MUNICIPALITY OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO AMENDMENT ACT (CONTINUED)

METROPOLITAN TORONTO POLICE PRACTICES

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The House resumed at 8 p.m.

House in committee of the whole.

MUNICIPALITY OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO AMENDMENT ACT (CONTINUED)

Resuming consideration of Bill 127, An Act to amend the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto Act.

Mr. Cunningham: Mr. Chairman, I do not notice a quorum.

Mr. Chairman ordered the bells to be rung.

8:04 p.m.

Mr. Chairman: Order. A quorum is present.

On section 6:

Mr. Chairman: We are on section 6, the amendment put forward by the Minister of Education (Miss Stephenson).

Mr. Ruprecht: Mr. Chairman, before we go into the details of this section, let me make it very clear that not only is our party very much opposed to subsection 6(4) of this particular bill, we are against the whole bill. The reason is very simple, especially when you examine subsection 6(4) where you will see the minister has committed one of her biggest blunders.

The reason I say that is that in committee, and I was present at the time, the minister indicated she was supporting the position of the opposition. Did you know that, Mr. Chairman? I know you cannot know everything. Most people do not know that. What really surprised me was that apparently the minister was ready and able, with one stroke of her pen, to throw the whole educational system into total and complete chaos.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: I see you guys are playing to the gallery again tonight. Lovely.

Mr. Ruprecht: Mr. Chairman, I am not speaking to the gallery. I want to speak to the minister through you.

Mr. Chairman: The amendment is what you want to speak to.

Mr. Ruprecht: I want to speak directly to the amendment. What we on this side of the House want to know is why the minister changed her mind in midstream. She went to the committee and said to the members, when I was present, "Yes, it is a good idea." It is in the record, clear and obvious, for everyone to see.

Then I read the fine print and even the finer print, Madam Minister, and the facts stay as they were. The minister comes to the committee meeting and says, "Yes, we agree with the position of the opposition." Then a few weeks later, out of the blue a bolt comes down from her ministry and I find that in her new recommendation she has changed her mind again.

It is the people who should decide. It is the people's choice, Madam Minister, but it is not the people's choice that you throw the whole educational community of Metropolitan Toronto into chaos, especially the Toronto Board of Education. What we want to know, Madam Minister, and I hope after I sit down we will get a statement from you, is why you have changed your mind again.

Mr. Chairman, if we can reason with the minister, and we have tried to do that at the committee level; occasionally, the minister is a reasonable person and we can reason with her. In fact she pointed this out in committee. She said, "The opposition is right." What I want to know and what we want to know is why she has changed her mind.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Why doesn't he read Hansard and find out?

Mr. Ruprecht: The reason I am repeating myself is that in saying it just once we seem to have a problem getting through to some people. As I said earlier, I would only hope that the minister will tell us specifically why she changed her mind.

Could it be that she simply went back to some of the people in the boroughs and talked to her supporters out there? Did they say, "Madam Minister, you have made a mistake"? Perhaps she then went back and contacted her oracle, or the entrails of an oracle, or the member for St. George (Ms. Fish), who is now here, or maybe even the member for --

Mr. Boudria: For Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry?

Mr. Ruprecht: No, not for Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry (Mr. Villeneuve) but for High Park-Swansea (Mr. Shymko). I want to know whether she indeed contacted the oracle, whether she contacted the member for High Park-Swansea, whether she contacted her boss, the Premier (Mr. Davis), or whether she contacted the Solicitor General (Mr. G. W. Taylor). I want to know who in heaven's name she has contacted who has made her change her mind.

It is obvious that by doing that she again threw the educational community into chaos.

8:10 p.m.

Mr. Haggerty: The minister would never do that.

Mr. Ruprecht: The minister has done that and I would only hope and pray that she would give us a good reason. Let us specifically examine the section that she has changed her mind on again. Do you notice, Mr. Chairman -- I want to add this because it is important to notice -- that she has not said I was wrong.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Read Hansard.

Mr. Ruprecht: We read Hansard. Let me point out to you that my distinguished colleagues the members for St. Catharines (Mr. Bradley) and Wentworth North (Mr. Cunningham), and the other opposition members from the third party who were also present, know full well that what I have been telling you up to this point is the complete truth. She has changed her mind. The minister will have her chance to speak to us and tell us what it is that she has specifically changed, unless I do not understand the language in this legislation or cannot read the legislative record of Ontario where she has indicated that she agrees with the original clause.

What happens here is simply that the different school boards in the metropolitan area should be permitted to keep the surpluses which are being raised locally. That is basically the question. Should they be permitted to keep those surpluses which are being raised locally? Of course, the position we have taken is that they should be able to keep those surpluses. What the minister wants to do is to have those surpluses maintained in the different municipalities.

Mr. Philip: Mr. Chairman, do you recognize a quorum?

Mr. Chairman: We will find out.

Mr. Villeneuve: You don't have great numbers in your own group there.

Hon. Mr. Gregory: On a point of privilege: I really find it offensive that the member has the nerve to call a quorum when they have two men in the House.

Mr. Chairman ordered the bells to be rung.

8:17 p.m.

Mr. Chairman: A quorum is present.

Hon. Mr. Gregory: Mr. Chairman, on a point of privilege: I think the record should show that after the call for a quorum with a five-minute bell, there are only two New Democrats in the House, the same number present when the member for Etobicoke (Mr. Philip), a New Democrat, called for a quorum.

Mr. Chairman: Order.

Hon. Mr. Gregory: Suddenly we have three.

Mr. Chairman: That is not a point of privilege nor a point of order.

Mr. Ruprecht: Mr. Chairman, I am happy to continue debating this particular section. As you understand, we were just discussing why the Minister of Education had changed her mind. While in committee she was saying one thing about the opposition being on the right track, and when she came before the committee of the whole House, she said the exact opposite.

The only problem with that is, in the meantime, I have been in contact with some of the people who are concerned with Bill 127, and I told them specifically that the school boards should be permitted to keep only those surpluses that are being raised locally. What has happened though is that the minister has come back to this chamber, to the committee of the whole House, and has indicated that is no longer her position, which in the beginning she had agreed on. That causes our party, as well as the third party, I am sure, considerable consternation. The reason for that is simple. When the minister keeps changing her mind, the people no longer understand nor do they know what the minister's position is going to be. Consequently, they are confused.

8:20 p.m.

The other problem with that is we have had committee hearings, and to these hearings we invited a whole slew of people to come and talk to the minister. When we had finished those hearings, the minister's statement at that point was still clear: she agreed with the position of the opposition.

Suddenly, after everyone had appeared, and I mean everyone -- people from York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, from all over the metropolitan area; housewives, professors, teachers, board members and trustees, even the chairman was there -- after all of these people had spoken, a whole lot of them went away thinking that the minister's position was clear and unequivocal. Now they are being surprised and are calling our members asking, "What has happened in the meantime?"

They want to know why the minister has changed her mind and why she made this change, throwing the whole educational apparatus in the city of Toronto, especially the city board of education, into chaos. We want to know today from the minister why she has changed her mind, whether she will talk to this House and whether she will give an answer to that question.

What subsection 6(4) indicates, and what the reversal of the minister's position indicates, is that she wants to continue to punish the school board in the city of Toronto. Did you know that, Mr. Chairman? I repeat, she wants to punish the school board of the city of Toronto.

Why? I do not want to go into all the details, but let me simply say this. If she persists in the continuation of her new position on subsection 6(4), what she will be doing in this section --

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, it is subsection 6(2).

Mr. Chairman: The minister has pointed out that it is subsection 6(2).

Mr. Ruprecht: Excuse me. Let me just say section 6, okay? That will be all-encompassing.

What will happen if she continues on the present course? She can have only one goal in mind, and not only will she be found guilty by everyone who has appeared before the committee of stripping the school board in the city of Toronto down to a bare minimum and its necessity, not only will she have succeeded in throwing the educational system into chaos, as I said earlier, but she will also have succeeded in driving the level of education below what is essential to maintain the programs that are necessary for Toronto.

Do I say this because I want to fill up the time? No. I say this because it is absolutely clear that this section in this bill will force cutbacks in programs in the city of Toronto.

Interjection.

Mr. Ruprecht: That is right. I am glad the minister is finally waking up to the fact, because I do not think she understands the parameters and implications of the position she has taken here. If I were the minister I would at this particular time not speak my mind, because I would not want to be found in the position of changing it again at a later time. I might say to her that as the minister, being in such a "flexible" position, she changes and flip-flops from one position to another after everyone has gone away because she could not take the pressure.

The minister prides herself on being tough, stolid, solid and immovable when she takes a stand. Let me assure you, Mr. Chairman, that she has changed and she has flip-flopped, and I for one want to ensure that everyone understands what has taken place here. What has taken place is simple: before the committee and before the hundreds of people who appeared she took one stand, and when everyone had gone home she took another.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, on a point of personal privilege: The sequence of events is not as the honourable member has described it at all.

Mr. Ruprecht: But the substance is.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: No, it is not. Indeed, the structure of the bill was similar to my amendment tonight in the original form. It was in committee on clause-by-clause examination after all the groups had appeared. I wish the member for Parkdale would clarify his imagination a little.

Mr. Ruprecht: Did you agree with us or not?

Hon. Miss Stephenson: It was after that there was discussion. I hope the member will read Hansard and see precisely what I said, because I did not record in Hansard any agreement with the opposition. Read it carefully.

While the member for Parkdale was out cavorting somewhere else, I have already explained to the House on two occasions why the amendment is being redrafted. I believe he can read and can look it up in Hansard.

Mr. Chairman: I would like to point out to the --

Mr. Foulds: Mr. Chairman, on a point of order: Could you inform me what privilege of the minister has been infringed that she rose and spoke at length on?

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Yes.

Hon. Mr. Gregory: He wasn't telling the truth.

Mr. Chairman: I would like point out to the member for Parkdale --

Mr. McClellan: Mr. Chairman, on a point of privilege: The government whip said the member for Parkdale was not telling the truth. That is not parliamentary. Would you ask him to withdraw that statement?

Mr. Chairman: I am sorry. I am only handling one question at a time. I did not hear it.

Mr. Nixon: You are doing a great job.

Mr. Chairman: Right, thank you. I want to point out to the member for Parkdale that I was listening closely. You have brought to the attention of the House seven times what took place in committee in terms of how you recognize it happened. I think we are reaching the limit of being repetitive.

Mr. Ruprecht: Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the minister's statement trying to defend herself. She is trying to defend the indefensible. What has happened here is simple. Even though I have repeated myself on this point, I want to make clear to the House the importance of this question and this point.

The minister indicated one thing to the committee and she states another here. That is the essence. If she is sensitive about that to the point where she wants to correct the sequence of events, we can agree with that. I will point out why in a minute.

But there are two points at stake. One is the sequence of events and the other, of even more importance, is the substance of the issue. As far as the substance of the issue is concerned, she does not have one leg to stand on.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: I have two and I will demonstrate.

Mr. Ruprecht: She has said one thing in committee and another in the House. If you want to say that is misleading, Mr. Chairman, if you want to tell me that is not the truth, that is for you to interpret and it is for her to state the facts.

Mr. Chairman: That was nine times. Even I am getting a little annoyed.

Mr. Ruprecht: The question here is not whether the Chairman gets annoyed --

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, on a point of privilege: I was disturbed by what I heard from the minister a minute ago. She said she had nothing to do with this amendment coming to the committee.

I have looked at the Hansard for the morning sitting of Wednesday, October 13, 1982, page 38. At the point where it was decided the NDP's amendment would not be accepted, the committee then decided by consensus to arrive at the amendment which is now being struck out by the minister's efforts in this House. It was the minister herself who, in the committee, read the form of the amended version we got back from committee. To quote:

"Hon. Miss Stephenson: Is equal to the portion of the surplus that was raised by local taxation in the area municipality." The minister read the darned amendment in the committee on behalf of the member for Wentworth (Mr. Dean). How she can try to lead the House to think otherwise is beyond me.

8:30 p.m.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: On the point of privilege, Mr. Chairman: I did not read it on behalf of the member for Wentworth. I was attempting to clarify what it was the honourable members were leading themselves to. I think you will notice there was a question mark at the end of that, because I was asking whether that was what they meant in that committee.

Mr. Cassidy: I can read as well as anybody else. I read what you said.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: But I was there. The member was not there; so he does not know. I am sorry. I happened to be there. It was indeed a question and when I understood what their question was, then I knew what it was they were talking about.

Mr. Chairman: You've had your say. Come on, let's go.

Mr. Cassidy: On the point of order, Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Chairman: It is not a point of order; I rule you out of order. It is a point of clarification.

Mr. Cassidy: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. May I just read the quote from Hansard?

"Mr. Grande: If the minister accepts the wording, 'is equal to,' it seems to me to drive at the heart of what I am talking about.

"Hon. Miss Stephenson: If we amend that portion that has already been amended by the change of the wording in the last three lines, 'has jurisdiction by an amount that, in the opinion of the board, is equal to the portion of the surplus that was raised by local taxation in the area municipality.'

"Mr. Grande: I am satisfied that deals with the concern in the argument I have presented."

Mr. Chairman: Come on. I think I have been extremely patient with you. It is time to rule you out of order. You have had your say.

Mr. Cassidy: It is on the record, and she accepted the proposed amendment.

Mr. Chairman: Member for Parkdale, I want to tell you it has been nine times --

Mr. Bradley: But he's got a 10th.

Mr. Chairman: Now, that's it. You have to get on to the amendment. If you go to the repetition again, you are out of order.

Mr. Ruprecht: This may not be important to you, Mr. Chairman, but let me assure you there were more than 200 people from the metropolitan area at those meetings and they want to know the details and the truth. At this particular point, I do not think you have any right to rule me out of order because I am reading into the record what the facts were.

You have permitted the minister to get up on a point of personal privilege and dispute the facts I have indicated. When I have the record in front of me, you want to rule me out of order? What is this?

Hon. Miss Stephenson: You are misrepresenting the facts.

Mr. Ruprecht: I did not quite hear what the minister was shouting across the aisle -- she is not doing it at this point; so I will let it go by and I will not repeat it -- but let me read for the record what the facts were. They are very short.

Mr. Havrot: For the 10th time.

Mr. Ruprecht: No. Not for the 10th time. I have never indicated --

Hon. Mr. Pope: It was the 11th time. You lost count.

Mr. Ruprecht: Was the minister present at the committee meetings? Does he know what is in the record?

Hon. Mr. Pope: You lost count, did you?

Mr. Ruprecht: If I were the minister, I would not be that loud. I am going to read what is in the record for the minister's illumination.

Mr. Chairman, let me briefly point this out and then I will continue. This is on page 38.

"Mr. Wildman: If the government is prepared to say that, we could accept that as a friendly amendment.

"Mr. Dean:" -- for whom I have the greatest respect -- "We have that amendment in. Do you want to amend the amendment or withdraw that amendment on the understanding that we will change it to say, 'will be equal to the amount of the surplus'?

"Hon. Miss Stephenson: 'Is equal to the portion of the surplus that was raised by local taxation in the area municipality.'" Interesting, Mr. Chairman. Then it continues:

"Mr. Dean: If the member for Oakwood would withdraw his amendment, I would be prepared to move that one.

"Mr. Chairman: As part of your original amendment? Would it not be simpler, now that we have passed your amendment, to deal with this 'is equal to'?

"Mr. Grande: If the minister accepts the wording, is equal to, it seems to me to drive at the heart of what I am talking about."

Here is the minister's statement:

"Hon. Miss Stephenson: If we amend that portion that has already been amended by the change of the wording in the last three lines, 'has jurisdiction by an amount that, in the opinion of the school board, is equal to the portion of the surplus that was raised by local taxation in the area municipality.''

"Mr. Grande: I am satisfied that deals with the concern in the argument I have presented.

"Mr. Chairman: Procedurally, yes. Let us move a motion.

"Mr. Grande: I will move the amendment."

Mr. Chairman says, finally, and I quit here, "Mr. Grande moves that the second last line of section 6(2)(4) of the bill be amended by deleting the words 'is not less than' and substituting therefor the words is equal to.'"

The motion was agreed to, and the minister has the gall to get up here and refute the facts of this situation, and you want to say that I cannot speak to this point, Mr. Chairman. I think that is ludicrous. Let me simply point out what the distinction is.

Mr. McClellan: The minister should apologize.

Mr. Ruprecht: She should apologize, Mr. Chairman. I would agree with what she said on the sequence of events; it was right after we had heard all the deputations. That means to me that the pressure was still on her, it was fresh in her mind and she said "Agreed" on page 38. Then, and I will finish here, she comes to the House and says, "I have changed my mind, folks. I flip-flopped and here it is again; I have changed the whole thing around again," leaving us to hold the bag for the minister.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, on a point of clarification: The member does not remember, unfortunately, that there was a request on the second day of the clause-by-clause examination that we reconsider that section of the bill. The honourable members in committee were not prepared to reconsider. The motion, as a matter of fact, was introduced on that day, which I believe was October 15 or 20, if I am not mistaken --

Mr. Cunningham: That is why we are here today.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: October 20. In fact, the motion that was being introduced as an amendment was introduced to the committee and was read to them on that date.

Mr. Ruprecht: I appreciate the minister's comment, Mr. Chairman, but you will agree the point surely is that it is in black and white and that the substance of it is simply -- I will not repeat myself. If she is going to tell me she does not agree, then I am going to sit down and not speak any more. Does she not agree that it is in black and white and that it is a fact now that she has changed her mind? Yes or no? If she says "Yes," I will continue; if she says 'No" --

Interjections.

Mr. Ruprecht: Mr. Chairman, let me simply continue. I think the point is very clear. Here we are in a situation where we in the opposition parties have to defend the minister's statement and her position when she has changed her mind. I think that is unfortunate. It is more than unfortunate, because it shows the kind of commitment, the kind of situation that is indicative of the minister's position vis-à-vis the city of Toronto school board. That is what it indicated, and everyone should understand that. The louder we speak on this and the clearer we are on this issue, the better for all of us, because we would not want to have this repeated in other school boards across all of Ontario.

When we look at this particular section of the surpluses, we know we are being shaken, and not only in the city of Toronto. The implications are so serious and clear to other boards across Ontario that they too are saying, "By golly, if the minister can change her mind on this, then she can change her mind on making a system of this nature available and sticking it right across the province." That is what they said when they appeared before the committee. Their accusation was that this was the first step towards that commitment. She said "No."

The point is, if she can flip-flop all over the map, then can we trust that minister not to change her mind the next time when it is clear that this kind of process and policy coming from the ministry could be applied all over Ontario?

8:40 p.m.

What is taking place here? This change really goes back to the old idea of punishment for the city of Toronto and its school board. What it means in its logical implications, its logical extension, is simply that the city of Toronto will be forced to do two things: (1) to cut back on programs and (2) to close schools. That is the fact of the situation when you look at the logic of this bill and of this situation.

I am sure the minister will agree that if those surpluses can stay with other municipalities, with other school boards, it means one basic fact in the financial agreements and the financial management of the board in Toronto, and that fact is a lack of money.

We are not saying that we do not agree with the restraint program. We are saying simply that the education of our children should come first and foremost in our minds and that it should not simply be a question of surpluses or financial arrangements dictating education policy in the city. That should not be the overriding fact, and that is now the overriding fact of this particular section when we speak of these surpluses.

This means, as I said, two things that are very important. First, it means that a lot of programs will be cut back in the city of Toronto. Second -- and the minister can correct me if I am wrong, and I hope she will make a statement to that effect -- even though I do not want to be a prophet of gloom and doom, in the case of subsections 6(2), 6(3) and 6(4), when we reconvene here in two or three years you will see that schools are being closed in the city of Toronto and that programs will have been substantially reduced and cut back to the point where we will have an education system that is not on a par with other school boards in North America. We pride ourselves in having one of the best, but it will be inferior.

The point is clear and the message is right on the wall: When you cut back programs and close down schools -- and that means when the teacher-student ratio is being increased -- our education will be lacking and inferior, and certainly it will reduce the availability of education.

To speak specifically to our position here, we believe unequivocally that school boards should be permitted to keep only those surpluses that are raised locally. I think that is a fair principle. They should not be able to keep surpluses that are not really theirs and that have been arrived at and received through other ways and means from other sources; they should keep only those that have been raised locally. That is, in fact, the whole position and that is the whole change.

To be specific, let us look at the very foundation of education policy in Ontario, to be found in no other source than a little booklet that has been sent to literally thousands of people. In fact, I will guarantee, having looked at all the petitions that have come in on this bill -- and those petitions speak directly to this section on surpluses and education policy that each one of those who have signed a petition have received in the mail, courtesy of the minister, this little leaflet.

The Deputy Chairman: The honourable member is deviating from the principal subject, which is the motion before this House.

Mr. McClellan: No, he is not.

The Deputy Chairman: That is my judgement as chairman. I am asking the member to speak to the motion on the floor and I am questioning how what he is saying now is relevant to that. I would like to see him tie it in, please, and that is the chair asking for it.

Mr. Ruprecht: Mr. Chairman, if you are afraid I might read the whole bill, let me calm your fears.

The Deputy Chairman: I have no fear of anything. All I am doing is asking the House to live within its rules and guidelines, seeking to cover those issues before us at the present time.

Mr. Ruprecht: I understand that, Mr. Chairman, but in this context I think it is relatively clear what I am trying to do.

This pamphlet speaks to this section. "Bill 127," it says, "is a move to more educational equality in Metro." Mr. Chairman, I will tell you how I will tie this in before I will do it. If surpluses are only being kept locally, it means there is more financial stability in the city school board, especially in the city of Toronto. That means the two fundamentals in this leaflet. the two fundamentals of educational policy through the ministry and in Ontario, can be maintained and can be progressed.

One of those positions is that it will be more equitable. That is what the minister is saying through this section, specifically in the section about surpluses. In fact, let me quote what it specifically says about equity: "Bill 127 is a move towards a more equitable distribution of financial resources across Metro. It will bring the community closer together."

I submit that our party's position is that it will do the opposite. It will not bring the community closer together. In fact, it will split the community and it will pit one school board against another. That is basically why we are basing these discussions: we do not agree, the city does not agree and some trustees in York do not agree. Does the minister want to indicate that she is bringing the community together through this bill? She rips it asunder. It does not bring them together, especially through these particular subsections, 6(2), 6(3) and 6(4).

She says the second fundamental of educational policy is that there will be equal educational opportunities. I submit, and I hope the minister will listen, that this bill, and especially this section, is not restoring the equality of educational opportunity. In fact, it achieves the opposite.

Why does it achieve the opposite? Because up to this point, especially in the city of Toronto and in its school board, we have had what we have called programs that are essential to maintain a stable educational policy in Toronto, and those are special programs for our very special needs. If she changes that and if her position now is that not only the surpluses that are raised locally can stay but also all the surpluses can stay within a municipality, which of course automatically takes money away from the city, that means that certain educational programs no longer will be produced and no longer will be had in the city and through its school board. That is the essence of my argument.

First, the minister has changed her mind, and I trust that she will not have disappointed everyone in the process. I trust that, but I think the damage probably will be irreparable.

Second, the two basic fundamentals are to bring the community together in terms of equitable distribution of financial resources and equal educational opportunities. This bill -- and maybe the minister will enlighten me -- particularly subsection 6(4), is not going to do it, because it will do the opposite.

8:50 p.m.

Mr. Chairman, you and I both know, being from the Metropolitan Toronto area or close to it, that in every great metropolitan area there must be one school board that is acknowledged as the leader of educational programs. With its ingenuity and flexibility, that has been, as we all know, the city of Toronto school board and its program and process. Simply to take away the resources that are necessary to maintain a stable and equitable educational policy, what that will do in the end we do not know for sure, but we know schools will be closed and programs will be cut back.

To make a long story short, I think I have outlined our concerns and how disappointed we really are. I wish I did not have to say this, but we are really disappointed in this particular process.

Let me say simply in closing -- and I think you will understand what I am trying to say, Mr. Chairman -- that in the immediate future, in the next two years, with these particular changes we will see drastic problems being created in the inner core of the city of Toronto. There will be educational problems and a drastic reduction of parent input and control over the schools and parent control over trustees, a drastic reduction in our educational policy and, through these processes, a drastic reduction in democracy. That to me is very disturbing. I rest my case.

The Deputy Chairman: I just want to remind the honourable members that we are on section 6 of Bill 127. We have spent close to four hours in the debate of this section so far.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, I want to talk about this. I talk about it as a member from outside Metropolitan Toronto but also as a member who is concerned about the implications of this amendment as representing one of the core parts of the bill in terms of the implications that could apply to the rest of the province.

I would like to read a quote from Jane Dobell, the chairman of the Ottawa Board of Education. After we finally persuaded the committee that somebody outside of Toronto had an interest in this, she was able to come down on the Ottawa board's behalf to talk to this bill in committee. Part of what she had to say, but not all of it, was quite flattering to the government. She said:

"Here I want to praise the Conservative government -- it must have been the Conservative government because they have been here so long -- which introduced, as you say, the regional two-tiered government system. I think there are elements of it that are very advanced."

The Deputy Chairman: I would say to the honourable member, that does not relate to the motion before the House.

Mr. Cassidy: Yes, it does.

The Deputy Chairman: No. This does not relate to the regional government system. You could direct your remarks to the motion before us in section 6.

Mr. McClellan: Mr. Chairman, can you explain to me how an amendment dealing with the Metropolitan Toronto School Board is not relating to government?

The Deputy Chairman: I do not see that as being relevant to the amendment before the House.

Mr. Cassidy: With respect, Mr. Chairman --

The Deputy Chairman: I am responding to the member for Bellwoods (Mr. McClellan). I am asking the member for Ottawa Centre (Mr. Cassidy) to speak to the bill. I have asked that in a kind way.

Mr. McClellan: It is an amendment to a regional government act. You will not get away with that kind of ruling.

The Deputy Chairman: I will read the amendment over so that you can tie it in. The member for Ottawa Centre is being asked by the chair to tie his remarks specifically to the motion before the House.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, I just referred to the two-tiered government system in the quote from Ms. Dobell. It seems to me that we are talking about the relationships between the Metropolitan Toronto School Board and the area school boards, which is two tiers.

The Deputy Chairman: I disagree. The amendment before the House does not talk about the two tiers. I am being very direct in asking the member to speak to the amendment before the House.

Mr. Cassidy: I happen to be speaking to it, Mr. Chairman.

The Deputy Chairman: If you are going to talk about two tiers, I am not going to allow you to speak.

Mr. Cassidy: You complained about the fact that the member for Parkdale had said the same thing nine times. I have not even had the chance to say one thing once.

The Deputy Chairman: What I want you to say, though --

Mr. Cassidy: You are overreacting to his speech, Mr. Chairman.

The Deputy Chairman: My only reaction is that members should speak to the motion. That is all I am asking and, as the chairman of this committee, I will require that.

Mr. Cassidy: Is it because I dared to read into the record a quotation from somebody who actually praised the Conservative government that I put you off balance?

The Deputy Chairman: If it is off subject, I will not allow it.

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, what she said was, and I quote: "I am here to say, 'Don't spoil a good thing. Don't go so far and tip the balance.'" That was the word of caution that came from someone who has a great deal of experience in working in a large school board and in a system which, if the minister has her way, very easily could be turned into something that looks like the two-tiered system that exists in Toronto, where we have the Metropolitan Toronto School Board and the area school boards and where we have a certain imbalance in terms of the tax resources between them and the problem of ensuring equity, of ensuring a fair share without ensuring injustice at the same time.

With the minister's decision to flip-flop, to back away from the amendment she was prepared to accept in the committee on October 13 of this year, it seems to me that what has happened is that now she is ramming it home in terms of her decision to do whatever she can to give the other area school boards and the Metropolitan Toronto School Board the ammunition with which they can somehow do in the Toronto school board.

To begin with, I cannot understand what it is that motivates the minister and her buddies on the Metro school board that they want to destroy something that has gone as far as the Metropolitan Toronto school system has gone and that has worked as relatively well as the school system has in Metropolitan Toronto.

It certainly has not been ideal. I have a number of criticisms about education in the province and about education here in the city of Toronto in particular from my knowledge of the system, from talking with parents and people whose kids have gone through the system and, for that matter, from talking with kids who have been in the system itself.

All the same, in contrast with other metropolitan areas across North America, if we look at it that way, we can be pretty proud of what has been achieved in the city of Toronto and in Metropolitan Toronto. Willy-nilly, it has been achieved in spite of, or possibly even occasionally because of, the fact that this has taken place in Ontario and not in Quebec or some other province and certainly not in a jurisdiction down in the United States.

The Chairman will be familiar with the kinds of gross imbalances that exist in terms of school systems between the central cities and the suburban municipalities in many parts of the United States. That goes so far in some areas as to get disparities of three, four or five to one in terms of the spending per pupil in rich suburban municipalities as compared to spending per pupil in the downtown area.

Here in Toronto there is, and has been for a long time, a relative equality. It has been achieved since the beginning of the 1960s and it has been achieved because of a policy of equalization which has been actively promoted by this party and which, one way or another, the government has gone along with. At times, as under Mr. Robarts as Minister of Education, there was some leadership in that direction to say that just because of the accident of where you happen to live, where your parents happen to live, where your parents could find jobs or where you happen to be born, you should not be discriminated against in Ontario in terms of the relative quality of education which you are going to get.

My colleague the member for Oakwood (Mr. Grande) has done an outstanding job in terms of voicing not only the concerns of our party but also the concerns of a tremendously broad range of people in the community: parents, citizens, teachers and people concerned about the state of education generally. When he moved the amendment originally with respect to this subsection 6(4), which we are debating right now, he initially suggested that there should be a cap on it. The minister's original suggestion had been that there should be a floor in terms of the amount of the surplus that should be left in the hands of an area school board that happened to have come up with a surplus.

There was a certain conflict between those two positions, and I think it illustrated some spirit of compromise on the part of the minister -- or at least I think so from reading Hansard -- and on the part of people on this side of the House who were seeking to make fundamental changes in Bill 127 during the course of the committee hearing.

9 p.m.

I suspect that those representatives of the public, of parents' groups, school boards and teachers who were watching felt that as well, and went away from the session that particular day saying --

Interjection.

Mr. Cassidy: No, I was not there. I left it to my colleagues and they did a damned fine job as well.

I suspect that when they left that day, they said, "This is something we can live with." It says that if a school board chalks up a surplus, then to the extent that it has contributed tax revenues to that surplus, it should get them back. That is somehow in balance with the fact that the bill is also saying that if a school board chalks up a deficit, it will have to be responsible for meeting that deficit from its own taxpayers' resources rather than being able to dip into a general pot, thereby having one school board contribute to the deficit from another area.

That is a part of the bill which has perhaps more acceptance than a number of the other very objectionable parts of this bill. It seems to me, on looking at the record, that what the minister really had in her mind, as she acquiesced in the proposal to the point where she actually read the words into the record in the amendment which she is now moving to have taken out, was to have peace at any price. It was okay to make everybody feel good that afternoon or evening because the minister was going to take it all back once it got back into this Legislature where there would not be the same intimacy and the same direct contact with the people who were concerned with every line and every word of the bill. She would wait, she would bide her time, and then she would try to do it here in the House where she knew as well that she would not have to worry about one or two of her Conservative members wandering off, and her losing the capacity to actually take the vote.

Now we have the minister moving to restore the misguided clause that she originally had at the end of subsection 4, the part we are debating now. I do not know why she is doing it, but what I do know is that it creates very grave dangers. I want to speak to that, not only with respect to the danger it creates in Metropolitan Toronto but for the dangers I can see were this principle to be adopted and extended across the rest of the province.

The minister can scoff at that and say, "This is just a Toronto bill." The fact is we are putting in place a set of new principles in the way that two-tiered school board systems will work across the province were they ever to be applied anywhere else in Ontario. There has been a great deal of debate with respect to the school board system in Ottawa-Carleton. We have four, five or six, depending on how they are counted, different school systems in Ottawa-Carleton. The French-speaking education system is scattered through four school boards in a community of half a million people. It is a rather ludicrous situation and begs for fundamental changes.

If those changes were, in the wisdom of the government, to include some kind of a two-tier system -- that was one of the proposals of the Mayo report -- I hope that is not the case, but were that to be the case then we would find the same kind of thing happening to Ottawa as is now being proposed for Metropolitan Toronto.

We would find the government saying to certain school boards with the kind of subclause that we are debating here tonight: "Look, boys, you do not raise from local taxes nearly what you spend on education. Now we are going to ensure that the revenues from local taxation are going to be spread throughout the region. We are going to do that, but then we will tell you" -- and this is why I object to the phrasing the minister is proposing now -- "that if you save money you will not just get back your own money, you will also get back the money that other municipalities contributed to education in your area."

What that does is provide an incentive for mean, flinty school trustees and school boards to get control of certain school boards and to dedicate themselves, not to the welfare of the children, not to ensuring that our job of passing on education between generations is carried out, not to the meeting of special needs such as heritage language and special education, but to the one and only goal, the bottom line, of saving a dollar and reducing the taxes.

I hope there is much more enlightenment in terms of the electorate and in terms of that kind of single-minded goal. I believe that everybody in office as a school trustee should have a number of goals among which the efficient use of public resources should be one. It is the case that there are communities in Metropolitan Toronto right now where the demography is changing, where the community is ageing, where the people with kids do not have that much political weight.

I think of parts of North York, for example, where there are whole wards that are basically made up of suburban housing, where people have grown up and have apartments and there are very few children. There, trustee candidates could run on a platform not of doing good for kids, but of doing good by saving money for the taxpayer. Then they would go and provide leadership within the school board, saying every dollar they raise and save as surplus will enable them to get $2 or $3 back from Toronto and other parts of Metropolitan Toronto.

I will repeat that, because this is the situation that is being proposed by the minister. If a school board gets $1 million from the general pot, of which $300,000 or $400,000 is contributed by its taxpayers, financed by industrial-commercial assessment among other things, all across other boroughs and that kind of thing, and manages to pare its expenditures to the point where there is a surplus, in addition to being able to pass back to the taxpayers the money contributed towards that surplus, the bill as it is proposed to be amended says the money other taxpayers contributed will also be passed back to the taxpayers in that particular borough.

If that is carried to the extreme, someone might effectively say: "Let us do our best to simply close the system down if we can get away with it, if the minister will allow us to do it. If we do that, if we save an amount equivalent to the entire local expenditure on schooling in this particular borough, not only can we spare people from any taxation they would have had to pay for schools in this borough, but we can give them back the equivalent in dollars again from the contribution that will come from other school boards."

That may be pushing it a bit hard, but that effectively is what is happening. If the board can save $1,000 a taxpayer in a particular borough because local school expenditures have been pared, cut and chopped, then instead of being able to give that taxpayer back $1,000, this section is saying it could give back $1,500 or $2,000 and the remaining amount of money would come from property taxpayers in other parts of Metropolitan Toronto. When one adds to that the degree of control that is being given to those same school boards, if that is the kind of priority they want to have over the kinds of education being provided in neighbouring boroughs, I believe that is a divisive and very dangerous situation.

The school board system in Metropolitan Toronto has worked imperfectly over time. It has not been an ideal mechanism. It is not going to work any better if the bill sets board against board, and trustee against trustee. That is what is being done in this subsection with the amendment that is being proposed by the minister.

It is my impression, from my knowledge of school boards -- and I have watched school boards quite closely in this province for 10 or 15 years -- because of the control of the educational administrators, the control of principals and teachers, and most of all the control of the Ministry of Education over what happens in school boards, because of the degree to which the spending of school boards is conditioned by the directives of the ministry and the requirements of the Education Act and so on, there is little room to manoeuvre in terms of what trustees actually administer or the policies that they actually effect.

I think that is a bad thing. I feel there should be more discretion in the hands of local school trustees. We should be looking for ways to encourage autonomy rather than to discourage autonomy. In order to do that, we need better-paid trustees, we need politicians who will spend more time on school board work and we need trustees with more power to act and fewer orders being given to them from other levels, be that provincial or from the Metropolitan Toronto Board of Education.

Mr. J. M. Johnson: The NDP conference.

Mr. Cassidy: What are you worried about?

Mr. J. M. Johnson: You want to endorse the school trustees.

The Deputy Chairman: Order.

Mr. Cassidy: Is the member criticizing the work of the Toronto school board trustees? Is that what the member is saying? That has been the most innovative school board in the province. If you look at the hours --

The Deputy Chairman: The honourable member is speaking to the motion before the House. I suggest you not be distracted by these interruptions.

Mr. Cassidy: This is an important point.

The Deputy Chairman: It is not germane to the key motion before the House.

Mr. Cassidy: It is germane in this sense, Mr. Chairman --

The Deputy Chairman: Do not allow yourself to be taken in by the distractions. Speak only to the bill.

Mr. Cassidy: He is a distraction.

The Deputy Chairman: I know, but for the sake of maintaining good order, decorum and standing orders, stick to the bill.

Mr. Cassidy: I will say this to the member, if in a few years he is still a member, and the Minister of Education has succeeded by that time in having some kind of a regional or provincial school board structure so that every school board in the province is taking orders the way that the Toronto board will have to take orders from the Metropolitan Toronto School Board with the proposal of the minister right now, then he will find out why he is wrong.

The Deputy Chairman: Speak only to the motion before the House.

Mr. Cassidy: One of the points made by Ms. Dobell when she came before the committee was precisely the fact that the needs and conditions of different school boards do differ very substantially even if they are in the same area.

In our situation in Ottawa, the Carleton school board is still going. The Ottawa board has had to cope with the problems of retrenchment and declining enrolment. That has been the case if we compare the Toronto and Scarborough boards. As my friend the member for Scarborough West (Mr. R. F. Johnston) was pointing out, Toronto has a developed system of education in terms of heritage languages and special education, in terms of its education in French and that type of thing. Why is it that a kid who lives on one side of Victoria Park Avenue should have those privileges because he lives within the city of Toronto, and the kid who grows up on the other side should not have those privileges because of the fact that he happens to live in the borough of Scarborough? Sometimes that is beyond me.

What I was trying to say before I was distracted was that in general, and except in the case of an exceptional and effective board like the Toronto board, trustees feel there is very little they can control. Therefore, they will start to focus on those few things that have been put in their hands. If they have very few tools, they use the ones that are available.

What we are doing with the proposed amendment to subsection 6(4) of this particular bill is to put a particularly offensive tool into the hands of the Metropolitan Toronto School Board trustees. They can go home at the end of the day feeling really good because they did not have to do anything about the quality of education in the Metro Toronto school system. But they sure took what Bette Stephenson gave them to club away at Toronto in order to give money to a school board whose only virtue was that it was deliberately cutting back education and failing to meet real needs of children in its particular area in order to get some dollars back from the other school districts in Metro Toronto, in order to reduce the mill rate at the expense of children.

An hon. member: Bunk.

Mr. Cassidy: The member says "Bunk." He should know that this could happen in Hamilton and Burlington as well. It is not bunk, as a matter of fact.

Mr. Allen: Mr. Chairman, I would call your attention to the fact that I believe there is not a quorum in the House at this moment. Would you ascertain that, please?

The Deputy Chairman ordered the bells to be rung.

9:19 p.m.

The Deputy Chairman: We have a quorum. The member for Ottawa Centre was speaking to Bill 127, an amendment to section 6.

Mr. Cassidy: Everybody knows, it is transparent, that the minister wants to use the Metro school board to step on the Toronto Board of Education.

The Deputy Chairman: I would ask the honourable member not to repeat himself. You have made those points. If you could, continue with new points because we do not want to have repetition.

Mr. Cassidy: Rather than jumping on me, Mr. Chairman, you might give me a chance to say a few words.

The Deputy Chairman: The chair is becoming anxious that members are repeating themselves and not speaking to the subject.

Mr. Cassidy: I am not repeating myself at all, Mr. Chairman. I am sorry about that.

The Deputy Chairman: You are just repeating yourself.

Mr. Cassidy: I do not know what kind of ruling you want to make about this.

The Deputy Chairman: My ruling is that I asked you not to repeat yourself.

Mr. Cassidy: I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, you are now repeating yourself by telling me not to repeat myself.

The Deputy Chairman: Just follow my orders.

Mr. Cassidy: Everybody has assumed that the minister wants to step on the Toronto Board of Education because of the number of NDP trustees who are on that board. I want to suggest that the real thing the minister seems to have in mind is that, because of the excellence of the work the Toronto Board of Education has done over the course of the last few years, the minister now wants to step on that because the quality of the work, and the thinking that has come out of the Toronto Board of Education, is putting her own ministry to shame.

9:20 p.m.

The Toronto Board of Education has provided leadership on heritage languages and has got rid of the two-year and three-year level high school courses. The Toronto Board of Education has been raising the issue of the kind of education we are giving to working-class kids and asking what it should be doing within technical and vocational education. That is taking place because of leadership from the trustees, the administration and the teachers. We are in the position, in education as in many other things, where Toronto is looked to as a leader across North America by many other municipalities which are jealous of what has been achieved and wish they could do the same thing in their area, in the United States and in parts of Canada.

I ask myself, as Ms. Dobell asked in her brief, why tamper with success? Why tip the balance? Why squash something that is good, productive and positive? The local autonomy and discretion that have been given to the Toronto Board of Education have led to a tremendous influx of fresh ideas and approaches which, in many cases, are being emulated across the rest of the school system in Ontario. Why is it the minister, with this amendment and the rest of the bill, is seeking to squash that innovation and put the Toronto Board of Education into some kind of a straitjacket, all in a spurious search for some kind of fiscal equality which may or may not translate into real equality or opportunity for the kids who are affected?

If we had one single school board in Metropolitan Toronto that took in every child from the Rouge River on the east to the Humber River and on into Etobicoke on the west and all the way up to Steeles in the north, does the minister really think the amount of dollars spent per child would be absolutely the same in every school under the one-tier Metropolitan Toronto School Board? The answer, of course, is no. If we look at any board, the Ottawa board, or the Carleton board, or the Nipissing board, or the Windsor board, or the Wentworth board, whichever board of education we look at, there are substantial disparities in spending for different kids, different situations and different schools. That is because of different needs.

A great deal may have to be spent on a child at one time. The child may need to be taken out for special education for three or four periods a day, or may need some counselling or assessment. It may be, if we totted it all up, that in a year we have spent $7,000 or $8,000 or $9,000 within a public board of education on the education of one particular child. In another case, a child may get only $2,000 or $3,000 spent on him or her. It depends on the circumstances.

What I find offensive is that the minister has defended her amendment by saying that the principle is one of equal access to education, equal opportunity in education and the equitable distribution of financial resources. Then she is saying that the suburban boards, by chalking up surpluses, have the power to dip their hands into taxes that have been raised on property by taxpayers in other parts of Metropolitan Toronto. I am suggesting that if she is looking for an equitable balance, it should be that if the deficit is incurred in a borough, it will have to find the dough to pay for it, but if a surplus is generated in a borough then let the borough get back a good portion of the surplus it raised.

If she does any more, she serves our kids badly, because she provides an incentive to trustees to cut and slash in order to generate surpluses and transfer resources from elsewhere within the system. What that in turn could lead to, rather than having equality by levelling up, is the minister really talking about a kind of equality by levelling down. There will be a downward spiral as board after board compete with each other in order to cut their expenditures more, in order to get more of these surpluses to give money back to the childless couples, people who may have grown up and forgotten what it was to have children who needed education in their families, and people who have never had kids. Trustees will seek to cater to that kind of opinion rather than doing their job and ensuring the best possible education for their kids and for our kids.

I cannot stress enough that this particular amendment, this backtracking or flip-flopping by the minister, is absolutely fundamentally dangerous in terms of the incentives that it provides to trustees, and the incentives are counter-educational incentives. They are fiscal incentives that are designed to diminish rather than augment the quality of education. They are incentives that are designed to discourage innovation and ideas, particularly in the suburban boards. They are incentives that are designed, therefore, to help to ensure that the boards continue to be slow in responding to the changing needs for education that are now occurring within their boundaries.

I have travelled a fair amount across Metropolitan Toronto in my days as leader of this party, and before and since, meeting with individuals, touring communities and talking to parents. To give one example: the situation in the Jane-Finch corridor in North York. That is not an area which is short of children. That is an area that has too many kids, too many crowded classrooms, too many substandard situations. It is scandalous, in my opinion, that the North York Board of Education has tolerated that situation as long as it has and taken so little action in order to ensure that those kids get equality compared to kids who grow up in the Bridle Path area, or in the other better ends of North York, where in some cases you may have only 150 or 175 children going to a very ample school that was built for two or three times that number.

There are some real inequalities built in right there, and the North York board has chosen to ignore them because when the people in the Bridle Path say "Jump," that board jumps, but when people in Jane-Finch say, "We have needs," and cry out for help, in the past they have gotten the back of the hand from the North York Board of Education. That is the kind of mean spirit which I fear may spread itself across education in general in Metropolitan Toronto with the kind of incentives that are being built into the bill.

When my friend from Scarborough West was running in the by-election and attempting to succeed Stephen Lewis, I went through a number of the high-rises, knocked on doors, and did some work in order to help ensure that he was elected. That was a very interesting cross-section because one has always tended to assume that the core of Metropolitan Toronto is in the city of Toronto; that is where the working class lives; that is where immigrant people live; people who are new Canadians; that is where people with modest incomes live. Whereas the picture of the suburbs is the bungalow and a couple of cars and maybe a cottage and a bit of affluence and that kind of thing.

Mr. Chairman, you know from your own riding in the Durhams that such is not a full description of your area and certainly it is not a full description of areas such as the older parts of Scarborough, North York or Etobicoke. There is a large ethnic population in Lakeshore and in Etobicoke. In Scarborough West there is a tremendous variety of ethnic origins and of incomes; a lot of families living in high-rise apartments whom one might expect to find in downtown Toronto, but they have been priced out of downtown Toronto and have moved to Scarborough.

They are living in high-rises because they cannot afford a home or because they are trying to save for a home and it always seems to be out of reach. They have some special educational needs which are equivalent to the needs of some kids in the downtown core schools in Toronto. Those needs, in many cases, are not now being recognized or met because the suburban school boards have been slow to meet them.

9:30 p.m.

What is going to happen through the amendment the minister is proposing here? What she is doing is dangling a carrot in front of those trustees to say: "Don't worry about the needs of those people who live in Richard Johnston's riding. After all, they probably voted NDP. Don't worry about them. Worry about the tax rates on the people who live in the fancy mansions down near the lakeshore and in other parts of Scarborough. Worry about their needs and put their needs, their concern about having a few dollars to go to Barbados for a winter holiday, ahead of the special needs of people whose kids just want a reasonable chance and a reasonable start in life."

That is what this bill and this section is saying because it provides a financial incentive to the school boards in the suburbs to act in that way. I would have thought that recognizing --

Hon. Miss Stephenson: It is a financial incentive to Toronto as well.

Mr. Cassidy: Don't be so cross.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: I am not cross. I was just reminding you that Toronto is a part of this system. It is an incentive to Toronto as well.

Mr. Cassidy: Toronto was a part of this and Toronto demonstrated convincingly in the last election that when it comes to a choice between quality education, to the limits that can be achieved within whatever constraints are set by the minister --

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, a point of clarification: I believe there are six Toronto trustees on the Metropolitan school board. Five of those Toronto trustees voted in favour of that section of the bill, which is precisely the same as the amendment I am introducing tonight. They are in favour of prudent spending.

Mr. Cunningham: If you believe that, you will believe anything.

Mr. Cassidy: By the way, I must say it raises some questions in my mind.

Mr. Bradley: What do they say about Suncor?

Hon. Miss Stephenson: They have not talked to me about Suncor; should they?

Mr. Cunningham: They are in favour of prudent spending: just wild about it.

Mr. Bradley: What do they think of Minaki Lodge?

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Ask the people in Minaki.

Mr. Bradley: Or land banking.

Hon. Mr. Bennett: The principal fellow who led that party went up there and tried to --

Mr. Bradley: What did they think about the jet?

Mr. McClellan: I think the Chairman should adjourn the House for grave disorder.

Mr. Cassidy: Particularly by the member for Ottawa South (Mr. Bennett). The minister has raised it. I did not intend to, but it raises some questions about the representativeness of the Metro school board. A lot of people, parents, teachers and others, came before the general government committee to object to Bill 127. If they came from the boroughs, what they were saying was their people on the Metro school board sure did not represent them when it came to this bill.

When we have a system where the Metropolitan Toronto School Board is appointed by internal procedures, it is therefore not open to individual parents, community groups, parent-teacher groups or whatever, to go and actually defeat a person who is a member of the Metropolitan Toronto School Board. It is a very difficult system.

It is like the system that sees a non-elected chairman in Metropolitan Toronto. That person can never actually be challenged in front of the electorate because he never has to face the electorate.

Nobody ever faces the electorate with respect to his election to the Metropolitan Toronto School Board. It is a caucus situation and the caucusing is done, particularly on the suburban boards, by a group of long-standing trustees. To change that balance takes a matter of a number of years. I recognize that it will take a number of years to change the temper, the tone and the composition of the area school boards to the point that new people will get elected.

For that matter, there are real practical problems about the Metropolitan Toronto School Board. Quite simply, when one serves on a school board these days, one serves on it for an honorarium and not for a salary. If one serves on the Metropolitan Toronto School Board, one gets a further honorarium, but it is not commensurate with the additional amount of time one has to devote to the metro school board, if one is going to do the job properly.

That means there is a tendency to have people who say: "I will do the job. I am retired. I have the time to go and take control of the Metropolitan Toronto School Board." That is with reference to their activity on that particular board.

The Chairman was stretching. I will return to the bill but I was provoked by the minister to that answer.

Five members of the Toronto school board, some 20 months ago, made the proposal there should be this particular bill. The Toronto school board came before a committee of this House and indicated strongly that it was opposed to Bill 127, that it believes the principles entailed therein are wrong and that it wants to have the bill fundamentally changed, not to rule out the principle of prudent spending, but to rule out the other things the minister has slung into the bill because of her vendetta against the Toronto Board of Education.

Mr. Chairman: How about this amendment?

Mr. Cassidy: Mr. Chairman, I am close to the end of what I wanted to say, though I shall want to speak on other portions of the bill. I guess there is not much point pleading with the minister about its implications because her heart is cast in stone. What I would say, though, to the member for Wellington-Dufferin-Peel (Mr. J. M. Johnson), the member for Burlington South (Mr. Kerr), the member for Sault Ste. Marie (Mr. Ramsay), the member for Ottawa South (Mr. Bennett), the member for St. David (Mrs. Scrivener), the member for York East (Mr. Elgie), the member for Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry (Mr. Villeneuve) and the members who are here -- I will not mention the member from Etobicoke who is in strange company right now -- is that the principles entailed in Bill 127 are wrong.

These members know from discussions in their own caucus that their caucus colleagues from Metropolitan Toronto, with the exception of the minister, dislike this bill intensely. They know this bill is taking the amount of legislative time it is because it is a bad bill that is fundamentally wrong in principle.

I want to urge all of these members to start doing what they always do when people say, "What do you do?" and start to work behind the scenes to get the Premier to ditch the bill or change it fundamentally: to get the Premier to call Bette Stephenson into his office one day, have a little tête-à-tête and say, "Bette, we cannot afford this any more."

Mr. Chairman: The minister.

Mr. Cassidy: To tell the minister, Mr. Chairman, that up with this he will not put, and you will not put, any more. There is no point putting this entire Legislature through this charade night after night, day after day, week after week because the minister is so hard-headed, so stubborn, so adamantine, so obdurate and so unwilling to compromise and to move. I think it is time we put the kids of Metropolitan Toronto ahead of the misguided desires of one minister in the Davis cabinet.

Mr. Van Horne: Up with this he will not put? Is that what he said?

Mr. Cassidy: Yes.

Mr. Foulds: If it was good enough for Churchill, it's good enough for us.

Mr. Cunningham: Mr. Chairman, I am going to be somewhat brief in my comments tonight. This section of the bill really brings us to a point, as I was discussing with my good friend the member for Bellwoods (Mr. McClellan), that is perhaps an opportunity for reconsideration of the bill itself.

This particular clause really relates to the fiscal responsibility we would hope every individual board in Metro would demonstrate in the discharge of its responsibilities. Frankly, I do not think there is an individual board in the Metro board that wants to spend money foolishly or wants to discharge its responsibilities in a negative fashion or an irresponsible manner.

Perhaps this is an occasion where the minister, if she is as broadminded as I think she is, unlike the view or disposition by the former leader of the New Democratic Party, might rethink this and reflect upon this section with the idea of effecting some compromise on the bill.

Naturally, members of the opposition would prefer to throw Bill 127 out in its entirety. That would be my personal preference. Obviously, that is not going to happen. But perhaps through this debate, and especially because of the extent of it, the minister might be impressed with the seriousness of members of the opposition with regard to this bill. In particular, this amendment causes me to think there is an opportunity for a sober second thought here.

Possibly we might contemplate ending the restrictions on the control of the local levy and on the joint bargaining provisions, which are not part of this particular section of the bill, but we could in turn, to reciprocate, make individual local boards responsible for their own deficits. Frankly, I think, with few exceptions, the history of the operation of this rather complicated board has really been a very good one and, in essence, quite a model. I think it was that very concept that Ms. Dobell had in mind when she paid what I thought were compliments not only to the Metro board but even to the Ministry of Education on several occasions during her presentation to our committee.

9:40 p.m.

Members of the government, I think, have expressed what is supposedly analogous to Conservative philosophy by saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." We have a situation here where really the system has not broken down all that severely, and in essence, "It ain't broke." I offer that analogy for you.

Without getting into long, arduous detail here, I would really encourage the minister to reflect on the process we have gone through. We spent a great deal of time in committee entertaining the discussions from various groups. I thought we had endeavoured, as my friend the member for Parkdale had described very adequately --

Interjection.

Mr. Cunningham: Sorry, am I interrupting you two?

Mr. Chairman: Carry on please.

Mr. Cunningham: Oh, thank you very much. I know we were reticent to challenge you, because we always are reticent to challenge you; and a challenge would be something, would it not?

I sense maybe by way of the minister's interjection, which I did not hear, that she is not well disposed to the compromise I have suggested to her very simply. But I hope she will rethink this, because we are not making what I would characterize as a great deal of progress on this bill. Simply put, if there were several changes, I think that maybe we could look at this bill with a more enlightened approach than she would characterize to date.

Again I say to her that in exchange for making local boards responsible for their own deficits and/or surpluses she might look at changes in the local levy control and assessment and, as well, put an end to the joint bargaining process. Frankly, I think that would make for a very viable bill. Again my preference is that we get rid of it in its entirety, but I offer those very brief comments to the minister.

In conclusion I would say that, unlike some members, I do not criticize her for changing her mind, as she has by way of her amendment here today. I do not share the disposition that at least I sensed with other members in committee when this particular section of the bill was debated originally. I do not fault anybody for changing his or her mind in this process whatsoever. I only hope that through this process we will see some equity, some fair play and some common sense, and I appeal to the minister on those grounds tonight.

The Chairman: The member for Bellwoods, speaking to the amendment to Bill 127.

Mr. McClellan: That is correct, Mr. Chairman. I am just trying to get my notes together here.

The amendment has already taken, I gather, about five hours' debate on this round of the bill. I heard your predecessor in the chair speak rather ruefully about that, but I hope you understand, sir, and I am sure you do, how deeply important this particular amendment is. It is an incentive to boards of education within Metropolitan Toronto to cut back education services, to generate a surplus and to keep a good chunk of that surplus, regardless of whether the money is raised within the local boundaries or not, in order to keep the property tax rates down, and for the trustees therefore to reap the political advantages that flow from keeping the local property taxes down.

I pointed out before that it is not possible under our legislation, and under the guidelines and regulations of the Ministry of Education, for a local board of education to plan deliberately for a surplus in any given fiscal year. A local board of education cannot strike a budget and say, for example, "At the end of the fiscal year, we will have a surplus of $2.045 million." I stand to be corrected if the minister wants to correct me.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Mr. Chairman, it is my understanding that there is nothing in the legislation which prevents it, but I would think logic and common sense would prevail in most situations. Indeed, no institution usually plans in that kind of way. They cannot budget for a deficit.

Mr. McClellan: Well, I would like to see the board of education that would sit down at the beginning of the year, draw up its budget, submit it to the Minister of Education with the request for the usual grant allocations showing a big chunk of surplus; or submit it at whatever part of the process. I must confess not to be an expert in the red tape of the Ministry of Education; I make that confession from the outset. There is no ministry in this province that imposes more red tape on more people than Education.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: On a point of clarification: We have invited the members of the opposition to hear explanations or presentations regarding the educational financing system, and one or two of this member's colleagues have attended. If the member needs some assistance in that direction, we would be pleased to provide it.

Mr. McClellan: That is awfully kind of the minister. I have been at many sessions of the Ministry of Education estimates when the red tape has been unravelled for us. Occasionally we even get tangled up in it, but that is by the by. I am simply making the point that it is not part of the normal budgetary practices of a board of education to sit down at the beginning of the year and plan its budget with a view to how much money it intends to keep by way of surplus at the end of the year.

Nevertheless, the minister is changing the legislation so that there is a very definite incentive for local boards of education to produce a surplus. There is only one way that a board of education produces a surplus and that is by cutting back on anticipated programs that have been planned and budgeted for during a given fiscal year. I want to spend some time on the assumption behind that thought and behind this amendment, that it is somehow acceptable for local boards of education in this community, in Metropolitan Toronto -- and I would guess anywhere else in Ontario but particularly in Metro Toronto -- to generate a surplus by cutting back on programs.

The argument that is put forward by the Minister of Education is, of course, a very simple one. We are in a period of declining enrolment, there is surplus capacity in our school system, if I can put it that way, and we are in a position where we are able to cut back in terms of educational services and programs -- lay off teachers, close schools and save money all at the same time. It is a wonderful situation we have, a wonderful opportunity for local boards of education to generate surpluses by cutting because the argument goes: "We have surplus capacity already. All of our educational needs are being met. Therefore, it is okay to cut, it is okay to generate a surplus."

We have before us some evidence that some of the boards of education in this community have been generating very hefty surpluses. In 1979, the North York Board of Education ran a surplus of $2,137,000. In 1980, the North York Board of Education generated a surplus of $869,000.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: Do you know what North York's budget is? It is $225 million.

Mr. McClellan: I realize that $869,000 is just peanuts to a high flyer like the Minister of Education, and so is $2,137,000.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: No, no. I am just suggesting that it's not a huge surplus.

Mr. McClellan: This is too insignificant; I realize that this is too insignificant for me even to be raising it. I do apologize for it.

9:50 p.m.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: You are really the most snide individual I have ever met.

Mr. Philip: No, you are the most snide.

Hon. Miss Stephenson: No. I don't hold a candle to him.

Mr. Nixon: This is moving too fast. Try to slow it down.

Mr. McClellan: I will do my best.

Mr. Chairman: Speaking to the amendment.

Mr. McClellan: Yes; I have been rudely interrupted. I am simply trying to collect my thoughts. I am sorry, I have misled the House.

Mr. Nixon: Okay, let us deal with that one.

Mr. McClellan: I apologize. I was giving surplus figures where, in fact, they were deficit figures. I must start again.

In 1976, the Etobicoke Board of Education ran a surplus of $1,795,000. Again, I realize these are piddling amounts in some circles, but they --

Hon. Miss Stephenson: No, they are not piddling amounts, but they are not huge surpluses within a budget.

Mr. McClellan: In 1977 the Etobicoke board ran a surplus of $1,446,000, and in 1978 the Etobicoke board ran a surplus of $2,661,000.

Mr. Philip: It shows what great planners they are, doesn't it?

Mr. McClellan: In 1979 the Etobicoke board ran a surplus of $602,000, in 1980 a surplus of $2,444,000, and in 1981 a surplus of $904,000.

The other board that has managed to run really large surpluses over the course of the last few years has been the Scarborough Board of Education. In 1977 it ran a surplus of $500,000; in 1978 a surplus of $4,353,000. Again, I apologize for the paltry sums. In 1979 it ran a surplus of $3,180,000; in 1980 a surplus of $1,632,000; in 1981 a surplus of $2,045,000.

Mr. Chairman: Will the member refresh my memory as to how this ties in?

Mr. McClellan: Yes, sir. The amendment talks about giving an incentive to these same boards of education to generate even larger surpluses. I would have thought the tie-in would have been self-evident to a man of your perspicacity.

Mr. Chairman: I am just a backwoods lawyer from Newcastle. I am in the big city trying to find my way. I need some help.

Mr. McClellan: If you were to take the amendment at face value, you would get the impression that somehow the boards of education in Metro need some kind of incentive in order to generate a surplus, would you not, Mr. Chairman? The reality is, of course, that many of the boards are already running huge surpluses: from where I stand, anyway. The minister disagrees that these are significant amounts of money. But in terms of special programs, special services, for example, in Scarborough particularly -- I notice the Provincial Secretary for Social Development (Mrs. Birch) is present. She would agree that with an additional $4,353,000, which is not an insignificant amount of money, a lot could be done in her community for the children with learning disabilities. We are talking about adding some extra itinerant teachers to help children to read; that is a lot of money to a project like that.

Somehow an assumption is being conveyed that it is quite all right to generate these kinds of surpluses because we are already meeting all our educational needs. I want to deal with the evidence of whether we are meeting those needs, and whether it is responsible for government to be moving an amendment that gives an incentive to boards of education, in particular to our suburban boards, to run additional surpluses.

Let us go through the evidence as to whether it is justifiable or responsible to give an incentive to boards of education to run a surplus. As I said, you run a surplus by cutting back.

We started to address this issue in the city of Toronto in the mid-1970s after a number of studies were done with respect to what was happening in our school system. The first piece of evidence I want to make reference to is a study that was done by the Board of Education for the City of Toronto as far back as 1974. This was the drop-out study, Patterns of Dropping Out, by Vivienne Young and Carol Reich, who were researchers at the Toronto Board of Education.

Prior to 1975, the Toronto Board of Education was one of those boards that had also been running a surplus, quite a substantial surplus, in each of the years 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973. It was only $111,000 in 1974 but in 1975 there was a surplus of $3,094,000.

What was the situation in Toronto when its board of education was accumulating relatively large surpluses at the end of each fiscal year?

First, the drop-out problem. Citing this study from 1974, page 43, the summary of conclusions and implications: "The size of the drop-out problem in Toronto is staggering. From our sample, we estimate that approximately 7,500 students dropped out over the course of the year, or 24 per cent of the total secondary school population. This is a rate about two and a half times what has been reported for other Metro boroughs. Breaking down these figures by grades, it appears that only 40 per cent of the students entering grade 9 will graduate from grade 12 and only 20 per cent from grade 13."

That was the situation in the city of Toronto during the last year in which the city of Toronto engaged in the practice of accumulating surpluses in its education budget. The drop-out rate equalled 24 per cent of the total enrolment in the secondary school system, a drop-out rate that meant only 40 per cent of the students going into grade 9 would get out of grade 12 with a diploma, and only 20 per cent, one in five students in the city of Toronto in 1974, who entered grade 9 could look forward to graduating with the grade 13 diploma.

"The picture of drop-outs which emerges from this study is of young adults whose decision to leave school is part of the fabric of their own personality, present circumstances and view of the future, as well as their past record of poorer than average academic performance." They go on to categorize the different reasons for dropping out.

I will not go into the rest of the findings of the study, but I would hope that a Minister of Education in 1982 would have at least a passing recollection of that historic study. But no, she is quite content to continue her regime of cutbacks and to continue to bring in amendments that encourage and give financial incentive to boards of education to cut back.

A second major study that was undertaken in the city of Toronto about the same period of time was referred to as the Every Student survey. It was called The 1975 Every Student Survey: Students' Background and its Relationship to Program Placement, done by Ramesh Deosaran and Dr. E. N. Wright, head of the research department of the Toronto Board of Education.

Mr. Chairman: Are you speaking to this amendment?

Mr. McClellan: I think I have established the connection.

10 p.m.

At a time when the city of Toronto was running surpluses in its education budget, in case you have forgotten what we were talking about, Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Chairman: No, I haven't.

Mr. McClellan: I have already talked about the first study, which identified a drop-out rate of 24 per cent of enrolment. The second study was of achievement within the Toronto school system at a time when these large surpluses were being accumulated in the city. I will make reference briefly to that study.

Approximately 30 per cent of the students in Toronto Board of Education schools were born outside Canada and almost 50 per cent did not have English as their first language, according to the Every Student survey. The survey was conducted in May 1975, based on a questionnaire answered by 98 per cent of the students from kindergarten to grade 13. It showed that the makeup of the city had changed considerably over the past five years.

Children born in Portugal had taken over from children born in Italy as the largest group of foreign-born students. The second largest group was West Indians, whose numbers had more than tripled since 1970, when the last every student survey was done. Students born in Italy ranked third; China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, was fourth; Greece, fifth; and Britain, sixth.

The survey found that almost 28,000 students were born outside of Canada, five per cent more than in 1970. On the 1970 basis, the proportion of Italian-born students decreased by more than 50 per cent and while almost all countries showed a higher number of students in the elementary panel than in the secondary panel, Italy had twice as many students in secondary schools as in elementary schools.

The students were also ranked according to their mother tongue. The survey showed that there were then more than 42,000 students in Toronto whose home language was not English and that there were an additional several thousand students who spoke dialects of English but who were born outside of Canada or whose parents were immigrants. Children whose mother tongue was Italian still formed the largest language group other than English but their numbers had dropped from 13,000 in 1970 to 9,250 in 1975. Portuguese was the second largest language group, with Greek third and Chinese fourth.

Several language groups had grown smaller since 1970, including Polish, Yugoslavian, Ukrainian, German, Macedonian, French and Hungarian.

The survey did not classify West Indian students according to home language, since their home language is generally English; so it did not reveal how many Canadian-born children there were of West Indian family background in addition to the 5,000 students born in the West Indies.

The survey found that the socioeconomic background of students was generally a far better predictor of school success than either country of birth or mother tongue. Quite frankly, this was a very startling finding in the Every Student survey. I will repeat again: The survey found that the socioeconomic background of students was generally a far better predictor of school success than either country of birth or mother tongue.

In other words, the Every Student survey gave us a picture of a school system that was in a sense frozen by class. The class bias in the school system was so pervasive, according to the finding of this survey, that children from working-class backgrounds were found to be frozen into a lower rate of academic achievement than children from middle- or upper-class backgrounds.

There was a completely ossified social structure within the school system. If you were from the bottom of the ladder when you went into school in grade 1, you would be at the bottom of the ladder when you came out of school in grade 12 or whether you dropped out at some earlier time. If you were lucky and you were streamed into a three- or four-year, dead-end program, you were frozen according to the background of your parents.

This spoke to the lack of upward mobility in this province, to the falseness of the mythology that Ontario was somehow a land of pure opportunity where those from any class background could achieve, regardless of any disadvantages they may have at home, because of the extraordinary support they received in our school system and from our society. That was revealed to be false for the children of the city of Toronto.

Mr. Bradley: That used to be on the licence plates: "Province of opportunity."

Mr. McClellan: "Province of opportunity." That is correct. That used to be a motto in Ontario. Now, of course, the motto is "Keep the promise."

Going back to this historic survey, more than 42 per cent of Toronto students were found to be in the lowest socioeconomic group based on the occupation of the head of the household. Much higher percentages of immigrants than of nonimmigrants were in this lower group, which included such jobs as labourer and factory worker. For Italians and Portuguese, for example, the figure was more than 70 per cent. For children born in Canada whose first language was English the percentage was only 26.5 per cent. That is wonderful.

For working mothers the disparity between immigrants and English-speaking people was equally great. Seventy-two per cent of working mothers whose first language was other than English were employed in the lowest occupation category. For working women whose first language was English the percentage was 27. Only 1.7 per cent of working mothers whose children's first language was not English were in the highest, mainly professional, occupation group, but 7.6 per cent of English-speaking working mothers were in this category.

Students of parents in the lowest occupation group had a 20 per cent chance of ending up in a level 1, 2 or 3 program. Children of parents in the highest occupation group had only a three per cent chance of this kind of school placement. If you were the bottom of the economic ladder, your chances were one in five of ending up in a level 1, 2 or 3 program, the very dead end -- a 20 per cent chance. But if your parents were in the highest occupation group, in the top quintile, you had only a three per cent chance of ending up in a level 1, 2 or 3 program. Is that not miraculous?

Those of us who studied social science were all taught about the marvels of the bell curve, and teachers in teachers' college are all taught about the marvel of the bell curve, about the perfect distribution of intelligence and aptitude: so many on the positive side of the curve, so many on the negative side of the curve. It is perfectly symmetrical, and it all balances this out with mathematical precision as long as you come from the top end of the occupational strata. If you come from the bottom end, it is just a little bit skewed, is it not? One in five.

The survey revealed that 85 per cent of Toronto high school students were in the two highest of the five high school levels. The children whose parents were on welfare or mother's allowance or who lived in group homes had only about a 40 per cent chance of getting into these two top levels. The rest of these children were in level 1, 2 or 3 programs.

The same pattern emerged for level 5 programs. The survey found that students whose parents were in the lowest occupation group had only a 50-50 chance of enrolling in a level 5 course of study, while students whose parents were lawyers, engineers, etc., appeared to have nine chances out of 10 of enrolling in such a course. That is pretty good if you are shooting craps. Those are pretty good odds if you are in the top bracket.

Mr. R. F. Johnston: This is the year they sent back $3 million in surplus.

Mr. McClellan: Yes. Just to refresh our memories on what we are talking about, this is the year the city of Toronto had a surplus of $3,094,000 in its budget. The minister is asking us to accept an amendment here that would add a further incentive to boards of education to generate surplus funds.

Since you resumed the chair only recently, Mr. Chairman, I am reviewing the evidence with respect to the justification for permitting boards of education to cut back and to raise surplus funds.

10:10 p.m.

Children whose parents were in the lowest occupational bracket had six times as much chance as children from the highest bracket of being in special programs for students with academic problems. If you are from the bottom of the ladder, your children are six times as likely to be in special programs. In 1975, they were called special programs for students with academic problems; now we refer to them as programs for children with learning disabilities. I suppose there is some measure of progress in some jurisdictions --

Hon. Miss Stephenson: We call it programs for exceptional children.

Mr. McClellan: We have made some progress there. But, really, six times as many chances for the poor as opposed to the rich?

The survey showed marked differences in the makeup of the Toronto school system's six areas. The vast majority of students in areas 5 and 6 had English as their mother tongue, in sharp contrast to areas 2, 3, and 4. For example, area 3 had almost as many students with Portuguese as their mother tongue as students whose home language was English. That happens to be the area that I represent. Areas 5 and 6 also had considerably higher percentages of students born in Ontario than other areas had.

In terms of parents' occupation, area 6 is quite unlike the other five areas. For instance, while area 6 had 49 per cent of its students from homes where the household head was in the highest occupational group, area 3 -- my area -- had only three per cent in this group and more than 62 per cent in the lowest occupational group.

Between 1970 and 1975 there was a decrease of six per cent in the proportion of students born in Canada. To put it another way, while 25 per cent of students surveyed in 1970 stated they were born outside Canada, 30 per cent of those surveyed in 1975 gave this response. The rest of this is statistical breakdown.

The fact remains that what the Every Student survey identified was that it totally ossified an almost completely rigid social structure within the largest board of education in the Metropolitan Toronto area. The people at the bottom end of the social and economic ladder were being frozen by the school system on to the same bottom rung. If you were disadvantaged when you went into school in grade 1, you would be just as disadvantaged, in an almost perfect correlation, when you came out of school wherever you came out and if you dropped out or were dead-ended out.

That was the critical problem the Toronto Board of Education started to confront in the mid-1970s: a school system with a horrendous drop-out rate; a school system with a tremendous bias against working-class immigrant children; a school system that was dead-ending children, freezing them into lives of disadvantage and denying them the same kinds of opportunities that were available within the same school system for children of the well-to-do -- like us in this assembly.

Is the situation unique to the city of Toronto? Are we talking about a phenomenon that exists only south of Eglinton and Lawrence or only south of Bloor Street? Of course not. The Minister of Education pointed this out just a few minutes ago when my colleague from Ottawa Centre (Mr. Cassidy) started to describe the stereotype of suburban life as the mom and dad and two kids, with two cars and two garages, a swimming pool and a wonderful affluent lifestyle.

First, that mythology is just that: a mythology. It totally ignores the reality of the suburban communities as they have developed, particularly over the course of the past 15 years. We are indebted to the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto for doing a very thorough and detailed analysis of the kinds of changes that have taken place in our suburbs, the same suburbs that are running the same kind of surpluses in their school boards in 1981 that the city of Toronto was running in its budget eight years ago.

I want to spend a minute on the most recent evidence with respect to this issue before us, because the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto's study, Metro Suburbs in Transition, dealt explicitly with this question that is in front of us tonight, on whether it is justifiable for suburban school boards to be generating surpluses, as though somehow they had managed to meet all of the educational needs in their community.

The old stereotypes were that the suburbs were homogeneous communities of middle-class folks who were generally pretty mobile, upwardly mobile, reasonably affluent, at least comfortable, stable families, prosperous neighbourhoods, with no crime, no social problems, where everybody was the same. They all spoke the same language even. They all looked the same. Those stereotypes are absolute nonsense.

The kinds of conditions I was describing as having been identified by social scientists in the city of Toronto in 1974 and 1975 are identical in our suburban communities, absolutely identical.

Let us look at the evidence as we looked at the evidence from the city of Toronto.

Page 99 of the first volume of Metro Suburbs In Transition, Part I: Evolution and Overview is talking about the kinds of changes that have taken place in the suburbs over the course of the past 15 years.

"The projected enrolment decline in suburban public schools can be somewhat misleading. There are communities north of Highway 401 where significant numbers of elementary school children still exist. Boards that are reorienting themselves to decline in other parts of the municipality are faced with demands from north of Highway 401 to expand educational facilities and services.

"Fewer suburban households now have direct relationship with the school system. Increasing numbers of suburban elderly who wish to remain in their homes found school funding from the property tax to be a heavy financial burden.

"Direct provincial funding of education continues to decline in relation to funds raised from the property tax. Metro suburban municipalities do not have direct access to the commercial assessment base of the city in raising revenue for local services.

"The demand that is heard loud and clear by suburban trustees from the general community is to keep education taxes low."

Of course, that is the clamouring voice that the Minister of Education is responding to in this amendment.

The study goes on: "There may be fewer children in Metro suburban schools, but there are more special needs to be addressed."

Table 5 indicates: "In the last four years the suburban proportion of Metro's inner city (that is, high-need enrolment) increased from 29 per cent in 1975-76 to nearly 35 per cent in 1978-79. Most of this increase has been in Scarborough, with some increases in North York."

This reference is to Scarborough and North York: North York, which ran a surplus of $1,852,000 in 1978, and Scarborough, which ran a surplus of $4,353,000 in 1978.

Figure 5 provides another view of the same concern. "Metro suburban schools now contain almost 44 per cent of children from families on social assistance," the highest number being once more in Scarborough. Suburban schools are now facing similar conditions to those that inner-city schools have faced for many years. They are having to face these conditions, however, in a time of economic instability, declining enrolment and an indifferent political climate.

10:20 p.m.

"As a result of these conditions, there are some neighbourhood schools in more recent areas of rapid suburban growth where serious overcrowding exists. School resources are inadequate to address the learning and developmental needs of their pupils. Teachers feel strained, intimidated and overwhelmed. Children are tired and undernourished, and a climate of disorder and violence prevails. One teacher interviewed during the course of this project stated she had to quit after a year of teaching in one such school north of Highway 401. The conditions facing her were similar to those encountered when she taught in a depressed area of Harlem in New York City in the late 1960s. Her sense of disbelief was in associating these conditions with the physical environment as it first presented itself.

"The neighbourhood appeared to be just another higher-density suburban area with apartments, plazas and townhouses. It was easy to drive through and be unaware of the social conditions that existed behind a range of ordinary physical structures. When social development patterns change significantly within a short period of time, the limitations of existing frameworks become more evident. The decline in the life cycle stage from zero to nine in the suburbs is not merely an item of passing demographic interest. New social conditions are created for which existing responsibilities may be inadequate. The future wellbeing of people, and in this case of children, is tied, however, to the inability to respond as required."

The study identified an increase in children in the suburban inner-city areas with special needs. It also identified the critical failure in capacity to respond to these special needs. Now we have a minister bringing in a program of incentives that deliberately ignores these needs, that deliberately, systematically and methodically pretends these social needs in our suburban inner-city areas do not exist, and that gives the suburban school board a direct financial incentive to cut back, to eliminate programs, to generate a surplus to keep the tax rates low, to reap the political benefits of keeping the rates low. But what happens to the children?

Is there nobody over there who understands this? Does the Provincial Secretary for Social Development (Mrs. Birch) not understand the implications of this bill and this amendment for her own community; or the previous Minister of Education, the government House leader, the member for Scarborough North (Mr. Wells)? He just told me Scarborough was doing a great job.

Hon. Mr. Wiseman: You are on page 120 now.

Mr. McClellan: I could read it verbatim if you want.

The Deputy Chairman: Do not allow yourself to be distracted from your presentation on section 6.

Interjections.

The Deputy Chairman: The member for Bellwoods has the floor. Just carry on please.

Mr. McClellan: The era of suburban and metropolitan innocence in Metropolitan Toronto is over, the report concludes. For those with rose-coloured glasses who live surrounded by a self-imposed cushion and cocoon of affluence and opportunity, it serves them well and serves their political purpose to remain deliberately ignorant of these social realities in their own communities and on their own doorsteps.

Many of you over there come from metropolitan suburban areas which have just as many immigrant kids as area 3 of the Toronto Board of Education which I represent. There are just as many immigrant kids with precisely the same occupational backgrounds, with precisely the same disadvantages in the school system as were identified in the school drop-out report of 1974 and in the Every Student survey of 1975. Those communities are located in Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke. They are located in ridings which are represented by members of the government party.

It is beyond my belief how they can pretend that these problems do not exist in their own bailiwick, on their own doorstep; how they can continue to pretend that it does not matter, that they ignore these problems which have been identified with such overwhelming conclusiveness by the social planning council study. This was not a study done by one or two staff people working in some downtown office. It was a study done by a team which involved literally hundreds of volunteers from your local suburban communities, doing a self-analysis with the help of scientific research techniques.

"The era of suburban and metropolitan innocence in Toronto is over. Stable post-war images of urban life in Metro with clear social distinctions between the city and the suburbs in the belief that Metro would sustain continued population growth into the indefinite future no longer correspond to the social reality of what exists today, or to the conditions which will have to be faced in the coming decade."

You cannot pretend that it is a sign of an "us and them" situation, if you take that paragraph seriously. What it means is that the social problems, people have pretended for so many years, are confined to portions of the inner-city part of the city of Toronto, are somehow contained there as though there was some cordon sanitaire around the city of Toronto that locked all of its social problems into the city boundaries and preserved the suburban areas from some kind of contamination; yet all of the evidence indicates that all of the problems that we have tried to raise with this government exist in equal measure in the suburban communities; that the problems are just as serious in the suburban schools as they are in some of the schools in my own riding of Bellwoods; that the children of -- sorry, what did the minister say?

Hon. Miss Stephenson: I wasn't interrupting you. Do proceed, for goodness' sake.

The Deputy Chairman: If the member finds it an appropriate time to break he could move --

Mr. McClellan: I move the adjournment of the debate.

The Deputy Chairman: Just so we can rise and report.

Mr. Nixon: I don't know of any rule that says we have to.

Mr. McClellan: There is no rule. You can leave any time.

On motion by Hon. Mr. Wells, the committee of the whole House reported progress.

METROPOLITAN TORONTO POLICE PRACTICES

Mr. Speaker: Pursuant to standing order 28, the member for Riverdale has given notice of his dissatisfaction with the answer to his question given by the Attorney General (Mr. McMurtry) concerning the Attorney General's response to the member's questions on the Proverbs matter. I would now recognize the member for Riverdale and remind him he has five minutes.

10:30 p.m.

Mr. Renwick: Mr. Speaker, I will be very brief. I am sure the Attorney General at some point will have occasion to read these remarks. I gave notice on Friday last of my dissatisfaction with the replies he made to the supplementary question I addressed to him on Friday, November 19, and also to a further question and supplementary question I put to him later on that day.

The first question I raised with him was that people might well have the view that there is a reasonable apprehension that the Attorney General might not be able to take an impartial view of the matter when he reviews the transcripts or the police report in what has become known as the Proverbs matter.

Later on that morning I asked that there be a public disclosure and discussion by way of investigation in whatever forum the Attorney General might choose so that the matters and the methods used and disclosed by those tapes, by the police and in the trial would be reviewed publicly.

The Attorney General did not reply to that question in any satisfactory way. He simply said he had nothing to add and then went on to explain that he would not make any further statement about it. I again suggested to him by way of a supplementary question that in view of the serious reflection on the whole of the police it was his obligation to make certain there was a public inquiry. He again referred to the police investigation.

I commented that he might well be biased in the legal sense of that term, not because of any necessary personal interest he would have but because the statements he had made indicated that to be the case and that he was not aware of his obligation in a matter that was pending before the courts not to make any comment about the matter until such time as the trial had been held.

You will recall, Mr. Speaker, that on June 26, 1981, Mr. Proverbs was committed for trial on a weapons charge out of an incident arising on Labour Day 1980. Early in January 1982, Mr. Proverbs had handed over five hours of edited videotapes to Sergeant Bullied, who then delivered them to Sergeant Reynolds and then on through, which led to an internal police investigation at the Metropolitan Toronto Police.

Nothing occurred with respect to that of any public knowledge so far as I am aware. On August 3, there was a letter from Mr. Proverbs to the Attorney General. Again, that matter did not come to the attention of the public until September 5, when the Star published the various tapes. At that point the Attorney General is reported to have said that all of the allegations had been reviewed by the Metropolitan police and his own crown law officers:

"I am advised by my crown law officers that the police have reviewed all these allegations to determine if there is any substance or could be any substance in any of them, and I am told, again through my crown law officers, that the view of the Metropolitan Toronto Police is that there is no substance to any of these allegations." It was also similarly reported that the Attorney General had said, "My crown law officers have advised me that there is nothing in the tapes they see to warrant any action."

The very next day, that report having appeared on September 7 out of events of September 5, the Attorney General held a news conference on this matter and indicated that he had ordered an investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police of this whole matter.

There was a further statement on November 4, in which the Attorney General said: "This was an outrageous suggestion and the police officer has brought great discredit to his force by making these statements to Mr. Proverbs. The end does not justify the means when it comes to slandering one's own police force in order to obtain information from somebody who is a known con man."

It is my view that the Attorney General cannot bring that degree of impartiality, and he is not prepared to recognize that -- and, indeed, he categorized any suggestion as foolish that he would not be able to be impartial in his decision.

I again call for a public inquiry into the whole matter surrounding the so-called Proverbs matter so that confidence will be maintained in the Metropolitan Toronto Police and so that the whole question of the methods and procedures followed by that police force will be known to the public and so that the matter of the tapes will be publicly discussed through a royal commission.

Mr. R. F. Johnston: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: I just wanted you to recognize, if you would, with all the goodwill you can, the presence in the House of the member for Hastings-Peterborough (Mr. Pollock) as one out of 70 potential Tories who could be in their seats tonight.

Mr. Speaker: It is hardly a point of order but it is an interesting point indeed.

Pursuant to standing order 28, the member for Ottawa East has given notice of his dissatisfaction with the answer to his question given by the Attorney General concerning the Attorney General's response to the member's questions on the Proverbs matter and trial.

Mr. Roy: Mr. Speaker, I find it somewhat ironic, and I suppose I cannot blame the Attorney General for not being here this evening because he gets so little support on that side. In fact, the member for Hastings-Peterborough arrived half way through the member for Riverdale's speech. So the record should note that at one point there was not a single Tory in the House during this most interesting and important discussion.

The concern that I have is that over the last few months, and maybe over the last year, the administration of justice has had great difficulty and encountered serious problems indeed. Some of these problems have been raised in this assembly.

Mr. Speaker, you will recall that I underlined the very unfortunate situation dealing with the Hospital for Sick Children and the ongoing investigation. The fact remains that the investigation has been going on for quite some time and we have yet to have a report. We are facing the very unfortunate situation in that case where one person has already been charged and, of course, discharged at the preliminary hearing. It could be very difficult to charge anyone else considering those circumstances.

My colleague the member for Yorkview (Mr. Spensieri) raised another problem about police apparently doctoring their evidence, working over their notebooks. We have heard evidence from Ottawa about police officers not telling the truth under oath. This has happened not only in Ottawa but in other areas of Ontario. Now we have this very unfortunate situation, the famous Proverbs situation.

This attack on the administration of justice required a very vigorous defence on the part of the Attorney General. Instead, we have had at times inconsistent and at times irrational conduct on the part of the Attorney General. My colleague from Riverdale has mentioned some instances, and let me review some briefly. When this situation was first discussed, the Attorney General made some public comments. I point out to the members that these were comments made by the chief law officer of the crown. They were made at a time when the preliminary hearing had already taken place and he knew full well that a trial before a jury is to take place.

He made a comment on September 7, in which he stated: "I am advised by my crown law officers that the police have reviewed all these allegations to determine if there is any substance, or would be any substance, in any of them. I am told again by the crown law officers that the view of the Metropolitan Toronto Police is that there is no substance to any of these allegations." This was said between a preliminary hearing and before the trial. It was repeated on September 7, and the member for Renfrew North (Mr. Conway) raised a question with the Attorney General indicating that on the same day he had said different things. He asked the Attorney General to review these allegations.

Again, on November 4, in the middle of a jury trial, the Attorney General made this statement: "An outrageous suggestion by the police and the police officer has brought discredit to his force." He went on to say, "The ends do not justify the means." In other words, we have the chief law officer of the crown commenting on the evidence in the middle of a jury trial. That is something that the jury is supposed to do, to review and determine the veracity and credibility of this evidence.

Finally, the Attorney General talked about "a known con man," the accused. Before the accused has even had an opportunity to testify, he commented on the background of the accused.

Finally, the Attorney General said in this House that he looked forward to discussing this matter with us at the end of the trial. On November 9 I read the transcript to you, Mr. Speaker; the Attorney General said, "I look forward to discussing this matter." The trial is now over. Now the Attorney General says: "It may be appealed; it may be sub judice. I want to read the transcript now." He did not need the transcript when he was making his comments before but now he wants the transcript.

Then he went on to make comments like he did the other day, saying, "I would repeat everything I said." He said this last Friday in the House.

Given these statements, and given these serious allegations against the police, against the Attorney General, against even the Premier (Mr. Davis), against the chief of police, given all of these things, surely the administration of justice requires a vigorous defence. It has not had it, in my opinion. I feel that the Attorney General can give this vigorous defence by making a statement in the House and, second, by establishing a public inquiry by someone independent who will review all of these allegations. That can be done only by a judge and not by the police.

Mr. Speaker: I deem the motion to adjourn to have been carried.

The House adjourned at 10:41 p.m.