The House resumed at 8:01 p.m.

BUDGET DEBATE (CONTINUED)

Resuming the adjourned debate on the amendment to the motion that this House approves in general the budgetary policy of the government.

Mr. Nixon: Mr. Speaker, the word must have got out that I was going to address the assembly tonight. Nevertheless, I am bold enough to proceed knowing of your great interest in matters of public concern, particularly those associated with the budget.

Before I turn my attention to those matters specifically I thought I would give you my views on an event that happened in the House some days ago. It was at the conclusion of the great Confederation debate. The leader of the NDP (Mr. Cassidy), my colleague and good friend the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. S. Smith), and the Premier (Mr. Davis), had just concluded their remarks when a group in each of the galleries, as you may recall, stood up and started berating the members and throwing tracts at us. They were subsequently identified as supporters of the Marxist-Leninist society, whatever that is, and they were trying to convince us that we were somehow blackmailing the province of Quebec by urging that province to stay in Confederation.

Without commenting about their point of view, it brought to my attention the fact that they could have been throwing anything else from the galleries. Many of us think about this from time to time, as far as the security of this House is concerned. Obviously, tonight, we are very secure indeed since you and I, Mr. Speaker, are almost alone except for a coterie of our close friends.

Obviously, Mr. Speaker, you and those who share your responsibilities in the chair have to give some thought to this. I, for one, would be very unwilling to place the heavy restrictions on admission to our galleries that are found in certain other Houses such as the Parliament at Westminster and even in Ottawa. I suppose the members there, and the governments in those jurisdictions are far more vulnerable than we are, since they are dealing with matters of world moment. The thing is, however, that there are nuts in almost every collection of individuals. You never know when they are going to stop throwing tracts and start throwing something else.

It really did occur to me, however, that one of the steps we should be taking is perhaps to set up a somewhat more formal organization. The responsibility lies directly with you, Mr. Speaker, and with those in our force of security guards who do their best to assist us and you in maintaining order in our galleries. The rules are very strict that people are not to be searched, and I don’t think those rules should be changed, although the guards have to use their discretion, of course. But I do feel someone who is closely associated with what goes on in this chamber on a day to day, hour to hour basis, might very well have conferred on him some additional responsibility.

I am referring to our Sergeant at Arms, who does an excellent job in leading your procession into the House each day, Mr. Speaker. Although he has not been put to the test of drawing his sword in order to usher any of us as individuals out of the chamber, I have a feeling, if called upon to do so, he could not only draw it, but run us through if on your command that became necessary in order to keep some semblance of order in this chamber.

I quite seriously suggest to you, sir, as is done in other jurisdictions, we might very well ask Mr. Stelling to add to his duties the supervision of the security in this chamber and the environs closely associated with it.

Mr. Breithaupt: The precincts.

Mr. Nixon: My colleague from Kitchener advises me “precincts” is a better word, although in South Dumfries we prefer “environs.”

I would say to you, Mr. Speaker, that this would be a suitable distribution of authority from yourself since many things have devolved in recent years on the Office of the Speaker. While we have assistance of a very high order and quality to advise on all matters pertaining to the rules and the business of the House, financial and otherwise, I believe we might very well call upon an official whom we know, in whom we have confidence, who is close to us here and who really knows some of the pressures, some of the boredom, some of the tedium that devolves upon us.

I put this as a suggestion to you and I intend to write to you, Mr. Speaker, in this connection because I think it is an alternative we should consider. There is no easy solution towards safeguarding our precious existence as members of the House. There has been nothing other than a mild embarrassment from time to time from the galleries. We would hope that continues to be the case. Yet I would suggest we take some thought as to the preservation of proper order in the galleries and I think our Sergeant at Arms could perform that duty very well indeed. I am very impressed with his capabilities and I hope this is something that you, Mr. Speaker, and those who are advising you might take under consideration.

This is a budget debate. I have in my hand the Ontario budget 1980 as delivered by the Treasurer (Mr. F. S. Miller) on April 22. I want to deal with it rather briefly since there are two or three matters of specific importance from my own area of the province I also want to bring to the attention of the House. One of the things that has concerned me has been the attitude of the government of the day to shine up its halo as it goes about the province and says, “Look what we are able to do for all of you taxpayers with no new taxes whatsoever.”

I am glad to see that my good friend who lost the vote in the Legislature this afternoon, the member for Chatham-Kent (Mr. Watson), is applauding what the government is doing. He might very well do that since he is one of the back-benchers with expectations.

Interjections.

Mr. Nixon: Well, vain hopes, let us say. He will probably be the shortest-lived minister in the history of 37 years of Toryism if he ever makes it. As a matter of fact, one step back and he is right out the door.

I do feel that if the government is going to be fair, which it prides itself on from time to time, then in the same breath as it says this budget includes no new taxes, it should inform the taxpayers that the deficit was increased from $600 million to approximately $1 billion.

I don’t think it takes much ability or perspicacity to keep the tax level constant if the government is going to increase the debt by about 44 per cent. This is somehow a matter that does not gain emphasis in the press releases that are sent out in great number and at great expense by the Treasurer and those who like to support him. It seems to me that if any kind of a candy store were run that way, it would be in bankruptcy tomorrow. If the owners were to advertise their ability that way, the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations (Mr. Drea), who has not been with us now for several days, would have them arrested and thrown into jail for false advertising because false advertising is exactly what the birds over there are guilty of.

8:10 p.m.

I want to look briefly at the page in the budget tables that always interests me more than anything else. It is entitled “Ten-Year Review.” It is on page 32, table C-13. I have one regret: that with the passage of time, that famous year 1970-71 has now dropped off the beginning of the table. It begins with 1971-72. I regret that because 1970-71 was the last year in which the province balanced its books and actually had a small surplus.

Those who are the grey-haired contingent in the Tory party, which is most of those members -- those who have any hair to brag about at all -- remember that is the last year that John Robarts was minding the candy store. We had balanced books and a small surplus. It was almost like a Liberal budget, although we did not describe it that way at the time.

Hon. Mr. Maeck: Who ever heard of a Liberal budget in Ontario?

Mr. Nixon: There have been Liberal budgets. I think the last one amounted to $85 million. It was in great shape -- balanced too.

I regret there is not a single balanced budget in the 10-year review. I am just looking at the right-hand end and the funded estimate for 1980 is $16,195,000,000, excluding Ontario Hydro.

I thought perhaps some of those less-positive figures should at least be brought to the attention of the public who are hanging on my words here tonight. Otherwise it is possible that not very many people would be aware that the great Tory management of our affairs has resulted not only in the debt of $16 billion, but as I turn back to another table on page 21, that debt is serviced by an interest payment this year expected to be $1.614 billion. Using old-fashioned arithmetic of a conservative variety, that means that in interest payments alone we are paying $4 million a day, every day; Christmas Day, the birthday of the Minister of Revenue, every day of the year we are paying out $4 million.

It really is shameful, particularly since the former Treasurer in the dying gasps of his incumbency was talking about and moving towards a balanced budget, I believe Darcy McKeough believed that. Now that he is running Consumers’ Gas, I hope he is doing a better job there than he did here.

Mr. Watson: Union Gas, Bob.

Mr. Nixon: Right, Union Gas.

Mr. Makarchuk: He can’t stand the word union.

Mr. Nixon: The only union that appalls me is the one between the NDP and the Tories. That is what is keeping this government in office for so long.

I have heard of the perfect union but that is not an imperfect one, it is an indecent one. There should be an 11th commandment against that.

I notice, by the way, the former Treasurer is now on the board of Noranda.

Hon. Mr. Maeck: They are keeping an opening for me.

Mr. Nixon: Yes, the Minister of Revenue indicates the seat is being kept warm for him when he passes on to greater things.

I suppose we can’t blame Darcy McKeough for the sum total of this serious mismanagement, but there it is.

I mentioned that the debt of $16 billion excludes Hydro. Down at the bottom in rather small print there is a special column assigned to Ontario Hydro. The first column is United States borrowing on behalf of Ontario Hydro and in 1979-80, which is the last year for which the figure is available, that is $3.782 billion. In addition to that, there is a contingent liability, In brackets “mainly Ontario Hydro,” and that is $6.692 billion. The last year for which that figure is available is 1978. The last two have an “N/A” meaning not available. I do not know why the devil they are not available from Ontario Hydro, but they are not. If we add those two figures together, there is a $10-billion debt associated with Hydro, and that is a conservative estimate of the sum total of all that is owed on behalf of Ontario.

I have the report of Ontario Hydro here. It is a very fine document indeed, well printed, in four colours, with a picture of the new chairman, Hugh L. Macaulay, and a very informal picture of the present board. Those of you who have looked at the report will see that the most dramatic and imposing member of the board of directors is the former Minister of Agriculture, who is prominently situated in the group, pointing with pride to a model of one of the developments.

But the report begins with an interview with the new chairman of Hydro, who is now already defending the situation in Hydro.

The reason it was brought to my attention is that it is very difficult to determine from the figures given to us from the official annual report of Hydro exactly what its indebtedness is. I am hard put, in fact, I cannot find figures in the report of Ontario Hydro that add up to the same numbers in the Ontario budget. The big numbers tend to be, if not concealed, let us say difficult to find in the report.

They have, however, as of 1979, the total principal outstanding in bonds and notes payable of $11,206,395,000. The reason I was concerned about that is that in the question period today the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. S. Smith), the next Premier of Ontario, was questioning the present incumbent of that office about his comments having to do with wage and price. Of course, the Premier (Mr. Davis) does not use the word “control.” What did be say? Review or --

Mr. Roy: Restraint.

Mr. Nixon: Restraint, yes. The Leader of the Opposition asked, “If you are so keen about restraint, why don’t you do something about Hydro?” The Premier, in high dudgeon, came back and said, “You don’t understand that many of these costs are fixed, and we have to produce power at cost” One of the biggest costs is paying the interest on the hundreds of millions, in fact, billions of dollars that Ontario Hydro has borrowed in New York. That is why the rates are going up. They are 16 per cent right now.

The question was, if the rates are going up, why are they going up the same amount for the farm consumers as for the urban consumers? The Premier, on the very day the galleries were full of farmers here to listen to the debate on the resolution from my colleague from Grey (Mr. McKessock) about the farm problems, got up and announced that he was going to equalize the costs of power between the urban and the rural parts of the province. The Premier was very surprised to learn from the opposition that the rural rates are the highest in Canada west of New Brunswick, and we all know in New Brunswick they make all their electricity from oil.

We have the advantages of a very elaborate and expensive atomic development and, of course, the natural resource of the hydraulic developments that have been the basis of the production of power here for years. it is only by virtue of very bad management and incredibly bad decisions that we have got to the point that the costs of our power in the rural areas are as high as or higher than almost anywhere else in Canada.

But my colleague the leader of the Liberal Party, indicating that at least the Premier, if he was so concerned with the containment of the inflationary process, should do something about Hydro -- they are asking for 16 per cent more this year which is well above the inflation rate -- was quick to point out that the costs of servicing that debt are associated with the overdevelopment of electrical energy that has been the hallmark of the bad decisions made by Ontario Hydro for the last decade.

8:20 p.m.

It is interesting to note that in the very peak draw, the consumption of electrical energy for the year 1979, we required, when all the factories were going full tilt -- it was the time of day when electrical heat was turned on in very cold weather and the housekeepers had the stoves all on high -- the draw was about 16,000 megawatts. At that very time, Ontario Hydro was capable of producing 25,000 megawatts.

Mr. J. Reed: The worst mismanagement in the history of Ontario.

Mr. Nixon: My colleague is entirely correct because when one looks at this 16,000 megawatts, that was one time in the whole year when the graph peaked at that high level. The rest of the time it’s way down, far lower than that. We are paying through the nose for the interest on the money borrowed in New York to build these tremendous enterprises.

I’m proud of them in one sense. Certainly Pickering, which by the way is completely closed down today and not functioning at all, which is regretted, is really the best atomic reactor in the world. The one up in the Bruce Peninsula, and if anybody has ever visited that he will know this is true, is probably -- we don’t really know what the Russians have -- the largest atomic complex in the world. I have no doubt it is the largest if you include with the reactors the heavy water plant itself, which is worth approximately $4 billion. In the riding of the member for Haldimand--Norfolk (Mr. G. I. Miller) and close to my own riding is the thermal generator that burns coal at Nanticoke, which is the biggest thermal generator in the world.

Here we have all these things, thumping and crashing and bumping away making the electricity we can’t possibly use. It’s almost as if somebody over there, years ago, and not too recently, had some delusions of grandeur. We have to have the biggest; we have to have the best. It’s very nice to do that. It’s lovely to do that

Mr. Conway: Robert Macaulay, surely.

Mr. Nixon: My colleague mentions the august name of Robert Macaulay, who now spends most of his time appearing before the Ontario Energy Board and the National Energy Board in Ottawa, criticizing Ontario Hydro for raising its rates, when probably he is the father, legitimate or otherwise, of the decisions which really led to these problems. They go back to the days when the decision, for example, was made to build this beautiful headquarters for Ontario Hydro right down here.

Many of the honourable members have heard this story before and I don’t intend to spend more than 10 or 15 minutes talking about it, but I can well remember in the good days when John Robarts was keeping the birds over there whipped in line that the chairman of Ontario Hydro decided to build the new headquarters. The former Royal Conservatory of Music had burned down. Ontario Hydro bought the property and they were planning for one of these great buildings. They even published a design. It was like a Cheops pyramid with one executive floor at the top, not too big but very high with a special elevator that went up to it. That’s where the chairman and his friends would rule this empire.

Robarts didn’t make a big fuss about it; he just made a little this time. We never heard another thing about it until after 1971 when we got a new Premier. The chairman said, “Well, I think probably I can put something over on this bird.” They announced this new headquarters, and it was built without any decision being taken over here.

Mr. Roy: Before you could say “Moog.”

Mr. Nixon: Before you could say “Moog” it was up. It was built even without a tender.

I wish the Premier were here. He may be listening, and he probably is, because I think he listens to all these things. It irritates him so much when we talk about this, but it is the absolute truth. The decision should have been made to sell the property down here in the heart of downtown Toronto and put the headquarters of Ontario Hydro where it would do the most good, out at Pickering or even some place up in the Bruce Peninsula. Why do they have to be on the most expensive real estate in Canada with the most elaborate building in Canada? It just doesn’t make sense, but that is the attitude which got Ontario Hydro into trouble.

We now have the Minister of Energy (Mr. Welch) guarding our interests, and I feel that is kind of a weak reed. He is in trouble with his deputy minister, Malcolm Rowan, who seems to be moving the levers and pulling the strings down there at Hydro and in the Ministry of Energy. It is still very much operating on its own, but that is typical. I do believe when the government of the day sees that Ontario Hydro is in real trouble, it solves that problem by appointing the Premier’s personal campaign manager as chairman of Ontario Hydro. I brought the figures to your attention, Mr. Speaker. They concern me. The debate tonight is about the budget, so I thought I should mention it.

Just before leaving the budget, I want to refer briefly to some of the revenue aspects. I notice it is expected that personal income tax this year will net $3.4 billion. The Minister of Revenue (Mr. Maeck), as he is almost always, is in his place tonight doing his duty. I appreciate that. But many people who pay their income tax figure that money goes to Ottawa. In many respects that is true. If they don’t like paying income tax, they curse the people in Ottawa, Joe Clark and those people. Most taxpayers don’t realize that a cheque for $3.43 billion comes back. Is it monthly and is it made out to the Minister of Revenue in person?

Mr. Breithaupt: Or occupant.

Mr. Nixon: Or occupant. It comes back and is actually a cheque for that money. We deposit it into the bank and it forms part of the consolidated revenue fund. In addition to that, down at the bottom it says, “Payment from the federal government, see table C-8, $3.4 billion.” Now that is for half of the cost of education, including half the cost of grade 13. They pay half of the cost of medicare and a large percentage of our social and family services and so on.

If we add that federal income tax, which most people think of as a federal tax, to these shared programs of an additional $3 billion, we get $6.5 billion, really no strings attached, from a rich uncle up in Ottawa. It comes back here, forming almost 42 per cent of the budget of this province, which is close to $16 billion. This has been worked out over a number of years.

I say to you, Mr. Speaker, it is probably one of the weaknesses of our democratic process that the government over there can open all the Tom Longboat schools and the William G. Davis schools and can put ads in the paper to say, “Happy hospital day. We’re building you new hospitals.”

Mr. Breithaupt: Simple justice.

Mr. Nixon: Right. They can give us legal aid, build new courthouses and take full page ads with a gavel, which somebody says is never used in our courts. Is that right?

Mr. Roy: That is right. It is never used.

Mr. Nixon: No gavel in our courts. It is some damned American thing they are talking about. These full page ads say, “Look what we are doing for you.” Yet the money that pays for these programs has not even been taxed by the government over there. It comes floating in in a Brinks truck from Ottawa. These guys go in there, wallow around in it a bit and say, “Now what are we going to do with this money?”

I believe it is undemocratic. It is an oversimplification, of course, to say that the government which provides a service and, therefore, gets the gratitude of the electorate should also have to carry the ashcans for taxing the money to pay for the service. That is the only kind of democratic balance. When I think of all the William G. Davis schools in this province -- there has to be a whole lot of them -- they were all bought by Pierre Trudeau. That is the thing that concerns me.

Interjections.

Mr. Nixon: When we are looking at the revenue side, the next important one is corporation taxes, $1.27 billion. I should just pass that over because I don’t want to sound too much like a democratic socialist, but I really do not believe those figures are high enough. I lent a publication, Profit Centre, to my leader who was about to use it this afternoon in question period. It is a publication put out to attract American industries into Ontario. On questioning it, we were told the publication cost $9.50 a copy. It urges companies to come to Ontario because the labour is cheap. I think that was raised by the member for Sudbury East (Mr. Martell). It says, “Come here because we have cheaper labour than anywhere else.” Isn’t that something?

8:30 p.m.

The thing that concerns me -- and I wish I had it here, but I will use it when we are discussing corporation taxes some time next week -- is that the publication says clearly our corporation taxes are lower than corporation taxes in Texas, which is the Vatican of the free enterprise system, lower than in New York and lower than in Michigan. I can’t understand why we should be having such high income taxes, retail sales taxes, OHIP premiums and LCBO profits when the corporations are getting off scot-free.

That is typical. I am glad the people in the Globe and Mail caught this because at the bottom of that Winsor column they now have that little cartoon. It showed the Treasurer making that comment about the banks. I can’t quote him verbatim but he said, “The way the interest rates are falling, the profits of the banks are being reduced.” We can all remember because we were very sympathetic on this side! If the bank profits fall a little bit or the energy companies’ profits fall a little bit, that is a disaster.

I don’t think our corporation taxes are high enough. We ought to be soaking the banks that do business here. Their head offices are down here. As a matter of fact, the Leader of the Opposition said to the Treasurer, “You can find them. They are just down the street.” Find them? We can see them in the sky. There isn’t a corner in this town or any other town where there aren’t four banks right there. They are the best buildings in town except for the LCBO outlets.

Mr. Roy: Or the Albany Club maybe.

Mr. Nixon: The Albany Club looks a little seedy. As a matter of fact, one can’t tell it from the King Eddy.

The retail sales tax is going to net us about $2.67 billion. While we were discussing that, I pointed out to you, Mr. Speaker, that amounts to $7 million a day. Mind you, we are paying $4 million a day in interest. Talk about easy come, easy go. That is a classic case.

As to the other revenues, there are over $1 billion in OHIP premium’s, I personally feel we ought not to have premiums at all. In my former capacity as Leader of the Opposition, I even had the temerity to say we should abolish those premiums and make OHIP universal, which is what it is supposed to be.

I can tell members, as soon as one says that, then these people crank up the Treasury experts, the $50,000-a-year employees of the Treasurer -- I don’t mean Cathy -- who then say, “Oh, if you do that, you would have to raise taxes by $1 billion.” The premiums are $1 billion. People write out cheques four times a year and send those in.

The government so readily misleads the taxpayers -- and the NDP, I am sure, understands this since that party is still talking about the same thing -- that it means one can’t put the point across since those people over there throw up these showers of sand and pepper in everybody’s eyes so that one can’t rationally discuss the alternatives. The galling thing is they use their high-priced help in the Treasury to make these statements.

If we follow the Liberal proposal to abolish OHIP premiums, it means taxes will go up $1 billion. It also means that premiums go down $1 billion.

An hon. member: They rarely see it.

Mr. Nixon: I’ll say they don’t. There is no point in saying it is unfair, but it is unfair.

LCBO profits this year were $423 million.

Mr. Roy: That is sinning a lot.

Mr. Nixon: The figure is very impressive until one looks at the cost to the Ministries of Health, of Community and Social Services, of Transportation and Communications, of the Attorney General and of the Solicitor General. There was a study that indicated the social cost, which is the phrase people were throwing past my ear a minute ago, was in excess of $600 million. From my position as a teetotaller, I feel quite secure in lecturing members about that, but this is hardly the occasion for that.

The only other point I want to bring to your attention, Mr. Speaker, is the Ontario lottery profit of $67 million that has been estimated for 1980. Way back in 1977, we were making $71 million from the lotteries. Once again, I am not going to give members a lecture about the thing. I voted for it to begin with, and we had many discussions in our caucus before we actually went that way.

It has been handled in just about as amateur a way as it possibly could have been handled. There is nobody now, including the Minister of Culture and Recreation (Mr. Baetz), under whom, in our backward system the management of lotteries lies, who could list the many different lotteries and games we play now for profit. It really is appalling that we have got to this point. We have made a huge investment in capital equipment in order to allow people to play some sort of a game where they pick out some lucky number.

We look at all the billboards around the province that indicate the attractive young people who are playing the game and indicating how it should be played. Talk about the law of diminishing returns; here is a clear example of it.

Mr. Breithaupt: And not a peep from the moral leaders of the community.

Mr. Nixon: I have not heard much from the Lutherans.

Mr. Breithaupt: I was more concerned about the United Church.

Mr. Nixon: If the member were to read the United Church Observer as assiduously as I do, he would know that our moderator is concerned. It concerns a good many people. It really is turning into a fiasco and it is something we will have to talk about on many occasions.

I want to deal specifically with a matter that is certainly just as important to me. I shall deal with it briefly since it has to do with a decision by the government to spend $5 million in my constituency which, having been in opposition now for 37 years, does not normally have this kind of largess from the government of the day. They do not put themselves out to put facilities in my area, but there is going to be a $5-million storage dump for polychlorinated biphenyls there.

It is going to be put in what I consider to be the most beautiful rural township in Ontario, Onondaga. By the way it is named after the tribe of Tom Longboat who was an Onondaga Indian. They are going into this beautiful rural area and spending $5 million to build a storage dump for PCBs.

I have become somewhat of an expert in these materials. I will not take up your time, Mr. Speaker, in discussing in detail all I know about them. The last time I did they almost threw me out of the hall. They are extremely interesting. Many of them are right in these buildings. For example, every fluorescent bulb has a small amount of PCB in it. The main source of the chemical is in large power transformers. Although it is now illegal to use PCBs in the new transformers, there is no thought that the ones presently in use will be replaced and the old ones cracked open and the material stored. It will probably be 40 years before the PCBs presently in use are gradually phased out as they are replaced by other materials.

The PCBs themselves have the advantage of having the physical property of electrical insulation. Also, they have a very high flash point -- they do not burn readily. So they are very good for the purpose of moderating fluid in transformers. For many years, people would keep a bucket of this stuff because it was very good to clean grease off one’s hands. There are many workmen today who have cleaned the grease off their hands and arms every day for many years without any ill effects that anyone can determine.

But it has been determined by experts that PCBs can affect reproductive facilities, particularly the chromosomes. They are not a violent carcinogen, but they are definitely a very negative factor in the environment as far as health is concerned.

8:40 p.m.

They are found everywhere in the environment of earth, that is, in the atmosphere, on the earth’s crust and in the oceans. They can be detected by modern equipment on the polar ice cap. They can be detected in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and, naturally, in the air we breathe. With every breath, we are breathing in a certain number of molecules of PCBs. The point is government feels they should be destroyed, and we cannot question that decision.

The Minister of the Environment (Mr. Parrott) is deeply concerned about this, and that is obvious. I have no doubt whatsoever about the sincerity of the minister. He is so sincere and concerned I sometimes wonder that he can carry the heavy responsibility he does because it is an extremely tough job. He has decided that these PCBs have to be gathered together and stored safely, although he has assured us that the storage will only be for five years. By that time, there will be a way to completely obliterate the polychlorinated biphenyl molecules, probably by pyrolysis, which is the word they use for burning them.

There have been experiments in the city of Mississauga. The whip of the Conservative Party represents a part of that city. He has discussed this before. There is a plant there called the St. Lawrence Cement plant which uses high-temperature kilns burning fuel oil to make cement. The idea is to feed the PCBs in small amounts into the ordinary fuel oil as it goes out into the roaring inferno of the kiln. The temperature is high enough and dwells long enough to destroy the dangerous molecule. This has been done experimentally but, unfortunately, it was not possible for the testing to be precise and official enough to persuade everybody, i.e., mayor of Mississauga, that the PCBs were permanently, totally and safely destroyed.

In its wisdom, Mississauga passed bylaws which said that the materials could not be burned in the municipality. As a matter of fact, this is a real problem since the Ontario Research Foundation is located in Mississauga and the bylaws, as I understand it, even restrict the experiments that might be done by the research foundation for the good of the whole province.

I do not criticize Mississauga for passing the bylaw. The bylaw was tested in the Supreme Court of Ontario and upheld, although the Ministry of the Environment wanted it quashed. It was upheld, which really means that any other municipality, for example, Onondaga, might very well pass a similar bylaw saying that these chemicals cannot be transported within its boundaries.

Mr. Hall: Tell them where they are now.

Mr. Nixon: My good friend the member for Lincoln (Mr. Hall) has just reminded me that without any kind of decision at all a special repository of the PCBs was established in Smithville in his constituency. I well remember that when this came to light he raised the devil with the ministry and everybody else, saying that without a public hearing one could not bring these materials into a community. It was completely improper, unjust and certainly unfair.

Mr. Hall: Two years later they are still there.

Mr. Nixon: Right. He reminds me they have been there for two years. We are both on the same side of this. I am sure that is obvious.

We have a solution which will get them out of Smithville, nor will they have to go to the little community of Middleport in Onondaga township.

The solution is one that I and others have referred to in question period on more than one occasion. There has been research carried out at the Royal Military College in Kingston using a high-temperature, electric flame called a plasma arc. They have developed a furnace into which this stuff can be dribbled at about a gallon an hour. There is no doubt that the molecule can be obliterated and destroyed. The effluent from it is carbon dioxide and water. So far, those have not been designated carcinogenic. So we are looking at a light at the end of the tunnel.

In my questions to the Minister of the Environment, he indicated that the research at the Royal Military College is complete. They have run out of funds, but they have been successful. My view, very strongly expressed and felt, is that this government, in conjunction with the government of Canada, should provide the $750,000 that is needed -- I want members to compare that with the $5 million the government is going to spend in Onondaga just to store them for five years -- and spend it to make one of these electric furnaces which would be portable, which could be taken around the province, and which would burn them completely safely under all of the tests and supervisions that are necessary. We can thus get rid of this problem once and for all.

I have a feeling the Minister of the Environment agrees with me. In answering my questions about this he indicated there is some problem about jurisdiction. Royal Military College is not a provincially assisted university, but is entirely funded by the government of Canada. It is very hard for this government to go in there and say, “We want you to do this,” without co-operation from the federal government.

I have written to the federal Minister of the Environment, John Roberts. I hope it will be possible for co-operation between the two levels of government to bring about a solution that is clear and obvious. It is effective and cheap and a solution which we must surely undertake in this province.

I wanted to bring this to your attention, Mr. Speaker, so that the members of the House who are present and who have been reading about PCBs, probably peripherally, will know that at least one member believes there is a ready solution to the problem in hand and that we should not delay in making use of that solution.

I didn’t know much about PCBs until I found out they were coming to my constituency. I can sympathize with other members here who are not saying, “Thank God it is in Nixon’s constituency,” but are saying, “That is one of the problems that doesn’t bear too heavily on me at the present time.” We have the solution, I believe, within our grasp at the present time.

There is another matter I want to refer to briefly that has to do with an article which was headlined in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Saturday, April 12. The headline reads, “17,000 Jailed Needlessly in Ontario, Study Finds.” I think many members will remember the two or three-day wonder that the headline caused here. I simply want to read the first paragraph of the article written by Ian Mulgrew:

“About 17,000 people needlessly spent time in Ontario jails awaiting trial over a six-month period last year. And the problem is costing taxpayers millions of dollars, Corrections Minister Gordon Walker said yesterday.

“Mr. Walker blamed Ontario’s legal system for creating the problem and lawyers for compounding it by using ploys that kept people in jail for extensive periods of time.”

I should say immediately that the lawyers in the province, and in this House, including the Attorney General, reacted strenuously to this serious charge. The group of lawyers in the city of Brantford, the ones chiefly appearing in court, made a formal statement indicating their substantial and violent disagreement with the views of the minister.

At the meeting of the justice committee some weeks later, I raised it in the presence of the Attorney General because it seemed to me strange that such a charge made by a minister of the crown would sink without a trace

Mr. Breithaupt: The Provincial Secretary for Justice.

Mr. Nixon: It was the Provincial Secretary for Justice, my colleague from Kitchener reminds me. It used to be, and I suppose it still is, one of the major concerns of the members of this House that the rights of the individual must be maintained and observed. For a minister to say this and nothing much to happen, except for a number of people learned in the law to say that is wrong, and then for it to disappear is just simply not good enough.

I suggested and the member for Riverdale (Mr. Renwick) suggested to the committee that since we were doing the estimates of the Attorney General or the Solicitor General we should call the policy secretary to come to the estimates so he could indicate why he had made the statement and the basis upon which he had made the statement. The minister declined to attend, but he did send me the following letter. There is certainly nothing private about the letter. It is dated April 24 and says:

“Dear Bob:

“On Tuesday you indicated to me you would like to receive our reports relating to the remand problem. Enclosed are three reports:

“1. Stanley, outside consultants, entitled ‘Prisoners Remanded In Custody’;

“2. Madden, of the planning and research branch, entitled ‘A Description of Ontario’s Jail Population’;

“3. Distillation of a computer printout for 18 months ending June 30, 1979.

“These reports form the basis of our concern over remanded accused who subsequently do not receive a sentence of incarceration at a trial. More recently our computer has produced very accurate statistics.

“In a cabinet submission last fall which led to the creation of an interministerial committee studying this problem, I stated that a recent survey of jail admissions, for the 18-month period from January 1, 1978, to June 30, 1979, revealed that there were 39,733 remanded admissions that generated 634,301 days’ stay.

“Of these admissions, 65 per cent were eventually released without a sentence of incarceration. This group generated 313,783 days’ stay or one half of the total days’ stay on remand.” Then he closed the letter.

In other words, although at those estimates the Attorney General was critical of the statement made by his colleague who is also, in a sense his superior, the justice policy secretary persisted in indicating that the reports, which I now hold in my hand and which are public documents and are available, indicated that what he said in his statement was true. His statement again was that 17,000 are jailed needlessly in Ontario.

I am very much concerned about this. I felt even at the justice committee there was almost a closing of ranks of those learned in the law. There is nothing improper about this, but simply the assumption that the minister was all wet, and that is probably the kindest phrase that I can use in that connection. Yet he sits on the front bench of the government. He has provided me with the statistical material that indicates what he said is right. I don’t know what further can be done about it. I don’t believe that the discussions in that committee were sufficient to put the problem to bed. Perhaps a committee of the House should review it.

There may be a chance in some other debate for us to discuss it. Certainly I intend to go to the estimates when the Minister of Correctional Services is responding to the money that is spent in the policy area because I frankly believe he should have a chance to defend himself. But I suppose, superficially, I don’t see how those two men, the Attorney General and the Provincial Secretary for Justice can stay in the same cabinet. I do not know how the Premier, whom I questioned directly on this, can lead a government in which two such opposite points of view are expressed, particularly when the Attorney General, as I quoted in the House two or three times, so I won’t do it again, indicated in those estimates that the justice policy secretary certainly does not speak for him.

8:50 p.m.

I just find it strange indeed. The press doesn’t seem to give a damn about it. Nobody in here seems to care about it. The Provincial Secretary for Justice is still in the cabinet and the Attorney General is still in the cabinet. The statement -- it is not a charge; it is the minister simply making a statement -- remains on the record. I intend to pursue it, as I am doing tonight, on other occasions. I am not at all sure what the result of it will be, but I would say I am concerned about it.

I should also in this connection quote from three people of unimpeachable backgrounds. This is from a publication of March 1980, called News Update, put out by the Ontario Legal Aid Plan. The first is a quote from Mr. Justice Willard Estey of the Supreme Court of Canada. He said at a recent meeting of the Nova Scotia bench and bar:

“Legal aid will be the single most important issue of the 1980s. Legal aid cases are plugging the courts in all 10 provinces, and the decade ahead must see some restrictions on universal access of the common man to the common law.”

I find that deeply disturbing on two counts. First, Mr. Justice Estey says that legal aid is plugging the courts and that governments, therefore, are not making accommodation for justice to be done. Secondly, he says we have got to see some restriction on universal access of the common man to the common law. That is almost a sin for a person learned in the law to say. One wonders what the devil is in his mind.

Willard Estey -- when we knew him downtown he was Bud Estey -- is a very brilliant person indeed. He used to do a lot of work for the government. As a matter of fact, he used to show up at Liberal meetings in his previous incarnation. It does not sound very liberal, it seems to me, to say we have got to find some way to restrict access of the common man to the common law. Fortunately, that is not his responsibility. It is ours, not to restrict access, but to see there are enough facilities for the common man to have access to the common law. I thought, Mr. Speaker, you would be interested in what he said.

The second quote from the same publication is from Chief Justice Gregory Evans of the High Court of Justice of Ontario. I remember meeting him on other occasions as well. He made some remarks concerning the court system, and I want to quote one: “I think we are legal aiding ourselves right out of business in the sense that so much stuff is legal aid that the ordinary guy just can’t afford to go to court. If he could afford it, he can’t get his case on because of the impact of legal aid. Legal aid is open-ended; there is no cap on it; and some lawyers just go merrily on their way and not at a very great speed. The cash register rings continuously if the lawyer gets hold of a good legal aid case.”

I think we have the best legal aid system I know of anywhere. I have always been somewhat attracted to the concept of a public defender ever since my television-watching days. There was something about that square-jawed man who would go into the courts to defend all these people who were improperly bound up in the coils of justice. I felt at the time it might be better to hire a public defender, just as we hire crown prosecutors, and let it go at that. But the same philosophy that led us to pay the doctors on a fee-for-service basis undoubtedly led us to our legal aid system. I really do not like it, but I can see it is justice. We have got it anyway. If we are going to use that system, I guess that is the system we are going to use.

I do believe we have a good legal aid system. While some people may have thought otherwise, I have not objected to its cost. I have objected, however, to some practitioners milking the system, and I think inherent in Chief Justice Evans’ comments is a similar criticism.

It is interesting to talk to people who have been active in the courts as lawyers, have moved on through end have been elevated to the Olympian heights where they have experienced it all. Then they look back down on it and are not in all respects positive as to what the profession is doing now. In essence, they are saying some professionals are ripping off the system. That is what concerns me. I believe we cannot restrict access to the courts and we cannot restrict access of individuals to a legal aid certificate, but we have to be aware of the problems that occur.

The last quote from this publication, which I found to be a fascinating one, is from Police Chief John Williamson of Windsor. He said on February 20 that legal aid was to blame for the city’s 44 per cent crime rise in the last decade. In past years, the chief has blamed lenient court sentences for increasing crime.

Mr. Bounsall: He was criticized by everybody for it though.

Mr. Nixon: But in presenting statistics to the Windsor Police Commission this year, he commented: “I am concerned about a person who lives a life of crime who can get continual legal aid and come back again and again. One or two bites of the apple and that’s it. That would stop the backlog.”

I don’t agree with what he said. I don’t agree with Willard Estey that we have to restrict it. I don’t agree with what Greg Evans is saying.

Ms. Gigantes: But.

Mr. Nixon: My good friend, who always knows what is in my mind, has said it for me -- but. But why should we be paying for a system which, in my view, does not have sufficient supervision? I cannot say it in any other way. I believe that here is an instance where, if there was the kind of utilization in the medical field, we would certainly have a review panel that would be stricter than that which is applied in the legal system.

9 p.m.

I heard an interjection from one of the Windsor members that everybody criticized the police chief in Windsor, and that is probably true. Yet we know of cases, in most jurisdictions where people return again and again under criminal charges with legal aid certificates. I suppose one thinks these people will always be with us. We used to worry about the poor, but this is a very bothersome situation.

I wanted to mention that in conjunction with the statement made by the minister and I want to pursue it when I can. I have a feeling my colleagues and friends, the lawyers in the House, are too quick to dismiss what has been said by the minister. I can’t identify myself with what he said because I am not professionally qualified. I can read the reports which seem to verify what he said. My most learned colleague and friend is laughing.

Mr. Roy: When I look at the source of the comments, I can’t get too serious about It.

Mr. Nixon: All right. I have said that. He happens to be a minister of the crown and my colleague’s deprecation of him is identical to the approach taken by the Attorney General, by his own colleague. It just infuriates me that they could sit in cabinet together under those circumstances, while the rest of us, who are supposed to be unlearned in the law and never to approach those sacerdotal tabernacles, have got to keep out of the robing room and never even look that way. We are assured that everything is okay. Well, I do not think everything is okay and I have made that about as clear as I can make it.

I am very glad indeed, that my colleague the member for London Centre (Mr. Peterson) in the conclusion of his address on the budget presented an amendment which is essentially a no-confidence amendment. I regret our procedure in dealing with the budget means that will not be voted upon until near the end of 1980. I personally believe we ought to tighten up our debates on these subjects so that they are concentrated with the leaders and others taking part, with some provision perhaps similar to the one we used in our constitutional debate so that people can not only take part, but perhaps listen to what other people say, and then end up with a vote upon which the government stands or falls.

I believe the province needs an election. We need only look at the Order Paper to see the government has nothing in mind. It is daring nothing. We spend all our time debating the most fatuous and irrelevant amendments to minor statutes and struggling around in various committees dealing with estimates, which is just grinding through old straw. I believe it is time this so-called minority government was recognized after three years as not working effectively in the province.

We have had lots of shots taken at our NDP friends for supporting the government. When the time comes, they will not support the government. My own feeling, having observed the leader of the government for a long time, is that he is canny enough to have the election when he wants it, not when the opposition people want it. It might well be that in the future we are going to have to co-ordinate our approaches more closely than we have in the past because for 37 years now the Tories have simply laughed at us as we have divided in the opposition, which the Acting Speaker, the member for Humber (Mr. MacBeth), knows from his days as a Liberal is a far larger group in this province than the group which supports the government. I don’t know what the answer is to this, but there probably is an answer.

I notice that the Premier has said clearly he will not call an election until 1981. I have never known him to go back on a publicly stated word in any way at all. But I have known him to contrive to have circumstances and events make decisions for him that he wants to occur. We don’t know what the future holds, other than the sureness, as sure as I stand here, that the Liberals will form the next government and my friend the member for Hamilton West (Mr. S. Smith) will be the Premier.

Interjections.

Mr. Nixon: There are those who feel the Tories are praying for a yes vote next Tuesday so that the Premier, who tends to play perhaps to some extent on issues like this, which he does with consumate skill, will then call for the kind of majority that would let Ontario take part in the difficult days that lie ahead. He would say how much he has done for the French community and then add parenthetically, no doubt without even using words, “However, you know where I stand.”

It looks as though that is not going to happen, thank God. It may even be as a result of his own visit to Montreal. It may have been as a result of our debate here last week. Who knows what caused it? It looks as if Claude Ryan is going to win and the no vote is going to win. That problem may recede, although in another sense it is going to come on us very heavily. Our first move in that direction is the appointment of a select committee on constitutional reform which is going to be an extremely important and interesting one indeed.

We don’t know what is in the mind of the Premier. He may engineer something for the fall. The rumours are starting to come from over there. They are going to get their house in order. They are going to make some cabinet changes and throw out some of the deadwood. I wish there were some more cabinet ministers here so that they could turn pale. That could happen. There could be some general changes in the cabinet over the summer.

Back in the Robarts days, the Premier used to call an election in August, and the province wouldn’t even know the election was called for three weeks. We would be out thrashing around, having these great Liberal rallies with 30 or 35 at them, and nobody would even know there was an election on until the kids would go back to school. Then there would be about three weeks of good campaigning and we would be back at the same old stand.

There is real pressure on the Premier. The fact, as I go back to the budget, is that the 10-year spread begins at its earliest end with his first budget. Even the Tories must be thinking if it is not time for a change in government it is going to be time for a change in leadership. He has one more election in him. We all know how desperately he wants to pass the party on to his successor in the good shape he received it. I don’t believe that is possible, but we know he will make every political effort to achieve it. We have already had a softening-up in the budget I think it is called a pause in the move towards a balanced budget -- lovely phrase. We have started the advertising campaign. Even today in his answers to the legitimate and moderate questions of the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. S. Smith), I noticed a certain something that sounded to me like the hustings.

I have got my stakes sharpened. I am going to use the same old “Vote Nixon. Vote Liberal” signs that have been so successful in the past. I intend to come back here with many of my colleagues. It will be a great pleasure to occupy those seats over there because there are a lot of changes needed around here after 37 years. I have briefly discussed some of them and I hope to have many more opportunities to discuss them again, not from this side of the House, but from over there.

Mr. Bounsall: Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to start in a much more serious mood than I usually start my budget addresses because I wish to speak tonight of a city which is grievously wounded and people who are grievously wounded. At the moment, there is still very much uncertainty about the future of that city of Windsor and about how soon those wounds can be repaired, if at all.

9:10 p.m.

I would like to start out by describing the situation in Windsor. Depending upon how one measures it, one could get a different figure for the percentage of unemployment in Windsor. We know those unemployment percentages do not contain all those people who have been out of work for more than a year, have not been able to sustain work and are not any longer listed formally in the job search lists. In spite of that, we are talking in Windsor of 15 or 16 per cent unemployment and a total figure of 24,000 unemployed.

The figures change very dramatically from month to month. There was a compilation made as of April 8 with respect to the two major employers in Windsor, the Ford Motor Company of Canada Limited and Chrysler Canada Limited of workers on layoff there. There were 2,269 on layoff as of April 3 from the three Ford plants in Windsor -- the foundry and the two engine plants. Since then, and that is slightly more than a month ago, we have added another 400. The casting plant is to be closed in August which will add another 840. They had already lost over 550 employees from that plant and there are layoffs that have been scheduled since that total 1,500. When we add up the total at Ford in Windsor, there are 5,800 persons that either are unemployed already or are scheduled to be unemployed.

Over the past 16 months, 5,100 jobs have been permanently lost at Chrysler. Those on indefinite layoff, for which no consideration can be given at all as to when they will be brought back, number between 3,500 and 4,000. In the engine plant alone there have been 2,000 jobs lost over the last 16 months. We hear that in August the last 460 workers will be laid off from that plant. In the van and truck plant, there have been 200 layoffs previously and there are 900 on indefinite layoff. Those are absolutely permanent layoff. There are another 900 on indefinite layoffs, leaving 1,300 still working. But 1,300 still working would imply those workers are on the job week upon following week. That is not the case. They work one week here, are off two or three weeks, and work another week. That is the situation pertaining to the remainder of the workers in that van plant. In the car plant, 900 jobs have been lost, but that does not include the 300 on indefinite layoff. And what did we hear this week? There will be another 850 laid off permanently as a result of the closure of the second assembly shift in that plant.

Again, when we talk about a Chrysler worker working -- those that are still left -- we are not talking about week-by-week work; we are talking about a week here and a week there. Starting May 5, there was a four-week layoff of the remaining 4,500 persons in that automobile assembly plant, of whom 850 will not return when the four-week prepared layoff ends.

What it all adds up to is that the Minister of Industry and Tourism (Mr. Grossman) was right on when he predicted that unemployment for Chrysler in the next two years would be in the vicinity of 5,000 to 6,000. In the light of what has happened over the past five or six months, we are looking at a situation where those 5,000 to 6,000 do not have week-by-week employment, but again are in their work place only temporarily.

It is hard to imagine the effect this is having upon the city of Windsor. Once every two weeks, on Friday afternoons at 3:30, whenever possible -- and it has usually been possible -- I attend a meeting of the mayor’s committee on the unemployed. It is formed by anyone from the social service agencies, from the business community, who could give any strength at all to a committee to assist the mayor in meeting with the unemployment problems that exist in the city.

One thing emerges from that. In Windsor, people have not yet had to go on a soup line. The increase in people needing food handouts has not occurred. There has been a slight increase but, by and large, it has not yet occurred, because the people in the city of Windsor are putting what little money they have into food for themselves and their families, hoping that something will end that situation. But they are in dire trouble in every other respect. The need for additional moneys, from this province and the federal government, to flow into the services provided in Windsor for people is incredible.

Credit counselling, which is supposed to be able to help people with financial problems by meeting with them and planning how to solve those problems, now has a six-week waiting list, as I understand it, for appointments. They cannot keep up or return the phone calls made to them.

This provincial government has to find some way of getting additional moneys into those service agencies to help them to meet the needs and the problems they are confronting, the very real needs that people are encountering in the city of Windsor. That situation with credit counselling runs through every social service agency in Windsor.

So much money comes from the province and it is matched by funds locally. Usually those funds are out of the United Way. Yet the United Way funds have decreased. The backbone of the United Way fund has always been the weekly contributions by the men and women in the auto and auto-related plants in Windsor. Those donations are no longer there.

Windsor over the years, to the surprise of itself sometimes but to the envy of all other communities in the province, has always had a higher than 100 per cent success rate in support of the United Way agencies. Every year they have 102, 103, 106 per cent subscriptions to the United Way. It is in very dire circumstances now as the jobs are not there to enable the people of Windsor to give to the United Way. They have no way in which they can get more funds to make up their share of whatever services they have for which the province will give a matching or even a four-to-one share. It is not there. Funds must flow from the province to those services without any matching funds from the city. There are no funds there to match it to meet the services.

9:20 p.m.

When one speaks to the representatives of the ministerial association -- to their spokesman, Captain Gillespie of the Salvation Army who speaks for the downtown service agencies that deal with all sorts of family and credit problems -- one is told that there has been a drastic increase over the last month or two in the marriage breakup field. As the tremendous financial strains come on families, an additional strain is placed on the normal marital relationships. The disagreements that sometimes occur are causing those breakups all over the place. The demand for housing increases when a family runs out of money and the major breadwinner has to leave either because of straight marital problems or because that is the only way that family can survive. And they cannot survive in their present accommodation. They must find subsidized OHC housing elsewhere, and that OHC housing is now full to overflowing, with growing waiting lists.

It is an awesome situation we have in Windsor, and it is not going to get any better for another couple of years. We are seeing just the start of the misery in Windsor.

One talks to the school principals and asks them if there is any evidence that families are leaving Windsor. They say, “Yes, one or two pupils per classroom per week are going from our schools.” That represents four or five families per week leaving Windsor. There are no jobs there; there is no short-term prospect of jobs there, and they go elsewhere to try to find employment.

I know the strain that must be put on families as the major breadwinner, a person laid off by Ford or Chrysler, has gone out west or to some other city in this province to try to find employment. In some instances they are successful and are working four and five weeks at a stretch before they can get home for a weekend to visit their families. That whole problem is very rampant and widespread. Bills pile up; mortgages are about to be called.

One of the activities in which the mayor’s committee on the unemployed has engaged itself is to write all the major credit companies and banks in Ontario. The committee asks that when a Windsor person -- no matter who they are; they don’t have to be an auto worker -- has a problem with a bill or a mortgage, that the credit company promise not to foreclose. It asks them to accept a very reasonable minimal payment of interest -- something much lower than the full rate, if it is a mortgage -- one that shows the person is trying to pay.

There has been a fairly good response to that to date. Before a week from this Friday, we will have met those banking and financial institutions that have not yet responded positively to try to resolve that situation.

A week ago this past Monday, letters went out to all the major gasoline and credit card companies in which the same thing was asked. That is a very critical situation. Our workers in Windsor are putting food on their table but are not able to keep up with the payments on their credit cards. Some companies have already indicated, at the first sign of a phone call, that they would be willing to take that into account. But there are others that have not. Because of the slur which may be put on some company that has not had that opportunity I won’t name them.

The week before this week, I ran into at least two instances of someone sitting down and writing a very reasonable letter to a gasoline credit card company, saying, “I will pay this much per month” or “I will pay what I calculate to be the interest per month.” In one case, it was even more than that to an oil company. The person said, “Can you accept this for the next four or five months?” Of course, they got an instant letter back, saying, “You pay up by the end of the month or we will have a collection agency collect it” or “We will garnishee your wages whenever it is you do get back to work.” That problem will be solved locally, but it is not allowing the people of Windsor to sleep soundly in their beds knowing this has not yet been reached and this sort of situation can happen to any of those families.

I want to leave for a moment the personal plight of those workers in Windsor as they try to meet these various problems. I don’t quite know how they will do so without massive amounts of social service moneys coming from the province to the agencies that are designed to help them. Those agencies, through their normal sources, the United Way or the city of Windsor, do not have sufficient funds with which to operate as they have in the past, even without that kind of problem.

I want to deal with the situation at Chrysler and Ford and the government involvement with them. I have said many times, through questions in this House and in other speeches, that the deal the federal government made with the Ford Motor Company in which Ontario participated as an add-on, was an incredibly bad deal. For $68 million, $40 million federal and $28 million provincial, what did we get? We got an engine plant, but there were no guarantees or conditions laid down with regard to that grant.

Within days of that grant being announced, I was asking here, in the Legislature, were there any guarantees that the construction companies would be Canadian? Was the labour going to be Canadian? Were the materials and supplies used going to be Canadian? Were there any guarantees in this? What about the machinery and equipment to be used in that plant? Was there a condition that machinery and equipment be sourced in Canada if at all possible? It turned out there was nothing in that regard.

It is very clear what has happened since then, as American construction companies and American labour have turned up time and time again on that site. In respect to supplies and materials, I have no firm proof, but there is no doubt in the minds of the people I talked to that in many instances those have not been bought in Ontario or Canada and, as far as anybody can see, there has not been a search for a Canadian supplier for the equipment and the machinery for that plant.

Then we found out the deal was completely and totally without guarantee of any kind. The federal government -- and I quote from a statement which Herb Gray made about a month ago at a trilevel meeting of municipal, provincial and federal members -- “assumed there would be no closures of other plants in Windsor.” They assumed there would be no closures, but nothing was written down, nothing was required from the Ford Motor Company.

We found there was nothing written down. The Ford Motor Company could blissfully go ahead and close its casting plant in Windsor. That casting plant was the most efficient of any the company had -- it had made money for that company consistently -- and it had already been reduced to 50 per cent employment. The one in Flat Rock, Michigan, was down to 50 per cent as well, and the Cleveland plant, doing essentially the same thing, was at 75 per cent employment.

Windsor had already had more than its share of the casting production layoffs, yet that plant was closed and those castings and engines which were assembled in Windsor were shifted completely to the Cleveland operation.

What did we get for our $68 million? Not very much, and what is a certainty now is something we have feared all along: less net employment in Ford at Windsor than we had before. The federal government should forever stand condemned over the kind of deal and money handout they made to Ford, the federal government at that time being the negotiators.

9:30 p.m.

Then we come to the Chrysler situation. Chrysler needs money. They need loan guarantees from our governments to qualify for the loan guarantees from the US government. We are very concerned, and have talked about this concern for the last two or three months, about guarantees in a whole host of areas which pertain to that Chrysler situation. What did we find out last Wednesday? We found out the federal government was quite willing to make a loan guarantee of $200 million, and Ontario was expected to add its $50 million with virtually the same kind of arrangement as the one with Ford, which had no guarantees whatsoever.

There was nothing in the way of research and development. The statement says, “We will do research and development on the van-wagon if it is feasible.” Does one call that a guarantee? We know very well that it would never become feasible. They said: “We will source parts in Canada provided we can source them cheaper than we can get them anywhere else.” That means they are not going to source parts in Canada or even try to search for them. They are not going to be required to prove that they can do it cheaper in Ontario or Canada than elsewhere. It meant, “Leave us alone on parts sourcing.”

It was an incredible situation, but one should have asked at least that all of the parts associated with the van-wagon plant and product, and the extension of that plant to build that product, be sourced here in Ontario, before we even considered $200 million in loan guarantees. There was apparently nothing in the deal at that time about an improved auto mix. There was nothing acceptable in the terms of employment in the city of Windsor. What finally came out at the end of the week contained the same problem with respect to employment.

In Canada we have more than 11 per cent of the North American sales of Chrysler products. Each year, those sales figures, as percentages, have become higher. I suspect in this year and next year it will be 13 per cent. Yet, on job guarantees expressed in percentages, which is the only way to calculate it, the federal government said that through 1981 and 1982 our guarantee will be nine per cent. That is three per cent lower than what their sales are here in Canada. In 1984, it will go up to 11 per cent. At that time, I would suggest, it will be one per cent lower than it is now and perhaps two per cent lower. What does that translate into in terms of jobs? In 1984 ‘at two per cent less than the percentage of sales, the total employment in the Chrysler plant would be lower by 2,000 to 3,000 jobs. If it is the present three per cent less, which is what the federal government is willing to negotiate for 1981-82, it represents between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs.

For our $200 million in federal loan guarantees, what did we get? We got between 2,000 as a minimum and 4,000 fewer jobs than our fair share employment should be. That is what we get for $200 million in loan guarantees. It is a complete and utter disgrace.

I applaud, as I did when I spoke in this House on Monday afternoon, the Minister of Industry and Tourism (Mr. Grossman) who did not and would not buy into that kind of a deal, as we had been saying all along that he should not so do. I am glad we were saying that to give him the strength to say that in return to his cabinet, to the federal government and to the Chrysler corporation.

I also applaud what the Minister of Industry and Tourism did for Ontario over the weekend in those final negotiations where he had to come up with something. He said: “We will give, not a loan guarantee. We will give $10 million for a $20-million research and development centre.” That was to get Chrysler to do something it has never done in living memory -- to site its R and D in the Canadian operations.

We didn’t know that in the early part of the weekend when we first heard of the announcement. We wondered: “Is that a $10-million straight grant or did we get some equity in the company, as we have always said on this side we should?” This was of some concern over the weekend. As I answered questions, I said: “The only bad part of that deal I can see is we may not have taken equity.” By Monday it became clear that in point of fact we had a mortgage on the building and the equipment for that $10 million. In point of fact, we in Ontario would get it all back in the event that Chrysler should not continue to succeed. It is a very good equity possession.

When we stood here on Monday and asked the Minister of Industry and Tourism what sort of other guarantees we get on it -- whether the construction of that centre would be by Canadian companies, using Canadian labour, Canadian supplies and materials, and whether the equipment for that research and development was to be built or purchased here -- he stood up and said, “Yes, indeed.” That was all part of the guarantees that would go into that deal when it was finally signed.

This is the kind of deal we should continue to make with every corporation in Ontario when we give them any money or loan guarantees. We should have that sort of equity position and those sorts of guarantees with respect to jobs uppermost in our minds. We have succeeded in doing that in this particular $20-million research and development centre for Chrysler. Any government that does not do that, as the feds still are not in any mind space to do, is not a proper husbander of our taxpayers’ money. The deals they sign are a disgrace. A deal of any kind is perhaps better than no deal at all, but one wonders how much of a bad deal one can get without it being better that that deal had not been consummated at all.

I am very concerned about what is going to happen over the next couple of years, at least in Windsor, until they can have in production some of the changed and new vehicles under the auto pact, as our North American companies go through a changeover to a smaller model which would meet the market requirements in sales for people in North America. We would like to see a great deal of activity in parts production, which can be instituted almost overnight in Ontario and in Windsor. This government can be very instrumental in going out and talking to the offshore suppliers, the offshore auto makers, and having them site parts production here in Ontario and in Windsor, in return for the already clear deal of Canada value added, which is a duty remission program they can fall under. Point out the advantages. Get them here. Get their parts production sited here.

I have talked specifically only about the layoffs in Chrysler and Ford. On May 5, a week ago Monday, 850 people at Bendix, which produces brake linings, were laid off indefinitely. So it goes through all the auto parts supply companies right across the Windsor area and right across Ontario. This is a way in which it could be remedied very rapidly, and I call upon the government of Ontario to do just that.

The de Havilland Dash-8 is still to be sited in terms of production somewhere in Ontario. The production for that would swing in effect fairly soon. I suggest Windsor would be a very admirable place for the production of the de Havilland Dash-8. The rest of our de Havilland workers out in Downsview are quite happy to see the production of that elsewhere than the parent de Havilland plant and have no objection to its being sited in Windsor.

I also call upon the Ontario government to put more money than just $10 million, if necessary, into research in the Windsor area, certainly a lot more money than the $1 million it has committed to the Ontario Research Foundation for parts production. I would suggest that the difference in moneys they were being asked to provide, that $50-million loan guarantee, the difference of $40 million between that and the $10 million for the research and development centre in Windsor, be put into further auto parts research and facilities.

9:40 p.m.

The one situation that cries out for redress is payment of transitional assistance benefits to workers in the Windsor area. They are suffering from very bad decisions and intransigent thinking on the part of those people who make decisions for the auto companies. Why should they be the ones who suffer? Why should they be the ones who lose their homes? Why should they be the ones who are hassled by bill collectors? There should be a definite federal government program with Ontario help of transitional assistance benefits until the auto industry turns itself around to whatever level it can.

Under the federal arrangement which took place with respect to job guarantees, it is clear that at Chrysler in Windsor, instead of the 14,000 jobs we had just two years ago, the most we can see ever being produced, if all of the Chrysler products sell well and if all the company’s expectations come to fruition, is between 9,000 and 10,000 jobs.

We are still talking about a vastly decreased work force in Windsor for both Ford and Chrysler. We call upon this government to give as much assistance as it can to those workers who stand in danger of losing their houses today, but who are going to be part of that work force, however decreased it is, who will be working overtime two years from now, as is the pattern in the auto industry. We call upon the government to help those and other workers so that they do not have this extreme situation. They have worked overtime before. They know what it is like. They all hate it. They can see they are in a transition period where they are not making anything. They are losing their houses, only to be working overtime again in two years.

It is an incredible situation I am describing. These governments have to remedy that situation and see there is an assistance benefit paid for this transition period to all of those workers.

I could go on forever on the auto industry in Windsor. If I could just make one last comment on the federal negotiations, the loan guarantees are mainly in return for an expanded van-wagon plant, for the present van plant to be expanded to accommodate the production of the van-wagon. In order for Chrysler to remain under the auto pact, it had to build in Canada something other than a car which would have been all it had the facilities left to do.

They had to build a truck. The pact requires that they build a range of products. It was even stretching the imagination to call the van-wagon a truck. Having called it a truck in order for it to qualify under the pact and for Chrysler still to stay qualified, in negotiations the federal government said to Chrysler: “Your van-wagon production must be done in Windsor in order to qualify under the pact. If you don’t, you are out and the duty-free remissions and transfer of parts and vehicles cease because you are not part of the pact. What are you going to do for us in return for keeping you under the pact, for the $200 million we are going to give you? The van-wagon production must be in Windsor if you stay under the pact. If you don’t, your corporation closes its doors tomorrow. You are asking for $200 million. We have done enough for you by classifying it as a truck. For the $200 million, what are you going to give us?”

That is where the negotiations should have started, and we could have then talked about parts, about research and development and about a fair share of employment between the United States and Canada, rather than those incredible results which took place federally. All of the aces were in our hands at the time, in the hands of the federal negotiators. Herb Gray, the minister during those negotiations, frittered them away, for what reason I don’t know. Here again, just as I would have liked to have been Ford and played poker with the federal government when that deal was made, it is very clear there is a government I would love to play poker with again if I wanted to win money for myself at no cost to myself. The deal that was negotiated is a disgrace.

Finally, the mayors of the auto towns approached the Premier on Monday of this week and the Treasurer replied to a question on it. They approached the Premier with a program with two interesting suggestions. I am not sure I would completely support one of them, but it was an interesting proposal none the less. The suggestion was that for the foreseeable future, for some months anyway, on North American cars there would be no sales tax collected by the province as a stimulus to buying North American cars. I am not so sure I particularly agree with that, but when the Treasurer replied he talked about all the problems with it. He said it was impossible for the province to limit sales tax incentives to vehicles covered by the auto pact.

That is not right at all. We know what vehicles are covered by the auto pact -- vehicles of the Big Four here in North America. What he is really saying is he doesn’t want to exclude foreign cars from that sales tax rebate program. There are some of those offshore manufacturers, such as Volkswagen, that do have some of their parts produced here in Canada; they do have what they call Canada value added to their vehicles. They do have a specific number; it is quantified. Duty is remitted; they don’t pay the total duty, but only a part of that duty. It is all quantified and updated month by month.

The government could even say to those offshore companies that have Canada value added they therefore would get a portion of their duty remitted -- something that is very quantifiable: “If you get 40 per cent of your duty remitted, we will give you 40 per cent off the sales tax on all your company’s vehicles for which you have that duty remission.” It is very easily quantified.

The Treasurer may not have wanted to do it for other reasons, but it wasn’t because it was impossible to do. They were talking about North American vehicles so those corporations stay healthy as well as produce employment. I happen to know the kind of suggestion being made, because I came down on a plane, on the subway and the bus with the mayor of Windsor, Bert Weeks, who was about to go into that discussion with the Premier. I know exactly what he was saying. It is possible to do this for all the North American vehicle producers, and it is possible to easily quantify and calculate what percentage of the sales tax would apply to only those foreign producers who have the duty remission program and the Canada value added.

The Treasurer of Ontario should not have tried to sweep the problem under the carpet in quite that easy way. It just doesn’t stand analysis. He may not have wanted to do it because of budgetary concerns but, if he wanted to see that North American cars sold and that employment held up, this is one thing which the Treasurer should have well considered and it is easily calculable.

One other thing that was asked in that meeting on Monday was that the Ministry of Industry and Tourism give a couple of staff persons to support the “Buy the cars your neighbours helped to build” program, which has been so successful in selling North American vehicles in Windsor. Windsor people know exactly what model cars are produced in the Windsor plants, and Windsor happened to sell quite a few of those models -- the small Chryslers, which are very fuel-efficient vehicles, the Cordovas and the Miradas. A considerable number of those have sold. This is a very good program which I would suggest should be extended to all Ontario cities and, one would hope, to all Canadian cities.

Buy the cars your neighbours helped to build, meaning North American cars. One will get the inevitable question: which of these North American cars are actually produced in Canada? It is a short list which could be provided as part of that program. Don’t say just “Buy these North American cars,” but for those who want to know which ones are assembled here, “These are a few models in the auto, truck and other vehicle areas that are assembled here.”

9:50 p.m.

This was not commented upon in the House by the Treasurer. I guess he was leaving it to the Minister of Industry and Tourism. I would say to the Minister of Industry and Tourism that if I were he, I would go wholeheartedly into that program and give it a couple of staff members who could help the program, which would cause it to be spread to all Ontario and, one would hope, to all Canadian cities.

I am tempted to go on for a very long time about the problems of the auto industry in Windsor and its various impossible solutions and what we should be doing to help, but I am sure this will come up day by day as we progress through the life of this parliament, certainly this spring and for the rest of this year.

I would like to turn to one other major area that has always interested me since coming into the House, and that is women’s issues. I think it’s deplorable that the government has not seen fit to call my private member’s bill about equal pay for work of equal value for further discussion in this House. The speakers who appeared before our committee in January made even the most reluctant person of that committee understand the need for equality of pay on the basis of sex around this province.

We had a couple of the answers from the Minister of Labour (Mr. Elgie), when he finally came on the last day to address us, not even having paid attention to or read the comments that were given to us. We asked him, in turn, a couple of questions. It was evident that he hadn’t even bothered to follow it. He said he wanted some experience in other jurisdictions in this area before he could anticipate seriously considering the problem, or words to that effect.

In this morning’s Globe and Mail, there was a report of two jurisdictions in Canada which are doing it, the federal government and Quebec, through their human rights commissions. We now have experience in the federal field, the actual first case of the application of that principle to federal civil servants. The federal government has been found to be in violation of the equal pay for work of equal value laws in relation to 3,000 people, most of whom are women. The group included food service workers, 60 per cent of them women; 82 laundry workers, 52 per cent of them women; 319 personnel service workers, 60 per cent of them women; and gatekeepers at our national parks. It was found that they were paid considerably less than their equivalent counterparts in other site categories whose work was certainly of equal value. They found that their work was equal in value to work performed by persons in four other categories of general service workers, who were primarily men, and that the rates for the female-dominated groups were much lower. Ninety per cent of them were men in these other categories,

If we take the example of food service workers in Vancouver, there was a difference of $1.79 an hour between the women’s group and the men’s group. The gap differs as you go from city to city across Canada. In Ottawa it was $1.50 an hour, and in the Atlantic provinces there was a $1.20 an hour difference between the men’s category and women’s category. Those categories were deemed to be of equal value by the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

We now have a very clear-cut case before us. The Canadian Human Rights Commission has been able to determine equal value and to identify who is short in value, and says those values must be made up. We have enough evidence in that case alone, which is rather a complicated case involving categories on both sides, for the current Minister of Labour to say there is enough experience to apply this principle in Ontario. There is not a fair-minded person in Ontario who agrees with the Minister of Labour when he says: “Equal pay for work of equal value is a good idea whose time has not yet come.” It’s long overdue, the first example of it having come up in a strike in Toronto here in 1860.

In the whole area of women’s rights, we definitely need this kind of legislation, accompanied by legislation in the affirmative action field, so that jobs are open to women in our province and women have a chance at those jobs. The two concepts go hand in hand; one needs the other. There is no point in having affirmative action when what you are doing is getting women into low-paid jobs or jobs of equal value to jobs occupied by men, except for pay.

Both pieces of legislation are needed, and this government should be bringing in my private member’s bill, as amended by the committee, and legislation in the affirmative action area. One could spend a whole evening talking about the things this government does not do on behalf of women.

To bring in another point, without any detail, on day care, this government does not have any intention of providing adequate day-care facilities for working women In this province. It is a disgrace, the small number of places and how they are funded. If this government were being fair at all to 53 per cent of our population, it would be providing day-care facilities adequate to the need.

As education critic, there are always several areas in education that I am tempted to speak on whenever I get to my feet. Having just gone through this year’s set of Education estimates, ending yesterday, and that set of estimates coming so few months after the 1979 estimates, which we dealt with in mid- to late November, I am almost talked out.

What we need very drastically in this time of declining enrolment in Ontario is encouragement by this ministry for the continuation and operation of small community schools and small classrooms in those schools.

The ministry made a very feeble first step this year in financing rural schools, which are small in numbers. But it does not touch the urban school situation, those community schools which are so needful to the life and viability of a community and which school boards continue to close with gay abandon right across this province. We need much tougher procedures for small school closings than the ministry has laid down which the boards must comply with.

I could go on about how the province continues to find a smaller and smaller percentage share of elementary and secondary education costs in this province. We are down from 61.5 per cent in 1975 to what I suspect is less than 50 per cent -- or just about the 50 per cent mark -- in this current upcoming year. The NDP would restore that grant to 60 per cent of the funding immediately and, over the next four or five years, put it up to 80 per cent. This is our policy. The funding would come from adequate taxes in the resource and corporate sectors.

We are about to have a special-education bill. When we talked yesterday, we might have had the bill today. We hear from the House leaders’ meeting today that it will be next week. We hope that there is not too much delay of that kind. We heard from the minister yesterday that it could be today. We heard from the House leaders’ meeting today that it will be next week; we hope that it will, in fact, come next week.

Our concern there is that the programs will be adequate, the teachers trained and the boards properly financed. We look forward to that debate, and the clause-by-clause discussion on that bill, to see that all those criteria are met, particularly the funding.

We continue to be concerned about trades training. This government, with its so-called desire to see that trades training is supported across the province, has not yet sat down with the six or seven very good -- in terms of programming -- and very well equipped technical schools in this province to see that graduates from those schools are given their proper partial credit towards their certification as tradespersons.

10 p.m.

We have been talking about this need for a year. Are we going to have yet another whole year of students, those in the 1980-1981 classes, graduating from those very good technical schools without proper credit towards their trades training at a community college?

Another matter was brought to my attention which I truly believe to be important. My colleague from Carleton East (Ms. Gigantes) has a concern over the occasions that Ontario Hydro and Atomic Energy of Canada Limited are taking to provide seminars in teaching material for teachers with an interest in science. When dealing with energy, there is no doubt that training is a pro-nuclear discussion.

My colleague from Carleton East, in writing to people about her concern on this, said it may be difficult for some of those teachers to resist that kind of teaching pressure, particularly if it is transmitted by the school principal that they should do this. It seems that the teachers should resist this. The federation might well consider drawing up guidelines for balanced information to which those teachers could refer. That is a very good suggestion. I hope the teachers and their federations would look at that program that is being given, because they have no confidence that the government will look at that program being offered by Ontario Hydro and AECL, to see that that material is balanced and to give out counterbalancing material so the children in our classrooms receive a balanced and not just a pro-nuclear course in science and energy.

There are several other things that are of widespread interest to me. Very recently I received a letter from an employee of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario from my riding. He indicated that the union and the LCBO have been meeting to try to bring about a new collective agreement in the province. They have been negotiating for quite some time. The contract expires on June 30, and yet the management side, the LCBO, has tabled a two-year agreement containing increases of 6.5 per cent in the first year and six per cent in the second year of the two-year contract they are talking about.

You and I know, Mr. Speaker, what percentage increases we got in our salaries this particular year in the bill which was passed last Tuesday. We know the cost of living has gone up nine per cent in this past year in this province. It is quite identifiable. The government of Ontario has given increases to many of its other employees of 12 per cent and 12.5 per cent, recognizing that some catch-up is required in percentage increases above the normal nine per cent increase in the cost of living. Yet the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is talking about six and 6.5 per cent per year in each year of that two- year contract. I would say to the Minister of Consumer and Commercial Relations (Mr. Drea) that he should talk to that board and get those negotiations going properly. In my terms, that is a bad-faith proposal on the part of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

The writer goes on to say: “If this offer was brought to the table in private sector negotiations, it would either have been updated or would have led to a strike but, unfortunately, we are classed as civil servants and not allowed to strike. The denial of the right to strike for liquor board employees is ludicrous.” I agree with him 100 per cent. He goes on to say: “No intelligent, living human being would ever consider us as providing an essential service.”

Mr. Ziemba: Absolutely right.

Mr. Bounsall: Anyone in this House, not just the member for High Park-Swansea (Mr. Ziemba), would agree with that. I think we all would. There is nothing essential about the service of a liquor control board employee. That is the term used to deny public servants the right to strike. He goes on to say: “Doctors can opt out of OHIP. Nurses, teachers and employees of the Brewers’ Retail stores can all strike -- and what is the difference between them and the employees of the Liquor Control Board, who sell alcohol as opposed to beer?”

The membership has been frustrated enough and they want that right to strike in order to move negotiations along and not wait, as they did last time, for 21 months to pass before getting their 24-month agreement. They have no authority or way in which to help their negotiation demands.

Before I quit, there are a couple of other points I want to mention. One of the first things I dealt with when I became a member was in answer to a rather curious call, as I thought at the time, and a rather detailed one, from the person involved with the government document section at the University of Windsor library and at the downtown city library. There happened to be the same person doing both jobs for a short period of time. He let me know that only about half of the government documents that were produced were received, and they were supposed to be full-depository libraries. The documents often were as long as six months late, and he asked if I could do something in this regard. I spoke and I wrote letters and two or three years later, slowly but surely, the full-depository libraries were getting a full range of documents sent to them. The time of receipt was rather shortened; some of them came within a couple of weeks and most of them were there within two to three months, rather than the very common lapse of six months before they got them. In that whole period, and I still continue to so do whenever I can find additional documents within the limits of $100 per year that is allowed to a member for additional government documents, I sent a copy each to the main Windsor library and to the University of Windsor library in order that they have copies early and to ensure that they get a complete set of everything.

Those documents are used very widely by the people of Ontario and, in this case, the people of Windsor. When a report comes out in the Globe and Mail or any newspaper, or on the radio or television, that a report has been received that says thus and so, you can count on every librarian in Ontario getting three or four requests for the document that very day, a line-up of people wanting the document, which in some cases never comes at all.

I haven’t had to correspond with respect to the provision of documents for these depository libraries for three or four years now. From time to time, I check to see whether they still want my extra set, and they tell me how useful it is to have a second set of things around: “Yes, please; keep sending them.”

I had a communication this week asking if I knew that, in the reorganization of the printing services branch of the Ministry of Government Services, the bibliographic centre had been eliminated. The centre was responsible for producing the Ontario government publications monthly checklist and the annual catalogue, both tools which were used by those libraries to see that their government documents section was complete and what was available that hadn’t been sent out in the normal way to provide them with their full-depository holdings. They wanted to express some real apprehension about that because they now had no checklist with which to compare.

Any proposed changes in this depository system would be of real concern to them, as it should be to all of us here, to ensure that government information on those documents gets widely circulated.

I hope they are all going to the minister responsible and if the member for Lanark (Mr. Wiseman), who is the Minister of Government Services, wants to talk to me later, I hope he can assure me there has been no change in the depository publications sent forth. I want to say, if it is true that the checklist and the annual catalogue have been cancelled, this is causing them some concern, because that is their way of checking to see whether they have a full set of all government documents.

10:10 p.m.

I would like to conclude with a few remarks about the city of Windsor and that area. I won’t make them too detailed or too long. The equalization factors have still not been properly equalized in the absence of market value assessment coming in. I say that Windsor is again going to fall some $5 million to $7 million behind in equalization grants in this current year. That is a very heavy burden in the context of the year. It is a burden which over the last four or five years has amounted to a net loss in grants by the province to the city of in excess of $20 million. I say to this government that this can no longer continue.

Some other cities, not as large as Windsor, are in the same relative position. I understand Sarnia is in the same relative position. Figures of losses on a yearly or cumulative basis are not as large, but they are in the exact same ratio. Other cities are disadvantaged too. I say to this government that discrimination should be ended immediately by a proper equalization factor coming into effect so that proper equalization takes place. The city of Windsor, which at normal times cannot afford that kind of drop in provincial grants, should receive at least its fair share of the provincial grants relative to other cities in the province.

I say to the Minister of Natural Resources (Mr. Auld) he will have received or is about to receive a detailed submission from the Essex Region Conservation Authority about the funding it will so very badly need if its conservation programs are to continue. This authority was established only three or four years ago and is well behind many other conservation authorities which have been established 15 and 20 years ago and more.

We do not have much recreational land in Essex county in comparison to other areas. There is a very desperate need for these lands to be purchased now and for a parkway, which is one of the authority’s proposals to be established starting at Lake St. Clair and running through Windsor and down to the Detroit River and the Lake Erie sector. A parkway should be established there linking the various parks which it hopes to acquire and develop. I will be talking to the minister and to this House about the very real need for the provision of funds to sustain the Essex Region Conservation Authority in its plans for acquisition and building that parkway.

I would like to end by pointing out one other problem area in the Windsor area; that is, the provincial court and the building there. It is clear now that it is woefully inadequate. Talk to people on the street and they will comment on how inadequate it is. The odd lawyer will talk in an awkward way about its inadequacy. I wonder why I don’t hear about it officially.

I will say, “Why haven’t I heard much about it?” They will say, “It is under the jurisdiction of the senior provincial court judge there to do that. But Judge Stewart isn’t paying any attention to the lack of facilities there. One of the problems is Judge Stewart. We can’t get him to focus on it at all.”

Then one inquires around a little bit more and finds that some funny things have I happened. The telephones have been removed from the provincial court building. If one is there awaiting a summons as a witness, or if one is appearing oneself and things run overtime, as they often do, and one wishes to make a phone call, one has to walk out of the building two blocks away to the nearest pay phone, I am told. The facilities are inadequate and some strange decisions are being made. Proper submissions are not coming forward for expansion or about the woeful lack of facilities in that court building.

I say to the Attorney General that something must be done with respect to seeing the needs of that provincial court building. He must see they are met even if at the moment there is not much leadership being taken by the judges themselves through their senior provincial court judge.

While we are on that topic, I want to point out that we are at least two judges short in Windsor in the provincial court area, and that those judges should be appointed as soon as possible. There was the unexpected death of one judge recently. He, of course, needs to be replaced, and we were slated to get a second. With two provincial court judges shy, the minister can imagine the way the cases are piling up in the Windsor area. It is a matter of immediate concern to the people of Windsor and to those who work in the whole legal, court, probation and parole community that this be resolved as soon as possible.

The time is getting on and I don’t want to go on unduly, but I want to say that I too was rather upset by the Premier’s remarks on May 13 to the Ontario Chamber of Commerce on prices and wages. He talked about high interest rates and chronic inflation representing an unfair and cruel tax on business. He said, “Price and income restraints must again become a matter of urgent and frank public discussion,” “We as Canadians must try to restrain ourselves in terms of income and price increases” and “Most Canadians have come to expect their income will always rise at least as much as the consumer price index.” That is not a bad expectation, I say myself.

According to the Premier again, “In my view, an anti-inflation policy must be established and must establish and explain new norms of reasonable and responsible social behaviour in this regard.”

I am concerned about it particularly because of the Premier’s attitude that perhaps we shouldn’t expect our incomes to match the cost-of-living increases. It looks as if he is going to he willing to return to a price and wage control situation that would be as bad as the one we had under Prime Minister Trudeau. That was one that controlled wages and not prices, one that saw the cost of living outstrip the size of the wage increases; it also provided in the people of Canada a large measure of feeling that they were being hosed by that program, that it was unfair -- which it was -- and that redress should be made when those controls were lifted. Here it seems we have the Premier of Ontario looking for a return to that inequitable situation.

I would not be opposed to controls on prices if wages were allowed to keep pace with those prices. I suggest that wages are behind the price increases that have taken place since 1975 and that we should allow catch-up there in addition to letting them match the price increases which have occurred. That is the kind of program I wouldn’t be opposed to. But if the Premier is thinking about any other kind of program in which wages do not at least equal the price increases in any sort of control situation, we in this party, and I in particular, can be counted upon to object most strenuously to that kind of program. There will be a disagreement in this House the likes of which we have not seen for quite some time should that be the intent of this government and the Premier.

On motion by Mr. Cureatz, the debate was adjourned.

The House adjourned at 10:19 p.m.