Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

The House resumed at 8 o’clock p.m.

ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF HOUSING (CONTINUED)

Mr. Chairman: Before we continue with the estimates of the Minister of Housing, the hon. member for Hamilton East would like to introduce his guests.

Mr. R. Gisborn (Hamilton East): I would like the House, those who are here to start off the proceedings on these estimates, to join with me in welcoming a large group of steelworkers from Hamilton and their wives -- and some steelworker wives and their husbands -- in the Speaker’s gallery; and to inform them that we are now dealing with, I believe, the estimates of the Ministry of Housing.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chairman: Will the hon. minister continue with his statement?

Hon. D. R. Irvine (Minister of Housing): Mr. Chairman, when we adjourned at 6 o’clock, I was stating that it is our expectation that the demand next year will be in the order of some 100,000 units.

Mr. P. D. Lawlor (Lakeshore): Well try to make it a little more convincing at this time.

Hon. E. A. Winkler (Chairman, Management Board of Cabinet): Impossible.

Mr. I. Deans (Wentworth): We will talk about that.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: In short, Mr. Chairman, if left on its own to respond to marketing conditions, the housing sector would in all probability next year be 15,000 to 20,000 units short of market demand. Should that be allowed to happen, the inflationary spiral that plagued land and housing markets this past spring would undoubtedly be reactivated. The totally unacceptable result would be to push already high house prices even further beyond the reach of low and moderate income earners.

Mr. Chairman, my ministry and this government are determined not to let this happen.

The programmes and levels of funding that I have explained here today, will directly influence production of 31,100 units in the fiscal year 1974-1975, and substantially more than that in fiscal 1975-1976.

Mr. Lawlor: You have already let it happen, what are you talking about?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The member for Lakeshore must remember that we are doing substantially more than he expected.

Mr. Deans: That is not in the text.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I understand why the member for Lakeshore has some interruptions. But in any event, I quite appreciate that.

Mr. Lawlor: You are the guy who has been responsible for all the problems. Do you mean you are not going to let it happen?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I remind all of the hon. members, Mr. Chairman, that many thousands of these units would not have been started if our ministry had not launched the programmes that it now has in place.

Mr. Deans: Balderdash, that is nonsense.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: With the introduction last month of our accelerated family rental programme, with its new concept of condominiums on leasehold land, and the greatly expanded federal-provincial family housing programme, we now have a full range of positive programmes in place. They cover all aspects of the housing sector and they focus particularly on meeting the housing needs of low and moderate income earners.

In the months immediately ahead, Mr. Chairman, we’ll concentrate on three areas --

Mr. Lawlor: In the years ahead; in the decades ahead.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, our main efforts will be in three areas: one, further emphasis on OHAP; two, sharply increasing the supply of socially-assisted family rental units; three, broadening our programmes of integrating such units as widely as possible throughout the community at large.

Now, Mr. Chairman, and to the hon. members, the full impact of those programmes will be felt in 1975 and beyond when their results will be most needed.

Mr. Deans: That is after we take over the government.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We will continue to monitor all housing needs closely. If further initiatives are needed we will launch them also.

Adequate housing at affordable prices is a basic right of all the residents of Ontario. Let me conclude by saying at this time, Mr. Chairman, that this government is committed to that right and we are going to fulfil that right. The empty words that come across day by day from the opposition will do nothing to hinder us to fulfil the basic right of providing housing for all the people of Ontario.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for St. George.

Mr. Lawlor: Oh, brave new world, and everybody in it is Pygmalion.

Mrs. M. Campbell (St. George): Mr. Chairman, we have heard a long and carefully prepared statement from the minister. And I would say that, really, for sheer fudging --

Mr. Deans: A bit inaccurate.

Mr. Lawlor: Fudging, that is a good word.

Mrs. Campbell: -- of the situation I do have to congratulate him, because that is precisely what it was.

Before I start to get into actual facts on OHAP, for instance, I do want to say a word about that organization which is known as Ontario Housing Corp. For a long time, this party has been endeavouring to get information about the operation of OHC. We want to see the minutes, we want to see the records; and so far this has been entirely denied, not only to us but to the people of the Province of Ontario. Therefore, at this point I must say on behalf of the Liberals that we demand that there be a public inquiry into the affairs of Ontario Housing Corp.

There is no doubt from the information reaching us that over the years the affairs of this corporation were carried on against a background of gift-giving and socializing with those involved in doing business with the corporation. Those matters which are currently before the courts, of course, I shall not deal with, but I would say this, that this sort of thing cannot go on, on even the alleged scale, unless there has been a wholesale sort of dealing in this area.

We also want to have the facts about the land assemblies and the conditions under which they have taken place, and you heard my colleague this afternoon address a question on the Saltfleet situation.

Mr. Deans: I asked that eight years ago, or seven years ago.

Mrs. Campbell: I am sorry, I wasn’t here eight years ago.

Mr. Deans: He has been reading my old stuff.

Mrs. Campbell: If I haven’t given the hon. member sufficient kudos for that question, I do so now.

Mr. Deans: I always wondered where he got his questions. He reads old Hansards.

Mrs. Campbell: I wasn’t here eight years ago; I was here this afternoon.

Mr. Lawlor: A typical answer.

Mr. Chairman: Order please, the hon. member for St. George has the floor.

Mrs. Campbell: This is the kind of thing which has caused the confidence of the people of this province to be seriously reduced, if I may put it that way, in both the government and in that corporation, and the only measure that can be taken is to have a complete look at that corporation and its functioning. I for one wonder, now that we have a Ministry of Housing, why we also need an Ontario Housing Corp., which really constitutes a buffer between the government and the people of this province, a buffer that they do not need to have, surely, in an area of the importance of housing. So much for Ontario Housing Corp. and its policies at this point.

I want now to look at the statements which have been made on the question of OHAP and what, in fact, appear to be the true facts of the situation. In May, the Minister of Housing brought forward his long anticipated housing report. His report stated, and I quote: “It is estimated that the Ontario Housing Action Programme will directly influence the production of 12,000 dwelling units in 1974, which otherwise might be built in 1975 or later, and upwards of 28,000 such units in 1975.” If I may pause, there is the first hedging to which I have made reference, because now we overlook the fact that we were talking about 1974 and we were talking about 1975, and were not talking about the fiscal year at that point.

Mr. Deans: That’s right; absolutely.

Mrs. Campbell: I continue with the quote: “This does not include dwellings made available to the Home-Ownership-Made-Easy programme through OHAP.” And so, Mr. Chairman, through you to minister, we were to get 12,000 units under OHAP in 1974, and, in addition, HOME units.

In October, the minister again reported this to this House on OHAP. The dimension of that programme had shrunk considerably, from 12,000 units to 3,033 units, or about one-quarter of what was promised.

This dismal performance is the clearest indication yet of the government’s total bankruptcy in the housing policy area. How long do you think you can get away with fooling the people of this province?

We took a close look at the purported 3,033 units under OHAP; and Mr. Minister, I am very disturbed about what we found. The bulk of the 3,033 units referred to by the minister in October were already on stream, some completed and others almost completed; I give you, for example, units in Brampton and in North York. In no way do they represent a net gain in housing units. These units were refinanced under OHAP to a slightly lower interest rate, and that is apparently all.

One developer was honest enough to say he went into this arrangement with hope for the future; that is that his future proposals might be processed more quickly at Queen’s Park. Now this, Mr. Chairman, is really almost a threat -- an indirect threat, but a threat nonetheless -- that has been used by this government. The programme as enunciated is both misleading and inaccurate.

There were 421 units in Brampton which were almost all completed. The building permit was issued last year. These were refinanced under OHAP. In North York, 699 units were all but complete; some of those already renting were refinanced under OHAP. They should not have been included in the minister’s mythical 3,033 units.

A further 200 units in Brampton included by the minister will not be started in December; the servicing is not complete, according to our information. In Markham, the story is the same; 550 units, the land is not serviced, the water mains are not in and the subdivision has not been approved. These units are included in the minister’s statement.

When we tried to determine the number of HOME units under this programme -- and you will recall, Mr. Chairman, that the minister promised us at least 10 per cent -- we could not find them. Approximately 30 units will be built in Scarborough and about 130 in Ottawa.

Where are the rest, I ask of the minister?

Mr. C. J. S. Apps (Kingston and the Islands): Four hundred and twenty-five in Kingston.

Mrs. Campbell: The 699 units in North York do not include HOME units, nor do the 421 in Brampton. In Oshawa, none of the OHAP units are under the HOME programme.

On the basis of this evidence, Mr. Chairman, I am forced to conclude that the programme, as enunciated, is clearly fraudulent.

I would ask that an accurate accounting of this programme be given to this House. The minister -- and one can certainly sympathize with the minister -- by his behaviour suggests that he has been desperate for starts and, therefore, anything goes.

OHAP is, in fact, NOHAP, and this is most especially true for families whose income is under $14,500 per annum. The minister knows as well as I do that about 70 per cent of the families of this province have incomes under $15,000. These are 1972 figures -- the latest we have at this time. But the situation has not changed substantially. It is clear that OHAP is useless for the majority -- and I emphasize the majority -- of this province’s families. It is clearly designed to look after the housing needs of the top 40 per cent.

Mr. Chairman, we are all tired of double-talk and double accounting. We need, and my party has repeatedly called for, a massive land-servicing programme.

I note again in today’s statement that the whole fault of the lack of housing now lies with the municipal governments of this province, these dreadful people who have their built-in biases, who don’t want to have any form of assisted housing in their municipalities. But never do we see this government meeting with the municipalities to come to grips with the actual costs of housing to municipalities. As a matter of fact, we know of the pressures this government has been bringing to bear on municipalities. They have been almost intolerable.

One of the interesting things you may not know, Mr. Minister, is that they are saying to us: “The wording of the assistance to us is ‘up to $600 per unit’, but nobody says we will get even $600 per unit.” To municipalities, with all of the increased costs which they have had to take on, $600 is not regarded, by any with which we have been in contact, as being reasonable or sensible to give them the kinds of incentives you complain they lack.

We would ask this government, if it really believes that it is concerned about housing the people of this province, and in these beautiful phrases that “adequate housing at affordable prices is a basic right of all residents of Ontario”; then I suggest, Mr. Chairman, the ministry must look at the costs to the municipalities and be prepared to give them that assistance. It has to be an ongoing assistance, because servicing of land is just the beginning. Growing from that are all sorts of community costs which the municipalities have to bear virtually alone, particularly in the metropolitan area of Toronto.

Almost a quarter of Ontario’s families in 1972 had incomes of under $8,000 per annum. What do you really propose to do for them? The growing burden of steeply-increasing rents is denying hundreds of children adequate nutrition and adequate clothing by any standards. We are all aware, or I hope we are all aware, of the long-term debilitating effect of insufficient protein and vitamins in the diet. But something has to go. They either have to pay their money for housing or for food; they don’t seem to have a choice of having both.

This is the situation we are facing today. In what the minister said in his speech, I could just hear the great statements which rolled from the lips of a gentleman by the name of Stanley Randall when he had something to do with housing. He came out with a statement as to just how much Ontario Housing Corp. had done in providing new housing. In fact, the situation at that point in time was that a great leap forward was possible only because the city of Toronto, much to my regret, went out of the housing business and turned over established units to Ontario Housing Corp. We were supposed to believe that this was a great new thrust in the development of housing. Most of those units had been around for a long time.

Then, Mr. Chairman, I think I made reference earlier to a conference which I attended recently when the subject of housing for the elderly was the matter before the House. If the minister is aware of reports, particularly “Beyond Shelter,” he has to be aware of the fact that this province is quite low on the list of provinces in this country in bringing to the senior citizens the kinds of services they need where they live. Other provinces, not so wealthy, seem to have a much deeper concern for the total person. We seem to believe that if we get people into a housing unit, that is basically the end of our responsibility. I would just like to point out that this is not something to which this minister can point with pride.

As a final matter, I would like to discuss the present state of the tenants living in the Province of Ontario. As the minister knows, the New Democratic Party introduced a private member’s bill and I introduced a private member’s bill. I at least have recognized, as no one on the government side seems to have done, that rents have become a desperate problem, according to my information, throughout most of the province, but certainly in the Metropolitan Toronto area.

There is no doubt in my mind -- and I want to repeat the statement I made a week or so ago for clarification -- that the programme and policies enunciated by the Tories in the last federal campaign gave warning to a great many people that perhaps they might get elected, and if they got elected there would be controls. If you look at the rise in inflation over that particular period, I think it is quite clear that at least the developers, who nobody has ever called stupid, decided that if they were to be faced with rent control they were going to have it at the highest range they could get. So there is something owing to the people of this province by this government in assisting them with this present crisis situation.

Of course, the other side of that coin is the fear and the anxiety of people in that they no longer have security of tenure where they live. In this area there are many landlords who will not give leases at all, and there are some who will only permit six-month leases. Surely if you haven’t the courage to do anything else you could face the responsibility to ensure tenants some security.

May I say that because of these escalated rents there is no doubt in my mind there is a tremendous doubling up in the big buildings which is affecting the service and the maintenance of the buildings. It is not entirely the fault of the developers or the landlords, but certainly as these rents go up, the quality of maintenance goes down. And of course in Metropolitan Toronto they really do have that added bonus of the cockroach infestation, which makes it a little difficult for tenants to accept the requirement of this greatly increased rental situation.

It would seem to me the time has come for this government to take a degree of responsibility in amending the Landlord and Tenant Act in accordance with a bill which I brought forward. But again, we are waiting.

I note in this great statement: “The full impact of those programmes will be felt in 1975 and beyond when their results will be most needed.” Well I suppose in a sense that is true because at the rate we are going you probably will have people without housing at all.

Then we talk about greatly increased progress in OHAP. Mr. Chairman, I, for one, am tired of the pretty speeches. I’ve heard them for a long time. I would like now to see the starts that the ministers in seriatim have brought forward. I would like to know whether this minister means a housing start when he talks about the figures, or does he simply mean that we are looking forward to entering some agreements? A start, to me, is when you get the shovel into the ground, or whatever you now put into the ground to start a housing project.

In short, Mr. Chairman, this statement and all of the statements which we have received are really an indictment and not something of which the minister or his government should be so greatly proud. Thank you.

Mr. Deans: Mr. Chairman, I have two or three remarks I want to make about the so-called housing programme of the government of Ontario. I’m interested in the last full sentence of the minister’s statement in which he says: “Adequate housing at affordable prices is a basic right of all residents of Ontario.”

He underlines “is.” It might be useful if he had underlined it all and had read it, not only for his own benefit but to his cabinet colleagues, because the problems we have in the Province of Ontario today are the result of the inadequate programmes of the government of Ontario over the last seven to 10 years.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Deans: Thank you. I’m pleased you don’t agree, because that shows how much you have been paying attention to what has been happening.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please.

Mr. Deans: Let me remind you of the statements of Stanley Randall when he was responsible for housing, and you should well remember that.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Deans: Seven years ago Stanley Randall, in answer to a question, pointed out to me the reason you didn’t put the land you held into housing at that time was that you didn’t want to go into competition with the private developers. It wasn’t your job to compete with the private developers. Your job was simply to provide an additional market to the private developers. You weren’t about to undercut their prices, because the fact of the matter was you were hand-in-glove with the private developers at that time and you still are.

It isn’t possible to meet the housing needs of the Province of Ontario with this kind of ad hoc programme. It isn’t possible to meet the housing needs of the Province of Ontario if all you are going to do is take the existing inadequate housing programmes of the private developers and try to shore them up with more money, less red tape and a few additional houses. And that’s all that is occurring in the Province of Ontario. Even to this day you rely substantially on the private developer to provide housing for the people of the province.

In addition, you don’t compete with them in price; and that’s what I want to discuss at some length. There is literally no competition between the Ontario government and the private developer, though the government should have been able, by virtue of the land that it held, to enter into strict and tough competition with the private developers in the housing market. It should have been possible, given the price paid --

Hon. G. A. Kerr (Solicitor General): Do they pay the same taxes?

Mr. Deans: I’ll talk to you later. You have to swim in the bay shortly.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: No; but do they pay the same taxes, the same encumbrances, the same overhead as a private developer?

Mr. Deans: I’ll tell you about that in a minute, if you’ll just listen. I am coming to it; I am glad you interjected. It shows now little you’ve listened in seven years.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Nobody else is going to build houses but the combination.

Mr. Deans: Much of the land that the Ontario government owned, at least in the Hamilton area, had been owned for 10, 15 and 20 years, and a lot of it had been bought at the ridiculously low price of $50 an acre, which was considerably below what was being paid by the private developers for the same land adjacent to the land owned by Ontario Housing Corp. Yet when the Ontario Housing Corp. put its home ownership land on sale, and when it put the houses on the home ownership land, the prices that were charged, whether by way of rental of land or by way of direct sale, were the same as the prices charged by the private developer.

Mr. J. E. Stokes (Thunder Bay): Are you saying the government was speculating?

Hon. Mr. Kerr: He wants the government to build houses.

Mr. Deans: When I asked Stanley Randall, the minister in those days, why it was that he didn’t use that land as a lever against what were becoming obviously inflationary pressures in the housing field, the answer he gave me was the answer I just quoted to my colleague from Windsor, who obviously must have forgotten about it.

The truth of the matter is that this government was speculating in the land in the same way the private developers were and was assisting in the upward pressure on the prices. In fact, it has to share a major responsibility for the upward spiral in housing costs right across the province.

This government has never recognized housing as a basic need. This government has never recognized its role in trying to provide housing for people at a price they can afford. This government has never recognized that even to this very day much if not all of the housing programme of the government is geared to the middle-income group, and that little if any of the housing programme is geared to enable those in the lower-income groups to purchase a house.

In 1964 I bought a house on Hamilton Mountain. That house cost me $14,880, including the land. It had a 6 1/2 per cent mortgage. I got gypped at the last moment; it should only have been 6 1/4 per cent, but it was 6 1/2 per cent.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: When did you build the pool?

Mr. Deans: And let me tell you something: Between then and now that house has gone up in “value” to something in the order of $45,000 to $50,000. That is ridiculous. No working person in the Province of Ontario can afford to pay out of their income the amount required to carry a house of that price in today’s society. Or if these people do as they have to do, and place far more of their disposable income into shelter and accommodation than they can afford, it means that the remainder of the economy, out of necessity, is going to suffer as a result of that income being tied up.

I don’t know whether you have really given any thought to what it costs -- well, quite obviously you have given thought to what it costs to carry a house in the Province of Ontario and the kinds of incomes people need in order to buy that. If you want to take a look at something around the average -- we’ll say that the average working person might make $12,000 a year; that’s a pretty high average by the way, but we’ll allow that that would be the average for the purpose of this discussion. For principal, interest and taxes, that person would have to pay out well in excess of $450 a month just to carry that house at today’s exorbitant interest rates and at today’s exorbitant prices.

The problem really lies in the fact that this government has never appreciated the need to move into the housing field and to build houses itself. It doesn’t matter who builds the house, because the same man would be working as would be working if it were a private builder. This government has an obligation to provide houses and to amortize the mortgages over much longer periods of time, if need be, in order to ensure that the income group at $12,000 and below is able to do what the average income group was able to do back in 1964, and that is to be able to purchase homes of their own.

There is no reason at all in the Province of Ontario why a person shouldn’t be able to buy a home, and there’s no reason at all why the private developer should have ripped off the public to the extent that he has, but the major responsibility for what has occurred in the province rests four-square in the lap of this government -- no other government.

It may well be argued that the federal government took actions which allowed for floating interest rates -- and we will talk about that in a moment -- but the truth of the matter is that if this government had paid heed to what was happening in land prices in the early part of the 1960s and the middle part of the 1960s, and if it had taken the bull by the horns when it was indicated that there were going to be spiralling land costs, the government could have quite easily put a stop to the increased costs of land and could have had a much greater hold and a much greater impact on meeting the housing needs of the people of the Province of Ontario.

You talk quite a lot about your housing programme and how it’s going to develop more and more homes. Let me just read to you some of the statistics of this year, just to try to get into perspective what it is that’s really happening in the province.

Housing starts are probably the most misleading general indicators of housing conditions available. They also happen to be the only ones that are really available. Over the last five years, starting in the year 1969, in urban areas with a 10,000 or more population: in 1969 there were 69,365 housing starts; in 1970, 66,497; in 1971, 78,476; in 1972, 91,114; and in 1973, 92,211.

In order that we could judge the actions of this government this year and the kind of impact that the entire housing sector is having, we have got to try to take a look at what occurred between the months of January and August in these years. In January to August, 1970, there were 34,289 housing starts; in January to August, 1971, there were 47,619 housing starts; in January to August, 1972, there were 58,146 housing starts; in January to August, 1973, there were 60,038, and in January to August of 1974, the current year, 53,011 housing starts.

The figures for urban areas, and the only recent ones that are available for Ontario, show starts to the end of August running 11 per cent below the corresponding figure for 1973 and 8.8 per cent below 1972. The January-to-August experience would suggest that the annual starts are running midway between 1972 and 1971 rates, about 95,000 in total, but urban starts for all of Canada in September were 34 per cent below September, 1973, indicating that the situation is worsening across the country and is worsening equally in the Province of Ontario. At this stage, it would seem a fair figure to think that we might get a total of 90,000 housing starts in the Province of Ontario in urban areas -- and that’s fairly optimistic -- in the year 1974.

The trouble with housing-start figures is that they conceal more than they reveal. More important than the number of starts would be the location of the starts and the type and the price of the housing involved. For example, an analysis of 1973 shows that despite an overall increase of seven per cent over 1972, starts actually declined in every metropolitan area in the province with the exception of Hamilton and Ottawa. The importance of type and price is obvious. An increase in the production of condominiums will not lower rents; nor will more $70,000 houses lower the average housing price, and that’s what we have seen in much of the Province of Ontario.

At the root of the problem is a misunderstanding of the housing market. In fact there’s no market for housing in the sense that there is for other commodities. There are many markets for housing in various locations and types. One might even argue that there are as many housing markets as there are houses. The result is that it makes no sense at all to talk of an increase in aggregate housing starts as easing the housing market. More $70,000 houses, as I said, won’t affect the price of the average house, because the two are not vying for the same purchaser and they’re not really in the same market.

Even if there were only one kind and location, the housing market wouldn’t function as a market. In the traditional but virtually nonexistent market, an increase in price would draw out additional supplies which, in turn, would tend to moderate prices. Obviously higher prices are not going to draw out larger supplies of the basic raw material in housing, because that’s land.

Higher prices don’t even play a major part in the supply of so-called developable land, which is dependent on public planning decisions. The scarcity or lack of land for housing depends upon public decisions, but the value generated by the planning process, reflected in higher prices for approved subdivisions and so forth, is appropriated by the owners of the land and in most cases larger developers, including Ontario Housing Corp. Land development in Ontario is essentially a public process carried on for private profit.

We take a look at another area then. We try to define it in terms of housing need, because obviously the market doesn’t reflect the need. As the minister has probably found out since he took over the portfolio, housing need is extremely difficult to define, because it’s subjective. Each person’s need for housing differs. A perfect assessment of housing need would be to have it individualized -- an interesting psychological study, but not much use as a guide to public policy. We obviously have to arrive at some way of objectifying the need.

One way to start would be to take a look at basic facilities. The 1971 census contained the following figures on facilities in Ontario dwellings, the total number of dwellings being 2.25 million: Housing-need facilities in Ontario, with no running water, 45,565 houses; with cold water only, 34,325 houses; with no inside flush toilets, 66,775 houses; heated by space heater or stove only, 187,945 houses. This is in the Province of Ontario, the lucrative, up-at-the-top, triple-A-rating province.

Mr. Lawlor: Yes, the finest in the world.

Mr. Stokes: The province of opportunity.

Mr. Deans: Let’s look at them in individual municipalities, just out of curiosity. In Toronto there are 2,815 houses that don’t have any running water. There are 3,445 with only cold water. There are 3,335 with no inside flush toilets and there are 8,365 heated only by space heater or by stove. In Hamilton the figures are 910 without running water and 585 with only cold water.

These are 1971 statistics but they’re interesting because they show, if nothing else, that housing needs do vary and, in fact, there may be parts of the province in which some of these things are neither desirable nor wanted. I don’t know; I can’t imagine it. The truth of the matter is that within all of the housing stock available in the Province of Ontario, there is a fantastic number without the normal amenities we would expect to see in the average house.

Another indicator of housing need is crowding. The rule of thumb in assigning space to poor families is one person per dwelling room; for example, a three-bedroom house with a kitchen, living room and dining room for six people, which is not exactly a comfortable standard. The average in Ontario is 0.6 persons per room. There are 150,715 dwellings in Ontario occupied at a density of more than one person per room or 6.8 per cent of the total housing stock.

Ontario has a surplus of large dwellings and a shortage of small units, which is a problem that Ontario Housing hasn’t even yet begun to realize. If we define a small household as one with three persons or less and a small dwelling as one with five rooms or less, the figures indicate, based on average density, that there are 189,170 more small households than small dwellings.

Corresponding to this is a compensating surplus of large dwellings relative to large families. The figures don’t reveal how the discrepancy is resolved, but they do suggest the following: The typical seven-to nine-room house being built in a subdivision is not a response to the average household need. Value can be used to reflect need of the 1,117,965 single, detached, owner-occupied, non-farm dwellings in Ontario in 1971 -- 32,525 in rural areas were worth less than $7,500; and 89,225 in urban areas were worth less than $12,500.

I don’t pretend that the figures that I have given may well have the same significance today as they had in 1971, except to show that those figures are extremely small in comparison to the incomes that the people have in the area. It might be worth looking at the reasons why even in those areas those figures no longer apply.

A more detailed analysis could combine any and all of the elements that I have mentioned to arrive at a characterization of housing quality in every community. That’s a massive and technical problem, and obviously I don’t have the wherewithal to do it. Nevertheless, there are some things that we can understand, that don’t require a great deal of expertise or technical knowledge. I want to talk to you about them for a few moments.ly

I want to talk to you about the problems of carrying charges that confront a great many people who are trying to purchase a home in this province. It interests me to listen to the radio on my way to work and to hear the advertisement for one of the large subdividers who says that houses are available now at prices ranging between on $42,500 and $56,000. Who does he expect is going to move into those?

Or, when I go and I talk to the people who are desperate to get a house and who are prepared to lay out far more of their income than they can reasonably afford -- and they have to do without many of the other amenities that they might well expect in this triple-A rating province -- those people are finding within one or two years of moving into their house it is going back on the market, because the carrying charges have changed, the taxes have risen, the interest rates have been changed, and they are faced with a situation that they can no longer countenance. It takes five years for the interest rate -- let me just read you some interesting statistics that I find make me sick -- just to put it as bluntly as I can. I want to talk about three different situations in a $50,000 house. If you had a 30-year mortgage, and you were able somehow or other to get an eight per cent mortgage -- and how would you ever get one? Well, maybe the minister would lend someone the money at eight per cent. The monthly payment would be $289.89. The total payment for that $50,000 home -- and this is assuming, by the way, that you have a $10,000 down payment; so you are amortizing $40,000 -- you would pay over the total length of time, for amortization, $104,360 to acquire that $40,000 mortgage and $50,000 home. The interest you would have paid, at eight per cent, at the end of the 30 years, would be $64,360 for a $40,000 mortgage -- if you could get eight per cent.

But you can’t get eight per cent -- because in the Province of Ontario today the average is 11% per cent. And, at 11% per cent, your carrying charge would be $395.28 a month. That is $142,301 you would pay out of your pocket by the time you had amortized that over 30 years. And do you know what that friendly financier would get? Do you know what he would put in his pocket for your $40,000 mortgage? It would total $102,301. And, if you were lucky -- if you were really lucky -- and you got in under the Ontario government programme --

Mr. Stokes: And Christ threw those people out of the temple!

Mr. Deans: Well said. At 10 3/4 per cent, you would have to pay $352.15 every month. You would pay, in total, $126,774. You would have paid to the Shylocks of the world $86,774 for the use of their $40,000. And that’s under the government programme.

But what if you were like most, and you had to go to 35 years, because you couldn’t afford that $352 a month, because it was really just too much for you, because your income wouldn’t sustain it, because it doesn’t include your taxes, because it doesn’t include your heat, because it doesn’t include your maintenance, because all it does is pay for the principal and the interest? At 11% per cent you would pay $389.58 every month, you would pay $163,624 for that $40,000 mortgage.

Mr. Stokes: That’s home ownership made easy.

Mr. Deans: And imagine the interest -- $123,624. It’s disgusting. And to think that this government, in spite of all of the warnings that were given to it and in spite of the efforts of so many people on this side of the House to convince you of the folly of your ways over seven or eight years, allowed this -- no, not even allowed it to happen; you encouraged it to happen.

Mr. Stokes: Participated in it.

Mr. Deans: Participated in it. To think that you would do such a thing. You don’t even deserve to be named the Minister of Housing, because quite obviously you are hand in glove with the very people who have been using the people of the Province of Ontario and abusing them for years.

Let’s take a look at the $40,000 house I mentioned: If you were able to get in at the lower level and managed to get a house that was worth “only” $40,000, and if you were able somehow or other, by working at two jobs and having your wife working too, to save $10,000 -- and you couldn’t save $10,000, by the way, if you happen to be one of these poor souls who is in a rent-geared-to-income Ontario Housing Corp. subdivision. But you are not there. You are living in somebody’s basement or somebody’s garret. If you save $10,000 somehow or other and you find you can get this $40,000 house with a $30,000 mortgage at 11% per cent, you are going to pay $296.46 a month; that’s just for principal and interest, and doesn’t include taxes. You are going to pay $106,726 over the 35 years that you amortize it, and you are going to pay $76,726 in interest.

And you tell me that you have got a housing programme in the Province of Ontario that is going to help the people of this province? You have got the nerve to stand up and tell me that you are producing X more new houses in this province, that those new houses are somehow going to help these people who can’t even afford to pay the price, and that you are providing houses at a level almost equivalent to the house prices that these people would be forced to pay outside?

The only difference between you and your programme, and this man who is selling the land, is that if you can’t get them on the house price, you get them on the rental cost of the land. What you don’t get in the house price, you get in the renting of the land. It’s a very unusual programme you have -- a programme that doesn’t even begin to meet the needs and doesn’t even start to eat into the basic problem confronting the majority of young people.

I am lucky. I am lucky in a lot of ways, but I am lucky that I bought a house when I did, because when I look around and see other people of my age who have three kids, as I have, who for some reason or other -- through no fault of their own in many cases -- were unable to get into the housing market when I got into it, they are now struggling like hell to try to get into it at these prices. But there is no way that they can.

You may say to me, “Well, who is buying these houses?” They are buying these houses but they are selling their souls in the marketplace in an effort to pay for them. They are working every single minute of the day, many of them working at two jobs and with their wives working too, in an effort to try to come up with the kind of payments that they have to make. And it’s wrong.

Surely, in this day and age, in this province with the triple-A rating, we can afford to put on the market housing at a price people can afford. Two or three hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured down the drain for buildings for Ontario Hydro, for Ontario Place, for the Science Centre and whatever other extravagances you are enjoying; surely we could afford to put some of that money into mortgages at a price people can afford.

Surely we can amortize it over much longer periods of time. Certainly there will be a greater payout in the long haul, but the monthly requirements for the average individual will be within his means. Surely in this province -- at this point before it is too late -- we can develop a housing programme that will put into the marketplace 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 or 100,000 units, that will drive the price charged by these Shylocks who are out in the marketplace -- and who are gouging the public for all they are worth -- that will drive the price of the units that they have on sale down to a level that people can afford.

If there is no other obligation, there is an obligation on the part of government to ensure that the people whom it governs are well housed -- not only well housed, but well housed at a price that they can afford. Surely there is an obligation, just as there is in health, just as there is in education, to ensure that housing is available to all people; housing that will meet their needs; housing that will come up to standard in terms of its facilities that are available; housing that will be available at prices that people can afford to pay out of the average income in the Province of Ontario.

How can you talk about a $2.25 or $2.50 an hour minimum wage in this province while at the same time talking about $40,000 and $50,000 houses being made available throughout the province for people to live in? How can you talk about trying to provide people with a reasonable opportunity to improve themselves, if you have a rent-geared-to-income programme that takes every single additional cent that they make from them so that they can’t save and move out of that housing programme into a purchase programme?

Why isn’t there a method whereby people in Ontario Housing are able to move from the rental programme into the purchase programme by virtue of their income increasing without having to try to save the additional money? There is no way to save it, because the Ontario Housing Corp. programme with its rent geared to income doesn’t allow for any saving of surplus. This is where you have got to take a serious look at it

I have had this out with so many ministers now I begin to feel it is getting repetitious. I don’t know how to convince you. You can build all the houses you like. You can come in here as often as you want and talk from now until the end of time about the number of additional housing units that you have put into the marketplace. It is minuscule compared to the overall need. It plays little if any part in maintaining a reasonable level for housing prices. It does nothing at all to provide a sufficient quantity of rental accommodation for the majority of people, and when you do provide rental accommodation, you even gouge the tenants in the rental accommodation.

It is a sorry laying out of this government’s inactivity and activity over the last number of years. And you have to bear the brunt of it; it is unfortunate, because in fact, if I can be charitable, what you have done is probably more than what was done by all of your predecessors put together, probably more than any one of them or all of them were able to do. The unfortunate part about it is that you have been left a legacy, and the legacy is one which I personally wouldn’t like, and which I suspect will eventually spell your doom, because you can’t simply enter into the supplementing of the private housing market. That is not how you are going to provide housing for people.

Just in closing that section that I want to talk about, you find if the average family income were $12,000, which is approximately what it is, in rental at 25 per cent that the rental charge by Ontario Housing Corp. is $3,000 a year -- an average monthly rent of $250 give or take a few dollars depending on whether you have got children or not, and how old they are and how many you have got -- $3,000 a year from a gross of $12,000. When you then deduct all of the other things that have to be paid out of that, you find that that, together with the normal requirements of a family -- food, insurance, and whatever other things are normal to a family -- means there is no way, no way under the sun, that those families can move in in sufficient numbers, either to the Ontario Housing Corp. home ownership programme -- because you don’t build a sufficient number of them -- or into the private market, because the private market is far, far above their capacities. And in ownership, if you did have a $12,000 income, you would pay out $3,600 for monthly carrying charges -- that is mortgage principal and interest.

It just can’t be done. It can’t be done under the existing system and I have to say to you that part of that problem is because you are very short-sighted about the entire housing field. I wonder, I wonder.

Let me talk to you for a moment. I am not going to read it all because there is much more than your seat could bear or my voice could carry.

One of the basic problems that confronts the minister is the one that was alluded to by my colleague from St. George, and that is the whole area of rental accommodation. I don’t think for one minute that he believes that the actions that the Ontario Housing Corp. has recently undertaken, or for that matter the projected actions of the Ontario Housing Corp., are likely to have any significant effect on the vacancy rate in many of the municipalities in the Province of Ontario.

The vacancy rate is so low at the present time, in most communities, that it would take a massive influx of housing in order to make any appreciable impact. In June, 1974, the vacancy rate in Hamilton was 2.1 per cent; in Ottawa it was 3.5 per cent; in Thunder Bay it was 1.7 per cent; in Toronto it was 0.9 per cent; in Windsor it was 2.9 per cent.

In order for the minister to have any impact or effect on that vacancy rate he would have to be building three times as many housing units for rental purposes as he is currently involved in. He would have to put all of the housing units that he builds in the Province of Ontario, for example, into Metro in order to have any appreciable impact on the ever-increasing population of Metro, over and against the vacancy rate within the existing housing that is available for rental purposes. And he would have to put a substantial number more into all of the other communities that I’ve mentioned.

There isn’t anything in the ministry’s programme that talks about a major assault in the rental housing area. There is no indication in his programmes of any major effort. He talks of Metropolitan Toronto and how he is going to pour in many millions of dollars for the development of rental accommodation, but the unfortunate part about it is, that even if he was able to meet Metro’s problem, which he won’t, he wouldn’t have begun to meet the problem that confronts the remainder of the other municipalities around the province.

There is not a sufficient number of units being built, and that is evidenced by the increasing numbers of people on the waiting lists in every single municipality that has rental accommodation under the Ontario Housing Corp. There are more and more people who desperately need to get into these houses, the simple reason being that the private sector has opted out.

The private sector is very funny, you know. It claims the right to be the sole provider of housing, until such time as it’s not too profitable and then it wants somebody else to do it. That’s typical, and that’s how it’s been done over many years.

I want to suggest to the minister that in the whole area of rental accommodation, unless there is an absolute commitment by the government to a rent-supplement programme -- not this meagre effort that’s going on behind the scenes at the moment, but a commitment to a true rent-supplemental programme -- and unless it is prepared to take some very positive steps to maintain rental levels at the levels that they are, or for that matter, to roll them back to the levels that prevailed in the spring of this year and beyond, then the government is not going to be able to protect the people of the province who, out of necessity, must rent from the people who happen to be taking advantage of their extremely lucrative position at the moment with regard to the vacancy rates.

What I’m really saying is that on looking at the minister’s programme, I don’t for one moment deny that he has built more houses than his predecessor. That may be true. I don’t, even for a moment, deny that he personally would like to see an improvement in the housing stock of Ontario Housing Corp. and in the housing stock of the Province of Ontario. I don’t suggest, even now, that he doesn’t have a sense of commitment about the job which he is doing.

I just simply suggest to him that he cannot have the kind of impact in the housing field that must be felt, if he is going to act simply as an addition to the existing housing markets. As the Ontario government, he is going to have to provide an alternative market of lower-priced housing, perhaps with fewer frills, in order that people can choose between two fireplaces and no fireplace, between an attached garage and no attached garage, between a finished basement and no finished basement. In other words, you are going to have to provide a fully integrated alternative market that will enable people to get away from the traditional sources and to go into a market that will provide them with basic accommodation at a cost that they can afford, given the wage structure in the Province of Ontario.

I think we were all raised in the same kind of house that I was; there was about three feet between it and the one next door and a very small backyard. I managed to survive it and so did most other people. I suggest to you that we have allowed the developers and builders to create for themselves a market, in consultation I suppose with many municipalities, that provided them with the largest possible return for their investment, and by so doing we have ensured that the cost of housing is well beyond the means of the majority of people.

We seem incapable of providing mortgage interest rates that will reduce the level of payment to one which will be within the means of the majority. We seem incapable of producing housing that will be available in sufficient numbers at a price that the majority can afford, and I think that that incapacity is a lack of desire on the part of the government rather than a lack of honest-to-God resources. I think the resources are there. I think the government has the capacity to do it if it desires. Frankly I don’t think you have the will.

Mr. Stokes: Where is the commitment?

Mr. Chairman: Does the hon. minister wish to respond at this time?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I would like to address my remarks, first of all, to the member for St. George, but as she is not in the House at this particular time --

Mr. M. Gaunt (Huron-Bruce): She will be in.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- I could go to the member for Wentworth and then come back to the member for St. George.

Mr. Gaunt: She will be in.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Thank you. The member for Wentworth was not as long as we generally anticipate and I can understand the member’s absence.

Mr. R. Haggerty (Welland South): You are improving now.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I would like to direct my opening remarks to your statement that was made a few moments ago.

Mr. Stokes: Your usual obnoxious self. I think I will go out now.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The first point was the matter of a public inquiry in regard to the Ontario Housing Corp. Now I have before me a document, which has your name at the bottom and which says “For immediate release,” in regard to the Ontario Housing Corp. I wonder if the member could advise me whether or not this is a document which has been given publicly outside the House, which has been given with her consent and which I would then like to inform the members of the House of tonight?

Mrs. Campbell: It was a press release which was issued today, yes. It was issued. I did not see it before it went out of the office but I certainly stated in it that I would be requesting an inquiry into the affairs of Ontario Housing, that I wanted it to have the power to subpoena the books and records, that we had asked for this information and had not been able to get it, that we had been denied it by the government, that information reaching my office -- this is taken from exactly what was given for the statement -- indicates very clearly that over the years the affairs of the corporation were carried on against a background of gift-giving and socializing with those involved in doing business with the corporation. The cases involving OHC presently before the courts, in my opinion, will not reveal all the facts or in any way indicate the prevalence of influence peddling and a public inquiry is absolutely necessary. That is was what was dictated for the press release.

Mr. J. Riddell (Huron): Right on.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank the hon. member for confirming what I have in front of me, and I would like to read it into the record:

“This afternoon, Nov. 12, Margaret Campbell, Liberal MPP for St. George, called upon the provincial government to initiate a full public inquiry into the activities of the Ontario Housing Corp.

“‘The Ontario Housing Corp. must be investigated fully and the activities of officials at every level, including the board of directors, must be scrutinized very carefully,’ said Mrs. Campbell. ‘A full, official inquiry is imperative and all records, including the corporation’s books and the minutes of the board of directors’ meetings must be available for scrutiny.

“‘In the past, when we have requested that these documents be made available to the members of the Legislature, we have been refused. If necessary, the power to subpoena should be exercised by those conducting the inquiry.

“‘Information has reached my office which indicates very clearly that the affairs of the corporation have to a very great extent been conducted against a background of socializing and donation of gifts by developers and others interested in transacting business with the corporation.

“‘At the present time, there are cases involving the Ontario Housing Corp. before the courts but, in my opinion, these only relate to a comparatively small proportion of the widespread practice of influence- peddling which has been prevalent for some years.

“‘Senior officials have been involved in these activities and have, therefore, not been in a position to give any moral leadership. A public inquiry is long overdue and should be initiated without delay.’”

Mr. Chairman, that’s a very serious charge. I think the hon. member, as a lawyer and one well aware of the law, should be also aware of the fact that when we make a charge such as this, especially since this case has been investigated by the OPP for some months, if you have had information before you for this length of time or any length of time, I would think it would have been imperative for you to inform the OPP that the MPP for St. George had certain information in regard to OHC.

I will join with any member in this House in the first instance in saying we want to make sure the operations of any part of this government are clear. However, I fail to understand how the hon. member can make such a charge, having known full well this investigation was before the OPP and certain charges have been laid. Certain more charges may be laid.

I think it is a very serious allegation to make against senior officials, unless the member has the information to support the allegation. I would look forward to receiving from the member at her earliest opportunity the information, which I would wish to pass on to the OPP, in order that this particular charge can be put before the proper authorities and certainly indicate who is guilty and who is not.

Mrs. Campbell: Mr. Chairman, I’m so glad the minister is now anxious to see that all of these matters are clarified. Will he now produce the minutes of the board meetings and the records of the corporation to this House, in his anxiety to give to the people of this province a full and clear view of that operation?

Mr. E. R. Good (Waterloo North): She will put you on the spot.

Mr. Riddell: You bet you are the one that is concerned.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the hon. member, and the hon. members, I think better remember this very carefully --

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Playing politics.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: An allegation has been made which has to be substantiated. If this allegation is not substantiated, I want the hon. member to withdraw it at the earliest opportunity in the House and publicly.

Mr. Good: What are you so defensive about if you have nothing to hide?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I say to you right now that I will make sure that everything is public when it is shown to me and to the Ontario Provincial Police --

Mr. R. F. Ruston (Essex-Kent): You are qualifying it now.

Mr. Good: Do you still fly the chairman to Florida?

Mr. Chairman: Order.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- and shown to the courts that there is a need for an investigation.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I am not going to be drawn into any witch hunt whatever, but I don’t think the hon. member means this. If the hon. member -- and I hope she has information -- if she hasn’t information which relates to this press release, I would like to be informed as of now, rather than later, because it does place a very serious charge against senior officials of my ministry. I feel there is an obligation upon her to produce to this House tonight any information she has, or at the earliest opportunity.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Very drastic way to get the minutes.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I don’t think that is the proper way to ask for a public inquiry, when she knows an inquiry has been on for many months.

Mr. Ruston: An investigation, not an inquiry.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: So, Mr. Chairman, I have made my point as far as that is concerned. The member can deal with it as she sees fit.

Mr. Riddell: That is a lot of words to answer a question you haven’t answered. What about the minutes?

Hon. Mr. Kerr: All she wants is the minutes I guess?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the hon. member for Huron is a rather new member like myself --

Mr. Good: How much more proof do you have to have?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- and doesn’t really understand that you don’t have a public inquiry until you have proven the need for one. Maybe if the hon. member would do his homework with his colleague, the member for St. George --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- he would know more about the situation; because he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Chairman: Order please, if the member for Waterloo North wants the floor, I will give him the opportunity.

Mr. R. G. Eaton (Middlesex South): That is about all the member can do.

Mr. Ruston: He is not really saying anything.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, in regard to the Ontario Housing Corp., I don’t believe that it has been a buffer for the Ministry of Housing. As far as I am concerned, as far as the government is concerned, the Ontario Housing Corp. has fulfilled a very great role in regard to housing throughout all of Ontario. It will continue to do so, and I will make sure it does. Every official who works for the Ontario Housing Corp. is working on behalf of the people of Ontario, and will continue to do so in the future.

So I will say right now, Mr. Chairman, to the member for St. George, that the corporation is not a buffer. It is part of the Ministry of Housing. It is a very great part of the Ministry of Housing, and will continue to be so.

The member brought up many points in regard to OHAP, which I am quite willing to answer when my officials are here. We will have the details for you. But I think one thing that you must remember is this: That when we talk about the Housing Action Programme, we are talking about bringing serviced lots onto the market and providing housing unit starts much sooner than ordinarily possible. These are accelerated starts; they are financed at a lesser rate than usual.

Those starts that we have brought forth in our proposals that were announced in the House not long ago, were starts that would not have been finalized. Fair enough -- the building permits are there. Fair enough -- the buildings were half built. But that doesn’t mean to you or to anyone else that those particular units would have been finished. We entered into agreements to ensure that we had the housing units finished. I am saying to you that if it hadn’t been because of our financing, because of the fact that we provided the mortgages at a reasonable rate, there wouldn’t have been those units.

Mr. Deans: Are you telling us that the buildings were started without the financing having been arranged? Oh come on; don’t give us a lot of nonsense.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the member for Wentworth --

Mr. Deans: That is a lot of nonsense. You know nobody starts a building in this province without mortgages being arranged.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Sure they have, sure they have; with interim financing.

Mr. Deans: Oh come on.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Waiting for an estate to be probated.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The longer he stays in the House the less patience he has, because he hasn’t really achieved too much. Why don’t you just sit back and listen?

Mr. Deans: But you talk so much nonsense.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: You know, you’ve been here for so many years, and you’ve admitted yourself that you haven’t heard anything because you haven’t listened. Now why don’t you try and listen? And why don’t you try to understand?

Mr. Deans: I didn’t say I have heard nothing. I have heard everything you have said, and it has not amounted to anything. I have heard every single minister from Stanley Randall to you, and you still haven’t produced the houses that the people of Ontario can afford.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Oversimplified; certainly it is an oversimplification, and you know it.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Chairman: Order. The member for Wentworth has not got the floor. The minister has the floor. The minister shall proceed.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The hon. member for Wentworth -- I’ll reply to him in due course; but socialists generally try to get into a debate in which they are not knowledgeable, in any event.

Now let me go back to the member for St. George for a minute, if I could. We want to make sure that the member and her colleagues, and everyone else are very fully aware that this government is not blaming municipal governments for the lack of housing. We are saying there is a lack of community acceptance for low- and moderate-income housing. That is what I said in my statement; that is what you can read.

An hon. member: We’re grateful.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: It’s not the municipal governments, but I will say to you that some of the fault has to be with the federal government because of the interest rates --

Mrs. Campbell: And none of it is with you?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- because the interest rates have to be very detrimental to the housing starts.

Now, if your federal colleagues had taken into their own hands the right they have to reduce the interest rates before now, we wouldn’t be in as much of a problem with regard to housing throughout all of Canada. It’s not just Ontario; it’s all of Canada.

The hon. Barney Danson has brought forth a programme which is limited dividend, as ours is. We agree with it. It’s at eight per cent, but we are saying to you that the federal government must go into a much greater funding --

Mr. Ruston: Six per cent to build a new hotel; six percent to put up a Holiday Inn.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- of much lower mortgage interest rates.

Mr. Riddell: Four per cent to put in tile drains.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: That’s for the farmers. It’s a programme for farmers.

Interjections by hon. members.

An hon. member: You’ll get four per cent for a farm drain?

Mr. Deans: Yes, come on. You have more answers than he has. They are equally wrong.

Mr. W. Ferrier (Cochrane South): Is the Solicitor General against farmers?

Hon. Mr. Kerr: No, I am for them.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The hon. member, Mr. Chairman, made some comments about senior-citizen accommodation. Well I haven’t been around as long as the hon. member, but I can tell you that everywhere I have been in Ontario, and I have been in a few places, the senior citizens are delighted with their accommodation. We have built more senior-citizen accommodation than any other province in the Dominion of Canada, and no one can dispute that.

Interjections by hon. members.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I am telling you the senior citizens are proud of the accommodation this government has provided for them, and they look forward to this government providing for other senior citizens in the future.

Mr. Ruston: Money from Ottawa.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: And they vote the right way to.

Mrs. Campbell: Mr. Chairman, would the minister yield on that point for clarification?

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for St. George would like a clarification.

Mrs. Campbell: If the minister had been listening to what I said, I was not talking about the units; I was talking about the services. If the minister had wished to be present at the recent housing conference of the elderly people of this province, he wouldn’t be questioning what I said -- his deputy was there for at least a luncheon period. I did not talk about the units; I talked about what is evident, and that is the lack of services to the senior citizens.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I am glad the member has more fully explained what she meant by her former remarks. I still say, though, the accommodation and the services that we have in Ontario are comparable to any other province, any other jurisdiction --

Mrs. Campbell: That’s not true.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- and I believe that this can be borne out by the experiences that have been shared by all of our senior citizens in Ontario.

Now I want to quote the hon. member. “There is something owing,” I think she said, “by the people of this province.”

Mrs. Campbell: “To the people.”

Hon. Mr. Irvine: “Something owing to the people.”

Mrs. Campbell: By the Ontario government.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: All right. The member, I believe, has changed somewhat her wording in the past, but in any event my interpretation was that there was something owing by the people of this province. Yes there is. There is something that will come about in the next federal election. The people of this province owe the Province of Ontario a darn good federal Conservative government and I think they will have one. I think that the member for St. George --

Mr. Ruston: They are not even going to have one in Ontario at the end of next year.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- recognizes this but is just a little bit ashamed to admit that maybe the federal government is part of the problem that we have right now; and certainly the federal government that we have in Ottawa did not implement any controls whatsoever.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: You all voted for inflation on July 8.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: They did not try to control inflation, did not wish to even attempt to control inflation, and have not at any time tried to make sure that we haven’t got the inflationary pressure that we have at the present time. I am saying to the hon. member that I have asked the hon. Barney Danson and his colleagues to try and stop --

Mr. Ruston: Your Treasurer (Mr. White) with his deficit financing is helping.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- this inflationary impact, upon not only housing but upon all of the commodities which we use in everyday life.

Mr. B. Newman (Windsor-Walkerville): You are not wearing a halo, are you?

Mrs. Campbell: What are you doing personally?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the hon. member --

Mrs. Campbell: Mr. Chairman, one of the problems in this whole area --

Mr. Chairman: The minister has the floor.

Mrs. Campbell: I know, but he is misinterpreting what I said.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We will probably have lots of time to talk about whether we have misinterpreted some remarks or whether we have other differences, but in any event we might as well carry on for a little while. We have got a few more minutes.

Mr. Ruston: You haven’t said anything yet.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Why don’t we just get back to the point of whether or not this is a shared responsibility? I really believe it is, and I think the shared responsibility starts, first of all, with the federal government; secondly with the province; thirdly with our people in the communities. All right, if we have that, then we can say to you that whether or not the federal Tories said certain things were going to happen if they got in, let’s talk about what is presently before us. We don’t have a federal Conservative government in Ottawa.

Mr. J. R. Breithaupt (Kitchener): Hallelujah!

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We should have one. We all know that. We should have one. We haven’t got one, so what happens? We have the worst mess we ever had. And I want to say this to you, that if some action had been taken --

Hon. Mr. Kerr: That’s what John Kenneth Galbraith said; permanent wage and price controls.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- we wouldn’t have a problem with rents and with the question of rent control.

Mr. Ruston: You have the power here.

Mrs. Campbell: I think that was your jurisdiction.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Let us go back to the situation in British Columbia, where they put in rent controls for a short time; eight per cent, and recently they had to raise it to 10.5. Next month they may make it 12 or 13 per cent. You know what happened?

Hon. Mr. Kerr: No apartments.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Do you know what the message is? Neither the tenants nor the owners are happy, neither one is happy. That’s the message. So let’s not talk about rent controls right now until we know exactly whether or not supply, as I say, can look after the problem which we have before us.

I guess, Mr. Chairman, that’s about all the points the hon. member brought out this time. The member for Wentworth went on at great length with a --

Mr. Deans: Not at great length. You said yourself it wasn’t as long as you expected.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- speech which I have heard so many times. I knew exactly what you were going to say. The only thing is, when you start giving me compliments that’s when I get uneasy.

Mr. Deans: They were tongue in cheek, believe me. When I compliment you, it is tongue in cheek.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Tongue in cheek, I thought so; fair enough. But in any event, let me make it clear to the member for Wentworth and his party, the socialist party of Ontario --

Mr. Deans: Yes, that’s right.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- that there’s no way this government is going to take over all the housing programmes, all the housing developments and all the other developments in the private enterprise --

Mr. Deans: No one has suggested that.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: Yes, you have.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: That’s what you said; that’s what you said.

Mr. Deans: I said for as long as --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Check Hansard. You said you would, as a socialist government, take over all the housing.

Mr. Deans: I did not say that.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: You said you would be responsible for housing --

Mr. Deans: I did not say that.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- and you would want to be the one to have housing for everyone.

Mr. Deans: On a point of order, I don’t mind having the minister say things, but I did not at any time say that we would take over all of the housing. I said that you should create an alternative market of sufficient size to allow the people who are being gouged another place to go to look for a modest house at a reasonable price. If you can twist that around, you go right ahead, because you are good at twisting things around.

An hon. member: So are you.

Mr. J. M. Turner (Peterborough): Who is?

Mr. G. Nixon (Dovercourt): That’s his job.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the hon. member talked about OHC in the past buying certain parcels of land. Let me say this, we’re buying land right now for the future, and I think it’s good business.

Mr. Deans: You’re right.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I think this government should try to buy up certain parcels of land in order to control the price not only of the land but the ultimate cost of housing.

Mr. Deans: But you never use it.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I say to the hon. member that we have done this and we are going to continue to do it. We’re going to use the funds that are available to us to make sure we control the ultimate cost of housing, whether or not --

Mr. Deans: Are you taking the responsibility for the present cost?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- the hon. member agrees with the philosophy. That really doesn’t surprise me, because I know the socialists want to take over everything in regard to private enterprise.

Mr. Deans: That’s nonsense!

Mr. F. Young (Yorkview): Who told you that?

Mr. Deans: I like the way you can twist everything around to satisfy yourself.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: The only point, Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Deans: But if you are taking responsibility for the price of housing now, that’s right.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- the hon. member brought out quite clearly was, if I understood him correctly, that he thought we would have 90,000 units this year.

Mr. Deans: I say I think you will have no more, and that’s down from last year.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: And 90,000 units is what I had said.

Mr. Deans: How does that begin to meet a need which is even greater this year?

Mr. Chairman: Would the hon. member for Wentworth please let the minister have the floor?

Mr. Deans: Don’t interrupt me when I’m interrupting the minister.

Mr. Chairman: The minister didn’t interrupt you, so why interrupt the minister?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I am delighted to have him interrupt, because every interruption he makes makes less sense.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: How many board feet in 90,000 homes? How much lumber in 90,000 homes? How many man-hours of construction?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: What I’d like to be sure of is that the hon. member does know this, that we will produce, as a government, as many units as possible to supplement private enterprise.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: How many bags of cement? You’re just in the numbers game over there.

Mr. Deans: Would you ask your colleague to stop interrupting? I can’t listen to him and you at the same time.

Mr. J. Root (Wellington-Dufferin): Why don’t you keep quiet so we can all hear the minister?

Mr. Ferrier: That’s not a very good speech for a Baptist.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Deans: Now I have to suffer from the root of all evil.

Mr. Chairman: Would the minister please proceed?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Yes, I would like to proceed, Mr. Chairman, but I’m not going to shout myself hoarse. If these people want to carry on an interchange, they can do so. I don’t mind; I can stand up here for a long time.

All I want to point out to the hon. member for Wentworth is this: When you mention that we haven’t provided any funds for rental accommodation, again you weren’t listening too closely. We have $50 million allocated as recently as last month. We’ll have more money than the federal government has given to us on the limited dividend programme. We are doing more than the federal government in every programme in housing.

Mr. E. Sargent (Grey-Bruce): Not one single apartment did they complete in Toronto and you know that.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: All I’m saying to the hon. member is that when you stand up as you did and you say that the government of Ontario has not recognized housing needs from the time of Stanley Randall --

Mr. Deans: That’s right.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- I say to you you’re crazy. I say to you you don’t understand what the housing programmes are all about. You don’t understand what the needs are about because you’re blindfolded with your own socialist interpretation of housing.

Mr. G. Nixon: Right on!

Interjections by hon. members.

On vote 801:

Mr. Deans: May I, on item 1?

Mr. Chairman: Vote 801, item 1, the hon. member for Windsor-Walkerville.

Mr. B. Newman: Mr. Chairman, I wanted to ask the minister what his policy is concerning rent supplements, dealing primarily with the senior citizens. Many senior citizens now are content to live in the accommodations in which they are presently residing, yet they cannot afford to live there without depressing their standard of living and depressing it to the point where there is danger to their health. You cannot yet build senior citizens’ accommodations fast enough in many of the communities, but you would be able to satisfy their needs temporarily up until the time you develop senior citizens’ housing by simply providing to them a rent supplement, so that they, living in supplemented senior citizen housing accommodation, would be on the same basis as those that are presently living in geared-to-income accommodation.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the hon. member for Windsor-Walkerville must have different estimates in front of him than I have. Vote 801 is ministry administration. Ministry administration, I believe, does not deal with the point he brought forth. I think the matter he referred to is in vote 804, if he wishes to examine the estimates.

Mr. Chairman: The member for Wentworth.

Mr. Deans: Thank you.

Mr. Chairman: Item 1, main office.

Mr. Deans: I am sorry; yes, item 1; policy, main office.

Mr. Chairman: That’s not policy.

Mr. Deans: No, it’s not policy and programme development.

Mr. Chairman: Do you want to do the two at once, 1 and 2?

Mr. Deans: I don’t care. All I want is to be able to ask a question.

Mr. Chairman: Okay. Agreeable with the minister?

Mr. Deans: Given that you were so upset with the member for St. George and her allegations, I had intended to raise something during my lead-off but I overlooked it in the interests of time. I want now to raise something with you.

Why is it that all of the charges to this point have been laid against Ontario Housing Corp. employees, who were the recipients supposedly -- alleged to be the recipients -- of bribes, and to this point in time there has not been a single charge, at least not a reported charge, laid against those who gave the bribes? Has your investigation uncovered the people who provided whatever it was -- the televisions and the many other things that were handed out, including finances, to the employees? And is it the intention of the government to lay charges of equivalent standing against those persons who bribed the employees?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, this matter is before the Attorney General (Mr. Welch) at the present time. His office, and the Attorney General, will decide whether or not there is enough evidence to proceed in this direction. This was mentioned in the House only a few days ago -- as a matter of fact, I think by your particular party.

Mr. Deans: Okay, but what are you going to do?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I’m not sure if it was the hon. member or not. At that time, the Attorney General indicated that investigation is under way at the present time.

Mr. Deans: I want to ask you a question. I have in mind sort of elementary justice. It would seem to me that if you know that a bribe has been received, you surely must know that bribe was given. It doesn’t require two separate investigations. If you know somebody got a bribe, you know somebody gave it. Is that reasonable?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: But there’s a different standard applied --

Mr. Deans: What I’m about is this. If, on the one hand, a person receives something illegally, then what is it that holds up the process, what is it that’s so complicated?

Mr. Good: It is more legal to give than to receive.

Mr. Deans: What is it that holds up the process that doesn’t enable you to tell me whether you intend to lay charges in any of the cases -- or have charges laid? You personally didn’t.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I think the member is missing the entire point. I am not prejudging anyone --

Mr. Deans: You have laid charges.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- and our ministry is not prejudging. At such time as the courts have decided that some past employee, or employees, has received certain gifts, and has in their opinion gone against the laws of Ontario, then at that time I think we are in a position to say that the person is not only guilty but possibly there is some other action to be taken. How can you assume right now that anyone is guilty? Surely you are not saying that.

Mr. Deans: Oh now, don’t start that kind of garbage with me. I said “alleged”; “it was alleged.”

Hon. Mr. Irvine: What’s the difference?

Mr. Deans: I said “alleged” and I chose my words very carefully because I know how carefully you twist other people’s words around.

An hon. member: Right.

Mr. Deans: Don’t try it with me, don’t try it with me.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Deans: What I am asking you is: How is it that you are prepared to drag the names of all the employees through the mud, when you don’t know if they’re guilty -- neither do I -- but you are prepared to let those people who allegedly gave the merchandise, that was allegedly received by the employee, to wait until after somebody has been convicted before anybody knows who was involved? That is the question that I am asking you. How is it that the employees, or former employees, are going to be dragged through the mud by this government on an alleged bribe or gift, while at the other end of the scale the people -- and you must know by now who they are -- who supposedly have this so-called bribe are going to be let off scot-free if it isn’t proven in court that it was a bribe. Come on now, where’s the double standard?

Mr. A. J. Roy (Ottawa East): Mr. Chairman, just on that issue, I might remind the minister that I asked the Attorney General about that specific point.

Mr. Deans: Where do you think he gets the answers?

Mr. Roy: The difference, of course, is that the ones who accept the gift are under a different section of the Criminal Code than those who give, and the difference is in the onus. You have to relate the gift for the giver to a specific contract, and that’s where there is more difficulty and, of course, there is more mens rea, as we call it under the criminal law, of application.

I think the member for Wentworth raises a valid point when he states that, after all, the Attorney General had had this investigation under way for a period of very close to a year, I think, when these allegations were made: and I cannot understand why, after all this investigation, if any charges are going to be pending, in spite of the different onus involved, your investigation should not be complete at this stage. The member is quite right, you are dealing with accomplices and you are going to have to use the people who gave the gift, in fact, as evidence against the one who received it. In fact we don’t want to prejudge the guilt or the innocence of any of the parties involved.

Mr. Deans: That’s right, but you are prejudging.

Mr. Roy: But it doesn’t look well in the administration of justice.

We have had a similar situation in relation to Dibblee in Ottawa where certain employees of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications were charged with accepting a gift, and the company, Dibblee, were not charged. It appears to the public, you see, that the people -- the big companies, the people involved in the highest strata of the business community -- are getting away with things which the employees of your department or various departments are not. I think it would be in the best interests, not only of your department but of the administration of justice, that when you come to a conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to prosecute the individuals who accepted the gifts, you are in a position to say: “We do not have sufficient evidence against the companies”; or “Certain officials of the companies are charged.”

But that was not the answer of the Attorney General. He said the investigation is still going on, and I say to you that the fact the investigation has been going on for six or eight months is not good enough, because you are putting in disrepute not only your own ministry, but the administration of justice in this province.

Mr. Sargent: Declare him immoral.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: That is a lot of nonsense and you know it.

Mr. Deans: Why does the Solicitor General sit there and mutter so?

Mr. Roy: Is the minister going to answer?

Mr. Sargent: Mr. Chairman --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I wasn’t sure whether the hon. member was getting up or not.

Mr. Sargent: Answer him first.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: In any event, the member for Ottawa East really just said two or three times what I said before to the member for Wentworth: The Attorney General is investigating whether or not charges will be laid, and when that investigation has been finalized the decision will be made known. I am not going to proceed any further because they are alleged charges, as the member has so correctly stated.

Mr. Deans: There are actually charges now.

Mr. Chairman: The member for Grey-Bruce.

Mr. Sargent: On that same subject, Mr. Chairman, my concern is that I have been talking with the people who have been charged, and in questioning how they have been charged it seems they have been probably caught on credit cards of developers and people who have been trying to influence people in your ministry. I appreciate, Mr. Minister, that you have inherited this can of worms, as it were, but these estimates and future events will prove that what is going through in housing is the biggest pork barrel in the history of Ontario. There have been more millionaires created through racketeers and organized crime connected with this ministry, as we will show eventually. My concern is that a lot of little people in your ministry are being hurt, and I would like first of all to ask you how many people have been charged at this point.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the exact number to date I can’t give you; as far as I am concerned, it is 22. There may be other charges that I am not aware of, though, that have been laid.

Mr. Roy: And not one donor, not one donor.

Mr. Young: There must have been 22 givers as well as 22 takers.

Mr. Sargent: There will probably be a lot more coming along the line. As my colleagues, both NDP members and the member for Ottawa East, bring out, the really guilty people are the people who have been left out in left field, who have been forgotten about.

The point I am trying to make is that my information, sir, is this: When a developer goes to your department for approval of a plan, the first approach is turned down. At no time is a plan approved at the first approach, and my bona fide information from a former official of your department is that the next step is they are referred to Mr. Kelly. Mr. Kelly talks to the developer or the applicant and then they are given directions where to go when he determines what the tariff or the fee will be on a percentage basis. Then the appointments are set up with the proper people in your department.

My concern is this. It is not the little guys, the 20 or 25 people whom you are whacking and whose lives you are ruining because they have accepted television sets, or $2,000 or $3,000, or what have you. You are taking the cowardly approach of taking these other guys and ruining their lives, and the big ball game is the pork barrel for the Conservative Party.

Mr. D. A. Evans (Simcoe Centre): Oh.

Mr. Sargent: Now don’t start saying “oh.” I know what I am talking about -- for a change.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. G. Nixon: Prove it.

Mr. Root: Names.

Mr. R. D. Kennedy (Peel South): Names.

Mr. Sargent: The names will come. They will come out eventually.

An hon. member: Why not tonight?

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Sargent: I would like to ask the minister, where does Mr. Kelly come into the ball game as far as you are concerned?

Mr. Kennedy: He is not a builder.

Mr. Sargent: You are damned right he is not a builder, but he is the biggest builder you ever had.

An hon. member: He is the “big blue machine” builder.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, the member for Grey-Bruce has again come up with some startling statements. I would like to ask the member, as I did the member for St. George: Produce some facts for me, will you please?

Mr. D. M. Deacon (York Centre): Are you going to produce the minutes?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I am as interested as anyone to make sure that the statements you have made are properly looked into by the law. Let’s not talk about something that you heard third-hand or seventh-hand. Let’s talk about something which you have in writing, and let’s talk about the actual facts as to how things do develop in the ministry. Mr. Kelly has no relationship whatsoever to the Ministry of Housing.

Mr. Deans: Which ministry is it he is related to?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I am the one who has the final signature to put on there. There are other signatures before me, many of them, and it goes through many areas besides the Ministry of Housing before certain expenditures are approved.

I would like you, as an hon. member of this House, not to stand up and make statements unless you are able to give me something that is factual. I know you, and have known you for some while, and I appreciate your concern. But I want you to understand that I have concerns too, and I want to get down to the bottom of whatever you are saying to make sure that you understand that as long as I am the Minister of Housing I will make sure that everything is on the up and up at all times.

Mr. Sargent: Okay. Mr. Chairman, if you want some facts and figures to set the ball rolling, I challenged you in the House today to furnish the facts of the Saltfleet development wherein Jon-Enco got a cheque for $6 million on Jan. 7, 1967, for 1,500 acres of land at $4,000 per acre, when Mr. Murchison, chief land developer for your department, was opposed to it entirely because his appraisers and his evaluators and assessors said the land was only worth, at top, $2,000 an acre. They paid this Jon-Enco $6 million -- $3 million more than they should have -- and Mr. Murchison, now resigned, is now a vice-president of Y and R Properties Ltd. in Toronto. He resigned because he couldn’t go on with this type of goings-on in your department.

Why pay $3 million more when the appraisal men your ministry had and the top evaluator said the land was only worth $3 million? Those are facts he can start with. I’m asking him to produce the files --

Mr. Roy: And the minutes.

Mr. Sargent: -- and the minutes of those meetings to prove the fact that I’m not telling him something untrue because we know it’s the truth.

You will tell me, sir, as the Provincial Secretary for Resources Development (Mr. Grossman) told my friend from Downsview (Mr. Singer), that it’s not in the interest of good government and the third parties involved who might be hurt that you divulge this public information. I suggest to the minister it’s not in the public interest that he should be minister of a department when he condones such facts as these. Furthermore, we will produce to him the names of all the properties involved that Jon-Enco bought from the farmers who were paid only $1,500 an acre. When those farmers find out that Jon-Enco got $4,000 an acre, all hell is going to pop loose. That’s what we are going to produce. If the minister wants to play some games, we’ll play some games with him. We’ll start right now.

Mr. C. E. McIlveen (Oshawa): Produce it.

Mr. Roy: Produce the minutes.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, can we establish the fact, which I think the member for Grey-Bruce said, that the case was in 1967?

Mr. Sargent: That’s right.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: And this is what he referred to this afternoon?

An hon. member: Where has the minister been all this time?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I am of the understanding that he has asked this question before, but I said to him this afternoon --

Mr. Sargent: Today.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- that I will produce the information requested.

Mr. Sargent: The minister said he would investigate it.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: And I said I would report to the House.

Mr. Sargent: I want the files and the minutes of the meeting. I want the proper bill of sale, the whole ball of wax of the original property.

Hon. Mr. Kerr: All the member needs is the appraisal.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I think the hon. member for Grey-Bruce had the answer many times before. I told him this afternoon that I would report to the House. I’ll do so.

Mr. Deans: Can I interrupt a moment, because this whole transaction, as the member for Grey-Bruce will recall, I think, I raised in the committee about 1968, and we had a lot of difficulty trying to get information? The fact of the matter is this, that the land was partially assembled by one real estate company. It was then assembled in total package by Balys Kronas --

Mr. Sargent: Jon-Enco.

Mr. Deans: No -- of Kronas Realty. Kronas Realty did the final assembly.

Mr. Sargent: The payment was made to Jon-Enco.

Mr. Deans: Wait a minute. Kronas assembled the land on Saltfleet Mountain -- the final assembly of it. It was begun by one real estate company and was taken over by Kronas and assembled by Kronas. It was then sold to Jon-Enco, which was a holding company in Toronto. That’s all. I couldn’t even trace them down. Even by going through the corporation records I couldn’t even find out what kind of business they were in in 1968.

Mr. Young: They were set up especially for the purpose.

Mr. Deans: It seemed, I might say as my colleague has said, it was set up especially for the purpose of transferring the land from Kronas Realty to the government of Ontario.

Mr. Roy: Right. That is not unusual.

Mr. Deans: That’s the situation. I think it was Jon-Enco, in fact. It doesn’t matter. At this stage my mind’s a little fuzzy on the actual name. To my knowledge, they did no assembling of land but they acted as a pass-through. It was one of those operations which brought the land from a $2,000 --

Mr. Gaunt: It’s almost a put-through.

Mr. Deans: A put-through, that’s right; like a put-through as we had in the Hydro deal. I can recall the discussion that centred on that particular thing. I asked for the same kind of information the member for Grey-Bruce is now asking for. There’s no doubt that what was paid for that land initially by Kronas Real Estate was nothing like what was paid by the Ontario government to Jon-Enco. There’s no question about it. And there’s no question either about the fact that Jon-Enco did nothing at all to improve that land. There was no change in the land.

My colleague from Wentworth North (Mr. Ewen) may recall the situation. It came out on the eve of the 1967 election. We’ve discussed it in passing once in a while and very infrequently, but not in this kind of detail. I’ve got to tell you there was something very funny about that land transaction, and the member for Grey-Bruce is right.

Mr. Riddell: Right on.

Mr. Deans: Something very strange happened in that transaction. It was extremely strange that Kronas, for example, didn’t sell it directly to the Ontario government, because Kronas is a big outfit and deals with the Ontario government. They could quite easily have sold it directly, had the Ontario government wanted the land. The passage of time between the initial assembly and the time it was sold to the Ontario government was short indeed. Now whether this was a tax dodge or whether this Jon-Enco was ever actually a company remains to be seen, because I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since the day they sold it to the Ontario government.

Mr. Sargent: They’re not in the phone book now.

Mr. Deans: They certainly haven’t owned anything in Hamilton since, and to my knowledge they haven’t sold anything to the Ontario government since then. I would be interested, like the member for Grey-Bruce, in knowing why it is, because this is what I was trying to talk about when I spoke to Stanley Randall. It was exactly on that issue that we were locked at the time he told me he wasn’t in the business of competing with the private developers.

Whatever was paid by the Ontario government for that land, which is now added to substantially by the cost of the development of that land, will now be borne by the people who are going to have to live on that land. If, as my colleague says, you paid twice what that land was worth, knowing full well what it was worth, and if you ended up buying from a front operation when you knew full well that it had been in the hands of a real estate company a matter of months just previously, then there is something drastically wrong with the way your operation goes about its business.

Mr. Roy: The onus is on the minister to produce the file. We have given him the case, so he should produce the file.

Mr. Deans: I can go further if you want.

Mr. R. S. Smith (Nipissing): Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Chairman: Before the hon. member for Nipissing continues, the Chair is trying to rationalize this discussion in relation to the 1974-1975 estimates.

Mr. Sargent: We’re talking policy.

Mr. Chairman: I am wondering if you would clarify the relationship for me.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. R. S. Smith: I wall clarify my position. As I understand it, this afternoon and this evening, the spokesmen from the two opposition parties have asked that the minister set up an inquiry into the Ontario Housing Corp.; and if that is done, of course, it has to relate to what has taken place over the years.

The point I am going to bring up is the one I raised in 1968 and 1969 in the estimates of this same department, when Mr. Randall was minister, and that is the question of a land purchase in the city of North Bay by the Ontario Housing Corp. from a group called Popeil, which is a friendly group of Tories from the Thunder Bay area. They had some land in North Bay which they held for a very short period of time and sold to the Ontario Housing Corp. at the rate of $4,300 per lot. if I remember correctly -- and I am going back six years, so some of the details may not be exact, but it is exact to the point where it is within $100.

Those lots were bogged and waterladen. Nobody wanted them. None of the developers wanted them. None of the builders wanted them. But there were 100 lots, and they were sold to the Ontario Housing Corp. at the rate of $4,300 each when similar lots in the same subdivision, on good land, were being sold at the rate of $3,700 per lot and the appraised value by local appraisers was about $3,000 per lot for the 100 lots that were sold to the Ontario Housing Corp. So there was a difference of perhaps $1,300 per lot. and on 100 lots that is $130,000 more than the actual value of the lots at that time.

Since then, of course, we have had inflation, a building boom and everything else, and the lots did become useful. They were sold under the HOME programme to certain builders who went in and built on them and spent $800 to $1,000 per lot to fill them in, for which they were never recompensed by the Ministry of Housing or by the Ontario Housing Corp. and which represented, by the way, their profit on the building, so they built in there for nothing. But the fact of the matter is those lots were sold in a block to Ontario Housing Corp., when nobody else even wanted to look at them, for $1,000 to $1,300 more than they were worth. What it did was to increase the value of every other good lot in the area. That’s where the real catch is. The ordinary guy down the street had to pay $1,500 more for a decent lot because Ontario Housing Corp. was in there paying ridiculous prices. Involved in the purchase of those lots was the Ontario Housing Corp. itself --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Who else then?

Mr. R. S. Smith: Who else?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Yes.

Mr. R. S. Smith: The Ontario Housing Corp., the people from whom they bought Popeil --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I just want to find out from the member, if he would, what developer we are talking about? Can we have some names tonight -- or do you have them?

Mr. R. S. Smith: Popeil, I said.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Anybody else?

Mr. R. S. Smith: They were the owners of the property, and they sold to Ontario Housing Corp. Involved in the transfer were local North Bay people, who acted on behalf of Popeil Bros., one of whom was a contractor whose name I find very difficult to remember, but it will come to me later on. The other was the mayor of the city at the time, who was a well-known Tory and who later became one of your candidates.

An hon. member: Defeated candidate at that.

Mr. Roy: Yes, one of your defeated candidates.

Mr. H. C. Parrott (Oxford): You have a few, too, you know.

Mr. R. S. Smith: He was acting on behalf of the developer, although he has no real estate licence or anything else. But he certainly had an in --

Mr. D. W. Ewen (Wentworth North): It’s the only reason he got in.

Interjections by hon. members.

Mr. Roy: Do you want any more by-elections?

Mr. R. S. Smith: You went in and out a couple of times, Don, and likely you won’t get any more nominations. So we all have our problems.

Mr. Ewen: We’d walk all over you guys.

Mr. R. S. Smith: We all have our problems.

Mr. Ewen: Why are you bringing it up now, anyway?

Mr. R. S. Smith: Well, I’ve brought it up before, and the member was asking tonight for cases and examples -- and that’s what I’m giving him.

The mayor acted on behalf of these people --

Mr. Roy: You woke up at the wrong time.

Mr. R. S. Smith: -- and he met down here with the minister and with Ontario Housing Corp. officials and with the developer who was selling the property to Ontario Housing Corp.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: What day of what month of what year?

Mr. R. S. Smith: It was in 1967-1968.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: What day?

Mr. R. S. Smith: Now you are being impossible.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I want facts.

Mr. R. S. Smith: All you have to do is look through the minutes of the Ontario Housing Corp.

Mr. Deans: You want facts? I am going to give you some.

Mr. Roy: You are not keen on giving out the facts.

Mr. R. S. Smith: And if it is not there, then your minutes are not true. Because it has to appear in the minutes of the Ontario Housing Corp. -- the fact that they did buy the property and what they paid for it.

You have to have in those minutes, as well, some type of estimate supplied by your estimators of the value of the property, plus the estimates of those on the local scene who made the same estimate. That must be all in your files. If it isn’t, you must have been operating an awful sloppy ship. Do you want us to do all the work for you people?

I brought this to the minister’s attention in 1968. You know what he did? He looked at me and said, “So what, we’ll get out of it. The property is bound to increase in value.”

Mr. Deacon: The poor people who paid extra for their homes.

Mr. R. S. Smith: He said: “If we paid too much, the guy who is going to build on it is going to lose his shirt. The people who bought them are going to have water in their basements and their backyards for years.” And they still have, because I’m still corresponding with your ministry in regard to some of the problems that have developed down there since that time.

But the fact of the matter is, there was $130,000 too much paid for the property -- and everybody knew it. And everybody knew it was a deal made through Ontario Housing Corp. So, you can charge these other 22 poor, innocent guys who go around fixing drains and what-not, but the real problem in that place is at the top of the Ontario Housing Corp., and not down the ladder where you started to lay charges. I don’t say these people were right in doing that. But on the other hand, let’s start at the top and work down, rather than start at the bottom and work up.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for Wentworth.

Mr. Deans: Thank you, I want to go back with you to 1968, if I may, and I want to provide you with the background, because I think it’s important. The Legislature opened Feb. 28, as I recall in 1968, and that was my first day.

On March 6 I asked the minister, who was then the hon. Stanley Randall, Minister of Economics and Development: “What was the total amount paid for land assembled for Saltfleet satellite city? Secondly, how much commission was paid to B. Kronas Real Estate?”

Mr. Eaton: Kronas? That’s the Liberal fund raiser.

Mr. Deans: Just hang on a minute, will you please? I know who Balys Kronas is as well as you do, probably better.

Mr. Eaton: A Liberal fund raiser.

Mr. Deans: Your colleague may know him better than you do, but I know him as well as either one of you or both of you combined.

Mr. Chairman, the answer to the member’s question -- I am not going to read it all to you.

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please.

Mr. Deans: All right. This was Stanley Randall answering:

“No commission was paid by Ontario Housing Corp. to B. Kronas Real Estate, as that firm was not acting for the corporation. His commission, if any, would have been paid by the vendor, Jon-Enco Ltd.”

Interjection by an hon. member.

Mr. Deans: He told me that he wouldn’t disclose the price, by the way. He told me in March that he wouldn’t disclose the price, that it wasn’t in the public interest. He told me that nothing was paid to Kronas. He wasn’t going to tell me how much he paid. So, on June 17, 1968, in the minister’s estimates, I asked him: “Well, who did you deal with?” He said: “I told you the other day, Jon-Enco Construction Co. Ltd. or something.” I said, “Okay, fine.” I asked him who they bought the properties from; who owned the properties at the time. He told me Jon-Enco owned the properties. I said: “What was the full purchase price?” He said: “That we are not going to disclose,” and I asked, “Why?” I think this is interesting when it gets down a bit. He said:

“Because we are still assembling land in the Hamilton area and we do not think it in the interests of the taxpayers to disclose it at the present time. Let me tell you this, as far as prices are concerned, when these properties are looked over they are looked over by the Ontario Housing Corp., then they are approved by our people, they are approved by the board of directors, they are approved by the Treasury in this province, they are approved by the cabinet, they are approved by the Treasury Board in Ottawa, and by Central Mortgage and Housing. And we don’t think it’s in the interests of the taxpayers today for the government to go out and talk about the prices for which it gets its land and so establishes new prices which we’ll have to bargain tomorrow.”

If all of that approval was given -- if Stanley Randall was telling me what is accurate, and the government approved it, the Treasury approved it, the cabinet approved it, the board of directors approved it, it was approved by the Housing Corp., it was approved by Central Mortgage, it was approved by the Treasury Board in Ottawa -- and we hear now that the price was $4,000 an acre, and we are told that the value of the land, as per the evaluation placed on it by Ontario Housing Corp. appraisers, was $2,000 an acre, how in heaven’s name did all of these people, from the Premier, through the cabinet, right down to the housing minister, out into the street to Ottawa, approve $4,000 an acre?

Can you explain to me how this can occur, because away back then this could have been stopped? This was what I was talking about -- the escalating prices of land and the effect that it was having on housing. This was back when houses were worth $20,000. And this was when we were talking about the effects that these kinds of purchases and these kinds of exorbitant prices were going to have on the housing markets in the Province of Ontario. This was back when I was giving the same blooming speech that I gave to you today, only today was with updated figures.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Some of your figures today were from 1971.

Mr. Deans: I am saying that I was using figures that were available today and then.

Can you explain to me what you intend to do to uncover the truth of what was alleged by the member for Grey-Bruce? Because if there is even one iota of truth in what he has said -- and I don’t doubt him for a minute; he said it, I’m sure, in all sincerity -- then there is something desperately wrong with the way this government does business with the land speculators of the Province of Ontario.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for Grey-Bruce.

Mr. Sargent: Mr. Chairman, before I go on with the next question, it appeared that the only people who didn’t approve of this whole package were the chief land developer of your department and all the appraisers. They are the only people who didn’t approve of these prices. But further to that, I would like to ask you, Mr. Minister, in view of the fact that you have charged 20 to 25 people with accepting bribes, how many millions of dollars are involved in these 25 cases?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I don’t know, Mr. Chairman. Quite obviously this is a matter that the Attorney General has in his hands in regard to the actual charges laid, the amount involved in the charges. If you want the information we can provide it for you, but I haven’t got it tonight.

Mr. Sargent: Would you explain to the House the mechanics of this operation? What happens now? Does he move into your department? Tell us what happens, will you please?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I’d be delighted to tell the hon. member if he would give me a couple of minutes to do so. As I understand it, this investigation has been going on for well over a year. Probably you were aware of it, were you?

Mr. Roy: Yes, we are, that’s why we don’t --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: And we have been, as a ministry, as anxious as anyone else to make sure that those who are guilty are proved guilty, and those who are innocent remain innocent in the eyes of all the people. But let’s not cast any reflections on anyone’s integrity until we know exactly where we stand in this matter. I have mentioned to you before that I would investigate the matter you brought to my attention in 1967, in 1968.

Mr. Sargent: May I interject? I am not talking about that now. I am saying --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Just a minute. Let me talk about 1967-1968. I don’t think that you or the member for Wentworth are expecting me to have an answer tonight, or something like that.

Mr. Deans: No, I don’t.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: What I said to you this afternoon still stands. I will look into the matter and report to the House.

Mr. Sargent: Mr. Chairman, I have the greatest respect for the minister, I really do, and I want to say this. I have a great respect for you, sir, and I know you have inherited this thing, but I want to say this: You say you don’t know how many millions of dollars are involved in the charging of 25 people in your department. It must be many hundreds of millions of dollars to take a man’s name and smear it in the papers and that’s what’s going on here. But may I ask you what is more important: Do you have a list of the people who have bribed these men?

Mr. Deans: I asked him that, he won’t give it.

Mr. Sargent: You must know what route you are going, because how can you charge a man if you don’t know who is offering the bribe?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, again, this is not in the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Housing.

Mr. Sargent: It must be.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I can give you what has been made public knowledge; the press has had it -- you have got it, I am sure. You have read the papers where certain people have been charged --

Mr. Sargent: Are you now doing business with these firms that have bribed your people?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- certain people have been charged with having accepted certain amounts. Now when those charges, or those alleged gifts, as it may be, are proved one way or the other, then we will be able to know whether or not there is any way in which the Attorney General should proceed further in regard to those who gave the gifts.

The Attorney General is handling this particular matter. The Ministry of Housing is not involved in the day-by-day operations of the law in Ontario.

Mr. Young: But why weren’t those who gave the gifts charged first?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Now, surely that is as plain to you as it is to me.

Mr. Sargent: Do you still continue to do business with these firms, Mr. Minister, that are suspect?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I don’t know what firms you are referring to.

Mr. Sargent: The firms that have bribed your people. You must start someplace. Why didn’t you start with the firms who are bribing and not the people who were bribed? Are you still doing business with them?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, again, I think what we are doing is prejudging.

Mr. Sargent: Well, you are prejudging the guys you got charged, aren’t you?

An hon. member: There’s enough evidence to charge them.

Mr. Lawlor: You should certainly suspend them from the rolls, for Heaven’s sake!

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I’m not prejudging at all. What I am saying is that we are investigating. The Attorney General has investigated fully --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- and the Attorney General’s office will make sure that justice is prevailing in all cases in regard to the Ontario Housing Corp. or anything else.

Mr. Lawlor: A lot of malarkey; you know who they are.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Now, don’t expect me to say tonight that we are going to charge this developer or that developer, because I don’t know what developers you are referring to, nor do I know what actions are being taken by the Attorney General.

Mr. Sargent: Mr. Chairman, one more point in this regard. I want to say that this is almost a kangaroo court, when you can take one segment of people who are judged guilty, and the people who are really guilty you are letting off. But further, I want to say to you, with regard to Mr. Clow, your chairman -- talking about policy, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Clow, I am informed, headed a supply company called E. S. Clow Supply Co. He was chairman of Ontario Housing Corp. when Headway construction -- long before your time, Mr. Minister -- were getting a great share of the moneys of the taxpayers of Ontario through housing contracts. It is a fact that in the majority of all the contracts in the north, Mr. Clow’s firm supplies all the plumbing supplies and what have you for Headway and the majority of all the contracts in the north country.

Where do we stop in this business? In the first place, how in the hell did he ever get to be head of the Ontario Housing Corp., in view of his involvement and his friendship with Headway and his involvement with the supply company? Where do we stop? What kind of an operation are you running in this department? Will you please answer that?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Yes, Mr. Chairman, very shortly. I think we are running a darned good operation, and I want you to prove otherwise.

Mr. Sargent: Well, you are the one who’s got to prove that you are. I think it’s a conflict of interest. Here’s the chairman of a multimillion dollar corporation, with $400 million or $500 million every year -- I don’t know what your budget is; I haven’t looked at it yet, but your land acquisition budget has been $285 million for the last few years, and here’s the man who is chairman of this giant corporation playing hanky-panky in terms of supplying Headway; his favourite firm is on the contract, and then he supplies them with the plumbing materials and so on.

Now, where in the hell do we go? What are the taxpayers of Ontario going to think about this? You and I wouldn’t do this in our business. We have certain ethics in our business, but why is your department rife with corruption?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We should have some ethics in the House too. We should have some ethics --

Mr. Sargent: When I haven’t, you will kick me out.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- to make sure that when you cast reflections on anybody’s integrity, I hope you will back them up. You have made some pretty serious remarks in regard to Mr. Clow. I think it is one of your most important duties, your first duty, to support those charges.

Mr. Sargent: Well, we will do it.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I look forward to receiving that, Mr. Chairman and hon. members on all sides of this House, because I think we are in the position of trying to do a job for the people of Ontario.

Mr. G. Nixon: Right on.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: We are not trying to be in the job of creating corruption or creating something that is not in the best interests of all. There is nothing to be gained --

Interjection by an hon. member.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- by any member standing up in this House and making some remarks that cannot be backed up by facts.

Mr. Sargent: Your first responsibility is to run a clean department, and that’s what you should be doing --

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Well, Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Sargent: -- and not have this conflict of interest.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please. The minister has the floor.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, let me say again to the hon. member that as far as I am concerned, I am running a very clean ministry. I intend to make sure it remains that way as long as I am the minister, and I am sure this government wants it that way.

Mr. Good: You are clouding the issue.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Now if you can substantiate that something has happened in the past -- in 1967, 1968 or whenever you wish -- fair enough; you prove it to me. But I am not going to listen, day by day --

Mr. Sargent: You produce the files. We’ll show you.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: -- month by month, year by year, to allegations which cannot be proved. If you have something, prove it.

Mr. Sargent: How do you know they can’t be proved? Get the files. We’ll show you.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Prove it.

Hon. W. A. Stewart (Minister of Agriculture and Food): You prove it.

Mr. Chairman: The member for Yorkview.

Mr. Young: Mr. Chairman, the minister has just indicated that he is running a clean ministry. All right, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt; he’s a new minister.

I just want to come back to the matter we were discussing a while ago. I had no chance to get a word in edgeways; now I have my opportunity.

Out there, in this city and other places, there are people whose names have been published in the public press as having been alleged to have taken bribes. Mr. Chairman, when a bribe is given by anybody to somebody else, the person who gives the bribe -- and I think this should be clear -- if a person receives a bribe of a $1,000 or $450 or $500, he gets that in cash or merchandise, but the person who gives the bribe expects to get value far in excess of that amount.

Mr. E. J. Bounsall (Windsor West): Right on.

Mr. Young: He expects to get advantages which outweigh entirely what he has been giving to the other person.

Two hands came together -- the one who gave and the one who received -- and the one who gave expected value far in excess of what he was giving in value. Yet the person who receives is castigated and charged, but the one who gave and expected to get far more advantage is left alone at this point.

Mr. Sargent: Right.

Mr. Young: It seems to me there is a fundamental injustice here, an injustice which this minister, if he’s running a clean department, cannot ignore, unless at his own peril.

I would hope before too long he will be urging upon the Attorney General, if he’s laying the charges, that matching charges be laid so that these people who are on the receiving end and perhaps were victimized to some degree by the people who gave -- and this is very often the case -- are charged along with those who received. I think if this minister is serious about this clean department, he’d better get action in this field to see if those other charges are laid, so that they can be heard along with the first lot when it comes to court action.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I want to say to the hon. member for Yorkview and the rest of the hon. members there has been action taken in the past, before my appointment as Minister of Housing. I have in front of me at this time a couple of memoranda sent out by the acting managing director in 1972 and in 1973. I’ll read only the one in 1973, but both are in the same vein. It is dated Dec. 5, 1973 and is entitled, “Conflict of Interest Guidelines; Employees, Ontario Housing Corp.”

“In view of the activities carried on by Ontario Housing Corp., Ontario Student Housing Corp., Housing Corp. Ltd. and the housing authorities, the board of directors has approved guidelines for certain standards of conduct, with respect to potential conflict of interest. The proposed guidelines for employees are intended to assist staff and to prevent the development of any undesirable situation. These proposals are designed to supplement the Public Service Act and its regulations, as well as section 110 of the Criminal Code of Canada which makes it a criminal offence, in certain circumstances, for a public servant to demand, accept or offer, or agree to accept directly or indirectly a reward, advantage or benefit of any kind in connection with government business or from a person having dealings with the government. I would draw these guidelines to each member of our staff.”

Mr. Sargent: Did you send a copy of that to the Tely?

Hon. Mr. Irvine: It is signed by Mr. Riggs, acting managing director. All I’m pointing out to the hon. members is this, action has been taken in the past to ensure the Ontario Housing Corp. operated in a proper manner.

Mr. Sargent: How do you know?

Mr. Stokes: That says nothing about the donor, though.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: I am saying that as far as I’m concerned we will ensure, to the best of our abilities, the Ontario Housing Corp. in the future is just as perfect as it can be. That’s all the assurance I can give.

Mr. Young: Mr. Chairman, just along that line, we appreciate what the minister has said. We appreciate it’s the instruction that has gone out, and that’s good. I don’t think any of us on this side hold any brief for those who broke that code and accepted gifts, donations, or whatever it may have been. But why should we take for granted there are people out there in the business world who are doing business with Ontario Housing who have their hands out ready to give these gifts? Why should not part of our blame and opprobrium be there?

Mr. Sargent: They are donors to the Tory party.

Mr. Young: In other words, if we’re going to do the thing to our own employees, let’s see to it that the people with whom we are doing business also have integrity, integrity of the kind that will not allow them to try to corrupt your own officials. That’s all we’re asking.

Hon. Mr. Irvine: Mr. Chairman, I’ve already said that the Attorney General is investigating this matter. I agree that those we deal with should have integrity.

Mr. Young: Right.

Mr. Chairman: Shall vote 801 carry?

Mrs. Campbell: No.

Hon. Mr. Winkler moves the committee rise and report.

Motion agreed to.

The House resumed, Mr. Speaker in the chair.

Mr. Chairman: Mr. Speaker, the committee of supply begs to report certain resolutions and asks for leave to sit again.

Report agreed to.

Hon. E. A. Winkler (Chairman, Management Board of Cabinet): Mr. Speaker, before I move the adjournment of the House, I will say that the business tomorrow will be as is called. The Ministry of Housing’s estimates will be considered again on Thursday, and hopefully the balance of estimates during whatever time is left on Thursday evening.

Hon. Mr. Winkler moves the adjournment of the House.

Motion agreed to.

The House adjourned at 10:30 o’clock, p.m.