is to go back to a question that was being asked earlier by one of our other colleagues, is that I think that there are going to have to be some changes done at the centre in terms of a realignment of some of those services. But I think for that to happen there has to be a real understanding at the community level about that need right throughout the system, which is why I think that the children's policy framework, beyond getting some good changes in services at the local level, which I think it is doing and we'll do more in the next couple of years as it actually gets significantly more implemented across the province, it will also point, as will experiences like the Better Beginnings projects, to what things we need to do in a more consistent fashion; no longer as pilots across the province, but more as a practice across the province, and I think that that's what's coming.

Mr Elston: One of the concerns I have -- always had, I guess, since I've been here now through three different political administrations -- is that when the guidelines are established for funding programs, when the comparators are established for efficiency of delivery inside ministries, including yours, we tend to adopt unrealistic benchmarks for our rural areas.

I've just gone through a bit of a fight with the Solicitor General on funding sexual assault centres for women in Grey-Bruce. I haven't been successful. I guess I'm not finished with it yet. But the criteria established meant that the program which was asked to be designed and which people spent a lot of time dealing with, yielded only about a quarter -- maybe it was a little bit more than half, sorry -- of the money that was required even to get close. Which meant they weren't delivering a service at all because there's a long area to travel from Markdale to Thornbury or from Owen Sound to Amberley or from Tobermory to Belmore.

They say, "You design a program that will work and then we'll fund it." Well, when the funding comes out, "You don't meet the criteria and as a result, you can't have satellites in." The same thing is happening with respect to long-term care and the manner in which funding has occurred to deliver services. You require people to drive 50 or 60 minutes to see a client and then you say, "Your level of efficiency of delivery of that service means that you are performing poorly in regard to the overall requirements."

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What are you doing, in the Ministry of Community and Social Services, to set reasonable standards that can be actually achieved and service still delivered out in rural Ontario? Because that is a really big issue for those of us who have pretty long areas to serve with populations spread out over the back roads, so to speak.

Hon Mr Silipo: I'm told we just have about a minute or so, so I'll try to be quick.

Part of what I think -- what I know, not just what I think -- what I know is coming and we're continuing to build on as part of the realignment of the ministry, is in fact a much stronger relationship between the area offices that we have throughout the province and the central office of the ministry. We've removed the intermediate barrier of the regional offices.

One of the things that that's doing is, it's putting our area offices, our area managers particularly, who know the needs across the province -- rural, urban etc, wherever they may be -- directly in at the decision-making table with our ADMs. I think that's going to be probably one of the more significant ways in which we will get some of these issues addressed.

Again, as we design policies we know that we have to be sensitive to those needs. By way of example only, and as we put in place JobLink, which will include your own area of the province, we know when we deal there with the funding distribution that we have to take into account that if we're talking about supporting people, for example, with transportation costs, it's a very different issue if you're trying to support people with transportation costs in Grey-Bruce than if they're in Metropolitan Toronto. So I think the funding mechanisms have to be flexible enough to take those things into account.

Mr Jackson: Since we were in the area of children's aid societies, perhaps I could ask which staff member here today is responsible. Is it Sue with respect to programs for the children's aid societies?

Ms Lucille Roch: I'm Lucille Roch, the ADM for children, family and community services. I guess Sue and I kind of share responsibility for children's aid societies.

Mr Jackson: Great. Feel free to share this question. Could you enlighten me as to what is the legal requirement under the act in terms of children at risk? Take an example of children who are potentially at risk for physical abuse: What does the legislation say is the party in society who's legally responsible to protect that child? What does the legislation currently say?

Ms Roch: I think we'd be in a better position if we went back to the act. We don't have a copy of the act in front of us here.

Mr Jackson: Sue, can you help?

Mrs Herbert: I can't quote the act. I'd be paraphrasing it. I'd prefer to use the act as well.

Mr Jackson: Well, what's your working understanding of who's liable? I'm asking you like a legal question, not this legalese reference to the act. What assumptions are you working on? Who's legally liable, the children's aid society or the province of Ontario as defined by the legislation, to protect children?

Mrs Herbert: Cam, I'm not sure that I understood the question fully, but the CAS, through the vehicle of the legislation, is liable. By liable, I mean has the mandate and has the responsibility to protect children.

Mr Jackson: Okay. And who monitors the CASs?

Mrs Herbert: The minister.

Mr Jackson: Okay. So the minister is responsible for making sure that the law is upheld and the minister is also, in almost 100% terms, the funding responsibility to ensure that that law is upheld?

Mrs Herbert: And as well we have the court. So the decision about the disposition of the child's status within society is made by the courts.

Mr Jackson: But that's an arbitration process more than it is the concept of protection. Protection is there and the requirement to go to court is only when that authority is being challenged or modified in any fashion.

Mrs Herbert: It defines the nature of the CAS's responsibility for the child. So if we think about whether it is society wardship or crown wardship, whether the child is placed under a supervision order, all of those things are defined by the court.

Mr Jackson: Yes, that's defining the status --

Mrs Herbert: And then it has an implication on the nature of the CAS's involvement with the child.

Mr Jackson: Given that there is this legal requirement, can you indicate to me how it's possible in the framework of the social contract and/or the expenditure control plan that with a growing number of vulnerable children requiring protection, we're able to provide the same level of service with the reduction in the funding base? How is it that we're able to do that? How do we instruct the children's aid societies with a broad range of mandates to make sure they are protecting these, for want of another word, most vulnerable?

Hon Mr Silipo: Let me begin on that one, Mr Jackson, because I think what you're raising is a broader policy issue. Under the social contract, as you're well aware, we arrived in the community services sector at an agreement within the sector which essentially meant that people agreed that they would be able to find the savings targeted, the $10 million a year targeted, through ways other than having to reduce staffing and having to resort to layoffs, essentially.

Mr Jackson: Did you get that in writing, Minister? And who specifically are you saying? This is your ministry staff, or are you saying CASs, for example? So did the CASs inform you informally or did they put this in writing that they were able to meet the reductions?

Hon Mr Silipo: You should take a look at the words of the agreement itself, which I think talk very clearly about being able to arrive at those savings in a way that would not affect the services and would not affect their ability to do the jobs they have to do.

Mr Jackson: Now, the CASs as the employer, or the employees through their collective bargaining arm?

Hon Mr Silipo: Clearly at the table, although not everyone was represented, there were representatives of the CASs among others as employers and representatives of employee groups.

Mr Jackson: So who from the CAS would have signed that document on their behalf to give you the assurances that none of these cuts would result?

Hon Mr Silipo: It was done through the umbrella organizations, so I believe the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies was one of the signatories to that piece of the social contract.

Mr Jackson: Perhaps you could advise me who was the individual for the CASs who assumed that legal point, that legal posture, before the minister of the day. Because that's an assumption of a legal assurance.

Ms Roch: All I can say is that Mary McConville, the executive director of the OACAS, was at the table and was a signatory to the agreement.

Mr Jackson: The next part of my question has to do with -- actually, before we get off on to the social contract, I wanted to get into this issue. The expenditure control and social contract cuts represent approximately $1.5 million over three years to, and I'm going to use this example, the Children's Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto. I'm reading from a letter addressed to David Johnson, my colleague, who happens to be in the Chair at the moment, and he has afforded me considerable correspondence in his ongoing concerns with funding for Metro Toronto children's aid.

My understanding is that Metro children's aid has a substantive deficit at the moment and is carrying it forward in spite of these reductions. There's one in particular perhaps we could have a look at. Perhaps the minister or appropriate staff could assist us by referring to the modifications that the minister may have considered for 1993. But you're still on target for 1994 and 1995 with the expenditure control plan and social contract. The original plan reductions of $8.9 million in 1993 and $13.7 million annually in 1994 and 1995 were contemplated.

The letter goes on to suggest that you've modified the 1993 target down to $3.75 million, but you are still on target for 1994 and 1995. Can you confirm that bit of information to this committee?

Hon Mr Silipo: There was a decision and correspondence subsequent to that which indicated that we modified the target for 1994-95 to about half the original amount, roughly.

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Ms Roch: The current reduction plan for 1994-95 is 0.5%.

Mr Jackson: I'm dealing in millions here. Help me out.

Hon Mr Silipo: Overall, it's about half of the original target. It's about $7 million.

Mr Jackson: Let's not play with a base here. I've got $13.7 million in 1994-95, so you're saying roughly $6.5 million is their cut, instead of $13.7 million.

Hon Mr Silipo: That's right.

Ms Roch: The $6.5 million is the cut across all children's services, not just the Metro Toronto CAS.

Hon Mr Silipo: The situation is as follows. We have had that amount of money, the $13.7 million, removed from our ministry budget, so that money is gone from our base at the ministry. What we've done in terms of dealing with it this year is that we have taken half of that amount -- as I say, roughly $7 million -- and taken it out across the whole sector by applying a 0.5% reduction to every agency's budget, as opposed to what would have been about a 1% reduction if we had taken the full $13.7 million. And then we still have, as a ministry, the task of finding the balance of the $13.7 million. We're trying to do that through discussions with the societies and other agencies and trying to see if the money can be saved and can be found across the system as opposed to having to put an additional reduction against specific agency budgets. We're quite confident that we can do that.

Mr Jackson: Could we be more specific? Could you talk to us about the user fee imperative contributions and the clawbacks? Those are offensive words.

Hon Mr Silipo: Those have been removed from --

Mr Jackson: These are no longer there?

Hon Mr Silipo: No, those are there. The parental contributions are available to societies if they wish to use them as vehicles, but they're not mandated as things that they must do.

Mr Jackson: And the federal transfer moneys for -- I always call it the baby bonus. I know I'm not supposed to call it that any more.

Hon Mr Silipo: No, that was also amended.

Mr Jackson: So you're not targeting that money any longer from agencies on the basis of the child's --

Hon Mr Silipo: Again, we're not calculating that in as part of the expectation with regard to agencies.

Mr Jackson: Okay. I received most recently the MCSS Restructuring Framework, late July 1994. I must confess it's a tough read. That's not surprising. It's a tough document when you're reorganizing your ministry.

When I talk to CASs in the field, they express concern about the current discussions around restructuring. Although I'm sort of tempted to tie this to estimates and say, "How much money are you anticipating saving and what is the basic nature of the restructuring?" perhaps the best reference is, what are the uncertainties or what are the legitimate or otherwise fears of the agencies with these reforms? I'm hearing a lot of concern with respect to the division of the policy framework and what issues are going to drive this restructuring.

I know this is not a particularly fun discussion to get into and it doesn't have "human resources" written all around it, but it actually is of major concern because within it lie messages about the direction government wishes to take its ministry. Within the policy framework around equity, I'm concerned about us moving so quickly or with so much emphasis in this area, given my question I just shared about the need within social services to maintain certain priorities for at-risk kids or high-at-risk kids. We don't have specific direction coming from this government to tell children's aid societies, "You must protect this group of your clients first, and then you have to protect this group in society second, and then if you've got any moneys left over, you protect this third group," in the context of the fiscal reality you find yourself in.

I just want to hear briefly, if I can, from the minister, if he can engage in a brief discussion about that concept, because I'm having trouble reconciling the direction the ministry may be going in if in fact you're not bringing forward legislation to further protect vulnerable children in the CFSA legislation. We're not entrenching special-needs definitions in CFSA legislation and I'm getting a little bit of uncertainty from staff about what the legal responsibilities really are. In my view, the least the government can do is to help agencies set priorities. If we're moving in the opposite direction, Minister, could you let us know why, and if we're not, for purposes of Hansard, let's calm down all the children's aid societies that are having some concerns about some of the mixed messages they're getting.

I can tell by the half-smile on your face you know what I'm talking about, but frankly I don't know where we're going with this and I'm uncomfortable. I kind of like to know when a ministry starts moving in a specific policy direction in terms of how it's going to prioritize need. Is that clear enough?

Hon Mr Silipo: I think it is. I guess my answer to your comments will tell you whether it is or not.

First of all, when staff were trying to outline earlier, responding to your question around the legal responsibilities, as I heard the comments I think that you were asking really for some legal definitions, and I certainly understand people's hesitation to give you, as non-lawyers, legal definitions. Clearly, the law --

Mr Jackson: You're a lawyer. Could you help us?

Hon Mr Silipo: No. I'm a lawyer, but the one thing I'm clear about having to do is to not act as a lawyer when I'm sitting as a minister. I try to remember that.

Mr Jackson: It could have helped the Minister of Housing.

Hon Mr Silipo: I won't comment on that.

There is nothing in what we are doing, whether it's in the restructuring document that you refer to or in the children's policy framework where some of these issues are addressed perhaps even more specifically, given that we're dealing with children's aid societies in your question -- there is nothing in either of those documents that does anything to diminish either the responsibility or the understanding that we have of the very particular role that children's aid societies have to play in the whole area of children's services; that is, the fact that they have some legal mandates that they have to fulfil. In fact, all of the planning and implementation of a more collaborative approach at the local level that we are encouraging and proposing under both of those documents clearly is also done on the basis of that recognition and that understanding.

We can talk, I think, a fair amount about how societies ought to go about fulfilling their legal mandates, let alone all of the other good things they do. I think it's fair to say, from even my limited knowledge of both the legalities and the non-legal areas here that we're talking about, that there is more than one way in which a particular mandate can be fulfilled. I think there are ways in which many of our societies are functioning which are very, very good, and there are things that some societies can learn from that. So part of the effort we are making is to get some of those best practices more utilized across the system.

But in that whole discussion we are very clear, and in our whole expectations as a ministry, as the overseers, as I think it was explained to you earlier and as you well know, that role that we have to oversee the work of children's aid societies in particular, the expectation that we have always had, continues, which is that they fulfil their legal mandate.

There is nothing afoot to try to change that. What there is is a real effort on behalf of the ministry to try to get societies to work with other agencies in the children's sector to say there can be certainly better ways of fulfilling the collective mandates that all of those agencies have towards children and there may even be better ways in which children's aid societies can fulfil their legal mandates, and those are issues that people need to continue to look at.

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Mr Jackson: Your economic adjustments to municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals, and then you have your economic adjustments that you give to CASs through the Ministry of Community and Social Services: What approximate percentage are you looking at in your 1994-95 budget as your adjustment? Or is that specifically scripted by the social contract and not by anything else?

Hon Mr Silipo: Essentially what we are doing in 1994-95 is that there is no increase, as there is no increase to any of the other sectors that you've described, and there is the application of the expenditure control measure that we've been discussing.

Mr Jackson: So are you using the exceptional circumstances review fund as your vehicle to ensure that children's aid societies have enough additional revenues, because that vehicle you have at your disposal?

Hon Mr Silipo: That is a fund that we do have at our disposal, which I believe by this year now totals about $30 million, because there's been --

Mr Jackson: Is it possible to get the most current -- these are all moving numbers over the last three years by virtue of the initial announcement of the cutbacks and the phase-out. Could we get this year's? I checked with the children's aid society early this morning and they had not signed off their 1993 year in terms of their funding. I just don't want to put it on the record, but I'll give it to you. And they're still in negotiations with their 1994 year, which is understandable.

Hon Mr Silipo: Yes. The 1993 issue is puzzling.

Mr Jackson: The 1993 year has not been resolved. I'm not saying all of them. I only checked with one today, but they've not closed off the 1993 year in terms of not just the exceptional circumstances review, but from the regional -- the Mississauga office actually hadn't finalized that. Could we get those updated numbers for tomorrow? Because I certainly don't want to be working with numbers that show that your cuts were more severe than they really are.

Hon Mr Silipo: No. We'd be happy to. We just want to be clear on what numbers you are asking. Are you asking about the combined dollars that are now available under --

Mr Jackson: You have not phased out exceptional circumstances review funding.

Hon Mr Silipo: No, that is there.

Mr Jackson: You are not using the same formula and grant numbers that you announced two years ago when you put them on notice that you were cutting.

Hon Mr Silipo: No. We have a larger fund this year than we did last year that we use, and we also have broader criteria that we are using than we did last year and the year before. So we can provide both of those.

Mr Jackson: Could I get the various numbers about the CAS deficits and where these moneys have been applied in, say, the last two years, or what applications are in right now? Because I don't know as if you've signed off all your 1994s.

Hon Mr Silipo: We wouldn't have.

Mr Jackson: No, I didn't think so at this point.

Hon Mr Silipo: We could probably provide you, with respect to 1994, certainly those that we have signed off on, as well as perhaps the requests. I presume that's information we can share in terms of requests societies have made.

Mrs Herbert: We would have the 1993 figures and know what the ECR amounts are or plan to be. Because it's an end-of-year adjustment, we will have some, such as the example you just gave, Mr Jackson, where we're still in negotiations or we may have an appeal. It can be a lengthy process.

For 1994 we're just in the process now of gathering that information because we still have a quarter of the year left to go, so we're doing what we call preliminary projections. It looks like we have about 30 CASs who have ECRs. We can give you the preliminary projections, but we won't have final figures until after we've done our reviews at the end of -- well, it will be January or February now, because their books don't close until December 31.

Mr Jackson: CASs are on the calendar year, so it's like the school boards where there are practical problems associated with the government's fiscal year and the --

Hon Mr Silipo: Or theirs.

Mr Jackson: Well, I remember being in a room and having discussions with you in our Metro days.

Since this will represent my last opportunity for questioning today, I'd like to put on the record a series of questions with respect to social assistance. Many of these questions you've seen before, Minister, as order papers or whatever, but if I could leave those and they could be circulated to the appropriate staff and, to the extent that it's possible, get early responses and, failing that, later responses, that would be helpful.

Could I serve notice that I have an interest, if we could, in getting into speech-language support services through your ministry and the triministry review that's been going on for I think now upwards of two years. Could we have someone come forward to give us a report on that?

I had occasion to check with legislative research to find out how we were delivering these services across Canada, and we are one of only three provinces that even get involved with three different ministries. Some provinces have clearly refined this to a one-ministry delivery mechanism. I think we have to bite the bullet and make a tough decision here.

I'm seeing a large number of children in my community caught here badly. My local hospital, because of its own cuts, abandoned 130 children who were to get preschool speech-language supports. I've referred to it in my opening comments, but the fine point in all of that is that these families are in dire straits and there's no delivery.

The school board, the other part of this equation, has said, "Look, they're not our responsibility either," even though we're taking children at three to five years of age, depending upon which system you're in and whether they have junior kindergarten or whether kindergarten is being implemented without it being optional.

So, Minister, I guess what I'm saying is that once I got into this issue, as the crisis arose in my community, everybody said, "Check the other ministry." In the meantime, I'd like a report. No one can tell me who's got lead responsibility, so it would be a huge victory for understanding here if we could find out which minister is responsible for resolving this in Ontario, how frequently this committee has been meeting and what resolutions, if any, have been achieved.

It strikes me that it's a moral offence that we have millions of dollars to teach children third-language instruction in our elementary schools but we don't have moneys to help a four-year-old to speak even to the level of a two-year-old prior to their arrival in our school system. This seriously affects their ability to learn, to socialize, to function in a normal way within the community of their family and the broader community, and here we are denying these services by virtue of, "If you're rich in Ontario, you can buy the service, but if you're not, you have to be on social assistance and get into day care, and then we can provide it to you." That's how we've been doing it, and that's not an appropriate vehicle, to try to get people on welfare so their child can get access to the service.

Somehow we've got to deal with this, Minister, and I'm looking to you, as I asked the Minister of Health, who gave me a blank look. I suspect you'll give me a straight answer as soon as your staff tell you what we're doing, but I really would like to devote some more time to this, which the Chairman won't give me because my time has just come to an end.

The Acting Chair: Almost. You can have a couple of minutes' response.

Hon Mr Silipo: To do this the kind of justice that you want and we agree needs to be, perhaps if we come back to this tomorrow, we can spend a bit more time on it.

Mr Jackson: Thank you. I'll serve notice of one final item, then. I mentioned earlier that I would like to find, if I can, any discussions about the Ontario drug benefit extension to social assistance recipients. I don't wish to get into the politics of the tradeoff with senior citizens and user fees. How the government would have financed it is not the issue for the debate; I'd like to leave that aside. However, I would like to ask you, if you felt it was that important, then what are you doing about it?

Whatever happened in cabinet, to say it had to be a tradeoff with seniors, I don't want to get into that, because it's not happening. What I would like to know is, if it was so valid a policy option, why has it died? What were the costings of it? Are there any plans to consider expansion of those benefits to the working poor in any form? If there aren't, that's fine too, but I'm sure they would find their way somewhere into your estimates if there were any of those plans.

Hon Mr Silipo: We can provide you with some additional information that addresses the array of questions that you posed on that, but let me just say to you that the basic answer is that we're not proceeding with it. We're not proceeding with it essentially because of the cost.

Mr Jackson: That's the full range, like dental, optical, drug? There's the whole series of things that we were looking at. Okay, thank you very much.

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Mr Hope: First of all, some of the questions I wish to focus on -- because it was brought up in the opening remarks by the Conservative Party about the themes that were there and a reference to the federal-municipal governments in cooperation or lack of support, and I think it's important because, as I make reference to page 35 of the estimates book, which deals with unemployment insurance changes, I'm just curious about the amount that's allocated there, which is a cost that's now also going to be associated with our government. I'm just wondering what the unemployment insurance changes are. Is it some current law that's been changed by the federal government in order to impact our budget the way it has?

First of all, they're reducing the transfers, or the inadequacy of transfers to us in the first place for social assistance, but I also notice in the estimates on page 35 that there is an unemployment insurance change in dollar allotment there. I'm just wondering if there is an explanation of why that's there.

Hon Mr Silipo: I'm sure there's an explanation. I don't see this item on the page.

Mrs O'Neill: I think it's under "Changes from 1993-94."

Hon Mr Silipo: Okay, I was looking at the top. The unemployment insurance? Sorry, yes, this is one that I talked about; I should know it. We were talking about this issue earlier. I think Mrs O'Neill was commenting earlier about the increase in the social assistance budget. The unemployment insurance changes that we have here, $101 million, account for a good chunk of that increase.

Part of the changes, to the tune of I think some $60 million, if memory serves me correctly, by the federal Conservative government and further changes to the tune of an additional $40 million from the last federal budget by the federal Liberal government, combined those are, in effect, a series of steps that tighten up eligibility to unemployment insurance and result in people becoming eligible for social assistance earlier than they would otherwise be. The cost to the social assistance system in the 1994-95 fiscal year would be $101 million.

Mr Hope: Okay, the other part of the presentation which was made by the Liberal Party talked about the issue of accountability, not believing we're doing the right thing. The questions I want to focus on are the accountability in the developmental services area. I guess my understanding is, and what I would like to know is, why has the ministry undertaken a DS accountability project?

I'm listening to the debate today focus on the issue of this ministry, and I remember your statement at the beginning talked about the amount of agencies that were out there, and I hear the Conservatives talked about the agencies like the CAS blaming somebody else for them now having to be financially accountable; you know, the cash cow that's no longer there is the provincial government. I must ask, why has the ministry undertaken the DS accountability project?

Hon Mr Silipo: I think we felt for some time that we needed to have some mechanisms in the system that allowed us to measure how money was being spent and how effectively money was being spent against some clearly stated criteria for meeting a variety of needs, particularly within the disability services area, where we spend as much money as we do. We spend a lot of money in the rest of the services as well, but we started with that area because of the large amounts of money and also because of the sense that we had to be clear about a mechanism to use that measured how effective agencies were being in delivering services to people with developmental services.

So that project really has that as its key purpose, to provide us with a set of tools that we can use to say: "This is the level of service that should be provided. This is how it's being provided. How do the two things mesh?" Again, in order for it to be a useful tool, we clearly are working it out with the agencies that are involved and with the consumers. With their combined input and the people who work in the system, I think we can get to a tool that will help us to be able to measure how wisely we're spending the dollars that we are.

Mr Hope: Then what would be the status of that project?

Hon Mr Silipo: In terms of where we are at this point with that, perhaps staff could comment. One of the things that I would say, as Brian Low is coming to the table, is that we see this as being an important piece of the developmental services framework that we are now developing as the next stage of the multi-year plan, and rather than a discrete project it will become one of the three areas that will be really at the basis of the direction for developmental services in the future. I think Brian can speak in more detail about that.

Mr Brian Low: Brian Low, director of developmental services branch. The accountability project has been involved for about the last two years and has a reference group that involves service providers across the province as well as labour representatives. The work to date has focused on identifying specific client outcomes and the management criteria through which we would measure whether or not those outcomes are achieved.

Where we are right now is that we are preparing to test and pilot test in three areas of the province the different criteria that we have established. This fall we will begin pilot tests in the areas of Timmins, Lanark county and Peterborough. This will inform us as to the effectiveness of the instruments that have been devised through this reference group and will then provide us with information around expanding that service to the rest of the province and the service system.

Mr Hope: Following up on the status, my other question is, what critical elements of the DS accountability work? What are the critical elements?

Mr Low: What we're looking at are the management criteria, setting out specifically what the expectations are for the boards of directors and their responsibility within service delivery, what their obligation is in terms of service delivery. We will be looking at, as well, the individual service agreements that are established with individuals and the implementation of that process; as well, the financial governance that is included in the individual agreements that are held with each agency.

Mr Hope: My further question to that, and I'm still focusing on developmental services, is the issue of, is it the only area in the ministry where we're focusing on this type of approach for accountability? I look at the expenditures that are being presented today. There are a number of areas. This is one area where expenditures are increasing. We are continuing to transfer moneys out to the broader community, it's not all being kept in the walls of Queen's Park, contrary to what the opposition may say, but if we're being asked to be accountable here, I think there is a responsibility to be accountable there in order for us to prove just to the proper taxpayers of this community. Are we looking at further expansion of such a project to put accountability in place?

Mr Low: Certainly, we are.

Ms Proctor: In response to that, I was going to say that there's expansion, and I think there's something that can be said to that in respect to developmental services but also with respect to accountability in the other areas and the expansion beyond the development services, to think about that in the other program areas as well. Sue Herbert could speak to that point I think.

Mrs Herbert: The ministry has adopted fairly recently a broad approach to accountability. Where it's first being tested is in the developmental services area, but it's also part of the children's policy framework. So we have a fundamental approach to accountability, and then we're applying that same approach in all of our program areas, starting first with the pilots in developmental services, but it will be carried through from children's. I believe we also have one just under way -- speaking for Lucille in her policy role -- in the family violence area as well. So we're moving the same approach through all of our program areas, at a slightly different pace.

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Mr Hope: With implementing such a project as accountability, one of the issues and the elements around the social contract was not only wages but restructuring. I listened to the minister explain in his presentation today about the number of agencies we have out there and the fragmented services. The member for Bruce, Mr Elston, clearly indicated the frustration that a client has in order to obtain services in a community dealing with the children. With the innovation money that was announced, the $6.8 million, how is it going to be used, and what restrictions are there with agencies to utilize and to access the $6.8 million that you've put out, I guess as a carrot, to an approach of restructuring?

Hon Mr Silipo: What we're doing is we're using the innovation fund as a fund to help support the kind of practice changes that we've been discussing all afternoon, whether that's in the developmental services area, in the children's services area or in any of the other areas of the ministry's work.

What we are looking for is really proposals that indicate willingness and efforts that people are prepared to make, agencies are prepared to make, to work together, to step outside of their own particular boundaries and to look at how they can not just better coordinate services but in effect better plan services so that there is removal of overlap and an approach to services that places the needs of whoever the client happens to be and strips away the labels, as we were discussing earlier in the exchange with Mr Elston, from whose responsibility it is to do what, and it gets us to a point of saying, "What can we be doing, and how can we be doing it better?" Those will be really, then, models that we can use throughout the province to encourage other agencies to do likewise.

Mr Hope: We're talking about saving money, and we're talking about working more effectively. I'm just looking through the questions Mr Jackson had just tabled, and it says, "How many children under three years of age are reliant on social assistance" -- and he's got -- "since 1990?" Most of the questions that are asked, from 21 to 38, are dealing with political manipulation for an upcoming potential election. I mean, these are the type of questions that are nothing more than rhetoric in dealing with the total issue that we're in here for, dealing with the estimates issues, and we're talking about making sure that we're spending money appropriately.

I just think it's important because these were tabled without being read into the record. When I read them into the record -- and we were talking sincerely about some issues that affected people in our communities, and then I started glancing, because I thought maybe he would have some good questions that I could maybe ask for the record and the minister could possibly answer. When I start reading some of these questions, like "How many children under two years of age are reliant on social assistance (most recent month), how does this compare to September 1990?" -- well, who was elected in September 1990? So the questions that Mr Jackson has laid before this table and before the ministry staff to work on, I find it ridiculous that such questions be put forward.

However, I want to talk about some questions around social assistance in the automation project that's out there. How is the $171 million allocated to the ministry for the social assistance automation being used? I guess that is a concern and a question that a lot of people in our communities are asking, streamlining the administrative process. I would like to know, out of the moneys that are being allocated, how is it being used?

Hon Mr Silipo: Again, I'll make some general comments and ask Lynn MacDonald to provide a lot of the details; we can provide as many as you wish on this, because this is a scenario of tremendous work for the ministry.

The objective, as we discussed earlier, is to help us automate the system so that we can reduce a lot of the paperwork that goes on in the system and eliminate a lot of that and really be able to have a system that is better run, more efficient, one that is more easily adaptable than the present system. Right now, whenever we look at making a change in the system, we have to think twice and three times because we're not sure that the system is capable of processing those changes, because of its age. More importantly than that, it will mean that it will free up a lot of staff time to be able to devote to the kinds of activities that I think we need to talk about more, around JobLink, for example, in terms of encouraging people to look at and plug into a number of activities to help them reconnect to the workforce. So it's going to help us in that significant way as well.

The work we are doing will mean we will add to the piloting that's already been going on over this year in Metropolitan Toronto, as we indicated earlier, with additional expansion of that into the Brampton area and into 30 other sites across the province during this year. The objective is to have the automation fully implemented over the next three years and to take it that way a chunk at a time, but a significant chunk at a time, and to make sure that we get to the point where we have a fully automated system across the province which will allow us to do not only the things that I've described but also will allow us to connect much more readily with other parts of government and indeed other provinces, subject always, of course, to the freedom of information issues that we're also in the process of working out. Lynn MacDonald can certainly give more details around the nuts and bolts of the initiative.

Ms MacDonald: Thank you, Minister. The social assistance automation project is, I must say, one of the largest that the Ontario public service has ever undertaken. It is a project which will see the integrated automation of a single uniform information system for use by all municipalities as well as all provincial offices right across the province. It will be providing an information system to over 7,000 workers altogether in over 160 sites, so it's an exceedingly complex project. We're dealing right now, as you know, with a split delivery system, as between the province and the municipalities, and there are probably no more than 300 to 400 computers in the entire system right now, so this is a very major undertaking and one which will have extensive benefits in terms of better customer service for our clients, but also in terms of administrative savings in time and in dollars.

The $171 million will essentially do four things over the next several years. It will provide case worker technology for all workers, and that will be essentially automated case management tools for our workers across the province to use in dealing with clients, so they will no longer be running back and forth between big heaps of manuals in order to find the latest information for their clients. They can do an input of client data or an update of client data right on the spot. So that's the case worker technology component.

The second major component is to replace the brain behind the current automation system, which is affectionately known as CIMS, for comprehensive income maintenance system, and also to replace MAIN, for municipal assistance information network, which is the Metro Toronto current system. These are both old, large mainframe-type systems. We are moving to a new, more decentralized what's called client service architecture, which means if one part of the system goes down the whole province isn't affected.

The third component is to explore new technologies, which we may be able to use to fundamentally rethink some of the ways in which we deliver social assistance in future, and some of those technologies could include -- we're at a very exploratory nature at this point -- card technologies or integrated voice data systems for imaging.

The fourth and final component is to provide integrated program and financial information systems to streamline the kind of cheque production and financial assistance that we provide through the system, and also to provide a better forecasting mechanism. So those are the four large components.

In terms of the actual breakdown of dollars which, I assume, you would like, Mr Hope, the overall project management for a very large project is in the nature of $4 million. That is pretty small compared to most large information technology projects. However, it is large enough to ensure an effective change management process, recognizing the complexity of the process we're engaging in.

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There's about $35 million for application development and maintenance, about $74 million for implementation and office retrofit -- I don't think these numbers add, but we can make them add for tomorrow. Then there's a lump of money that relates to ongoing support and maintenance beyond the actual implementation of the project.

Finally, there is a large amount of money associated with the actual acquisition of hardware, software and telecommunications devices across the province and that's in the order of $60 million.

In total, I should note $171 million to put technology on the desks of workers who currently have no modernized tools at their disposal whatsoever, either municipal or provincial, and to replace a terribly outmoded large and cranky current computer system which fails us with disturbing regularity. To provide training and ongoing support and maintenance in support of a $6-billion program is, we think, a very modest investment.

Mr Hope: I was curious, and it's good that you brought it out, about the word "training." I was on the freedom of information and protection of privacy, and during that process we were talking about persons in social assistance in communities who still write the cheques by hand and still process everything by hand.

Moving up from still handwritten cheques into the computer technology age is going to be one transformation of lifestyle in a workplace. I'm hoping that we're going to be able to cope with those smaller communities that have been totally dependent on the handwriting process and handwriting accounting practices or whatever practices they do in the office to bring them up to speed with the new technology you're talking about. So it was good to hear that and I hope I heard you right. I heard you use the word "training," so I'm hoping in the allocation there is training available for those small rural communities that are still back in handwritten cheques.

Ms MacDonald: Yes, indeed. In fact, that has been one of our largest preoccupations in going through the tendering process, to acquire a vendor of record who will be responsible for, in large measure, delivering on the implementation of this project.

Our concern has been to ensure that the vendor of record really understands the sensitivity of the training needs. We're dealing with people who, as you say, may have absolutely no computer expertise, may never have seen a computer, right up the spectrum to some who may be extremely sophisticated in their own individual approaches. We have devised a strategy that addresses that full spectrum of training needs for workers onsite and offsite. We will also be providing practice time and return visits by trainers to ensure that any problems that have arisen since the initial training can be addressed, and there'll be a hotline available to workers as well.

Mr Hope: Just out of curiosity, how much time?

The Acting Chair: About seven minutes.

Mr Hope: One of the issues that's been in the forefront for a lot of people, and it can probably be answered twofold: through the new allocation of money through technology, but also the other question which has been on the minds -- and it's unfortunate that there is one political party that always seems to go out and preach about welfare fraud in our communities and talk about people on welfare making $17.50 an hour -- I would say if there was a Conservative member present, but there is one present, so I must indicate that.

I need to ask the ministry: Through the new technology and also currently, what have you done to cut down on fraud to its minute existence in our communities? It is there; we know it is there. How do we cut it down so it's obsolete in our communities? I just want to know what we have done to cut down on fraud in the social assistance system, because it was something that was also indicated in the auditor's report a number of years back and we had to deal with the whole issue of fraud. I'm just wondering what has been done today and what the future is. Does your new technology that we're spending $171 million on deal with the issue also?

Ms MacDonald: I'll yield to my colleague Kevin Costante on the larger issue of fraud and fraud investigation.

In terms of the new technologies that we will be developing and implementing, certainly within the technology there is the capacity to do a better verification, a better matching of data right across the province, and remembering also between the general welfare assistance system and the family benefits allowance system. So part of the intent is to ensure that we have the capacity to do a much better, faster verification, a much better assessment of risk profiles and a much swifter follow-up than we've been able to do in the past.

But I must stress that we are introducing this project not solely from the point of view of fighting fraud but very largely driven by the desire to improve customer service and to improve the working life of our social assistance workers which, with their rapidly rising case loads, has become exceedingly difficult.

Mr Costante: Minister, do you want me to --

Mr Hope: She's deferring part of the question.

Mr Costante: Kevin Costante, assistant deputy minister of social assistance and employment opportunities. In terms of dealing with the issue of fraud, the ministry, over the last two or three years, has introduced a number of new measures. First of all I think most recently of the minister's announcement, in March, of the case file investigation process where, over the next two years, both in the FBA and the GWA programs, we will be reviewing all the files to make sure that people who are truly in need are getting the benefits they deserve and that those who may not meet the qualifications are found out.

To assist in that process, we have provided our workers, both in FBA and GWA, with more stringent guidelines in terms of the eligibility rules and the proofs that we require to make sure that people are indeed eligible.

Again, I think in support of our overall direction on fraud, the ministry has significantly increased the number of eligibility review officers we have in the system who deal with specific instances where there's a suspicion of fraud. They go about an investigation, and if there is sufficient proof developed, they then turn those over to police to deal with through their processes in the courts.

I think another major element of the case file investigation process is, we have provided municipalities with funding to undertake similar investigations and increase their ability to seek out evidence of abuse. We've also introduced other things that will help cut down on fraud, such as direct banking, where people cannot claim to have lost a cheque and then get a cheque replacement. So things like that have occurred also.

In support of all of these efforts, we've also brought in an eligibility review database which will allow us to start tracking some of the cases that are going on here, the number of complaints and referrals and that sort of thing. That's kind of a brief overview of what's been going on.

Mr Hope: One of the other questions that has been brought up, and I guess not so much from the larger centres but from the smaller centres, smaller municipalities, is again still focusing around social assistance. Even on the freedom of information and protection of privacy, the question was brought up about councillors.

I remember this councillor coming into the committee like a full-blown report and had done everything and knew everything about everybody on welfare. It just kind of upset a lot of us. I guess my question would be, do you propose to stop municipal councillors from obtaining general welfare assistance clients' lists? That is an important thing for the protection of a lot privacy of individuals. I mean, the horror stories that were out there.

Before you answer the question, through that committee we heard horror stories of a person going to buy a chocolate bar and one of the councillors happened to know the individual was on social assistance and started saying: "Well, you shouldn't be buying that. You should be buying something else" -- the infringement on an individual's life.

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Does the ministry propose to deal with this issue of making sure that general welfare assistance lists are not accessible to the councillors and people, elected officials of a municipality, to invoke their rights and privileges on an individual who happens to be in an uncertain circumstance of collecting social assistance?

The Acting Chair: If we could have a speedy response to that.

Hon Mr Silipo: I'll try, Mr Chair. We've taken some very clear positions on this to indicate that we don't think it's appropriate for councillors to have access to those lists. Certainly, in the case that we're probably all relatively familiar with, the issue of Lambton county, we've taken steps to enforce that position, even going to the point of saying that we would withhold, as we did in that case for a period of time, the transfer of funds until and unless that situation was rectified. That particular one was.

What I think we've learned that we need to do from that experience, just so that there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind about our intentions, our positions or the requirements of the laws and regulations of the province, we are going to be proceeding with some regulatory changes which will make it really clear, even more clear than we believe it already is, that there is to be absolutely no provision of these lists to councillors or other elected officials at any point in the process. The only people who are entitled to have access to the lists are those people who work in the system and need to have access to them for the purposes of providing service to people.

The Acting Chair: Thank you very much. Now we're back to the Liberal Party.

Mr Wiseman: Excuse me, Mr Chairman. With Mrs O'Neill's indulgence, if possible, could I have a follow-up to that?

The Acting Chair: Your time has expired. Could I put you down as the first questioner in the next time allotment? How's that? Mrs O'Neill.

Mrs O'Neill: I'll begin by saying to the minister that I really was very pleased to see the way he got personally involved in the instance he's just brought forward. It was a very difficult situation. The media got very involved and many people in the community did. It did take leadership and you showed it. We need to educate the public a little more about the rights of individuals who happen to be in difficult circumstances and I don't think we've done that broadly enough to this point.

I'm going to go now, in my logical way, to page 27, if I may. If I read your remarks over again, and listened to them this morning, Mr Minister, you seem to suggest that developmental services are a high priority with you, that they have taken a large portion of your budget and that you have been almost personally involved in the policy directions of the ministry there. But if I look at page 27, I see that we spent heavily in the actuals of 1993-94, more so than we had estimated we would, and now we're going back lower than the estimates of 1993-94.

I'm just wondering what programs have had to go, because I have never seen evidence, in my experience, that community programs are cheaper than facility programs. In fact, certainly in the transitional phase they seem to be more expensive. I just wonder what those general figures on page 27 are indicating.

Hon Mr Silipo: We can get into more detail if you wish, but overall the reduction has to do with the social contract targets that are there. As I say, we can go through each of the specific numbers if you wish us to.

Mrs O'Neill: Since it's a fair amount of money, in the tens of thousands of dollars, I would like to have a little more specifics. If we're going to know that you have taken developmental services as a priority, I think it should somehow be proven to us through these estimates, and this estimate seems to contradict that statement.

Hon Mr Silipo: Do you want us to that? I think we can do that now if you wish.

Mrs O'Neill: Oh, have you got it now? Well, if you have it now, or I can have it in the morning.

Hon Mr Silipo: Is it easier to come back to it?

Ms Proctor: No, it's fine today.

Hon Mr Silipo: We can do that now. Let's have that now, then.

Ms Proctor: We can speak to the breakdown in transfer payments and the difference there.

Mrs O'Neill: All right. Is it all social contract?

Mr David Cope: This is David Cope, the manager of estimates and allocations. The social contract applies to the direct operating part of the ministry and that is not part of the number that you were looking at. You were looking at transfer payments on page 27. Social contract applies to the direct operating portion, which is at the top of that page, not the developmental services.

The spending in 1993-94, you're worried about why that's going up and then going down. Well, there are transfers that happened within here. The actual extra spending was payments made under the down payment for proxy pay equity program. That's why the extra spending in 1993-94 over the estimates. Then the change, moving downward, is a reflection of the direction the minister spoke of, to move from facility delivery programs into the community, and we're in fact completing the MYP, the multi-year plan program by converting direct operating money into transfer payments.

Mrs O'Neill: So you are actually projecting that that's going to be a saving. You're suggesting that the moneys are going down because you're moving into community. I guess that isn't the way my mail reads because my mail is suggesting that when you move into community, you have the support systems or you don't have the support systems, and we are phasing out certain of the developmentally handicapped facilities.

Mr Cope: Can I add to that? The fact is that what you don't have reflected in the estimates for 1994-95 is the pay equity payment that will have to be made in-year again. It hasn't been built into our estimates, so what you'll find probably, if you were at this table next year looking at next year's book, there'd be another $20 million or $30 million in pay equity payments that would come on top of that, which doesn't allow you to see the delivery of the program when you compare estimates to last year's actuals. It looks like a drop when in fact you're going to have to add numbers on.

Mrs O'Neill: All right. I guess it's more important to go into the body of this then to get to the real figures that I'm interested in. I had some trouble at the bottom of page 29, changes from 1993-94, when I compared the social assistance reform project there and then, if I go to page 35 in the same category, changes from 1993-94, social assistance reform is $40 million on one page and $3 million on the other page.

Can you tell me what the difference is in those two figures and what they include? One looks much more specific than the other. I thought the social assistance reform project was mainly, as I said earlier this morning, JobLink. What are these large amounts of money on page 29 and 35 paying for under social assistance reform?

Mr Cope: The numbers on page 29, which is under the program administration activity, are for the staffing and the delivery group that was put in place to look after social assistance reform in the social assistance and employment opportunities division. That's what this activity is.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay. Will we be able, in writing, to find out exactly what that social assistance reform is, because as we've said earlier this morning, JobLink is there. I think we all understand that quite well, and it's had a lot of profile. But the rest of the project, some of it I know is only in the negotiation stage with the federal government. Where is that project? It's a very high interest project, and it's had so many documents worked on and people are waiting to see what's going to happen to some of those recommendations. I think we need more specifics on that.

Hon Mr Silipo: We had actually indicated, as you may recall, Mrs O'Neill, some time ago, certainly a few months ago if not earlier, we had outlined in a public letter the specific pieces that we were and are proceeding on beyond JobLink. Those remain the initiatives that we are doing. We can list them again for you if you wish.

Mrs O'Neill: It might be helpful. We do get a fair amount of stuff around here. What about the $40 million on page 35?

Hon Mr Silipo: That in effect would be the cost estimate that had been put into the ministry's budget for those initiatives that I've just described, as well as the technology: $30 million of that I believe is around the technology, and that needs to be further explained.

Mrs O'Neill: The technology then --

Hon Mr Silipo: The case worker technology that we've been discussing earlier this afternoon.

Mrs O'Neill: Yes, but if you look up a little further in the changes from 1993-94, you've got case file investigation. Is that another extension --

Hon Mr Silipo: That's separate from the technology piece.

Mrs O'Neill: That was your announcement regarding, as you called it earlier, "irregularities."

Hon Mr Silipo: Yes.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay. Just to refresh us, can you give us one or two of the social assistance things that you're actually doing there?

Hon Mr Silipo: Yes. One of the things that we are doing is looking at how we can be better marketing the STEP program and the things we need to do there. Another is to look at putting into the system a clear statement of principles and rights and responsibilities for both clients and workers.

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Mrs O'Neill: So this would be part of the student assistance?

Hon Mr Silipo: Exactly.

Mrs O'Neill: Okay. But you will provide that again, what you're actually doing.

Hon Mr Silipo: We can give you a complete list, yes.

Mrs O'Neill: And $30 million of the $40 million is actually for technology?

Hon Mr Silipo: That's right.

Mrs O'Neill: So those are really break-outs of the figures that we've just been given? Is that correct? Okay.

I have some trouble with the pay equity down payment on proxy being listed on page 29 as zero and zero, then further on pages 53 and 67 -- now this obviously is an accounting mechanism, but I'm just wondering why you're doing it this way, and then you're telling me that you haven't really got some of those folded in even to the figures of the estimates.

What are we doing here? Pages 53 and 67 have relatively large amounts for the pay equity and then nothing on this more general statement. Does this mean that no one in this area qualifies?

Mr Cope: Under that program, program administration, that's not delivery of transfer payments. That payment for pay equity down payment on proxy is for transfer payment organizations. Under this activity program administration, we don't fund that kind of thing there.

Mrs O'Neill: I just wanted to check that. If I may go back to page 35 -- most of my questions are going to be down here on the changes -- social assistance workload, $347 million. What is that including?

Ms Proctor: The social assistance workload number essentially refers to the additional cases coming into the system and adjustments based on the forecast for 1994-95. I think in terms of that process and the forecast, Kevin Costante can speak more to the adjustments that we make with respect to new cases.

Mrs O'Neill: You are suggesting that the eligibility review officers are in there too?

Hon Mr Silipo: No. I think these are just the case load forecasts.

Mrs O'Neill: That doesn't really fit the trends that we are into now. I think that some places you were projecting 4%, 3% and then the worst-case scenario was 7% increase in social assistance in different categories. Why would you need that kind of money to front-end-load?

Hon Mr Silipo: This is a question that I can understand being there, because I could tell you that, again, I've asked this as well just in terms of my understanding of the numbers. It is in part because we're looking at estimates-to-estimates comparison. But there is a better and more detailed answer that Kevin can give on that.

Mr Costante: Kevin Costante, ADM, social assistance. Essentially what is embedded in there is the cost of allowances and benefits for individuals. The key element here is that year over year there has been an increase in the number of people on FBA and GWA. If I can read into the record and what those numbers are, near final numbers for 1993-94 is a case load figure of 668,936 and our forecast for the coming year is 688,151. This is the average monthly case load for the years, so what has happened essentially is the case load in social assistance peaked in March 1994 and has been coming down steadily since then. If you had taken last year's numbers, and I think I have them here --

Mrs O'Neill: So this is more a budget figure that may improve year-end?

Mr Costante: It may improve year-end. As we go into the fall particularly and see what happens with the case loads, we could be seeing some improvement based on the forecast.

Mrs O'Neill: If I just may go back then to another intervention that you made regarding reviewing all the files, I have a lot of difficulty with that project, because I think it's impossible and I don't think we should be uttering what we think is impossible. The change in case loads and the way people come in and out of the system, I find that that project in my mind is unrealistic.

I really think there must be, especially with the front-line workers, a knowledge of the people who are in some jeopardy for a longer period of time, and particularly with the FBA. I wonder if you have any strategies you're using, because I really don't think we will ever review every single file. Maybe you can convince me, but I don't think so.

Hon Mr Silipo: We intend to do it, and in order to do that, we've had to look obviously, as you point out, at the practicalities of doing that. We've set a two-year target for ourselves in which to accomplish that. We've obviously prioritized where we need to start and what we can leave to later times.

Again, Kevin can talk a little bit more about that and how that also meshes in with some of the other initiatives that we cluster under "enhanced verification," which really is a set of tools that we are using or a set of criteria that we are using as we are opening up new files. So we're trying to deal with the problem on that end as well.

Mr Costante: We have essentially two techniques that we intend to use as we review the files. Many municipal ities in dealing with their social assistance case load already had systems in place where they would review cases that had been on their case load more than six months in some cases, and they were doing that anyway. We're simply encouraging those types of practices across the entire system. A lot of what we're talking about here is making sure there's a certain minimum standard of review. A lot of them already meet or exceed that standard and those who don't we'll of course be encouraging to meet them.

In terms of the FBA system, because it's sole-support parents largely and people who are disabled, they tend to be on the case load for a longer period of time. We wanted to make sure in our own provincially run system that they are indeed reviewed at least every two years, because people's circumstances change. With the rapid run-up in the case loads in the early 1990s, we weren't able to meet that standard often. So that is part of it.

Our second main strategy in order to assist people, and we've got a lot of positive feedback both from municipalities and our own staff on this, is that we have identified, with the help of auditors and what we've heard from other jurisdictions, what we have called a priority verification index, ie, a high-risk index.

We've told our workers to concentrate and we've actually given them printouts of cases to look at, where there are missing social insurance numbers, where there are two or more cases with the same phone number, where they have a very high income, where they have had five or more address changes in a year, where there are dependent children 16 years of age and over.

We know from experience that those tend to be the cases where there is abuse or misreporting, so we've provided that to our workers in order to concentrate in the first instance on the cases where we think the most opportunity is to find savings and to make sure that people are getting only what they deserve.

The Acting Chair: The hour being 5 o'clock, I think this would be an appropriate time to break. I've been asked to inform everyone here that total time today consumed is four hours and 43 minutes. That leaves four hours and 17 minutes tomorrow. That will be in room 151 tomorrow, not here.

Mrs O'Neill: How many minutes do I have in this round?

The Acting Chair: You have about 12 minutes left, and the total time tomorrow is four hours and 17 minutes.

Mr Hope: Will you be able to go into half-hour modules tomorrow?

The Acting Chair: I won't be here, so how you do it is up to you.

Mr Hope: That's okay with you.

The Acting Chair: It's okay whatever you do.

The committee adjourned at 1659.