Journal des débats 1988-nov-17 | Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

M. Pouliot: Je vous souhaite le bonjour, Monsieur le Président, en ce jour historique qui marque, je crois, le deuxième anniversaire de la Loi 8. On aura l’occasion, certainement, d’en parler plus longuement au cours de l’après-midi.

Mr. Pouliot moved resolution 50:

That, in the opinion of this House, the Ministry of Natural Resources, with the support and expertise of the Ministry of Northern Development, the Ministry of Mines and the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Technology should enter into agreements with municipalities for the purpose of setting up community-based resource authorities which would be given the right and responsibility of planning and managing these resources for the benefit of the resource itself as well as the benefit of local economies, and that the government of Ontario, with federal assistance, should make available, to communities interested and wishing to set up such an authority, sufficient funding to enable them to enhance the value and maintain the viability of the growing forest by those who have a greater stake in its future than those who make the decisions in distant boardrooms.

Le Vice-Président: M. Pouliot propose cette résolution en son nom. L’honorable député a jusqu’à 20 minutes pour faire sa présentation. Il peut en réserver quelque portion que ce soit pour conclure.

M. Pouliot: À ce titre, respectant l’option, je crois que je prendrai cinq, six ou sept minutes qui me seront disponibles à la fin.

There is a real and very justifiable anxiety that prevails in northern Ontario today. People are concerned throughout the north about our forest resource. Historically, the north has been dependent on its resources. We depend on mining and we depend on forestry, and we produce across Ontario some $12 billion of wealth annually; yet more and more anxiety is the order of the day in our special part of Ontario. The reason is very simple. For decades now we have experienced a cut-and-run approach to our important resource. We have not farmed our forestry.

I have some pictures with me that show some of the devastation. I should have had them enlarged, but I did not wish to embarrass the government. People who live in and represent northern Ontario have a sense of vision when it comes to natural resources. They plan. If you opt for decentralization -- and this bill proposes to do that -- the promotion of the north will happen automatically.

What we have here is called silvicultural slum --neglect, systematic, deliberate -- and that has been allowed to happen. Consequently, there is an increasing body of evidence that tells us in definite terms that unless we choose to act promptly and decentralize the authority to manage our forestry, we will not be able to look to the future with any confidence.

We have some 60 communities with a population of 2,500 people or fewer that are solely dependent on the forest industry. It is the only game in town, the only employer, and yet in those communities, because we are talking here in terms of cyclical business, the rate of unemployment in some of those communities reaches between 30 per cent and 35 per cent. Those statistics are nothing short of horrifying.

Members will be most aware of the report that was tabled in May 1986, the report of the Advisory Committee on Resource Dependent Communities in Northern Ontario. This is what the report says: It tells this government that the outlook for the north is not encouraging. It mentions to the government that our population is decreasing, and yet we still produce $12 billion of wealth and it is going to senior forms of government, going into the pockets of shareholders. We want to wish them well; there is nothing wrong with getting a fair return on investment. Our party has always advocated the spirit of free enterprise. We make no apologies for that, but what is happening here is that we have a one-way street. There is less and less money coming back to the north. More and more money is going to the senior body of government and less money to access roads, less money to reforestation. We do not plant enough trees. We cut some six million or seven million cords a year in northern Ontario. It takes 60 or 70 years to grow a tree, depending on the species. It costs more and more to harvest what should be a renewable resource, but we do not do that. We do not put enough money back into the system to give us the viability that we should, indeed, be taking for granted.

What the committee says is that its opinion is that we need a major political and public commitment by the people of Ontario to give us a chance to encourage l’industrie forestière.

Vous me permettrez, bien sûr, Monsieur le Président, de déclarer avec toute la sincérité que je peux commander -- et je ne parle pas en ultimatums; je parle sans menace -- vous me permettrez d’essayer d’expliquer candidement au gouvernement que nous avons besoin de planification.

On a toujours tenu pour acquis que le Nord était éternel à cause de ses richesses naturelles. D’accord, en ce qui concerne l’industrie minière, ça ne peut pas être éternel; tout le monde comprend ça. Mais quand on parle de l’industrie forestière et qu’on constate quotidiennement la négligence systématique et délibérée que nous avons permise dans le Nord de l’Ontario, on ne peut pas envisager l’avenir avec confiance, loin de là.

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Je sais fort bien, en vertu de la place que j’occupe dans le Nouveau Parti démocratique, que la chance de voir adopter ici une résolution qui est raisonnable est minime. Cela, je le sais, mais ça, c’est dommage aussi. C’est dommage parce qu’on nous offre aujourd’hui, en ce qui concerne l’industrie forestière, deux choses. On établit, sans l’ombre d’un doute, que nous sommes dans un sérieux pétrin; que notre population du Nord, à cause de la technologie qui, souvent, est associée à des pertes d’emplois, avec l’influence du Sud de l’Ontario, avec one industrie soi-disant cyclique; que ces facteurs individuels, ces facteurs collectifs contribuent à one performance économique qui ne vient absolument pas près de remplir son potentiel.

Ce qu’on propose, c’est une autorité à l’échelle municipale, une autorité à l’échelle provinciale, une autorité à l’échelle fédérale. En somme, il s’agit ici de décentraliser l’autorité gouvernementale pour assurer un avenir prometteur. Le gouvernement l’a fait à Geraldton mais, bien sûr, en temps de crise. Tout récemment il l’a fait à Armstrong, où il a créé, à cause de l’autorité municipale, quelque 35 emplois. Bien sûr, vous me direz, Monsieur le Président, que 35 emplois, eh bien, ce n’est pas beaucoup. Mais quand on regarde les 35 emplois situés dans la petite municipalité d’Armstrong, on s’aperçoit évidemment que 35 emplois, c’est quand même beaucoup; ce sont 35 emplois qu’on n’avait pas hier. On a quoi? une population de 200 personnes, 300 personnes à Armstrong? Si on a 35 emplois bien rémunérés qui n’existaient pas hier, eh bien, c’est quand même beaucoup.

Mes collègues se permettront aussi, avec moi, de faire état, ligne par ligne, de ce que j’ai voulu soumettre à la Chambre. Il est bien dommage que, à cause de la partisanerie politique -- c’est le parti que vous représentez, votre parti, Monsieur le Président -- cette résolution, qui est à la base de l’économie du Nord de l’Ontario, n’a aucune chance d’être adoptée. Donc, je vais prendre l’option qui m’a été offerte et garder quelques minutes pour conclure.

Le Vice-Président: Merci. Vous avez dix minutes.

M. Pouliot: Oui, merci.

Le Vice-Président: En passant, si je peux me le permettre, par respect pour la présidence, on ne devrait pas faire référence... Je suis dans le fauteuil d’une façon non partisane. Je voudrais vous rappeler ça, Monsieur le Député.

Le député de Nipissing.

M. Harris: Je comprends la frustration du député de Lac Nipigon, mais si le ministre des Richesses naturelles (M. Kerrio) faisait son travail comme il se doit, cette résolution ne serait pas nécessaire.

I really regret that the member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Pouliot) has felt compelled to bring this resolution forward. I understand his frustration. I understand why this resolution is before the floor, because the Ministry of Natural Resources has completely and totally abandoned its authority, its job of managing our resources in Ontario. I do not believe they have done it voluntarily, and that gets to the heart of why this resolution is necessary.

What has happened over the past two or three years is that resource decisions are now being made by Shelley Peterson, by Margaret Atwood and by the Toronto Star. I want to say to members that this is wrong. The Ministry of Natural Resources had a proud tradition of balancing the various interests .

The member refers to decisions being made in distant boardrooms. I do not think decisions should be made in distant boardrooms. I think the boardrooms of New York will have their viewpoint on their international companies, of how they would like to proceed, whether it is mining, forestry or other resources, and they will have valid opinions, which should be taken into consideration. The Shelley Petersons and the Margaret Atwoods and the Ministry of the Environment will have their concerns, but there should be an arbitrator of those opinions. When one becomes so strong that it is the decision, then the system is out of balance and it is out of whack.

Some may argue that at some point in our history those decisions were being made in the boardrooms and it was necessary for others more concerned about the environment, more concerned about the long-term sustained yield, particularly of our forest industry, that those views were not balancing. I agree; there was a time in history when that was the case.

But that time in history is not now. Everyone is concerned with the environment, none more so than those people who live in northern Ontario, where the resources are. We all recognize, particularly in the forest industry, that it is not an infinite resource; that it is a finite resource which must be managed on a sustained-yield basis and the land use planning guidelines which were brought in in the late 1970s and the early 1980s by my colleague the former minister, the member for Cochrane South (Mr. Pope); that you must balance the other interests in forestry practice and in land use planning, the tourism interest, the recreational interest, the wilderness interest. There must be a balance.

The Ministry of Natural Resources, as the steward of the land and as the steward of the resources, ought to be given the authority to balance all the various interests and to make those decisions, and it must be held accountable. When they make mistakes, they must be held accountable. But I will say today that nobody can blame the Minister of Natural Resources (Mr. Kerrio) or the Ministry of Natural Resources, because the decision-making process has been snatched out of that ministry and it is being put into the hands of the Toronto Star and the Shelley Petersons and the Margaret Atwoods, and that is a crime.

We have seen decisions taking place in the Temagami area based on that. We have seen 150 jobs in Temagami, and they have said, “Hey, not many votes there for us.” But if the Toronto Star reports that cutting a tree is bad and we authorize the cutting of a single tree, we will not do it. Then it multiplies and it affects my riding. It affects many of the lumber operations in my riding. It affects MacMillan Bloedel in Sturgeon Falls.

It really comes down to a total abandoning of the government’s responsibility to be the final arbitrator through the Ministry of Natural Resources. I guess it fits in with what we have seen with this government in so many areas. There are difficult decisions to be made. In the forest industry a difficult decision has to be made virtually every day, balancing all the interests and then coming out and making a decision.

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Since this government lost the decisiveness of my colleagues to the right, the New Democratic Party, who forced it to make decisions in the two-year period it ran things -- I did not agree with them all, but at least they forced it to make decisions -- since 1987, when it was on its own, this government will not make a decision. It appears unable to make a decision.

I am not particularly happy with this resolution. I have to tell members I do not think communities should be making these decisions. I would support the setting up of a community-based board to have input to the Ministry of Natural Resources if the Ministry of Natural Resources in fact were making the decision as it should.

I understand the frustration of the member, and I am going to support this resolution. I am going to support it because nobody is doing it right now. I do not think a municipal board is the right way. I see many problems with that. I see many local municipal interests taking the place of overall interests. Quite frankly, I would be concerned from the environmental point of view, the forestry practice point of view, the mining point of view, the aggregate point of view, about the decision being made by a community-based group which can see the immediate impact of jobs and dollars. I think there needs to be a more provincial authority looking at the long term in these decisions.

Why am I supporting the resolution? It is because nobody is doing it right now and I think it would be better than what is happening in the way this government is operating. I think it would be better than that.

I would assume the government probably will be opposed to this. In its opposition to it, I hope it recognizes why this resolution came forward, why the member for Lake Nipigon felt compelled to put something into the vacuum which exists there right now, and really looks inward at what is happening in the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Those members who live in ridings in northern Ontario, outside of Toronto, who deal with the ministry, and their constituents deal with it on a fairly regular basis, know that those staff people are completely demoralized. Professional foresters with 20, 30 and 40 years of experience are no longer making decisions they should be making and they are demoralized. Whatever recommendations they make, they know are not being considered.

I ask members, if they oppose this, as government members probably will, to at least recognize why the member for Lake Nipigon felt this resolution was necessary and to look at what has been happening in the resource decision-making of their government. I know they will not do it publicly -- I understand that -- but privately, they had better start asking questions. This is private members’ hour. This is a private member’s resolution, and I really do urge those private members of the government benches to raise this issue in caucus, to raise this issue with the Premier (Mr. Peterson). There is no point raising it with the Minister of Natural Resources because he has been whipped. He has been taken to his feet and he has got whop, whop, whop, and he is down and out.

If members do not support the member and do not support the ministry, they are making a bad, bad mistake.

Mr. Brown: I am delighted to be able to stand and respond to the resolution put forward by my friend the member for Lake Nipigon. As members will recall, the resolution suggested that agreements be made between Ontario municipalities and the provincial government to set up community-based resource authorities.

We fully support the concept of co-operative resource management with local communities, interest groups and individuals. The government of Ontario has demonstrated that support time and time again in many of its programs and initiatives.

As a matter of fact, in response to proposals by several northern communities to establish community-based forests, the Ministry of Natural Resources is already actively investigating mechanisms that would involve communities even more closely in the planning and management of local resources. Also, several southern Ontario communities have expressed an interest in increasing their involvement in the existing agreement forest program in which MNR currently assumes management responsibilities for municipally owned forests.

In addition, the ministry is aware that many groups and individuals in unorganized areas would like to become actively involved in resource management decision-making. Our government, through the Ministry of Natural Resources, is continually exploring opportunities for co-operative resource management with local communities and groups to ensure the best possible approach. The Ministry of Natural Resources consults with many other ministries, including the ministries of Northern Development, Mines and Industry, Trade and Technology.

I would like to remind members that while the Ministry of Natural Resources is exploring various mechanisms for local involvement in forest resource management, there is already a variety of opportunities for communities and individuals to share in the wise management of all of our natural resources.

The Minister of Natural Resources has appointed a number of active citizens’ advisory councils to provide vital consultation on such issues as the management of our fisheries and our provincial park system. The Ontario Fisheries Advisory Council was appointed last year to advise the minister on fisheries management policy and programs. Dr. E. J. Crossman of the Royal Ontario Museum chairs the council, which represents all types of fishery users from across the province.

The Provincial Parks Council is another citizens’ advisory body that reports to the Minister of Natural Resources. In the summer of 1987, the council conducted a comprehensive survey of park users. Council members visited 54 parks, interviewed more than 650 people and 36 interest groups and analysed more than 1,000 written comments. The results were very encouraging. Ninety-six per cent of those surveyed were satisfied with the quality of their visits. Many of the points raised in the council’s report are being addressed in the ministry’s five-year, multimillion-dollar parks revitalization program.

The Ministry of Natural Resources also receives voluntary support in its provincial parks through co-operating associations. The Friends of Provincial Parks is instrumental in helping to develop and implement interpretative programs in such popular parks as Algonquin, Killarney in my riding, Quetico and Presqu’ile. Of course, the ministry has very successful community wildlife and fisheries involvement programs in which local residents, municipalities, fish and game clubs, cottagers’ associations, naturalist groups and schoolchildren all have a direct hand in improving habitat and restoring natural populations.

The community fisheries involvement program completed its sixth year of operation in 1987 with more than 212 projects involving thousands of volunteers across the province. Clubs, local residents and even schoolchildren are getting actively involved in the rehabilitation of fish spawning areas or helping with restocking programs and much more. The ministry spent more than $500,000 on community fisheries projects in 1987.

The community wildlife involvement program has also been extremely productive. More than 5,000 volunteers have logged 50,000 hours of their time on 172 projects in 1987. This program supports the Ontario lakes loon survey in which loon populations are being monitored by 600 individuals across the province.

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In the forest resources area, the majority of the ministry’s forest resource program is built on co-operative commitment among the forest industry, various levels of government, special interest groups and individual land owners.

On crown lands, co-operation between the ministry and the forest industry occurs through forest management agreements. These 20-year agreements commit forest companies to plan and carry out the harvesting, regenerating and tending activities in their licensed forest areas. Reviews of these agreements are conducted every five years to ensure that companies are adhering to the strict ground rules set out by the ministry.

There are now 30 forest management agreements covering a total of 177,821 square kilometres or 69 per cent of all land under timber licence in the province. Forest management agreements are very successful at integrating harvesting and regenerating activities so that the long-term economic security of both the industry and the communities which depend on them is ensured.

On public and private lands, the Ministry of Natural Resources co-operates with local governments through agreement forests. Today, 55 of these agreements, covering more than 110,000 hectares, have been signed with counties, townships, regional municipalities and conservation authorities across southern Ontario. There is also a forestry agreement with one company in eastern Ontario and one with the federal government for the National Capital Commission. Agreement forests are managed by the ministry through the provision of necessary equipment, fences and planting stock.

Finally, individuals who own more than five acres of land and are interested in reforesting and improving their forest areas have the opportunity to become involved in the ministry’s woodland improvement agreement program. Under this program, private owners agree to protect their forest areas for 15 years. This includes buying trees for planting. In return, ministry staff prepare a management plan, estimate the cost of prescribed management practices and either do the work or pay for it. By the end of 1986-87, there were almost 10,000 active woodland improvement agreements covering about 140,000 hectares of forested land.

As members may know, the Ministry of Natural Resources is actively pursuing the continuation of the five-year, $150-million Canada-Ontario forest resource development agreement. This agreement is scheduled to terminate on March 31, 1989. Through co-operative agreements with different levels of government, with special interest groups and with individuals, the Ministry of Natural Resources is continuing to build effective resource management partnerships.

In addition to its highly effective agreement programs, the Ministry of Natural Resources policy on integrated resource management makes public participation an essential part of resource management planning. The ministry regularly asks for public input on how local parks, wildlife, fisheries and forests should be planned and managed through ongoing discussions and through open houses and public meetings held across this province.

As the honourable members can see, the Ministry of Natural Resources is committed to the continued active involvement of the people of Ontario in planning and managing the future of our natural resources. The Minister of Natural Resources agrees wholeheartedly with the cooperative intent of the resolution put before the members today. The ministry is continually evolving programs in all resource management areas that not only embrace this concept but are much broader in scope than the resolution raises today.

Co-operative resource management is an integral part of the direction of the Ministry of Natural Resources and will continue to take place in the future. The people of Ontario have expressed their interest in a multifaceted approach to resource management. Just as our natural resources overlap and affect one another, the ministry’s management initiatives overlap a wide spectrum of both public and resource issues.

The Deputy Speaker: The member’s time is up, I am sorry.

Mr. Brown: For these reasons, I cannot support the resolution.

Mr. Laughren: The member for Algoma-Manitoulin spends 10 minutes supporting the resolution and then winds up saying he cannot support it. I do not know where he is coming from this morning.

I would like to begin my comments by giving members a couple of quotes. The first one is, “The waste and destruction of our woods has been so universal that I conceive nothing less than a universal plantation of all sorts of trees will relieve the situation.” That was back in 1662. A second quotation: “We are wasting our forests, habitually, wickedly, insanely and at a rate which must soon bankrupt us all. Destroying a forest because we want timber is like smothering a hive of bees because we want honey.” That was from a New Brunswick businessman in 1872.

A third quote, “We continue to live off our forest capital like an exiled Russian princess selling off her jewels one at a time.” That was from a British Columbia politician in 1943. The final quote: “The existence of a perpetually renewing forest is seriously in doubt. Extensive regeneration at vastly increased rates is required.” That was from a royal commission in Ontario in 1985.

For 400 years we have had these kinds of comments being made about the lack of regeneration in our forests. We cannot blame the mismanagement of our forests on the fact that we do not understand the need to regenerate; those quotes going back 400 years are evidence of that. We cannot blame it on the fact that we do not know how to replant our forests; of course we know how. In places in Europe, they have been doing it for centuries.

We had such a luxury of trees here, such a surplus of trees, that we felt we did not have to do it properly. We have allowed forests to be depleted to a point where jobs, indeed whole communities, are being threatened. The answer, in my view, is quite simple. If members would, I hope, listen carefully -- I have listened carefully to what my colleague the member for Lake Nipigon said -- it is to decentralize the management of our forests.

I believe that better forest management will not be achieved as long as our forests are managed by highly centralized multinational corporations under the supervision of highly centralized, highly complacent government bureaucracies. Instead, we need a system of forest management that decentralizes control over the forests and puts this control in the hands of those with the greatest interest in maintaining a healthy forest, the communities that depend on those forests for their very survival. Decentralized, local control combined with strong leadership from provincial governments are the prerequisites of a well-managed, regenerating forest.

Let me elaborate on those points. I believe that for both ecological and economic reasons, we need a decentralized forest management system that is flexible enough to adapt to the needs of a specific forest. One cannot have a conversation about silvicultural practices without reference to the site-specific nature of forestry. Soil type and thickness, topography, slope, drainage patterns, watercourses, the age and mix of the forest and climate will all affect the cutting methods and regeneration techniques needed on a specific site.

Forest fires, disease and insect infestation all make forest management an even more unpredictable task. Proper forest management cannot be practised from an isolated boardroom or a head office. It requires an army of local foresters who have the desire, the knowledge and the time to get to know the specific forests under their care.

Beyond the ecological reasons, there are other factors that make decentralized local control of our forests the most sensible management system. Our forests are more than just fibre to be turned into next year’s profits. Beyond their importance to the national economy, the forests are the life source of dozens of Canadian and Ontario communities. These communities have been built up around the forest industry. Roads and schools have been built and new small businesses established.

The very existence of these towns and cities depends on the surrounding forests being managed on a sustained yield basis. If regeneration programs fail, the survival of those communities is in doubt. Forest communities are also dependent on the environmental and aesthetic values of the woodlands to support the tourist industry, which is often crucial to their economy as well.

Who is more suited to managing the forest than those who have the largest stake in maintaining its long-term health? Decentralized control over the management of our forests makes sense for a number of reasons. First, it allows for the flexibility needed to adapt to the site-specific and ever-changing needs of the forest. Second, it would put the management of our forests into the hands of those who are most dependent on the forest for the values it can provide.

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Let’s look at the current system of forest management that we have in Ontario. Here, our forests are managed by large forest companies under forest management agreements. These 20-year agreements are negotiated between the corporate executives and top-level bureaucrats, and each agreement covers areas as large as 16,000 square kilometres. There is little or no input from the communities that depend on a well-managed forest for their survival.

Then the role of forest manager is turned over to the multinational corporations. Harvesting, regeneration and tending all become the responsibility of the corporate executives. One could hardly imagine a group with a more limited interest in the forest and with a more short-term view of its value. By their very nature, the goals of the forest industry conflict with intensive forest management.

The forest industry exists to make a profit, and by forest standards, a short-term profit. A corporation’s main concern is that there be enough growing stock to recover the investment in plant and machinery and to make a profit over a finite period. This profit will be made on the current stand of trees, not on the trees that may or may not be growing in the year 2060.

Business concern for profit divides forest industry operations into two components. First, there is the mill or the profit centre where chemists, engineers and accountants pour their expertise and where new discoveries and new technologies can mean instant profits. The second component is the woodland operation, or what I would call the cost centre, where meeting government standards for regeneration is one of the costs of doing business, a cost to be kept to a minimum.

Even the concern for profitability is rarely tied to the profitability of one mill. The major forest product companies operating in Canada are affiliates of much larger corporate conglomerates. International firms like Canadian Pacific, Olympia and York and George Weston have planning horizons that do not include the future health of single-industry towns in northern Canada.

The track record of this kind of management is not good. Virtually every study on the forestry sector in the last 10 years has concluded that Canada in general, and Ontario specifically, is faced with an impending wood shortage. Report after report has estimated that as much as one third of Canada’s forest land is being lost to production because of unsuccessful regeneration programs. We cannot continue to put all our forests in one corporate basket. New methods of management, methods that combine local control with strong government leadership, are needed. That is why the resolution from my colleague makes so much sense.

Our provincial governments must begin to play a stronger role in ensuring a healthy crop of trees in the decades ahead. One way of doing that is as my colleague has suggested. There are other models that could be used as well to give more local control. I personally like the way in which the Algonquin Forestry Authority functions. I do not think we need to be monolithic or single-handed about the model we build. The member for Lake Nipigon has offered one. The Algonquin Forestry Authority is another model that I personally like very much, where it is run basically on a nonprofit basis, markets the wood, and makes sure the wood is cut property and regenerated properly. I like very much that way of ensuring that our forests are replanted.

Until we design a system of forest management that combines strong government commitment to the forest with decentralized, locally controlled management, we will continue to have regeneration programs that are designed to fulfil minimum government standards rather than to guarantee a healthy forest for the generations to come.

For these reasons, I am proud to stand in my place this morning and support my colleague the member for Lake Nipigon, who I can say without hesitation has more trees in his constituency than people. As a matter of fact, he has more trees in his constituency than are in any other constituency in Ontario. I think he must have one of the largest constituencies in the province as well. I am not sure how large it is, but he truly has an enormous constituency and he has a very, very deep and abiding interest, as did his predecessor, Mr. Stokes, in the health of the forests all across northern Ontario.

Mr. Pollock: I would like to mention that I am really not the designated speaker on this motion. He did not show up. He must have got caught in traffic.

Hon. Mr. Mancini: We would rather hear from you anyway.

Mr. Pollock: Thanks. Anyway, I would like to say that I support this resolution. I think there should be local input on our forests. They are the people it affects and concerns. I certainly agree with the comments of the member for Nipissing (Mr. Harris) and his concerns about the protection of our forests.

It has been said that insects destroy more trees in Ontario than man actually does. Therefore, we have to protect our forests from these insects such as the gypsy moth and the spruce budworm because they cause a lot of problems with our forests. It is a major concern of mine.

I appreciated the comments of the member for Nickel Belt (Mr. Laughren) when he paid tribute to the Algonquin Forest Authority in its efforts to actually protect and preserve Algonquin Park and only cut those mature trees. I have known some of the people who served on that particular forestry association and I think they are doing a terrific job.

Basically, that is all I have to say, and I thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Adams: The member for Lake Nipigon’s resolution is based on the concept of a community forest. As a concept, this has a great deal going for it, the idea that local communities can manage the forest that surrounds them. In various parts of Europe, the community forest is commonplace. In the Alps, for example, in France, Switzerland and Austria, large tracts of forest are owned in common and managed by villages, cantons or whatever the local government is. The sides of the mountains in those areas are covered with manicured forests waiting for the villages to use them.

The concept of a community forest has real merit here in Ontario, but I know the member for Lake Nipigon knows deep in his heart that this concept cannot be simply transplanted from Europe to Canada. In Europe, there are centuries of common law behind their community forests. Centuries ago, for example, rights to private property and private use were given up in favour of communal rights. Similarly, the rights of other levels of government were given up to allow one village to protect its lands even against the better interests of surrounding villages.

Also, in Europe, the communal rights concerned are very narrowly related to forestry management and so these rights and these community forests greatly limit what we think of as multiple use of the forest resource or multiple use of all the resources of the lands concerned. We tend to think on this side that multiple use is most appropriate here in Ontario.

Lastly, the community forests of Europe, large though they may appear to the nonexpert at first sight, are tiny by comparison to the forests we deal with in Ontario. I understand that 87 percent of this province is still crown land. We have forests that are larger than whole countries in Europe. That huge scale involves an incredible variety of forest environment, of forest conditions. It is a diversity that cannot be addressed by one single, simplified, transplanted management approach, no matter how good that approach appears at first sight.

The common law situation in Ontario is special and it is already very complex. We have private property here and we have a very wide variety of well-established, existing, local forest management agreements. Many of those local agreements involve a great deal of local participation: My colleague the member for Algoma-Manitoulin (Mr. Brown) has described some of the existing management approaches that the Ministry of Natural Resources has developed with a wide variety of local groups. As he has said, the ministry continues to develop and study a diverse range of such agreements.

I have great personal sympathy with the intent of the member for Lake Nipigon, but he knows that we cannot simply implement one simple community-based approach. I hope the member’s resolution will have the effect of increasing interest in all sorts of local management techniques, in all sorts of local involvement in resource management.

Having said that, I regret to say I cannot support the resolution.

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Mr. Pouliot: My good friend the member for Algoma-Manitoulin spends a full 10 minutes reading from a prepared billboard telling us about the reasons why he should support the resolution, but then, just as matter-of-factly, concludes that he cannot.

He cannot because: “I would have to go to his office with my ideas and come out of his office with his ideas and then, indeed, I would have a better chance. Of course, I cannot. It is a vision. It proposes an alternative. It defies the status quo. It has vision, planning. Promotion would follow soon. It would give us a boost. No, no. I prefer to sit in the near north in Manitoulin and count the 50 trees I have left in my riding,” or maybe there are a little more.

Miss Martel: Fifty-one.

Mr. Pouliot: Fifty-one. “I do not want to go up north. I do not want to go to the riding of Lake Nipigon. I do not want to go to Hudson Bay. I do not want to do that. I prefer to say, ‘Everything is well.’ Like an ostrich, I will bury my head in the sand and expose my rear end.”

No, no. That is not the policy of the future. That is not what he should be doing. He should travel up north and go to Domtar in Red Rock, then travel another 100 miles and go to Kimberly-Clark in Terrace Bay, then go into the forest, cut across and go to Longlac. Then he will feel the anxiety of the people asking: “Where are we going to be five years, 10 years, 15 years down the line? We must travel 100 miles to get a truck full of wood. Why is that?” It is very simple. Somebody has neglected the forests.

We have heard all the rhetoric. What we are seeing here is a new approach. It has been tried someplace else and it has worked. We want to give local people, the people of the north, a chance to make their decision. Had we farmed our forest resources, we would not be in this kind of dilemma. We would not face this impasse. There is nothing wrong in admitting, because the facts are there, that we have treated our forests and the people of the north in a cavalier fashion.

It is not a good example of how to manage and harvest resources: Cut and run; no planning for the future; decisions made elsewhere; as long as we can satisfy shareholders; the prices are up; play the commodities market; we are going to do well -- but do well for a while. What is going to happen 15 and 20 years down the line?

We cannot go across Bay Street and get a job at the other bank. That is all we have. We keep sending $12 billion a year elsewhere. We are getting some back, but we are not getting enough. It is patchwork. When the revenues are up, we get a little more, but there is no planning, no sense of vision and we do not have the feeling that the north is eternal. There are 51 communities in our riding alone. How many of them will still be there 10 or 15 years down the line if we do not farm our forests?

There is no need for that. We know that once is all in the mining sector; it is a finite resource. The first shovelful you take out of the ground, you are that much closer to extinction. That is a condition we relate to, a condition we accept in advance; but in terms of our forests it is an entirely different business.

With this resolution, the members have an opportunity to give local authority a chance to plan.

Mr. Brown: Local option.

Mr. Pouliot: I heard the member say “local option.” He should be ashamed of mentioning those words in this House.

I have searched long and hard for flaws associated with the resolution, and truly, I was unable to find any because it gives the recipe for a better future for the people of northern Ontario.

COMPENSATION FOR VICTIMS OF CRIME

Mr. J. M. Johnson moved resolution 48:

That, in the opinion of this House, the Attorney General should review the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act to determine whether that legislation is adequate to meet the needs and redress the losses of victims. Such a review should take into account recommendations made by the standing committee on the Ombudsman (16th report, 1988); the standing committee on procedural affairs (Report on Agencies, Boards and Commissions 7, December 1983); and the areas identified by the past chairman of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board as requiring special attention, (board’s 17th report, 1985-86).

The Acting Speaker (Mr. M. C. Ray): The member has up to 20 minutes to make his presentation and may reserve any portion thereof.

Mr. J. M. Johnson: I will reserve a few minutes.

A headline in the Toronto Sun today highlights the need for this resolution. It reads, “He Could Kill Again.” If our society cannot provide more security and safety for its citizens, and I strongly encourage it to do so, then we have an added responsibility to make certain that the innocent victims of these criminals, and their families, receive fair and reasonable compensation.

The reasons for presenting this resolution are many, but the most important reason was a very personal experience dealing with a constituent’s need. A few years ago, a tragic case was brought to my attention by a young man, a constituent who was an unfortunate example of a victim of crime. I intend to be deliberately vague about the details of this terrible crime because this innocent victim has suffered enough and I do not want attract any more publicity to him or his young family.

This young man lived in a small community in his own home with his wife, his young two-and-a-half-year-old son and a baby daughter. One day he returned home from work and found his wife slashed to death, the young son hysterical and the daughter crying. Apparently, the next-door neighbour’s son, a convict who had just been released on parole, had broken into this young man’s home and slaughtered his wife with a butcher knife.

Imagine the terrible impact on this poor husband. His life was totally devastated. He had to give up his home and moved into my riding to live with his mother so she could look after her son and her grandchildren. In doing so, she had to completely change her life. She had to quit her job and devote her total time to her son’s family.

After a period of time, when he was finally able to accept the reality of the situation, through absolutely no fault of his own but entirely because he was the innocent victim of a terrible crime, the young man asked for my assistance.

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I appealed to the Ontario Criminal Injuries Compensation Board on behalf of my constituent. I was advised that they would contribute to the funeral expenses and if he needed psychiatric help they would pay for some sessions, but that was about the extent of what they had offered. When it was pointed out that my constituent’s mother had to quit her job to stay home and help her son look after the family, they expressed sympathy. I suggested that while monetary assistance to the family would not replace the wife and young mother, it might alleviate some of the pressing financial problems created by this criminal act.

Unfortunately, the Ontario Criminal Injuries Compensation Board does not have the right under the present legislation to make awards based on cases such as this, which they class as pain and suffering. They give lots of sympathy but no financial assistance.

Two chairmen of the board, Allan Grossman and Margaret Scrivener, both confirmed this negative decision. Mrs. Scrivener has consistently requested a revision of the board’s enabling legislation to address this very important issue.

I would like to make reference to the chairman’s report at this time. It is the Ontario Criminal Injuries Compensation Board 17th report, 1985-86. It is addressed to the Attorney General (Mr. Scott) and it goes on to state that, “Since joining the board on May 1, 1985, and undertaking the review of operations necessary for a new chairman, three main areas requiring special attention have been identified.

“These are: revision of the board’s enabling legislation,” and that, sir, is the most important. The second is the “reduction of the backlog of cases;” and the third, “and certain administrative improvements.” That is signed by the chairman of the board of the day, Mrs. Margaret Scrivener. I might mention that at the present time there is a backlog of more than 3,500 cases.

This frustrating personal experience dealing with my inability to be of assistance to this young family -- a truly innocent victim of violent crime and in my opinion someone entitled to compensation under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board -- encouraged me to work towards changing this legislation. I was also encouraged by many members of this Legislature, especially the members of the two committees I served on dealing with this board and I will make reference to these committees in a few minutes.

I might mention that I conducted a survey in my riding. It was a questionnaire that I sent out early in 1987. One of the questions that was asked was, “Should victims of crime be given financial compensation and restitution for injuries and loss resulting from the crimes?” Of the 2,426 who replied to this question, 73.2 per cent said yes; 11.1 per cent said no; and 15.7 per cent were undecided or did not respond. In answer, 1,770 citizens of my former riding of Wellington-Dufferin-Peel said victims of crime need more consideration.

I might make reference to an article in the Toronto Star, October 22, 1988, “Violent Crimes Up 92 per cent in Five Years.” I will just quote the one paragraph, “Murders, sexual assaults, robberies and other violent crimes shot up more than 92 per cent in the last five years, a statistical study shows.”

I might also mention another article in the press. This is Lorrie Goldstein’s article from the Toronto Sun, May 31, 1988 -- “Victims Deserve Fair Play.”

“Criminals get their day in court. So should victims of crime. As Attorney General Ian Scott attempts to clear up the three-year backlog of 3,600 cases facing Ontario’s Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, he would do well to keep that in mind. Scott wants the CICB to handle a larger percentage of its cases simply by having a review of the paperwork involved rather than by holding full hearings.”

I go on to one paragraph:

“In response to criticism that he has not adequately funded the CICB, Scott notes he has doubled its annual budget, now $7.5 million, in two years,” and I give the Attorney General credit for doing so. “Still more people are making claims to the CICB than ever before, and these claims are increasingly complex. Scrivener, a former Tory cabinet minister, pushed constantly for more staff and resources for the CICB during her term as chairman.”

I would also like to make reference to a federal study. It was in a publication entitled Victims and Witnesses of Crime in Canada which was commissioned by the Department of Justice in Canada. I quote from one section which deals with the results of a Canadian urban victim survey entitled Reported and Unreported Crime:

“The survey demonstrated that over one half of crimes were not reported. Reasons given for not reporting crimes included the view that the crime was too minor, the police could do nothing about the situation, that it was inconvenient or that the criminal justice system was too complex and too intimidating. Reasons for not reporting sexual assaults varied from the usual pattern. These victims stressed concern with negative attitudes of criminal justice officials and fear of revenge by offenders.”

If half of all crimes committed are not reported, then it follows that half the victims of crime receive no consideration whatsoever. Surely this is an indictment of our judicial system and demonstrates an urgent need to address this injustice.

I will refer to a couple of sections from the 16th report of the standing committee on the Ombudsman, 1988. Subsection 17(1): “In determining whether to make an order for compensation and the amount thereof, the board shall have regard to all relevant circumstances, including any behaviour of the victim that may have directly or indirectly contributed to his injury or death.”

When our committee was meeting this section created a very major problem and many of the members felt that indeed, if for no other reason, that should be opened up to deal with that section.

In the recommendations of the standing committee on the Ombudsman, number one states that it is very important, “That the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board award appropriate compensation to the complainant for loss of income and pain and suffering as a result of injuries sustained by him.” That is the one that would have reflected on the innocent victim that I mentioned earlier.

There is another section that I will refer to briefly, and I will quote from the report: “in the board’s view, this section” 25(1) “does not allow it to reopen a matter and make an award awarding compensation where no order of compensation was made in the first instance. The board,” and that is the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, “says that as there is no other authority in the act which can be employed to accomplish the Ombudsman’s and now the committee’s recommendation, the board is legally unable to act to implement the recommendation.”

In other words, while the board supports the thrust of the Ombudsman and the standing committee on the Ombudsman, legally it has no right to implement the recommendations. That is another reason the act should be opened, so that section can be dealt with as well.

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The committee also suggests that an amendment be made to the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act by deleting the words “for payment of compensation” in subsection 25(1). The committee believes that this statute, as presently written, unnecessarily hampers the board’s ability to re-examine cases where no award of compensation has been made. On behalf of my constituent I appealed to the board to give consideration, and this is the very section it pointed to. It was unable to comply with my request.

The committee recommends “that the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act be amended by deleting the words ‘for payment of compensation’ from subsection 25(1),” recommendation 9. There are several other recommendations and these can be dealt with by the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act when it is reviewed. Possibly some of the other members who served on either or both of these committees will make appropriate comments when the time comes.

I would now like to make reference to the standing committee on procedural affairs report number 7 on agencies, boards and commissions. This report was tabled in the Legislature on December 15, 1983. I will just make one reference to this report. I will quote this section:

“Criminal injuries compensation boards are a relatively new phenomenon in Canada. Most have been in existence not much longer than a decade and have operated within the scope of existing legislation. In the last few years, a debate has been initiated as to the adequacy of present institutions, methods and procedures in the treatment of victims of crime. A thorough analysis of these issues together with recommendations was recently prepared by the Federal-Provincial Task Force on Justice for Victims of Crime. The task force concluded that the justice system in Canada, with its present practices tended to ‘neglect the needs and concerns of victims of crime.’” That is most important. We “neglect the needs and concerns of victims of crime.”

“The recommendations of the federal-provincial task force will undoubtedly be studied by the appropriate Ontario authorities, the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and the Provincial Secretary for Justice. It is in the context of such review that the committee believes that a review of the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act be conducted and that such a review deal with all aspects of the act, including such matters as the criteria for eligibility, maximum payments, the criteria for receiving compensation under the head of pain and suffering and other such related matters. “

There were other recommendations made by the committee, but those are some of the most important.

I will just make one other reference and then reserve a few minutes.

At the present time there is federal legislation, Bill C-89. This act received first reading on November 5, 1987, and was passed by the House of Commons on May 3, 1988. Bill C-89 makes several references to supporting the need for assistance to victims of crime. I would just like to comment on two.

This has been presented by the Honourable Ray Hnatyshyn, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. He says:

“I have offered to more than double the federal contribution to provincial criminal injury compensation schemes and to fund a new victims assistance fund. This commitment will involve $27.2 million over three years. This is a near tripling of federal money in this area.”

I will make one other reference. It makes three recommendations; this is the fourth. “They will require the courts to consider restitution in all cases involving damage, loss or destruction of property and bodily harm, thereby removing the need for the victim to apply for restitution.”

I think because of the federal legislation, because of the two reports we have from the standing committee on the Ombudsman and the standing committee on procedural affairs and because most members certainly respect the fact that there is not enough consideration given to the victims of crime, that a hearing process into this act is in order. I appeal to the members of this Legislature to give consideration to having the Attorney General send it to a committee possibly to do that very thing.

I will reserve the rest of my time.

Mr. Offer: It is a pleasure for me to rise and join in this debate, particularly with respect to ballot item 42.

I have carefully read the resolution of the honourable member for Wellington requesting the Attorney General to review the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act in order to make certain that the legislation is adequate to meet the needs and redress the losses of victims. The resolution goes on to say what we should focus in on, that is, basically, certain recommendations made by other committees.

I have had the opportunity of reviewing some of those recommendations and I hope that in the time allotted to me, I will be able to deal with some of those recommendations. I would like to state at the outset that I stand here in support of this resolution. I stand in support of the comments made in the resolution, but I would also like to indicate that this particular resolution, though very important and well worded and extremely crucial to not only victims of crime in this province but in general to all of the public of this province, is one which has been done by the Attorney General since this Attorney General became Attorney General.

The Attorney General and the chairman of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board have continued to reanalyse, reassess and re-examine the aspect of whether the legislation does meet the needs of the people for whom it was designed. I would like, if I might, to refer to some of the recommendations made in keeping with the resolution of the member for Wellington (Mr. J. M. Johnson).

In its report on agencies, boards and commissions in 1983, the standing committee on procedural affairs recommended that a review of the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act be conducted and that such a review deal with all aspects of the act. In particular, the committee recommended that in all jurisdictions where maximum limits on awards are imposed, those limits should be reviewed regularly to ensure that they keep pace with the cost of living. In addition, the committee recommended that the Attorney General, in co-operation with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, amend the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act with the objective of raising the limits on awards.

I think it is important for us all to remember that at that time the existing limitation of awards had not changed since the act was passed. It was this Attorney General who, very early into his first appointment as Attorney General in November 1986, introduced amendments to the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act wherein the limits on monthly payments to victims of crime were substantially increased.

I think it is important to refer back to that time because on that occasion, the Attorney General remarked: “This government is committed to assisting victims of crime and I am delighted that we have been able to demonstrate this commitment in a very practical and important way. This is the first increase victims of crime have had in 15 years; it is long overdue. This legislation ... will put Ontario in the forefront of North American jurisdictions which seek to compensate their citizens for the costs of violent crimes.

“Under the legislation introduced by the Attorney General, the maximum award for monthly payments to a victim of crime doubled. The maximum lump sum award for any one victim was increased. Additionally, the maximum award for all victims in respect of any one occurrence was increased.

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This does not mean to say that we are at the end of the road of analysis and examination. It is to say that this Attorney General and this government have, as time proceeds, demonstrated a continuation of such an analysis and such a reassessment. The legislation must continue, as best as possible, to address the needs of the victims of crime. The actions of this government and the Attorney General clearly, and I believe unmistakably, demonstrate that there is that commitment.

I would like, if I might, to refer to a further recommendation brought forward by the committee. That recommendation dealt with the question of public awareness in terms of what the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board is. The committee recommended in 1983 that a campaign should be launched in each jurisdiction to acquaint citizens as fully as possible with the existence of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board and its purposes. That is an extremely important recommendation. The police should be required to provide victims of crime with information on the existence and purpose of the board. Hospitals and other institutions and agencies should be urged to support the police in doing so.

Since 1983, the board has been actively involved in such an awareness campaign. The past chairman made frequent speaking engagements. An information brochure entitled We Care about the Victims of Crime, which I happen to have before me, and a poster entitled People Just Don’t Bounce Back, were introduced. More than 50,000 copies of this brochure have been distributed to police stations, hospitals, rape crisis centres, the homes for battered women and children’s aid societies across the province. Wallet information cards were mailed out to police officers. Very important, and I believe the honourable member for Wellington alluded to this, board activities have increasingly been reported in the newspapers, on the radio and on television.

Under the present chairman, the board is working closely with the communications branch in developing and implementing an effective communications plan. I think it speaks quite highly of the chairman of the board that, upon learning we are dealing with this resolution, he has come to the Legislature today and is in the members’ gallery listening to this resolution, listening to the concerns of members in dealing with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. I think it speaks highly of the commitment, determination and effort that the current chairman is going to bring to that particular position.

All police chiefs in Ontario have been canvassed. Their needs, in terms of brochures and wallet cards have been responded to. The board has asked the Ontario Police Commission to provide courses and information to police officers on the role of the board and the means by which applications may be made for compensation. Of extreme importance, in an address to the Ontario Police College, Aylmer, the current chairman has requested an inclusion of the board’s role in the college curriculum.

The board is intent on developing a new format for its December 1989 annual report and is considering new methods to address the committee’s findings, all with a view to informing the public of this province of the existence of such a board, what its purpose is and what it is designed to meet, as well as reassessing, reanalysing and revisiting the legislation to make certain it meets the needs of the people for which it was designed.

I think very much that the Ontario government has shown its commitment to improving and to continue to improve the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. I have spoken of a few of the recommendations of the agencies and the committees alluded to in the resolution by the honourable member for Wellington. I am confident that this government, the current chairman of the board, the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Attorney General himself have demonstrated over the years a commitment and a determination to reanalyse, reassess and revisit this legislation in order to make certain it meets the needs of the people for whom it was designed and I am confident this will continue in the future.

Mr. Jackson: It gives me great pleasure to rise in support of the resolution put forward by my colleague the member for Wellington. For those at home who have just tuned in to these proceedings, I should explain that we are debating a call for a review of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board so that the Attorney General can look at ways of improving services to victims of crimes.

As the Conservative MPP responsible for women’s issues, I support the call for this review, not because I disagree with the board’s concept and not because I object seriously to its current method of operation; rather, I think any government agency requires regular review and monitoring so that any problems can be identified and corrected. Over the next few minutes, I would like to voice some of my concerns about criminal injuries compensation in this province and make suggestions for its review.

First, I believe the board needs the power to reverse an initial decision denying compensation.

As all members are aware, a crime victim’s medical condition or financial stability can deteriorate over time. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board must therefore retain the flexibility to increase compensation after an order is made, and what is already a power in the statute should be given more meaning and more life.

But the board also needs the power to make an order of compensation after initially denying one, if changed circumstances so warrant. This June, the all-party standing committee on the Ombudsman recommended an amendment to the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act that would give the board this badly needed flexibility. I support that recommendation and hope it will be studied carefully during the review.

The second point is that there must be greater public awareness of the board’s existence and the services it provides.

In 1983, another standing committee of the Legislature recommended that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board “strengthen the public’s awareness of the board and its function of compensating victims of violent crime.”

I realize that over the years the board has taken great strides in the area of public awareness and that the number of applications continues to increase, but those applying for compensation still make up but a small minority of all crime victims in Ontario. For example, one in four women will be the victim of sexual assault in her lifetime, yet in 1986-87 there were only 258 sexual assault victims applying for compensation. One in 10 women lives in an environment of domestic violence, and child abuse is an equally serious problem, yet in 1986-87 there were only 88 applications brought on behalf of child abuse victims in this province.

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The following story of one child abuse victim who received $15,500 from the board appeared this week in the Toronto Star of November 15. I would like to quote from that article.

“She loved school -- but for secret, ghastly reasons.

“For Tammy Wilkieson, a grade 3 student with a fistful of As each term, school meant a break from home. Especially on Thursdays.

“Thursday was the day her stepfather would rape her.

“Thursday after Thursday ... he would knock on her bedroom door, order her to come to his temporarily vacant bed and force her to have sex with him ... Tammy is her real name. She insists the Star use it, for reasons that are key to her recovery.”

The article goes on and quotes her social worker, Jan Heinrichs, who explains the importance of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board to Tammy’s recovery. Tammy is now 25 years old. The board, which often has been described as a well-kept secret, is one way ‘incest survivors can have the satisfaction of having society acknowledge that what has happened to them is unacceptable,’ says Heinrichs. ‘...Society is telling Tammy that sexual abuse is not acceptable and that what happened to you was a terrible thing and we want to help you.’”

Ontario is full of victims like Tammy. To them, an award is more than financial compensation. It is society’s recognition that a crime took place and a statement that that crime is unacceptable. It is an important part of the emotional and psychological healing process for victims.

But for too many victims, the board is still a well-kept secret. How many Tammys remain unaware of our criminal injuries compensation system? Hopefully, the review called for by my colleague the member for Wellington will come up with new ways to publicize the board and the services it provides to victims of violent crime.

Third, there must be greater participation by criminals to pay back to victims in the compensation process.

My biggest concern about the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board is that criminals are not paying their fair share of awards to victims. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board has a statutory right to recover awards by taking criminals to court. In theory, this allows victims to receive compensation up front, without delay, and allows the board to sue the criminals afterward to recover the damages. Unfortunately, the theory is far from practice and too many criminals escape the financial consequences of their acts.

Understandably, moneys cannot be recovered if the criminal cannot be located or if he has neither assets nor income, but even where the offender can be located and does have a job, more often than not no attempt will be made to recover the award.

In the last year for which statistics were available, we have been able to determine that the board paid out $4.3 million to victims in Ontario. Less than $62,000 was recovered from criminals. In other words, 98.5 per cent of the costs of violent crime are borne by society and by law-abiding citizens, and only 1.5 per cent of those costs are borne by the criminals themselves. That is not just and that is not fair. Criminals must pay their share of victim compensation.

There is a need for a Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in Ontario and there is a need for prompt and full payments to victims, but when an award has been paid and the criminal is located, there is no excuse for the board’s failure to use its legal right to recover those moneys. The federal Conservative government has made great strides with its recent Criminal Code amendments, Bill C-89, but here at the provincial level we have a similar obligation to ensure that when compensation is necessary the offender pays up.

Over the past few months, my office has been conducting a study of criminal injuries compensation in jurisdictions around the world. I hope the review being requested by my colleague the member for Wellington will consider some of the positive features of other systems.

For example, in Victoria, Australia, the compensation tribunal can order an offender to refund an award without the need to take him to court. In South Australia, the criminal injuries compensation system is partially funded by a special surtax levied on criminals. In New South Wales, a government task force recommended in 1986 that the state garnishee a portion of the wages paid to prison inmates in order to partially refund any payments made to their victims.

Ontario borrowed the concept of criminal injuries compensation from other Commonwealth nations. Now we can learn from their incorporation of offender participation into the compensation process. Common sense suggests it, fairness supports it and justice demands it.

Since 1971, Ontario has operated one of the finest victim compensation schemes in the world. I am proud of that. I am proud it was instituted by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. Yet any program, especially after 17 years, can benefit from review and reform.

I support this resolution fully in the hope that the Attorney General will examine some of the problems I have identified so that together we can make our criminal injuries compensation system more flexible, more accessible and more just.

Mr. Kanter: I would like to commend the member for Wellington for his resolution on the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act administered by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.

I would also like to commend him for putting his case in very personal and moving terms. I think sometimes we get entirely caught up in reports, and the member for Wellington had some personal knowledge and experience with this particular matter.

I was interested that the member noted one of the past chairmen of the board was the honourable Allan Grossman, the former member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick, the father of the honourable Larry Grossman and a public official in this province who was very involved in both the correctional and victims’ side of this issue.

I would also note, and I believe my colleague noted, that the current chair of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, Wendy Calder, is here listening to the debate and she will bring her extensive municipal and police commission experience to this issue.

My colleague the member for Mississauga North (Mr. Offer) has responded to many of the concerns raised by the member for Wellington, but I would like to indicate some of the initiatives that the Solicitor General (Mrs. Smith) and police forces in this province have taken in this extremely important area. Indeed, the Solicitor General has identified assistance to victims of crime, particularly domestic crime, as one of her top priorities.

Just before I catalogue some of the initiatives the police have taken, I would like to make two general comments to perhaps broaden a little the resolution by my colleague the member for Wellington.

First, I would note that financial assistance is a crucial, but sometimes not the only component of assistance required by victims of crime. They may need social services, counselling, the assistance offered by self-help groups. I would say, particularly in the case of the type of sickening and gruesome crimes described by my colleague the member for Burlington South (Mr. Jackson), that nonfinancial assistance may be as important or more important than financial assistance. I would also note that in some cases, witnesses of crimes might require some assistance.

I would note first, and my colleague the member for Mississauga North referred to this, that a training program for all police in the province on victims has been instituted. The program, known as Consider the Victim, includes videotapes and workbooks. It is offered not just to new recruits but to all police officers in the province. Within the next year or so, every police officer in the province -- there are 17,000 municipal police officers and members of the Ontario Provincial Police -- will have received this training. This includes, but goes beyond, information about the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.

Second, there is a brochure by our ministry that provides information for victims and witnesses. It certainly mentions the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board and how a victim can get in touch with that board. It goes beyond that and provides information about other institutions in that area: family service organizations, welfare agencies, interval and transition houses, alcohol and drug addiction foundations, and many, many others. Of course, the written information should be supplemented by information from the police involved.

It contains a very handy location for information about the police force: investigating officer’s name, badge number, occurrence number; information that will be useful to the Criminal injuries Compensation Board or to insurance companies or to other sources as well. It complements the brochure produced by the Attorney General entitled We Care for Victims of Crime, which describes the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board in greater detail.

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I would like also to bring to the attention of the member for Wellington and other members of the House the victim crisis assistance and referral services offered directly by the Ministry of the Solicitor General. There are three pilot projects, in Brant county, Frontenac county and Algoma district, where victims are provided with assistance and referral to various agencies, including, of course, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board.

In addition, there are efforts by various municipal police forces. The emergency community service offered by the Metro Toronto Police Force has two components, professional social workers or volunteers, depending on the severity of the offence and the needs of the victim. These services are initiated by the Metro police and provided by the Salvation Army, a community agency with a long record of assistance in this area.

I also want to point out, and this is something I did a small bit of research on, that victim assistance is an integral part of police service in Metro. It is part of the general occurrence report. I am reading from the Metro Toronto Police general occurrence report. There is an extensive mention of the victim and various data that are gathered. The police officer has to check off whether a victim pamphlet was issued. The police officer has to indicate whether the victim witness assistance program was referred to.

We are trying, through our ministry, through the Ontario Provincial Police, which has a standing order dealing directly with the subject, and through municipal police forces to ensure that all victims are aware of the assistance offered by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board; and indeed are aware of other sources of assistance as well, in some cases assistance which may be even more helpful than financial assistance. I understand that other police forces, such as the Peel Regional Police Force and Durham Regional Police Force, have instituted their own programs in this area.

There was some comment on the amount of funds required. Substantial additional money, both federal and provincial, has been put into the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. In 1979-80, the total awards were about $2.5 million, in 1988-89 about $10 million. Administrative costs are borne entirely by the province. They have increased as well.

The backlog which was referred to by one of my colleagues has been reduced; it is still too long, but it has been reduced. In addition to putting more money into the program, we are exploring means of expediting awards by using documentary evidence rather than formal hearings in cases where it is appropriate. I understand that it is the need for extensive documentation that has caused part of the backlog, that the actual backlog of cases ready to proceed is only several hundred rather than the several thousand referred to by one of my colleagues.

There also have been reforms at the federal level in terms of help to make the task easier for victims of crime. Photographic evidence is now allowed. There is provision for a fine surcharge, victim impact statements and restitution. These are very new provisions, but they are certainly being administered by the province. While they were passed by the federal House of Commons, of course, they require the co-operation and the education of police forces, both provincial and municipal, and the provincial justice system.

In fact, these measures have been proclaimed only very recently, October 1 for most of the provisions; the restitution provision will not be proclaimed until January 1989. These provisions, the provision for restitution and the provision for fine surcharges, I think, will go some way to meet some of the concerns of my colleague the member for Burlington South.

In summary, this government is deeply concerned about the rights of victims and witnesses of crime. My colleague has described the extensive efforts of the Attorney General to improve the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board’s systems and procedures and in reviewing the legislation.

I have tried to describe the efforts of the Solicitor General and the police force in this province to further assist victims of crime. I have tried to emphasize that while financial compensation is important, it is not the only concern of victims of crime, and we are trying to meet these other needs as well.

The review proposed by the member for Wellington has commenced. Indeed, in some ways, it is perhaps a little broader than the review he has requested, and we will continue the review he has proposed. For that reason, I am pleased to support his resolution.

Mr. R. F. Johnston: I would like to add my support as well to the member for Wellington’s initiative today and say that it is always timely for the House to be reminded of the needs of victims of crime. Too often our citizens get the sense that the laws of the land perhaps protect the criminal more than they do the victim; we are continually having that thrown back at us as legislators.

Unfortunately, too often as well we as legislators and governments have dealt with the issue, when raised, with public relations approaches to the problem rather than dealing with the substantive concerns people have around how we compensate victims of crime. I think that has changed somewhat over the past four or five years. In the 10 years I have been here in the Legislature, in the early period of time it was much more a PR exercise than it was a real, active compensation program with all the ancillary supports that are required to make victims feel that the system of justice is not weighted against them rather than the perpetrators of crime in the country.

There are a few comments I would like to make. The member has rightfully said that it is presently time for a review of the act. I am glad to hear from the member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick (Mr. Kanter) that this review is ongoing, but sometimes we get confused about what the concept of a review is. If it is just a matter of somebody sitting at home one night rereading the act and looking things over, but not really thinking about a major revision in the sense of action on an act, then that is something we would not want to condone in this House.

There have been recommendations, as the member for Wellington has said, from committees of this House, back in 1983 and most recently in 1988 from the standing committee on the Ombudsman, suggesting that it is time for changes to the act, that there are limitations on the board, specifically in terms of what it can or cannot do, and that these are changes which can be easily moved on. One would not find within this chamber an ideological difference of opinion at all in terms of facilitating the powers of the board to more adequately compensate and take into account a broader range of concerns than it is able to presently under the legislation.

I hope that while a review is being undertaken by the Attorney General and while the Solicitor General and the police forces are trying to do a number of things to make things better, we might in fact be gearing ourselves to some changes in legislation and a focus for debate here that would not be just on a resolution in private members’ hour but around specific government action that is being taken.

I think the people of the province are in real need of hearing from us that this is not something to which we just give lipservice, on which we place some TV ads and nominally give some minor financial compensation to individuals in the province, but rather is something important enough to have legislative change, legislative enactment and debate.

The member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick says there has been a large increase in the amount of money that is actually within the budget now, from $2 million to $10 million, but that is over the course of a decade, I would remind the member. If we were to look at some of the cost-of-living changes during that period, the actual increase in support is not as high as I would hope this government might think a priority. When we look at the amounts of compensation that people actually get under criminal compensation compared with the amounts that they are able to get under, say, workers’ compensation or other kinds of programs that are out there, they are usually infinitesimally small.

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It has always been a principle of mine that if one becomes disabled in this province, there should be more equality in terms of the financial outcomes for that individual than we have presently. At the moment, we have this enormous range whereby if you are on family benefits and disabled you get a certain amount that keeps you well below the poverty line. If you happen to qualify for Canada pension, you may in fact be able to get to around the poverty line. If you had a good job before you were injured, and if you were injured at work and you can prove it and get workers’ compensation, then you are likely to get a wage which will keep you above the poverty line, depending on the meat chart determinations about how extensively you are injured. But if you are injured as a result of a crime, it is highly unlikely that the money you will be given to compensate you for that will go anywhere near meeting your actual real costs as a newly disabled person in our society.

Within that context I think it is really important to talk about, as have the reports that the member for Wellington alludes to, psychological pain and suffering that victims of crime endure. Any of us who has been robbed -- and in this day and age that probably comes down to a majority of people in the Legislature -- know that sense of incredible violation which you feel personally when your home is broken into and things which are of importance to you to one degree or another are taken. It is not so much the loss of the piece of jewellery -- in my case, I remember it was a typewriter that at one time was taken -- it is more the sense that your space was violated, that somehow you are no longer secure.

For a victim of crime in the more serious cases where there is actual physical violence perpetrated on that individual, the psychological effects are enormous and incredibly long-lasting. All the studies and follow-up that have been done around the victims of crime, especially in the United States, show that the enormous, lifelong damage that can be put on people is something which our compensation system does not recognize as it should.

I would just like to say that it is time, not just for a review internally by the ministry but for initiatives and a focus for debate in terms of legislative change to be brought forward to this chamber so that we can all focus more correctly on this issue and, hopefully, make those who are victims of crime out there get an extra psychological assist from the sense that they know that their members of provincial parliament are focusing on that issue, think it is of importance, want to provide the kinds of supports that will assist them to survive and continue to flourish in our society after a calamitous, usually unpremeditated -- no sense that it was going to happen to them -- kind of incident that has changed their lives for ever.

I welcome the member for Wellington’s resolution. I presume that all members of this House will support it. I would just say that I hope a strict interpretation of what the word “review” means is not taken by the ministry, but rather that it sees this as in fact something that will initiate action which will come back to this Legislature for our support.

Mr Speaker: There is still a minute, left, if any other member wishes to participate. If not, I know the member for Wellington has reserved a little less than two minutes.

Mr. J. M. Johnson: I would like to start by thanking the member for Mississauga North, the member for Burlington South, the member for St. Andrew-St. Patrick and the member for Scarborough West (Mr. R. F. Johnston) for their Support of the resolution.

I would like to congratulate the Attorney General for taking some positive steps, but more are needed. I would like to congratulate the new chairperson of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, Mrs. Wendy Calder, and wish her well in the future.

A review is needed to consider the recommendations made by the standing committee on procedural affairs, the standing committee on the Ombudsman, the Office of the Ombudsman and indeed the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. I hope the Attorney General will take into consideration the fact that all these bodies have made recommendations that do deserve some consideration. The new federal legislation, Bill C-89, should be taken into consideration too.

The main thrust of a review has to be the board’s enabling legislation, to allow the board to do the things that the different committees have made recommendations on and certainly dealing with the concern I raised about my constituent. I am hopeful that the Attorney General will direct a committee of this Legislature, possibly the standing committee on administration of justice, to review the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act.

I thank the members for their support.

Mr. Speaker: That completes the allotted time for discussion on the two items of private members’ public business. As members know, the standing order says we should deal with these at 12 o’clock. It is so close, I presume all members would be agreeable.

Agreed to.

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COMMUNITY-BASED RESOURCE AUTHORITIES

The House divided on Mr. Pouliot’s motion of resolution 50 which was negatived on the following vote:

Ayes

Bryden, Charlton, Epp, Grier, Jackson, Johnson, J. M., Johnston, R. F., Mackenzie, Martel, Philip, E., Pouliot, Rae, B., Reville, Runciman, Villeneuve.

Nays

Adams, Black, Bossy, Brown, Chiarelli, Cleary, Cooke, D. R., Elliot, Faubert, Fawcett, Fleet, Hart, Henderson, Kanter, LeBourdais, Lipsett, Lupusella, Matrundola, McClelland, Miller, Morin, Nicholas, Nixon, J. B., Oddie Munro, Offer, Owen, Poole, Roberts, South, Tatham.

Ayes 15; nays 30.

Motion negatived.

COMPENSATION FOR VICTIMS OF CRIME

Mr. Speaker: Mr. J. M. Johnson has moved resolution 48.

Motion agreed to.

The House recessed at 12:05 p.m.

AFTERNOON SITTING

The House resumed at 1:30 p.m.

MEMBERS’ STATEMENTS

ONTARIO HOME RENEWAL PROGRAM FOR DISABLED PERSONS

Mr. Laughren: The Ontario home renewal program for disabled persons provides forgivable loans to home owners to renovate their homes for disabled access. The importance of such a program for increasing the accessible housing stock for disabled persons speaks for itself. Without new housing starts, renovations of existing housing stock to accommodate an ageing population and disabled persons seeking a life of independence in the community is absolutely essential.

Understandably, the demand for this program has been widespread. Essentially, the home renewal program for disabled persons grants loans of up to $15,000 to approved home owners with gross family incomes below $45,000 for making homes or apartments in owner-occupied homes accessible. The loan is forgivable if the renovated home is not sold for five years after the award of the loan.

As of September 30, 1988, 751 applicants have been approved for the provincial program. There is now a recognized waiting list of 525 eligible applications. This program is clearly needed and clearly underfunded. Municipalities that participate in the application programs have simply been telling those interested in the program that there is no point in applying for six more months, because the money has run out. Toronto, for example, has 171 qualified applicants waiting at this very moment. In my own constituency office, there is seldom a week goes by that I do not have someone come in seeking an application.

EXPO 2000

Mr. Sterling: It is with a great deal of dismay that I recently learned that the Premier (Mr. Peterson), in a letter to the Prime Minister, has come out in support of Toronto in its bid for an Expo world fair in the year 2000. I am dismayed and disappointed because the Premier knows full well that Ottawa was also bidding to host this world exposition.

The federal government has said it will make only one bid for the turn-of-the-century world fair and that it is up to the Ontario government to decide which city it will support. Obviously, that decision has been made.

Toronto is a very dynamic city, but it is not the only city capable of hosting events of this magnitude. Why has this government forgotten about the nation’s capital nestled in eastern Ontario. When will Ottawa get an opportunity to benefit from some of the perks afforded only to Toronto?

Toronto hosted the economic summit. It is building the domed stadium, with $30 million coming from the taxpayers all over the province, and of course, Toronto is bidding for the 1996 Olympic games. Is it necessary that the province support its bid on both the Olympics and the world’s fair?

I forgot to mention that the Premier did want the space agency in the Ottawa area. Unfortunately, he let everyone else get in line ahead of him. His pitch was of little value by the time it was delivered.

To the Premier of Ontario and the government of Ontario: Ontario does not end at the borders of Metropolitan Toronto.

PRAYERS IN LEGISLATURE

Mr. Velshi: I wish to comment today on a member’s statement made in this Legislature on November 1 by the member for Scarborough West (Mr. R. F. Johnston) concerning the Lord’s Prayer. The member stated that this prayer is perhaps dated and anachronistic and went on to speak on behalf of a minority of people within this House.

As a member of a minority religious group within this Legislature, I wish to inform members, in particular the member for Scarborough West, that I have no objection whatsoever to the opening ceremonies of this Legislature, and to suggest changing the prayer at the beginning of each session is sure to be divisive and counterproductive. I fear that the end result might be to eliminate prayers altogether, and that would be wrong.

I would like to note that I do not need the member for Scarborough West speaking on my behalf on this or any other sensitive matter. Since the final decision to act on the member’s suggestion is yours, Mr. Speaker, I would like to suggest that if a review of our proceedings is being considered, let it be a change to rotational prayers rather than eliminating prayer altogether.

AMBULANCE SERVICES

Mr. Reville: Ambulance officers from communities across Ontario are visiting the provincial Legislature to demand changes in the ambulance system. They are members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. Two days ago, a report on ambulance service found a deep malaise within the province’s ambulance services. It was commissioned by OPSEU and followed public hearings in eight centres in late 1987 and early 1988.

The ambulance officers will also be seeking an end to the 15-week-old strike by OPSEU Local 207 against the ambulance service in Halton-Mississauga. They are seeking wage parity with ambulance officers employed by neighbouring Metropolitan Toronto.

Following the visits to MPPs, representatives of the ambulance group will be available immediately outside the legislative chamber at the end of today’s question period.

YOUNG OFFENDER

Mr. Jackson: Members of the Halton community are shocked and outraged that a 17-year-old triple murderer is being given unescorted day passes that allow him to travel through my riding of Burlington South on his way to work in Hamilton. Halton residents have good reason to be concerned. A young murderer well known to the media and politicians, who cannot be identified, has been getting day passes since June. Last week, two other inmates escaped. Today, we read in a Toronto newspaper that the inmates are practically running the Syl Apps treatment centre.

My own city of Burlington used to take pride in the fact that it was one of the safest cities in Ontario, yet there have been three killings since 1987, some associated with day passes. It is understandable that my constituents are worried and upset, and the last thing they want to hear is that a young triple murderer is walking the streets of Halton by himself, a triple murderer described by a corrections officer as “so dangerous it’s unbelievable. He could kill again, without a doubt.”

Residents of Halton need to be reassured that our criminal Justice system works and that law-abiding citizens are safe both on the streets and inside their homes. All levels of government, therefore, have a responsibility to ensure that this is the case.

CANADIAN NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND

Mr. Offer: It gives me great pleasure to rise today in order to recognize and honour the Canadian National Institute for the Blind on this 70th year of its existence. With a proud history, the CNIB has grown and matured into a first-class, front-line service agency with a client population in Ontario of over 24,000 individuals, the majority of whom are over 60 years of age. Just as important is the outstanding contribution made by the thousands of trained volunteers, whose commitment and vitality maintain the excellence of this institution.

The resources and services provided are many. Suffice it to say that there are over 10,000 volunteers providing services in a variety of ways. While these accomplishments are impressive, the challenges for the CNIB remain. The special needs for the blind and visually impaired children must be met so that they can participate in the educational process, so that employment opportunities and career development plans will be in place for younger adults and so that older adults are encouraged to remain self-reliant through the use of technology and assistance available through sight enhancement services.

The CNIB is currently addressing these challenges in a committed and determined way, a way that not only meets the needs of the blind and visually impaired but also allows those individuals to reach their full potential.

STATEMENTS BY THE MINISTRY

SERVICES EN FRANÇAIS

Hon. M. Grandmaître: Monsieur le Président, c’est un plaisir pour moi de vous adresser la parole aujourd’hui, à l’occasion du second anniversaire de la Loi sur les services en français.

C’est une réalisation dont nous pouvons tous être fiers puisque cette loi a été adoptée unanimement par les membres de la législature, le 18 novembre 1986.

Deux ans plus tard, les ministères du gouvernement de l’Ontario, appuyés par l’Office des affaires francophones et la Commission des services en français de l’Ontario, poursuivent la mise en oeuvre de la Loi.

Les ministères ont manifesté un engagement et un enthousiasme peu communs envers l’offre de services en français. Ils sont en train de transformer les dispositions de la Loi en une réalité dynamique pour la communauté francophone de l’Ontario.

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Mais pour atteindre les objectifs que nous nous sommes fixés, nous avons besoin de l’appui constant de la communauté francophone de notre province. Elle aussi a un rôle à jouer pour assurer le succès de cette entreprise.

C’est pourquoi j’invite tous les francophones à s’engager dans la mise en oeuvre de la Loi. Pour ce faire, ils n’ont qu’a faire appel aux services qui sont déjà disponibles auprès des bureaux-chefs et des bureaux régionaux des ministères situés dans les 22 régions désignées par la Loi.

Je les encourage également à se tailler des places au sein des conseils d’administration d’agences telles que les hôpitaux ou les sociétés d’aide à l’enfance. C’est à ce niveau que se prendront les décisions sur les services en français qui touchent leur quotidien.

Les francophones sont conscients de l’importance de leur participation au succès de la Loi. Ils nous ont indiqué clairement que c’est un défi qu’ils entendent relever avec détermination.

De fait, j’aimerais profiter de cette occasion pour remercier les organismes et les individus qui nous ont accordé leur appui au cours des deux dernières années. J’adresse aussi des remerciements à tous ceux et celles qui out pris le temps de nous écrire et de nous communiquer directement leurs commentaires. Leur soutien a été fortement apprécié par toutes les personnes engagées, de près ou de loin, dans la mise en oeuvre.

Notre attention est maintenant tournée vers l’avenir et sur le travail qu’il nous reste à accomplir au cours de la prochaine année. Oui, il y a encore bien des choses à faire, mais nous entreprenons ces tâches avec un dynamisme renouvelé.

La Loi reconnaît l’apport des francophones au développement de la société ontarienne, et c’est pourquoi nous sommes heureux de contribuer à la sauvegarde de la langue et de la culture de nos francophones.

SERVICES DE SANTÉ EN FRANÇAIS / FRENCH-LANGUAGE HEALTH SERVICES

Hon. Mme Caplan: Demain, nous célébrerons le deuxième anniversaire de l’adoption de la Loi 8, Loi sur les services en français, qui proclame l’engagement de cette Assemblée à préserver la culture et l’héritage des Franco-Ontariens.

Tomorrow will mark the second anniversary of the enactment of Bill 8, the French Language Services Act, which proclaims the commitment of this Legislature to preserve the culture and language heritage of French-speaking Ontarians.

While the act guarantees the use of French in designated Ontario government institutions, there is perhaps no field where this guarantee will have a more personal or profound impact than in health are.

I am pleased to announce in the House today that my ministry is funding a new French language community health centre for Metropolitan Toronto. Centre médico-social communautaire will provide services that will be available to 70,000 French-speaking residents of Metro Toronto.

Our ministry has found that community health centres, or CHCs, improve access to health care for target groups at the local level, We see this community health centre as the nucleus for French-language health services in Metro Toronto. My ministry will provide $44,000 in startup operating funding and $183,000 in capital funding. My ministry will provide approximately $1.3 million in annual operating funding when the centre is fully operational.

Services will be provided by family doctors, nurses and specialists, starting next year. Emphasis will be placed on health education and health promotion, and allied services such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy and counselling will be phased in over several years. In addition, interpretation and accommodation services will be provided to French-speaking patients travelling to Toronto for specialized care.

As members will know, one of the challenges we face in offering health services in French is the shortage of French-speaking health professionals in Ontario.

The Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities has now arranged for the admission of Ontario students in health programs to Quebec universities. Up to 100 seats in medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, audiology/speech-language pathology and social work, for education in the French language, have been secured.

Our next priority is to promote this new program and make Ontario candidates aware of this opportunity. A ministry representative is visiting every French-speaking or bilingual high school in Ontario to take this message to students, parents and teachers.

French-language services are especially vital in the field of mental health, where successful treatment can depend on the quality of communication between doctor and patient. The ministry now provides funds for 25 community mental health programs and eight addiction programs that offer services in French.

The Ministry of Health is now actively working to honour our commitment to equitable access to health care in the French language.

Le ministère de la Santé travaille activement à respecter notre engagement à assurer un accès équitable à des soins de santé en français.

COMPUTERS-IN-EDUCATION GRANTS PROGRAM

Hon. Mr. Ward: I am pleased to announce further policy changes to my ministry’s computers-in-education grants program.

I believe that under previous policy we have not been receiving a great enough value for our education dollars. The changes I am announcing today will permit school boards to pursue more cost-effective purchasing strategies more closely geared to the educational needs of our students.

School boards will be able to increase their purchasing power by up to $130 million, because they will now have the flexibility to purchase less expensive computers capable of serving specific needs in our classrooms. With this step, we will be able to move much more rapidly towards our long-range goal of providing each student with 30 minutes of instructional computer time per day.

Starting in 1989, school boards will be permitted to allocate up to 25 per cent of their computer grants to the purchase of less expensive equipment that meets specific needs, such as business and computer studies, database analysis and word processing.

In addition, school boards will now have the flexibility to use up to five per cent of their computer grants for the purchase of specialized equipment that can better serve the needs of exceptional pupils and the unique training needs of students enrolled in technological courses. Boards will thus be able to apply a portion of their grants to assist in the purchase of special computers that will allow the blind, the deaf and the physically disabled to develop skills that will be of particular value to them in the world of work, and school boards that want to revitalize their technological studies programs will be permitted to apply a portion of their grants towards such high-tech equipment as computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing and robotics.

Finally, I will be providing school boards with the option of spending up to five per cent of their grants on related in-service training for teachers to help them acquire a greater understanding of and familiarity with the use of computers. This training will also help our teachers to better integrate ministry-licensed software and commercial software into the curriculum.

The steps I took in July to open our computer program to more manufacturers, followed by the policy changes I am announcing today, represent a bold move forward. School boards will be given greater flexibility to seek out equipment that precisely meets student needs. The interest of Ontario taxpayers will be advanced by developing much more cost-effective purchasing policies. Teachers will benefit by gaining access to funds for in-service training. Perhaps most important, our children will benefit by being able to leave our schools confident in their ability to live and work in a world filled with information technology. Rather than being overwhelmed by that world, they will be able to take charge of it.

These and other computer-related initiatives I intend to introduce in the weeks and months ahead will ensure that Ontario remains a world leader in the development and application of educational technology.

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COURTHOUSE SECURITY

Hon. Mr. Scott: Later today I will introduce a bill entitled the Police and Sheriffs Statute Law Amendment Act.

The purpose of the bill is to make clear in statutory terms that municipalities, either through their municipal police forces or through a contractual arrangement with the Ontario Provincial Police where there are no municipal police forces, have responsibility for providing security in the province’s courthouses.

I want to emphasize that for the vast majority of municipalities these amendments do not represent a change in the current situation, as these municipalities already provide security in the courthouses within their boundaries. Indeed, these amendments simply codify arrangements made by the previous government in March 1985 when the then Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing announced a $3-per-household increase in the unconditional grants made for policing.

In a statement to the Legislature at that time, the then minister, Dennis Timbrell, who will be remembered by some in the House, indicated that this increase was designed to provide additional assistance in covering the cost of courthouse security as well as the supervision and transfer of prisoners appearing in court. This extra $3-per-household grant, first paid in 1985, translated to payments totalling $8.7 million in the 1986-87 fiscal year.

We believe the existing police agencies in this province are in the best position to judge the level of security required in our courthouses. The province’s responsibility in this area continues to be met through the inclusion of security features in new court facilities and the upgrading of such features in older courthouses.

In the past, some municipalities have benefited from special arrangements they have made with the government to cover costs of courthouse security. When this bill is passed, these arrangements will end. The government believes that all municipalities should be placed on the same footing.

We have discussed the general principle of this bill with the Courts Advisory Committee, composed of the chief justices and chief judges of the courts in the province. They concur with the government’s decision that the security of the users of our courthouses is best ensured by using the trained police officers who serve all the residents of the province.

I have indicated to them that while municipal forces and the Ontario Provincial Police will provide general security for the courthouses, the sheriff and his officers will continue their traditional role of ensuring decorum within the courtrooms.

RESPONSES

SERVICES EN FRANÇAIS

Mlle Martel: Au nom du Nouveau Parti démocratique, qu’il me soit permis de souligner le deuxième anniversaire de la Loi 8.

II y a deux ans, l’Assemblée a adopté à l’unanimité la Loi 8. Cette loi avait pour but d’offrir des services gouvernementaux à la population franco-ontarienne dans les régions désignées. Le gouvernement s’est donné trois ans pour mettre en oeuvre les mécanismes nécessaires pour assurer la disponibilité des services.

Malgré les efforts du président de la Commission des services en français de l’Ontario, M. Gérard Raymond, je crains que l’application de la Loi ne soit pas complétée en 1989. Il reste encore beaucoup à faire afin que toutes les parties impliquées comprennent pleinement leurs obligations.

Il sera important, dans l’avenir, de mieux informer le public sur cette Loi. J’encourage donc le gouvernement à lancer une campagne publicitaire qui expliquerait en détail les différents aspects de la Loi 8.

J’aimerais aussi souhaiter bonne chance au ministre délégué aux Affaires francophones (M. Grandmaître) en ce qui concerne la tâche qui l’attend.

FRENCH-LANGUAGE HEALTH SERVICES

Mr. Reville: I would like to respond to the statement today by the Minister of Health (Mrs. Caplan), en anglais seulement. While this party obviously is pleased to receive news of another community health centre and that the government is going to provide startup operating funding and capital funding for service that will begin next year, we have to point out with regret that the minister is taking tiny steps indeed towards a health system which will have much more reliance on community health centres than it currently does. All members of the Legislature will know that over the years this party has insisted strongly that community health centres are one of the ways to reduce the pressure on hospital services, pressure that we hear about more and more often every day.

We notice with regret as well that the Ministry of Health continues to aver that community health centres can improve access to health care for target groups at the local level. Of course, our quarrel with the targeting of community health is that we believe community health centres have a far broader application than clearly does the Ministry of Health and we think that in this regard the Ministry of Health is quite wrong. Yes, target groups can benefit from community health centres, but so can all people who are desirous of preventive health services.

I note, as well, that the proposal involves accommodation services to French-speaking patients travelling to Toronto for specialized care. Does this mean the Ministry of Health is finally going to repair the inadequacies of the northern travel grants which have been pointed out to the minister over and over again, particularly by my colleagues from the north?

Clearly, equitable access to health care is important in French as well as in other languages. We do not believe we have achieved a health care system in this province that gives equitable access to people in any language.

SERVICES EN FRANÇAIS / FRENCH-LANGUAGE SERVICES

M. Villeneuve: Au nom de mon parti et en mon nom personnel, je me joins au ministre délégué aux Affaires francophones (M. Grandmaître) pour reconnaître le deuxième anniversaire de la Loi 8 sur les services en français. Je peux aussi admirer, comme le ministre délégué aux Affaires francophones l’a mentionné hier, lors de la réception fêtant le deuxième anniversaire, le fait d’une croissance grandissante d’employés francophones parmi la fonction publique de l’Ontario.

En octobre 1987, j’ai écrit au premier ministre (M. Peterson) en lui demandant de créer un comité gouvernemental dans le but d’examiner les intentions du gouvernement en ce qui a trait à la mise en vigueur de la Loi sur les services en français. Cela aurait pu éviter toute confusion et inquiétude parmi la population ontarienne. Malheureusement, le premier ministre a refusé la création d’un tel comité.

Par contre, je ne peux m’empêcher de faire part de quelques souvenirs lorsque mon chef parlementaire a mentionné que le gouvernement voulait célébrer le deuxième anniversaire de cette loi.

Deux ans peut sembler une éternité pour certains députés libéraux, mais je dois leur rappeler que le 24 août 1988 était le 17^e anniversaire de l’annonce, par le premier ministre Robarts, de l’établissement des écoles secondaires françaises en Ontario. Cette année, on célèbre aussi le 20^e anniversaire des écoles primaires françaises en Ontario, annoncées par le premier ministre Bill Davis à cette époque.

En 1978, le procureur général Roy McMurtry annonçait la traduction des lois ontariennes. On célèbre cette année le dixième anniversaire de cet important événement. En mai dernier, on aurait pu célébrer le quatrième anniversaire de la disponibilité du français dans nos cours provinciales.

It has always been our party’s policy to expand French-language services where numbers warrant. While we are on the subject of anniversaries of significant legislative initiatives, it might be useful to remind the new members of the Liberal Party opposite that Ontario has a long history of progressive, social, sensitive legislation. The first human rights statute in the contemporary era was the Racial Discrimination Act, 1944. This is the 44th anniversary of this initiative by the then Premier George Drew.

In 1951 we passed the Fair Employment Practices Act and the Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act. It is also the 26th anniversary, in 1988, of the Ontario Human Rights Code and the 30th anniversary of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, established by the Honourable Leslie Frost.

I could go on and on and mention many other anniversaries. However, we want to acknowledge the second anniversary of Bill 8 and also remember that this is the 20th anniversary of the Progressive Conservative motion in this House to permit the use of both English and French in this Legislature.

COMPUTERS-IN-EDUCATION GRANTS PROGRAM

Mr. Jackson: I would like to respond to the rather incredible statement by the Minister of Education (Mr. Ward) regarding computers in education. Today’s announcement is a reconstituted announcement of one he made last year. In fact, it masks over the outrage from boards all across Ontario when the very same Minister of Education cancelled promised funds for computers.

He is well aware of the impact. It put boards all across Ontario in the most awkward position of having to cancel orders. Some they could not cancel; they had penalties to pay. Other boards were forced to buy the equipment. Based on his promise, which he cancelled, they were forced to buy that equipment and pass that expense directly on to taxpayers.

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Instead of the minister seeking a headline today, he should be guided by the headlines he has already created for school boards across Ontario. For example: “The Timiskaming School Board Returns Seven Computers,” thanks to his decision; “Cutback in Government Funding Means a Shortage of Computers for Elementary Pupils,” thanks to his government; “Reduction in Grant Means Public Boards Must Pay More for New Computers,” thanks to his government; “RC Trustees Decide to Find the Cash to Keep the Computers” his government promised.

There is an expression in computers that there are bits and bytes; those are the key components of computers. Today the minister has walked into this House with a two-bit announcement and all it does is take a bigger bite out of local property taxpayers in this province.

ORAL QUESTIONS

OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY

Mr. B. Rae: I have some questions for the Minister of Labour about the very tragic situation at Libbey Owens Ford in Lindsay where there are, as the minister will recall from question period yesterday and from last week, a number of workers who have been terminated and fired by the company because of their health, and a number of other workers who are involved. We understand that there is a woman working at the plant who has been advised by her own doctor that she is in fact now sensitized to isocyanates. She sees what happens to those individuals who, under the medical surveillance program, are so classified: they are terminated by the company.

I wonder if the minister can tell us what he thinks this woman should do. Should she report her health condition or should she simply keep it to herself?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: The Leader of the Opposition refers, I think, in the preamble to his question, to some six workers who have already received termination notices after being on leave with pay for periods varying from four months to two and a half months. One has to be very sympathetic to the plight of those workers who, I think everyone agrees, ought not to return to an environment where their health will be put at further risk. The issue really is how we are going to ensure that those workers continue to have an income and continue to have resources to put food on the table, pay their mortgages and all of those sorts of things.

What I should tell my friend the Leader of the Opposition is that I have asked the Workers’ Compensation Board to put those cases on a priority basis and have a determination of their claims, because where a worker’s health has been imperilled as a result of a situation in a workplace and that worker can no longer work there, it is imperative that the worker compensation system intervene early and provide appropriate compensation.

Mr. B. Rae: There is no scarier word from the minister to workers than that their case has suddenly become a “priority” with the Workers’ Compensation Board.

I hear two very different things from the minister. I hear him saying yesterday to my colleague the member for Hamilton East (Mr. Mackenzie) that the reason these individuals were fired was because there was no place in the entire plant, no spot in the office or anywhere which could be found in which they would be safe, in which they would not be sensitive. There is no place they can work. That is his statement yesterday.

His statement just about five seconds later was that his officials have found that the levels in the plant are okay; there is no problem with the level of isocyanates in the plant.

I find a contradiction between those two statements. The minister cannot have it both ways. He cannot have a plant in which the substances are so volatile and so widespread throughout the plant that workers who are sensitized -- and there may in fact be as many as 100 of those workers -- cannot work and at the same time say the levels are safe. There is something wrong with the minister’s law, something wrong with the minister’s legislation --

Mr. Speaker: Question.

Mr. B. Rae: -- something wrong with the way the minister is doing business in the province, if he is saying to those workers who are sick, “You can’t go back anywhere in the plant,” and saying to everyone else, “Don’t worry; it’s A-OK.”

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I do not think I said that at all. I think what I said --

Mr. B. Rae: You did.

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: If the Leader of the Opposition wants to stop hollering for a moment, I think I can clarify what he considers to be inconsistencies and show him that these are not inconsistencies. He knows full well that sensitization to isocyanates can take place over an extended period of time. Back in 1987, ministry officials went into Libbey Owens Ford and put into place a number of orders and control programs to ensure that Libbey Owens Ford was always under the acceptable levels of isocyanates in the workplace. Those orders are now being complied with.

What I said yesterday and what I will tell the Leader of the Opposition today, is that as a result of those control orders being put into place and as a result of further investigation being done by the health and safety support services branch of my ministry and inspectors, and medical surveillance orders being put into place, the atmosphere today is safe. But I should tell him that isocyanate sensitization can happen over a period of time. Even with those orders being complied with, a worker who has been sensitized to isocyanates ought not to return to that environment. Surely the member could understand that.

Mr. Mackenzie: Surely the minister understands that given a process of beginning to be sensitized to the isocyanates means that even levels lower than the levels normally associated with being safe can affect these workers.

Will the minister not understand that history has a way of repeating itself. We took a hell of a long time to come up with standards that dealt with asbestos workers, and an awful lot of people were sick and died in the meantime. We did the same thing with the miners in the gold mines of northern Ontario, and their widows suffered for many years. We may have the same thing happening now with aluminium dust in a number of our plants in Ontario. We have the same situation with isocyanates. This is why the minister has to move in that plant and has to move now, and he does not do it by allowing a company to fire workers because it has made them sick.

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I want to remind the member for Hamilton East that the regulation of substances of this sort, of isocyanates and other hazardous substances, is now done through the work of a joint labour-management committee. In fact, the members of that committee, working together, have determined jointly what acceptable levels or tolerable levels of isocyanates in the atmosphere ought to be. If he is suggesting to me that I ought to ask that committee to review the determination that has been made, that is a fair suggestion. We may very well have to do that.

I want to tell him and the Leader of the Opposition, though, that under Bill 162, which is currently being debated in this House, the level of compensation for the workers who must, withdraw from the workplace under these circumstances would be full compensation and, second, that this bill provides that employers in these circumstances must re-employ their workers and indeed suggests and requires --

Interjections.

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: Let me finish -- suggests and requires that employers under these circumstances would design modified work to get those workers back to work as quickly as possible.

Mr. Speaker: New question. The Leader of the Opposition.

Mr. B. Rae: I want to keep going to the minister on this question. I am going to be coming back to the question of the ambulance drivers later on, but I am so dissatisfied with the answers I have had from the minister that I feel obliged to pursue this series of questions.

Again, what advice does the minister have for the woman whose name I cannot give him because I do not want to make that decision for her? I want the minister to tell us what his advice is. The company has taken the position and has made it very clear that as soon as it has that information with respect to sensitivity to isocyanates, it is going to terminate.

They are not worried about the Workers’ Compensation Board; they are not in a relationship with it. They are simply terminating that employment relationship.

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I want to ask the minister: What is he going to do to stop the company from terminating people without any assurance that they are in fact going to get coverage from the Workers’ Compensation Board? The minister knows there have been claims galore on isocyanates alone that have been refused consistently by the board and in which workers are like ping-pong balls. They go back and forth between the board and the company, they are out of work and they do not get any compensation.

I want to know what the minister is going to do to guarantee workers that the company is going to keep them on and not simply terminate them for the simple reason that working at that company has made those workers sick.

Mr. Speaker: Thank you. The question has been asked twice.

Mr. B. Rae: What is he going to do to save those workers?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: Obviously, I do not want to comment on the situation of a worker based on the facts presented to me by the Leader of the Opposition. I simply reiterate what I said yesterday, that first, there are a number of recourses that, obviously, will be proceeded with immediately. A grievance under the collective agreement is the first and most available.

Second, it may very well be that matter should come, on an urgent basis, before the Ontario Labour Relations Board. Third, ministry inspectors will be there and are on site to determine if any of the actions taken by the company represent a reprisal.

The fourth point I can only reiterate, and that is, what we need in this province, desperately, is a statutory provision requiring employers to ensure employment of their injured workers just as soon as those workers are healthy and ready to go back to work. That is what Bill 162 provides, and that is the bill that I hope we can get passed in this House quickly so we can resolve problems like this.

Mr. B. Rae: Bill 162 is a complete red herring. The minister has already said in this House that they cannot go back to that particular workplace. He has accepted the company’s arguments that said sensitivity is such that they could not go back. Bill 162 has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The minister is bringing this in and it has got nothing to do with the situation.

My question for the minister is a different one. This is not a case of one dismissal, one termination in a plant, with respect to a question of insubordination or something else. The minister knows full well that the termination grievance can take as long as a year or a year and a half before it is finally settled.

This is a question of a pattern. There is an isocyanate problem in that plant. It is not isolated to one worker; it covers several workers. I am saying to the minister: What guarantee is he prepared to give to those workers that they will not be terminated by the company until such time as there are firm guarantees with respect to their future in terms of workers’ compensation and other benefits?

Mr. Speaker: The minister.

Mr. B. Rae: You cannot simply leave people out on the street with no benefits, no protection --

Mr. Speaker: Order. The member asked the question some time ago. Minister.

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: Just on Bill 162, I think if the Leader of the Opposition wants to review the provisions, he will see in that bill references as well to requiring employers to undertake modified work plans to ensure that workers can get back to work.

The situation we have here is a medical determination that it would be inappropriate for those workers to return to that workplace. In those situations, it is urgent; I agree that compensation matters should be adjudicated just as quickly as possible so that appropriate compensation can be paid. Beyond that, the grievance procedure has to be used, and certainly in the interim short-term sickness and disability plans available to the employees in that situation would compensate the individual workers.

Mr. B. Rae: There are notices going up on the company’s bulletin boards with respect to what has gone on. The company is accusing the trade union of being involved in an organized work stoppage. There are major disputes going on within the company right now as I speak, with accusations being made by the company with respect to concerted activity by employees. The minister himself is in possession of a letter from Mr. Nickerson, who is the secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Auto Workers, who says to the minister, “We are aware of individuals who have been told by their doctors that their breathing is getting progressively worse and the comment has been made that there is no way they are going to let the company find out because they do not want to be fired.”

The minister’s response is, “Use the grievance procedure,” which every worker in that plant knows can take as long as a year to a year and a half in terms of ultimately getting to an end of that process. That is how badly jammed up the labour arbitration process is in this province, and the minister should know that as Minister of Labour.

I would like to ask the minister: Get with it, get on to it. He has workers who are being fired. He has people who are afraid to tell the company they are getting sick because they know they are going to get fired. Why does the minister not tell the company to clean up its act and make sure that people are not getting fired in this province simply because they are getting sick?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I want to assure the Leader of the Opposition that our inspectors in the Ministry of Labour have not only issued orders but also have stopped work in that facility until orders have been complied with, and that there are ventilation systems going in to that facility as a result of Ministry of Labour orders and other steps being taken, including the requirement that workers work with respirators that are clean-air, fresh-air supplied. Those steps have been taken.

The fact is that the circumstances in that plant today, as reported to me by my inspectors, now comply with the regulations governing isocyanates. If he is suggesting to me that we need new standards in respect to isocyanates, I will take his suggestion seriously and I will bring that matter to those members of the Joint Steering Committee on Hazardous Substances in the Workplace and ask them to consider that and review their evaluations and their determinations based on the circumstances at Libbey Owens Ford. But I cannot tell him that tomorrow I can bring out a set of new standards that change the dynamic of that facility.

Mr. D. S. Cooke: So everything is okay?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: You know it is not.

PAY EQUITY IN HOSPITALS

Mr. Brandt: My question as well is to the Minister of Labour. It relates to a speech the minister made very recently with respect to the question of pay equity. In that speech the minister indicated that 13 months from now adjustments for nurses will start to be made; it is a historic adjustment that will make a very significant difference because it will put nurses on a different plateau. Let me state, before I ask my question, that we agree with the adjustments that will be made under pay equity and we believe those adjustments are positive and progressive, and we favour them and applaud them.

What I would like to know is if the minister did in fact make this statement, and does he agree that is a statement that is in context in the speech that he delivered?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I am not sure what the leader of the third party is quoting from, but he is not quoting from the speech that I gave to the Ontario Nurses’ Association, I think it was two or three days ago, at the commencement of their annual meeting here in Toronto.

I think what he is quoting from is a newspaper article, and what I said to the reporter at the time, trying to explain pay equity, was that the Pay Equity Act is to eliminate gender discrimination in the pay package in situations where there are female-dominated classes and that the effect of the pay equity legislation is to redress, under the terms of the act, by the development of a pay equity plan, an appropriate regime for eliminating gender discrimination. Given the fact that hospitals come within the broader public sector provisions of the act, adjustments under those pay equity plans would have to begin 13 months from now.

Mr. Brandt: I appreciate the minister explaining what pay equity is all about. I know that really did not touch at the heart of the question that I raised with him and I indicated our support for the concept of pay equity.

What I really wanted to know is if the minister said the words that I repeated in this House, and if he agrees with them -- and I assume that he does because he certainly did not challenge the remarks as being his own -- then my question to the minister is this. In the context of his remarks he said that the nurses would now be reaching a historic plateau. That presumes they are at a certain point now in terms of the pay they will be receiving or that they are in fact receiving at this time and that they will over a period of time, some 13 months from now, be receiving an adjustment, to use the minister’s words, which will result in a historic plateau.

Could the minister give this House some indication of what the cost of that historic plateau will be over a reasonable number of years, the four- to five-year period of adjustment that I believe the government agrees is going to be necessary? How much will that cost?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I am pretty sure of one thing. I do not think I used the term “historic plateau.” I think probably I did say that the Pay Equity Act was historic legislation in that it was the first comprehensive legislation in Canada to address the inequities that exist in our legislation and the undervaluation of work done by women in many circumstances in the province.

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What I said was, what the pay equity legislation does, in general terms -- and this would apply to hospitals as it would apply to every other workplace covered by the Pay Equity Act -- is require employers to begin to make adjustments to pay based on determinations of underpayment, as identified by pay equity plans. That would apply to hospitals and in that sense that represents a new plateau, an identification of what the starting point should be; and the act requires, as the leader of the third party knows perfectly well, adjustments for hospitals must begin to be made some 13 months from now.

Mr. Brandt: In the minister’s response he indicated that the employers would have to be making some kinds of adjustments in order to prepare for pay equity and the additional costs that are part and parcel of that entire package of adjustments. I agree with that. But the minister must also be aware that the Ministry of Health is going to have to make those adjustments surely by early in 1989, so that at the point of the implementation period there is going to be some certainty with respect to hospital budgets relative to the cost of this program. I will again repeat that our estimate is that the cost is $115 million over a four- to five-year period. If that figure is incorrect, then please correct the figure.

I would like to ask the minister whether he and his cabinet colleagues have made a determination as to when they are going to advise hospitals as to what level of increase in transfer grants will be provided to individual hospitals to cover the pay equity program and when that will take place.

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I think it would be inappropriate in the extreme for this minister or anyone else to make public suggestions as to a figure. My friend, the leader of the third party, suggests a figure. The member knows perfectly well that at this very moment the Ontario Hospital Association and the Ontario Nurses’ Association are in the midst of discussions to work out details as to the development of pay equity plans.

The determination of the workplace parties talking together about how they will proceed with job classification and job identification and evaluation within their particular institutions or perhaps, if they choose, on a province-wide basis, is something that those parties are going to work out. They will identify the inequities and they will make the determinations and then the procedure will unfold. But for him to suggest, or for this minister to suggest, that my research team or his research team or whoever’s research team, has made this estimation – I think that it would be just inappropriate.

AMBULANCE SERVICES

Mr. Harris: The Minister of Health will be aware, I am sure, of the Shapiro report that was released. It indicated that there were varying standards of ambulance service across this province -- in training, staffing, wages and unequal access to service. I was disappointed in the minister’s response to the study when she indicated, “We will study the report and then we will have another whole study of our own again,” -- which seems to be this government’s response to everything that comes along.

I wonder if the minister could tell me what she disagrees with in the Shapiro report that is necessitating a whole other major study by her ministry, and I wonder if she could explain the statement attributed to her in the Toronto Sun today that says, “Ontario residents cannot expect ambulance services to be the same across the province.” Is that really what the minister said, and if it is, why can ambulance services not be the same across this province?

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: I think that it is important as we discuss ambulance services in this province -- and I would like to acknowledge today in the gallery emergency medical attendants and acknowledge the role that they play in delivering services in the province; that in fact we have one of the finest ambulance services in North America. They come from other provinces to see how we do what we do, given our geographic differences, our urban and rural differences. In fact, I appreciate the work that has been done by Mr. Shapiro and took forward to having an opportunity to review it.

Mrs. Marland: I wish that I could stand in this House this afternoon and say I was pleased to see the ambulance drivers here. I would rather see them driving the ambulances, quite frankly.

It is now three and a half months since the Halton-Mississauga ambulances went on strike. That service is now below an acceptable level for the people in the city of Mississauga and the region of Peel. We have two ambulances for 600,000 people.

I would like to ask the minister how she can sit there as Minister of Health and accept that this is an acceptable level when people are being put at risk with the kind of response times that we now have documented in this strike situation.

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: It is important when we discuss this issue that we recognize that negotiations on wages and benefits occur between the employers and the employees. The ministry, as members have heard on previous occasions, monitors the situation to ensure that in fact no one is at risk. The information I have is that emergency services we being maintained.

Mr. Jackson: The minister represents a government that can intervene when students’ education is at risk, but it seems to be reluctant to participate when people’s lives are at stake. That is a double standard.

This strike is in its 100th day. People in Halton in my riding believe this to be an absolutely unacceptable level of risk. The stories have been coming through the telephones, story after story, of high risk. The fire department in Burlington is making contingency plans to extend emergency medical training to firefighters.

Is the minister not even looking at some form of plan? Has she not got something on the boards that she is examining which at least will have to deal with the potential for a dual, parallel strike which will accelerate the risk levels in these two communities of Halton and Mississauga not to unacceptable but to life-threatening? When is she going to get a plan? When is she going to provide some stability for health care planning in our regions?

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: As the member knows, we recently appointed an emergency services coordinator within the ministry so that, in fact, we could review our emergency services planning both on a provincial basis and on a regional basis.

We have made a lot of progress in the past two years. We have added some $12 million to emergency services in 101 communities across this province. One of the reasons our service is as good as it is is that we are always trying to improve it and make it better.

I want to assure the member that we monitor to make sure that no one is at risk and that emergency services are being maintained. The information I have is that this is so.

Mr. B. Rae: The ambulance service in question normally has 10 ambulances. It now has five.

We have information showing that response times can be as long as 20 minutes, and in some exceptional cases will be even longer than that.

Dr. Shapiro, in his report on the public inquiry into ambulance and emergency services, says that anything longer than five minutes is not acceptable and in fact can be described as a risk to health and indeed to life.

Did the minister consider an incident on August 20, 1988, at nine o’clock in the evening when an 80-year-old male with vital signs absent waited approximately 20 minutes for an ambulance, when the police were on the scene within five minutes; or one on October 22, 1988, at four o’clock in the afternoon at the comer of Airport Road and Derry Road with a male patient with vital signs absent? The Peel Regional police had to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The ambulance took at least 20 minutes to arrive and it came from Bolton.

We have a hodgepodge system that is clearly breaking down. We have a ministry that is responsible for the level of wages and it turns around and says, “This is a private arrangement between the private employer and the ambulance drivers,” where, surely, this is a service that is for health. It is not for profit; it is for people. When is the minister going to step in and create a province-wide ambulance service worthy of the name, worthy in fact of the service that the people who are in the gallery today want to provide?

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Hon. Mrs. Caplan: Let me assure the leader of the official opposition that if at any time he has individual cases about which he has concern, he knows that I would be equally concerned and I would be pleased to investigate those.

I want to tell the member that I met with Mr. Shapiro, that we discussed some of his recommendations and that I assured him the ministry appreciated the work he had done, that I was aware of the work he did as a former chairman of the Toronto board of health -- and I knew him in those days as well -- that we would treat his report seriously and that we would review his recommendations.

Mr. B. Rae: Mr. Shapiro has overwhelming evidence that the system is fractured, that it does not work properly, that some drivers are significantly underpaid, that there are no province-wide standards with respect to training; that people who work harder, train more or take advanced courses do not get any difference in their pay; that there are enormous problems of burnout and low morale; and that, in fact, it is a service that is not working effectively across the province.

We have people who have been out on strike for 100 days because they are working for a private-profit operator who is not prepared to negotiate some questions that need to be negotiated and dealt with. The minister pretends she has nothing to do with it, that it is some other movie she is not involved with. She is the Minister of Health; she is responsible for the delivery of health care services in the province --

Mr. Reville: She pays the bills.

Mr. B. Rae: -- and she pays the bills. She is the silent partner at the negotiating table. When will the minister realize that there needs to be a coordinated, comprehensive plan for ambulance services in this province which recognizes that it is a public service, that it should not be operated for profit, should not be operated here one way, there another way, taken away here, added on there, in a hodgepodge, unplanned way and that it should be seen as a service which all --

Mr. Speaker: Thank you. I think there was a question somewhere there.

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: Not only is our service recognized across Canada -- and, in fact, early in December people are coming from Alberta, whose legislative committee said Alberta should model its system after Ontario’s -- but it is also recognized internationally. They come from Pennsylvania, from New Zealand and from Brazil.

Let me tell the Leader of the Opposition not only some of the features that make our system special but also the kind of coordinated approach that those from other jurisdictions are looking at. We have an integrated communications capability, we have defined qualifications for personnel and we have legislated standards. As well, we have integrated land and air ambulance elements.

We are constantly monitoring and reviewing to make it better. We seek advice from a number of places: from the district health councils, from consultants, from all those who have an interest, including the operators and the emergency medical attendants. We listen and then we make appropriate changes based on resource allocation, on a provincial as well as a regional basis.

Mr. Speaker: New question, the member for London North (Mrs. Cunningham).

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: The member for Burlington South (Mr. Jackson), please allow your colleague to ask a question -- and the Treasurer (Mr. R. F. Nixon) and the member for Hamilton East (Mr. Mackenzie).

EXTENDED CARE

Mrs. Cunningham: My question is for the Minister without Portfolio responsible for senior citizens’ affairs. The most frightening thing facing our seniors today is certainly not trumped-up scare tactics about free trade. No, the biggest thing facing our seniors is this government’s complete inaction to live up to its commitments to our elderly citizens. Many seniors are wondering what happened to the integrated homemaker program, hearing-aid funding and, perhaps of most importance, the extended care legislation.

When is the minister going to announce details of the rationalization legislation for extended care that brings about fairness and equity for all residents in nursing homes and homes for the aged!

Hon. Mrs. Wilson: This government, in our white paper A New Agenda: Health and Social Service Strategies for Ontario’s Seniors, committed itself to rationalizing the extended care program. We currently have, through historical means, three different acts under two different ministries. My intention is to develop one new, improved piece of legislation that will move towards rationalizing extended care for all extended care providers in the province.

Mrs. Cunningham: I have letters here from the honourable minister saying that she is unable to comment on the issue because of legal action. I have another letter from the Minister of Health (Mrs. Caplan) responding to a citizen, dated October 20, saying that she is unable to comment because of legal action. I also have a letter dated October 19 from the Premier (Mr. Peterson), who states, “The government of Ontario is undertaking a major revision and rationalization of the extended care program, which will result in the development of new extended care legislation for all providers.” The minister has confirmed the Premier’s statement. I am assuming that we are working together in that government. The question is, when will the legislation be introduced?

Hon. Mrs. Wilson: As the member is aware, the Ontario Nursing Home Association launched a legal suit with regard to funding of nursing homes within the province. That issue is now before the courts, and for that reason it would be inappropriate of me to comment on the tithing. The suit is before the courts at this time.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: I wonder if I could remind the member for London North (Mrs. Cunningham), as well as other members, that we have a standing order 24(b).

An hon. member: We know about that.

Mr. Speaker: I believe you have all heard of that before. I wish you would remember it.

ONTARIO ECONOMY

Mr. Owen: I have a question for the Treasurer. Statistics show that 33 cents of every dollar earned in this country and one out of every three jobs are drawn from our exports, and 80 per cent of those exports go to the United States. At the present time, we are witnessing a weakening United States economy. It is a belief that US economic growth will continue to deteriorate.

Will the minister share with us his reaction to the US slowdown and what, if anything, the province of Ontario can do to cushion the detrimental effects that will take place on this economy?

Hon. R. F. Nixon: I thank the honourable member for giving me notice of this important question. I also want to tell him that he is entirely correct when he brings to the attention of the House that the economy of Canada tends to follow what happens in the United States with some time delay. When things deteriorate in the United States, it is important for us.

Our assessment of what might be called a deterioration in the United States, however, is not that. It is that the rate of growth is reducing somewhat, to about 2.2 per cent to 2.5 per cent, which is seen by economists internationally as a much more sustainable rate than has been experienced. Our own projection, which I hope to table in the House in the next two or three weeks, would indicate that our own rate of growth will come down next year to something about three per cent, which is less than it was this year but still substantial growth, and we consider it to be sustainable.

Since the honourable member gave me notice I had a chance to look at some of the statistics. There have been some surges, particularly in retail purchases in the United States, which grew by about 0.7 per cent last month, indicating consumer ability to be quite strong in purchasing growth. We are not at this point seriously concerned about any sort of recession, but in fact real growth in the United States will continue and we trust and hope it will be reflected in Ontario and Canada.

Mr. Owen: The figures are now out for the third quarter, and they show that the economic growth in the United States has actually slowed down to 2.2 per cent. This would appear to be their slowest rate of growth in over two years. My question to the minister, my concern --

Mr. Brandt: Don’t worry about it. You don’t want to trade with them, anyway.

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Mr. Owen: That is right. My concern is that the signals are shifting, as the minister said, to maybe something more moderate, but there are some economists who are saying that it is worse than being moderate and that the situation could worsen substantially. I would like to have the Treasurer’s reaction to that.

Hon. R. F. Nixon: I agree with the more optimistic economists that a 2.2 per cent rate of growth is sustainable growth. After a tremendous expansion over the last few years, it is my view, frankly, that whatever the people of Canada decide on Monday and whatever the next government of Canada decides, whether there is a free trade agreement or not, there will be expanding trade because we have resources and abilities here.

Interjections.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Hon. R. F. Nixon: That is right. There is no doubt that the concerns that have been expressed by thoughtful Canadians have to do with many aspects of the free trade deal. They have to do with the removal of the control of our energy resources, the control of our trade involving our agricultural sector, and the list is well known to every reasonable observer. They would agree that the free trade agreement, as put forward, is a deal which is unsupportable.

The honourable member has indicated clearly that those measures which control the strength of our economy are those which are in fact controlled by the government of Canada, having to do with the money supply, interest rates and the rate of inflation. These are the matters which must concern us when we consider the rates of growth here.

WORKERS’ COMPENSATION

Miss Martel: I have a question for the Minister of Labour concerning Bill 162 and the dual award system. In particular, I want to deal with the future-loss-of-earnings benefit.

The minister will know there has been a great deal of concern expressed by members on both sides of the House about this benefit in light of what is already happening at the Workers’ Compensation Board around pension supplements, and that is that the board is deeming workers capable of doing jobs they do not have or have never done before. The board is then basing payments on those jobs instead of on the actual employment situation of those workers. As a consequence, workers across the province are being cut off supplements or are being denied supplements.

I would like to ask the minister how he is going to prevent the same type of thing from happening with this benefit under Bill 162.

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: I think that is a very good question from the member for Sudbury East and I think that discussion of the very issue she has raised may well be the basis of a number of submissions when the bill goes to committee.

I want to tell her, though, in anticipation of that, that the way in which Bill 162 is designed -- and I hope and fully expect that further design work may be done as committee members analyse the specific words -- is to ensure that there is a better set of rules for making those sorts of determinations.

For example, in the bill we have used the phrase “suitable and available work.” Right now, the basis for paying temporary supplements really is a matter of policy and guidelines, and there are no clear statutory guidelines, so I think the approach we are taking in Bill 162 will be a clearer and more direct direction to the Workers’ Compensation Board to provide both parts of the award in the dual award system on a basis far fairer and far more just than supplements that are being paid today.

Miss Martel: I want to go back to the case in Saskatchewan, because that province does have the dual system in place now. The minister will know that when I spoke on this on second reading, I pointed out what a legislative review committee in that province said about the dual system. It was this: The present practice of deeming occurs continually, and the board interpreted and applied the legislation in a way which undermined the spirit of the legislators of that province. In particular, workers were being cut off because they were being deemed capable of work they were not qualified to do. They could not obtain the employment in any place and they also could not get a rate of pay that the board deemed them capable of obtaining.

I would like to ask the minister, given that this is the case in Saskatchewan, where they have the dual system, how can he continue to propose that same type of system here?

Hon. Mr. Sorbara: Simply because when we were designing the dual award system for Ontario we were quite concerned about this business of deeming and the business of the so-called phantom jobs, and we looked at the problems that Saskatchewan was having with its system. In fact, I personally phoned the minister in Saskatchewan and asked him what problems he was having, and he identified the very problems that the member for Sudbury East is talking about. Then we designed our legislation to avoid those problems, to put statutory criteria in and to provide for regulation-making power so that the rules and regulations governing how the second part, the income maintenance part of the dual award system, will work. We ensured that we guarantee that the worker has an opportunity to have that reviewed at every stage under specific, clear guidelines that are written out in statute and set in regulation, and with the additional right of appeal should a worker feel that those rules and regulations have not been appropriately applied to his or her case.

TRADE WITH UNITED STATES

Mr. Harris: I have a question for the Minister of Industry, Trade and Technology. Putting aside for the moment the Canada-US free trade agreement -- I do not mind returning to that -- before I ask the minister to comment on the merits of that particular package that is before us now and to allow that dialogue to proceed in the proper context, I would first like to ask the minister, could he tell us, yes or no, if he supports the concept of free trade with the US?

Hon. Mr. Kwinter: I would be delighted to. My government, myself and my Premier (Mr. Peterson) have said from day one that we have no quarrel with the concept of free trade. We are opposed to the deal. We think it is a bad deal, and we think we gave away far too much for what we got. The only problem that we have -- and I think everyone should realize this -- is that we are not discussing free trade. It is a misnomer. There is nothing “free trade” about this agreement. It is a bilateral trade agreement that has no relationship whatsoever to the concept of free trade.

Mr. Harris: All I asked the minister was, did he support the concept? I did not ask for a lecture on the metaphysics of trade. I do not know how illuminating members found that.

Hon. Mr. Conway: This would not be a setup?

Mr. Harris: No, it is not, and I would like to --

Mrs. Cunningham: You should know about that, Sean.

Hon. Mr. Conway: That is why I asked.

Hon. Mr. Scott: Let us have the supplementary and get on with it.

Mr. Harris: I thought I was being very sincere and very upfront.

Let me ask the minister, in his role as spear carrier for Canada’s prince of protectionism, who is currently exercising his veto over the free trade deal in the Far East, can he tell us how the rejection of the Canada-US free trade agreement will encourage trade liberalization at the multinational level, how it will advance negotiations at the current General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade round and whether or not, when the minister attends the GATT mid-term review in Montreal, he is going to go there with a bag over his head?

Hon. Mr. Kwinter: I think it is important that all members know that these two issues are not mutually exclusive. We have been supporters of the GATT process. We are going to be participating in Montreal on December 5. We have been actively pursuing our trade relationships with the Pacific Rim, with our traditional partners in Europe and with the United States.

I should remind members that we have the largest trading relationship in the history of the world, and what is more important -- and I think the member should understand -- as far as trading, when you take a look at the United States, we buy more from them than the United Kingdom, Japan, West Germany, France and Italy combined. So we have a very important role to play in that particular relationship, and all we want is something where we have equity. The deal itself is not equitable. We have given away far too much for what we have got. We think that we could have achieved as much through GATT, and if we had had a good deal we would have supported it.

PLASTIC PACKAGING

Ms. Collins: My question is for the Minister of the Environment. As the minister is aware, plastic packaging is causing increasingly serious environmental problems in our society. Last June this assembly unanimously endorsed my resolution calling upon the minister to establish a plastics waste management program. Would the minister please outline the steps his ministry has taken to date or plans to take in the near future to implement this motion.

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Mrs. Cunningham: In 30 seconds.

Hon. Mr. Bradley: I will certainly try to do that as expeditiously as possible.

It is a very good question. It was, as the member has pointed out, the subject of her resolution in this House. I can tell her, for instance, that the PET, or polyethylene terephthalate bottle, which is a plastic bottle on the market, in fact is currently being collected in most of the municipalities as part of the blue box program. We want that to be in all municipalities.

To move beyond the blue box program, which I think everybody would agree is important, I have had initiated, with representatives of the plastics industry of Canada, the Grocery Products Manufacturers of Canada and the Packaging Association of Canada, a number of discussions between our ministry officials and those people, because we would like it to be similar to the soft drink industry which in fact provided a lot of money, $20 million, and some resources to make recycling work.

We are developing joint 4R, or reduction, reuse, recycling and recovery strategies for consumer and for commercial and industrial packaging. The ministry, along with the Society of Plastics Industries of Canada and TransOntario Plastics, is jointly funding a special project in the Ottawa area at a cost of $165,000. This project will provide information for future plastics programs.

The Recycling Advisory Committee and Ontario Multi-Material Recycling Inc. have commissioned a waste management strategy that will include a packaging strategy. It will be submitted to the minister, I understand, by December of this year.

Ms. Collins: Although my resolution affirmed a clear preference for 4R in the development of a plastics waste management policy, it also recognized that safe and environmentally sound degradation may be a desirable method of waste disposal in certain instances, and called upon the minister to take a number of actions to investigate further the degradability option. Would the minister please outline his ministry’s plans in this regard.

Hon. Mr. Bradley: Very briefly, I agree that, first of ail, we must put recycling of plastics as a first priority. There are few people out there who are concerned about waste management who would not recognize that. Many of the environmental and industry groups in the province believe that degradable plastics make the recycling of plastics difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, I am indicating that I believe the jury is still out on whether biodegradable or degradable products, for instance, are the way to go.

The ministry will jointly investigate the science of these biodegradable plastics. This study will take into account the photodegradability and the biodegradability parameters, the effects of the byproducts and the degradable products.

In other words, essentially what we are doing, to put it in a nutshell, is investigating very carefully all aspects of degradability to ensure that in the method we follow, and I prefer recycling, recycling is not detrimentally affected by this and that the degradability of products does not cause contaminant problems.

WATER QUALITY

Mrs. Grier: My question is also to the Minister of the Environment. The standing committee on general government has now had two meetings to discuss the estimates of the Ministry of the Environment. We meet again today, by which time most of the allotted time will have passed and we will have listened to the minister for at least two hours; it seems like more.

For the last two weeks, my staff have been attempting to obtain the latest report on the discharges by industries into the province’s waterways, because this would have been most useful in preparing for the minister’s estimates. The 1987 industrial discharge report was sent to my office half an hour ago.

Can the minister tell the House whether the release of this very important document, which is the most important document in reviewing the ministry’s performance with respect to waterways, late on a Thursday afternoon and late in the discussion of his estimates was by accident or by design?

Hon. Mr. Bradley: I used to be suspicious when I was in opposition as well, I can recall. In fact, it was released today, not late this afternoon. I think, first of all, that we will have time this afternoon in the estimates of the Ministry of the Environment, and of course we will have time next week.

If my calculation is correct, next Thursday -- it will not be Monday or Tuesday, that kind of thing, where we would be right back into it -- we will have the opportunity to discuss this at some length, in both the morning and the afternoon sessions of the general government committee.

I think there will be a full and good discussion. I have enjoyed, so far, the presentations that have been made by the opposition critics. I have really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to respond to their very good questions that have been directed to me. I will certainly continue to do so as we proceed through the estimates to determine whether the policies are those with which the member would agree or not.

Mrs. Grier: I think the time allotted to a ministry’s estimates should bear some relationship to the loquacity of the minister.

In a preliminary review of the report we have just received, one notices there are 300 industries that discharge to the province’s waterways. In 1985, when this minister took office, 147 of them were being monitored. In 1986, the performance had improved and 154 were being monitored. We find now that there are 157 being monitored. Can the minister explain why 143 industries that discharge directly to waterways across Ontario are not even categorized or monitored by his ministry in the report we have now received?

Hon. Mr. Bradley: The member would know that since this reporting system has been established, the number of items looked at has been considerably enhanced. For instance, in terms of sewage treatment plants, the number we now took at, which is beyond the requirements of the International Joint Commission, is rather substantial. She would know that some improvement has taken place in this particular year. I do not think it is sufficient improvement to please me, but there has been that improvement.

She would know that there are cleanup programs in place for those industries that have experienced the most exceedences in 1987, and that we have responded positively for the sewage treatment plants by enhancing the funding, more than doubling the funding from 15 per cent to almost 33 per cent for sewage treatment plants in the enhancement of that.

She would know that as a result of that additional funding, $87 million in additional funding has been provided. She also knows that the municipal-industrial strategy for abatement program will find far more contaminants to look at, not just lumps and colours; a wide range of contaminants will be monitored under the MISA program. This, of course, is going to give an even more detailed picture and a better way to look --

Mr. Speaker: Thank you. New question, the member for Burlington South.

REPORT OF LEGIONNAIRE’S DISEASE

Mr. Jackson: I have a question for the Minister of Health. It has recently come to our attention that there has been an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease discovered at Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital. Could she please confirm that report.

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: It is my understanding that in fact the public health units and the Ministry of Health are investigating right now the reported outbreak at Hamilton Psychiatric.

Mr. Jackson: The minister would also be aware there is a fourfold increase in the number of reported incidents for residents of that institution. There are 180 residents. There has been a fourfold increase in the number of those showing symptoms. She would also be aware that the incubation period of this disease, which is transmitted through the air, is between two and 10 days.

Given that the source of this disease is generally found in the heating and cooling systems of larger institutions like this, has she not only directed her health care people to go in, but also people to examine the air quality and the heating and cooling systems, to help better understand the source of the disease so we can be assured that people in health care facilities in Ontario are not at greater risk because of this disease?

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: I am always concerned when I am made aware of reports of any kind of outbreak of any disease in any institution that might have an impact on public health.

I want to assure the member that Dr. Lorna Browne, associate medical officer of health at the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Health Unit, visited the hospital on November 15 and determined that the situation is under control. In fact, environmental sampling has been undertaken with the assistance of public health labs. I want to assure the member that public health officials from the Hamilton-Wentworth are available with whatever assistance is required from the ministry and the situation is under control.

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LANGUAGE TRAINING

Mr. Faubert: My question is to the Minister of Education. Multicultural communities in the city of Scarborough and throughout the province have received the government’s recent heritage language announcement with much enthusiasm. However, some groups and individuals have expressed to me concern that equal attention must remain focused on English-as-a-second-language training. Can the minister advise this House of initiatives this government has taken to assist ESL training

Hon. Mr. Ward: There is no question that this province has been enriched by a very rapid influx of new Canadians, as many immigrants to this country choose to locate in Ontario, no doubt to take part in the significant prosperity Ontario is currently enjoying as a result of this government’s policies. I think it is also fair to say that this government fully recognizes the need to support that community to help it make the transition and to thrive and prosper in our society.

Over the course of the past three years, for instance, we have increased English-as-a-second-language funding to school boards for day programs by something like 93 per cent. In the past three years, we have increased funding for English-as-a-second-language continuing education programs by somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 per cent.

I think that clearly demonstrates that in we are committed to providing the very necessary services new Canadians will need, and I would encourage our federal counterparts to show the same level of commitment because, frankly, I think they too have a role to play in sharing our commitment to deliver those services to new Canadians.

PETITIONS

POLYCHLORINATED BIPHENYLS

Mr. Mackenzie: I have a petition to the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario which reads as follows:

“No PCBs at Woodward Avenue sewage treatment plant. As a community, we are entitled to a say as to our backyards becoming a storage site for PCBs for the region. We do not want this community to turn into another Love Canal: cancer, birth defects. Stop it now before it is too late.”

It is signed by considerably more than 650 residents of the north end of my riding. I have signed it.

TEACHERS’ SUPERANNUATION FUND

Mr. Owen: I have a petition signed by 41 people.

“To the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“We, the undersigned, beg leave to petition the parliament of Ontario as follows:

“To amend the Teachers’ Superannuation Act, 1993, in order that all teachers who retired prior to May 31, 1982, have their pensions recalculated on the best five years rather than at the present seven or 10 years.

“The proposed amendment would make the five-year criteria applicable to all retired teachers and would eliminate the present inequitable treatment.”

I have signed it as submitted.

RETAIL STORE HOURS

Mr. Sterling: “To the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“We, the undersigned, beg leave to petition the parliament of Ontario as follows:

“On the issue of Sunday shopping, let’s not leave this issue up to the municipalities. This is the responsibility of the provincial government. I say no to Sunday opening.”

This petition has been signed by 47 people from the Ottawa-Carleton area and signed by myself.

I have another petition:

“To the Honourable the Lieutenant Governor and the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“We, the undersigned, beg leave to petition the parliament of Ontario as follows:

“We are opposed to open Sunday shopping and want to retain a common pause day in Ontario.”

This was also signed by many people from the Ottawa-Carleton area -- 125 including people from Nepean, Gloucester and the city of Ottawa. This is also signed by myself.

REPORT

STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT

Mr. Laughren from the standing committee on resources development presented the committee’s report and moved its adoption.

Your committee begs to report the following bill as amended:

Bill 88, An Act to regulate Truck Transportation.

Motion agreed to.

Bill ordered for third reading.

MOTIONS

COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP

Hon. Mr. Conway moved that Mr. Kormos be appointed as a member of the standing committee on regulations and private bills.

Motion agreed to.

PRIVATE MEMBERS’ PUBLIC BUSINESS

Hon. Mr. Conway moved that notwithstanding standing order 71(h), the requirement for notice be waived with respect to resolution 45.

Motion agreed to.

HOUSE SITTING

Hon. Mr. Conway moved that when the House adjourns today, it stand adjourned until 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday. November 22, 1988.

Motion agreed to.

INTRODUCTION OF BILLS

POLICE AND SHERIFFS STATUTE LAW AMENDMENT ACT

Hon. Mr. Scott moved first reading of Bill 187, An Act to amend Certain Acts as they relate to Police and Sheriffs.

Motion agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Scott: This is the bill I referred to in statements this afternoon.

JURIES AMENDMENT ACT

Hon. Mr. Scott moved first reading of Bill 188, An Act to amend the Juries Act.

Motion agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Scott: When the Legislature passed the Equality Rights Statute Law Amendment Act of 1986, it extended the exemptions that are available from jury duty to the spouses of the persons exempted. As a result of an oversight, we did not permit the exemption to extend to common law spouses of the spouses in question, and this major reform is effected by this bill before the House.

PROVINCIAL OFFENCES AND HIGHWAY TRAFFIC AMENDMENT ACT

Hon. Mr. Scott moved first reading of Bill 189, An Act to amend the Provincial Offences Act and the Highway Traffic Act.

Motion agreed to.

Hon. Mr. Scott: As the House will perhaps know, under the Young Offenders Act, there are provisions for the suppression of information as to the names of young Offenders being prosecuted under the act. The federal government has made exemptions from that suppression and the purpose of this legislation is simply to bring our provincial quasi-criminal legislation -- the Highway Traffic Act and the Provincial Offences Act -- into line with the Young Offenders Act in terms of the exemptions from suppression of information as to identity.

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ORDERS OF THE DAY

House in committee of supply.

ESTIMATES, MINISTRY OF HEALTH (CONTINUED)

Mr. Chairman: Mr. Eves adjourned the debate, but of course he may come back at any time he wishes to do so. Shall we proceed?

Mr. Sterling: On behalf of Mr. Jackson, we would relinquish the floor at this time.

Mr. Chairman: Fair enough.

Mr. Reville: Perhaps I could let members of the Legislature know what is about to happen this afternoon. We are now into almost the third hour of Health estimates. On Monday last, the Minister of Health (Mrs. Caplan) made her opening statement, followed by the critic for the Progressive Conservative Party, the member for Parry Sound (Mr. Eves), who made his opening statement. This afternoon I shall make my opening statement.

At the conclusion of my opening statement, I expect the estimates for this day will be concluded and we will go to questions on votes on the next occasion when we deal with the Ministry of Health estimates, which I understand, following our meeting this morning, will be Tuesday afternoon, November 22.

For those of you who have never heard me give a two-hour-and-45-minute speech, this will indeed be an occasion not to miss --

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: They thought I was long-winded.

Mr. Reville: Thank you, Madam Minister, particularly as part of the reason for this unusual arrangement was that I had made an arrangement with the government and the third party that they would carry the estimates on day one and I would carry them on day two. This allowed me to go forth and lose my voice.

I was happy to be the master of ceremonies at a municipal election campaign on Monday evening, and all six candidates in that joint campaign were victorious. I was required to spend the entire evening screaming with exaltation, and it appears that my voice has not yet returned to its normal volume.

If members think I am being uncharacteristically diffident, it is not that I am being diffident, it is that I do not have the projection that they might have come to expect from me, and those of you who are prone to heckling may do so with impunity today, because issuing sharp retorts is beyond my current capability. However, you never know, Mr. Chairman, I may recover that ability at any time during this speech, so I want you to beware.

I have just been handed a selection of excellent notes which I will reveal to you shortly. I do have a number of introductory remarks I want to make, and I should warn members that I intend to go quite minutely through the estimates briefing report, which some members will have before them.

I should point out that the notebook of the Minister of Health is considerably thicker than mine, which makes me wonder whether she has additional pages in her book that the critic for the third party and I did not receive. If that is the case, perhaps she might like to make those additional pages available. I have this sort of thin little book. It has a red cover and it has 106 pages and the pages are filled with numbers.

The Ministry of Health estimates background material is organized. It is divided into a total of six votes, each of which relates to the expenditures of each of six divisions, the first of which is administration; the second, institutional health; the third, emergency and special health services; the fourth, mental health; the fifth, community health, and the sixth, health insurance.

The briefing materials include some additional information of interest to people who find these things interesting. For instance, there is a schedule of the establishment of the Ministry of Health and a comparison of the size of that establishment with that of the previous year. We could note, if we look on page 88 of this briefing book, that the staff complement of the Ministry of Health -- still called, oddly, “manpower” -- is increased by very few numbers of permanent staff, which would lead one to believe there is a lot of contracting out going on.

There are almost 10,600 employees who work for the Ministry of Health, and the bulk of those employees, almost 6,500, work in psychiatric services. That, of course, represents the staff of the 10 provincial psychiatric hospitals dotted around the province. The next highest group of staff is those people who, I assume, work mainly in Kingston, Ontario, and have the delight of processing the health insurance claims and payments to those who are able to reach into the Ontario health insurance plan pot of gold and withdraw tax dollars for the provision of various kinds of health services. There are just a few more than 1,600 employees there.

I believe this is the place at which the famous gentleman with the quill pen works and adds up the amount of money that will be billed to the federal government for its share of our health care system. He has an eyeshade, I understand, the kind of arm suspenders we are familiar with from some shopkeepers in the west and a quill pen. He works somewhere in Kingston.

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Now that I have explained how this book works, for all those who are just listening and hanging on my every word, I want to make some opening comments. I want to actually take us back for a moment to June 20, 1986, the day on which this Legislature, in a previous incarnation, in the 33rd Parliament, passed Bill 94, the banning of extra-billing. On that occasion, my leader had this to say:

“This is indeed a historic day. For our party, it is a day of celebration. It is a day of victory for the people of this province. It is yet another step along the way to the best health care system in the world, one that should belong not to any one profession or any group of people who work in the system but to all the people of the province.

“That is why the battle about extra-billing has to be seen in this great, historic context. It has to be seen in the context not just of a battle that has taken a few years or a year or six months but of one that has been the work of working people all over this country who at different times and in different places have taken on a great cause.

“In an economy that defines so much by what one can afford, in an economy that tends to define everything in terms of the cash nexus, in terms of the market relationship, those people have struggled for generations to make a basic social statement and to try to build an institution that is based on a different principle: that when it comes to health care, there should be no cash nexus, no marketplace. When it comes to health care, there should be only one thing, a commitment to making sure everyone has an equal right to health and to access to a service that is there not as a business, not as a corporation, not as a profit-making institution but as a fully insured service for people.”

I have said before in the Legislature on a number of occasions that the day was particularly gratifying for members of the New Democratic Party, gratifying not only because of the role Tommy Douglas had in convincing the people of Canada that they should make a social contract about access to health care, but also to us in a very personal way here in Ontario. Many of us, either as members of the Legislature or as members of the party in our riding associations, had participated in a number of campaigns over the years to try to convince successive governments of this province that extra-billing should not be tolerated.

I personally remember a campaign in 1977 in which many of us went out into our neighbourhoods, talked to our neighbours and solicited their signatures on a major petition which was presented in this Legislature. That was part of the reason why it was so gratifying nine years later that, as a condition of the accord that the New Democratic Party signed with the Liberal Party, extra-billing would be banned as one of the first legislative initiatives of the 33rd Parliament and the Liberal government that was allowed to take power by the workings of the accord.

We were all exceeding proud of those of our colleagues who had worked so hard for so long to build a health care system that would indeed be accessible and that --

Mr. Sterling: How can the member for Lake Nipigon (Mr. Pouliot) hold up his head when listening to this speaker?

Mr. Reville: The member for Lake Nipigon never has any trouble keeping his head up, I should point out to the member for Carleton (Mr. Sterling).

Perhaps the reason why this set of Health estimates may be more interesting than the estimates process normally is, is that I think by the workings of government policy, either spoken policy or tacit policy, what is now seen by many observers of the health care scene, many users of health care and by providers of health care, many would-be users of health services, is that increasingly the social contract that we negotiated one with another in this country is being eroded and that access to health services is being rationed.

It is not being rationed following a discussion by policymakers that this service will be provided or this service will not be provided. It is being rationed in a hidden way, in a way that is masked with mythology and with rhetoric. It is a system in which people have to form a line to wait for services. They have been advised by their physicians that they need a particular kind of procedure and they are placed on a waiting list. That is a way by which the government has reduced its financial liability in terms of providing services that it alleges are there for all, and about which we hear in glowing terms frequently from this Minister of Health in the Legislature when we raise the real-life cases of people who have had to wait for some kind of service that they need.

I think there has to be a recognition that technology and science have made various kinds of treatment and various types of procedures possible that would never have been possible in years past and that, in fact, the march of science and the advances of technology operate somewhat independently of a government’s ability to make policy. There are so many examples that it is somewhat difficult to decide just where to start, but one of the examples that comes immediately to mind has to do with traumatic head injury.

We have heard, and I know all members of the Legislature have heard, from parents and relatives of people who have suffered head injuries which at one point in the development of health science would have proved fatal. The relatives, parents and friends would have had to mourn the loss of a loved one, but today the trauma units and the procedures that have been developed by the medical profession and those health professionals who work with the medical profession have become so successful that life can be maintained.

We are now confronted with a problem that did not exist before. If a young man in an accident falls off a motorcycle and sustains a massive injury to his head, the trauma units can go to work and they can save that young person’s life. After a period during which the young person’s medical condition has been stabilized, he or she is discharged into a community that is almost absolutely barren of services to support that person in an altered state. This is a person who has different capabilities than he or she had before this injury occurred.

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So we listen with concern and often pity to people from the Head Injury Association of Toronto, who talk about their relatives who are languishing in prison, in psychiatric hospitals or in crummy boarding and lodging houses because their capabilities have been reduced as a result of the accident. They are not dead, but they are barely alive. We have but the most paltry of services to help these people regain capabilities that have been lost.

This is not to say that in that area as well great strides have not been made, because indeed they have. There do exist in various jurisdictions excellent programs in which people who have suffered a massive head injury can, in fact, learn to do the things they used to do by developing parts of their brain that they had not developed before, But such treatment is quite often very labour intensive and is definitely very expensive. The opportunities for such treatment here in Ontario are far too few.

I know that will be acknowledged by the Minister of Health, who I believe took some action at Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals to increase our capacity to provide rehabilitation programs and assessment. Assessment is part of this whole trick of identifying problems. Once you have identified the problems, you cannot sit down and say, “Well, we have all those problems identified.” You then have to identify the solutions to the problems. If you are the Minister of Health, you have to identify a way to convince the Treasurer (Mr. R. F. Nixon) to part with some more dough so that those programs can be up and running.

Just tangentially for a minute, Mr. Chairman, if you do not mind, and I know you do not, there is much that can be done in alternative ways. It is not always necessary to create fancy institutions and hire hundreds of high-priced professionals to achieve good results. There are other ministries of this government that might be prepared to entertain an increased funding for various kinds of self-help approaches.

Even as I say that, I am concerned that the advancement of self-help contains within it both a right-wing agenda and a left-wing agenda. Having recently been in the United Kingdom, I can tell members that self-help is very much on the rise there because the government has withdrawn the resources that used to provide services for people, so they have no choice but to band together to try to provide the services for themselves. Of course, those services are of quite a different nature than they would be if they were provided in a higher-technology, more institutional way. Sometimes those services are, in truth, much more accessible to the people who use them because they are the ones who have designed them for their own needs.

The left-wing agenda is to ensure that a range of alternatives is available to people. In fact, we know that on some occasions we need a highly sophisticated intervention and that on other occasions we need a much more homey kind of help. In that regard, there are examples within our health care system of good programs that do both of those kinds of things, although it is fair to say that the reliance continues to be massively on institutional medical responses to illness and the beginning, at least, of a rhetorical base issuing forth from the Minister of Health to try to rebalance the system and to try to create an attitude of people in this province that they themselves can make choices that will keep them well and improve their health without waiting for illness to strike, which will then require treatment.

I watch with somewhat bemused interest the television advertisements with the little dancing dog that I spoke about and that the minister let loose on us a few weeks ago. There is a little cartoon person. It is kind of an androgynous person – I am not sure whether the person has any gender whatsoever -- and then there is a little dog that dances around and gives up drinking and smoking and sort of eats what looked like grapes, and I was a little worried that those might not be union grapes.

In any event, the dog’s whole demeanor changes as soon as he or she -- it was unclear; it was kind of an androgynous dog as well. It is unclear whether the minister really believes that dogs have bad health habits. My experience with animals is that their health habits are awfully good and that it is people who have bad health habits. In any event, both the little dog and the androgynous person, human, seem to be very happy by the end of the ad and they say, “Health, that’s a great feeling.”

I asked for my daughter’s advice about whether she thought this ad was really goofy or not, and she said, “No, Dad, it’s good.” I had to get sorted out in that regard.

Hon. Mrs. Caplan: Very bright young woman.

Mr. Reville: She is incredibly bright, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Ministry of Health, either, I want the minister to know.

I did point out at the time the minister made the announcement about “Health, that’s a great feeling,” that it would be really great if, in fact, people did have the ability to make healthy choices in the province. In a kind of sombre tone that was perhaps somewhat out of step with the dancing dog and the dancing humanoid, I pointed out that there are lots of people in our society, far too many people in our society, who really do not have the ability to make those healthy choices, because they are burdened down by poverty, and making choices, of course, implies having an amount of control over one’s life that is not always possible when one is struggling for survival.

Miss Martel: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman --

Mr. Reville: Maybe there is no quorum in committee of supply. Is there a quorum in committee of supply?

Mr. Chairman ordered the bells rung.

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Mr. Reville: I want to extend my thanks to those members who have attended to make up the quorum, and I want to say, through the chair, of course, that the next time I call a quorum, would they please take their time about getting here, because I have to sit down and rest my voice every now and then. Perhaps if half of the members could leave now, I will know that I have an investment in the future that I can cash at any time.

Hon. Mr. Conway: I thought perhaps it was a call of another kind.

Mr. Reville: Mr. Chairman, it is not the call of the wild, which, of course, the member for Renfrew North (Mr. Conway) hears often. Usually it is just the bell from the church in Wilno, saying it is time to have a chicken supper.

Hon. Mr. Conway: Agreed.

Mr. Reville: Agreed.

Hon. Mr. Conway: We are going to go to that supper together some time.

Mr. Reville: I would love to go to that supper with the member, because then I could explain to the constituents of Renfrew North some of the things they are probably dying to find out.

I will conclude my general remarks on the understanding that I may return to them from time to time, because I have ordered the speech with some care to ensure that it is particularly interesting to all members. That is to say, my speech will emerge in no particular order, and this will require perhaps a level of mental agility that would do us all good, to see if, in fact, the members can follow the thread here. I will sort of look around from time to time to see whether or not anyone’s eyes have glazed over, and if they have, I will remind members what I am talking about. I will point it out; I will say, “This is what I am talking about now and it relates to a particular vote,” and then they will immediately say, “Ah, isn’t it wonderful to hear a kind of teleological speech from time to time instead of a tautological speech?”

Sometimes I get so inspired by the member for Renfrew North I can hardly contain myself, but this is not one of those times, regrettably. If the member needs to take a walk, he should go ahead, whatever call he may need to answer.

The first vote is the ministry administration. I do not have a whole lot to say about this vote, but I will none the less say a few things. For instance, I have a letter from RR 2, Washago, Ontario. It says:

“Dear Sir or Madam,

“Due to the inefficiency of either your department ... this is the second letter I have written to you. Although the first letter was written in November, I have not yet received any correspondence from your department.” This letter is dated February 1. “I would have thought two months is more than adequate for a reply.”

The letter in question was written to the assistive devices program, which really belongs in vote 1803, but I mention it at this stage because this is a matter about which I personally feel quite strongly, and that has to do with the turnaround time of an incoming letter and a response letter from the Ministry of Health.

Mr. Pouliot: How long did it take?

Mr. Reville: Actually, they called me later and said they still had not received a response by March. So that was November, December, January, February -- almost five months, and there was no response from the health programs division of the Ministry of Health.

I frequently experience a turnaround time in terms of correspondence with the Ministry of Health that is, on the low end, at least two months. My colleague the member for Sudbury East (Miss Martel) acknowledges that that is her experience as well, and so do my colleague the member for Lake Nipigon and any other members of the House who would like to agree at this point. Some of the pages are agreeing as well. It is clear that whatever system and whoever runs the system of managing the correspondence in the Ministry of Health needs to get cracking and improve that turnaround time. It is just not adequate.

One of the things that disturbs me, actually, is that we often hear that the minister wants to preside over a system that is well planned, well managed and fairly funded. I have this down. It is a rhyme that I have learned: well planned, well managed and fairly funded. For the life of me I cannot figure out how it is that the minister would know whether the health system in Ontario was well planned, fairly funded and well managed.

As far as I am aware -- and I am sure when the minister reads the Hansard of this tour de force she will pick up this question -- I do not believe the Ministry of Health employs in its administration any clinical epidemiologists. For those who are not clinical epidemiologists, I will say that they are a kind of health professional who figures out what kinds of things work and what kinds of things do not work.

Here we have a health care system that is proceeding along, allegedly managed by a group of people who do not include in their numbers any group of people who can say, “Well, all those procedures in fact do not work.” It is possible to make some embarrassing comparisons with much smaller health operations in various parts of the world, operations that are not dealing with the health of over nine million people that in fact employ not one but dozens of clinical epidemiologists who track the success rate of various kinds of medical procedures and give advice to those who would run a health care system about the kinds of things that work and the kinds of things that do not.

There is a book that is going to be published early in the new year by a friend and neighbour of mine named Dr. Michael Rachlis. I will acknowledge to members here and now, so that there will be no mistake and no shrieks of horror when members find out, that he of course is a member of the Medical Reform Group of Ontario. He is a former physician at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre and he is also a clinical epidemiologist. He has written a book that talks about some of the goofy things that are done routinely by physicians in Ontario for which there is either no benefit or a negative benefit.

This is a system that is presided over by a Minister of Health who cannot turn to anyone on her staff and say, “Does this kind of thing work or does it not?” For instance, non-small-cell lung cancer should not be treated with chemotherapy. It does not work. It is well known that it does not work. A physician who prescribes chemotherapy for non-small-cell lung cancer is prescribing a procedure that does not work, and some $20 million annually is spent paying for this procedure that does not work. How could that be?

Recently in the press, and not only in the press but in a public relations exercise managed by the Ministry of Health, a number of epidemiological works were distributed to members of the Legislature and people in the media that talked about differing levels of particular kinds of surgical procedures from county to county in Ontario. There are some overall implications, shall I say, that particular kinds of surgical procedures are performed far more frequently in Ontario than in any other health jurisdiction in the world. One of those is gall bladder surgery.

In fact, the health risks of undergoing gall bladder surgery are very high. I do not want to make anybody who has had his gall bladder out or who wants to have it out perhaps later on today nervous, but complications from gall bladder surgery are not uncommon, and the incidence of gall bladder surgery in Ontario is higher than in any comparable health jurisdiction in the world.

Likewise, the incidence of hysterectomy is higher in Ontario than anywhere in the western world. What does this have to say? Is this something to do with sexual politics, or is it something to do with fee schedules’? I am not sure what the reason is, but what is clear is that more women undergo hysterectomies in Ontario, proportionately, than in other western health jurisdictions.

The same is true for the number of women who deliver babies by caesarean section, and there are some contra-indications of caesarean section, particularly if women are interested in having quite a large number of children. Why is that? The Ministry of Health does not know and it should. I was quite irritated -- in fact, I was more than irritated; I was damn mad -- when the minister said that it was almost as though these things were going on in some kind of system that she had nothing to do with. Why did she not know that stuff and why was she not doing something about it?

Who pays for all these procedures? Of course, the taxpayer pays for all these procedures. However, this particular dollop of the taxpayer’s money is routed through the Ministry of Health, and it certainly makes you wonder.

Another kind of discipline that does not seem to be particularly well represented in the ministry administration is the discipline of health economy. Health economists are the people who can look at the things that work and say, “Well, this is what they cost.” The ministry does not know what works and it does not know what it costs. That is reassuring.

They do a lot of other things there in the ministry administration, at least judging by the table of contents. They develop systems. They have something called the district health councils, which are being elevated into some kind of dream health planning agency. I am not aware that the district health councils have any capability of doing this kind of comprehensive health planning, but they have now got a coordinator, a person for whom I have a good deal of respect, because she used to be the coordinator of Metro health services. I had an occasion to have some business with that particular public servant, and I am sure that she will do the best she can with the district health councils, but there are serious problems with the whole concept of district health councils that need to be addressed and need to be addressed under vote 1801. Some of us who are very, very old will remember the hopes we had when the idea of district health councils was brought forward a number of years ago.

The older you get, sometimes the more dashed your hopes can be because my experience with district health councils is that they have performed one function very well. That function is that they have been a very absorbent flak-catcher for the Ministry of Health. Those who have health proposals are invited -- nay, urged; nay, directed -- to the district health council with their proposals.

The district health council reviews the proposals with great care, ranks each proposal with great care and sends these rankings off to the Ministry of Health. Of course, the Ministry of Health pays absolutely no attention to those rankings whatsoever. It quite often just drives right around the district health council’s recommendations and does something else. The other things that the Ministry of Health does, one might suspect if one were modestly cynical, quite often have something to do with politics.

District health councils, I observe, are not particularly representative. I worry particularly about the role of district health councils that is positive in the Graham report. I do not imagine that any of the district health councils that I know about are going to be able to go forth and develop a community mental health plan that would be worth anything very much because, of course, they do not include a user’s perspective or a relative’s perspective. They are dominated by a professional perspective. That just will not do at all.

There is something called the health innovation fund under vote 1801. This is a fund that is rumoured to exist. In fact, it has some money attached to it. It seems to have about $10 million attached to it. One is drawn to the description of the health innovation fund. It is “to test and evaluate new approaches to improving the health status of Ontario residents and to foster new service delivery models.” That would be a laudable goal for sure.

It is under the direction of the Premier’s Council on Health Strategy and “is designed to encourage community groups, healthcare providers, researchers and others to submit proposals.” Then it describes the kind of proposals that could be submitted.

Because I have the honour to receive the minister’s speeches fairly close to the time --

Interjection.

Mr. Reville: The minister says she does not include the jokes. For that small mercy, I am very grateful, Mr. Chairman. If I really get desperate, I will recount to you some of the Minister of Health’s jokes. Perhaps we could all go into an in camera session because some of them are not suitable for family viewing. Most of them are not suitable for laughing at, either. Clearly, one of the other kinds of professionals the minister needs in her administrative division is a joke writer -- for sure, a joke writer.

I read a speech of the minister in which she went to the Ontario Hospital Association and said, “Come and get all the health innovation fund.” That worried me a lot because I thought this was to encourage community groups, not to encourage hospitals. Hospitals, of course, need some encouragement right now, but we will get to that in the next section.

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There is a group, for instance, that I think would be an ideal recipient of bucks from the health innovation fund. That would be a group like Street Health, which operates out of All Saints Church. It is designed to serve the most vulnerable members of our society, those members who, in fact, cannot get service at hospitals, who cannot get service from physicians, because their arrangements are not particularly permanent. In fact, they are thrown out of a lot of hospitals, quite frankly, because their life is so grim that quite often they do not behave themselves in a pleasant, middle-class manner, and sometimes they smell. Certainly many of them suffer infestations of lice. Some of the primary health care that they need is being provided by Street Health, which is run by some people of faith, some community workers and some nurses who provide their time virtually for free.

This is a project that has knocked on the minister’s door umpteen times, and has been told to go and make a deal with St. Michael’s Hospital. Can members believe that the ministry would say to a group representing street people, “Go off and make a deal with the board of St. Michael’s Hospital”? Do members know who is on the board of St. Michael’s Hospital? I do not know either. They normally have their discussions, not at All Saints’ drop-in centre, but at the Sutton Place, sort of corporate types.

In any event, Street Health does not want to run its program out of St. Michael’s Hospital because it says it is an alternative to a hospital program. It is an alternative to the very system that has rejected the people in question, and the people in question do not want to go on their hands and knees to the board of St. Michael’s Hospital to beg them to flow their money.

Just going back to district health councils for a minute -- and I may pick this up again under vote 1804, mental health program -- this is another neat example of the crap that is involved in some of these bureaucratic mazes that have been created by the Ministry of Health. There is a little self-help group in Ottawa made up of ex-psychiatric patients.

Mr. Miller: They were not created by our government.

Mr. Reville: The member for Norfolk (Mr. Miller) points out that many of these bureaucratic mazes were not created by his government, and that is true. However, I want to point out that his government is in charge now and has to bear the responsibility for whatever bureaucratic mazes it may have inherited, whatever bureaucratic mazes it may now be creating and whatever bureaucratic mazes it may seek to create in the future.

This particular case is a perfect example of what is wrong with some of these inhuman approaches to problems. I am talking about a group of ex-psychiatric patients who basically want to run a little self-help service in Ottawa. It is led by a tough and determined woman named Sue Clark, who lives in Ottawa, who is very embarrassed to talk about being an ex-psychiatric patient, but thought it was important that she do that, to try to give some support to other people who she knew had similar problems.

They started a little group, and they have been going around trying to get a bit of money so they can have a little office and maybe a drop-in centre or whatnot. One of the things they are interested in is providing some housing programs and they are trying to go about doing that.

Sue was down in Toronto not long ago and she dropped in to see me. I asked her what she was up to, and she said she had just been to see the people over at community mental health in the Ministry of Health, on the umpteenth floor of the building in which the Ministry of Health is housed. She wanted to talk to them about a little idea that she had. What they gave her was a form that was about 50 pages long, which she was to fill out and submit to the district health council, I guess, in the Ottawa-Carleton region.

Sue thought this was one of the craziest things she had ever encountered, and she pointed out to me she had encountered a heck of a lot of crazy things, but this 50-page form did not have anything to do with what those people wanted to do. It had to do with how you make an application to a district health council. It is the sort of thing that large institutions can fill up in a minute; they have hundreds of scribes filling out forms to the DHC. It is not the sort of thing that enables or empowers self-help groups to get access to the programs of this government. That system has to change.

There is a very specific little item under the ministry administration that I want to just touch on for a moment. It is the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review. This is a unique kind of operation because it is required because of the way the Criminal Code has decided to deal with people who are not guilty by reason of insanity or who are unfit to stand trial.

This is at the nexus that I talk about where the criminal justice system and the health care system meet and the board reviews the cases of those who are detained under a Lieutenant Governor’s warrant. We call them LGWs in the business. There has been a lot of chat about LGWs lately following an unfortunate incident in London. I have said before, and I will repeat again, I have appreciated the minister’s measured response to the difficult issues raised by the responsibility of this government to provide care for patients detained under the Lieutenant Governor’s warrant and also to protect the public safety and those two obligations are not easy ones to discharge.

Traditionally, the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review has created a number of problems of its own. I think the situation is somewhat better now, but for many years many civil rights advocates were appalled at the lack of appropriate procedural protections for people who were appearing before the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review. Part of that occurred because the original chair of the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review basically invented the procedure and I do not think he remembered very much civil procedure jurisprudential protection when he did that.

This is an operation that costs about $1 million a year. Many people who have appeared before the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review feel very strongly that they do not get a fair hearing there even today. I have had the opportunity to appear before the Lieutenant Governor’s review board on two occasions a year apart, both in respect of the same appellant, and could not believe what a kangaroo court was being operated there. As I say, I believe the procedural protection of appellants has improved somewhat. I believe there is still some distance to go. I think it would be incumbent upon the Minister of Health to have some conversations with her colleague the Attorney General (Mr. Scott) and take a look at the procedures currently in force at the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review with a view to recommending some changes. If my recollection is correct, the Criminal Code of Canada is silent as to what the procedure should be.

While the Minister of Health is chatting with the Attorney General, she might ask him to make some representations to our federal cousins, because in fact there have been in Orders and Notices for some time some amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada that would have greatly improved, I think, the way in which people who had been charged with a criminal offence and were found not guilty because of reason of insanity or because they were unfit to stand trial will be dealt with. I think it is way past time that those abuses were corrected. Currently in Ontario there are 400 people detained on Lieutenant Governor’s warrants in various places under various inadequate information management systems.

I think one of the most difficult questions for a society to answer is how to treat people who may not be considered treatable by physicians and who are not popular at all. There is just not a whole lot of sympathy extended to many LGWS, perhaps because many of them have been accused of committing particularly gruesome acts. I can see no justification, however, for depriving people of their simple civil liberties, nor do I see any justification for the inhumane treatment that is sometimes dished out by the Lieutenant Governor’s Board of Review and in those places where such people are detained. A lot has been said about that over the years, and perhaps when I get to vote 1804 I will say some more.

I want to move to the second vote. I will note the passage of an hour and I would like to ask you, Mr. Chairman, if you would see if we could get a quorum.

Mr. Chairman ordered the bells rung.

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Mr. Chairman: The member for Riverdale may proceed.

Mr. Reville: I want to thank all those members who proceeded at such a stately pace to make up this quorum. That allowed me to find some more pieces of paper.

Vote 1802 is the biggie in the Ministry of the Health estimates. This is a number that is hard even to imagine -- you have to be a politician to be able to say these numbers -- $6,068,462,500.

Mr. D. S. Cooke: That has to be institutions.

Mr. Reville: The member for Windsor-Riverside (Mr. D. S. Cooke) has correctly guessed that this has to be institutions. I think I have just said a whole mouthful, that almost half -- 44 per cent, I guess, is the most recent number that stays in my mind -- of the expenditure of the Ministry of Health is being spent on institutions, and the institutions include 222 hospitals and a lot of nursing homes. How many?

Mr. D. S. Cooke: It is 32,000 beds.

Mr. Reville: It is 32,000 beds in nursing homes and probably some other stuff that I cannot think of right now.

I guess the biggest message that has come out in the last year or so is that in the institutional sector -- and this is not exclusively in the institutional sector; it is also occurring in the community health sector as well -- the biggest single issue, at least in my view, has to do with the shortage of nurses. The Ontario Hospital Association might not agree that that was the biggest issue. They would probably want me to say that the biggest issue was the squeeze on their budgets and the exponential growth in the demand for hospital services.

They are not wrong. There is a squeeze on their budgets, there is a demand for additional services and there are expenses that hospitals are incurring that they did not once incur. Prophylaxis in connection with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, for instance, has increased the expenditure that every hospital must make, and that is not always reflected in the amount of money that is transferred to hospitals by the ministry. Clearly that is something the hospital association and we must address, the way in which hospitals are funded and the kinds of services hospitals are expected to provide.

We have raised in the Legislature over the last year, certainly during the time when I have been Health critic and before that, the real-life stories of people who need, usually, surgical procedures and who cannot get them, not because there are no hospital beds -- it does not appear to be a bed shortage -- but because there are not in place the staff to serve the people who would appear in those beds. There are just so many stories.

In March I had a phone call from a middle-aged woman who had rheumatoid arthritis. Her day surgery had been scheduled for January 18. On that very day they rescheduled her for March 7, and then they postponed that surgery again. The hospital at which she was to have the surgery said it was because it did not have enough intensive care nurses, so it had backed up all the surgery. The woman was very worried that she would lose her job, because she had already been off work for a long, long time.

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Health critics particularly, but members of the provincial parliament in general, get a lot of mail from people who have had a real experience in the health care system of Ontario and who have found the health care system to be absolutely wanting. Here is a woman who went into Toronto Western Hospital on November 26, 1987. She had a spinal injury and on December 2 had an operation, a spinal fusion of the L-4 to the sacrum. When you have an operation on your back like that, you can barely move. You are very much in need of assistance to perform the most simple of acts.

My correspondent found the experience hair-raising. There were 34 patients on the ward. Many of the patients were on intravenous. There were five patients who had just had surgery, so they were all post-op. There were only four nurses on duty. Pain medication for my correspondent had been prescribed for six o’clock in the morning. My correspondent was in tears and frantic by the time the medication for pain was administered at 7:15 a.m. The head nurse was very frustrated.

How about a bath that took two-and-a-half hours to complete because the nurses had to do so many other things? My correspondent was worried about the totally demoralized attitude among the nurses, who cared so much and who were so good at their jobs but were unable to perform their duties properly, because they had too much to do.

The minister knows about this problem. We had the flying moms and tots episode last January. “Triplets’ Mom Flown to Kingston because Toronto Could Not Cope.” The mayor of Toronto, of course, probably flew into a total fit when he had to read in the paper that Toronto could not cope. “Critically Ill Newborn Infant had to be Airlifted to Buffalo.” All the high-risk baby wards were full.

My friend at the Patients’ Rights Association tells me that access to health care is just not there at all on weekends and holidays. She wondered whether it was acceptable to have a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five health care system. She thought that was pretty weird when you had a government that decided people should be able to shop seven days a week, “Out of the other side of its mouth,” she said. “Don’t have a baby on a holiday, just go shopping instead.”

The Patients’ Rights Association wrote to the minister several times. “Many expectant mothers have reported to us that the obstetrician has told them that if the child arrives in the night, over a weekend or on a holiday, he or she will not attend the birth. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has issued instructions to the members that the patients should be made aware of this. We suggest to our members that they ask the question first, and if the answer was unsatisfactory, there might be time to find another doctor.”

Patients who are unfortunate enough to become ill or be in an accident during a weekend or on holiday are routinely denied adequate care because of reduced staff at these times. I talked to a young nurse at the Wellesley Hospital who was working in the intensive care unit. Because of the reduction of staff at that hospital and on that unit, she had four patients to deal with, all of whom were in life-threatening situations. If two of them had gone into crisis at the same time, she could not have managed the situation at all. At the end of a 12-hour shift, when there are four people’s lives depending on your ability to sprint from room to room, members can imagine how wrung out you are going to feel.

The fracture clinic of at least one downtown hospital closes up completely at five o’clock. What do you do if you break a bone after five o’clock? I never discovered what the Minister of Health responded to that. She probably said, “We have a well-planned, well-managed, fairly funded system.”

That is pretty specific; we will leave that one to another time. That was the flying-moms-and-tots situation.

The minister, when confronted with the nursing shortages, at first tried to suggest that this was a cyclical problem; it would somehow go away. I do not believe that is her view now, and I hope it is not, because a significant amount of advice to the contrary has been given to the minister, not only by her own Advisory Committee on Nursing Manpower but also by the recent report of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, which commissioned a study by Noah Meltz and Joe Marzetti called The Shortage of Registered Nurses: An Analysis in a Labour Market Context.

That study was released just recently. It is not that one. I have piles of stuff here, Mr. Chairman. You should not feel at all alarmed that I am going to run out. I put the study somewhere. One needs ever larger amounts of storage space just to keep the studies that are generated by the --

Miss Martel: Are you okay?

Mr. Reville: I am okay, and even if this were not the real study, I could say it was and people would not know the difference. But in fact it is the real study and it shows a person lying on a stretcher in a corridor. The title is, Sorry, No Care Available Due To Nursing Shortage. I think that came out, maybe, on November 10 -- no. Recently, anyway.

It has been responded to by the Ontario Nurses’ Association, which was modestly critical of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario for not hammering the government harder than it did as to the government’s responsibility in dealing with the nursing shortage. But notwithstanding this professional dispute about how hard to hammer the government or how softly to hammer the government, the study clearly found that there is a shortage of hospital nurses.

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One of the proofs of the labour shortage in Metropolitan Toronto is that hospitals are paying more than the Ontario Nurses’ Association rate to agencies to obtain nurses. Among the reasons cited for the shortage of nurses is the replacement of nursing support staff by registered nurses. This is a problem that is not confined to the Metro area either. It seems to be endemic in hospital staffing approaches these days to reduce the number of support staff that is available to assist nurses in doing all the things that need to be done on a ward.

I spoke with a porter at the Wellesley Hospital not too long ago who said that it had been the practice to have a porter on each floor of the hospital and now he is working five floors, so in fact there was a fivefold decrease in the number of staff and a fivefold increase in the amount of work. The upshot of that, of course, is that more of the portering falls on the backs of the nursing staff, and that just creates another stress that has to be carried by the nursing staff.

One of the other phenomena, particularly in the Metro area, is the shift to part-time work by many nurses who previously had been full-time staff nurses. It has been explained to me by many nurses that the shift work is so burdensome and the stress experienced during those shifts is so difficult to bear that it is much better to go on a part-time basis, where they have some chance to pick their shifts and manage the other parts of their lives more than they would be able to do if they were staff nurses working those kinds of shifts.

I spoke to a nurse who told me that one of her friends had joined the housekeeping staff to escape the stress of her job. Basically, a health professional had decided it would be better to work as a cleaner than to work as a nurse.

I spoke to a number of young nurses who said they were going to leave the profession because the rewards they could foresee in the future were so few that in spite of the fact they had invested a number of years of their lives in obtaining a bachelor of nursing science, they were just going to throw it all in. Many nurses have left the profession and gone off to sell real estate in this hot real estate market, where perhaps they may feel better control over their lives.

We in this party have urged the minister to take action in respect of the status of nursing in relation to other parts of the health system, and the minister says she is developing a regulation under the Public Hospitals Act that will reconstitute the medical advisory committee of hospitals into a professional advisory committee on which nurses will be invited to sit. Yes, we would welcome that. Regrettably, that is not nearly enough.

One of the difficulties, of course, is that nurses have very little say in how the hospital is managed and a lot of responsibility for the decisions made by others. The lack of appreciation for their skills is one of the reasons many seek to reduce their involvement in the profession and some leave it altogether.

This is an interesting fact many members probably do not know -- the member for Middlesex (Mr. Reycraft) probably does not know this fact -- which is that the largest occupation in Canada is nursing. I did not know that fact. Three quarters of nurses work in hospitals, 96.5 per cent of nurses are women, 42 per cent of nurses work part-time --

Mr. Reycraft: Four per cent of the nurses are men.

Mr. Reville: No, 3.5 per cent of nurses are male.

Mr. Reycraft: That does not add up to 100.

Mr. Reville: I hope the member for Middlesex did not teach mathematics -- 96.5 and 3.5 is not 100? Mr. Chairman, will you discipline that member, please? If he is going to interject, could he at least add properly, or perhaps it was a problem of subtraction.

Ms. Collins: Your argument doesn’t add up.

Mr. Reville: I am going to find out what the member’s name is and I am going to say something to her. I know the member’s name; I just cannot think of her riding. The member for Wentworth East (Ms. Collins) says my argument does not add up. I think that is what the member said. Did the member say that? This is the argument of her sisters, the nurses, actually. It is not my argument. I am just sharing it with the member.

Mr. Pouliot: The member should at least blush.

Mr. Reville: She should blush.

One of the things the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario said to me some long time ago was that the association’s policy on health care reform would be to establish mechanisms to “involve nurses, other providers and consumers in decision-making about resource allocation and policy and program development.”

The RNAO, by the way, is also quite interested in seeing a movement towards remuneration by salary of all health professionals and a move away from the fee-for-service approach. I think that is interesting.

The Ontario Nurses’ Association, speaking to the same point -- this by Glenna Cole Slattery, who is the chief executive of the Ontario Nurses’ Association. This will make one think. “Strained backs from hefting 200-pound patients by themselves, slipping on faecal matter on floors and breathing poisonous chemotherapy concoctions are a few of the workplace hazards facing registered nurses today.”

The nursing shortage means nurses face greater risks of injury and their concerns are increasing about occupational health and safety for their members. They clearly have a large number of back injuries. I have talked to a number of nurses who work with head-injured patients, and most of them have bad backs and many of them have had surgery on their backs. This, of course, is a function of the reduction in staff. At one time, orderlies were available to help move patients around and they are not now.

I might come back to vote 1802 in a minute when I dig into my box here and find some more stuff, because I have lots more stuff in there that is interesting and worrisome.

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I want to turn for a moment to vote 1803, the emergency and special health services section.

I have been handed a note signed “a friend.” The note says, “The automatic TV camera operator just fell asleep.” Of course, the conflict-of-interest legislation prohibits me from getting any fee for this service I have provided to the automatic TV camera operator, and I should say to those within the sound of my voice, any time they are having insomnia, they can just tune in to this speech and will be cured instantly.

Under the third vote of the Ministry of Health estimates, called emergency and special health services, I have a number of remarks to make, some of which are especially topical, some of which are less topical and some of which may not fit here at all, but I will do them anyway.

The emergency and special health services program is dominated by the drug benefit plan, about which I have a number of things to say, and the second-largest part of this almost $600-million item relates to emergency health services, the most common of which, and probably the ones that would come most readily to your mind, if you still had one, are ambulance services.

We know that just this week Jack Shapiro tabled the final report of the Commission of Public Inquiry into Ambulance and Emergency Health Services Delivery in the Province of Ontario. A number of members of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union who work as ambulance officers were in the gallery today, and in fact were involved in an MPP lobby, I suspect. Today, I had the opportunity to address them, about 100-strong, perhaps more, in our caucus room during question period today.

Members will be interested to know, I am sure, that the commissioner is a person who is known to me. He used to be the chairman of the local board of health for the city of Toronto, has a great interest in public health and was clearly a good choice to inquire into the provision of ambulance and emergency health services delivery .

I had the opportunity to appear before this inquiry when it was in Orillia. Some members will know the Highwayman Inn from a different visitation there with another committee that wanted to listen to the people about some other matters. Well, it was in the same place and I can tell members that on that occasion, the chlorine seemed to be pretty strong too.

Jack Shapiro gathered information from a lot of sources. He was busy identifying problems, considering the impact of the problems and making recommendations.

The overall conclusion was that “there is a great inconsistency in the level of service being provided throughout the province, and, “A greater level of consistency is essential if there is to be a semblance of equity in the distribution of ambulance services.”

This will provide some encouragement to members of the government. He noted: “The ministry has put in place a system which in many parts of the province is comparable to the best available in many jurisdictions in North America. Unfortunately, its performance has been thwarted by a failure of successive governments to show the political will necessary to rationalize and bring consistency to the service.”

Shapiro observed that the Spasoff report to the ministry concluded that “equity is the primary principle upon which health planning should be based. In the provision of ambulance services in Ontario, equity does not appear to be a primary principle at all.” Fragmented ownership, inadequate funding, lack of clear ministerial policies regarding allocation of resources were found to be the key reasons for the inconsistency and inequity of service.

Jack Shapiro concluded that there are structural problems in the delivery of emergency services in Ontario. There is a structure that involves six different forms of ownership.

“Full funding comes from the Ministry of Health and has no firm goals or policies upon which to base the allocation of vehicles and staff. There is great inconsistency in the training of ambulance officers in the provision of advanced life-support services. The ambulance division has failed, clearly, to convince the ministry” -- or perhaps the ministry has failed to convince cabinet -- “that increased funding is necessary to provide consistent levels of service and remuneration for staff.”

It is interesting to note that in the last few years, the number of volunteer ambulance brigades has increased dramatically. Volunteers who normally spend their time teaching school or selling real estate are hopping into ambulances to respond to calls.

It is my view, and in this regard I take a view contrary to Jack Shapiro’s, that it is the province that should be responsible for the provision of ambulance services, not the municipalities. I would be very concerned that would continue the fragmentary approach. Of course, there are unorganized areas of the province and municipalities that perhaps would have other public policy objectives for their dollars.

Members will not be surprised to know, as well, that I favour a not-for-profit ambulance service. I find it a form of vertical integration that is nervous-making that the company that operates the ambulance also operates the hearse and the funeral home. Without being macabre, one can imagine that the response time becomes an issue in this regard.

There are 175 ambulance services in this province; 66 of them are owned and operated by hospitals, 65 are operated by the private sector, 28 are volunteer -- I think that has increased even since the report was put together -- and there are nine ministry-owned-and-operated ambulance services.

One of the things I was not aware of until this afternoon is that it is only the Ministry of Health’s employees who are considered to be part of an essential service. All other ambulance officers are not considered to be part of an essential service.

Four ambulance services are run by municipalities, including the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, and three are run through a ministry tendering process. That is probably a fascinating process.

I understand there are 2,300 full-time and 1,600 part-time ambulance workers in Ontario.

There is a perception that many ambulance services, although not all, are characterized by inflexible, insensitive and archaic management practices. These attitudes are seen to be reinforced by the ministry.

Ambulance officers suffer from burnout, stress, frustration and feelings of being badly undervalued.

There is mention made of the ghost at the bargaining table. Of course, the ghost is the ministry, which controls the money. Ambulance services are 100 per cent funded by the Ministry of Health, with the exception of Metro Toronto, and therein hangs a tale. The deal was that the Ministry of Health would fund 75 per cent of Metro’s approved cost but usually comes up with 56 per cent. Metro is being tapped on the wrist for making what the ministry calls unapproved expenditures. These unapproved expenditures, of course, have to do with better wages and better vehicles.

Jack Shapiro notes, and I agree with him, that “The variety in the forms of ownership does not serve the public interest and this system needs to be rationalized.”

Perhaps there are no supporters of privatization in the Legislature, but just in case there are, Jack Shapiro notes:

“Supporters of privatization traditionally argue that the private operators can deliver better services at lower costs. An analysis of the submissions to the commission does not support the better service part of the equation and lower costs are only realized because of the lower level of remuneration for the ambulance officers they employ.” Here is a little pat on the head to the Ministry of Health: “The ministry-run ambulance services provide the best level of service outside of Metropolitan Toronto.” Congratulations. Regrettably, there are only nine ministry-owned-and-operated services, and that leaves 166 that are not as good.

Apparently, in certain circumstances, because of the absolute unavailability of vehicles, there are periods when there is no local service available at all. One of the issues that comes fairly readily to mind in respect to emergency services is the amount of time it takes to get the emergency service to the emergency. In the ambulance business they call that the response time.

The maximum allowable elapsed time between the occurrence of a trauma or a cardiac incident and the arrival of an ambulance at the scene should be no more than five minutes if loss of life is to be kept to a minimum. The ministry reports that the average response time, measured from when the ambulance is dispatched rather than from the occurrence of the incident, is about 9.9 minutes. That is almost twice as long as the maximum allowable elapsed time. In Metro Toronto the response time is closer. It is about 6.3 minutes.

The average response time outside of Metro Toronto is about 12 minutes and would be even higher if elapsed time between occurrence and dispatch of the vehicle were taken into account. I quote: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the total prehospital time from the placing of the emergency call to the delivery of the patient to definitive medical treatment would be close to half an hour outside of Metro.” He concludes: “Clearly, some avoidable loss of life must be occurring.”

There are a lot of factors that determine response time. Some of them are the size of the investment the government is prepared to make in the service. Response times obviously improve as you increase the number of vehicles, the number of stations, the number of ambulance officers. An improved response time is available at a price. It is not only the price of the provision of dollars, but it is the price of the provision of integration and a management plan.

The Ministry of Health, in its guidelines for planners of emergency services, has developed a response time for large urban communities -- that is, communities over 300,000. That goal would be a four-minute, basic life-support response and an eight-minute, full, advanced life-support response. Clearly the ministry has fallen short of its own goals even in the best-served areas of this province.

There are a number of important recommendations that Mr. Shapiro made; some of them I have already mentioned. One of the goals that Shapiro recommends for the government’s consideration is that allocations to ambulance services personnel, vehicles, equipment and stations should be made equitably across the province on the basis of the goal of being capable of bringing a patient to hospital within 15 minutes of receiving an emergency call for 90 per cent of the population. Clearly that is not currently possible.

In the context of the tabling of the Commission of Public Inquiry into Ambulance and Emergency Services in Ontario, we have a labour dispute that has also been mentioned today in question period. Some of the parties to that dispute were in the Legislature as well. There are 85 ambulance officers of Halton-Mississauga Ambulance Services Ltd. who have been on strike since August 10, 1988. The strike is in its fourth month, and because of the strike, of course, the quality of ambulance service has deteriorated for people in the Halton-Mississauga area. This service is 100 per cent funded by the Ontario government, but it is owned and operated on a commercial basis by Halton-Mississauga Ambulance Services Ltd.

This is a very good example of the unequal, fractured service that Jack Shapiro documented in this report, tabled just a few days ago. The incident in which people of that area are being served by fewer ambulances than they should and 85 workers are waiting for some bargaining to resume, I think, is pretty symptomatic of what happens in a system that is as disparate and discontinuous as the ambulance service system we have currently in Ontario.

Halton-Mississauga is one of the 65 privately owned ambulance services that I have mentioned. Last year it got $3.6 million from the government, and this year it will get about $3.7 million out of the $126-odd million that the government will spend on ambulance services. Almost $50 million of that goes to private ambulance service.

The ambulance officers in Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 207 have been without a contract since April 1. They are trying to get parity with the Metro ambulance officers who work the border area. If you drive one street further west, you are in the area served by Halton-Mississauga. There has been only one meeting, on September 10, and, of course, the union would like the ministry to intercede.

It is interesting to note what is happening to these ambulance officers who have similar training. They get paid $13.94 an hour, compared to the Metro rate of $16.65 an hour.

I could point out that you would probably get paid more if you were a provincial cabinet minister’s driver than you would if you were running an ambulance in Halton or Mississauga.

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Hon. Mrs. Caplan: What do they get paid?

Mr. Reville: Our information is that ministers’ drivers get paid between $25,400 and $29,700. There perhaps are some variations. This information was provided to us by the human resources folks -- the human resources secretariat, I guess we call that, not “folks.” We do not have any folks around here.

In Burlington, ambulance officers have been doing paramedic work for four and a half years without any pay increase at all. One company offered a $900 one-time bonus. Of course, the workers who have this additional training would like that training to be recognized in their compensation.

Service in the area, which encompasses about three quarters of a million people in Burlington, Milton, Oakville and Mississauga, normally has 10 ambulances. The company is running five now with supervisory staff and owner-operators from other areas of the province. It is just doing emergency calls, and the central dispatch is sending out the fire department first to see if an ambulance is needed. My leader earlier today gave some examples of response times in excess of 20 minutes, which, of course, are not satisfactory.

I just received a note that a number of the ambulance officers are watching this performance on closed-circuit television and like it. I thank you for sending that note in. All the other notes I received today have indicated that people did not like it, so it is good to see that somebody does.

Mr. Epp: This is exciting stuff. This is what democracy is made of.

Mr. Reville: Well, there you go.

I get mail from other parts of the province as well that talks about ambulance services. This is a letter to the Premier (Mr. Peterson), actually, that was copied to me and, it looks like, about 15 other people. This letter says:

“Dear Mr. Peterson:

“From past documentation sent to your office, you have been made well aware of the need for improved ambulance service for this community. You have also been made aware of a number of occasions where ambulances have not been available to respond to emergency calls in an efficient matter. It should also not surprise you to learn that this situation applies to routine calls.

“In the fall of 1986, there were promises made by the Ministry of Health and ambulance services branch that new ambulance stations were going to be built to provide better ambulance coverage for the city of London and the surrounding district. To date, only one new station has been built, and it has turned out to be a replacement station and not a new one. One station has been closed and is no longer being used on a permanent basis now that the new location has become operational. There has been no word as to the completion date of these two new stations or when there will be a manpower increase to make these stations functional.”

The letter goes on to say: “It has been 18 months since the promise was made, and we are not the only ones concerned with the level of staffing provided for this community. Last week, there was a request for a patient to be transferred to Hamilton, and when it was apparent that no ambulances were readily available or would be for some time, there was a call made from your office requesting a reason why there were no ambulances available.”

Enclosed with the document were -- what would they be called? It is actually a record of delays in response. Here is a delay of two hours and 20 minutes. It indicates the time on a 24-hour clock and the reason, the call number and the delay in each case: “All cars out on high-priority calls,” “All cars out on 4s,” “Too busy,” “Too busy,” “Busy,” “Busy,” “Insufficient vehicles.” This covered a period of from just before 11 o’clock in the morning to just after five o’clock in the afternoon, and the delays ranged from six minutes to two hours and 20 minutes.

I think it is pretty clear that it is the government’s responsibility to provide more than patchwork emergency services. I think it is the government’s responsibility as well to ensure that such services as are provided are not provided on the backs of the workers who are providing them. In my experience, it is fairly common that people who do vital work are often expected to subsidize that work, in effect, because their wages are low. I do not think that is right at all. People should be properly compensated for the kinds of services they are providing. The ministry should attend to that situation, which has been carefully documented and about which I do not believe there should be any dispute whatsoever.

One of the other programs under vote 1803 is one that we have talked about a great deal and that is of special concern to me. It is the Ontario drug benefit plan, which was estimated to cost in 1987-88 -- holy smokes -- close to $500 million. In December of last year I raised a number of concerns in respect of the Ontario drug benefit plan. Following that, in the brief session we had in February I raised the matters again, as did my leader. I want to review some of that material now.

What has happened, of course, is that following our short winter session last year the Minister of Health asked Dr. Lowy, “To review all aspects of the government’s role and influence in the prescription drug marketplace, specifically to examine the current drug programs operated by the government; their past, present and future trends in relation to government’s objectives; the most effective ways to ensure quality of care and quality assurance of drugs under the ODB” -- that is the Ontario drug benefit plan -- “the impact of the utilization of drugs on the health status of eligible recipients; the current criteria for eligibility for the government-sponsored programs,” and some other stuff.

Dr. Lowy’s committee is out there and has recently done some hearings, some of which were held here in Toronto quite recently and to which a number of groups have made submissions. A number of very disturbing situations have developed in Ontario that I am sure Dr. Lowy has been made well aware of and which must disturb him and his committee, as well.

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“We believe that 20 per cent of all seniors admitted to hospital have a drug problem caused by the ingestion of two or more incompatible drugs or from overmedication. That is an extremely serious health risk. The other piece of that is that if we assume that seniors account for about 40 per cent of acute care hospital patient-days, we are talking about probably $400 million a year in terms of the cost of caring for people who have been made sick by medicine. It is really a bizarre and weird thing to have happened, that somehow our system has gone so awry that people are becoming ill from medications that are intended to make them well.

One of the things that is pointed out and has been pointed out to Dr. Lowy -- this was material in a significant study on drug utilization that was available to the previous Minister of Health -- is that physicians’ knowledge of drugs is very low . What they tend to learn about pharmacology happens in less than 100 hours of training in medical school. Most of the knowledge that physicians have about pharmaceuticals is provided to them by detail men.

As life will have it, detail men these days are usually women, but they are basically salesmen for pharmaceutical companies. They allot about $5,000 per physician per year to market their products and on occasion, provide various kinds of prizes and incentives if physicians will use particular kinds of drugs.

Nursing home residents often receive their medical care from the physician responsible for the entire institution. This restricts opportunities for discussion among colleagues, obviously. More frightening is the finding in the study that the use of psychoactive drugs is very high. It is at a very high rate in elderly nursing home patients. Psychoactive medications are very powerful, mind-altering chemicals that have been invented in the last two or three decades. Basically, what we have is a large number of elderly people who are absolutely zonked on medications that have been prescribed for them as a way of client control.

“Physicians with large nursing home practices are responsible for prescribing 81 per cent of all antipsychotic medications.”

It is surprising to me that the government was so slow to take action in this regard, because all this information was available to it. In fact, the government has a committee composed of expert pharmacologists, called the Drug Quality and Therapeutics Committee, established by order in council to advise the government. The government declined to listen to the advice of its own DQTC.

There is some pretty amazing information that became available about the utilization of the Ontario drug benefit plan. In 1986, there were over 700 people who received more than 200 prescriptions each in one year. Can you imagine how many prescriptions that is? That is four prescriptions every single week. There was one case of a person who received 1,400 prescriptions under the drug benefit plan in one year.

I do not know what those prescriptions were for. I do not know whether the ministry’s computer can figure out what they were for, but it is really hard to imagine a person being able to ingest over 100 prescriptions of medication in a month. It makes you wonder where these drugs are going, who is getting them and why.

I know the minister is sensitive in this regard and has had some experience with so-called brown bag programs in which elderly people are invited to put all the medications they may have in their medicine cabinet, in the kitchen cupboard and on the kitchen table in a bag and bring them to a place where a physician will take a look at what is in the bag and encourage the person who has all the medications that are out of date, incompatible, stale and wrong to throw them away.

Clearly, the practice of medicine has changed to an extent where the number of people getting home visits by physicians these days is much smaller than it once was. It is pretty clear that we are a society that somehow has come to believe there is a pill for every ache. We go out and get a prescription for that pill and we keep them all in our medicine cabinet. When our friends drop over and describe their symptoms to us, we say, “I have some thing that will fix you right up.” It is a dangerous practice to share your medications around. I know there are people who are working with seniors who are trying to discourage the nonmedical prescription of drugs that sometimes goes on.

It is one thing to waste tax dollars. It is another thing to make people sick while doing so. It is clear that control has to be gotten of the Ontario drug benefit plan. I would worry if the major tranquilizers, particularly, are finding their way on to the street and that that drug traffic is ironically being paid for by the taxpayers and funded by the government.

The Ontario drug benefit plan is an idea that is based on a good idea that people on social assistance and the elderly should not be impoverished by having to pay for drugs they need. It is a cruel irony indeed that excessive prescription of drugs may be related to the fact that they are free. I am not one who is comforted at all by the thought of user fees and do not recommend them, although I know that some people would say that is the solution to this problem.

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I do not believe that is the solution to this problem. I think the problem has a number of solutions. One is a solution that is directed towards the consumer; another is a solution that is directed towards the prescribing physician, and another is directed towards the pharmacist, who should be able to keep track of what kinds of prescriptions somebody is having all at once.

I think we will all look forward to what Dr. Lowy has to say and we will hope that the government will take speedy action thereon.

That is the Ontario drug benefit plan. It is one of the most “successful” programs of the provincial government. It has grown from a modest beginning of about $10 million to the sky is the limit, practically, half a billion in here and more to come. Part of that is the function of our ageing populations; part of it is the function of the fact that 70 per cent of all visits to a physician result in a prescription being written. There has to be a better way to do some of this stuff.

I want to let people know I have now completed the second hour and then some of this discussion today and I am certainly enjoying it a great deal. I do not have all that much further to go and I am going to make it. This will comfort all the members.

Vote 1804 is the mental health vote, and under this area we are talking about close to half a billion dollars, much of it spent on psychiatric services and, clearly, the operation of the 10 provincial psychiatric hospitals. These use up the lion’s share of that money.

Mental health, as members will know, is the area in which I have the most interest and, in a number of ways, the most experience. I have a great many things that I like to say about mental health and do in fact say about mental health.

As recently as last week, I was a guest of the Ministry of Health in Oshawa at the ninth annual Ontario alternative housing conference. I do not suspect the Minister of Health was aware that I was the key speaker at that conference. The other speakers were physicians. This was a group of community mental health program people whose main interest is in the provision of supported housing to people who have had psychiatric problems. They have an annual meeting to discuss various issues, and I was very pleased to go and speak to them.

Members might be interested to know that the week after next I will be returning to England to speak for the second time this year at the annual convention of British Mind, which is equivalent, probably, to the national division of the Canadian Mental Health Association in Canada. What I will be speaking about is community mental health and a model that I have had some hand in developing for delivering community mental health services, some of which I am pleased to now find reflected in the Graham report. I am encouraged that the Minister of Health has said she intends to look at a way of implementing some of the recommendations that Mr. Graham has made.

In some ways, I think the situation in mental health is a microcosm of the situation in health in general. Once in our society we got past the notion that mental illness was caused by evil spirits or the devil or witchcraft, we developed an institutional response to “treat” people, and the treatment has varied over the years. I will not subject members to a tedious description of some of the horrifying treatments that were developed in the early days before the invention of the psychotropic drugs. Some of the ways in which people who were considered to be mentally ill were treated were quite horrible, indeed.

We continue to maintain a mental health service system which is dominated by institutions in which the medical profession has the lead role and which, in many ways, does not seem to work at all. If you look at the situation in most of North America, you will see that usually 90 per cent of the money spent on mental health is spent on an institutional response and the remainder is spent on programs that support people when they leave the hospital.

One of the things that we need to take account of is, number one, we have decreased the number of psychiatric beds by 75 per cent in Ontario during the process that we called deinstitutionalization. We have developed medications that are so powerful that a person can be stabilized quite quickly, so that periods of hospitalization are getting shorter. The experience of people, though, is serial hospitalizations, interrupted by some kind of struggle for survival in the community for a while for those people who are not served by the increasing array of community mental health programming that is available.

I am pleased to tell the Legislature that a couple of things have happened in the last year or so that give me optimism that we may finally be starting to move in the right direction, not only here in Ontario but in Canada as a whole, where there seems to be a greater understanding of the need for mechanisms, programs and approaches which will empower people rather than disempower them. But there is always a danger, as we look at improving our community mental health service system, that all we will do is create more people who are dependent on that service system, and that would be an objective that I would not support.

I have done some work just recently on the question of user involvement. There was an international conference I spoke at recently in Brighton, England. I delivered a paper called User Involvement in Mental Health Services in Canada.

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Mr. Cousens: Whereabouts?

Mr. Reville: Brighton.

Mr. Cousens: In England?

Mr. Reville: Yes.

Mr. Cousens: We have a hard time listening to you here. How would they suffer it over there?

Mr. Reville: I actually made a much shorter, sharper speech there.

Mr. Cousens: If you did that, you would give us a bad name.

Mr. Reville: The speech was very well received, and my paper is being published by the mental health association in England, I am happy to tell the member.

Mr. Cousens: Would you be so kind as to send copies to members of the Legislature?

Mr. Reville: No, not unless the member wants to pay for them.

Mr. Cousens: I wouldn’t pay for them, no way. There are limits beyond which we may not go.

Mr. Reville: The member for Markham might, however, be interested in knowing that the point of the paper was that there are some institutional barriers to recipients of services really being involved in the planning and delivery of those services. Considerable effort is going to have to be devoted, particularly towards enabling users of mental health services to be involved in the planning and implementation of the services they need.

I think the Graham report is deficient in this respect, in that it does not address the way in which a government would enable families’ and friends’ groups -- that is the informal caring network -- and user groups or self-help groups to be involved in the design and delivery of services and how those groups would be involved with the district health councils, the planning mechanism foreseen by the Graham report.

One of the things that is clear is that there are some efforts being made in parts of Canada at the moment to strengthen consumer participation that are encouraging. The government of British Columbia has recently implemented a $500,000 program whereby ex-psychiatric patients have been hired to develop a consumer network in that province, so they can be better represented in the planning process for community mental health; this in a province that is not always known for its generosity in social services. I am very encouraged by those kinds of developments and I hope that in Ontario we will see a similar kind of progress.

There is a whole host of problems in our delivery of mental health services that need to be addressed and have not been adequately addressed, although they have been reported on over and over again. On the one extreme is the maximum security facility at Oak Ridge about which so much has been written and about which so remarkably little has been done.

The Hucker report was tabled in 1985. The then Minister of Health indicated, at the Health estimates of that day, that the Oak Ridge facility was obsolete, outdated and had to be replaced. Recently, I think in response to a question from the local member, the member for Simcoe East (Mr. McLean), we heard the minister say that the planning process was under way to replace the facility.

I think planning needs to be done, there is no question about that. The announcements we have had indicated that a kind of recreational facility was going to be built on that site, and I do not think that has happened yet. There have been some renovations to the existing facility, but basically Oak Ridge is a dungeon. If I were the Minister of Health, I would not want to include any dungeons among my health care facilities.

There are a number of difficult issues to address here. The Oak Ridge facility is of significant economic benefit to that area. I do not know whether there is any particular reason for it to be located there. That would be a difficult issue to sort out because everybody who lives in Penetang and Midland works at the Ridge and it is a significant contributor to the local economy.

The ENCON report that came out just recently that was looking at the risk management procedures of the government in respect of psychiatric patients who are on Lieutenant Governor’s warrants recommended the building of a medium-security facility here in Metropolitan Toronto or near Metro. The minister has indicated that she is going to have an interministerial group take a look at that. If the history of the replacement of Oak Ridge is an example, then it will be many years before a Minister of Health stands up and says that they are starting to plan a medium-security facility. I am not convinced that one is necessary. I would be interested in seeing the date on which the ENCON people made that suggestion.

There are some other areas in mental health which concern me.

Mr. Cousens: Are you going longer?

Mr. Reville: I am going until 6.

We had a big day in December 1985. We have two mental health reports tabled at once, I think. I think we got the Clark report at about the same time. Some may remember that the then Minister of Health asked Mr. Clark, who was a lawyer, to take a look at the question of electroconvulsive therapy. Mr. Clark did that and wrote a report, which the previous Minister of Health tabled in the Legislature in December 1985, and a large number of recommendations were made about electroconvulsive therapy, sometimes called ECT, referred to by many consumers as shock.

One of the recommendations was that a brochure be prepared describing the procedure that would be made available to people who were being recommended for it so that they could read about what it was and make an informed decision about whether or not they wanted to have such a treatment. I should indicate at this point that there are a considerable number of people who do not see electroconvulsive therapy as treatment at all. They see it as torture.

I believe that three years later we do not have a final version of the brochure on electroconvulsive therapy, although I have seen a couple of drafts, or maybe three drafts, and I have been mildly encouraged to see that each time the draft has been somewhat improved. It would appear to me that in the absence of this material being available, the question of informed consent continues to be moot, that in fact people are still getting the treatment when they have not been given adequate information about it. That, I believe, is against the law. I think it is incumbent on the Ministry of Health to get on with this job, this job that has now been going on for almost three years, and develop adequate information so that people can make informed judgements about whether or not they want to have a particular treatment.

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In the early part of 1988, the standing committee on public accounts investigated the Provincial Auditor’s findings on the adequacy of arrangements to provide and manage mental health care in the province. Among the concerns were: “the staffing facilities and utilization of the 10 provincial psychiatric hospitals; serious inadequacies in the availability and co-ordination of housing alternatives and community support programs, contributing to a revolving-door syndrome; the absence of a comprehensive management information system needed to collect and analyse data, either for management of existing facilities or the planning of new ones.”

The public accounts committee caused a number of officials, including the deputy minister and the assistant deputy minister responsible for mental health care to appear before the committee and discuss their concerns. It is clear to me that a great deal more remains to be done. During the election period of 1987, the Premier announced that the money available to community mental health programming would be doubled over three years. That would bring it to an amount that is significantly more than has been spent, clearly, in recent years.

One of the dilemmas, however, is that the existing programs have waiting lists and the existing programs have salary levels for their professionals that are well below the salary levels on the institutional side. All that money could be gobbled up in just sort of meeting the waiting lists and rectifying some of those inadequacies and inconsistencies in the current program.

In addition, it has been shown by people in the field that in the Metropolitan Toronto area we probably need an additional 7,000 units of supported housing, some of which would be the responsibility of the Ministry of Health to provide and some of which would be the responsibility of the Ministry of Housing to provide.

Clearly, the provision of supported housing is not going to make a significant dent in that demand for a long time. That will result in people who are coming out of hospital competing for an ever-decreasing supply of affordable housing. The situation is particularly severe here in Metro where even the crummiest and cheapest of housing is now probably $80 a week. Some of that is hard to describe as housing.

Some of these problems are not entirely the responsibility of the Ministry of Health. They are the responsibility of the Ministry of Community and Social Services and in some cases the responsibility of the Ministry of Housing or the Ministry of Correctional Services. It seems that it is almost impossible to conceive of a situation in which several ministries which overlap a public policy area could ever manage to move ahead together in a coordinated way.

Mr. Laughren: Do you want a quorum call?

Mr. Reville: Is there no quorum?

Mr. Laughren: No.

Mr. Reville: I can wind it up. I can do 10 more minutes. I am still running. I can probably do the last 12 minutes without a quorum call.

I am particularly concerned about the conditions in some of our private boarding and lodging homes. The minister, I am sure, will remember a particularly gruesome situation in an Orillia boarding home in which the owner was charged with manslaughter. Twenty-seven charges were laid against the owner of this private boarding and lodging home. The embarrassing thing was that about 25 former residents of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre were referred to this home by ministry staff. I am happy to tell you that the owner has been convicted and the home has been shut down.

It is a situation that is not uncommon. The ministry operates a large number of homes for special care or provides funding for a large number of homes for special care outside of Metro. Many of them are no more than warehouses for numbers of people, and the amount of anything that could be called programming that occurs in some of these places is tiny indeed. I suspect that at some time we are going to have to tackle the inadequacies of the homes-for-special-care system, which I do not believe have ever been looked at by a committee of this Legislature but very much need to be. A significant amount of public money goes into homes for special care, and the adequacy of the program they provide is seriously questionable.

In my remarks this afternoon, I have had very little to say about community health. That is not because it is not an important area; in fact, I think it is probably the most important area. I have just had so many other things to say on other topics that we have not really got there yet. It is encouraging to me, as I said earlier in my response to the ministerial statement today, to see an increase in the number of community health centres. I believe the minister has announced five in the last few days or months or weeks.

It remains my contention that the government needs to do much better than its stated goal of increasing the number of people served by twofold over the next five years. That is still a very small number of all the people of Ontario served by community health centres, and we very much need to serve a lot more than that.

There are significant advantages in providing health services through community health centres, one of which is that the community health centres can concentrate on preventive medicine and do community education about healthy lifestyles. It is important perhaps to note that one such community health centre -- and I am thinking of the health centre in my own riding, the South Riverdale Community Health Centre -- has been a significant player in the development of public policy because of its interest in environmental issues.

Were it not for the leadership of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, I do not believe the contaminated soil would have been removed from my community in what has been the most significant soil replacement program that has ever been undertaken in this country.

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It was the efforts at educating and organizing the community that were part of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre’s mandate that finally pushed this provincial government into agreeing to replace the soil, and I think that raised the consciousness of the people in that community and in other parts of the city about the threat to our health that environmental pollution can pose.

Similarly, the South Riverdale Community Health Centre has an occupational health and safety committee, because it serves an area that continues to have a significant number of industrial jobs, and provides an information service to the community about various occupational health and safety hazards to which they, as workers and as neighbours, are exposed.

The other part of the community health service delivery model in Ontario is the health service organization, and there too the growth has been very slow. It is an interesting nuance on the way of remunerating physicians that needs to be looked at. There continue to be a number of problems with the way the program is administered that work to the disadvantage of those who are in health service organizations.

I know this particularly because I am in close contact with the Main Street health service organization, which is on the edge of my riding and which is one of the few health service organizations that has a community board. It is not a doctor-managed health service organization but a community-directed health service organization, and it provides a service to the people in the east end of the city that is valuable and needs to be expanded and encouraged.

Mr. Laughren: Right on.

Mr. Reville: Is that not right on?

During the next seven hours of my remarks, I will have an opportunity to ask some trenchant questions of the Minister of Health.

Hon. Mr. Conway: Take your time. You are going to have to go to the Ed Philip school of resilience.

Mr. Reville: Does the minister think I am kind of flagging here?

Hon. Mr. Conway: Not flagging.

Hon. Mr. Curling: Flaking.

Mr. Pelissero: Sagging.

Mr. Reville: The government House leader unkindly suggests that I am not flagging. Mr. Chairman, I am indeed flagging. If he is trying to urge me on to more spectacular industrial heroism than he has ever seen before, I shall not respond to such a foolhardy challenge. I have been Cool Hand Luked before, Mr. Chairman, and I will be again.

In fact, I was trying to conclude my, whatever they are, remarks -- trenchant. And mordant, I believe, kind of fits with trenchant, do you not think? Probably hardly anybody knows what trenchant and mordant mean.

Hon. Mr. Conway: You sound like you are getting ready for the House leaders’ Christmas party.

Mr. Reville: If the member had gone to plumbing university, as did I, he would know these words.

I have enjoyed making these initial remarks and I look forward to returning to the six votes and asking some specific questions, to which I suspect there will be no specific answers.

I thank the members for their patience and their indulgence. I think it would be appropriate, seeing that I have almost got to six of the clock, to adjourn the estimates for today.

On motion by Mr. Reville, the committee of supply reported progress.

LEGISLATIVE PAGES

Hon. Mr. Conway: Before reading the business statement for next week, I am sure the House would want me to take this occasion to observe that this group of pages will be leaving us as of this afternoon. We would all, I am sure, want to thank these wonderful young men and women for the very excellent service and good humour they have provided. Certainly all of us, the member for Nickel Belt (Mr. Laughren) and others, want to wish them all the best in their future endeavours.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Hon. Mr. Conway: Pursuant to standing order 13, I would like to indicate the business of the House for the coming week.

On Monday, November 21, this House will not sit on account of the federal general election.

On Tuesday, November 22, we will continue with the estimates of the Ministry of Health just adjourned by the honourable member for Riverdale (Mr. Reville), who tells us that, like General MacArthur, he shall return.

On Wednesday, November 23, we will continue the adjourned debate on Bill 162, the Workers’ Compensation Amendment Act.

On Thursday, November 24, in the morning, we will deal with private members’ business standing in the names of the member for Brampton North (Mr. McClelland) and the member for Hamilton Mountain (Mr. Charlton). In the afternoon, we will consider second reading of Bill 122, An Act to amend the Retail Sales Tax Act.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.

17 novembre 1988