YOUNG OFFENDERS IMPLEMENTATION ACT
The House resumed at 8 p.m.
YOUNG OFFENDERS IMPLEMENTATION ACT
Hon. Mr. Drea moved second reading of Bill 28, An Act to provide for the Implementation of the Young Offenders Act (Canada).
Hon. Mr. Drea: Mr. Speaker, I made a statement on April 5 when the bill was introduced. I would just like to draw to the attention of the House tonight that a minor technical amendment has been provided by the Ministry of the Attorney General in regard to the Courts of Justice Act. I believe legislative counsel has distributed it.
Mr. Nixon: That is what Fred Cass said.
Hon. Mr. Drea: No, this one is not Bill 99.
It is a two-line amendment. While we are on second reading, I will try to find legislative counsel and get the members a copy.
Mr. McClellan: Is the minister not going to make a speech?
Hon. Mr. Drea: I made a statement on April 5.
Mr. Wrye: Mr. Speaker, on behalf of my party I rise to indicate that we are not prepared to support this legislation on second reading.
It is not unlike this government to bring in important matters at the 11th hour, but this time it seems to me the government has gone one better than usual. Its proposals for implementing an act that is nearly two years old have been brought to this House, not at the 11th hour but at 12:01 am., specifically four days after the proclamation of the Young Offenders Act in Ottawa.
We are being asked to rush this legislation into law despite the fact it was not until after the proclamation of the act that members of this Legislature even knew which was to be the lead ministry in this act. In short, we are still not sure. We may have another lead ministry for part of the act next year.
Ontario's role in the implementation of this important new treatment of our young offenders in this province has been bungled right from day one. I want to speak about some of the problems, as we see them, in the implementation of this act in the province.
It is typical of this government's handling of this legislation that as of this moment, as the official critic of the Liberal Party in this Legislature on this piece of legislation, I have not even been given a compendium. I have been given no copy of the Young Offenders Act. I have been given no copy of the orders in council of last March 30, by which the Minister of Community and Social Services (Mr. Drea) was given the power to appoint provincial directors and probation officers. I have received not one typewritten word of a compendium that would apparently accompany this act.
That is not the only reason we are not prepared to support this legislation, but I wanted to emphasize that I do not believe that is the way the government should act. This party is not going to stand by on a piece of legislation brought to our attention in this House and passed in a day or in an hour or in a couple of hours and then presented as a fait accompli to the many individuals and agencies so particularly concerned with how this province will implement this new federal legislation.
More important, we will not sit idly by while this government presents the young offenders of this province, who after all need our help, with a policy which adds up to an apparent decision of Ontario to move ahead in a spirit of what has been called minimum compliance.
There is an article in this month's issue of Toronto Life by John Galt. It is entitled Political Delinquency. It is all about this government's inexcusable procrastination in making the crucial decisions pertaining to implementation of this act. I will get into a couple of them specifically in a few minutes. I thought the conclusion is worth repeating. It neatly sums up the indictment against a government which has shown a callous, uncaring attitude towards bringing to reality a piece of legislation which received the unanimous support of the House of Commons nearly two years ago.
Mr. Nixon: Thank God for Pierre Trudeau and Mr. Kaplan.
Mr. Wrye: That was Mr. Clark, I think. Mr. Clark led that other party at that time.
Mr. Galt concludes his article with this these words: "We had such a wonderful chance here with the Young Offenders Act to show our kids the majesty of our law, to show them that the law exists for good reasons and not merely to thwart and punish them. Somewhere down the line the Young Offenders Act may be allowed to fulfil its promise. It is still a quantum leap from what existed before, certainly, but between Ottawa and the provinces the act has been made much less than it should be."
When we talk about the provinces, this is one occasion when Ontario is right at the top of the list. No other province has put up such a defence against Ottawa's funding proposals. No other province has been so intransigent. No other province has indicated it wants money from Ottawa for purposes which would seem to go against the very spirit of the Young Offenders Act.
Let me be quite specific. Ontario keeps complaining about all the money it needs for new detention centres. One article I read -- and it must have been a typing mistake because I cannot believe the province started at this number -- said the province started the bidding for its capital needs at $200 million. Since then it has come down.
I see the former Provincial Secretary for Justice (Mr. Sterling) is here. He has been quoted in a number of the articles.
They have come down slowly, first to $100 million, then to $90 million, then to $80 million and now earlier this month the new Provincial Secretary for Justice (Mr. Walker) stood in his place and said this province could do with just about $65 million.
I would like to know -- I think this House deserves an explanation; we did not get it from the minister and maybe we will on the wrapup -- what we are going to do with $65 million. Would we build more detention centres for young offenders? Surely that is the very last thing we are supposed to be doing with those young people who have run into trouble with the law. After all, the Young Offenders Act offers 11 alternatives to incarceration. Perhaps it would be a good idea to use a few of those before rushing to throw our young people in jail.
In coming up with those new centres, this government might want to put a few dollars into them itself, since it ought to remember the incarceration of those 16-year-olds and 17-year- olds, particularly after the act is implemented on April 1, 1985, will begin to ease the overcrowding burden in the present adult centres.
I might even suggest to the minister, if he is so concerned about all the new detention centres that are needed, he might simply agree with Ottawa and he can get the $25 million of startup money that Ottawa has offered. Surely that would go some distance to solving the problem.
Interjection.
8:10 p.m.
Mr. Wrye: This is the implementation of the act and I know the minister is not going to do anything, but somebody in this government is. He is implementing this part of the act and he is going to run this part of the act and maybe he can indicate to his cabinet colleagues that he would like to use this money for this purpose.
The Minister of Education (Miss Stephenson) indicated in a rather remarkable way the other day the real neglect of this government putting into place the matters this province had to put in place before the proclamation of this act earlier this month.
Hon. Mr. Drea: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: The honourable member alleged he did not receive a copy of the compendium and I feel very strongly about that. I have checked and on April 5 a compendium was delivered to the office of his House leader.
Mr. Wrye: I will have to check with my House leader after I complete my speech and find out if it was. I certainly have not received it. If that is so, I apologize to the minister.
Hon. Mr. Drea: They say it was delivered to the office of his House leader.
Mr. Nixon: Mr. Speaker, as far as I know, we have received no compendium. Unfortunately, my extensive staff of one very efficient young lady is not present tonight, but I will check first thing in the morning. If it is there, I will certainly deliver it to my colleague without delay, but I can assure the minister it has not been brought to my attention.
Hon. Mr. Drea: I just want to put it very plainly on the record that I said my information was that it was delivered to the office -- and this is the third time -- of the House leader.
Mr. Wrye: If he sent it by inter-office correspondence, my House leader may get that tomorrow morning.
Hon. Mr. Drea: What is wrong with those guys?
The Deputy Speaker: Order. The member for Windsor-Sandwich will continue his second reading debate.
Mr. Wrye: I want to remind the House of some of the comments of the minister's colleague the Minister of Education in her rather remarkable admission of the problems we now have, the potential problems we have in terms of truancy. I would remind the House the amendments, and there were proposed amendments in both of the last two years -- I certainly know there were some earlier last year to sections 29 and 30 of the Education Act -- were amendments which were proposed but died on the order paper.
From the last word I had, I understand the Association of Large School Boards in Ontario, which in June of last year presented a brief containing its views to the Ministry of Education, has now once again been asked for another brief. I hope it will have this policy in place by next September.
This is against a backdrop of the fact that Ottawa had first planned to implement the Young Offenders Act on April 1, 1983, but delayed the matter to October 1, 1983, after appeals from the provinces, in particular this one. I was just rereading some of the minister's comments in estimates last year where he was pleading for more time. What he really wanted was more time to see if he could get some more bucks from Ottawa. He was the minister who made the plea in estimates last year.
The Minister of Education, in a really remarkable comment, accused Ottawa of having proclaimed the Young Offenders Act too soon. It was proclaimed two years after it passed the House and that was too soon. We would not want to rush into anything.
She said, "As you are probably aware, the Young Offenders Act, in spite of all the efforts of my colleagues, was dropped on us rather precipitously." Rather precipitously, after two years.
That means we have no truancy policy in place today. The minister has given the people of Ontario hope that everything is going to be all right. I just want to read into the record a brief comment she made --
Mr. Nixon: Mr. Speaker, just before my honourable friend begins reading into the record, I would like to read to you rule 32(c) on page 10 of our standing orders, "On the introduction of a government bill, a compendium of background information shall be delivered to the opposition critics."
Mr. Sweeney: Not the House leader.
Mr. Wrye: Or his office.
The Deputy Speaker: I do not suppose that requires any comment.
Hon. Mr. Drea: There is one last thing on this whole matter. There has been another allegation that it was not filed with the House. There is a notation in votes and proceedings.
Mr. Nixon: The standing orders are quite clear.
Mr. Sweeney: The critic is still waiting for the compendium.
Hon. Mr. Drea: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker: Votes and Proceedings shows the compendium was filed in the House April 5.
Mr. Sweeney: The critic is still waiting.
Hon. Mr. Drea: I do not think it is my duty to introduce the critic of the Liberal Party to his House leader.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. I think we can all agree there has been enough discussion about it.
Mr. Wrye: It really has been a very useful learning experience for the minister, for his poor staff. I see a number of ministers writing. I am sure they are taking notes so they can pass them on to their staff and to the official printer so they will know what they have to do.
The Deputy Speaker: Perhaps the member would return to second reading of Bill 28.
Mr. Wrye: I want to get back to the logic being used by the minister's colleague the Minister of Education and Minister of Colleges and Universities who says not to worry about the fact we do not have any power in terms of truancy these days because we forgot to do that as well. The Minister of Education, in justifying the fact we are without any policy or any regulation on truancy, made this rather remarkable comment, "Fortunately, there is not a very long school period from now until the end of June."
Mr. Sweeney: Because she does not know what we are going to do.
Mr. Wrye: She knows what she is going to do. She said: "I am just hoping we will not have any problems. We may have a loophole, we may have a gap at the moment" -- that is putting it mildly -- "so that any child who decides he is going to be a truant in spite of his parent's best efforts will take advantage of it."
All I can do is remind the government once again that this bill received royal assent July 7, 1982. I do not know what this government has been doing for the last year and nine months, but it was elected to govern and it would be really nice if it could get its act together long enough to put the matters in place.
Interjection.
Mr. Wrye: I did not want to say it, but my colleagues have made some comments about the compendium again. It really would be nice if in this area, as in so many others, the government of the day would start to do what it is mandated to do and get down to governing. I suspect what is really at issue here is just how this government could slough off the bucks on Ottawa. That is really all this government is about; how much it can squeeze out of Ottawa.
It is a little more concerned with money than it is with people. Nowhere have I seen that demonstrated so obviously as in this piece of legislation.
There is one other reason we are here tonight discussing this piece of legislation, and that is the very embarrassing tug of war, or maybe we should call it power struggle, which has gone on for 17 or 18 months now between the Minister of Community and Social Services and his absent colleague the Minister of Correctional Services (Mr. Leluk), who we hope is not pouting tonight because he did not win.
I was rereading the estimates today. For well over a year this party has asked, has demanded to be told, which ministry was to be put in charge of implementing this act. The minister will remember this came up from my colleague and predecessor as critic, the member for Prescott-Russell (Mr. Boudria). I noted the member for Scarborough West (Mr. R. F. Johnston) also offered a few thoughts during estimates last year, that maybe it would be a nice idea if we were told which the lead ministry would be. I guess we were told, in the fullness of time, three or four days after the proclamation of the new act.
8:20 p.m.
Only now do we and the service providers find out it is to be the Ministry of Community and Social Services, although I was reading in some of the notes that there are indications the Ministry of Correctional Services has been given a part of the action. It is going to handle the 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds when they come under the act next year.
I notice some legal scholars have indicated, among other things, that if we have two ministries handling the act and different treatments for those 12 to 15 years old as opposed to those 16 and 17 years old it may be unconstitutional; but we will see in the fullness of time.
The serious and very sad result is that the agencies and the workers in those agencies who are in charge of making this act work are simply not ready. I would like to quote the comments of just a couple of them, and I know the minister will be very interested to hear those comments.
Grant Lowery is the executive director of the Central Toronto Youth Services. I am sure he might have a little something to do with this. He said recently:
"We are simply not ready. The total system is not prepared. I see a lot of people scrambling, a lot of last-minute preparation; and while some people may be prepared for this at the provincial level, certainly we at the agency level do not know what is going on."
In case the minister thinks Mr. Lowery is all alone in his criticism of the foot-dragging that has accompanied the government, perhaps he would like to hear some of the comments of George Caldwell, who I am sure members know is the executive director of the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies. I suppose they have some small role in making this act work. Here is what Mr. Caldwell has to say, and again I am quoting:
"The sense I am getting is that there is a bit of unreality to it." Mr. Caldwell says the transition period will be "a chaotic one," and he adds: "There is a hunger for more information and more practical direction that has not come from any ministry as to what is going on. We have lived with a theoretical direction for years."
In short, while this government played its usual game of fed-bashing -- and that is all you find: just one minister after another with his hand out, saying to Ottawa: "Please help me with lots of money. We do not know what we will do with it, but please help with lots of money" -- the agencies on the front lines in Ontario waited for direction that, certainly until recently, has not come.
In talking about the role of this province with respect to the funding demands it has made of Ottawa, it is worth noting that two provinces, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, have now reached agreement with Ottawa. The information I have is that agreement on funding with four other provinces is at hand and that full agreement should be reached fairly shortly. That will make six, and once again Ontario is on the verge of being 10th and last. That would not be surprising. The plain fact is that Ontario --
Hon. Mr. Drea: Are you going to come down there with me?
Mr. Elston: Are we invited?
Hon. Mr. Drea: Sure. I would love to see him there.
Mr. Wrye: Well, hang on a little bit. Maybe this spring or next spring we will be over there, the present minister will be over here and he can watch. I will be here well after this minister and this government are gone.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. Back to the debate, gentlemen.
Mr. G. I. Miller: Give him a challenge, Bill. They would not like it over on this side. Frank, you would not like it over on this side; you would not look as good.
Mr. Wrye: I hope he likes it, because he will get his chance pretty soon.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. The member for Windsor-Sandwich will speak on the bill, please.
Mr. Wrye: Mr. Speaker, there was a bit of provocation from the other side.
The plain fact is that this government and this minister have had a long time to get ready for this legislation and have done absolutely nothing. Now apparently the young offenders and those who have to deal with them -- the courts, the crown attorneys, the service providers -- are going to have to pay for the lack of preparedness of this government. Fortunately some agencies, such as the police here in Metro, for example, have been able to get prepared on their own, and they are all set to deal with matters; but obviously a lot of others are not.
The minister sits there smiling. I remind him of what happened, and maybe he would like to chat with his friend the Attorney General (Mr. McMurtry), because last week we had a little problem with a couple of judges.
The Attorney General went to Brantford in early February. He made a speech. As usual, we got a speech from the Attorney General about the funding. It was the kind of speech we have had from the Attorney General, from his colleague the previous Provincial Secretary for Justice, now the Provincial Secretary for Resources Development (Mr. Sterling), and from the minister's seatmate, the present Provincial Secretary for Justice. All of them have been worried about nothing else but funding: "Just give us our money, Ottawa. We will not tell you what we are going to do with it. Give us a lot of money so we can build some detention homes".
Perhaps it would have been a good idea if the Attorney General or some of the law officers of the crown had checked with the judiciary of this province. If he had checked, he might have been able to head off the problem that has occurred for the last seven days. As I understand it, the Attorney General is going to try to get a writ tomorrow. If that does not work, it may clog up the system a little more. That might have been a more useful exercise for the Attorney General to have taken on.
One of the things we do not know, and about which we have still had no direction from this government in spite of this legislation, Bill 28, is what is going to happen on April 1, 1985. Will this minister be in charge of implementing the Young Offenders Act as it pertains to 16- and 17-year-olds? Will it be his colleague the Minister of Correctional Services? Will we have a two-tiered justice system? Will we have the 12- to 15-year-olds and the 16- and 17-year-olds separate? We simply do not know. This government comes out with policy only at the very last minute, if at all.
This matter is far too important for that. Attempts are being made through the Young Offenders Act, in the first instance, to replace a piece of legislation that could best be described as archaic and, alternatively, to bring in a piece of legislation that attempts to take into account the fact that this is 1984 and not 1908, which I think is the date when the Juvenile Delinquents Act first passed Parliament.
The commendable efforts of the federal government have been somewhat negated at the outset by the less than commendable efforts of this provincial government. Its efforts have been more of a self-serving nature than of a nature to begin to attack this problem and try to solve it.
I remember a comment by the Attorney General when discussing why he could not get more legal aid about a year or a year and a half ago. He said one of the problems was that he could not get more legal aid because the issue was not very politically sexy. I suppose the implementation of the Young Offenders Act in this province is one of the issues that is not politically sexy. But for those young people, their families and the province in general, and for the future those young people have, while it may not be politically sexy it is ultimately very important.
For our part, we simply do not believe we have enough answers. As a result, we do not believe we should support this legislation on second reading. We will withhold further comment as to what the government is proposing until we hear a little more in the wrapup from the minister. Perhaps later on in clause by clause in committee, in this place or in another place, we can hear a few more direct answers as to what is going on.
8:30 p.m.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Speaker, our party will be opposing this legislation. We will be requesting that the legislation go out to committee for hearings.
After all the notice provided by the federal government of its intentions, first many years ago when it moved to revise legislation affecting young offenders and then, again years ago, when it actually implemented the legislation and tried to come to grips with the various provinces of the country, it is a sad story that any government in this modern age would come to this Legislature as this one did last December with part of the information that is involved in this package of legislation.
It is not just this act. It is important to see this act in the context of other acts. The government comes to us today so ill prepared and fraught with dissension in its own ranks that it is going to perpetrate on the province an incredibly dangerous direction and package of services to young offenders.
It is a schizophrenic approach that reflects an inability of the cabinet and the government to come to grips with who should be in charge. It is a two-streamed approach which in my view threatens the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that has been passed in this country. It threatens the right to equal access to service by certain young people as opposed to other young people, as we are now seeing in this discriminatory legislation that is being brought forward.
This is all because this government was reluctant to get involved and did not like the young offender initiatives in the early days when they were brought forward. It tried to fight the move to 18 from the very beginning. This is also because every member of the Justice policy field and the Minister and Community and Social Services have been absolutely transfixed by costs and have not looked at all at what is going to be out there in terms of service.
Because these people have been so busy fighting the battles about how much money is actually going to be transferred to allow the accommodation of the changes in the legislation, they have ended up in a situation in which we are totally unprepared. We are bringing in legislation that is going to be not only poor legislation but also very dangerous legislation in terms of the kind of services we provide to young offenders in Ontario.
I believe the government is bringing it in this way for a third reason: it wishes the federal legislation to fail. How else can one explain defying the very principles involved in that federal legislation? How is it we end up in the position of actually having two different ministries with different philosophies of treatment and service providing care to the different groups of young offenders that the Young Offenders Act supposedly wants to bring together?
The lack of planning has left us in the situation where at the last minute the Minister of Community and Social Services brings in legislation to cover people up to the age of 16. Months before, the Attorney General did work on provincial offences and the dangers involved in that and what is happening in our court systems at the moment.
Then they say to the Minister of Correctional Services, "You get to keep the 16- to 18-year- olds." The 16- to 18-year-olds do not pick up any of the extra rights that have been put into the Young Offenders Act for those who are under the age of 16. They are treated as adults. They are put in the adult stream.
I think there is a lot of evidence to the effect that they are already being discriminated against in the system in terms of sentencing practices and where they end up in the system. We are going to leave them there for a year to then go where? To come to Community and Social Services with that philosophy all integrated, to again have the two ministers somehow divide the two groups, 16 and under and of 16- and 17-year-olds? We have no idea. It is not here in the legislation. There is no direction. There was nothing in the compendium I received indirectly through my House leader.
Mr. Wrye: Why not directly?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I have no idea why not directly. I am sure the minister knows who the critic is. I did get it through my House leader but, as I say, indirectly.
Mr. Boudria: Did I miss anything?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Yes, but not a great deal.
We now have in the province police forces that are unprepared to deal with this. The critic for the Liberal Party said that maybe in Metro Toronto they are ready. I was talking to a social worker today who works in prevention. She said a police officer walked into her office today and asked: "What do I do with a kid under the age of 12 whom I find committing an offence? I do not know where to take him."
The member for Windsor-Sandwich (Mr. Wrye) thinks the other parts of the province are unprepared for this. However, those out there on the front line who have supposedly become prepared for it are not prepared at all. They do not know what is going on. They have not been involved in the process -- God, we in the Legislature have not been involved in the process. We do not know what kind of negotiating has been going on between the two ministries. Parents do not know.
There are in this act some fundamental changes in the rights that are available to juveniles as far as due process is concerned. Some of the changes are good; some I have some difficulties with -- and I will come to those in a minute -- but they are there and they are different. Parents and people in Ontario generally have no idea of what the Young Offenders Act means federally. Neither do they know what our interpretation of it, as expressed in this legislation brought forward today, means to them. They just do not know, and because there are fundamental human rights involved in this I think that is a very serious matter.
I would like to talk a little bit about the dangers in the splitting of jurisdiction. The Ministry of Correctional Services deals with children who are 16 and 17 years old, and the Ministry of Community and Social Services deals with those who are 16 years and under. There are different processes and different rights for the two groups, because one is covered under young offenders legislation and the other is not. When this happens, we can run into some very serious problems as to where those people get streamed and the kinds of services they receive.
I am convinced there will be actions under the Charter of Rights. Under this legislation, a child of 15 who is involved in a criminal act gets streamed with young offenders in family court. He goes into some kind of a group home, for instance, at the age of 15 and a half, say. At 16 he may still be there because the judge, after six months, determines he should stay there. That child stays within the juvenile system, the family court prerogatives and the kinds of support systems that are in place, even though at that point he is over 16. However, a child at 16 years of age who has committed the same crime goes into the adult criminal court. This is a very different kind of streaming as regards the kinds of services that are available. I suggest that offends the Charter of Rights. I suggest that will be challenged and should be challenged.
I am thinking of what happens to children's aid societies. They are already a little reticent about dealing with the older juveniles of 16 years of age. They are concerned about their mandate and whether they should be involved. I suggest they will be making very sharp decisions in the next little while. They will be saying: "Children 16 years and over go to the criminal system. Corrections, you can look after that." A very different kind of methodology will be used in dealing with those kids.
On the child welfare side of things, there is some flexibility at the moment. A child in trouble with the law but whose real problem is that he is in need of protection or in need of support can no longer be streamed into the social welfare field. That is going to cause some incredible distinctions between children whose ages vary by only months. It will create great problems as to how they are dealt with in the court system and in how they are redirected.
If I can go back to what we did on the Provincial Offences Act, perhaps I can make a point; I hope I will. Last December we supported a bill not realizing what was going to take place. Most of us in the House are not lawyers, I am happy to say. Some things have happened around provincial offences which are very frightening and which have a real impact on the Young Offenders Act.
8:40 p.m.
Under the Provincial Offences Statute Law Amendment Act that was brought in last December, a new process was developed for dealing with young people on provincial offences. These are not the major criminal offences. These are things such as liquor offences, traffic offences and that kind of thing. This new process is called a certificate of offence. Rather than an information being laid against a child and then going through the system that way, a certificate of offence is brought in. Essentially, that means the child has to go to court. That means a lot of parents end up going to court with that child.
I was told about a case just recently by somebody in the judicial system who said there are predictions that in Toronto there will be thousands of these kind of processes undertaken in the case of juveniles who in the past would normally have been dealt with by a warning or would have been moved into the child welfare system if there was a concern about their need of protection.
An example would be if a child was out driving his bike late at night without a light. The child who is caught in that case -- I have North York examples if the members want them -- is now given one of these certificates of offence and ends up going through the court system. This is clogging up the courts, according to people I know in the judicial system. It is causing all sorts of problems. We may have thought that was an innocent piece of legislation we were bringing through and we not have realized the kind of dangers involved in that.
Let me just say the mess we are going to have in the judicial system with the Young Offenders Act is going to be very substantial. For instance, on the whole question of redirection of kids, one of the good things about the act federally is the idea that there should be more work done through community service orders and the kind of thing where kids pay the people who have been victimized by them. There is a lot of that kind of process involved.
At the same time, in the federal legislation there is also the notion that it is tied to that of responsibility -- the child should take responsibility for his act. What many people fear we are going to end up with in the Young Offenders Act is more determinate sentencing, less diversion and more kids being incarcerated for this period of time. He will do his service and he will be responsible for that.
Unlike our old system, where somebody could be redirected before that ever took place and go off into community service or whatever, it is going to be much harder to stop the child from going into that system. Under this system a judge will now send that child for a predetermined length of time. After six months the judge may decide to have the case reviewed and after a year he must, but it is going to be much more defined. There is some real concern about the conflict of the philosophy there about what is a very positive notion of redirection into the community work and paying off with the notion of sentencing to incarceration of juveniles.
I am very concerned about that kind of problem. When one looks at the case of the Attorney General of this province who, although he knows there are well in excess of 100 programs around the province -- probably 150 -- available to assist the courts in terms of other kinds of alternative means of dealing with juveniles that are out there right now, even though he knows they are out there, he says he is going officially to recognize two of them; that is all. That was a very direct --
Interjection.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Three now. It has gone up to three; we are really moving. What is the message that is being given to judges? The message is they should not be listening to plans for redirection of that sort because they are not officially sanctioned. Instead, those children should be put into detention centres for a definite length of time and released only under the very strict terms of the Young Offenders Act.
I suggest that is going to cause us a hell of a problem. If we are worried about money, that is going to mean we are going to have more and more people going into detention homes. That means we are going to need more detention homes, even after we have been getting rid of those training schools, instead of having more redirection. That is a very unfortunate move that will be taking place.
Someone I was talking to a little earlier estimated that at the present time about 75 per cent of the cases are redirected to community service, various kinds of payments and that kind of thing. If that stops, if that seals up because the message of the Attorney General is that only three out of 150, or however many, of these programs are acceptable to him, then what does that mean in terms of the number of children who will be going into detention homes?
I think it means there will be an alarming number of increases, especially when one considers that for some juveniles at the moment there is already the philosophy among some judges that what they need is a short, sharp shock. That kind of notion and philosophy will get reinforced through this act as incarceration.
Hon. Mr. Drea: The member is talking about the enabling legislation.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I would suggest to the minister that even though it is in the enabling legislation -- and that is the limitation in the enabling legislation -- there is nothing, as I understand it, that would preclude a government in Ontario from putting in changes to the legislation to give other kinds of direction to or to redirect judges. I would be pleased to hear from the minister when he does his wrapup whether he does not feel that is possible.
A number of judges have said to me they would be in favour of some very explicit power being put in to redirect cases from the criminal system to child welfare, where they feel the case before them -- whether it is a break and enter or whatever -- is actually an acting out by a child who is in need of protection, whose family home is in such turmoil that the misdeed was part of an escape mechanism. That child is really only partially responsible for what is happening to him or her but really needs more support.
The judges would like to have in this legislation a very specific statement that they have the power to order that child from the criminal system of the Young Offenders Act into child welfare if they feel that is appropriate. I would like the minister to consider that.
I am very concerned about the 16- to 17-year-olds. I have been concerned for some time that the people in that age group in our society have fewer rights than the rest of us, certainly fewer rights than adults and in many cases, if we look at the legislation we are talking about bringing in for children in Ontario, fewer rights than children. They are in a no person's land. They are dangerously vulnerable at the very time at which they are going through some hard changes. If children are already having problems with the law, that is often exacerbated. Those are kids who need more protection, in my view, than those of other ages, given the difficulties of those growing years.
Last year I asked the Minister of Correctional Services whether or not he could give me some information about what is happening at present in our courts and in our correctional system with those 16- to 17-year-olds. I have had it said to me, on an anecdotal basis only by lawyers in the court system, that judges were being harder on the 17-year-olds than they were on adults and younger juveniles. The kinds of sentences being brought forward were much harsher and were counterproductive in the view of these lawyers.
This is from the compendium of information put out by the Attorney General when he brought in the amendments to the Provincial Courts Act and Unified Family Court Act in December. There is another section of laws that were brought in to prepare us for the Young Offenders Act, I would remind the members. According to current estimates -- and I am quoting again from this backgrounder -- there are approximately three times more 16-to-17-year-old offenders than 12-to-15-year-old offenders in Ontario.
8:50 p.m.
That is the Attorney General's position. I would just like to read into the record some of the information that came back to me from the Minister of Correctional Services. Note the change between 16-year-old and 17-year-old males.
The information given to me had to do with types of offence by length of sentence for those receiving provincial sentences during 1982-1983. There were 1,080 male 16-year-olds sentenced to some form of incarceration. On the other hand, there were 2,696 male 17-year-olds sentenced to a term of incarceration. That is an enormous increase -- more than 100 per cent.
I looked at some of the sentences put out. I do not know the particular cases and I am not questioning the validity of the decisions made. I just want to talk about the enormity of some of these sentences in terms of a child of that age, in terms of what time is like for somebody in that age group.
Of the 1,080 16-year-old males who were incarcerated, 442 were cases related to break and enter. The average incarceration was 141 days. I want the members to think about that. That is a very long time for somebody to be put in an institution. What kind of an institution was it?
I remember when the member for Riverdale (Mr. Renwick) and I went on a surprise visit to the Don Jail and saw young people there on remand. They were 16 and 17 years old. I talked to about 10 people who were lined up along the bars as we came along. The first person was a murderer who was up for the second time. He was 26 years of age. The next person was about 30. He was in for some serious crimes of violence with a weapon, aggravated assault. The next person was 17 years old. He was in on his first offence. Because he was unable to go bail, he was mixed in with those people on remand before he was ever sentenced.
We are saying there is a mean sentence of 141 days for break and enter. For serious, violent crimes, the sentence goes as high as 245 days. They may all be understandable, but I have a bit of difficulty with them. For theft, the sentence was 51 days in one of our jails or detention centres. I do not have it broken down in terms of where they went.
One can look at the enormous increase in the sentencing of 17-year-olds and think of them mixed in with some of those very hardened criminals. One can think of the options they are provided through the Ministry of Correctional Services versus what they would get through the Ministry of Community and Social Services at 12 to 15 years of age. One of the reasons there are fewer offenders now is the redirection into other kinds of programs under the family court system.
I am staggered by the fact that the average stay for 17-year-olds charged with break and enter was 175 days. Who are they with? What kind of situation are they in while they are waiting for transfer? Were they in the Toronto east end detention centre in my riding? Were they in the Don Jail? Where were they?
I worry very much that we are leaving those kids in that kind of situation today with that kind of tendency. Are we not reinforcing that? If we do not move now, even after all the time we have had to incorporate this older group with the other -- and we have had this much time to adjust knowing this was coming -- then the message we are sending out when we leave them in the criminal system, when we leave them in the system of the Ministry of Correctional Services rather than under the Ministry of Community and Social Services, is that this government should continue to treat them this harshly. It should continue to put them in the kinds of places they have been. I think that is unfortunate.
I was also greatly surprised by the statistics involved in this. Although I knew fewer women were sentenced, I had no idea the difference was so staggering. Compare the 1,080 male 16-year- olds who were sentenced with just 80 female 16-year-olds. I do not know how many of those went before the courts, how many got more lenient situations or how many are better trained in our society not to respond as males seem to and get themselves into difficulties, but I find that a staggering difference in numbers.
Although there is more than a 100 per cent increase for 17-year-old girls to 195 who were incarcerated during the year 1982-83, that compares with 2,696 males. I remind the members of that. It is a phenomenal difference.
Maybe as we look at this legislation, we should look at some of the answers to the question of why women do not end up there, why they do not run into the same difficulties with the system as young men do, and perhaps look for some answers there rather than maintain the structures of the moment which have discriminated against 16-year-olds and 17-year- olds.
I want to raise three more items. One is the question of truancy that has been raised, which seems to be an oversight in the production of legislation at this time. I am trying to figure out what the policy of the government is on truancy, on whether a child who is a truant will ever find himself or herself part of the court system and end up in a detention centre someplace.
I am assured by some of the things the Minister of Education is saying. I see the Minister of Community and Social Services shaking his head. They do not see that it can happen. I would like to raise a scenario with the minister about how I can see that taking place currently, flag it for him and he may respond to it in his wrapup or he may decide that perhaps I have caught something on this that is a difficulty.
The situation would be one in which a child is brought before a family court judge because of truancy and is sent back to the school system. There is no incarceration or anything like that. There is no mandate for that, but it is considered a probationary move by that family court judge.
Hon. Mr. Drea: You cannot be brought before a judge for that.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: From speaking to some people in the court system in the last hour and a half, my understanding is that they see it as quite possible a child could end up before a judge because of consistent truancy. It may be a family welfare matter or whatever. The judge would say the child should go back to school, but the child continues to be a truant.
At that point the child would be in contempt or in breach of the probation of that judge who has said, "You should be back in the school system," and therefore could end up going through the process of ending up in a detention home, because the initial cause for breaching that probation was forgotten. It was only truancy, but because it came before a judge, it was seen to be breaking a probationary agreement.
That is the argument that has been made to me and I would like to raise it as a concern. I am no lawyer in these matters, but this has been presented to me by people in the legal profession.
Mr. Nixon: Never apologize for not being a lawyer.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: That is a good point.
The other thing I want to raise with the minister is a concern I have had since it was raised in consultations we had as a committee on the Child and Family Services Act. It is the whole question of what is a place of safety.
I am talking here especially about what happens now to a child under the age of 12 who is found by a police officer to be in breach of the law. The police officer has to decide what to do with that child while the process is undergone to look after the child and make sure he is not in need of protection, etc.
Provincially, the act says the police officer may take the child to a place of safety. A place of safety would be the child's home, a foster home or a group home. What it cannot be is what is covered under subsection 24(1) of the federal act, which is the definition of "secure custody." That is the one place that child may not be taken.
9 p.m.
Under that definition, it says, "'Secure custody' means custody in a place or facility designated by the Lieutenant Governor in Council of a province for the secure containment or restraint of young persons, and includes a place or facility within a class of such places or facilities so designated."
Mr. Nixon: Is that a jail?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I do not think it is a police station. I think a child under the age of 12 could be taken by a police officer to a police station and kept there for as long as 12 hours under this act, as that being a place of safety, presuming they tried to go to the child's home before and nobody was at home.
If that is the case, a police station could actually be considered a place of safety under the act. Again, I will read out the definition of secure custody under subsection 24(1) to the minister, in case he did not hear it. That does not state "a police station." It is not in my view so designated and therefore it would be theoretically possible for a child to be taken there. That is something none of us would want to see. I do not think a police station is any place for a child of 12 to be kept for up to 12 hours before being sent back to his or her family for care.
I want to be absolutely sure that could mean there is no observation and detention centre left out of that definition. I think it is ironic when we are dealing with the Children's Act, we are dealing with this problem of what we do with the kids under 12, who are not now going to be subject to the law as they were in the past over the age of seven. What do we do with them after we return them?
The proposal under the Children's Act was to find them in need of protection and move that whole child welfare system into place to assist those kids who had serious problems at 12 years of age.
It is ironic that is the case. At the moment, a kid 12 years of age and older cannot be brought into the child welfare system. That is a terrible irony in a sense. I would rather see the option. I go back again to the notion that the option should be for judges to move the child back into the child welfare system to be dealt with rather than put under the punitive or criminal system.
I want to conclude with two other things; one is the judges. I presume from what Judge Steinberg in Hamilton was saying some time ago that some judges recently interpreted what we have done, or what the act is doing federally and our response to it, as provincial jurisdictions creating a court without appointing judges to it specifically. The distinction there is one which says, and some of them are saying, because they are not officially appointed to a youth court, in other words that court has not been designated youth, they will not hear cases.
I gather part of the reason for this is their opinion that a judge cannot be appointed for a defined length of time. What we are doing under this act is saying, "Until next April, a court is being established to deal with this particular age group and that is the youth court in the provincial family court system." Those judges will say, "We are not appointed to it directly, but if you appoint us to it directly, you cannot designate that the appointment ends after a year." While you cannot put that definitive length of time on a tenure on the judges in that kind of position and therefore --
Mr. Nixon: Is that a provision of the charter?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: I am not exactly sure. Maybe some of the legal beagles who told me that can explain why it is the case. I am not sure it is, but it has been brought to my attention that is a concern of some of these judges who are now raising this matter.
It is tied up with the matter of them not wanting to involve themselves in the two-tiered system at the moment. They find a dangerous kind of distinction is being made between the 16- and 17-year-olds and the others. They do not understand how they can involve themselves in a process for a year while they have the two- headed monster of the Ministry of Correctional Services on one side dealing with one group and the Ministry of Community and Social Services dealing with the others.
Mr. Nixon: I bet we could pass an act that would regularize it.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: It would be a very important thing if we had legislation here that would make it more regularized, as the member said.
In conclusion, this party is opposing this legislation because we see it as a badly-thought- out response to what is a long-term provision, a long-term plan to extend the age of young offenders to 18 for all of Canada, and we are unprepared for it; because in view of the fact we are unprepared for this move, we are setting up a two-tier system which offends or should offend our notion of the charter and of the right to equal service without discrimination with respect to age; and because the kinds of treatment that various groups of kids will be receiving will be so very different.
I think of the difficulty of somebody who is involved in a children's mental health centre today deciding what he is going to do with a 16-year-old, whom he would normally handle, who has a behaviour modification problem but is in trouble with the law. Is he going to bring that child into the Community and Social Services system under the children's mental health centres? Or is he going to say: "No, this child should be in Corrections. The child is having problems with the law. Go the Corrections route"?
If that is the case, we are going to see a very different situation for the 15-year-old, who will go automatically to the children's mental health centre, will receive treatment and will have a right to that treatment, and the 16-year-old who is perhaps involved in the same crime and is diagnosed with the same mental health problem but ends up going into the correctional system without any right to treatment, without any guarantee of treatment in that system. That should offend all of us.
The politics of how this has come about are opportunistic and the worst example of shoddy planning that I have seen in some time in this Legislature. They are jeopardizing the assistance and the proper kind of support to young people who are in some ways in the greatest need of our assistance if we are ever going to break some of the cyclical patterns of who goes into our correctional system.
I would suggest we should have seen one minister in charge of this. My preference would have been Community and Social Services so we would have that kind of model brought forward, and there should be a statement that this is where we are going with the 16- to 18-year-olds. There should be some provisions right now as to how we are going to deal with them if we are not capable of dealing with them in totality. We should not have been left in the hotchpotch we have now, which is offensive to me and to others because of its attack on human rights and certainly with respect to a two-tier system with two different standards of care.
Mr. Sweeney: Mr. Speaker, so often when we are dealing with legislation of this nature we tend to forget what it is all about or who it is all about, who it is we are supposed to be serving.
I want to draw the Legislature's attention to the definition on page 2 of the act. It says:
"(i) 'young person' means a person who is, or, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, appears to be,
"(i) 12 years of age, or more, but
"(ii) under 16 years of age,
"and includes a person 16 years of age or more charged with having committed an offence while he or she was 12 years of age or more but under 16 years of age."
In other words, for the most part we are talking of children between the ages of 12 and 16.
It is true there is a reference in this act to police apprehension of children under the age of 12; I am aware of that. We are all well aware of the fact that the Young Offenders Act, and the title of this refers to the implementation of that act, will also deal with children, and they are still children, who are 16 and 17. But that does not take effect, as the minister well knows and has drawn to our attention, until a year from now, in April 1985.
9:10 p.m.
So for all practical purposes the subject of the debate tonight is children between the ages of 12 and 16. I wanted to stress this so we will not forget who we are serving, will not forget why we are debating this act.
It is not a case of a jurisdictional dispute between the two levels of government; that is not the issue. It is not a case of dollars and where they come from and where they go; that is not the issue. It is not a case of a dispute between the members of the government party and the members of the opposition benches over here; that is not the real issue. The issue is how we serve children aged 12 to 16 in Ontario who, for numerous reasons, find themselves in conflict with the law of Ontario and the law of Canada. That is the issue.
When I think of that I have to say this is a sad day, because there was so much promise two years ago when the Young Offenders Act was passed in Ottawa, and passed, I may remind the members, unanimously. All three political parties in Ottawa two years ago unanimously agreed with the principle and the spirit of the Young Offenders Act.
Unfortunately, in Ontario during those two years the spirit and the principle of the act seem to have been forgotten. The only thing that seems to have mattered is the jurisdiction, the dollars, the squabbling and the disputes; and during those two years the children of this province between the ages of 12 and 16 also seem to have been forgotten.
That is why it is a sad day and that is why the critic for our party has already announced clearly that we are not supporting this legislation It is not because we disagree with the spirit and the principle of the Young Offenders Act; we agree and we support the unanimous support of the federal House of Commons. It is the way this act has been dealt with over the last two years; it is the way the act and the implementation of the act are continuing to be dealt with in this province. That is what we disagree with and that is the point we are trying to make.
Mr. Speaker, I will try to bring a few points to your attention to indicate why we feel so strongly about this. Just in the last couple of months in most jurisdictions in Ontario -- the member for Scarborough West has already illustrated this point -- even here within the confines of Metro Toronto, where surely they have far more services available than anywhere else in the province, police and judges still were not sure what they were going to be doing; they still were not sure what their part was going to be; they still were not sure how they were going to deal with this act and what was going to be expected of them. The two members of our society who had to deal with it up front on the front lines were still not sure how they would handle it.
I will make some specific references to this. It is really sad that the children of Ontario are being made the pawns of the small-mindedness of this government.
Let me step aside for a second. I want to make this very clear. I am not aiming any barbs at this minister. I am not saying this minister is responsible for some of the concerns we are expressing, and I say this because even this minister himself did not know he was going to be responsible for this legislation a very short time ago. What I want to make very clear is that I am holding the government of Ontario responsible, the whole government. I want only to make the point that the particular minister who has now found himself responsible for this act cannot be the only one to blame.
What concerns me is that the children of this province who are going to be caught by this legislation, children who should have been helped by the legislation but who are going to be caught by it as it is currently drafted and, as we understand at the present time it is going to be administered, until we hear otherwise, those children have enough problems already.
By the very nature of the fact they are in trouble with the law and with the justice system of this province, they already have enough problems. The whole purpose of the legislation we pass here should be to ameliorate those problems and help them with those problems, not to make them more difficult. It is a tragedy that the vindictiveness -- and that is about all I can call it -- of this government is leading to the furthering of those problems.
One thing the members of this party cannot tolerate and will not support is that the battles between various levels of government will be fought on the backs of the children of this province. That is what is happening. That is why we are so angry. That is why we are so frustrated by this legislation and the way it has been dealt with by this government. It is clearly being fought on the backs of the children of this province.
Two years; that is what we have had. That is the damnable part about this. For two whole years the government of Ontario knew this legislation had to be implemented. Yet for two years all it did was bicker, argue, fight and dispute with another level of government. The children of this province are the ones who will have to pay for it.
It is my understanding, and I stand to be corrected by the minister if I am wrong, that as of March I this government still had not decided which minister and which ministry was going to be in charge of this legislation. That is nothing short of a scandal.
Hon. Mr. Drea: Mr. Speaker, on a point of order: The member is incorrect. The member wanted to be corrected. He is incorrect.
Mr. Sweeney: What is the date?
Mr. Van Horne: February 28.
Mr. Sweeney: I apologize then. I am three days out.
Hon. Mr. Drea: Mr. Speaker, he wanted to be corrected. It was many weeks before that.
Mr. Sweeney: If it was, it was the best-kept secret in Ontario.
As of July 1, 1983, fully one year after the federal legislation received royal assent -- not just passed in the House of Commons, but received royal assent -- a letter was sent to the Premier (Mr. Davis) by the following groups of people: the John Howard Society, the Elizabeth Fry Society, Central Toronto Youth Services, Huntley Youth Services, the Salvation Army, Anglican House and the Criminal Lawyers Association. On July 1, 1983, those organizations, all involved with helping children, asked the Premier to tell them what Ontario was going to do. As of February 15, 1984, they had not received a reply.
The same groups sent a second letter: the John Howard Society, the Elizabeth Fry Society, Central Toronto Youth Services, Huntley Youth Services, the Salvation Army, Anglican House and the Criminal Lawyers Association. As of February 15, they sent a second letter asking the same questions.
Interjection.
Mr. Sweeney: No, to the Premier, the leader, the first minister of the government of Ontario. All we can say is, if he does not know, who the blazes over there does know.
They still have not received a reply. That is a scandal. I do not know what other word to use. There is stronger language but it would be unparliamentary. I am getting the eye of the Clerk to remind me it would be so.
9:20 p.m.
I indicated the judges and the police were not sure what they were going to do. As of the end of March of this year, we still had family court judges who were being converted to youth court judges, still not sure--
The Acting Speaker (Mr. Cousens): I caution the member that the word "scandal" might be a little strong within the parliamentary context we are now discussing this subject.
Mr. Sweeney: If the Speaker has a better word, I will gladly consider it, but I really cannot think of --
The Acting Speaker: I ask the member to remove that word and indicate there may be other ways of --
Mr. Sweeney: All right. It is a political disgrace then. Would that be better?
Interjections.
Mr. Sweeney: It is a political, social and inhuman disgrace, if that makes the Speaker feel a little better.
The family court judges of this province who are going to deal with this act, who are going to become youth court judges, were getting a cram session as of the end of March as to what their role was going to be. That was only days before this legislation was brought before the House. Are we to believe the judges who are going to have to administer this legislation are only given days' notice in advance as to their role?
Sergeant George Davies, a trainer for the Metropolitan Toronto Police with respect to this act and who is described as one who supports it and all it stands for, was asked, "What lawyers' list is the police going to use when it advises the young offenders that they have the right to call a lawyer?" He said, "I guess it is going to be from legal aid."
As of very recently, and again I stand to be corrected by the Speaker, there has been no agreement between the Attorney General and the legal aid society that this will be done. We still do not know. If the minister knows, I will be quite happy to hear him tell us. The judges get a cram course at the end of March, the police do not even know where the lawyers are going to come from and then we want to know whether people are ready.
The real irony of this legislation is it was stressed over and over again -- as anyone can see from reading the record from the House of Commons -- that it is going to make the young offenders of this province more responsible for their own actions; it is going to make them grow up a little bit. Yet what kind of an example is this government giving to them? Its actions over the last two years, and even over the last couple of months, have been far from responsible.
The critic of our party has made it very clear that the major battle between the two levels of government has been over dollars. Let us take a look at the kinds of dollars that have been offered to this government. First, the federal government has offered a straight 50:50 split for all costs except for the construction of any jails; that is the one exception. It has offered $25 million for startup costs, $20 million for programming costs and $100 million for the Canada assistance plan. That is a lot of money in anyone's language.
What has all the dispute been about? The previous minister who thought he was going to have to carry this legislation said we would need millions of dollars to build new jails and facilities. Yet right within the Young Offenders Act, as my colleague the critic has indicated already, there are 11 alternatives. To the best of our knowledge, those 11 alternatives have not been seriously considered by this government. Otherwise, it would not be so up in the air about building more jails.
I find that ironic too, because one of the points the Justice ministries of this government have made over and over again is that jails do not work for adult offenders. The fact that we have 70 per cent repeaters in most of our jails of this province is clear evidence that they do not work for adult offenders.
Surely when we are starting down a whole new line in terms of dealing with young people in this province, we should not be starting down the same line of putting them in more jails. We are developing alternatives for adult offenders. We have put community resource centres into place in the province.
It is my understanding that when the minister now responsible for this legislation was the Minister of Correctional Services, he was very supportive of the community resource centres. Therefore, we would expect he would be supportive of alternative forms of treatment for young offenders as well.
We are on record as saying we oppose this legislation. We want a great deal more input into it than we have had. We oppose it because the principle and the spirit of the legislation as espoused in the House of Commons are not being adhered to by this government. The spirit and the principle of that federal legislation are something we support. When we see that, we will support it -- but not until.
Mr. McClellan: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to take part in this second reading debate. I guess the minister is starting to twig to the fact that we in opposition are somewhat incensed and cheesed off about this statute. We do not intend to support it on second reading, and we want it to go out to committee.
I hope the minister understands, if he does not understand now, why people are so upset about the legislation in front of us. The problem is very simple. We do not have answers to a whole host of questions that have been on the plate of this government for a long time. It has not been just two years that these questions have been before the Ontario government but for almost a quarter of a century. Efforts were begun to rewrite the Juvenile Delinquents Act in the 1960s. The first draft of a successor act was done in 1961, the second draft in 1970 and the third draft in 1977.
The bill promulgated by the federal government at the beginning of this month has been in the works for five or six years. This government has had in front of it the questions that this radical new system poses for all of us for about five or six years. Yet here we are, weeks after the bill has been finally proclaimed into law by the Parliament of Canada, and this government is still flying by the seat of its pants.
It comes into the Legislature on April 2, the day after the bill is proclaimed, and announces to an astounded opposition that it has not been able to settle the fundamental question of which ministry is going to be responsible for the implementation of the Young Offenders Act.
It has been no secret that the Ministry of Community and Social Services and the Ministry of Correctional Services have been fighting each other for the honour to be the lead ministry. They have been fighting over turf and territory since 1981, if not before then. I have certainly been aware of the fight since 1981.
We know the Provincial Secretariat for Justice and the Provincial Secretariat for Social Development have been involved in a vain attempt to bring some degree of rational co-ordination to the government's planning and policy development operations. We know the Attorney General has tried desperately to knock heads together.
Yet on April 2 the Provincial Secretary for Justice came into the Legislature and said: "We really have not made up our minds. We are going to have a two-tier system. The Ministry of Community and Social Services will handle children up to the age of 16, and the Ministry of Correctional Services will handle children between the ages of 16 and 18."
Thanks for nothing. This question has been in front of the government, as I said, for at least five years and it still has not sorted it out. It has not even sorted out the basic administrative structure of a new system of justice for young people in this province. It has made a decision not to make a decision because it could not decide.
The Ministry of Community and Social Services will keep juvenile corrections, which it has had since 1977, and the Ministry of Correctional Services will keep responsibility for children between the ages of 16 and 18, which it has had since 1977, because that was the path of least resistance. The government avoided the necessity of implementing the act by simply copping a plea; it did not make a decision.
9:25 p.m.
That is only the beginning of a whole battery of decisions, questions and policy issues that have not been decided. The minister comes in here, in a sense with a gun to our heads, saying: "Look, the federal Parliament has proclaimed the law. Oh God, we are surprised; we are horrified; we are shocked and appalled. We have to have this legislation passed right away. Never mind asking all these questions."
I am sorry, I am not an expert. I am a social worker who has worked in a variety of settings. I confess to not knowing very much about correctional services; I never have and I suspect I never will, but I know there are a number of questions that have to be answered. If the minister thinks he is going to get this legislation through this House without providing answers to those questions, he is wrong. It is as simple as that.
When the minister can answer our questions, he will have his legislation. It is a very simple process in here: the minister is accountable to this assembly for what he does. In case he does not like that, he is accountable to the Legislative Assembly and he has to satisfy us that he knows, even remotely, what he is doing. So far, I have to tell him we suspect the opposite.
I have never seen such sheer incompetence in the introduction of a major piece of legislation as the incompetence surrounding the introduction of this act to implement the Young Offenders Act and all the nonsense that has led up to it.
The minister has come into the House tonight without even deigning to participate in the second reading debate.
Hon. Mr. Drea: That is not true.
Mr. McClellan: The debate started at eight o'clock this evening. The minister got up and moved second reading of the bill, then sat down. That is my recollection of what happened this evening.
Hon. Mr. Drea: I will speak at the end and the member will not like it. He probably will not even be here to hear it.
Mr. McClellan: I am always here.
Hon. Mr. Drea: He will pull his usual stunt and run.
Mr. McClellan: The minister is talking to the wrong member. For my sins I am always here, and I will be here when the minister deigns to address the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. When he does that, I hope the minister will answer some of the questions.
I have the consultation paper produced by the ministry in November 1981. I am not going to go through it. It has 50 pages of questions; 50 pages of thorny and complex problems that have to be solved before Ontario can say it is ready to implement the Young Offenders Act.
It is a good thing Ontario put out the consultation paper in November 1981. The members will recall that in that month, the ministry had not been dismantled by the incumbent minister. It still had the capacity to produce an intelligent consultation paper that set out clearly and precisely the policy issues to be addressed by the government, by the service community and by us as legislators.
As we stand here in April 1984, I doubt very much whether the ministry any longer has the capacity to produce a consultation paper of this quality, having endured the incumbent minister in the intervening three and a half years. Most of the people who had the capacity to produce this kind of document have been driven out of the ministry.
Be that as it may, the questions raised in this document cry out for answers. Where is the green paper, the white paper, the blue paper or whatever? Where is the paper that sets out the answers to all the questions that were posed in November 1981? Where is it? Did I miss it? Was it sent to somebody else's office? I do not think so, because the questions have not been answered.
The minister is still as much in the dark in April 1984 as he was in November 1981, and he does not know the answers to all these questions. He has played a cute kind of game of chicken with the federal government, and the federal government has called his bluff.
Here we are, two and a half weeks after the bluff was called, with legislation, all the policy questions undecided and the basic administrative apparatus as confused and incoherent as it was four years ago.
I do not intend to take the time of the House to go through a 50-page document and ask the minister to respond to each of the policy options that are set out in here. That would be quite intolerable. But when the bill goes to committee we will do precisely that. We will have to ask the minister to respond to each of the questions which he himself put to us in November 1981, and he will have to give us answers. I do not think the minister has the answers now.
Mr. Nixon: What is that document called?
Mr. McClellan: It is called Implementing Bill C-61, the Young Offenders Act-An Ontario Consultation Paper. It was put out by the interministry implementation project in November 1981.
For those who are not connoisseurs of this kind of nonsense, this was the interministry committee that was charged by the cabinet with the task of producing Ontario's response to the Young Offenders Act and coming up with ways and means to implement it. Their first step was to raise all the questions involved, all the thorny, complex difficult problems -- and they are difficult and complex problems -- and to come up with solutions to each. They did a good job of setting out the questions, but since then there has been nothing but a deafening silence with respect to the answers.
I will run quickly through a couple of major concerns, leaving aside all the nitty-gritty problems that are set out in the implementation report of November 1981. Some of these have been touched on very well by other speakers, but I just want to run through them.
First, what is going to be the role of the police? What is the new role of the police in operational terms? What kind of preplanning has taken place with all the police organizations across the province? What kinds of organizational arrangements and management systems arrangements have been made with the police organizations across this province as they accept the challenge of a whole new set of roles and responsibilities under the Young Offenders Act?
The police are now, in a unique kind of way, the front-line workers in our child welfare system. This is a profound change. What kind of training has been made available to our police officers? What kind of supports have been built into police forces as far as beefed-up youth bureaus are concerned? I want the answers to those questions.
I want to know what the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ministry of the Solicitor General have been doing with our police organizations across this province to get them ready for their new roles and responsibilities. What are the budget implications? What are the guidelines? What are the criteria? We do not know. None of this has been provided to anybody -- not to the police force, not to the social agencies, not to us. We are not asking a lot. We are asking for an operational plan, and I do not think it is there. We will find out when we get to committee.
Second, what will be the impact on the child welfare system? What is their state of readiness? What are their new roles and responsibilities? What are the financial implications? What are the organizational implications?
Surely it would have made sense for the ministry to issue some kind of comprehensive document that would answer these obvious questions. These are not esoteric questions that only come to the minds of experts. These are simple, commonsense questions. What are the answers? What is the ministry's position, or does it have one? I suspect not.
9:40 p.m.
Third, what about the courts? We discovered in December 1983 who and where the responsibilities for the Young Offenders Act will lie with respect to the court. That was only about two and a half months ago.
The member for Kitchener-Wilmot (Mr. Sweeney) raised this issue very clearly. What kind of training programs have been laid on for the judges? What will be the impact on the courts? What can we expect in terms of either increased or decreased demand on the courts? After five years we have had no answers. With regard to sentencing procedures or sentencing practices, again we have had no information at all from the minister. He no longer seems even to be listening. We have had no information at all from the minister with respect to this critical issue.
Finally, in my own little litany of obvious concerns, there is the question of the detention and custody systems that will have to be set up. We have had concerns expressed formally by the government of Ontario that it will require 20 new maximum security centres for young offenders by 1985. The government has said this. Is it still the same situation? Has the situation changed? What are the requirements? We are entitled to these answers.
Even as a matter of simple courtesy, the minister should have issued the members of this assembly this basic information. After alarums and excursions over the course of the last three years, in which the government and various spokespersons said we would require up to 20 new maximum security centres for young offenders by 1985, what does the province really need? What are the capital requirements?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Bluewater Centre.
Mr. McClellan: Yes, we will come to that. Let us come to it now. It is quite obvious one of the ways the government is making room for young offenders is by closing mental retardation centres.
Mr. Riddell: Is the minister going to call the member stupid? Is he going to say it is the most stupid remark he has ever heard said in the House?
Mr. R. F. Johnston: The minister knows he had an engineer in Bluewater before he even announced the closing. He knows it is right.
The Acting Speaker: Order.
Mr. McClellan: Thank you so much, Mr. Speaker. This is the only advanced planning that has actually been done with respect to the Young Offenders Act. The minister has decided to make room for the young offenders at the expense of developmentally handicapped people. He has thrown the entire program for the developmentally handicapped into a cocked hat in order to accommodate young offenders.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: We approved the Williston report.
Mr. McClellan: The minister knows exactly what my position is on the Williston report and on the aims and ideals of deinstitutionalization. I have nothing but contempt for this government for the way it has distorted those aims and ideals and botched up the network of programs for the developmentally handicapped in this province since the present incumbent took office. It is simply shoddy.
Hon. Mr. Drea: The member's speech is --
The Acting Speaker: Order. The member for Bellwoods has the floor.
Mr. McClellan: Thank you. As I say, we know exactly what kind of planning has taken place with respect to the detention and custody systems. With the exception of what has been done in the mental retardation centres, which I am sure other members will speak about at length, there has been no policy, no planning and no interministerial co-ordination.
We have now the reintroduction, as a matter of policy, of a two-tier system. There will be one level of service with respect to detention and custody systems for children up to the age of 16. There will be a second class of service -- I mean second class literally -- for children between the ages of 16 and 18. There will be two separate bureaucracies administering two separate programs with two sets of criteria. It is going to be wasteful, it is silly and it will mean the children will fall between the stools.
What will happen to the 16- and 17-year-olds is exactly what happens to 16- and 17-year-olds in the mental health system. They will get short shrift. They will be put into dangerous and harmful settings with dangerous adult criminals. They will not get the service they need and they will not get the treatment they need.
Children who are approaching their 16th birthday will be shunted off into limbo in order that they can be routed into the second-class system under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Correctional Services instead of getting the first-class service that will be available under the Ministry of Community and Social Services.
I have seen this happen before. I see it happening now in the Ministry of Community and Social Services and in the Ministry of Health. We will see it perpetuated in spades under the two-tier system. A two-tier system is a two-class system, and the second class will be for the older young offenders.
The government has accomplished exactly nothing by failing to address the basic territorial question.
This leads me, since we are talking about custody and detention, to turn back to the 1981 report for a second. On page 18 -- and this is the only one specific I want to deal with -- the report says, "It is anticipated that a relatively broad class of facilities and programs would be designated as places of custody and that the facilities would be listed in schedules."
Where is the list? Where is the list of designated facilities? Again, have I missed something? Has something wafted by me on a cloud? Has some messenger brought the report to the wrong office? Has the schedule been shredded before it even got to us? Where is the list of the "relatively broad class of facilities and programs...designated as places of custody"?
No minister in his right mind would ask this Legislature to pass a piece of legislation without giving us that list and that schedule. I assume it is a simple oversight and that when the bill gets to committee we will have the list of facilities and programs set out in the schedule.
We have been through a major process of legislative reform before in the Ministry of Community and Social Services. If you can believe it, Mr. Speaker, all the kinds of questions I am raising here tonight were provided to us by the ministry before we ever got to the second reading stage.
We rewrote the Child Welfare Act. We rewrote all the children's residential statutes. We were given extensive discussion papers and extensive documentation. We had operational plans set out before us. It was entirely clear what the ministry had in mind before it asked this Legislature to pass bills into law. They consulted widely in the service community, with the police and with the courts. Everybody had a clear understanding of what was in front of him and what was coming.
How different that process is from the kind of nonsense, the kind of arrogant disdain we are seeing today, with the Legislature being treated as a bunch of nobodies who should not even be given basic information and the service agencies being regarded by this minister as though they were somehow the enemy who has to be attacked, fended off, criticized in public and slanged and slammed in the press.
What a performance it has been. I hope the government is proud of that kind of confrontational nonsense, especially when it was preceded by such a constructive and useful legislative and reform exercise. They are as different as night and day.
9:50 p.m.
We will get a chance to look at these things when the bill goes to committee. Since the Minister of Education is here, I just want to end by dealing with the issue of truancy. I am sure she was misquoted in the press the other day because she said the government had not had time to develop its policy on truancy.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: That was a misquote, very definitely.
Mr. McClellan: Oh, what did the minister say?
Hon. Miss Stephenson: I said the policy is in place and the legislation will be following.
Mr. McClellan: Oh, good. I guess the minister had forgotten that her ministry had been engaged in a policy development exercise since 1982 and she just blurted out her statement to the press, which always gets these things wrong. Why do they always misquote that minister? I have never been misquoted in my life, but this minister is always misquoted.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: On a point of privilege, Mr. Speaker: I spent 20 minutes on the telephone explaining the policy to that reporter and was therefore somewhat astonished to find the headline that we did not have a policy.
Mr. McClellan: What a silly-billy that reporter must be -- after 20 minutes of detailed explanation to report that this government had not had time since 1982 to develop a policy.
Interjections.
The Deputy Speaker: Order.
Mr. Wrye: It is only two months until June.
Mr. McClellan: I want to remind the minister that in 1982 the Ministry of Education issued a policy proposal that outlined three options for dealing with truancy under the Young Offenders Act. The first of those was to retain habitual absence as a provincial offence and let the courts deal with it. The second was to resolve the non attendance problems within the educational system. The third was to refer habitually absent children to the children's aid society where the situation would be dealt with through the child welfare system.
In 1982 the Ministry of Education had already designated the first of these as its preferred option. That is to say, it wanted habitual absence to remain a statutory offence which would be dealt with in the courts. That was the policy of the Ministry of Education in 1982. I have no clue what it is today because the Minister of Education told the press the other day there was no policy because they had not had time to think up one.
The Minister of Community and Social Services said sotto voce tonight the option of leaving habitual absence as a statutory offence to be dealt with by the courts -- if I understood his gesticulations correctly -- was not going to be the government's policy with respect to truancy. Fine. What on earth is the policy?
Interjections.
Mr. McClellan: Mr. Speaker, I have the floor. He had an opportunity to speak on second reading debate and he chose not to exercise it.
Hon. Mr. Drea: Stop misquoting me.
Mr. McClellan: He cannot jump up like a jack-in-the-box, every time --
Hon. Mr. Drea: The member should try to use his limited faculties to quote me correctly.
Mr. McClellan: It is so hard to quote this minister because he has not said anything and his ministry has not provided us with any information. The policy questions I am outlining with respect to truancy have not been answered and they are a matter of tremendous concern. Everybody recognizes habitual absence from school as a serious social problem that has to be dealt with. This government has been diddling around since 1982. The minister says: "Oh, gosh, we have not had time to think up a policy."
Hon. Miss Stephenson: This is not true.
Mr. McClellan: The minister says it is not true. Then what is the situation? The rotation, if I am not mistaken, moves to the Conservative Party. The Minister of Education will have an opportunity to rise in her place.
Interjection.
Mr. McClellan: What does that mean? Is the Provincial Secretary for Resources Development trying to swim?
Mr. Martel: Can we have some information? That is what we need.
Mr. McClellan: The Minister of Education has the opportunity to rise in her place and tell us what her policy is.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. The member for Bellwoods is on the debate on second reading. Other members will please refrain from all this.
Mr. Martel: It is the interjections.
Mr. McClellan: He is gesticulating at me in a very dangerous manner.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: The minister has been muzzling the Minister of Education.
Mr. McClellan: The minister is trying to stifle freedom of information. He is trying to stifle my contribution to the debate. I am intimidated and I am going to terminate my remarks at this point because I am so terrified.
But I want the Minister of Education to take the opportunity of having 35 minutes to get up and tell us what the policy of the government of Ontario is with respect to truancy. When the Minister of Community and Social Services comes down off his high horse and participates in the debate, perhaps he will tell us when and in what manner we are going to have answers to all the questions that were set out so lucidly in his ministry's document of 1981 and that have been raised so eloquently by all the members who have participated in the debate this evening.
The Deputy Speaker: Does any other honourable member --
Mr. McClellan: Let the record show the Minister of Education is sitting fast and stuck to her seat.
The Deputy Speaker: Order. Member, take your seat.
Hon. Miss Stephenson: That is not what we are debating.
An hon. member: Yes, we are.
Interjections.
Mr. Riddell: Mr. Speaker, I really did not intend to participate in this debate until I put a question to the minister this afternoon and received the kind of response I did, which, I can assure the members, did not do the minister one iota of good.
The introduction of Bill 28 and what has led up to it is yet another government fiasco. I do not think I can word my condemnation of the minister and the government of which he is a part any better than was done by a completely unbiased author in an article that appeared in Toronto Life entitled "Political Delinquency."
This article did not come from a politician; it came from a person who is concerned about the Young Offenders Act and the procrastination of this government in implementing the act. I just want to quote a little from this article written by John Gault.
Mr. R. F. Johnston: Read the whole thing.
Mr. Riddell: I would like to because it is really a good article, but I am going to quote only part of it:
"After more than 20 years of study and false starts, the Young Offenders Act was passed unanimously by the House of Commons and received royal assent on July 7, 1982."
That was July 7, 1982. Here we are in April 1984, and this government is scrambling around trying, first of all, to find accommodation for young offenders before it ever decides to bring the Young Offenders Act into the Ontario Legislature. I will have more to say about that later.
To continue: "It was supposed to come into effect April 1, 1983, but the provinces, with the possible exception of Quebec, weren't ready for it. Then October 1 became the proclamation date, but the provinces still weren't ready. And on February 28 this year most of the provinces, including Ontario, were pushing Solicitor General Robert Kaplan for yet another extension. This time he said no. Which meant that there was exactly one month available to train thousands of people -- judges, lawyers, child welfare workers, probation officers, police officers and soon -- in a whole new, very complex body of law.
"In fairness, as of March 1 some of these people had already received instruction and guidance; also in fairness, some will be less affected by the changes than others and will be able to carry on business pretty much as usual. But as of March 1, after a dozen lengthy conversations with officials in various ministries, youth service organizations, legal aid services and the police, I could only expect the worst.
"The simple fact is that, less than a month before the Young Offenders Act was to become law, there was a shocking lack of preparedness in this province. Queen's Park had not even established which ministry was going to be given overall responsibility for implementation."
I might just say that when the so-called five-year plan for the phase-out of six centres for the developmentally handicapped was leaked, to use the minister's words, I was probably one of the first members to get on the telephone and ask the minister what in the world was going on. Absolutely no one, including the Ontario Association for the Mentally Retarded, knew that these six centres were scheduled to be closed.
10 p.m.
In my conversation with the minister I asked him what in the world he intended to do with the very excellent facilities at the Bluewater Centre, including the relatively new construction that had taken place.
He said to me, "The Bluewater Centre is ideally suited for a centre for young offenders." He certainly knew at that time they were going to be considering some of these centres for the developmentally handicapped he was closing, with the intent of using them for the young offenders.
Even prior to the announcement he was going to close these centres, it is my understanding that an engineer had been sent to the Bluewater Centre to look at the facility to see if it would render itself for use by the young offenders. Nobody can tell me the minister and his staff did not know they were going to be turning these facilities previously used by the developmentally handicapped into centres for young offenders.
Let me get back to the article, which says it much better than I can.
"The simple fact is that, less than a month before the Young Offenders Act was to become law, there was a shocking lack of preparedness in this province. Queen's Park had not even established which ministry was going to be given overall responsibility for implementation. Community and Social Services, which had been responsible for the kids under the Juvenile Delinquents Act, was operating under the assumption that it would retain that role. It seems, however, that the Ministry of Corrections was pushing a takeover bid and that this inter-ministerial power battle had been dropped in the plump lap of Premier William Davis.
"None of this would matter much if the problems were self-containable, but they spread far out into the community. Agencies directly and deeply involved with young offenders (or which might become deeply and directly involved, depending on the directions the province takes) have been stonewalled by Queen's Park.
"As long ago as last July a letter was sent to the Premier over the names of the John Howard Society of Metropolitan Toronto, the Elizabeth Fry Society of Toronto, Central Toronto Youth Services, Huntley Youth Services, the Salvation Army, Anglican House and the Criminal Lawyers Association. The letter asked for guidance on a number of fundamental issues, including the ministry of record and which courts would be involved. The Premier did not reply. On February 15 of this year, another letter was sent, undersigned by some of the same agencies. '...There are still critical policy decisions remaining to be taken by you...'" That is a quote from the letter to the Premier.
"Once again, there was no reply. The suspicion is that despite the fact that there were and are a fair number of people working hard within their ministries, and that official interministerial discussions have been ongoing for some time, Queen's Park has refused to come to terms with the Young Offenders Act. The expression I kept hearing was 'minimal compliance.' In other words, this province -- and others, to be sure -- is doing as little as possible to make the act work the way it was intended. The oft-repeated excuse I received was that it was a question of time and money. Which I consider indefensible. We're not talking mineral rights here, we're talking children's rights.
"Let's deal with 'money' first. Once Ottawa passed the Young Offenders Act, responsibility for making it work was passed to the provinces. Without truly solid evidence that the new system was going to cost more than the existing one, Ontario (for example) demanded an increase of 'X' million dollars in federal funds. Ottawa, having no more idea of the new costs than the provinces, offered 'Y' million dollars -- significantly less than 'X.' So there was a standoff, which led to Ontario doing as little as possible until a deal was struck. Instead of attempting to be innovative and creative, the Conservative government has been grudging and small-minded, putting financial considerations ahead of all else.
"Which brings us to the 'time' factor. The province seemed to be operating under the assumption that the act could be delayed until hell froze over. As a result, an enormous amount of discussion, particularly discussion with agencies that had vital interests in all aspects of implementation, from arrest to final disposition in the courtroom, never took place. It was as if Queen's Park did not want to explore options and alternatives, an attitude of the less said, the better."
I would dearly love to read the whole article because it is surely a condemnation of the actions of this minister and of this government. The minister also stands to be condemned for the replies he makes in this House. If the members take a look at some of the news media reports and follow what some television stations have to say, they will find they are now starting to condemn the government for taking the attitude that it has the divine right to rule and that we as opposition members have no right to stand up and ask questions. The kind of answer the minister gave me this afternoon is highly irresponsible and unlike a minister who cares about what is going on within his ministry.
In connection with the question I put to the minister this afternoon, I want to go back over a little history. In May 1981 the Minister of Community and Social Services visited the Bluewater Centre in Goderich. During that visit he praised highly the staff and their work at the centre, making such comments as: "truly a community"; "centre is extremely significant"; "vital and viable part of the community"; "whatever successes you achieve now, however enormous they may seem now, will be pale and minuscule in terms of what we will do in the future"; "if you were not here and this was grass, think of the enormous loss in human potential and the loss to the whole community."
Those are excerpts from the speech the minister made in Goderich in May 1981. He allayed the fears of the people there that this facility would ever be closed and said they were doing wonderful work for the developmentally handicapped. The minister knows as well as I do that they had some of the best programs you would find in this province. It was a home; it was as close as you would get anywhere to a community home as far as the developmentally handicapped people and the staff were concerned.
But no, in October 1982 the very same minister announced the five-year plan, a low-cost option that entailed the closing of six centres for the developmentally handicapped. One of the centres to be closed was the Bluewater Centre in Goderich, which the minister had praised so highly only a few months earlier.
The minister stated the plan's purpose was to expand community living alternatives for developmentally handicapped people. However, the actual text of the plan never mentioned deinstitutionalization. Instead it states, "This plan must address both facility- and community-based services in an integrated package designed to meet necessary service requirements in the most efficient and effective way possible so as to optimize the use of government funding."
Even though the original five-year plan did not sound very promising to most of us, some of us took a wait-and-see attitude. Even after the fiasco the government made of deinstitutionalizing psychiatric patients, some people felt they should give the government the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the principle of deinstitutionalization. We in the Liberal Party, of course, support deinstitutionalization, and even we were prepared to give the minister the benefit of the doubt, although for what reason I have no idea.
By December 1983, more than a year had passed since the announcement of the five-year plan, and the evidence speaks for itself. The last of the Bluewater Centre's residents were to be gone by the middle of December; and that was an extension of the original date, which had been set for some time in October, had then been extended to November and then to December.
10:10 p.m.
Of Bluewater's original 150 residents, almost half, or 72 people, have gone back into facilities. They have been reinstitutionalized. Of those 72 people, 58 have gone to the Midwestern Regional Centre at Palmerston, a facility of more than 200 beds which is larger than the Bluewater Centre, so they have gone to a larger institution. Six more have gone to the Oxford Regional Centre, a facility that is supposed to be reduced in size, not increased. When it is reduced in size, will those six people be moved yet again?
I for one do not think the government has lived up to its promise of deinstitutionalization in the case of the Bluewater Centre and neither does the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
I attended a meeting in St. Thomas a matter of three or four weeks ago set up by the Save the START committee. We had many concerned people from all over the province at that meeting. A research document submitted by OPSEU showed 45 per cent of the residents who had been moved by the centres that had been closed thus far had gone into larger institutions. This is contrary to the minister's policy of deinstitutionalization.
Hon. Mr. Drea: That is not correct.
Mr. Riddell: We will see who is correct.
However, even the Bluewater residents who have been deinstitutionalized will suffer. As opposed to the staff of more than 100 people who previously worked at the Bluewater Centre and who served not only the centre's residents but also a community case load of 135 clients, the area will now be served by three crisis teams. These teams will be composed of two professionals, a psychologist and a counsellor and will be supported by backup resources of nurses and social workers.
I cannot believe six people can replace qualified staff of more than 100 people. From those statistics, I believe and the concerned people of this province believe we are justified in saying the Bluewater experiment has been yet another government fiasco.
To go back to the question I put to the minister this afternoon, asking if it was true the minister was caught with the proverbial pants down around his ankles, with the Young Offenders Act having been introduced in the House of Commons and all of a sudden he finds he has to scurry around and find facilities for the young offenders. What does he do? He turns the developmentally handicapped out of the places they were pleased to call home, where excellent progress was being made for these people.
The matter was raised in the Ministry of Community and Social Services estimates in June 1983. Questions were asked of Mr. McDonald, the deputy minister. In answer to a question, Mr. McDonald said:
"When we were identifying the mental retardation program, we identified possible centres, both the ones that were occupied now and those that were not occupied or mothballed, that might be reactivated without getting into an institutional setting for young offenders. The danger is that if you open everything, you might fill them."
The deputy minister was suggesting they had planned for those centres when they closed. I see the minister shaking his head, as he did when he sat beside his deputy in the estimates. He proceeded to shut his deputy up and immediately he stepped in and said: "Wait a minute. I wish the member would reword his question." He did everything possible to try to get away from the subject at hand.
Then the member for Scarborough West pursued the line of questioning and said to Mr. McDonald, "But it is fair to say that prior to the announcement of the closing of the Bluewater Centre as a facility for the mentally retarded, you were already planning to look into the correctional possibilities of that building?"
Mr. McDonald's response was, "Of that and other areas across the system."
Once again, the minister jumped in and said: "Wait a minute, would you? He did not exactly say that. I want that question phrased again. You are saying prior to the announcement or prior to the decision?" Well, you can see what is going on.
Hon. Mr. Drea: Keep going.
Mr. Riddell: All right, I will keep going.
After the member for Scarborough West pursued it, Mr. McDonald said:
"Prior to the announcement, internally we were looking at all areas across Ontario for potential correctional facilities. After the decision was made, the decision was made at my level to look into it actually as a physical facility, and we hired architects and engineers to go to look at it."
Hon. Mr. Drea: After the decision was made.
Mr. Riddell: The minister cannot deny the fact that an engineer was sent to Goderich to look at facilities before he ever came out with the five-year plan.
Hon. Mr. Drea: No, sir. You just hanged yourself.
Mr. Speaker: Order.
Mr. Riddell: That is the thing that bothers me. When we put questions in the House, we expect honest answers. I have to say we were treated to what I consider to be less than honest answers and certainly no answers when the minister got up, refused to answer a question and simply stated, "Well, that is the most stupid question I have ever heard asked in the Legislature." Let me tell him it is going to come back to haunt him.
Hon. Mr. Drea: Let the record show the honourable member will never read anything again.
Mr. McClellan: What is the minister going to do, beat him up?
Mr. Riddell: Idle threats.
Mr. McClellan: Take him outside.
Mr. Eakins: Where is the member for Northumberland (Mr. Sheppard)?
Mr. Speaker: Order.
Mr. Riddell: I think what has been done by this minister is somewhat criminal. He has taken six of the best centres for the developmentally handicapped in this province and has closed them down because with the introduction of the Young Offenders Act, he found he had to come up with facilities to accommodate the young offenders. This is just a continuation of this government's disorganization when he is closing correctional facilities such as the one in Haldimand-Norfolk.
Mr. G. I. Miller: White Oaks Village.
Mr. Riddell: White Oaks Village was closed. What was the facility in Victoria-Haliburton?
Mr. Eakins: Kawartha Lakes School in Lindsay.
Mr. Riddell: Kawartha Lakes School. In other words, across the province he closed down these facilities, and then all of a sudden he found he had to come up with new facilities for the young offenders. He said to the developmentally handicapped, "I am sorry, folks, but we are going to have to put you out of your home because we have got to come up with something for the young offenders."
This is not right and the minister will for ever stand to be condemned for that decision, considering that many of the residents of these facilities have gone back to larger institutions. There has been poor planning all the way through. The minister did not have the support services set up in the communities for his so-called community homes, and as a result there is no other place for many of these residents to go other than back to the larger institutions.
He will never live down the decision to close those facilities at a time when he did not have the support services in place in the communities. Looking back over the sequence of events, the reason he closed the facilities for the developmentally handicapped, as far as I am concerned and as far as many people in this province are concerned, was for the accommodation of the young offenders. The minister stands to be condemned. On that note, I sit down.
10:20 p.m.
Mr. Renwick: Mr. Speaker, in the few minutes that remain and just following along on what the member for Huron-Middlesex has said, we share the kind of concerns and the very questions that have been raised by the honourable member with respect to the Bluewater Centre conversion for correctional purposes and the role of the minister in connection with it. I do not know whether the minister is informed about the matter.
On behalf of our party, on March 5 I wrote to the minister's colleague the Minister of the Environment (Mr. Brandt) to ask specifically that there be an environmental assessment with respect to the question of the Bluewater conversion, so there would be a public opportunity both to air the concerns with respect to the closing and to assess the questions with respect to the proposed future use.
Our assessment was that the position taken by the Minister of Government Services (Mr. Ashe) in making the submission for an exemption to the Minister of the Environment was specious. He was in the position that he had to put before the Minister of the Environment the circumstances leading to the need for an urgent decision without an environmental assessment.
This is no game that is being played. If the Minister of Government Services applied for an exemption under the Environmental Assessment Act, who am I to say an environmental assessment was not an appropriate opportunity under the act for a public review of the reasons for the conversion project, let alone the matters that have been raised by the member for Huron- Middlesex with respect to the details of the closing? I do not intend to pursue that, but I want the House to know in the closing minutes of the debate this evening and before I move the adjournment of the debate that we believe no exemption should be granted.
I tried to find out today, and with the co-operation of the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of the Environment I undoubtedly will find out shortly, the decision of the committee looking into the question of the advice to be given to the minister.
The minister cannot pretend it has nothing to do with him. It was his decision to close the Bluewater conversion project and the involvement of his ministry in the plans for the feasibility study with respect to its conversion into a facility for the 16- and 17-year-olds that led us to raise with the Minister of the Environment the question of the assessment.
In my letter to the Minister of the Environment, we stated:
"The government has already made a grievous error in rushing through the closure of the Bluewater Centre for the developmentally handicapped without properly planning for the continuum of care required by the residents. Mr. Ashe is advocating a continued suppression of public involvement by seeking an exemption from the terms of the Environmental Assessment Act. The public is entitled to make its views known both about the former use and the proposed development of a young offenders' centre.
"This matter has been cloaked in secrecy from the beginning. The feasibility study which forms the basis for the conversion is still not available to the public. Lack of consultation has characterized the project.
"The purpose of the Environmental Assessment Act is clear. It is the betterment of the people of Ontario by providing for the protection, conservation and the wise management of their environment. Their environment includes the social, economic and cultural conditions influencing their lives or their communities. To protect these rights, the act sets out the procedure for assessing the environment, review of the assessment and public participation at hearings with respect to the undertaking.
"These rights are fundamental. The people of Ontario should not be deprived of these basic rights as a result of the minister's lack of due diligence in preparing and submitting an environmental assessment.
"The only argument the minister has put forward in support of his application for an exemption is his desire 'to expedite this project.'
"Any delay in this matter has been caused by the lack of diligence of the ministries involved. The Comsoc feasibility study was completed in March 1983 -- 10 months before Mr. Ashe applied for this exemption. In September 1983, Mr. Gordon Walker, the Provincial Secretary for Justice, announced that Bluewater would be turned into a new facility for young offenders. Four and a half months then elapsed before the present application for an exemption was made.
"The minister now argues that 'the crown and the public will be interfered with in that there will be a delay in the provision of suitable detention facilities...'" That is basically the only argument he puts forward in the course of his submission.
"Although material has been filed giving a chronology of events with respect to the Blue- water closing, there has been no material filed to indicate the type of environment which will be created for young offenders. We fail to see the connection between the mere chronology of events in the filed material and an environmental assessment of a facility for 174 young offenders.
"In the draft exemption order which Mr. Ashe submitted, he indicates that it is in the public interest to order that this undertaking be exempt from the application of the act for the following reasons:
"A. The undertaking is a continuation of the institutional use of the existing site.
"The young offenders' facility will clearly not be a continuation of the existing use. The environment which would be appropriate for the developmentally handicapped is significantly different from that which is appropriate for young offenders.
"B. All work will be restricted to interior alterations of the existing vacant buildings (with the exception of the external security fence).
"Although most of the work involves interior alterations, those alterations are very extensive. It is impossible to believe that the nature of the institution can be changed so significantly without having an effect on the environment of the institution and the neighbouring community.
"C. The facilities are relatively isolated, on a large piece of government-owned property in a rural setting.
"The relative isolation of the institution did not preclude well over 10,000 people from signing petitions and sending letters about the Bluewater closure. As was noted in the project justification, 'Over 150 letters...were received and answered by ministry officials regarding the closure. Three petitions were also received, one with 10,000 names.'
"Also, the very isolation of the facilities could have a serious impact on the environment of young offenders. It appears likely that a 174-cell facility for 16- and 17-year-olds will serve more than the Goderich area. What accessibility will there be for families, friends, youth workers and community?
"D. Conversion of the existing facilities would represent a considerable savings to the crown in time and funds.
"The mere fact that the minister alleges that there will be savings should not serve as the basis for denying the right to an environmental assessment and public hearings. The right to assess and wisely manage the environment is a matter which cannot receive roughshod treatment even assuming (although the minister supplied no evidence by which this could be established) that there could be government savings in time and funds."
The fifth item is a fatuous one:
"E. The crown is required by federal law to provide suitable facilities within a severely restrictive deadline."
I go on simply to comment: "It is essential that this conversion be evaluated and opened to public debate."
I ask later: "Why will the 16- and 17-year-olds be separate from the 12- to 15-year-olds? Is this in the best interests of the children? Given that the Young Offenders Act has as its objective the creation of a unified justice system for children aged 12 to 17, why will the 16- and 17-year-olds be separate from the 12- to 15-year-olds? What will the impact of this be?
"The Young Offenders Act has as its objective the right of young persons to the least possible interference with their freedom consistent with the protection of society. Is the proposed environment consistent with this objective? Will the jail-like setting created by these renovations be in the children's best interests?
"Which ministry will be operating the centre? The letter requesting the exemption was written by the Minister of Government Services on behalf of the Ministry of Correctional Services, and the project justification was prepared by the Ministry of Community and Social Services. Dual ministry involvement will surely lead to duplication of services and confusion. What impact will this have on the lives of residents and those working with residents? Is this in the best interest of the children?
"What impact will the conversion have on the Goderich community? What impact will it have on others involved with the judicial system in Ontario?
"These questions and many more must be properly assessed, then scrutinized and opened to public hearings."
Mr. Speaker: I call the member's attention to the clock.
Mr. Renwick: "We ask that you deny the minister's request for the exemption and proceed immediately with the assessments and public participation requirements of the Environmental Assessment Act."
Mr. Speaker, as it is 10:30 p.m. and that seems a fitting conclusion, I will deal with the substance of the bill on the next occasion.
On motion by Mr. Renwick, the debate was adjourned.
The House adjourned at 10:31 p.m.