Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

The House resumed at 8 p.m.

ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

On vote 2802: (concluded)

Mr. Chairman: When the committee rose at 6 we were discussing item 2 and the minister was responding to comments that had been made by various members of the Legislature.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Mr. Chairman, I think I was talking about some of the comments that the hon. member for Oakwood (Mr. Grande) had made in the House, and I was referring to some research that was published in the Review of Educational Research in the spring of 1975 by a researcher called Patricia Lee Engle. She points out in that article that bilingual education, as I think I said, has become a political issue with world-wide ramifications and is at present in many countries. Her purpose was a purely pedagogical one; it was merely to evaluate the evidence bearing on the issue of what language to use in teaching minority children -- their own language, or that of the majority. Incidentally, they must learn the language of the majority well because that is a priority concern of their parents.

Engle examined 24 major studies done around the world. Her conclusions: The 24 studies provided no substantial evidence as to which approach is better for the child. She reports that they do not indicate a clear direction nor are they mutually consistent. They resemble the seven blind men exploring an elephant, she said. She concluded that the success of a bilingual education is related to a complex web of factors that differs in each situation.

I would submit that this problem is compounded in Canada by the fact that in dealing with maintenance of languages we are not dealing with bilingualism, but with what might be called trilingualism. As an example of the debate or controversy surrounding this issue, one study -- the Henderson and Silverman study of transitional Italian programmes designed to ease the child’s way into English and at the same time to continue instruction in other school subjects in Italian -- showed that the use of the child’s own language did not interfere with the learning of English. In fact, it showed the child would make more progress also in mathematics.

Yet Skoczylas, reporting in the California Journal of Education Research on the bilingual education of Spanish American children, showed that although progress in English was the same for both the bilingually and the monolingually instructed groups, the monolingually instructed groups scored significantly higher in mathematics.

We are vitally interested in doing what is best for children, and that is why we are funding research in this area. That is why we do permit the use of the child’s own language for transitional purposes. If the teacher thinks a child has not understood what was said in English, for example, he or she may repeat it in the child’s own language. There are many ways the transitional programme can work.

The evidence to date is that parents, I think, are as divided as the researchers are on this issue. I think that -- perhaps my friend is aware of this -- at General Mercer School this summer we saw an indication of this. In this particular school area the Italian parents of incoming kindergarten children were about evenly divided on whether they wanted their children to go into a bilingual English-Italian kindergarten or into an English-only kindergarten.

The maintenance of the child’s own language is another issue. I am concerned about this as an educational issue. It can be approached as a cultural issue or as a political issue. But I want to look at it at this point in time as an educational issue. I agree that a facility with more than one language is, of course, a desirable objective. As the member for Oakwood quite rightly pointed out, these children of whom we are speaking today, here and now, come with a talent that should not be lost.

This was the reasoning behind our decision to extend experimental course procedures for secondary schools -- so that any language might be offered for credit in grades 9 to 13. In some 86 classes more than a dozen languages are being given in secondary schools across this province today. Italian, of course, has been offered in secondary schools for many years. This year, I think, approximately 6,500 students in grades 9 to 13, for example, are taking Italian as part of their secondary school credit programme.

At the elementary level, we have more problems, perhaps; some philosophic, some organizational. The programme of the elementary school does not easily lend itself to the offering of options, but what is more important, parents in the non-official language groups are, themselves, divided on the issue. A recent study of the non-official language groups by O’Bryan, Reitz and Kuplowska shows that, for example, while 34.4 per cent of Chinese parents would assign responsibility for third-language programmes to the primary school, 29.3 per cent prefer to allocate responsibility to ethnic or church schools, as they refer to them; in other words, outside of regular school hours. While 35 per cent of Italian parents prefer primary schools, 26.1 per cent would allocate responsibility for maintenance of languages to the secondary school.

Of all the non-official language groups surveyed, only 43.3 per cent thought that the taxpayers in general should cover the costs of such programmes, while 45.4 per cent thought that the parents, or the ethnic group itself, should cover the costs. These figures, coming from the non-official language groups themselves do not suggest to me any universal mandate justifying the introduction of third language instruction to the elementary school to this province’s part of the regular curriculum.

Within this province, as I have stated, we live with the basic fact of bilingualism with the two official languages, English and French. This form of bilingualism is, of course, enunciated in the Education Act in our regulations. I must say tonight it is not our intention to change the Education Act in this regard. But we are also committed to exploring ways and means of supporting third-language programmes outside the regular curriculum in the schools. To this end we are working toward several programmes which may or may not -- depending on how our study on them goes in the next little while -- assist in this particular matter. We are aware of the legislation that has been enacted in other provinces and various states of the US. Some of it is akin, really, to our own provisions for transitional use of the child’s own language. Some of it goes further and permits instruction in, and maintenance of, the child’s own language.

As I indicated earlier, we do have a ministry committee and a work group which is studying all of these issues of education for this group of young people; the whole area of language instruction other than the official languages; the whole area of multiculturalism as it applies to Ontario schools. We intend to host another seminar very shortly dealing with the issue of third- or non-official language maintenance. The committee that I talked about just a minute ago will be reporting to me at the end of this year with any recommendations for change that they may decide are necessary, and at that time I hope we’ll be able to make some further statements about this very important matter.

Mr. Grande: A few questions of the minister, if I may. First of all, the minister talked about the development of this committee, and I understand it’s an internal committee of his own ministry called the committee on multiculturalism. I would like to know specifically the terms of reference for setting up that committee and what it is looking at. I suspect that the Minister of Education has set up this committee for no other purpose than to stall for time. Pressures have been brought upon his ministry by the Toronto Board of Education and by many groups within the community -- from the North York Board of Education and from the Borough of York Board of Education. The minister is saying, “In order to alleviate these particular pressures on the ministry, what we’re going to do is set up a committee and say we’re working on it.” I would like an answer to that question -- and then, if I may, Mr. Chairman, I have other questions which I would like to ask.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Of course, I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say that is my answer: We’re working on it. But I think I tried to indicate in the paper and the response that I just gave that there are many conflicting opinions about what is the best source of action to take in this particular area. You have some research and the Toronto board has a report of the working group on multiculturalism. There are a host of research studies that have been done on bilingual education in other jurisdictions. There are all kinds of things, many of them conflicting, many of them very indefinite as to what direction should be taken.

This internal ministry committee that I have told you about is the group that is working for me to help synthesize all the things that are coming into this ministry so that we can stand up and tell you what we are going to be doing. But I can’t do that, just based on the fact that you might bring in one piece of research, excellent as it is, and tell me that’s the way things should go.

I think I’ve tried tonight to indicate some of the ways I think things can go, some of the things that are happening, and some of the things that are being studied. Yes, the answer is definitely that the group is there so that we can decide. If you think that’s stalling for time, well, then it is stalling for time.

Mr. Foulds: But you haven’t replied on the basis of educational research.

Mr. Nixon: I was interested that the minister, in giving his report, said that a number of the families prefer to have education and actually cultural matters taught in their church schools or the private educational opportunities in many communities.

I’m concerned about the opportunities in our regular school system, either public or separate, or at the secondary level. I’m concerned about communities with specific cultural and language interests and responsibilities having the opportunity of having courses, not necessarily taught in that language, but to have that language taught as a special language skill for the people in that community.

I’m thinking specifically of a community in my constituency where there’s a very large group of Ukrainians. They’ve been farming in that area now for many years, actually since well before the Second World War. They have become well established and have a major role to play in the community in every respect. I have felt for a long time that there ought to be the opportunity, not for their ordinary classes to be taught in Ukrainian, but that the Ukrainian language and the literature be taught as a regular subject in the curriculum of the schools in that area where, in my opinion, the numbers of students in the families would warrant it.

Is there any reason why the school board could not take an initiative in this regard? These classes would not be special classes, but be a part of the curriculum.

[8:15]

I’m sure that it follows true in other communities, with many cultural groups, that the young people perhaps have an opportunity to learn their native language, either at home or perhaps in church or special schools, but that they lose credit for it when they go to a regular school system. Too often we in this province, whether we intend to or not, seem to downgrade the knowledge of a second or a third or a fourth language -- and why not? This seems to be one of the few jurisdictions where the knowledge of additional languages is not as highly regarded as it should be. We have one of the few school systems which graduate supposedly well-educated people at the end of 13 grades who are, in fact, unilingual and often not terribly competent in that regard.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Mr. Chairman, it is our policy to allow this. It’s the policy in the schools where the board wishes it and there are parents who wish it, to have the course in, for instance, Ukrainian for credit purposes in secondary schools. That’s now a policy.

Mr. Nixon: Might I ask another question that is at least related? Unfortunately, I haven’t been here for all of the debate. Has the minister been asked about the disposition of the Gillin report on French language instruction? I don’t know whether this has been discussed, and I certainly don’t want to raise it again if I can read about it in Hansard.

Hon. Mr. Wells: No, it hasn’t been discussed. I haven’t made any policy statement on that report and what will follow from it. It’s still under discussion in the ministry.

Mr. Nixon: I can remember when the report was first made public it received a good deal of approval from many areas in the community, educationists and those in the English-speaking community who are particularly interested in French-language instruction. There has been a substantial feeling that French-language instruction has not been as effective as it might be. I can tell you, sir, whether you’re interested or not, that in saying that, in a number of schools I’ve had French teachers get up and tear several strips of skin off my back, but the truth really is that in this province I understand the number of secondary students taking French -- that is, in the English-speaking communities -- is now somewhere about 35 per cent or even lower.

This must be of great concern for us all, and I’m sure it is for the Minister of Education. He certainly doesn’t want to compel anybody to do anything but it seems that in a bilingual country we should be sure that we have good opportunities for students to take the French language, to have an appreciation of the spoken language and an appreciation of the literature. I feel this is one area where our education system has been substantially failing.

I happen to know Prof. Gillin personally. I taught with him during my extensive education career, and I know him to be a very competent man indeed, a man who worked mightily with effective assistance for many months to provide this report. It’s been in the hands of the minister for how long? Fifteen months? Longer? As I say, it was well accepted by everybody. I don’t know whether the minister is delaying because of some political concerns he may have, but surely in the education system in this province, a banner province in a bilingual multicultural nation, we ought to be taking the lead in providing the most effective procedures in instruction in the French language -- I’m not sure I’ve got those phrases right; let’s say French instruction -- that we possibly could have?

I’m sorry there has been such a delay. Where is the report now? Is it with the minister, or has he made recommendations to cabinet?

Hon. Mr. Wells: The report is still with me. I think it’s an excellent report and I’m still hoping that we’ll be able to move in some of the areas.

I’ll be very frank and honest with you -- the reason that we’re not moving at the present time and we’re still working out where and how we will move with the report, is that my costing figures on implementing it “as is” in the first year were $37 million and I can’t get another $37 million in my estimates at this time to implement that report. We’ve got to scale down some of the sections in that report and find out what is a priority, and that is what we’re still working on.

Mr. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, with your permission, don’t we have special federal grants that come into the province to foster French-language education? It’s been the feeling of many school boards that these sums somehow get submerged in our $2, $3, $4 billion education budget and are not directly used for the fostering of this sort of education. I’m sure these grants are not large enough to pay the $39 million or whatever the figure was you were talking about. There is a phrase often used in politics about steps in the right direction. Surely a full implementation, while it might be desirable, is something which is not practical as the minister pointed out. Surely we could do something to move in the direction pointed out by the Gillin report.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Let me comment about the money from the federal government. We get money from the federal government based on the teaching of French in the schools -- French to French and French to English. According to the method of calculation the amount of money which we will receive will be approximately $22.3 million. The amount we now pay out to the school boards for existing programmes is estimated to be $27.4 million.

In other words, under the identification method we now have in the grant and ceiling system, which identifies the money which goes to French-language instruction, we are paying out $5.1 million more than the federal government contributes.

Being very frank with you again, the issue becomes further confused to some degree because that money, as I said, comes here based on French to French and French to English. We get a fairly sizable grant for the French to French; in other words, the French-language educational system in this province I guess in actual terms you could say, as some of their French-language advisory committees have said, we don’t pass all that money on because we don’t think they need all that money above the normal funding they get in this province because the normal funding will carry on the kind of programmes they run in their schools. We take some of that money and use it to help the French to English programme which is grossly under-funded by the federal government. In other words, we give a lot more money to the school boards to help them run their programmes of French as a second language for anglophone students.

Mr. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, I’m a bit offended by the implication of the minister that the federal government ought to be paying for our French and English instruction. In the schools it’s a subject like history and science and math. This is a provincial responsibility and until about 1968 it was fully covered by the appropriations from this House. I think the federal initiative was because there was a feeling that at the provincial level there had not been sufficient initiative in bringing the teaching of French to English students up to a proper level. That money was surely designed to pay for special programmes, not the regular French classes to which all of us were exposed and which are still conducted in much the same method as they were conducted back in the 1940s when they were such a failure with some of us.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Yes, it’s basically designed for the French programmes in the elementary schools which we all agree could stand to be improved. The money is to carry on those programmes which actually do involve extra cost above and beyond that the board would normally be paying. Usually the teacher who normally is teaching a full elementary class through all the subjects in the curriculum can’t do that, so they have a special French teacher and the other teacher has to do something. There is an incremental cost to that board for the French programme. Any increase in the programme is going to cost more to that board than carrying on the normal programme in one language.

Mr. Nixon: If I may finish with one more question. Do we understand the minister to say that no aspect of Prof. Gillin’s recommendations are to be implemented in the coming year? Is there any prospect of any implementation barring some additional funding?

Hon. Mr. Wells: I hope we will be able to introduce some aspects of his report within the coming year.

Mr. Grossman: Unfortunately I missed the comments of the member for Oakwood (Mr. Grande) on the general subject of multiculturalism. As the member for a downtown Toronto riding which is, perhaps, the focal point of what is happening in Metropolitan Toronto with regard to this issue, I wish to emphasize to the minister that the issue is indeed as complicated as he has set it out and with as many ramifications a he has indicated. It’s really a trauma which affects the very family life of those immigrant families, although the parents in very many instances are saying: “We do want our children to get an education in the English language.” The net effect of that after two, three, four and five years is that those children and their parents have some difficulty in talking with each other and communicating adequately. So while the parents want one thing to occur, the net effect is something they aren’t always happy with.

The parents are also wrestling with this problem. They are very much interested in seeing that this problem be alleviated whenever possible and wherever possible. I am not generalizing, but this is some of the playback I get from my constituents. Many of them are of the school that is concerned about things such as field trips and so forth. They are used to a more structured school system -- and I hear sounds of the election campaign rolling through my head. They are used to a system in which the three “r”s are the three “r”s with nothing added. Indeed that’s often what they expect to get. They don’t quite understand nor in some cases appreciate the tremendous value that some of the extra added attractions of our educational system provide.

Mr. Nixon: Like a trip to the Legislature.

Mr. Grossman: Like a trip to the Legislature -- on the right days.

Mr. Bain: It gets them right to the heart of the problem.

Mr. Grossman: So -- now, just wait. You spoke at some length.

So as the report on multiculturalism sets out, it’s a complicated problem that needs some resolution. But it must be resolved in a manner in which the parents of those children are satisfied that their children are going to be able to go out of this system and, unlike what the leader of the Liberal Party has said, be well educated in the English language and be able to cope in this country.

Unlike some others, I have a lot of faith in the quality of the teachers in this province -- in the teachers who will be asked to implement some of the programmes that the minister is anticipating will come through.

Mr. Foulds: He’s not anticipating anything.

Mr. Grossman: I am convinced that we need not --

Mr. Makarchuk: Why don’t you pay them if you think so much about them?

Mr. Grossman: I am convinced that we need not --

Mr. Chairman: May I point out to the spectators or the visitors in the galleries this evening that one of the House rules is that there will be no applause or emotional outburst from the galleries.

Mr. Lewis: Maybe the member would like to give the teachers some sense of his English skills --

Mr. Chairman: Let the hon. member for St. Andrews-St. Patrick (Mr. Grossman) continue.

Mr. Lewis: -- his skill with language.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please.

Mr. Lewis: He could make a few guttural sounds.

Mr. Johnston: Everyone heard it.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please.

Mr. Grossman: I thought I heard the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. Lewis) earlier -- I may have misunderstood him but I thought I heard him indicate that he really wasn’t trying to carry a special brief for any special group --

Mr. Lewis: That’s right.

Mr. Grossman: -- and perhaps that doesn’t quite coincide with the member for Brantford (Mr. Makarchuk).

An hon. member: I did hear him say he’d use anybody he could.

Mr. Grossman: That’s true. The member for Brantford doesn’t quite agree. He’s pitching where he can and when the people are present. I am addressing myself --

Mr. Foulds: You are striking out.

Mr. Grossman: -- to the quality of the teachers in the system and how far you have to go, and how far we can go, without getting too far involved in a complicated school system.

If they were all that simple, that long draft report -- mind you, it is still a draft report on multiculturalism -- would not have been called for. It would not be as long as it is and would not need the study that it does need. I might add the trustees involved agree and admit that it needs further study, and certainly the parents agree that it needs further study. Indeed, the multiculturalism report has been debated in four or five locations in Metropolitan Toronto alone, and with some very mixed reactions among the parents -- indeed, among the students as well.

[8:30]

Mr. Foulds: What language is it in?

Mr. Grossman: But I am happy to say that the minister appears to have grasped the problem. I was in the House for his remarks, and they did indicate that he had a good grasp of the problem and how far we have to go to resolve it. I would hope that he would not forget --

Mr. McClellan: A stranglehold.

Mr. Grossman: -- those figure that he quoted with regard to the wishes of the parents. There is also a very great danger that they will feel that the educational system, while attempting to meet their needs, is not in some ways meeting their emotional needs, wants and desires.

With those comments, I would say to the minister that I hope he will keep that in mind and I hope he will make an effort to obtain the minutes, or at least whatever minutes are available of the various meetings held by the group on multiculturalism in the communities through Metropolitan Toronto. It is a complicated issue.

Mr. Grande: Mr. Chairman, I don’t know to whom or to what we owe the pleasure of having the leader of the third party in the House. During the past two or three days, when the Education estimates have been on, he has disappeared as soon as the question period was over.

Mr. Sweeney: Speak for your own party.

Mr. Nixon: It must have been because you were talking, whoever you are.

Mr. Grande: Mr. Chairman, if I may, I would like to return to the basic discussion.

Mr. Nixon: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, does the hon. gentleman object to my taking part in this questioning?

Mr. Grande: None whatsoever.

Mr. Nixon: Oh, that’s good, I just wanted to get that straight.

Mr. Foulds: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, the member for Brant-Oxford-Norfolk might speak on the correct vote, which was debated a day or two ago.

Mr. Nixon: Did you raise the Gillin report then?

Mr. Foulds: Yes.

Mr. Nixon: Oh, the minister didn’t recall it.

Mr. Chairman: The member for Oakwood has the floor.

Mr. Ruston: He hasn’t said anything yet.

Mr. Chairman: If you would be quiet he will.

Mr. Grande: I will this time; listen.

Mr. Riddell: We don’t want to hold our breath.

Mr. Grande: Mr. Chairman, the minister mentioned the multicultural committee that he has established, the internal committee within the ministry. He said it is not a way to stall for time --

Mrs. Campbell: It is infernal not internal.

Mr. Grande: -- but it is a way of gathering up information. Let me remind the minister that in 1972 a lot of people got together, invited by this government, to appear before the government’s so-called “Heritage Ontario” committee. They were asked to tell the government: “This is what we think is important for the students and for the particular ethnic communities in this area.”

Mr. Nixon: That wasn’t the same gang who went to Italy with the Premier (Mr. Davis) was it?

Mr. Grande: I don’t know. At that particular time the ministry responded by setting up the Ontario advisory multicultural council. Two years later, in 1974, we received a report of this multicultural council. In effect, it bore a very dim resemblance to exactly what we were talking about in 1972.

Mr. Mancini: We know why he is on the front bench.

Mr. Grande: Now that the pressure comes from different sources, the minister sets up still another committee to say to the people: “Look, we’re doing something about it.”

Let me respond to what the minister was saying earlier. He said that the “Act allows students speaking another language -- other than English or French -- to use that language to facilitate the learning of English in school.”

The Toronto Board of Education went before the minister 2½ years ago for discussions on this. His response was: “Yes, we will allow it; but before any other programmes of this nature are set up you will need special permission from the minister.” That does not mean that the Education Act allows for these programmes to be set up. I wish the minister would be clear in this area.

The next thing is that we always raise the bogus question of parents wanting their children to speak English. Of course they do. Nobody ever said that they don’t want their children to learn how to speak English and to learn how to speak English well so that they can take every opportunity available to them to improve themselves. That is not the question. The question is, what is the best approach for those children to learn English?

Your comments have completely evaded the question. You mention research and, sure, there is research. Back in the 1930s and 1940s the child who spoke another language was considered to be emotionally and intellectually retarded because he could not acquire the English language as fast as we thought he should acquire it. It was considered that having another language would hinder the child in learning English. Now we’re beyond that.

In the past 10 years research has shown that without any question this approach works. As of 1971, a total of 167 different kinds of bilingual programmes have been set up in the United States both as transitional programmes, using the mother tongue as the language of instruction, and as maintenance. As a matter of fact, the federal government right now is using exactly that approach with our Indian population. In the summer of 1974, your ministry started a special programme for teachers of our native people whom you encouraged, and for that I congratulate you because finally, for the first time, I think you have taken a stand on something.

Hon. Mr. Wells: That’s not the first.

Mr. Grande: Well, all right; in this particular area. If that particular kind of programme is good and you see the rationale behind it, then why is it not applied with other groups? What is your rationale for having set that up -- I think it was at Hamilton Teachers’ College? As a matter of fact, I went down there one day to visit it and I was very I impressed.

Why is it that you’re having difficulty in using the mother tongue of children who happen not to be native people and who happen not to be of French origin and not of English background? Why is it that it works in one area and does not work in another? What is the problem?

I have another point. Probably you got the information from a Toronto Star clipping about a year and a half ago which said that the parents were evenly divided, talking specifically about the General Mercer programme. I was present that particular night and 28 out of 29 parents signed the permission form right there and then. I don’t know where you got the information; perhaps you could check on that.

Let me sum it up. The most important thing that I’ve been trying to say -- that I tried to say yesterday, as a matter of fact -- is that by using the native language of a child, the first language of a child, and by easing that child into the culture and into the English language that child eventually will learn the English language a lot better than he’s doing under the complete English immersion programme. And the evidence shows it. So the research that you’re bringing forward perhaps is slightly out of date.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Let me just add to the debate, first to say that the transitional programmes I was talking about in my remarks do not need ministry approval at this time. That may have been so two years ago but I think at that time we were still feeling our way on the kind of programmes which should be used. At this particular time if the teachers feel this is the approach to take they do not need ministry approval to conduct that kind of programme.

I suppose the only thing is what my friend is saying presupposes that there will be a specific class set up where this will be used. That may not, of course, be the case. It may be that the teacher will use it for some of the students in his or her class; we have to allow for that difference also.

Insofar as our ministry work group is concerned, I want to make it very clear that I had a meeting with the chairman of the Toronto Board of Education -- who I’m sure is a friend of yours and of the Leader of the Opposition -- I guess early in the year. He told me about this report of the work group on multicultural programmes, told me what was happening and asked how we could co-operate.

I indicated the way we could co-operate was by giving them a liaison person -- who is the chairman of our work group -- and liaising with them as they develop their report. That’s exactly what’s going on and I draw to the attention of the House that the final report of their work group isn’t here yet.

To suggest we’re stalling and everybody else is waiting for something to happen -- I guess what I would say in answer to that is we are waiting for the final work group report. The process they are going through is --

Mr. Grande: You have a report.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Is that the final one?

Mr. Grande: Not the last report; the draft report of the multicultural work group. You have a report of the General Mercer programme in your hands and it has been in your hands since last year.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Yes.

Mr. Grande: Right.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I acknowledge that but this goes far beyond the General Mercer programme.

I assured the chairman of the Toronto Board of Education that we would study this report very carefully. Instead of being put in a position of being confronted with a report and then arguing over it, we have a group who are working as this final report is developed so we know what’s in here -- what we might accept, what we might not, what we agree with and what we do not agree with.

I think we are really quibbling over things which don’t need to be quibbled over in this House. Within the general policies which I stated in my remarks -- which may or may not be the same kind of policy my friend is thinking of -- within that general context, we are working toward doing certain things to assist in this particular kind of education in Metropolitan Toronto.

Mr. Grande: I am sorry the minister thinks we are quibbling. Thousands of children out there are not quibbling. Thousands of children are not receiving the best possible education we can give them. All it requires is an organization with which to do it. All it requires is legislation which allows it to get done. Otherwise they will always be left behind academically. Until the culture and the language of the child is taken into account in the curriculum that child is going to be left behind.

Perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the brighter ones will go to the top because after all it has always been that way. The cream always comes to the top. A large number of these children are destined for vocational schools and until the minister moves to rectify that situation it’s going to be that way for a long time.

Mrs. Campbell: I, too, must apologize for not being here to follow through on some of the things which have been said in this particular series of votes. Representing the riding of St. George as I do, a downtown riding, I would have to lend my voice to what has been said concerning this whole question of multicultural teaching in the school system.

[8:45]

As I expressed before, not just this year but in other years, I have had the opportunity to see some of our children in the court system and to see what has happened to them. They have, in fact, been placed in the position of being considered less than average in intelligence when it had nothing to do with basic intelligence at all, but simply with the fact that they were not comprehending because of their difficulties with language.

I certainly have to renew the plea I have made in the past. I do query the kinds of figures which the minister has given, simply because there are two things involved here. The parents, as has been said, want their children to understand English and to be proficient in that language.

I think there are some parents who are concerned about the teaching of English in the way it is taught and in the whole atmosphere of the school system, because it has become divisive in families. I have seen dichotomies between children and their families. I think this is one of the points where parents may not be giving the accurate picture of their concerns and their desires for those children. I think we have to understand that many of them are very angry, because they feel their children are being placed into courses which are not suited to their talents, as they see it, simply because of the language problem.

We have already said earlier today that we feel education is a provincial function. But we in this party are never quite sure any more what we can pass off to the federal government. I understand that we are now looking for more support from the federal government in the French scene before we are going to educate in that area. Perhaps we could turn over the whole of education to the federal government, as we have turned everything else over to them, to let them educate our children as they see fit.

Hon. Mr. Timbrell: Nonsense. Your usual high calibre.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I did not say that I was waiting for money from the federal government in order to implement a French programme. All I was sharing with you, in a very frank manner, was the kind of cost involved in developing a programme. I should think that the members of the Liberal Party would be most concerned about that because they were the ones --

Mrs. Campbell: We are!

Hon. Mr. Wells: -- who were going to cut millions and millions of dollars from the budgets of this province if they had won the election.

Mr. Mancini: Talk on the question.

Mrs. Campbell: Administrative costs, yes.

Mr. Lewis: Oh, come on.

Hon. Mr. Wells: That’s very easily said, but I just think --

Mr. Nixon: It is easily done.

Mrs. Campbell: Easily done.

Mr. Nixon: Do away with your regional offices in one sweep.

Hon. Mr. Wells: The centralized --

An hon. member: What a hypocrite.

Hon. Mr. Wells: My friend, the Leader of the Opposition, says it --

Interjections.

Hon. Mr. Wells: My friend the leader of the third --

Mr. Lewis: But it certainly adds up.

Interjections.

Mr. Chairman: Order, please. Let the minister reply.

Hon. Mr. Wells: My friend, the leader of the third party, is still making the same kind of silly statements he made during the election.

Mr. Mancini: There is your bed partner right over there.

Mr. Good: You didn’t lose 23 seats.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I think that if he had been here for the opening of these estimates, which he wasn’t, he would have heard what I said about the education critic for his party who stood up and all he did was ask us to spend more money. He didn’t suggest where we could save any money, he just said spend more money. Cut out the educational ceilings; spend more money on special education.

I agree. All these things have to be done, but let’s not have all this --

Mr. Gaunt: Oh, you and the NDP make a great pair, I tell you.

Hon. Mr. Wells: -- let’s not talk out of both sides of our months. What I wanted to say to the hon. member for St. George was that I really didn’t want to leave the impression that we would only move in the French language area if we got more money from Ottawa. I just wanted to show you that we are, in fact spending more money than we do receive from Ottawa on French language programmes. That idea that we are getting money from Ottawa and not even spending that on French language programmes is absolutely false.

Mr. Nixon: It just sinks into your regular programme.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I want you to know also that we have gone to Ottawa to ask them if they wish to help in multicultural education. We will have our meetings with them and see whether they are willing to give some funding, but what we do in that area will not be dependent on the money that we get from Ottawa. Sure, it would be nice if we could have it, but if we can’t get it we will still look toward bringing in programmes that we think are necessary and it won’t be dependent on whether we get money from Ottawa or not.

Mr. Chairman: Item 2 carried. On item 3, planning and research.

Mrs. Campbell: Could I have one question on planning and research? I think it is the proper vote. Do I understand that the report of the Lowes committee, which was a research report I think, is now before the Robarts commission? Have I missed something in translation? Was it tabled here?

Hon. Mr. Wells: Yes, it was tabled here and I will be happy to get the member a copy.

Mrs. Campbell: It has gone to the Robarts commission?

Hon. Mr. Wells: Oh, yes, it has gone and we have sent to the Robarts commission all the briefs that were submitted and all the research that was done. Everything has gone to them and they are studying it along with all the other matters they are studying about Metro Toronto. I will see that you are sent a copy so that you have it.

Mr. Chairman: Item 3 carried. On item 4, special education services.

Mr. Godfrey: Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a few remarks, following up my preliminary remarks with regard to the special education services. I wish to speak particularly on children with learning disabilities.

I addressed a question to the Minister of Education previously as to the ratio of funds which were being put into this particular area. As you will recall, sir, during his preliminary remarks he was good enough to point out he was not being simplistic when he pointed out learning disability was not simply a matter of reversals of “p”s and “b”s but actually was a very profound problem which affected a sizable number of our students. I am sure that he is aware that this has been calculated to affect some eight per cent of students in the primary school system who have an involvement and three per cent who have a very severe involvement. Of these children, some 80 per cent are males -- a remark, I am sure, which will gratify my hon. colleague from Beaches-Woodbine (Mrs. Bryden).

Mr. Lewis: We have suspected it all along.

Mr. Godfrey: The point of the figures is to query whether sufficient funds have been made available in the budget for special education services. Indeed, I am surprised to see they are so low. One of the reasons why I query whether sufficient funds are being made available is because I wonder whether these funds will make available throughout the province the necessary diagnostic and assessment type of personnel who can examine these students and determine whether they do have a learning disability. For example, in my riding of Durham West we have very few facilities to examine these children. I rather suspect that bright as the students are in my riding there is about the same percentage of children who suffer from learning disabilities as there are in the ridings downtown.

This assessment and diagnostic service has to be carried out by a specialized group of people, teachers who have had far more experience possibly than the normal grade school teacher has had. The board of education in many centres has been involved in upgrading their teachers with the assistance from the Ministry of Education, but I wonder whether sufficient consideration has been given to this identification of these students. This is particularly apropos following the previous discussion with regard to children with languages other than English. I wonder how competent our educational system is to diagnose that this child’s failure to make proper progress is due to the possibilities of English not being the native tongue or whether it is a learning disability or whether it is a combination of the two.

I’m asking if this is enough money that has been set aside in order for the government to attack this problem with a certain amount of imagination. The imagination lies in the fact that prevention is better than cure, and in the establishment of high-risk identification centres which could look at children in the very early four- and five-year-old range, and possibly identify them as being high-risk children who require special consideration. This consideration could be given at an earlier time, before they’re put into a scheme where they are automatic failures and falling behind their colleagues, and begin developing all of the cost that goes along with that.

My worthy colleague from St. George (Mrs. Campbell) has already referred to the number of children who appear in family court as a result of failure to make normal educational process. I hope the ministry is aware that in setting up this type of high-risk clinic and proper remediation of these children in the earlier grades we can do something toward relieving some of the load that does appear in that particular area.

Not only is it a matter of social cost with regard to the families and the courts, but it's also a matter of dollar cost. If a child is identified as having a learning disability and subsequent to that is given proper remediation, this cuts down on the amount of reworking that has to be done.

What I’m asking in essence, sir, is whether sufficient emphasis is being placed in primary grade examination and remediation in order to prevent this endless dirge we hear of students getting into high school who have difficulty with reading, writing or thesis-type thinking.

Mr. Nixon: They are getting into college too.

Mr. Godfrey: I’m also concerned whether sufficient consideration is given in this budget for the child who eventually is pushed out of the primary school system and into the secondary school system and there begins to fail even more abysmally with even more and greater social consequences. I want to know what steps are being taken to prevent that.

We’ve already discussed earlier in the session the necessity for specialized centres to which some parents are now sending their children in the United States. I wonder whether the Ministry of Education is considering and actively taking part in setting up centres in Ontario which can take care of these children who have this disability.

In sum, I would like to point out several questions which I wish to put to the ministry directly. Is the ministry truly involved in this programme to identify and remediate children with learning disabilities? Is it accepting the enormity of the programme? Does it have a grasp of the problem which is there? If so, is it prepared to fund a proper programme and is it prepared to fight the other ministries in the government in order to make sure adequate funds are available?

I was a little shocked to hear earlier that our powerful Ministry of Education could not raise the $30 million or whatever it was to do something which the minister thought was worthwhile. Surely in this day there are two ministries which must have priority. One of them, of course, is the Ministry of Education. Surely our minister can be as eloquent with his colleagues as he is with us and convince them that these monies should be made available.

Mr. Nixon: That may explain why he is not more successful.

Mr. Godfrey: I would also like to know, if the ministry is concerned about setting up a proper programme, why it has not made funding available to the schools through special funding for learning disability programmes. I also wish to know, in the final question, whether the minister has definite plans for an early identification type of facility which is the key to future cost saving and delivery of educational skills.

Mr. Chairman: Does the minister wish to reply? The hon. member for Kitchener-Wilmot.

Mr. Deans: Is he going to answer?

Mr. Sweeney: Mr. Chairman, I would like to draw the minister’s attention to a couple of specific cases. I would also draw to the minister’s attention that the time we’re talking about is 1975, not a period prior to his administration. The first one is dated May 1, 1975, and it is a statement from the city of Kingston. The mother of an emotionally disturbed 16-year-old youth says it costs $20 a day to keep him in a private institution, while all other youths there receive outside financial help. It goes on and on, but the key part is this one: “The mother said her son Geoffrey was born with a learning disability which evolved into a severe emotional disturbance and behavioural problems.” It finishes where the mother says: “We have an excellent credit rating, but at $20 a day it adds up pretty quickly.” The point being made is that in this particular situation the school system was not able to provide the necessary help.

[9:00]

Another one is dated July 1, 1975; the heading you may recognize: “Convicted youth will end up as a killer, his psychiatrist warns the court.” The story reads as follows:

“According to Toronto psychiatrist Alan Davidson it’s a tragic obituary-like prediction. But it’s one that’s likely to come true, and it’s one that nobody seems capable of changing. Jack was born in September, 1958, one of four children. He began his school career in the conventional fashion; by grade 3, however, he began to fall by the wayside. His reading and writing weren’t up to par. He was, in the school board jargon of the day, a boy with a learning disability.

“Dr. Davidson said that Jack, whose IQ had been computed at between 127 and 135, is gifted but disturbed. The learning disability which meant that Jack was unable to keep up with his classmates threw him in with other slow learners, and brought with it increasing behaviour problems. Another situation where our school system couldn’t help.”

One more, dated July 5, 1975. This is a letter from a mother to the Globe and Mail and about halfway down it reads as follows:

“Unfortunately, because we were so late in finding the learning disability, there was considerable emotional damage done. And even at the dyslexia school in the middle of the second year, he was expelled for misconduct. Now at 14, there is nowhere for him to go. He is not ready emotionally to cope with the normal school system, and there is little else in the Province of Ontario available. Do we have to go to the United States or Britain to get help?”

Who is going to help that poor kid who has just been sentenced to jail? And that was the previous article.

We could go on and on and on with cases like that. As a matter of fact at the present time, in my own riding, there is a young boy by the name of David Bruyn, whose parents participated in that celebrated Ontario Supreme Court case of last May -- that did not directly deal with this ministry, but it should have. That particular case dealt with the Ministry of Community and Social Services, and the result of the Supreme Court case was the decision that that particular ministry was obliged to provide funding to send that 15-year-old boy to a special school in the United States. It costs the mother, a mother raising that family by herself, $13,000 a year to keep that boy there. The Ministry of Community and Social Services is providing $7,000 toward it.

My question is, why does another ministry have to step in and provide service to a child who has a serious learning disability? Why do we have case after case in this province, where the school system is not able to provide help to these children? Why is it necessary right in Toronto for private schools to be set up -- such as the Toronto Learning Centre which in one year quadrupled, from the schools in this city, the number of students that it serves -- I might add at the cost to the parents of $20 an hour.

In this province a significant programme to train teachers to handle children with severe learning disabilities is not provided. Any school system that wants to prepare teachers to do so must send them to the United States or somewhere else. There is not within this province any institution, any school, which can handle this kind of children. They have to go to the United States. At that Supreme Court hearing a representative of the Ministry of Community and Social Services, when asked by the judge if there is any place in the Province of Ontario where this child can get the help he needs, said no.

If there is one way in which this ministry has fallen down and fallen down badly -- and there are specific cases which can be quoted -- it is in the area of providing significant, realistic and helpful assistance to children of this province who have serious learning disabilities.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I would like to say in regard to the particular case my friend mentioned, it has been drawn to my attention that a special education consultant from the Waterloo County Board of Education and someone from one of our regional offices travelled to that school in the United States and observed the programme. The Waterloo county board feels very confident it can have an equally good programme available in Waterloo county with one exception -- the residential component of that school. However, I am told that was not acceptable to the mother and she still felt that even if that was available from the Waterloo county board she would want her son to go to the school in the United States.

Perhaps that illustrates in one way what we don’t have in this province. I wonder if we really want to start developing that kind of facility -- that is, the residential school to provide not only the programme but also a residential facility for that student. I say that at a time when we have been moving away from residential schools for the mentally retarded. We are moving into community facilities in all various areas. The suggestion that perhaps what we need is residential schools for children with special learning disabilities is not one that particularly appeals to me.

I draw it to your attention today because I think it does underline one of the reasons these American schools are perhaps more attractive for people. I don’t dispute that they can serve the purpose. I think they can serve the purpose and provide a good learning environment. I think that environment can be and probably is being duplicated in this province by school boards but not with the residential component. For a lot of parents that is not what they want.

I think one of the real paradoxes or anomalies we find when we get into this particular area is that people decide that certain programmes are the ones needed for their child. Boards which have offered alternative programmes, which feel they have programmes which can help that child, have been turned down by the parents. This has happened.

Let me say further that in the establishment of our special education branch -- which we re-established a couple of years ago -- one of the roles I saw for that branch and which Mr. Clarke, the director, sees for that branch, is to provide, if you will, an ombudsman for people with problems such as the first case you indicated.

Dr. Gord Bergman, who is in charge of that particular section of the branch, is there to help people who feel they can’t find the right facility, the right programme, the right school, the right type of environment for their child with a special problem. We have been doing this and that was part of the reason for re-creating the special education branch in the way it was re-created.

Let me say that the amount of money we are voting here is basically for the special education branch -- the staff who make up that branch; the services they need and the training programme in our schools for the deaf. This $1 million-and-some-odd is not the money which is being spent on special education in this province. Indeed, in 1975 we find that school boards provide special education in self-contained classes to approximately 41,000 students at the elementary level. About another 119,000 were programmed for in withdrawal and resource room instruction, on top of the 41,000 who were in the special classes. Of this number, 23,000 learning disabled children received specialized programmes and services.

At the secondary level, 51,000 exceptional students received individualized instruction, many of whom are classified as learning disabled.

Now in total this means that there are 212,000, or about 10 per cent of the student population in this province, presently being provided with education by about 10,600 specially trained teachers and professional support staff. In 1975, approximately 1,400 teachers enrolled in the ministry’s summer courses in special education.

The reimbursement to school boards for special education is provided through weighting factors. They of course get the normal grants and are allowed the normal ceiling for those students, but then there are weighting factors which generate more money for special education programmes. A total of $31.6 million is being provided in addition to the normal grants in 1975, and a large portion of this expenditure is allotted to the education of children with learning disabilities.

In addition, about $4.5 million is for occupational and technical programmes, plus $1.7 million reimbursement to boards for programmes in psychiatric facilities, group homes and so forth, where the boards provide the teachers to go into those facilities and the total cost is reimbursed by the ministry. This means about $58.4 million over and above the normal grant money that goes to the school boards. Incidentally, that amount of money is not the extra money that they get for the programmes for the mentally retarded, although the mentally retarded group were included in the 212,000 students I mentioned. They are accounted for -- as I am sure my friend knows -- in a special way in the ceiling and budget grant formulae. This is the extra money that special weighting factors generate for special education programmes.

We are also conducting about 25 research programmes in the ministry through the special education branch in the field of autism, blindness, deafness, gifted children, physical handicaps, medical handicaps and children with learning disabilities.

The approach that we take is that the school boards in Ontario have the responsibility for the delivery of services in the special education field. I think, in my dealings with them, most of them are very willing and very capable of doing so. We are trying to provide the support services and the funding and the backup research to assist them to provide programmes for children who need special help.

Of course we have this problem that my friend the member from Waterloo identified, of children who are now going out of the province for programmes. I think I indicated some of the reasons why this is happening. I certainly hope that we arrive at the day when we have programmes here for these children. I think I indicated one of the paradoxical situations or anomalies that will arise. Even when those programmes are available some parents feel these special private schools are somehow superior to any programme the public education system might be able to provide.

Let me just comment for a few minutes on the early identification of children, because I think that’s a very important area. The member for Durham West (Mr. Godfrey) indicated in his remarks -- and I might say that I welcome the member for Durham West to this Legislature. I haven’t had anything to do with him over People or Planes or airports, but we did used to discuss many matters concerning health when I was Minister of Health. He has had a very distinguished career in his particular field of medicine. I think that the area --

Mr. Lewis: Why do you render him to the past tense?

Hon. Mr. Wells: I understand that everybody who comes into this House becomes a full-time politician.

Mr. Lewis: Not everyone.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I hope not, because I know some friends of mine who are patients of his and who would not like to think they couldn’t count upon him as a doctor.

[9:15]

I think the comments he made about early identification are right; the early identification of children with learning disabilities is very vital. We funded an early identification programme in the Windsor school system. It was started in 1971 and it went on up to Aug. 31, 1975. During that time there have been interim reports. We’ve studied these reports and the final report is now being made.

This was a carefully done project to see how an early identification programme could work. The reports will be available for all those concerned in school boards and teachers will be able to read them and see if this programme couldn’t be duplicated or assist programmes they might want to operate in their schools.

The research has been conducted on an assessment procedure to determine a child’s skills in receptive language, auditory association expressive language, mathematical capability and the recognition of colours. This assessment was administered by the class teacher for each child in five-year-old kindergartens in the project at the beginning of the school year, in September. The core of the pattern was the education and assessment by the teacher, but of equal importance were other procedures developed at the same time. The pattern that was developed as a result of this project is now being used in 30 of the Windsor school board schools.

I think that a full reading of this carefully controlled research project may lead many boards to adopt this kind of programme, to make it better and to improve it. Certainly it will put emphasis on early identification, which I think is one area we need to put emphasis on. We’re intending, as a ministry, to make sure that this report and all the information on early identification is disseminated widely to the school boards in this province. A number of boards have already started to conduct early identification programmes.

Mr. Sweeney: Mr. Chairman, may I just respond to a comment the minister made before another question comes up?

Mr. Minister, I accept the fact there are many school systems in this province doing a very fine job in special education. I accept there are quite a large number of children in this province -- I won’t quarrel with your figure of 10 per cent -- who are receiving some form of special education. The point to which I was attempting to direct my remarks concerned those children who could be identified as having severe learning disabilities -- not minimal, not even moderate.

The difficulty is that there are no training facilities in this province to prepare teachers to handle such children. There are no institutions of any kind to handle such children.

In each of the specific cases to which I referred, Mr. Chairman, I have checked with the parents, and they advised me their individual school systems -- and that includes the Waterloo County Public School Board that you referred to -- have admitted they are unable to deal with the specific cases I mentioned. Officials from the Waterloo County system have even said they intend to put a programme into force but it will not be able to look after this particular case.

In each of those cases, the parents have only gone to private education -- whether it’s the Toronto learning centre or the centre in Kingston, or whether it’s in Britain or the United States -- because the local board can’t do it. That’s the area, Mr. Chairman, to which I do not think this ministry has yet addressed itself.

I think there’s one other point that needs clarification. It is only one year ago, Mr. Minister, that you reactivated the special education branch. For the previous five or six years I believe, your ministry did not have a special education branch. I think it says something significant that such a long period of time elapsed before a new branch was set up again in 1974.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Let me just correct the figures. The special education branch as such was phased out in 1972 as the result of a reorganization report and then was reinstituted two years later. That didn’t mean there was any less emphasis on special education; it didn’t mean we were abandoning special education. It meant we had listened to some consultants who said that you shouldn’t create special branches -- and I am sure we have all heard this kind of dialogue before from consultants -- but you should have the people working in the normal delivery service areas; you don’t identify special education as such, but you have someone working in the curriculum branch, in the supervision branch and in your regional offices. That is what we did -- and there was great emphasis on special education. I have to say, though, that that kind of approach doesn’t work.

In order, first of all, to make people aware and confirm that you do have a real interest in a thing, you must have a special branch, a visible branch -- I think what you have said today emphasizes that to me. You need people who can be readily identified by the people they serve in the school system, which is what we have done in our reinstituted special education branch.

Really, the emphasis on this problem has always been an important aspect in the ministry; it has just been a case of how it has been approached. I think the branch is the better way to approach it.

Mr. Lewis: I would like to add a footnote to this discussion, triggered by the observations of the member for Kitchener-Wilmot (Mr. Sweeney), because as I understand the minister’s response to him it is really begging the question.

The matter of residential care for kids whose learning disability has been so inadequately responded to by the school system is something which in one sense shouldn’t be at issue here. The ministry not only falls down in crisis intervention -- all of us understand that; these Bruyn children are driven to residential care because all along the line the educational system has failed them.

Why is it not possible in the Province of Ontario to develop, at the earliest ages and in the earliest years of the elementary system, the kind of identification patterns which my colleague from Durham West talked about and the kind of support services which most of us know to be desirable?

Less than two weeks ago, curiously enough, I met for an evening with a chap named Morgan, Dr. John Morgan, of the Centre for Learning Disabilities at Guelph.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Griffith Morgan.

Mr. Lewis: I am sorry; Dr. Griffith Morgan, at Guelph. As a matter of fact, he is the fellow who spent a lot of time drafting P1-J1, as you well know; he also has a most remarkable background in Wales and in other jurisdictions dealing with special education.

One of the things which quite threw me in conversation with the gentleman was the fact that at the Centre for Learning Disabilities in Guelph they are handling, almost on an emergency basis, 40 or 50 virtual referrals from the surrounding school system which cannot be coped with within the school system.

I thought to myself that the Wellington Board of Education must surely be a pretty sophisticated board. I also wondered why it is necessary to send those cases to a special little group associated with the university, beleaguered, pressed for funds, and working largely on the goodwill and commitment of one extraordinary educator. Why is the system so wanting in substance that even the schools and the administration are sending kids with whom they cannot cope to the university setting? It struck me as a most intriguing commentary on the inadequacy of the elementary school system. It is no pejorative view of the board; it is just what is happening to boards all over Ontario. You have kids with learning disabilities who then have emotional repercussions, and the boards aren’t equipped to cope; that’s a failure of the system.

I am working from memory, but I think I recall that on May 1, 1975, there was a report presented to the trustees of the city of Toronto Board of Education by the special education committee of the board, showing 631 -- I may be three or four out; forgive me for quantifying it -- 631 kids in the elementary and secondary system in the city of Toronto alone for whom no adequate response was given to problems of learning disability primarily and to some extent emotional disturbance as well.

I was flabbergasted that in the board which pretends -- and probably rightly -- to have the broadest spectrum of responses to kids with special problems there were over 130 sliding through the system in a way which every trustee knows to be damaging and harmful to the child. Not only the trustees but every teacher senses it and every teacher is frantic about it because, for the reasons that have been stated, there just isn’t the kind of expertise or the time or the support for teachers in our system to respond to that sort of calamity. And it is a calamity. It is a calamity when 630 kids in one board of education in the middle of 1975 cannot receive sensitive, human response to a serious learning disability which has already been recognized by their teachers, which is already identified and which is now left in limbo.

I want to know what it is about your sacred education system, of which we talk so proudly, that makes it impossible for us to deal with those who are most vulnerable. We deal so well with middle Ontario, to use the term that might fit the Tory party. We deal so badly and so poorly with children who are vulnerable, whether it’s the Wellington Board of Education or the board of education in the city of Toronto.

As long ago, I guess, as 10 years ago, you may recall that the city of Toronto had what was known then as the child adjustment service. It was a perfect commentary on the city of Toronto’s view of children with problems that they called it the child adjustment service. Ten years ago they were still attempting, or they were beginning to attempt, to deal with some of the problems that present themselves now. And today, 1975, there are still kids falling through the sieve of the educational system.

It all comes back to the basic debate we’ve had in this Legislature, God knows how many times. My colleague from Port Arthur (Mr. Foulds) has put to you again and again that as long as you have that financial disparity between secondary expenditures and elementary expenditures and as long as you have a disparity of $515 per student we will never have the investment at the earliest years of the educational system in the primary grades to allow us to do the kind of identification which my colleague from Durham West (Mr. Godfrey) raised with you half an hour or so ago. As long as you are incapable in that ministry of reordering your priorities so that the kids with special problems are identified, responded to and assisted in the early years, then we’re just going to be in this endless aggravating, repetitive situation of coming to your estimates year after year and describing situations in Waterloo, describing situations in Guelph, and describing situations in Toronto, none of them graphic enough ever to get through to the government.

No matter how many case histories we chronicle, we never seem to be able to change it. But we know and you know, because you’re a better than average Minister of Education -- dare I say it? -- that these kids are being damaged for a lifetime and for some reason you’ve never been able to mobilize yourself or education in Ontario sufficiently to respond to them. That’s an indictment of the system far more profound in its implications than this stuff ‘n bother about the three “r’s.”

Mr. Warner: Mr. Chairman, I fully realize that time is of the essence. Yet I cannot sit here and idly watch what is happening and not hear from the minister clearly that for the most part the parameters of our educational philosophy rest with the political boundaries of Ontario and that somehow we have always operated within a vacuum. I wish the ministry would finally acknowledge that fact.

[9:30]

I sat here and listened to the description about the testing that would be done in Windsor -- the trial situation -- and how the experiment would be carried out and reports would be given and how they would consider the reports. I ask the hon. minister if he is not aware of what, in fact, has been done? I’ll just give you one example. In the Province of Manitoba, when they came to grips with early testing for children who had hearing problems, they embarked on a programme where they sent out into every community in the province a mobile band with 28 audiometers and one highly skilled technician. When they arrived at a town, they summoned anyone who was interested in volunteering his or her services. For the most part these were pensioners. In a very quick session, they showed them how to use the audiometers. They then left them the 28 audiometers and went on their way. When they returned two weeks hence, they picked up all of those cases which had had the first diagnosis by the volunteers. That was a screening process, obviously. Then the highly skilled technician put those people through the final testing. Expensive? Obviously not. Community involvement? Obviously; at grass-roots, where it belongs and quite rightly so.

The community knew that their government cares about the young children. That is quite evident. What happened was that children of pre-school age, for the first time, had their hearing problem identified and were ready for a proper programme. Yet none of that has filtered through. We still will have study after study. In the areas of teacher-training, curriculum-development, special education and educational research, we operate within a vacuum.

Finally, I would ask the hon. minister if he is aware of a concept called a programme for every child; a concept which has been adopted by many states in the United States of America. What it does is diagnose preschool age children. It takes the child and a programme is developed that is specially suited to his or her needs, to work with that child through the early formative years. There is a great amount of literature on that programme available, yet none of that, to my knowledge, has filtered through to the Minister of Education. I ask, finally, when will the hon. minister admit to us that this educational system is the inheritance of operating within a vacuum? When will this government come to grips with the fact that there are other people on the face of this earth who know something about education and that we should be listening to them?

Hon. Mr. Wells: I don’t admit that at all. As a matter of fact, we do study and we do listen. If I can be frank again, some of the problems we’ve got into are because educators in this province listened to what was going on in other areas of the continent. One of the examples that most comes to my mind, while it has nothing to do with this particular vote, is the open concept school which was imported from California or some such place to this province and --

Mr. Lewis: We imported a lot from California.

Hon. Mr. Wells: That’s right and we’ve certainly never drawn a wall around this province. I’m pleased to hear things that are happening in the Province of Manitoba. I might tell you that Manitoba and British Columbia take a lot from here. They are now implementing them and the exchange process is very good. We look at what they are doing and they look at what we are doing. We certainly are not unaware --

Interjection.

Mr. MacDonald: They provide the yeast for your loaf.

Hon. Mr. Wells: There are a few things that they hope are going to help win an election for them out there -- as long as everyone remembers that the Minister of Education in British Columbia is a woman.

Mr. Lewis: I don’t quite know what that has to do with it.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I guess my friend, the Leader of the Opposition, was not here for the little exchange the other day when I indicated something about the Minister of Education in British Columbia and one of your colleagues said, “A fine fellow.”

Mr. Lewis: Just shows the absence of sexism.

Hon. Mr. Wells: That’s right. It just happened to be one of your colleagues who writes me letters quite regularly about sexism in the schools.

I was just going to say in answer to what the member for Scarborough-Ellesmere was saying, that we have a programme in this province for all those children who are identified as deaf, pre-school children. Each summer they and their parents come in, if they wish, to one of our schools for the deaf and they stay there for a week. A complete programme is gone through with them as to what services are available, assessment, an explanation of the kind of the teaching that goes on in those schools. The children may not stay in one of those residential schools. They may go into a programme back in the school area where they are living. But they do have the opportunity to come in and have this special introduction to the programmes at the School for the Deaf.

Mr. Chairman: The hon. member for Durham West.

Mr. Godfrey: Mr. Chairman, unfortunately the strictures of time prohibit me from properly acknowledging the pleasant remarks made by the minister in his previous address. However, it will not restrict me from making a few pungent remarks, I hope.

I feel the Ministry of Education is thinking in stereotypes when it talks about institutional settings for children with learning disabilities. I would draw to the minister’s attention the excellent residential programme offered by the Integra Foundation with a camping programme which acts for six weeks during the summer months. During this time children with severe learning handicaps receive an excellent programme of remediation and come back greatly benefitted. That type of imaginative approach has been put up by an organization funded by the Ministry of Health and not by the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Health has picked up something the Ministry of Education has neglected. I am surprised that they are not aware of what is going on there.

This stereotype approach to residential training marks a programme that smacks of the 1940s rather than the 1970s. I feel shocked at the early identification programme which was outlined by the minister. Was he not being a little simplistic in order to communicate? I gather that a series of five or six reasonably simple procedures are carried out on five-year-olds and the child is then identified, tabbed, etc. This will guarantee that we will have another 630 children with learning disabilities in Windsor in the formative years from nine to 12.

Really, I am shocked that this is the flagship of their research programme, that they can say this is an investigation into early identification of children with learning handicaps. Surely the ministry realizes this cannot be done properly by a teacher no matter how highly she is trained. It takes a team of people who can look at concept formation, who can look at whether the child is grasping what it means to learn. I charge that the ministry in setting up that type of tokenism research is fudging the question as to whether it is really interested in learning disability. I am also shocked that all over Ontario they are going to carry on this sort of programme, to see it disseminated to more children throughout the province. This will then cost more money in our future education budgets when possibly another party will be deciding what the education budget should be.

But I would point out to him that the present facilities in the province are not adequate. Otherwise why does this organization I spoke of before -- Integra -- find it necessary to send travelling teams out to each of the major centres throughout the province in order to counsel, in order to teach, in order to see children, in order to do the ombudsman job which isn’t being done by the ministry? Why is it necessary for the Wellesley Hospital in Toronto -- on a medical budget -- to operate a learning disability clinic on Saturday morning in order to take care of 50 children who can’t be handled by the Toronto educational system and who are referred there by the Toronto Board of Education for that type of remediation?

I suggest, sir, that the Ministry of Education is really not considering in fullest detail the problem of children with learning disabilities. This augurs poorly for us in the future, not only in social costs, but also in costs which I suggest the other side of the House understands more effectively -- money costs.

Mr. Chairman: Item 4 agreed to. Item 5, schools for the blind and the deaf.

Mr. Foulds: I must say it is a pleasure for me during these estimates to hear the contributions, such as that by my friend, the member for Durham West, who so clearly defines one of the areas that I have perhaps been fumbling with in the last three or four years.

Mr. Yakabuski: What did he bill OHIP in 1974?

Mr. Lewis: Oh, you are a very nice fellow.

Mr. Yakabuski: No, I am not. I am just like you at most times.

Mr. Lewis: You are a high-quality member. You bring credit to this House.

Mr. Yakabuski: Like your colleagues; $72,000 in 1972.

Mr. Chairman: Order, the member for Port Arthur has the floor.

Mr. Lewis: No wonder you lost 24 seats, and you will lose another 24 next time.

Mr. Yakabuski: No we won’t.

Mr. Lewis: It is thanks to people like you.

Mr. Chairman: Will the member for Port Arthur continue?

Mr. Foulds: Yes.

Mr. Yakabuski: You can’t have it both ways.

Mr. Lewis: You are a man of integrity.

Mr. Foulds: That’s the longest speech you have made in five years.

Mr. Deans: Is he a new member?

Mr. Lewis: And the only one which had a noun and a verb in the right place.

Mr. Yakabuski: That kind of speech we wouldn’t make.

Mr. Foulds: I want to deal very briefly with a subject that I raised when we combined items 4 and 5 last year. It is the business of negotiations between the provincial schools authority and teachers in the schools run by this ministry and other ministries in the province.

It is my understanding that the negotiations are not going as well as we could have hoped -- that there has been a fact-finder called into the situation between the provincial schools authority and the negotiating team. There has been only one week of active meetings -- at the end of August. And since the fact-finder came in, I believe on Oct. 2, and asked both parties to meet regularly, there have been only two meetings. There has been no offer from the provincial schools authority since August.

I put it to you in the strongest terms, and I put it to you this quickly because of the stringencies of time, that if you are going to make Bill 100 work -- and I believe it is Bill 132 that particularly applies to the provincial schools authority -- the ministry must demonstrate bargaining in good faith with its teachers as an example to the board. When those teachers are on the average 15 to 25 per cent behind people in equivalent positions in the top 10 of the boards across the province, it behoves the provincial government to offer something over the federal guidelines and not to stick to that and hide behind that particular federal skirt.

I also think it is rather disturbing that a ministry official would say to a meeting of teachers, I believe at Thistletown, that the government will not lead in terms of an agreement to attract top-flight people to this area of education. As I understand it, the official said: “The ministry will not be innovative; the government will always have to be behind. We are in a meat market and if we can get teachers cheaper, we will.”

I think that is a disgraceful attitude for the provincial ministry to be setting as an example to the boards in the province.

Mr. Nixon: I was interested that the Treasurer (Mr. McKeough) indicated in his list of government employees who don’t come under the civil service aegis, those people employed in the Ross Macdonald School. Are they not considered civil servants, but contract employees?

Hon. Mr. Wells: Yes, just the teachers. The teachers are on a contract, but it is not even a contract the same as the other contract employees of this government. They are on a special teachers’ contract that was devised a few years ago. In order to get teachers into the public service to teach at our schools, it required the same kind of contract as the teachers would have had if they were teaching with a board. They wanted to have the same kind of benefits that teachers have with a board -- in other words, the time they can give their notices of breaking or leaving their contract; two months holiday, study time or whatever you want to call it, in the summer; --

[9:45]

Mr. Nixon: Professional development, if you like.

Hon. Mr. Wells: -- the various things that make them the same as teachers who are employed by a board. There was a study done at the time and the way it was decided this could best be handled was by having them sign a contract with, at that time, the provincial school management committee.

But they are not civil servants and they don’t belong to the association. Now they are in a special category again since that bill we passed here last year. They have full bargaining rights, the right to strike and so forth under the special bill that we passed giving them the same kind of rights as the teachers have under Bill 100.

The other employees at the Ross Macdonald School are all civil servants. All those who are non-teachers there, all the support staff, residential counsellors, any other staff there are civil servants.

I don’t really think that I should comment any further on the negotiations that are going on at present except to say that my only words to our negotiators were to negotiate in good faith under the bill that gave them the rights and powers to enter into those negotiations. I know they’re in the process of having a fact-finder look at the situation and they’re waiting for his report at this time.

Mr. Chairman: Item 5 carried. Item 6, educational programmes and the developmental service centres.

Mr. Ferris: I would like to ask a brief question of the hon. minister since there is a 30 per cent salary increase there. Is there a brief justification of it?

Hon. Mr. Wells: The major portion of that increase, in fact the very major portion, is an adjustment in the salary and fringe benefits for the teachers. That basically covers the group of teachers who are teaching in the developmental centres and that was the revision in their contracts for last year.

Mr. Chairman: Item 6 carried. Item 7, correspondence courses services. Carried. Item 8, teacher education and certification.

Mr. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, just a word on this. Has the ministry given any further consideration to changing the status of the teachers’ professional organization so that they would have a more specific role to play in the certification procedure? Does the minister feel that for the future this responsibility should be retained by the ministry? Or should we be moving, as I believe we should, in upgrading the professional aspects of teachers’ organizations and giving them some direct control over certification, the professional development in service, and the disciplining of the profession and the members within it?

Hon. Mr. Wells: Mr. Chairman, the ministry’s position, and my position at the present time, is that we think that certification should remain with the ministry.

Mr. Nixon: If I may ask further, I believe that that was the position that had flatly been taken in the past. Are there any negotiations going on with the professional organizations toward giving the teachers a more direct control of the certification aspects, as has been given by this House to other professions? We tend to talk about the teaching profession but we treat them in a very paternalistic way, very much the way Egerton Ryerson treated them when he was godfather of education. The present incumbent has retained not only those powers, but it seems to me those attitudes, when we should be striving, as far as we possibly can, to put more responsibility with those people who feel themselves to be professional and whom we tend to call professional when we want to compliment them.

Mr. Yakabuski: Has the situation changed?

Hon. Mr. Wells: I think certainly a case could be made for the very great differences between the so-called self-governing professions, who operate on a fee-for-service basis with the public, and the teaching profession in this province who are employed by public school boards. I really can’t conjure up in my mind any reason why the present system of certification by the ministry is not a satisfactory one.

I might say that the Ontario Teachers’ Federation presented a proposal about a governing council. I indicated that we would set up a group within our ministry to look into their proposal and see the kind of ramifications that it might have, and that is presently going on, but I have to tell you that it is our policy here that we certainly think certification should remain with the ministry.

Mr. Sweeney: A question to the minister with respect to teacher education: Now that the bulk of our teachers are being trained in a university setting rather than under the direct jurisdiction of the ministry, it seems as if -- if I can use the colloquial expression -- the stuff of teaching, the methodology of teaching, is getting some short shrift, and teachers coming out of that particular programme, although well versed in the theory of teaching, are not getting a solid grounding in the methods of teaching.

I recall why that shift took place, and many of us supported it, but I would ask, is there any kind of an ongoing evaluation taking place to determine whether or not the actual quality of teachers coming out of that particular teacher training programme compares favourably with the quality of teachers coming out of the other two teacher institutions which do come under the jurisdiction of the ministry?

Hon. Mr. Wells: As part of the process that we are now going through as a result of the universities taking responsibility for teacher education, except for the one institution that we still have -- OTEC -- and working with the presidents of the universities and the heads of the faculties of education, we have set up a procedure for an evaluation of the teacher training component of the programme at the universities. It is a co-operative evaluation process that involves ministry people, teachers and school board people, and they are charged with reviewing that part of the programme that concerns the practical teacher training part, not the academic part.

Universities, of course, were very leery of somebody coming in to accredit their academic programmes. They said this was not the proper thing to do, but we convinced them that there should be an accreditation of the methodology part of their courses and that is being done at present. Lakehead has been done, we have done our own Ontario Teachers Education College, I think Ottawa University is beginning very shortly, anal over the next three or four years all the faculties of education will have been completed and then the process will start over again.

I think it should also be remembered that each of the faculties of education has an advisory committee to the dean, made up of people from the teachers and school board people in the local area that is served by that particular faculty, to help bring in practical suggestions about how the programme should operate better and suggestions, I am sure like those you have made, about the need for, if it is not there, more practical experience for those people before they come out into the school system.

In other words, what I am saying is that there is a real attempt to evaluate what is going on in these programmes insofar as the teaching methodology component of the programme is concerned.

Mr. Chairman: Item 8 carried.

Item 9, curriculum services? Carried.

Item 10? Carried.

Item 11?

Mrs. Bryden: Vote 2802, item 11, is probably the largest estimate in the entire government estimates -- $1.5 billion for general legislative grants. So I don’t think we can let it go by, because it’s the vote that tells us what proportion of total education costs the provincial government intends to carry and tells the property taxpayer what proportion he is expected to bear. With total education costs running at about $2.5 billion nowadays, this vote of $1.5 billion indicates that the province is carrying about 60 per cent on the average, across the province.

It took quite a long time for our friends opposite to reach that 60 per cent figure, whatever you think of it. Back in 1943, Mr. Drew in the frenzy of an election campaign, about which they know something across the floor there, promised to raise the provincial share from 14 per cent to 50 per cent. But it was many moons and many elections before that figure was reached, finally, 27 years later in 1960. Since then, the proportion has inched up to what appears to be about 60 per cent today.

The first question I would like to ask the minister when he responds in a few minutes is whether we are still at that 60 per cent plateau or whether we are slipping back down from that figure. But I would like to ask him an even more fundamental question and that is whether we should be thinking of moving on and having the province assume a greater proportion of the total educational costs.

We are becoming more and more aware of the regressiveness of the property tax. With the re-assessment that is going on and the artificially inflated values of houses compared to commercial properties, we know the property tax will become even more regressive on the homeowner. We know that a lot of people consider education a general service for the whole province. What is spent on it benefits everybody. It does not benefit them in proportion to the amount of property they own.

A lot of people feel it is very unfair for pensioners who have raised their families, have no children left in school and are living on fixed incomes to have to continue to pay education costs. Education is inevitably a growing cost, partly because it is largely made up of salaries and partly because we want to give good educational service and we have to pay additional fuel costs and building costs. Even with enrolment going down, it will be a rising cost. These are arguments as to why it should not be left on the very narrow and regressive property tax base.

The latest report of the government-appointed committee on the costs of education has come to this conclusion as well. I just want to read one paragraph from their June, 1975, report, which is Interim Report No. 7. They say:

“When expenditures on education increase, the province can decide the additional amount that it will provide from its tax sources. The school boards in the municipalities are left to absorb the residual amount of any increase out of a single, largely inflexible, source -- the property tax. The fact that for many persons the level of taxation on their homes has already reached the point where real hardship is created adds to the inflexibility of the property tax as a source of revenue. While the financial demands on the provincial government are of considerable magnitude, it has a greater variety of tax sources available to it than school boards and municipalities. At the same time, the province’s sources are more buoyant and less regressive than the property tax.”

That’s on page 31 of the report.

[10:00]

The committee does go on to suggest that the 60 per cent share should be increased to 66⅔ per cent. They don’t quite say where they found that figure; whether they plucked it out of the air. Our party has been advocating for quite a while that we should go much further than that; that we should go at least to 80 per cent on a staged basis of five per cent a year for the next four years, and that we should then review the situation and probably go on to take over educational costs entirely by the province.

I know the minister will say, “What are you going to do about local autonomy if all of the money comes from the province?” I think in this sort of staged programme of five per cent a year there will be ample time for us to work out new methods of community involvement, of global budgets, with freedom within those budgets for community groups and boards of education to spend the money that is available, and I think there will still be local autonomy. Anyway, I think we will have time to work out those problems.

I can hear the minister probably saying, “What you are suggesting is going to be very expensive. You are suggesting that we are going to add several hundreds of millions of dollars to that deficit which is already causing our credit rating to tremble.” I am not suggesting that he bring in a supplementary estimate adding to that deficit. What I am suggesting is that he start planning now for the next budget, which is less than six months away, I would imagine, and plan a shift in educational financing from the hard-pressed property-taxpayer to the provincial revenue sources which are, as this report said, much broader, much more buoyant.

I want a shift which will be to the pools of wealth that are not being taxed in this province. Back in 1971, our leader went through some of these suggested areas that are being under-taxed, and I will run through them again to remind the minister of where he might find the money. I want to suggest, however, that we are not proposing an increase in the total educational spending in this province. We are simply suggesting that it be shifted as to who pays for it. It will be an increase in fairness, it will be an increase in equity, but it will not be a tremendous increase in the budget deficit, because we will add, on the revenue side, additional funds to cover the additional provincial share.

The sort of sources that he should be looking at for financing this shift are the resource taxes. We are still getting only four to five per cent of the gross value of mineral production in this province back in taxes. In 1974, over $2.4 billion was obtained in production in this province from mineral resources. The tax estimate from the mines profit tax for 1975-1976, and it probably covers the profits for that previous year, is estimated at only $100 million. The increases in the nominal rates, which were brought in in the last budget with a great fanfare, appear to have been offset by increases in processing allowances and in exempt income, so that we haven’t really started to tap resource wealth.

Second, there is an excess profits tax, which the provincial Treasurer (Mr. McKeough) said he possibly might consider if the federal government didn’t move into this field. I suggest that he should move into it right away, because $290 million of profits for Imperial Oil is certainly wealth that is not being tapped in this province.

Then there is the tax room vacated by the federal tax cuts on processing industries and manufacturing industries. These cuts were intended to increase jobs but they appear in many cases to have simply increased profits. The province could move in and pick up some of that vacated tax room.

Fourth, of course, there is the other half of the capital gains tax. We have been advocating for quite a long time that there should be 100 per cent of capital gains taxed rather than 50 per cent, on the ground that a buck is a buck, as the Carter report suggested.

The provincial income tax in this province is the second lowest in the country. I am not suggesting that everybody in this province should pay more income tax. What I am suggesting is that the people at the upper levels should pay more and that we should have further tax credits to offset any increase in the income tax in the lower and middle levels. Under the federal-provincial tax collection arrangements for income tax we can’t have a graduated income tax in the province, but we can have an increase in the present percentage and a tax credit to offset it and more or less nullify the increase for the lower and middle groups.

Finally, the minister could consider putting to work the 183,000 people who are out of work, and increase his gross provincial product and his tax base that way. So I don’t think the minister can plead that we cannot move away from that 60 per cent plateau because the money is not there. It is simply that this government is afraid to touch the pools of wealth that are very evident in this province. If you look around, you can see evidences of great wealth and great poverty side by side with it.

Mr. Laughren: You can tax wealth as well as incomes.

Mrs. Bryden: This is what we are suggesting you should consider -- this step in tax reform as part of the educational budget next time.

Mr. Laughren: You really should listen.

Mr. Nixon: Mr. Chairman, I don’t know whether the minister is going to respond to that programme or not. It has been discussed here, of course, for many years. I know the hon. member for Beaches-Woodbine has heard the debates and normally the minister waits until he is in another forum until he talks about the disastrous consequences of paying 80 per cent of the costs of education from our provincial Treasury. He never seems to understand, as the hon. member has explained once again in this House, so effectively, that it is a fairer balance of the imposition of taxation and relieving the property owners of that additional burden. It is always difficult to get the minister even to fairly consider those alternatives, but he and I both know the exigencies that sometimes prevail in this regard.

Our position has been, of course, for a phased movement toward the 80 per cent of the costs of education. Perhaps we are not so sanguine that these costs can be so readily met by those untapped pools of resources lying around. It is always the well-to-do rather than the individuals to whom you are speaking; it is always the resource industries far away from the people to whom you are talking who can pay these bills, but essentially, I believe, as the hon. member has indicated -- and also as has been indicated, at least in part, by the Committee on the Costs of Education, which has given, I believe, its final report -- or does it have one more?

Hon. Mr. Wells: It has two more.

Mr. Nixon: It is probably its accounting which is still to come. It is interesting, Mr. Chairman, and you are aware of it, of course, that it was just before the 1971 election that the then newly ensconced Premier (Mr. Davis) decided we should have a Committee on the Costs of Education, and this committee has been working all these years since. There has not been much attention paid to its findings but at least it took a bit of the heat off before the 1971 election. Before this election, you may recall, Mr. Chairman -- and I see you glancing at the clock -- the Premier appointed another committee having to do with the costs of government. We saw the headlines at the time they were appointed but we haven’t heard a damn thing from them since, because I don’t really believe they are very much concerned with the costs of anything over there.

On this particular vote, what are we spending -- $1.5 billion? Of course, we want to finish this in the next two or three minutes so we are very much concerned with the cost of education. The minister is, I know he is.

We have a programme from the spokesman for the NDP by which we can pay for 80 per cent of the cost of education without hurting anybody or without affecting the costs the rest of us pay. It is not a simple matter and we all know it. But I do believe, along with the member for Beaches-Woodbine (Mrs. Bryden), that the province must move on a phased basis to assuming 80 per cent of these costs. It won’t be easy to do but it will be an adjustment of the tax balance between the province and the municipalities and it would be certainly in the direction of fairness.

I wanted to mention one thing. I was really interested in the rather off-handed way the Minister of Education sort of pooh-poohed the open concept in education. It’s a concept which has been accepted by a number of school boards which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in providing new facilities in the open concept scheme on the understanding that the research experts down here somewhere thought it was a great idea.

I would recall to your mind, Mr. Chairman, and to the Minister of Education -- I am sure you are both aware of this -- that the board of education in the county of Brant undertook some elaborate investigation and made a policy decision four or five years ago that all their schools were going to be open concept. They have built them on that basis.

It really appals me when I hear complaints coming from parents about the inadequacies of those facilities to realize that the Minister of Education, with all the millions of dollars of research, communications and public relations available to him and his platoons of experts didn’t get around to saying to the people in Brantford, “Maybe you shouldn’t do this.” Without telling them what to do in any way the minister almost treats the open concept as something preposterous, a joke imported, as he says, from California or somewhere. It is one of the ideas which has come from that other jurisdiction which has so frequently led us astray in education.

I will tell you it is here. It is not just the taxpayers in Brant and Brantford who have been paying the dollars for those schools. It is all of us as taxpayers; not just in Brant, but even in Scarborough where the Minister of Education was chairman of the board. You were building open concept schools in those balmy days. If not you, it was your immediate predecessor or successor; both of them fine people.

It really amazes me when we look at this thing. We are close to a bottom line where we number the allocation in billions of dollars and it is still sort of run like the old Scarborough hot stove league. The educationalists sit around chewing gum and saying, “What are we going to do tonight?”

It really amazes me with a matter like this. The open concept school sounds so great. There have been so many treatises written and printed. There have been so many professional development days when unnumbered groups of teachers have sat around in school rooms and solemnly told each other about the importance of these facilities -- while school itself did not go on -- and the minister gives it this off-hand, “Nobody in their right mind supports that concept.”

It really worries me. If there is one thing we are prepared to support it is dollars for education research. Over here, the vote went without any discussion really at all. But we must realize that the research has to have some practical emanation. You read the titles of the papers which come out of OISE and you wonder. It is adding to the sum total of knowledge in the universe which somebody told me is unfolding as it should but I am darned if I can see any direct application of usefulness of most of that material in the practical emanation and development of an education system which is going to be significant or useful.

We are spending a lot of money on things which actually should be directed on the basis of research we can have confidence in. If I may be allowed to use the phrase, I don’t have confidence in either the research or the communication of the findings of that research to the people who are spending the money.

[10:15]

Hon. Mr. Wells: I want to make a comment, but I thought that there were some other comments. I just want to say before I make my general comments that I’m sorry if the leader of the third party took it that I was in some way downgrading the open concept. I was merely indicating -- and certainly he must be aware -- that there are those who question it today.

Mr. Nixon: Are you one of them?

Hon. Mr. Wells: No. I am not one who questions it in its totality. I do think that at one point in time it was perhaps adopted as the cure-all, end-all and be-all in education, which it should not have been.

Mr. Nixon: It is like new math and the other things you and your predecessor have been shoving at us.

Hon. Mr. Wells: It has a place. With teachers who believe in it and feel they can operate and are in that type of environment and are committed to it, it serves well if students find that --

Mrs. Campbell: It has its place.

Hon. Mr. Wells: -- they can adapt to it. There are others that find the total open-concept school is not for them. I think we have developed since those years when it was brought in in its original form. We have developed forms unique to this province that I think better suit our needs now than some of the very open schools that were opened six, seven or eight years ago. However, given the right teachers, teachers who are committed to that kind of programme, those programmes in those schools are going on well.

Mr. Nixon: The right teachers can educate in any circumstances.

Hon. Mr. Wells: It has to be remembered it is an architectural form and it’s the kind of teacher and the kind of learning that goes on that counts. That kind of good learning, excellent learning, can go on in an open-concept school or a traditional-type classroom just as well.

Mr. Nixon: It can go on in a barn.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Yes, and in a barn.

Mr. Bain: I would like to address myself to one aspect of the administration that I suppose, in part, has emanated from some of the changes that have occurred with the implementation of school boards on a regional basis. One of the things that I think is most lacking with regional school boards is the personal touch. With Nov. 11 approaching again, we see this personal touch lacking.

I have had, in the last few days, a number of constituents who came to me to ask me why the Minister of Education is allowing schools to have a holiday on November 10 for the convenience of a long weekend. Because time is passing quickly, I would only like to know from the minister what his plans are to persuade school boards to observe Nov. 11 on the 11th because of its significance to us as a democracy and because of the great sacrifices that were made by our veterans. We have taken the easy route in the case of Remembrance Day. For many students, Remembrance Day is not fully appreciated. Therefore we have said we will give the holiday and it can be taken on whatever day the school board chooses to take it. In fact, in September, 1974, one regional school board in southwestern Ontario had Remembrance Day in September so the students could help harvest the tobacco crop.

This may be a very functional use of the day, but I think it’s a complete distortion of what the day should be. Could the hon. minister tell us how he is going to attempt to rekindle the meaning that Remembrance Day should have for us, so that we can observe it in the proper fashion in which it should be observed so that we can soberly reflect on the contribution that was made, and on the liberties we enjoy because of that sacrifice?

Hon. Mr. Wells: Mr. Chairman, I would welcome the opportunity to send to my friend the documents which we have sent out to school boards this year -- elementary and secondary -- urging them to celebrate, to commemorate, to recognize Remembrance Day in a fitting way. We’ve sent curriculum helps, which I think are excellent. They have been prepared by our ministry and various other people and they have gone out -- as I emphasized -- to both the elementary and the secondary schools.

It has long been my feeling that we could develop a much better appreciation of what Remembrance Day is all about in a total sense if there was not a holiday on Nov. 11. A few years ago, we, in the name of local autonomy, freed up the school year and gave a lot of local autonomy to local school boards. One of the things that we did was allow them to shift the holiday that is held on Nov. 11.

You say that Remembrance Day was celebrated in September. It was not Remembrance Day that board celebrated in September. A holiday was held in September for another purpose. Remembrance Day is only celebrated on Nov. 11, and that school board decided that it would have programmes in its schools on Nov. 11 rather than have a holiday.

Let’s remember that Nov. 11 is not a national holiday in this country. It is a holiday in which public buildings -- federal government, provincial government and I believe banks -- are closed, but it is not a general national holiday such as July 1.

I believe that in the name of local autonomy and in the name of letting local people decide the kind of things that they want in their communities and in their schools, it makes good sense to allow a school board to have some other time as a holiday and have Nov. 11 celebrated in their schools. If the community doesn’t approve of that and really wants a holiday, they can have that holiday by asking their local school board to put the holiday on Nov. 11.

Believe me, I am one who believes there is great significance for our young people in attending some kind of commemorative service that relates what went on in previous wars and the sacrifices made with the kind of things that have to go on in a democratic society today. There is great merit in the kind of service that can be held.

I think that there is a holiday on Nov. 11 -- most of our young people find that they don’t get that kind of service unless the school has held the service the day before -- which I had hoped they would do.

Mr. Sweeney: In 1975 in an attempt to close somewhat the gap between the ceilings for elementary school students and secondary school students your ministry added an additional $80 to the elementary school ceiling. When questioned on this you observed among other things that you hoped this $80 would be used for such things as reducing the pupil-teacher ratio in the elementary schools. I believe that you particularly alluded to reducing the ratio in the primary division.

I would point out to you that unfortunately this was one of those situations where the right hand of the ministry and the left hand of the ministry didn’t know what the other was doing. A number of school boards picked up that point that you made rather happily.

If I can give a specific example: Let us assume that there is a school system with 20,000 elementary school students -- and that’s about average for this province. The $80 additional ceiling, if it were applied, would produce $1.6 million and if we are talking of average teacher salaries in the neighbourhood of $10,000 to $12,000, that board would be able to -- using those dollars for that purpose -- hire an additional 133 teachers and thus reduce the ratio.

The difficulty is that they would also have to have 133 additional classrooms in which to put those children and to put those teachers. But your ministry, at least the plant approval branch of your ministry, has a very rigid guideline which says that you need 35 students in order to build another classroom. From time to time that figure is flexible. It can go as low as 32 or 31, but it can’t go anywhere near the kind of space requirement that would make possible the reduction in the ratio for, let’s say, even the primary division.

The point I am trying to make, and I would like you to respond to it, is that on the one hand you quite rightfully supplied additional funds that would do something that I think every elementary school board in this province would dearly love to do. That is, reduce the ratio of its primary grades. But your plant approval branch simply doesn’t make this possible. I find that, as I talk to some of my people, that there is a very large credibility gap to determine whether or not the minister really meant what he said.

Mr. Chairman: Shall item 11 carry?

Mrs. Campbell: Wait a minute. Why don’t you let him handle it?

Hon. Mr. Wells: I certainly did mean what I said, but I want to tell my friend that I did not mean and I never said and I don’t think I have ever said at any meeting with schools boards or others that in encouraging the use of that money to reduce, for instance, pupil-teacher ratios, if a board so desired, we intended that there be massive building programmes in this province.

Surely, with the numbers decreasing the way they are in the elementary schools insofar as enrolment is concerned, with the number of unused classrooms around this province reported to me, these kinds of improvements can be made by school boards without building. I have to tell him that there is no intention of approving massive building programmes to allow pupil-teacher ratios to reduce in this manner and there never was when we developed the programme.

We believe that the enrichment and encouragement of better programmes in the first six years of the elementary school is going to have to be done within the context of schools which have been built. The only exceptions, of course, are in growing areas where new schools are going to have to be built or in the areas where population is increasing and where additions are going to have to be put on.

It was never our intention that there be building of additional classrooms, to add them to lower the pupil-teacher ratio in the schools. There is no way that I can see that happening in the next few years in this province.

Mrs. Bryden: I wanted to ask the minister if he could provide us with the figure of what percentage the province is carrying in 1974. I don’t think the figures are published yet but does he have them? If not, could he get them for us?

Hon. Mr. Wells: I am sorry, the figure -- do you mean the percentage of education costs we are paying?

Mrs. Bryden: Yes.

Hon. Mr. Wells: Yes, the figure is about -- the 1974 estimate is 60.01 per cent. That is pretty close.

Mrs. Bryden: Thank you.

Hon. Mr. Wells: That’s an estimate. I hope when the final figure comes out it will be pretty close. I might say that our aim, based on these estimates, is to maintain that figure of 60 per cent.

Perhaps I could comment on what my friend has said. The policy of the government at the present time is to maintain 60 per cent average support of education across the province. We are not thinking of increasing our share. I realize all the arguments put forward in committee on the cost of education, about increasing the share the provincial government pays and reducing the share the property tax bears. However, they do suggest only a 6⅔ per cent increase, which really isn’t that great -- nothing like the 80 per cent your party has suggested. Or did you suggest 100 per cent?

Mrs. Bryden: We are working towards that.

Hon. Mr. Wells: You are working toward 100 per cent and our friends in the Liberal Party suggested 80 per cent. I am going from memory but I think there are pages in that report which deal with the whole issue of local autonomy. While we can all stand here and say you don’t take local autonomy away, if we supply all the money -- and we have these great tax sources sitting there -- it is just a transfer of taxes from one area to another.

I am not going to deal with that for a minute but on the whole area of local autonomy I submit to you that if the provincial government paid 100 per cent of the cost, the local autonomy of school boards would vanish within a few years. There would be no open-ended contract. I don’t care what party was in power -- no party in this province would give an open-ended contract to school boards. They would say, “This is the money you will get” period. If you are paying 100 per cent, there is no way you could have any local levy and I submit that autonomy would completely vanish, much more so than it has at present.

Mrs. Bryden: What about the hospital boards?

Mr. Deans: Autonomy and money are not necessarily the same.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I submit he who pays the tune calls the shot.

Mr. Nixon: With your ceilings you don’t allow local levy anyway. That’s why we object to your ceiling policy.

Hon. Mr. Wells: I suggest to you that would play a very big role. An even more important consideration, I think, is that it is not as simple as shifting from here over to there and taking these great sources which, of course, I don’t admit and I am I sure my friend, the Treasurer (Mr. McKeough) will not admit --

Mr. Foulds: He wouldn’t.

[10:30]

Hon. Mr. Wells: -- are just out there waiting to be taxed. There is one more important thing we would have to come to grips with first and foremost and that is are we going to put ceilings on municipal tax spending? In the years that we’ve come up to the 60 per cent level, we have made some pretty significant contributions to change the percentage rate. In so doing three or four years ago, we actually reduced the property tax people were paying on education. And yet, in an area like Burlington, the people who paid the tax never saw that reduction. It was gobbled up by the municipal people; they were just desperately waiting to gobble that up.

Mr. Deans: You always told us --

Hon. Mr. Wells: What’s going to happen if you assume 80 per cent at a cost of an additional $530 million out of the provincial budget, or whatever you have, and then find that you’ve not even reduced the property tax for those people out there who are paying the tax, because the municipalities now are taking that $530 million for themselves?

Mr. Chairman: I must remind the committee that we have reached the time for adjournment. Is there going to be further discussion on these estimates?

Items 11 to 13, inclusive, carried.

Vote 2802 agreed to.

Mr. Chairman: This completes the estimates of the Ministry of Education.

Mr. Deans: Just wait until next year.

Hon. Mr. Brunelle moved 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 it has reached certain resolutions and asks for leave to sit again.

Report agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Brunelle: Mr. Speaker, before I move the adjournment of the House, may I indicate that on Thursday there will be legislation as indicated on the order paper?

Hon. Mr. Brunelle moved the adjournment of the House.

Motion agreed to.

The House adjourned at 10:35 p.m.