L032b - Wed 24 Jun 1998 / Mer 24 Jun 1998 1
The House met at 1830.
ORDERS OF THE DAY
TAX CUTS FOR PEOPLE AND FOR SMALL BUSINESS ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 SUR LA RÉDUCTION DES IMPÔTS DES PARTICULIERS ET DES PETITES ENTREPRISES
Mr Baird moved third reading of the following bill:
Bill 15, An Act to cut taxes for people and for small business and to implement other measures contained in the 1998 Budget / Projet de loi 15, Loi visant à réduire les impôts des particuliers et des petites entreprises et à mettre en oeuvre d'autres mesures contenues dans le budget de 1998.
The Acting Speaker (Mrs Marion Boyd): : The member for Nepean has moved third reading. The member for Nepean.
Mr Tony Martin (Sault Ste Marie): On a point of order, Madam Speaker: If the member for Nepean is going to grace us with his words of wisdom, we should at least have a quorum in the House.
The Acting Speaker: Clerk, would you check to see if there is quorum in the House.
Clerk Assistant (Ms Deborah Deller): A quorum is not present, Speaker.
The Acting Speaker ordered the bells rung.
Clerk Assistant: A quorum is now present
The Acting Speaker: The member for Nepean may now continue.
Mr John R. Baird (Nepean): I want to say at the outset of my remarks that we've got a real treat tonight. We've got a number of speakers I hope to share my time with. On the agenda tonight we've got the very hard-working member for York East; a noted environmentalist, the member for Northumberland; and the ever-charismatic member for Etobicoke-Humber, who's just entering the room. For those of you who are tuning in on TV, don't adjust your TV set, you've got a lot of good remarks to come to you.
I'm pleased to speak to Bill 15, which is the first budget bill arising from the 1998 budget presented in the House more than a month and a half ago by our colleague the Minister of Finance, the Honourable Ernie Eves.
I know that all of us sought election to this place with some very noble intentions. We wanted to do a good job, to represent our communities. We wanted to improve the lives of the people in those communities. In the 1995 provincial election, the number one issue by a country mile was jobs and the economy. Whether you were in Nepean or whether you were in Dundas, in the riding of Wentworth North, whose member is here tonight, or whether you were in Stevensville or Port Colborne - the member for Niagara South is here tonight - that was the number one issue across Ontario.
I know that in my constituency, when I first started to campaign in the last provincial election, unemployment was at a rate of 10.8%. That was a very high number. There was despair in the land. Not only were there far too many people out looking for work, there were far to many people who couldn't find work. I spoke with a lot of parents worried about whether, when their children grew up, they'd have the same opportunities that they and their parents had enjoyed a generation earlier. I spoke to parents who worried whether their children who were attending college or university would be able to get a job when they graduated from university. The very high standard of living that we've come to expect, even demand some would say, in the province was very much in doubt.
For many years we'd become accustomed to knowing Ontario as the economic engine of Canada. I've said if before and I'll say it again: Ontario for many years was the economic engine of Canada. We were a magnet for jobs, for investment and for opportunity.
Mr Tim Hudak (Niagara South): What happened?
Mr Baird: "What happened?" the member for Niagara South said. Over ten years, from 1985 to 1995, we became a mismanaged debtor - overgoverned, overregulated and overtaxed. For far too many, that meant despair. That meant lack of hope and lack of opportunity for the future.
At the same time as we're discussing the economic policies contained in this budget, there are some out there who, you'll be shocked to learn, believe that a provincial government without the control of the currency, without the control of fiscal policy, can do nothing with respect to the economy, that the government of Ontario has no power to influence job creation in the province. I want to say that those of us on this side of the House totally reject that notion. We totally reject it.
We believe that the provincial government, the government of Ontario, can have a tremendously positive or negative impact on job creation. For 10 years we saw the negative impact and now we're seeing the very positive impact, not of spending the taxpayers' money and seeking simply to redistribute wealth, but rather of trying to create an environment where the private sector, where the businesses of Ontario can create jobs for people. That is very much our view.
I didn't hear anyone in the last provincial election running for office saying, "By the way, if you elect me there's nothing I can do or seek to influence to help the economy." Each party ran with an economic plan that they believed would put the economy on the right track. The good news is that the plan that this party, this government, this caucus and this cabinet with this Premier put on the table is being implemented and exactly what they said would happen is happening. The unemployment rate is falling. More people are working now in Ontario than at any other time in our history. The economy is doing well. We've got to rededicate our efforts to ensuring that that is felt in every part of this province and that we continue to recognize the importance of job creation for our work as legislators.
Some people say that it's simply the value of the Canadian dollar, or where interest rates happen to sit, where Gordon Thiessen - a constituent of Nepean, I might add - would set interest rates or where the US economy is, and that's going to completely dictate where the performance of the Ontario economy lies. That's certainly not he case in other provinces. In other provinces, the economy is not doing as well as in Ontario. I believe that the economic policies set out in three successive budgets and a number of financial statements are having an incredibly positive effect on job creation in Ontario.
We believe we can create an environment where the private sector can create jobs. But to do that, we had to make a very fundamental decision at the outset of the process. We had to determine what was priority number one. Was it going to be the deficit or was it going to be job creation? Those of us on this side of the House unanimously said that job creation was priority number one. Whether is was in Stevensville, whether it was in Kitchener-Waterloo, whether it was in Petrolia or Sarnia, whether it was in the former Kingston township, in Frontenac-Addington, whether it was in Etobicoke, we believed, all of us, that job creation was the top priority. For those people who were so narrowly focused on just the deficit, we were unprepared to say that we would simply balance the budget over the first three or four years and then get on to job creation in the future. The answer was no, we were going to make job creation priority number one.
That was a tough decision. After that, everything was very easy. We could say that we could create jobs and cut taxes at the same time as balancing the budget. The leadership demonstrated by this government has shown that they are prepared to make the tough decisions to ensure that we can leave a balanced budget for the next generation, to ensure that our future generations aren't saddled with the $11.3-billion deficits that we inherited from the previous government.
We said that we would balance the budget in the full course of a term, which is five years. The good news is that in every single quarter of every single fiscal year we have not just met those targets, but rather we have exceeded them. An $11.3-billion deficit, just three years ago, quickly went down to $9.3 billion and that was succeeded by $8.1 billion. Then we got the revised financial statement and it went down to $8.7 billion. Then it went down to $8.2 billion. Then it went down to $6.6 billion. Then it went down to $5.6 billion. Then they revised them again and they went down to $5.2 billion. In the budget this year, the deficit is scheduled to fall well below $4.2 billion.
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Interjections.
Mr Baird: The good news is that we've set aggressive targets and we've been able to meet those targets on each and every occasion. We've built in solid contingency funds to ensure we meet them, which is something that the previous government simply couldn't do, as the member for Ottawa-Rideau said. The member for Oxford said, "How did the NDP meet their targets?" Far too often, they didn't meet their targets. To be very fair, as I think you have to be in this debate, the New Democratic Party was elected on September 10, 1990. On September 10, there was a balanced budget.
Interjection.
Mr Baird: September 6, 1990. The budget was balanced and in fact there was a $75-million surplus. There was three weeks in between the election and when the Honourable Floyd Laughren found his way to the seventh floor of the Frost Building. Do you know what happened in those three weeks?
Interjection: No, tell us.
Mr Baird: Instead of a $75-million budget surplus, in 21 days a $4-billion deficit developed. That is literally $10 million for every working hour that went by during that transition period. Somehow the balanced budget evaporated in some 21 days. By October 1, some 21 days after the New Democratic Party was elected, when they took office, a $4-billion deficit developed. I checked the campaign literature from the Liberals across the province and I found a balanced budget, a $75-million surplus. That certainly didn't develop and that was extremely important.
We made some very tough and aggressive goals for balancing the budget. The good news, and I know you'll be pleased to hear this as will people across the province, is that on every single occasion they've not just met those targets but they have exceeded them.
The number one goal, to try to create jobs and an environment for jobs, was to try to boost consumer confidence, which was lagging far too much across Ontario. Those people who were unemployed simply had no money to spend. Those people who were fortunate enough to have a job were holding on to every dear penny for dear life because they were afraid they'd lose their job. They were afraid they'd lose their job, they were afraid they'd have their hours cut back, they were afraid their spouse would become unemployed, they were afraid they wouldn't have enough to retire, so they weren't spending any money. Consumer confidence was an incredibly strong issue.
Mr Garry J. Guzzo (Ottawa-Rideau): Fear of the social contract.
Mr Baird: Particularly fear of the social contract, as the member for Ottawa-Rideau said, was indeed part of the issue.
The member for Ottawa-Rideau will know that in our community of Ottawa-Carleton it was the fear of the Chrétien layoffs in the federal public service. We know that under the Conservative government in Ottawa the federal public service grew by 400, but then the federal Liberal government came into place and let go 45,000 people - 20,000 in our community. I don't remember reading about that in their election platform in 1993 either. In our community we had the fear of the federal public service layoffs, which were tough and were undoubtedly required. They were undertaken, so there was a tremendous lack of consumer confidence.
But the number one problem with consumer confidence was the high taxes we were paying in Ontario.
Mr Hudak: Huge taxes.
Mr Baird: Huge taxes, as the member for Niagara South said. In Ontario, we were paying the second-highest income tax rate in the country, second only to Newfoundland. I'll tell you, that is not a good sign for economic growth.
I read a good speech the other day by my colleague the member for Niagara South where he very eloquently made some of these points.
As a government, we set out to say that we were not going to be able to grow the economy and create jobs with the second-highest income tax rate in Canada. We set out to change that and we are following through with Bill 15 to cut provincial income tax rates from what were the second-highest in the country. A week from today, you'll be interested to know, this government will have lived up to its 30% income tax reduction. That is indeed good news.
Mr Guzzo: Repeat that.
Mr Baird: The member for Ottawa-Rideau says to repeat that. It's actually not 30%; it's 30.2%. That type of income tax reduction is putting a lot of income into people's pockets. I had a number of people come into my constituency office, as I know they undoubtedly came into the constituency office of the member for Wentworth East or the member for Cambridge, and say: "John, I've got my tax forms out here and my tax cut exceeds 30%. Could you explain that to me?" We took their tax forms out and I was able to show them that if you are of modest or middle-class means your tax cut is actually greater than 30%.
Mr Marcel Beaubien (Lambton): That's where it should be.
Mr Baird: That's where it should, as the member for Lambton said. I want to first acknowledge the member for Lambton and the member for Sarnia for their three-year effort to try to help create a climate for job creation in Sarnia-Lambton with the recent passage of labour legislation, which will undoubtedly be a job windfall for the people of Sarnia-Lambton. They've worked extremely hard on that. The Minister of Labour eventually just threw his hands up and said, "These guys have been fighting for three years," and gave into the new jobs that are going to be coming to Sarnia-Lambton as a result of the efforts of this provincial government.
We set out to cut the income tax rate. We started with the second-highest in Canada and, as of seven days from today, we will have the lowest income tax rate in the country, right here in Ontario. That will undoubtedly be a real boon to investment and that will undoubtedly be a real boon to allow people to keep more of their hard-earned tax dollars. We wonder what happens when you let people keep more of their hard-earned tax dollars.
Mr Hudak: What's happens?
Mr Baird: First, when taxes are too high we know what happens. I have here a very interesting article from the Toronto Sun:
"Martin Admits Taxes Too High. `Obviously I think taxes are too high,' Finance Minister Paul Martin said, `and we would like to bring them down, but we're not going to bring them down.' Nor would the finance minister choose between investing in government programs. `I think we should do both.'"
But of course this was before the last federal election and now we find out that promised tax cuts before the election have turned out to be no tax cuts from the federal Liberal government.
Interjection.
Mr Baird: The member for Kenora talks about -
The Acting Speaker: Member for Nepean, take your seat for a moment. When the member for Nepean has the floor, he gets to talk. When you folks take the floor, you get to talk. Member for Nepean.
Mr Guzzo: Well, there's a novel ruling.
The Acting Speaker: Member for Ottawa-Rideau, come to order.
Mr Baird: The tax cuts are very important because what's going to happen? The tax cuts that the federal Liberal government promised of course have not materialized.
The member for Kenora says, "What about property taxes at the local level?" In Nepean, they've cut property taxes by 2%. They had a big fight. Were they going to cut them by 0.8%, 1%, 2% or 5%? There was a big debate in Nepean city council, but Councillor Jan Harder led the fight and was able to get a 2% cut in property taxes in Nepean.
Interjection.
Mr Baird: A very good woman indeed, as the member for Lambton says.
Anyway, what's the effect on consumer confidence in my community? That's what I'm here to tell you. The Ottawa Citizen from earlier this month:
"Indicators Point to Expanding Economy. More jobs, rising retail sales in Ottawa generate optimism and consumer confidence. Rising employment and a solid performance in key business indicators continue to show the Ottawa area economy in a strong expansion mode, a review of the latest economic indicators show."
We talked about consumer confidence. Sales at department stores in the first four months of the year totalled nearly $199 million, up 14% from the same period last year, the federal Statistics Canada bureau reported. That is indeed very good news. Retail sales are up and one of the big factors that contributes to that is the provincial government is allowing taxpayers to keep more of their own hard-earned tax dollars. That 10.8% unemployment rate that I encountered when I first set out for election to this place is now down to 6.8% and falling. That's what it's all about.
Bill 15, in some concluding remarks, does a whole host of things. It implements the last phase of the provincial income tax reduction, that job-creating tax cut. It also seeks some reductions in corporate taxes. Someone said, "Is that a corporate tax cut for the big corporations in Ontario?" Not at all. It's a tax cut for small corporations and it's a 50% reduction of corporate tax for small business to be implemented over the next eight years, because we on this side of the House know the very important role that small businesses play in job creation. We want to have as vibrant a small business sector in the economy as we can have because the government of Ontario recognizes that small business means more jobs. That's extremely important.
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The unemployment rate in my region is down to 6.8%. We're continuing to work very hard, because as long as there's one person out there looking for employment who can't find it, that's one person too many. We're working extremely hard on that. When you look at the economic numbers, we see more than 350,000 net new jobs created in the province in the last two years and 10 months, and that is indeed good news.
Some of the other measures to help that job creation contained in the tax reduction bill: I've already mentioned the tax reduction for individuals that is more than 30% for the small and middle-class. I've mentioned the corporate tax cuts for small business, to cut that by 50% over the next eight years.
I also want to talk about the land transfer tax cut. What this does is extend the land transfer rebate. When first-time home buyers buy their first home, this will return a portion - and all in certain cases - of the land transfer tax for new homes constructed. In my community, in Longfields and Davidson Heights and Centre Point, there's a tremendous amount of new home construction in the province, and this is undoubtedly helpful. There's significant new home construction in Cumberland and Stittsville and in Kanata in my region, so obviously that's having a positive effect. It's not responsible for everything, but it's undoubtedly having a very positive effect.
That is indeed good news for those people looking for work and good news for those people who say that job creation must be our top priority, because that's the whole purpose behind Bill 15 and the provincial budget tabled in May 1998. It's all a package designed to help stimulate the economy, to boost consumer confidence, to give small business and the job creation industries in Ontario more fodder.
The big job creation industry in my community is high technology. For far too long there haven't been enough education spaces for the high-technology sector, particularly in post-secondary education. So this 1998 budget brings $150 million of new money to double the number of computer science and electrical engineering and computer engineering spaces so we can help double the pipeline.
That was proposed by the Canadian Advanced Technology Association. They deserve a lot of credit for very eloquently pushing that issue. It's another example where a presentation came before the standing committee on finance during our pre-budget consultation and it was recommended as an issue in the report and then finally adopted in the provincial budget. That will have an incredible effect on job creation, not just in Nepean and Kanata but in Cambridge and in Kitchener-Waterloo. The member for Kitchener knows the importance of high technology to his region, as is the case in Markham and the greater Toronto area as well, the three high-tech centres in the province. That will have undoubtedly a very positive effect on job creation.
Bill 15 is about economic growth. It's about job creation. It's about Ontario once again leading the economic recovery in Canada and being among the leaders in economic growth in Canada.
I'm very pleased to support Bill 15 and look forward to its early adoption. On this second-last night before we break, I especially look forward to hearing my colleagues the members for York East, Northumberland and Etobicoke-Humber.
Mr John L. Parker (York East): It's my pleasure to join in the debate tonight on Bill 15. As always, it's an honour to follow the member for Nepean after his fine remarks on this very significant bill, and of course after me comes my colleague from Northumberland. The three of us are but warm-up acts for the fourth and final speaker on this bill. We are but messengers for he whose thong we are unworthy to tie, the member for Etobicoke-Humber. I am looking forward to hearing his remarks on this very important bill later on this evening.
Mr Ted Chudleigh (Halton North): I can't picture Doug in a thong.
Mr Parker: My friend from Halton is trying to picture the member for -
Mr Baird: Don't even go there.
Mr Parker: Use your imagination and you can do it.
The bill before us tonight is Bill 15, An Act to cut taxes for people and for small business and to implement other measures contained in the 1998 Budget. This bill in essence is an omnibus bill that brings together a host of tax amendments - all tax cuts - arising out of the 1998 budget delivered by the Minister of Finance just a few short weeks ago. It brings into effect tax cuts in the Income Tax Act, the Corporations Tax Act, the Highway Traffic Act, the Land Transfer Tax Act, the Ontario Loan Act, 1988, the Ontario Lottery Corporation Act and the Retail Sales Tax Act.
It makes amendments to other acts as well, but in these particular acts, after 10 years of tax increases, from 1985 through 1995, this government has reversed that trend. It has begun bringing taxes down, and Bill 15 brings further tax cuts as part of the program of this government to bring about jobs, hope and opportunity in this province.
We know that the years from 1985 through 1995 were difficult years for this province. I want to make it clear right off the top that I think the Bob Rae government has been the target of undeserved criticism for its part in those difficult years and for the deficits of those years and for the debt that was built up over those years, because we know that although the Rae government did not respond appropriately to the challenges of those years, the challenges were not entirely of their own making. Those challenges were inherited from the government immediately beforehand.
Mr Dan Newman (Scarborough Centre): Who was that?
Mr Parker: That was the Peterson Liberal government from 1985 to 1990. It's probably the best thing that could possibly have happened to Premier Peterson that he lost the 1990 election, because he got out before the story broke on just what a dismal condition the province of Ontario was in after five years of Liberal government. It was the Bob Rae government that was the unfortunate successor to that terrible legacy. We know that during the NDP years, before they even had breakfast in the morning there was another billion or so dollars of debt that the province had fallen into as a result of a track that this province had been set on by the previous government.
How did those two governments attempt to deal with the problems of the economic times they put us in? As Mr Peterson saw the cost of government going up, he increased the spending on the public service in this province and on transfer payments given by the provincial government, and as they borrowed more and more to cover those costs they followed the approach of taxing more and more to try to cover the cost of borrowing and to try to cover some of the costs the government was incurring. But each time they raised taxes - and they did a lot of that, over 30 times during the Liberal years - they further depressed the ability of the economy of Ontario to create wealth to generate the revenues to meet the needs of the government, which were constantly on the increase.
That was the track this province was set on through the years 1985 to 1990 and that was the situation that the Bob Rae government inherited. What did the Bob Rae government do to try to deal with that tendency? They continued to raise taxes even further. With each new tax increase - and there were over 30 under the Rae government - the ability of the economy to generate wealth was further depressed and we saw more and more people out of work and more and more people on welfare. They raised the welfare rates so those people who were on welfare got more welfare, and that further increased the dependency on provincial spending, which increased the costs to the provincial budget, which the government of the day tried to cover by increasing borrowing and increasing taxation, which further depressed the ability of the economy to perform, and so on and so forth.
So in 1990, to take a snapshot of that time, we had a provincial debt approaching $50 billion, and by the middle of 1995 we had a provincial debt approaching $100 billion. The annual deficit, the degree by which that debt continued to grow at that point, was over $10 billion.
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There was some attempt to hide all of this by keeping two sets of books. There was a set of books for the taxpayers and the citizens of Ontario to see, but there was another set of books for the lenders on Wall Street and in Frankfurt to see that told the true story. The first measure that this government took to rectify that situation was to have one set of books so that the story we were telling to Wall Street and to Frankfurt was exactly the same as we were telling to our taxpayers and to our constituents here in the province - no more trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the citizens of Ontario as to exactly what the situation was with the Ontario economy.
This government inherited a debt approaching $100 billion and an annual deficit of over $10 billion, and we decided that the old ways of trying to deal with the situation were not good enough. They'd been tried and they'd failed. Increasing borrowing and increasing taxes is not the way to deal with the problems of the economy. It's not the way to create jobs, it's not the way to create hope and opportunity.
We set about an entirely different approach, and this was the approach that we were committed to in the 1995 election. We set out upon an approach of reducing taxes, taking less out of the economy, less out of the pockets of the people who were earning money, and giving new hope and new opportunity to the people of Ontario to generate wealth, to generate more jobs, to generate taxpaying jobs so that there were fewer people dependent on welfare for their livelihood, more people working, more people paying taxes, more people earning good incomes, more people looking after their own families, more people paying taxes, more revenue coming into the government, more revenue available to finance the needs of the province and the needs of those among us who are less fortunate.
All of this is directed towards getting out of that psychology of Ontario as a place where things are looking down, where there's no hope and where your only hope is to get some form of government assistance to help you get by, and turn Ontario back into the best place in the world to live, to work and to raise a family.
This Bill 15 is an important part of that effort, because with this bill we take further steps on that road towards getting taxes down, revitalizing the economy and setting us back on that track of jobs, hope and opportunity.
What has the track record been over the last five years? According to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in February 1998: "1997 saw Ontario on a very strong upward economic path, with the momentum likely to continue through 1998 and 1999. A strong domestic recovery is now in full swing in the province." That's what the Bank of Commerce had to say in February 1998 about the Ontario economy as a result of the measures that have been taken over the past three years under the Mike Harris government.
Real gross domestic product growth in 1997 in Ontario was 4.8%. We're back on a growth track and we're increasing the size of the economy, increasing the ability of our economy to look after the needs of Ontario citizens.
The unemployment rate is down: more people working, fewer people out of work, more people earning an income and looking after their families, paying taxes, helping to carry the needs of the government and to finance the services the government provides.
Job creation over this period: Remember, my colleague from Nepean made the point that this government faced a very critical decision in 1995 about whether we were going to concentrate on attacking the deficit, which was over $10 billion, or concentrate on creating jobs. We're doing a bit of both, because we have to attack that deficit. We can't carry on with a deficit of over $10 billion a year, costing us $1 million every minute just to carry the debt load. We can't go on that way.
But you don't solve your economic problems by putting people out of work and carrying on with the kind of unemployment and the kind of joblessness that this province had seen over the previous 10 years. The best way to turn the economy around and get people to see that this is a province of hope, jobs and opportunity is to concentrate on getting people off welfare, getting people back to work and getting the economy going again. We have stressed measures directed at increasing employment in this province.
By the end of 1995 we had already seen an increase in employment in this province of about 19,000 new jobs. That's net new jobs, bearing in mind that part of the government program, part of this government's approach to reducing the size and scope and weight of government on the shoulders of the taxpayers, is to reduce the size of government. We've been reducing the total payroll of the provincial government and we've been urging our transfer partners also to find efficiencies in their operations so they can do more for less. That has resulted in some reduction in employment in the public sector, but there has been a far more than compensatory increase in employment in the private sector.
At the end of 1995 there was a net increase in employment of 19,000 jobs. By the end of 1996 we saw a net increase in employment of 91,000 new jobs, and by the end of 1997 a net increase in employment across the province of 263,000 new jobs. That's enough new jobs to fill the Toronto SkyDome more than five times over. That's the degree of job creation that we have seen since the Mike Harris government took office in June 1995.
At the same time, where have these employees come from? A lot of them were former welfare recipients, people who had given up hope in the previous years, people who couldn't find work before, people who had to turn to public welfare to pay their bills and to make ends meet. We have seen a reduction in the number of people who need to rely on welfare of over 250,000 over the same period of time. That's 100,000 children whose families are no longer dependent on welfare to keep a roof over their heads. People are getting off welfare and are getting paying jobs in the private sector.
The projections for employment over the years to come by all accounts are another 480,000 jobs by the end of 1998, 640,000 by 1999, and by the turn of the century there's every expectation that there will be 825,000 net new jobs in the province from June 1995. As I mentioned earlier, that will also mean a substantial number of people off welfare, no longer dependent on welfare, into paying jobs, looking after their families, looking after their needs and the needs of those around them.
What's happened with the provincial budget in the process? I've mentioned that the government's focus has been on job creation over this period. We still have that deficit. The deficit is coming down. The deficit is coming down not because the government has been raising taxes - the government has in fact been reducing taxes - but the increase in economic activity in the province has generated more revenue, and that has helped bring the deficit down. Whereas we had a deficit of over $10 billion in 1995, by the end of the 1996-97 fiscal year the deficit was $8.2 billion, the year after that $6.6 billion, in the current year it's projected to be $4.8 billion, and the projections indicate that there should be a balanced budget in this province by the end of the year 2000-2001, which is on track with the plan this government had for balancing the budget as well as creating new jobs - jobs, hope and opportunity.
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I will conclude my remarks at this point. This is a bill that achieves many of the goals of this government as far as job creation and tax reduction are concerned. Bear in mind that the job creation in Ontario has represented two thirds of all the job creation right across the country. Of every three new jobs that have been created in Canada since 1995, two of them have been created here in Ontario. Bill 15 will keep us on track, creating more jobs and more prosperity in this province.
The Acting Speaker: Further debate? The member for Northumberland.
Mr Doug Galt (Northumberland): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on Bill 15, the Tax Cuts for People and for Small Business Act. As I was putting some notes together, thinking about this bill and reading through it, there started running through my mind some of the criticisms that our government's received, some of the undue criticisms of course, talking about the tax cuts, as to whether they were they really necessary and would we be further ahead without them, all that kind of thing. Certainly the answer's loud and clear: We wouldn't have been.
A quote came to mind: "We can't predict the future. We can only invent it." I think the invention of our platform, the developing of that platform and then carrying it out have certainly put this province on the road to prosperity. What started running through my mind was, where would we have been had we not won the election, had the Liberals come through, as the polls showed when the campaign started out? So I started reading through the red book to see where we would be three years later if Lyn McLeod happened to be the Premier. As I looked at the red book, I thought an awful lot of plagiarizing had gone on, copying from our platform. I looked at the actions, past and present, of the Liberals.
In summary, what I was seeing was that taxes of course would be higher, because they always get upset if we reduce taxes. If we were not stimulating the economy and bringing in more revenue, the debt would have been higher. I know right well there would have been no reform of the municipal governments, of education or health. It would have just gone on, business as usual, with absolutely no new direction or absolutely no direction whatsoever for this province.
As I looked in the red book, it said they would have cut 12,000 positions from the civil service. We're kind of close. It was 14,000; they were going to cut 12,000. They did a lot of yelling as we cut back, but they weren't that far off - another kind of copy from the Common Sense Revolution.
Big question, really: Where would the debt be, where would the deficit be, where would taxes be, if Lyn McLeod were Premier today? If Lyn McLeod were Premier, probably Gerry Phillips would be the Treasurer - a very competent MPP, no question. As I think about him in that role, he'd have no support from the leader, he'd have no support from the cabinet. He understands what's right about the economy and what should be happening. He'd be arguing about the books being far worse than they ever expected when they took them over, but they'd probably still be keeping the two sets of books - they would be enjoying that very much - that the NDP developed; very cagily, I might add.
As I looked through the red book, they talked about a 5% tax cut. I really don't think they would have followed through on that tax cut because we know what Liberal promises are, especially if we look at the federal Liberals. They promised to cut the GST, they promised to get rid of helicopters and they promised to get rid of the privatization of the airport. What's happened since? Now they're out trying to buy helicopters, cheaper helicopters, and ending up paying the same amount of money. They're out there privatizing the airport activity.
We know what happens when Liberals make promises. The Liberals were opposed to tax cuts and user fees, and they had some 33 tax increases during that term of 1985 to 1990. I know right well the employer health tax is one of those taxes that kills jobs, one of the worst job killers going. They brought it in so I doubt they would have gotten rid of it; they might have actually increased it. They probably would have succumbed to the wooing of the federal Liberals and would have harmonized the GST and the PST, at great expense to Ontario. We've seen what's happened in other provinces where they've gone ahead with this harmonizing of those two taxes.
I know right well they wouldn't have cut the corporate tax because corporations are big, bad people, even in small business. The corporate tax would still be in place. They wouldn't have looked at anything like cutting the tax for new home buyers buying new homes. There'd still be a full property tax on the managed wood lots. As you'll recall, we brought back the tax rebate to 70% for the managed wood lots and got rid of the property tax for conservation lands. I know that when we came to office, during the campaign the farmers were very concerned about the farm tax rebate. They thought that was going to be lost as well, and I'm sure that if the Liberals were in government today that would have been lost, and you know what would have happened to our farmers under those circumstances.
With all those taxes in place, there'd be no job stimulation whatsoever in this province and obviously the debt would go up. We know how opposed the Liberals are to tax cuts and we know that they helped to create an awful lot of the debt that we have. I'm sure, I'm absolutely positive, that the deficit would be well in excess of $12 billion per year at this point in time.
As we look at it today, three years plus since the election, I know the Liberals would have left photo-radar out there. We'd still have these vans sitting along the 401 and many of the roads, flashing pictures, as a cash cow, taking in all kinds of money. They would have been out there with runaway welfare costs because they wouldn't have addressed any kind of reform to welfare; it would still be going on at the same rate. We'd indeed be closer to bankruptcy in this province, with the debt climbing to ever higher levels with $12 billion-plus being added to it every year.
The payroll taxes would still be in place, strangling job creation. Whether it be the employer health tax or the corporate taxes, they'd all still be there. There'd have been no income tax cut to have stimulated the economy, and I can tell you that has been the greatest stimulation to our economy that could ever have been brought in. I have all kinds of quotes here. Time is running too short to get into those quotes, but they just go on and on for pages and pages. I know that, as I mentioned earlier, the GST and the PST would have been harmonized by this point, at tremendous expense to the people of Ontario. Probably nothing would have been done about Hydro; they'd still be wallowing in debt and bureaucracy.
The Workers' Compensation Board would still be probably the same: wallowing in debt and bureaucracy, with absolutely no hope for the future. If the Liberals had won that election, they wouldn't have addressed the WCB. We now have the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, the chair being Glen Wright. It's been a tremendous turnaround in my riding office. When I went into that riding office, the phone was literally ringing off the wall about problems over WCB. There was just one complaint after another; it just seemed like we would never get on top of them. But with the work that the Minister of Labour of the day did and the work that the Honourable Cam Jackson did on the WCB, we have made tremendous inroads in improving the new Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. It's been a real boon to the province of Ontario and to every MPP's office. Whether you're a Conservative, a Liberal or an NDPer, I think you all have to admit that the complaints coming into your office have reduced significantly in the last year, thanks to good leaders like Glen Wright and the Minister of Labour and the minister without portfolio of the day who was responsible for the WCB.
If the Liberals had won, where would be three years after the election? We'd have teachers and other unions blocking major reform - blocking reform for education, blocking reform for health. We'd just be adding up dollars, pouring money into a bottomless pit, because without reorganization in health, that's essentially what would be going on. We'd be paying for the bricks and mortar rather than for people to heal people. It's so important that we get that under control. It's so important that we get the spending of education under control and that the spending go into the classroom, not to administration and bureaucracy.
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The previous government, the NDP government, brought in studies. I believe it was the Sweeney study - a previous Liberal minister headed that up - that identified that there was too much spending outside of the classroom. We are addressing that and it'll be moving; 60 to 65 cents of each dollar will be spent in the classroom. That's certainly going to be a boon to our students as well as to our teachers. Obviously, some of the administration is not too happy about that.
I'm sure that job creation would never have happened; there would be no job creation in this province. We'd still be going on the same as we had been before, similar to BC out on the Canadian left coast, with no job creation going on there right now; it's going backwards. It's obvious that just because of some international activity it doesn't mean it's going to necessarily happen here.
We'd also be spared the headlines in the Liberal press saying what a mean-spirited government this PC government is. I think if you really look at it, it's a very compassionate government, compassionate for our future generations, that they're not going to be hung with the debt that had been spiralling in this province. We'd also be without hope. We'd know that the pain of the debt that's over our head, the debt that would have been inherited by our children, would never end. It's bad enough now, especially with the federal debt at some $583 billion and the province over $100 billion. But it's rounding out, we're doing what is sustainable for our economy and it is indeed going to be much less than it might have been had we not taken the drastic actions we have.
I thought it would be fun to look at what the province would look like had a disaster occurred on June 8 and the Liberals won. But thank heavens that didn't happen. We ended up with a PC government that had the intestinal fortitude to go out and do what we said we would do, and that's exactly what we have been doing for the last three years - doing what we said we would do.
The Acting Speaker: Further debate? The member for Etobicoke-Humber.
Applause.
Mr Douglas B. Ford (Etobicoke-Humber): Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen of Ontario, Etobicoke-Humber and Etobicoke Centre, we're going to talk tonight on Bill 15, the Tax Cuts for People and for Small Business Act. I would like to tell you in a roundabout way about small business creating jobs and creating enthusiasm across this province.
I went to an academy award presentation the other night at Dixon Grove Junior and Middle School. At the school, they had this graduation class of young people at Kipling Collegiate Institute, in the gymnasium. I know that some of the members in this House speak more than one language. Let me tell you something: At Dixon Grove Junior and Middle School - ponder this for a minute - they speak 84 different languages. I have to give the principal and her staff, Collette Dowhaniuk and all her assistants, an academy award for the fact that when you walk into this school, when you walk in the front door, you can feel the enthusiasm. The teachers aren't standing out in the hall talking about problems in the school; they're in their classes talking to students.
I was principal for a day in that school and they took me around. They invited me in to see the school. That was very interesting. I saw them outside at recess. I saw them at noonhour. There was a great deal of respect in that school for the teachers. Not only that, but there was a great deal of respect for the students.
Aside from that subject, Ontario has worked hard over the past three years to put this province back on track, to supply jobs for all these young people that will eventually come into the marketplace. They showed me that these young people had average scores that I don't think anybody in this House could equal in math, sciences - you think it's a joke? Try getting 94% or 98% out of eight subjects - average. You can giggle now.
We have to get back to the benefits of hard work as evidenced by the 370,000 jobs that this government has created since we took office. As a result, Ontario is once again becoming the kind of place we want for ourselves and for our children and their future.
Mr Len Wood (Cochrane North): Thanks to Bill Clinton.
Mr Ford: Our friend says, "Thanks to Bill Clinton." Yes, in part, but the rest of the provinces across Canada haven't done so well; in other words, they're lagging behind Ontario.
I am going to give you an article that I read. This is from a Mr Brenner, a professor at the school of management, McGill University, Montreal. It says, "How Canada Scares Away Investors and Talent." This is on the 15% tax cut. It's six months old but it still prevails today:
"In a recent seven-nation study, KPMG Peat Marwick ranked Canada as the lowest-cost Western industrialized country in which to do business. The study ranked Sweden second, Britain third, the US fourth, Italy fifth, France sixth and Germany last.
"Unfortunately for Canadians, being a low-cost country does not mean that their economy is competitive or that it is a good place to invest. If low cost is the criterion for investment, why not invest in Newfoundland, land of low incomes and low rents?
"In October, Canadian Industry Minister John Manley hit upon the more important factors for investment, economic growth and price stability, noting in a speech that a shortage of skilled workers prompts companies to leave Canada. He also noted that although Canada is one of the biggest spenders on education, it experienced the lowest rate of productivity growth among the G-7 countries in the last 15 years, has low research and development spending, and hosts a smaller share of high-tech manufacturing than any other G-7 country.
"The financial markets confirm these observations, as does the performance of the Canadian dollar. The Dow Jones industrial average has more than tripled since 1989, whereas the Toronto Stock Exchange average increased just 70%. After adjusting for the 20% depreciation of the Canadian dollar since 1989, the return on the TSE in US dollars between 1989 and 1997 falls to less than 50%. Much of the small gain in the TSE is based on a recent pickup in commodity prices, reflecting Canada's resource-based economy.
"Meanwhile, the Canadian dollar stays low while the country has record surpluses in the current account of its international balance of payments (whereas the US has continuous deficits). The current account surplus merely reflects the fact that Canada is not a good place to invest, and capital - both top-notch human and financial - is leaving the country.
"One of the main reasons is high marginal tax rates. In Canada's most populous provinces, Quebec and Ontario, the combined marginal income tax burden (federal and provincial) for earners in the $40,000 range stands at 55%. This punitive rate in fact taxes human capital, as demonstrated by the fact that Canada's best talent leaves the country. A number of CEOs have stated bluntly that they moved from Canada because its high taxes limited their ability to attract talent. As Peggy White, Royal Oak Mines' CEO, says: `High Canadian taxes made it very hard to attract top-notch talent from outside the country and sometimes even to keep top-notch talent home.'
"The emphasis is on `top-notch.' Canada can attract the not too ambitious or those denied entry visas to the US. But the `vital few' - those who can move a company's market value by hundreds of millions of dollars, or, as Michael Jordan, bring a team from oblivion to championship - matter the most. This is the talent that Canada has been losing and fails to attract." What our government is trying to do is to get these people to stay here and bring in new people and bring in new business.
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"Canada taxes capital gains at approximately 40%, double the US rate for investments held over 18 months. If untaxed, a $1,000 investment compounding at 20% brings $1.4 million after 40 years. If that investment is taxed yearly at 20%, the US rate, the owner ends up with around $400,000. If it is taxed at 40%, the net return is 12% per annum, and the owner ends up with $93,000 after 40 years." That's the difference if you're putting it into an RRSP or investing for your retirement: You end up with 25% of what it should be. "Even the best ideas will not find financial backing with this differential in returns.
"With brains and capital moving out of Canada, only finance ministers indulging in political calculations can claim surprise that trade surpluses have not strengthened the Canadian dollar. Nor that low interest rates neither brought about much investment or significant decreases in unemployment (which has been holding at a stubborn 9% to 10%)."
Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): Who said that?
Mr Ford: Mr Brenner, a professor at the school of management, McGill University, somebody you should talk to, Jim, and he'll tell you all about it.
Interjection.
Mr Ford: I realize that. Don't listen to it.
"When businesses decide where to locate in the G-7 countries, they are measuring their ability to attract and retain skilled people to countries whose currencies are expected to be stable." Is our currency stable? "If Canada's labour seems `cheap,' that's because the authors of the KPMG report are comparing apples and oranges. A recent CIBC Wood Gundy study calculated that Canadian factories are 20% less productive than their US counterparts. It is not surprising that Canadians are paid less.
"The KPMG Peat Marwick study also celebrates Canada's low land and construction prices. But the price of a building is the present value of anticipated rents. The smaller the after-tax rewards, the smaller the value of the building, and the smaller the value of land and of construction costs.
"Low interest rates are not the issue, either. When there is not much demand for investment, real interest rates stay low" - and that's what we are talking -
The Acting Speaker (Mr Bert Johnson): Thank you. Comments and questions? The Chair recognizes the member for St Catharines.
Mr Bradley: Mr Speaker, I would like to request unanimous consent to allow Mr Ford to finish the article if he wants to do that. He was just about to finish, so I'd like to let him do that.
The Acting Speaker: The member for St Catharines has requested unanimous consent to have the member finish his statement. Is it agreed? Agreed.
Mr Ford: Thank you very much. I read these articles because I have a great deal of concern for the people in Ontario and the people in Canada, because we have the ability in this country. I listen to some of the people from up north say: "Where are the jobs? Where are these things?" We have to change our strategy. Anyway, the KPMG report comparing apples and oranges:
"Low interest rates are not the issue, either. When there is not much demand for investment, real interest rates stay low" -
The Acting Speaker: Would you please take your seat. I have a member over here who has a point of order.
Mr Gilles Bisson (Cochrane South): Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I and other members of this assembly can hear what the member is saying, but I notice that the mike isn't working and I want to make sure that people back home can hear the last part of the member's speech, so if we could get his mike going.
The Acting Speaker: That is a point of order, but the technicians are having just a little bit of problem with it. I can see them working frantically. They're doing their best. We'll just have -
Mr Bisson: How about on a point of order I ask for unanimous consent -
The Acting Speaker: Member for Cochrane South, I'm sorry, you're not allowed to get up when the Speaker is standing. You can't have a point of order while I'm standing is what I'm saying.
Mr Bisson: On a point of order, Mr Speaker, now that you are sitting: In order to assist in this particular dilemma with the technical difficulties, I would ask for unanimous consent to allow the member to speak at the next seat so that we can allow that mike to work and he can finish the speech.
The Acting Speaker: The member for Cochrane South has asked for unanimous consent to have the member move to another microphone. Is it agreed? Agreed.
Mr Ed Doyle (Wentworth East): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I believe they may have technical problems with the mike in that seat as well. Is that right?
Interjection.
Mr Doyle: He's okay, then? Thank you.
The Acting Speaker: The Chair recognizes the member for Etobicoke-Humber.
Mr Ford: Last but not least, the KPMG report mentions that Canada has the lowest corporate income taxes:
"Since corporations are only a complex association of contracts, any corporate income tax is of consequence only in the sense that investors will evaluate who will pay - consumers in higher prices, employees in lower wages or shareholders. Even low corporate income taxes will be paid only if investors cannot negotiate a better investment deal elsewhere in the world."
This is what I'm talking about when I talk about unions, free enterprise and trying to get the best possible jobs for the unions. I don't criticize them, but they have to understand that we have to be competitive as a country to create those super jobs that the opposition is always talking about.
"Taxes on dividends, on capital gains and on incomes are the issue" - that's what I mentioned - "not the incidence of taxes based on legal entities.
"Some of Canada's provinces, Alberta for example, have cut provincial taxes. In Ontario, the new provincial government tries to dismantle its disastrous fiscal and regulatory inheritance from its predecessor.... But on the federal level, the situation does not seem promising. With no effective opposition, and forecast that next year the federal government may have a surplus in the budget" - that's right now - "Paul Martin, the federal finance minister, who never saw a tax he did not like, announced in an October speech how the government will spend the anticipated `fiscal dividend.'
"The US will be pleased to hear that it is among the major recipients: One of the contemplated programs would spend an additional $800-million subsidy to higher education, which will train, no doubt, some excellent people - who will end up working in the US."
This really bothers me intensely. That's why I got involved in politics. This is the greatest area in the world, Ontario. We have the skills, but we have to have the initiative to carry it forward, and not all this struggle and strife all the time. Positive thinking: That's how you get to be aggressive and that's how we build up greater institutions, greater universities, greater schools. With the influx of new people coming in, like I mentioned, with the 84 different languages they speak, we will be able to do trade with all these various countries and have a prosperous economy.
Mr Len Wood: Who told you that story, Doug?
Mr Ford: Who told me that story? To repeat, Mr Brenner is a professor at the school of management, McGill University, Montreal.
Getting back to the 15% tax cuts that we were talking about for small business, I went around to every small business - stores, shops - in Etobicoke-Humber and Etobicoke Centre. I went in and introduced myself and this is what they were talking about. People are very concerned about the economy, but some of them are very happy.
I want to thank the opposition for letting me finish my speech.
The Acting Speaker: I'd also like to convey our appreciation to the hardworking staff who resolved the problem. Thank you.
Comments and questions?
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Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming): You can tell that all the members of the House, including the opposition members, thoroughly enjoyed the dissertation of the member for Etobicoke-Humber, as it was our House leader, Jim Bradley, who asked for unanimous consent to allow the member to finish his article and to finish his speech because we just didn't think there was enough time to do that.
I'd like to comment on one of the last comments the member made, a reference to the fact that we've got to get away from this strife in Ontario. I would say to the member that that's not the history of this province. We didn't use to have all this strife. In fact, I would compliment your own party, that under the leadership of premiers such as Robarts and Davis, they had a sense of governing for everyone in Ontario. Even though they did that in the context of your political party, they still had a sense that they didn't just govern for their supporters. That's very different from the philosophy that your party seems to have adopted today under the leadership of Mike Harris, and very well supported by a lot of your members, which has caused a lot of the strife, because you haven't really taken the attitude that you have to govern for everyone in Ontario.
You mentioned the 84 different languages. We are a very diverse group of people here in Ontario, whatever language we speak. We live in different regions. We all have different economies and different needs and you have to be sensitive to that. I would think this government could go a long way to stopping a lot of the strife if you stop just governing for some people in 905 that you believe are going to get you re-elected and look at the full spectrum of Ontario.
There are a lot of poor people in this province. While the stock market has done very well and a lot of rich people have done very well, there still are a lot of poor people in Ontario and they need the government's support. In a perfect world, maybe that wouldn't be, but it's not a perfect world. I would ask you to govern for everyone in this province.
Mr Len Wood: On Bill 15 we've heard four of the government backbenchers praise the finance minister and the government for all the job creation they're supposed to have done. If we look back and read the newspapers, we find out that because of the extreme growth in the United States, all the jobs in Canada, especially in Ontario, have been created as a result of the growth that has happened in the United States - very low unemployment there and they're buying the products and they're creating jobs within Ontario.
Coming from northern Ontario, we know this government decided they were going to put user fees and taxes on every resident in northern Ontario who owns a car, for example. Because of the long winters and the excessive price of gasoline, northern Ontario residents didn't pay for their licence plates. This government decided they were going to put a tax on every car in northern Ontario of $37.50. If you look at all the other user fees they've put on, it's contributing to the high unemployment rates we have in northern Ontario now. In my area we have unemployment rates of 20% to 25%; some of the areas are up to 50%. The member for Sault Ste Marie talks about unemployment of 18% or 20%. There are no jobs that have been created.
The jobs that have been created in southern Ontario are a direct spinoff of the good economy happening world-wide, especially in the States. When the recession was over in 1994, when the NDP government was still in office, jobs were created at that time and they've continued. It doesn't matter which government was there. The economy is what creates jobs. It's not as a result of any particular government, especially not Bill 15.
Mr Jack Carroll (Chatham-Kent): It's great to have an opportunity tonight to comment after hearing the speeches of the members for Nepean, York East, Northumberland and the particularly stirring speech from the member for Etobicoke-Humber. I'm sure all the members in the House, plus all the guests in the gallery, tonight join in complimenting him on that great speech.
When we talk about tax cuts and job creation and we take some numbers and boil them down to my riding, the tax cuts in my riding, when they're fully implemented in the new municipality of Chatham-Kent, amount to $41 million that will be in the pockets of the people of my community of Chatham-Kent rather than sent away to the government of Ontario. In the next municipality, the area of Windsor-Essex, it's $155 million every year in the pockets of the people of Windsor-Essex rather than sent to the government to waste.
When we look at job creation and look at Navistar, one of the largest employers in the city of Chatham-Kent, which produces some of the world's greatest highway tractors, it has gone from an employment level of around 400 to up to over 2,000 employees now. They currently have an order board, according to the employees there, higher than it's ever been: somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000-plus trucks they have on order that they haven't built yet.
I was in Leamington last night talking to some people at a hospital board meeting. The greenhouse growers in Leamington tell me the single biggest problem they have is that they can't find enough workers. They have tremendous markets for the products they grow; they cannot find enough workers to work in the greenhouses to create those products.
There's ample evidence over the last three years that tax cuts do create jobs. More important, they don't just create jobs, they create private sector, high-quality, long-lasting jobs, and that is what's good for the whole province of Ontario.
Mr Frank Miclash (Kenora): When I listen to the comments from the members for Etobicoke-Humber, Northumberland and Nepean, I often think that maybe I'm living in a different province, because what they're saying here tonight is certainly not what I see in northwestern Ontario.
As one example, Saturday morning I was approached by a mechanic who was telling me about the increases, the quadrupling of fees he's paying to get a licence to practise his trade in the region. I said to him, "God, you must have noticed your 30% income tax reduction," and he told me no. He said there was no difference on his paycheque, yet he's expected to pay these extra fees. He's expected to pay additional costs. Wait until he gets his municipal taxes this year to find out what the municipal tax rate is going to be in terms of the extra fee.
He was talking as well about the registration fee he's paying on his vehicle. These are vehicles he uses for work, along with his own personal vehicle. I said again, "Well, did you not notice your income tax reduction of 30%?" Again he said no. He said there is no way it's going to be even close, when he adds up all these additional fees he is being forced to pay as he moves from day to day in the working world of northwestern Ontario.
As well, as I attend various schools and health care facilities in the region and municipal meetings, I'm not hearing what we were told here this evening. I feel like I live in a different province, a different part of the country, because this is not what the municipal leaders are telling me, not what the nurses are telling me on the front line, not what the hospital administrators are telling me, not what the teachers are telling me. They're not telling me any of this. I wonder where these people are living compared to where I'm living.
The Acting Speaker: The member for Nepean has two minutes to respond.
Mr Baird: I want to thank the members for Timiskaming, Cochrane North, Chatham-Kent and Kenora for their remarks. I want to break away from the norm of responding and just address the comments of the member for Etobicoke-Humber.
I'll tell you, this is a member who knows of what he speaks. He's been there, he's walked the walk and he's created the jobs. I suspect that over this man's lifetime he has created and employed literally hundreds of people in Toronto, and those hundreds of people whom this member has hired have been able to support their families. Why? Because of entrepreneurship, of willingness to put capital at risk and to work hard to help create those jobs. I salute the member for Etobicoke-Humber.
In his remarks he laid out the facts about what it's going to take to create jobs. Many of us spoke about consumer confidence and the terrible effect that high taxes have on consumer confidence. The member for Etobicoke-Humber spoke about the importance of high taxes as a disincentive to investment, and too often we forget that. When people have to decide where they're going to invest, whether they're going to invest in Ontario or in Michigan or in Manitoba or Quebec, they're going to look at the tax rates. The member for Etobicoke-Humber made a very strong case about why we've got to be internationally competitive with taxes or we're not going to get the investment and create the jobs.
He spoke about the importance of not just creating jobs, but creating good jobs and high-tech jobs and what we're going to have to do to create a skilled workforce. He alluded to some of the measures contained in the budget to try to deal with those skills shortages. He spoke about the new economy and the importance of embracing the cultures here in Ontario and how we exploit that to reach out around the world and help sell Ontario goods and services around the world, to help even more jobs.
I want to salute the member for Etobicoke-Humber and all the jobs he's created over his lifetime and the families that have been able to provide for themselves.
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The Acting Speaker: I just wanted to outline the rules. The response is supposed to be to the questions and comments addressed to the speakers.
Mr Miclash: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: If those were the rules, why did you allow him to go on for two minutes and not say anything about the comments I made in my two minutes.
Mr Chudleigh: It's not for him to decide.
Mr Miclash: He just finished saying it was the rule. Mr Speaker, why did you allow him to go on for two minutes? I ask you that question.
The Acting Speaker: That is not a point of order.
Further debate?
Mr Ramsay: I'm pleased to be part of this debate tonight. I'm very pleased that the Minister of Health is here tonight, because I would like to talk to her directly, to -
Mr Bradley: The pamphlet?
Mr Ramsay: Not about the pamphlet necessarily, but I might bring that up. I wanted to talk about the northern doctor situation. Having the minister here I think is very appropriate. I'm glad I have this pamphlet here, because one of the problems with the Harris government administration of health care is that they are quite willing to spend over $1 million - I think it's $1.27 million - on this particular pamphlet, sending it out to every household in Ontario, yet I would like to tell the people watching tonight, not only back home but everywhere, that in the largest municipality I represent, the town of Kirkland Lake, by the end of August 50% of the people there will be without a family physician.
It is a town of 11,000. In today's Ontario, which the government members have been touting in their last speeches as a great province and how great business is doing, it's an absolute shame that a town, any town, any citizen of this province be without a family physician. But that's the position we're in, and one of the reasons is the mishmash of incentives and policies that this Minister of Health and the Ministry of Health have in Ontario today.
I'll give you a concrete example of what's happening. Some geniuses in the Ministry of Health decided that they would bring forward an incentive program to help those communities that have seven doctors or less. They decided that for those communities only, in underserviced areas, they would allow an incentive program to attract doctors and give them the option, which I think is a great option, of going on salary if they wished. So they offer a salary package of $186,000, with benefits and with vacation, which I think is fair wages, quite frankly, for a town like that, because a lot of these doctors get burned out.
That's fine, but what's happened is that doctors living in other underserviced areas, mid-sized towns in my riding especially, such as Kirkland Lake, which I just mentioned, and towns like New Liskeard, this program attracts doctors away from these communities to others. We have the absurd notion of one government incentive program stealing from needs in other areas, and I think it's absolutely wrong.
The height of ridiculousness of this particular program is that just 50 kilometres down the road from Kirkland Lake on Highway 11 is the town of Englehart. Englehart has the medical manpower needs of seven and under, and this month they will have a complete complement of doctors there; they'll have their seven. So what's happening is that people 50 kilometres up Highway 11 in Kirkland Lake are now clamouring to be part of the doctors' practice in Englehart. We have the absurd situation now of a lot of elderly people, who have to see doctors more than other folks, going 50 kilometres down the highway to see a doctor. In fact, one of the doctors from Kirkland Lake went to Englehart to take up that particular program, because if you're a doctor practising in Kirkland Lake or New Liskeard or any other mid-sized community or larger in Ontario, you cannot benefit from that incentive program.
I can just imagine, in January and February, when we have some of our worst weather in northern Ontario, a senior couple trying to get to their doctor's appointment having to drive 50 kilometres down Highway 11, risking their lives because of an inept, illogical incentive program that the Ministry of Health has in place to attract doctors to very small communities, and it is doing that at the expense of other communities across the north. That's just ludicrous.
This minister has to have the guts to take on the Ontario Medical Association and say, "I'm going to put doctors in every darned community in this province, whether you guys and gals it like or not." Every citizen in this province deserves to have a doctor, and we should no longer kowtow to medical associations that refuse to put doctors in every part of this province. We're all Ontarians and we all have equal rights, and all Ontarians deserve to have a family physician. It's not right that seniors, families, people who are working have to travel 50 miles or have to go Sudbury, have to go to Toronto to find a doctor.
What's the problem here? Is there a shortage of doctors in Ontario? No, there isn't. There is a maldistribution of doctors in Ontario. Too many doctors want to practise in the Golden Horseshoe area and not enough want to get out to rural medicine. There are a lot of reasons for that. It's not just the north, because I see some of the members from rural Ontario nodding their heads. In Kent and Essex - Windsor is an underserviced area. It's unbelievable. It's not just a northern, remote problem; it's a rural problem.
Part of that boils down to how we educate doctors today. We educate them in big city hospitals with all the high-tech machinery and a specialist down the hall, and then we ask them to come to a place like New Liskeard, where it's basic, primary medicine. They're extremely independent. They don't have the backups and they don't have the support, and quite frankly we do not prepare them properly to practise in small towns and rural settings.
We still in Ontario, by and large, are a community of small towns and rural areas. That's certainly where we have our doctor shortages, and we've got to be developing in our medical programs the proper teaching in the courses so that doctors are prepared to practise in small towns. I think the proper incentives also have to be in place.
We have to ensure that not only do we have good incentive programs there to initially recruit doctors to come to our communities, but because of the harder work they do - they can't just quickly refer a patient down the hall to the oncologist or cardiologist but have to do the primary care themselves, with maybe not the very latest of equipment in a rural hospital - they need to have a higher level of payment than a doctor working in Toronto.
That has to happen, and again that's the minister having to take on the Ontario Medical Association. It's as simple as this: a 0.1% cut on the fee levels or salary levels of a southern Ontario doctor would give a 10% additional payment to doctors working in underserviced areas of this province. That is the type of long-term incentive that needs to be in place that would reward the doctors who work very hard, many of them on the edge of burnout, having to do the ER work, having to do their office hours during the day, being on call during the night. They deserve to have a differential OHIP fee and have the choice, if they so choose, to go on salary.
That's the type of flexibility we need to have, and we need to have a Ministry of Health and a Minister of Health that would take that on and say to the doctors of Ontario, "We've got to have family medicine service, at least, as a basis in every part of this province." I've been talking about this with many of my colleagues and we, for sure, are going to be coming up with some ideas of how to do this, because it is long overdue that the government finally take some action to do this. We need to be doing that.
Mr Chudleigh: When would that be? When are we going to hear your ideas, David? I am waiting for your idea.
Mr Ramsay: I would say we just put doctors in every community, and that's how we would do it. It just has to happen, and I mentioned that to the member.
Another problem we have in northern Ontario, especially in the region of Timiskaming-Cochrane, through rural northeastern Ontario - when I listen to members from southern Ontario on the government side speak, they wouldn't even understand that in my area there are 4,850 households on telephone party lines. All of us today take for granted that when you pick up the line, you've got a single line, at least one, and you're able to connect not only your fax machines and your answering machines but also hook up your computer and get on the Internet, get on to the e-mail system. Almost 4,900 households in Timiskaming-Cochrane cannot do that. This now is getting way beyond an inconvenience. This is getting way beyond an economic detriment to our area. It's now putting people's lives at risk, because unlike the old days when a party line was tied up, at least you could interrupt the call. Another party could say: "I've got an emergency in this house. We have to call the police. We have to call an ambulance." You can't do that. If somebody hooks up on to the Internet on a party line there is no way another party can interrupt that connection, and that is putting people's lives at risk.
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I've talked to the Minister of Northern Development about this. It is time that this government in Ontario said: "Every Ontarian should have access to a private line, period. That should happen. That should be the policy." That's the type of policy that would build northern Ontario, would put us on a level playing field.
I see across the way there are a lot of farmers in here, and they know how they use the Internet as a tool to check daily on commodity prices, to get the very latest data on weather, to make those very critical decisions, those business decisions on the farm that's a very big, sophisticated business today. You need those modern tools today. The farmers in most of northern Ontario are not on a level playing field with the farmers of the south because they don't have access to that very basic connection. It would be nice to have a high-speed data stream. It would be nice to have a lot of other luxuries. What I'm talking about is moving these 4,900 households from the horse-and-buggy era of telephone service to at least maybe close to the Concorde jet type of service of data transmission that we have in southern Ontario.
It's these sorts of inequities that really upset the members from northern Ontario. I see my colleague from Algoma-Manitoulin is here. My colleague from Kenora who was just here was very upset with the last comments because they speak of Ontario as a monolith, as if the great affluence that is happening down here in southern Ontario, the great building boom that very much echoes that which happened in the late 1980s, is happening in northern Ontario. Maybe the members say, "Jeez, he keeps harping and they keep harping on that," but this is the area I represent. This is my job down here, to speak to that, to present to the government the facts and the reality of what it's like in northern Ontario today.
There are a lot of reasons for that, but I've given you two areas that you could really tackle, that the government could tackle, in helping the quality of life through the support of family physicians in northern Ontario, and I think making the number one investment for economic development in the north is to make sure that every household had access to a private line. Those are the types of initiatives that we would be doing. Those are the types of initiatives that I'm talking about now and asking you to do now, because we should no longer have to wait for that. We need the service of our doctors in the north and we need private-line service right across northern Ontario to put us on a level playing field.
That is very important, and I'm glad I've had this opportunity tonight to do that. If I didn't mention it before, I'm going to be sharing this hour with several of our members, and I believe the member for Scarborough-Agincourt is next in line to speak for us.
Mr Gerry Phillips (Scarborough-Agincourt): I hope the people watching at home understand why we have our jackets off. The air-conditioning is not working in here and it's quite warm.
I'm pleased to join the debate on the budget bill, Bill 15. I'll start by commenting on the gambling provisions in the bill. This is perhaps one of the most serious parts of this bill, in that it gives Mike Harris essentially an unfettered right to expand slot machines in Ontario. The government tells us that when this bill is passed it is their intention to introduce 15,000 slot machines right across Ontario. That'll be their first blush of them, that'll be the first number that they put out there - 15,000 machines. Just so we understand what that means, it means that people will lose -
Mr Chudleigh: If that doesn't happen, you will apologize.
Mr Phillips: Mr Chudleigh is barracking, but many of my -
Mr Chudleigh: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I have a riding. The people of Ontario deserve the right to know what my riding is and I think the member is supposed to refer to me by my riding -
The Acting Speaker: Just a moment.
Mr Chudleigh: - not by my surname, as proud as I am of that surname.
Mr Phillips: He's a little touchy, but maybe he's embarrassed about the gambling because certainly when Mike Harris and he ran he said they had no intention of introducing slot machines, and certainly -
Mr Chudleigh: He doesn't know my riding.
Mr Phillips: I hope the people at home can hear Mr Chudleigh barracking over there, because he ran on the platform that said he wouldn't be introducing these slot machines and now we find him here tonight voting in favour of a bill to bring in 15,000 slot machines. And what will the government do with it? They will take -
Mr Chudleigh: And you will apologize if the 15,000 is wrong. You will apologize.
Mr Phillips: Mr Chudleigh doesn't want to hear this, but I think his residents and the constituents want to know that he is supporting 15,000 slot machines. People in Ontario will lose every year in those slot machines, according to the government's own numbers, $1 billion. People will go into these gambling casinos that Mike Harris is introducing, 15,000 slot machines, and every year they will lose $1 billion in those slot machines. That will create, without a question of a doubt no one disagrees with that, serious social problems.
We read just today that the province of Alberta is having very serious problems with the video slot machines - they're virtually the same thing as what Harris is introducing here - serious problems with the slot machines. But here we are at 10 after 8 on a late June night with the members ready to ram through this bill that will give Mike Harris the authority to introduce 15,000 of these slot machines. Surely we have before us in today's paper the problems that these machines have created in the province of Alberta. Mike Harris is fond of saying that he likes the hardworking people of Ontario to have money, and here we are taking $1 billion out of the pockets of the hardworking people of Ontario.
I say to the government, is this really what you want to do? We have a police report. The senior police organization in the province looked at this issue, because one of the arguments that we get on this bill is, "We have to legalize slot machines because there are a lot of illegal ones out there and we'll eliminate them." What did the police say about that? The police said clearly in their report:
"It is proven that by legalizing slot machines you do not eliminate illegal gambling and illegal slot machines. In fact in many respects you simply grow the illegal gambling because people first get hooked on legal gambling and then they naturally participate in other forms of illegal gambling."
That's what the police say. That's not me. That's not the Liberal caucus. That is the senior police officers in Ontario who did a study, requested by the government, which proved that.
Here we are tonight, ready to push through this bill that will legalize 15,000 slot machines that Alberta is now finding create serious, serious problems and is now withdrawing from many communities, and our own senior police organizations say, "By legalizing this we are not eliminating the illegal part of it, we are encouraging it and embodying it."
Why are we doing it? Why would Mike Harris want to ram this thing through? He's got to find the money to fund the tax cut: simple as that. Here's the document supplied by the Ministry of Finance. It shows that people in Ontario making $250,000 a year or more are going to get a total tax break of $500 million. That's what this document shows, that as soon as this bill passes, the total tax break for people making more than a quarter of a million dollars in Ontario is $500 million. Well, Mike Harris has to find that money somewhere, and where will it come from? Heavily it will come from these slot machines.
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I was interested to hear that the government said, before they proceeded with this, that there would be a legislative framework that we would have opportunities to review. This is the legislative framework, this bill, called the budget bill. Tucked away in the back is the legislative framework. It gives the government the authority to proceed with these 15,000 slot machines. I just say to the members of the Conservative caucus that many people in the province of Ontario believed you when you said, "We don't believe in gambling." Mike Harris said he doesn't want to touch gambling money. But here we have a bill that the government's own figures show will take $1 billion a year out of people's pockets to go into slot machines, and we understand why. The government has to fund the tax cut. So that's one part of the bill I wanted to comment on.
The second part of the bill is the income tax cut. I was interested to see in the budget what has happened to the debt of the province. There's an interesting chart here on pages 56 and 57, which you would be familiar with. When Mike Harris became Premier, the debt of the province of Ontario was $88 billion. The budget document shows now, four years later, the debt of the province, according to the government's own figures, is up by $22 billion. So the debt of the province has gone up from $88 billion by $22 billion. Yet we have been able to fund a tax cut that over the last three years has meant a loss of revenue to the province of approximately $12 billion. That's been the lost revenue as a result of the tax cut.
Hon Charles Harnick (Attorney General, minister responsible for native affairs): Nonsense. What nonsense.
Mr Phillips: The Attorney General is saying, "What nonsense" but I would just say -
Hon Mr Harnick: Why don't you say how many jobs have been created? Why don't you say that we are now one of the most competitive jurisdictions?
Mr Phillips: I'm pleased the Attorney General is here, because it is to the Attorney General that I have on several occasions said that you, the government, had in its possession a document that proves that it was a provincial government engineer -
Hon Mr Harnick: What nonsense. You don't tell the truth. You twist everything you say.
Mr Phillips: - that found a burial ground at Ipperwash Provincial Park. It was a provincial government engineer, during the construction of that park in 1937, who found the burial ground. That was why -
Hon Mr Harnick: What does that have to do with the deficit? You just switch from one thing to another to another to another.
Mr Phillips: The Attorney General, the public should realize, is in here barracking and hollering on a budget bill when he will not look in his own file to prove that there was a burial ground at Ipperwash. It was the government's own files that proved that it was a government engineer that found the burial ground and you will not even look in your own files to find it.
I say to the public, the reason one gets angry here with Premier Harris is that a first nations person was killed as a result of a confrontation at Ipperwash Provincial Park, and there was a file produced by the government itself, from the government's own records, that showed that it was a provincial government engineer that found that burial ground during the construction of the park. It was -
Hon Mr Harnick: Not true.
Mr Phillips: He says it's not true and now we want the Attorney General to prove that.
The Acting Speaker: Order. I would ask the Attorney General to withdraw that remark, please.
Hon Mr Harnick: Withdrawn.
Mr Phillips: The reason I'm dealing with the subject is that we are dealing with a bill that authorizes Mike Harris's budget. That's what this bill does. It gives Mike Harris the budget to run his cabinet office. It gives Mike Harris the budget to run his office.
One key question that is on our minds for which we cannot get an answer from the government is, "What happened at Ipperwash?" One thing is clear: The government had in its possession a letter, written from the federal government to the provincial government, saying it was the government's own engineer, during the construction of Ipperwash Provincial Park, who said to the first nations: "I have found a burial ground during my construction. My suggestion to you is, why don't you request the provincial government to fence off that burial ground and have it protected?" The first nations said, "All right, that is a good idea." They passed a resolution. They sent it to the federal government, and the federal government sent it to the provincial government, saying, "It was your own engineer that found that."
The reason I spend the time on it is because that is a part of Ipperwash, the fact that there was a provincial government engineer that found the burial ground and we could not even get the Premier to agree to look in the files to confirm that they did anything about that. The reason I raise it is that the Attorney General has chosen to come into the House tonight and to participate in this debate by heckling. Before he heckles, I suggest that he instruct his own government to look in those files. He is the minister responsible for native affairs. He has the responsibility to deal with the first nations and he is abdicating that responsibility.
Back to the gambling issue, which is part of this bill, where our own senior police officers have said: "By legalizing slot machines you are not going to eliminate the illegal ones. In many respects, you are simply going to expand them." Yet here we are with a bill tonight designed to give the government the authority to implement 15,000 of these slot machines.
On the tax cut I would simply say that the debt of the province, according to the government's own figures, since Mike Harris became Premier has gone up $22 billion. The tax cut has cost $12 billion. I say to the people of Ontario, frankly, every penny of that tax cut we have had to go and borrow that money. We borrowed $22 billion, and $12 billion is as a result of the tax cut. These are the government's own numbers.
I come from a business background. There's no business in the province of Ontario that could go to its bank when it's running a deficit and then -
Interjections.
Mr Phillips: There they are heckling again because they don't like the message. They don't like to hear the fact that they ran on a platform of no slot machines and they're bringing the slot machines in. They don't like to recognize that every single penny of this tax cut is borrowed money.
I understand the need to balance budgets. I understand that. But tell me again, how can we afford to spend $500 million on a tax cut for people who are making more than $250,000 a year when we cannot afford -
Mr Baird: The red book had Gerry's fingerprints all over it.
The Acting Speaker: The member for Nepean, you had your turn to debate and now you'll give that turn to somebody else.
Mr Phillips: I realize that the Attorney General might not want to hear about Ipperwash. I realize that it is a major black eye on the province of Ontario and the fact that he is the native affairs minister and refuses to even investigate the file on whether there is a burial ground at Ipperwash. The reason I raise it is because you want authority and money to fund the tax cut, but you're not prepared to deal with the essential issue of what happened at Ipperwash on that fateful night.
I am pleased to participate in the debate on the budget to say that the public should be aware of the gambling provisions in this bill, gambling provisions that Mike Harris said he would not implement before the election and now is implementing, and the provisions on the tax cut, and again I say every penny of the tax cut - we are still running significant deficits - is borrowed money. I understand many people in the population of Ontario appreciate and like the tax cut, but I'm not sure that many realize that every single penny of it we have had to go out and borrow in order to fund it. As I said before, it's essentially trying to bribe people with their own money.
So we are here tonight, and I would raise one final issue that I raised the other day and I'll personalize this a little bit. There was an issue that I raised with the Minister of Health nine months ago. There was an individual in the area I represent who was 30 weeks pregnant who went to a local hospital - a terrific local hospital, I might add - and had a brain haemorrhage. The hospital then went to a service called CritiCall, which made 21 phone calls attempting to get that individual a bed to handle neurosurgery in the greater city of Toronto. There was nothing available. That individual then found a bed in Hamilton. They could not get an air ambulance and that individual then was transported by land and tragically passed away.
The reason I raise that is, first, it's been nine months and I still do not have an answer on whether steps have been taken to prevent that from ever happening again. But there's no question that the hospitals in Metropolitan Toronto have had their budgets cut. They have been strapped, their resources strapped, and yet we can still afford a tax cut that gives people making a quarter of a million dollars a $500-million tax break a year. That's what we're dealing with in this bill. I just wonder where our priorities are.
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Mr Sean G. Conway (Renfrew North): I want to join the debate tonight for a few moments. I want to start where the previous member, Mr Phillips, left off and talk a bit about the health care situation. This is a budget bill covering the waterfront of government appropriations and revenue generation. I want to simply say that, as my colleague from Agincourt makes plain, most hospitals in the province have seen their budgets cut in real terms. In my area we have the only facility that has actually been closed, and some of you have heard me talk about this in recent days.
The thing surprises many of us is that the government has been making much of new announcements. Certainly the health budget is a multibillion-dollar budget - $18.6 billion. There has been no small effort made by a number of interest groups to try to track the money. It does appear that hundreds of millions of dollars have been appropriated but not yet spent.
But let me talk to the House tonight about what happened and what is happening in many hospital centres across the province. I will use Pembroke as a good example. When I look at what the Health Services Restructuring Commission has ordered, they ordered the closure of the nearly century-old Pembroke Civic Hospital. Those doors are shut, the windows boarded up and in fact the building has been sold. It's a very, very attractive building in the heart of my home city, Pembroke, and I'm going to tell you there is no little bit of anger about the decision and the rapidity or speed at which it was implemented. We've got a hospital closed in Pembroke.
Yes, there will be reinvestments, but the fact of the matter is that when you look at the calculations that are made by the commission - and apparently by the ministry, but I want to get to that in a moment - our city of Pembroke and area will lose, after all of the reinvestments are calculated and in place - and it will be several years to come before it's all in place - we are going to have in Pembroke the net loss on an annual basis of between $6.5 million to $7 million - gone permanently.
When I look at London, Ottawa, Windsor, Hamilton, Sudbury and Thunder Bay, it is virtually the same in all communities. I was saying to some of my colleagues the other day that this is like a saucer, with the 905 area, the Metro belt, being the one part of the saucer into which additional money is draining in net terms. Everywhere else along the course of the saucer wall is in fact losing money. People have this notion that if you lose $10 million, you're going to get $10 million of reinvestment. That's not true. In my area we're probably going to get - I haven't got the material in front of me, but I'm going to guess - not more than 30 cents of the dollar reinvested in our community. Millions are coming out of the Pembroke area and going down to Aurora, Georgetown, Pickering, Newmarket and Whitby. The same will be happening, money will be draining out of Chatham, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste Marie and Toronto into the Metro belt. When people say the reinvestment is there, don't think for a moment that the reinvestment is going to be made dollar for dollar in your home community. I'm quite astonished at how much money we are losing in my community, for example.
The other thing that has really astonished me in recent days is that when I talked to hospital officials who have had to deal with the Health Services Restructuring Commission, they thought, like I did, that once the commission came in and made an order it had the effect almost of a court. Well, that's not true at all, particularly where the Ministry of Health is concerned. It's absolutely clear, and nowhere more so than in Pembroke where we've got a hospital closed and sold, that the ministry apparently does not accept all of the restructuring analysis and certainly doesn't accept, apparently, all of the funding implications of the decision. The board at the Pembroke General and certainly the senior administration, with whom I met 10 days ago, were perplexed, to be polite - I could use other language - to find out that they are swimming in a sea of red ink and there does not seem to be any willingness on the part of the Ministry of Health to accept the diktat of the commission.
My colleague the member from Lanark appeared with cheque in hand the other day, saying, "I've got $1 million." Yes, they got $1 million, which is going to be applied against their $1.1-million operating deficit, to say nothing of their restructuring costs of $2.5 million to $3 million already incurred. I would just be stupefied if I were on that board, thinking: "Where are we in this? I thought that if we closed the one hospital at the very least and restructured consistent with your plan, we'd get the money." One of my hospitals - the only one now - the Pembroke General, has an operating line of credit now beyond anything they've ever had in their 100-year history, and they're wondering when they are going to see the end of this red ink that was not of their making.
Pembroke is a small, regional city. When one gets into Ottawa, when one gets into Toronto and London, I can imagine what the implementation pains and costs are going to be.
I know that as we head closer to the election the Minister of Health and all her happy camper friends on the treasury bench will be the most busy and best-paid postmen and postwomen in Ontario. They will be going from Listowel to Little Current, from Petrolia to Pefferlaw with cheque in hand to say, "My, my, it's now Christmastime," in the middle of September or the end of November. There will be a rain of government money, I am sure, as we head into the last part of this mandate. But I want to make it very plain: The evidence could not be clearer that the government does not appear to accept the financial implications of decisions ordered by the Health Services Restructuring Commission.
I wish no harm to people in communities like Ottawa, Toronto and Thunder Bay. My friends and neighbours in Pembroke, and I'm one of them - I look every day out my window and I can almost see the Pembroke Civic Hospital boarded up. Yes, my friend from Oxford smugly observes a thumbs up. You come to Pembroke and do that. You just come and do that. I'll tell you, you'll be needing the big cheese of Ingersoll behind which to hide.
The point I want to make here is, what do we hear? I heard Jane Pepino this morning on CBC Radio talking about the magic that's been worked at Women's College, and I'm happy for them. I read the Ottawa press, the Black press in the national capital, to see what changes have been made to certain of the orders given by the commission in Ottawa and I say to myself, "What's going on here?" It certainly appears that there's now a very different standard being applied later in this process than was applied to my town.
All I know is that if the calls to my constituency office are any indication, the general impression in the Upper Ottawa Valley is that health services are not getting better. They may, but it is chaos at the present time. I was talking to some people at the Renfrew Victoria Hospital the other day. The Pembroke Civic Hospital closed about eight or nine months ago. I'm told that the emergency room activity at the Renfrew Victoria Hospital is up over that period by something like 20% to 25%, and the clinical activity in that hospital in Renfrew is up by almost the same percentage. Talk to my doctor and my nursing friends in places like Ottawa and certainly one gets the very same impression. There is a very real worry that we've made the cuts, we've shut the door on certain facilities, we've gotten rid of many of the providers.
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Yes, we've committed to some new resources. As I say, in my community we are supposed to get some new mental health services and we are going to get some new rehabilitation services, and those will be very, very well received. I can't imagine, given the financial situation at the Pembroke General Hospital today, how they are going to be even able to consider things like the new rehab program for months, if not years, to come. So cuts today, new services some time in the distance and certainly some time in the future.
All of that is having a clear impact on health services for people in this province and community who have a right to expect quality services when and where they require them. I thought it was remarkable chutzpah for my colleague from Lanark to come, cheque in hand last week, saying, "Aha, $1 million." Yes, $1 million towards a deficit of $3.5-million to $4 million, most of which is a restructuring deficit.
The second point I want to make concerns the university question, and I've only got a few more minutes because my colleague from St Catharines is going to break his customary after-dinner silence and opine on subjects of government advertising and the like. I want to pick up on some remarks I made in the House about a month ago. It was May 14 this past year. When on a debate about post-secondary education I expressed some rather strong views, which I certainly maintain, about where we are leaving young people and the kind of message we are leaving. I must say that in those remarks of May 14 I said some rather strong things about, among others, the University of Western Ontario, and Mr Paul Davenport, the president of the University of Western Ontario, was on the phone expressing some concern about some of what I said. I simply want to say to President Davenport and anyone else who might have read those remarks that - let me be very clear - if I were a student today I would not volunteer to pay one additional red cent to any of the universities in this province without a good, thorough audit of the cost basis of those institutions. I didn't mean to suggest - and this is where I do think I need to clarify the record - in the remarks of May 14 that there was something particularly nefarious going on at the University of Western Ontario.
What I had in mind was a number of audits that have been done by, among others, the auditor general for Ontario who has gone in in recent years to look at certain of our post-secondary institutions, and he has found some very interesting things. I look elsewhere in the country, I look at the United States and, boy, do I see some spending patterns at universities, big and small, public and private, that would make me want to - as I said a moment ago, if I were a student, I would say, "I'm not paying one more red cent until I see a very clear picture of how it is you, University X or College Y, are spending the money you've now got, both from government and from me as a student."
I say that because we are now expecting young people to shoulder a growing cost of higher education at the very time we say, out of the other side of our mouth, that at no time is higher education more important to the individual's social and economic wellbeing. To repeat what I said on May 14, what angers me most, especially if you're my age - 46, almost 47 - is that I got a university education almost free because people like Mr Robarts and Mr Davis, responding to pressure I suppose from people like my parents, made a very good offering, very attractively priced to my entire generation. So for my generation - we who got it for nearly free in the late 1960s and early 1970s - now to stand up and say to our kids, "The sky's the limit," is the alpha and the omega of hypocrisy.
I find it really offensive that in so much of this debate we hear so many people just saying, "Let the kids" - that's who we're talking about basically, the 18- to 25-year-olds - "let the 18- to 25-year-olds pay tuition that's going up four, five and six times the annual inflation rate." I'm not here to argue a position of students not making a contribution. I like to think my position on this is not unreasonable. The last time we debated this, colleagues were reminding me that I as minister raised tuition, and of course I did. But I just simply say that in the last three or four years we've raised university tuition in this province by something in the order of 50% and, I repeat, it's going up now annually four, five and six times the annual rate of inflation. I think that is not acceptable and not fair.
I say to the university and college presidents, whether they are at Western or Laurier or Carleton or Ryerson, you better understand that there is going to be, yes, pressure exerted on this Legislature for additional resources, but there is going to be a very real pressure on the institutions - and I'm not just talking about the administrations; I'm talking about the professoriate and others - to justify the way in which those resources currently allocated are being spent.
It came as a big surprise a few years ago to some in the university administration community, apparently, that many young people at the undergraduate level expected that there might actually be some kind of an emphasis on teaching. Can you imagine? Some young person from Millbank, north Perth, home of one of the great university teachers and administrators, the late principal from Queen's University, Dr Corry, who came out of your part of the world, Mr Speaker - and I'll tell you, he had something to say about some of these issues.
I want to conclude by saying I just hope all of us, as legislators, as parents, as community leaders, have some sensitivity to what message we are sending out to young people. I include the university presidents. Part of the reason I picked on Mr Davenport is that I kept hearing the radio and television reports, which almost sounded gleeful, that university presidents seem to be so much on the side of increased tuition. I hope we have some room and some sensitivity for young people who are being asked to pay for this burden. I certainly did not intend, and I want to make plain to Mr Davenport that I did not have any cause, to suggest that there was some particular nefarious activity going on at Western. But I say in conclusion that as a student I would want to see a rigorous audit of all post-secondary institutions just to see what kind of cost structure and what it is I was being asked to pay for before my tuition was cranked up yet again.
The Acting Speaker: The Chair recognizes the member for St Catharines.
Mr Bradley: Thank you, Mr Speaker, for this opportunity. What see in this bill is that the government would extol the virtues of the tax cut at a time when we are still running a deficit in the province and most conservative-minded and cautious individuals would be saying to us that the time to implement any tax cuts is after you have solved the problem of the deficit. In other words, most would say that once you're running a surplus, there is some justification to look at selected tax cuts in specific areas.
What we have seen, however, is that while the government is running this deficit it has had to borrow money in order to finance the tax cut. Then it is critical of other levels of government, particularly the federal level of government, and says it wants more money. The federal government looks at Ontario and says, "Any money we would give to Ontario they would simply give away in a tax cut," which we all know benefits the wealthiest people in the province to the greatest extent. If you're the president of a bank, for instance, you're getting to get the most back out of this tax cut.
What I want to point out is that what the tax cut is doing is driving far deeper cuts than even many members of the Conservative caucus anticipated would happen. In the Niagara region there are five hospitals which are threatened with some kind of drastic action, either closure or something close to closure, and people have turned out in the thousands to defend those hospitals: in Fort Erie, where we have Douglas Memorial Hospital; in Port Colborne, where we have the Port Colborne hospital; the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital group out there in Grimsby, where the West Lincoln Memorial Hospital is located, a large group of people out for a candlelight meeting; in St Catharines, the Hotel Dieu Hospital; in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Niagara-on-the-Lake General Hospital, all of these under siege from Mike Harris. Mike Harris, you will all recall, said during the last election campaign, "Certainly, Robert" - he was referring to Robert Fisher from Global TV, who asked the question - "I can guarantee you it is not my plan to close hospitals." And yet, 35 hospitals in this province have closed or have been forced to merge, despite the fact the Premier gave a solemn promise that would not happen.
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There are some who buy into this crackpot realism that somehow we must punish ourselves for having a good health care system, that somehow we must tear down the hospitals which have served us so well in years gone by and which continue to serve us, that somehow we must now impose user fees which mean, more and more, that the amount of money a person has in his or her wallet, instead of simply the need of that person in terms of health, will dictate the kind of service that person is going to get.
The Hotel Dieu Hospital in St Catharines has been designated by the local health care restructuring commission for closure. I can tell you that it will not close easily. I will stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who wish to keep the Hotel Dieu Hospital open, as I will with the people who wish to keep the St Catharines General Hospital and the St Catharines Shaver Hospital open, because we need all of those hospitals to serve the people of our community. What we need are more beds available, not fewer beds available. What we need is a situation where you're not kicking people out of the hospital quicker and sicker, but rather allowing them to stay in until such time as they are in appropriate medical condition to leave.
The people who are involved with home care or who have people coming home will tell you they're coming home requiring a lot of extensive and comprehensive service, medically speaking. They are unable to obtain that because there's insufficient money for home care. in any event, it's difficult to deliver that kind of care in the home setting.
Our long-term-care facilities are certainly in need of appropriate funding. Linhaven in St Catharines is going to have to lose some of its resources and some of its staff because of cutbacks that are taking place in terms of the operating funding. What we don't need is a cut; what we need is an increase.
When they went to the local commission - it was headed up by Rob Welch, who was a respected regional councillor in St Catharines, son of the Honourable Robert Welch, who we all know served with distinction the riding of Lincoln and then Brock and then St Catharines-Brock in his years in this House. Rob Welch and his commission were left with the unenviable task of having to come up with a program or a plan for medical care services in our area that would be based on the fact that there'd be $43 million taken out of the system. That is $43 million taken away from hospital operating budgets. You can imagine then that the recommendations that are going to come forward are going to reflect that unfortunate reality.
It's what I call crackpot realism. Some people buy into it, some people who think they are the intelligentsia like to buy into this, as though somehow this is really clever that somebody has thought of this. They are often people who can afford to purchase their own services about 35 miles away, or 15 miles away, in Niagara Falls or Buffalo in the United States where they can purchase medical services.
We see of course the ambulance services responsibility being dumped on the local municipality. My fear there is we'll see widespread privatization, that Rural/Metro from the United States, which charges huge rates in western New York, will move into Ontario and want to charge the same kind of rates and operate looking at profit as being most important because it is a private sector company. There is a place for the private sector. I don't expect the government to get into the automobile manufacturing business; that's for the private sector. It seems to me, however, that the delivery of health care services is best undertaken by those in the public sector.
The neo-cons, the 20-somethings who get elected to this House and have all the answers and think that you should privatize everything and that the health care system they have in the United States is somehow transferable to here, that group does not persuade me with their arguments.
We have fewer nurses in the hospitals today. Ask anybody who goes into a hospital today to compare it to 10 years ago. They'll tell you the service is not the same. The hospitals are not as clean, the kinds of services that are provided, not only medical but non-medical, are simply not what they were just five or 10 years ago. I don't care whether hospital administrators get up after firing 225 people out the door, and that's because they've lost the funding, but after having those people laid off, saying, "Oh, we can do just as good a job." There isn't anybody who believes it, nor should they, because that is simply not the case.
When I hear people talk about the tax cut in my area, most of them will say, "I wish to heck the government would keep that, help to pay off the deficit, but better, keep our health care system going in this province as it should."
We have hospitals in the Niagara region that are running deficits. Of course the local Tory member comes with the big cheque and the local media cover it, the Conrad Black press covers it, as though it's some huge announcement. Its the old story of, they kick you in the face and then come along later and kick you in the shins and you say, "Thank you for just kicking me in the shins this time." They come back with a little bit of money after taking a lot of money out of the system.
Mental health services are almost a disaster in the Niagara region because of lack of appropriate services available to those who are suffering from mental afflictions. We have the psychiatric hospital now closing in Hamilton, and that will put greater pressure on it.
We've had the restructuring commission show up in St Catharines, or, as I call it, the Ontario Mike Harris hospital destruction commission because they're coming in looking at ways of cutting money out of the system. Instead of investing and making the system better, they are interested in cutting. Their mandate is to cut, cut, cut. We have in the Niagara region the largest proportion of population per capita of people 55 years of age and over, and they want to start cutting.
Dr David Foot, author of Boom, Bust and Echo, when he spoke at Brock University, was asked by a student, "If you could give one piece of advice to Mike Harris, looking at the demographics of the Niagara region, what would it be?" He said, "Don't close hospitals." What do they want to do? Close five hospitals in the Niagara region. The people of our area will not stand for that. I'm not going to wait for any restructuring commission; I'm not going to look so-called objectively at any restructuring commission. I know we need those hospitals and we don't need Mike Harris's hospital destruction commission to come in and start slamming the doors on our hospitals.
You've got lots of money for certain things. You've got money for advertising. Every person in Ontario should know when this pamphlet arrives at his or her house, a propaganda pamphlet trying to extol the virtues of Mike Harris and his government in the field of health care, that it cost $1.27 million. So when it arrives at your house, ladies and gentlemen, this cost you $1.27 million. It comes with a lot of other pamphlets that have been showing up lately, or this obscenity, which is of course a full-page ad, in this case in the Toronto Star but it was in the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Sun and I'm sure other newspapers, by the hospital restructuring commission.
Once again, lots of money for advertising, but when it comes to essential services such as the service which was described by Dalton McGuinty, the Liberal leader, today for an individual in Niagara Falls, Ian Strathern, we don't have the money for that. A parent of Ian Strathern went to the Tory fund-raiser in St Catharines. Somebody gave him a ticket for it so he would have an opportunity to approach the Premier on this. The Premier said in his speech, "I'm going to try to do something about this." Then we read in yesterday's newspaper that several weeks later nothing has been done about it.
You see, what annoys people is when they see that you've got money for self-serving propaganda for the Conservative Party, such as this pamphlet that's arriving in every household in Ontario, or for full-page ads such as this, they wonder why you don't have money for essential health care services in this province.
There's so much in this bill that is worrisome. One is the fact that hidden in this bill is the acquiescence to gambling in this province, the permission which allows Mike Harris to establish the 44 new Mike Harris gambling halls, or charity casinos as he would prefer to call them, that will operate seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year if possible - probably a few days less than that. These will operate and they will bleed from local communities all of the discretionary money that's there. If you think local businesses are going to benefit from this, you're wrong, because they're not going to have the money to spend on other services. Most of the Conservative caucus knows I'm right in saying this. I think the crime commissioners, the family coalition people who ran on family values, instead of trying to get into the cabinet, should be standing up to Mike Harris saying: "Mr Harris, this is not right. You were right when you were in opposition and you denounced that."
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Last, I'm going to touch briefly on education. I have not seen, in the education system, morale as low as it is today. That need not be the case, but it is. People who are retiring today are retiring not at the end of the year that they're eligible to retire; they're retiring on the day they can retire. So much of that is because they feel besieged by this government, attacked by this government, put down by this government. I know it sounds good when you go to a certain meeting and the anti-education crew applaud you wildly and say, "It's time you put those educators, those trustees, those teachers, those administrators in their place." But I'm going to tell you, you've done almost irreparable damage to our education system. You've kicked the stuffing out of the morale that people in the front line of the delivery of education services have in this province. For that you will never be forgiven.
The Acting Speaker: Comments and questions?
Mr Dwight Duncan (Windsor-Walkerville): My colleagues on this side of the House always speak with wisdom and experience. They bring to the debates of this House the sorts of thoughts and comments that all of us ought to listen to well. When we talk about government advertising, when we talk about the kinds of issues that my colleague from St Catharines has pursued, we essentially talk about priorities. What are the priorities of government?
In my community, like his, we've seen two hospitals closed; we've seen beds cut; the emergency room at Hotel-Dieu Grace is backed up; the emergency room at Windsor Regional is backed up, yet this government has money for advertising - cheap political propaganda. All of us in this House have an obligation to talk about priorities and what they mean for us and what they mean for this province.
It's most unfortunate that as we proceed through this year we see more and more advertising. First it came from the Premier's office, Ontario Jobs, then it was "We're on the right track," now it's health care and next we're told it's going to be crime. We're told there was quite a rough-up at the Ministry of the Solicitor General over a $400,000 budget cut that had to be restored for what the senior public servants called blatant partisan political advertising using taxpayers' dollars.
When my colleague from St Catharines speaks of these matters, it's important that the government members listen, because we think if there's money for that kind of political propaganda, there ought to be money to keep hospitals open; there ought to be money for more nurses; there ought to be money for junior kindergarten. I applaud my colleague, as always.
Mr Martin: In this couple of minutes I want to say that I agree with the presentation that was made tonight by the Liberal caucus, the number of them who spoke. They certainly have put on the record some of the very important things that we need to be saying here in these dying hours of this session of this Legislature: talking about the advertising that is now happening, for example, to sugar-coat, to cake over, to gloss over some of the very draconian pieces of legislation that have come forward, some of the ways that communities have been hurt in a major and significant and fundamental way by this government, whether it's in health care or education, the economies of some of those communities.
I think very specifically of my own community, where we're now experiencing a 20% unemployment rate. The system is beginning to fray at the edges and the Liberal caucus and the New Democratic Party caucus are noticing that. The government caucus, I'm not sure whether it's that you're ignoring it or that you just don't see it, but you're certainly not talking about it. If you don't talk about it, your constituents are going to begin to notice and they're going to tell you very clearly, come the election, in spite of, as the member from Renfrew has very articulately said here this evening, the largesse that you will come to them with as we move ever closer to the election that will happen within the next year or so. They will have felt personally in their own life, in the life of their families, in the life of their friends and neighbours, in the communities where they live, the full negative impact of some of the initiatives that you have sprung on them and put in place to bulldoze over them, and they will be very clear in their judgement. You have a short period of time left. The largesse won't do it. Perhaps a repeal of some of the legislation that you've brought into place -
The Acting Speaker: Comments and questions?
Mr Carroll: I just want to comment on one thing that the member for Renfrew North made reference to. He talked about being 47 years old and when he went to university - I think I'm using his terminology - basically it was free. He was referring to the excessive cost of university now. I'm a little bit older than the member for Renfrew North but not substantially older. Obviously the price went down dramatically between the time I went and the time he went because I have to tell you, mine was not basically free.
To put it in perspective, when I left university after three years with my degree, I owed $4,000 at the bank for my university education. My first job teaching school produced an income of $2,800 a year. If we can translate that into today's numbers, a first-year teacher would get about $30,000 a year, and to owe the same relative amount as I did, they'd owe about $42,000 for a three-year education. I don't believe the record would show that that in fact is what students coming out of three years' university do owe today. I think, relatively speaking, the cost of university today for students is a bargain relative to the incomes they can generate.
Mr Miclash: It's always a pleasure to comment on the speeches made by the members from Scarborough, St Catharines and Renfrew North. As we know, they are three of - I can't call them the older members of the House, but the more experienced here in the House, and it's always the information they bring forth to the House that I look forward to.
In terms of the member from Scarborough bringing up a touchy subject, I think it's going to be a subject that is going to bring harm upon this government as we get closer to the facts, as we get further into it, as we find out more about what some of the commissioners out there are saying, that being the subject of Ipperwash. I know a good number of constituents in my riding are watching this very closely. After meeting with a grand chief this morning and listening to some of their comments, I think they have some real concern and I think it's concern that will resurface in this House more than once in the upcoming session. So I recognize him for those comments.
In terms of the member for St Catharines, he talked about the demoralization in education. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was an educator 11 years ago and whenever I go back into a school, into a classroom or talk to colleagues who I taught with some 11 years ago, I hear it every single time I speak to them: They are demoralized. They are leaving the classroom not because they want to but because of the circumstances they are facing that the Harris government has put on each board of education in Ontario.
All you have to do is travel throughout the northwest, talk to the people in the new board created around Kenora, talk to the teachers who retired. I have retirement letters to that board from a good number of them saying that they cannot put up with the political garbage they are faced with today. They didn't leave the classroom because they didn't like what they were doing; they left the classroom because they were fed up. They're telling me there's no way I would ever walk back into a classroom that I left 11 years ago and recognize education as we had it in this province at one time.
The Acting Speaker: The member for St Catharines has two minutes to respond.
Mr Bradley: I appreciate the comments of each of the speakers. In wrapping up for us and responding for us, I would mention to you that not only is the cost of tuition rising substantially, but keep in mind that it is now going to be deregulated. So the sky will be the limit at many of the universities out there, and special programs, which are expensive programs, will cost even more. That's okay if you're the son or daughter of a wealthy person, but for those of modest incomes, that's going to be very difficult for that person to attain, keeping in mind that those are the people who often don't have access to the good jobs. They don't have the special connections. They're not somebody's son or daughter who has these special connections with the big shots in a company or the big shots in government. Often the people who are the wealthiest are the people who are able to get the very best jobs because of those good connections.
Second, remember that you have ended rent control in this province, I say to the member for Chatham-Kent. Rent control is now gone and those who are the most mobile are going to be those who are affected, because when they leave the apartment, when they leave the rental accommodation, the landlord is allowed to hike it. The sky is the limit when that happens. I can tell you, that's going to hurt students very, very much.
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I look at the fact that they have the textbook fund. I would like to have been able to stand in the House and compliment the government on the textbook fund and say, "That's a good investment." But instead of doing it right, they had to rush it so all the Tory members could show up and get their photograph taken at the school. Everybody's talking about how you've botched this. It's a good idea. For once I wanted to say something good about the government, and you've botched the idea because you want to rush into it. You want to get all those American-made books on to the shelves of the various schools in this province. That is what has happened now. It's just unfortunate that you're mismanaging even the things which could potentially be good.
The Acting Speaker: Further debate? The Chair recognizes the member for Dovercourt.
Mr Bill Murdoch (Grey-Owen Sound): Tony, tell him about the books.
Mr Tony Silipo (Dovercourt): You want to talk about books? We can talk about books. Remind me, I'll talk about books.
I want to say, in the last little while that remains this evening, and I think it's already been mentioned, as we're winding down this legislative session, as we will be doing tomorrow, we are in fact tonight dealing with - and I know we'll be passing it, whether we vote on it tonight or tomorrow - probably the most significant piece of legislation we've had to deal with this session. It may not seem like that in terms of what's been the most controversial, but this bill, Bill 15, that we have been talking about this evening is the bill that implements the essential measures of the budget: the income tax cut, the corporate tax cut, the borrowing of the money for those tax cuts, which is something that is also part of the bill, and a number of other changes that are in the bill.
If people who have been watching tonight have heard members talk about very many things, it's because this bill is really at the heart of what the fiscal agenda of the Mike Harris government is all about. We have seen a situation in which the government, however they have couched their promises and whatever they are telling us or want people to believe about their promises on health care, where they said they would maintain funding - they've made significant cuts to education, where they said they would maintain the level of funding in the classroom and have cut to the tune of about $1 billion.
In any of the other areas where the Tories would like the public to believe they are keeping their promises, the one area that I will say to them they are keeping their promise in is with respect to the income tax cut. I have always said from the beginning - and I have said this from the beginning, even when people would not believe it - that of all the promises Mike Harris made, the one and only promise he would really be sure to keep was the one about the income tax cut, not because of the reason Mike Harris and the government members give for that, which is that they believe this is going to create the jobs out there, but because what this income tax cut does is redistribute money and wealth in this province like nothing that's ever been done by a government in the history of this province before.
What this does, essentially, is put the government in a position where they have to borrow, over the life of the government, about $30 billion that they are adding to the debt to fund this income tax cut, an income tax cut that is going to benefit largely those who are the most well off in this province. It's interesting; when you look at the breakdown of the income of people across this province, half of the taxpayers of the province make less than $33,000. Yet, of the total value of the tax cut, which is around $5.5 billion, that 50% of taxpayers ends up, at the end of the day, receiving less than 18% of the value of that tax cut. The large proportion of the income tax cut goes to a small percentage of people making over $80,000, which is 6% of taxpayers across this province. They are the ones who receive a huge benefit. In fact, the top 3% of income earners get 18% of the value of the tax cut.
There is very clearly a redistributive approach going on here, and the money is being redistributed, quite frankly, from Ontarians of modest and low income to Ontarians of high income. That's what the essence of the Tory agenda is all about. But what's even worse is that in order for that to happen not only does the government have to borrow the money, but they also have to find money in other areas. Where are those areas? They're in health care and education, by and large. That's where we're seeing those cuts. We've talked many a time about these cuts. I can tell you that what the government is trying to do is simply not convincing many people out there.
Tonight I was at a commencement in one of my schools, at Oakwood Collegiate, a good school. It's a school that's 90 years old this year. Interestingly, as a bit of an aside, when the school, which is now in the heart of the western part of the old city of Toronto, was built 90 years ago there was a bit of a controversy about why the school board was building a school out in the country, if you can believe that. That's just a sign of how things have changed over these last 90 or so years here in the city. It's a good school, a school that has had a tradition of both very strong extracurricular activities but equally, and probably even more so, strong academic achievement for its students. In fact, the principal was noting tonight how a high percentage of graduating students this year, as in previous years, have achieved the status of Ontario scholars.
But there, I can tell you, both tonight and in the many other times I've had the chance to be in that school and in many other schools, people are very concerned about what is happening. One former science teacher said to me: "I can't believe this. We have this new science curriculum" - which he says is generally good; it's not great stuff, but it's actually good, solid stuff - "but then we have the government telling us that the textbooks we have to get are the textbooks based on the old curriculum."
To my colleague who wanted me to talk about textbooks, let me say to him that this is exactly what happens when the wrong reasons drive the agenda. When the government is telling schools and school boards, "Order the textbooks and have them in by September so that we can have photo ops with all of our MPPs," the boards, in the rush to be able to spend this money and use this money, are having to make bad decisions or decisions that are not as good and as solid on an education front as they would be if they had been able to make them in due time and with appropriate preparation.
That's essentially what the government is doing. They're trying to focus in on their message, and then of course from time to time they let the Premier back in the House and we see the charade we saw today. The handlers are working very hard to try to give this whole government a softer image, a "We're listening" approach. Then they put out, as has been pointed out by one Toronto columnist, one of the last missives they sent out, the little glossy one that talked about "Are we on the right track?" where one of the pages of that was of course "We want to listen to you." As the columnist notes - in language which I won't repeat, Speaker, because you would probably rule it out of order - the space that's there for comment is very tiny and is this government really interested in listening?
Of course we know they're not, because you only have to hear the Premier as he gives us the benefit of his presence once a week here in the House. He comes in and seems to destroy all efforts to try to give a softer image, because when he's asked to explain how, in the Mike Harris world, things are getting better when in fact we have a higher level of poverty, particularly around single parents, than we had three years ago, when we see the gap between the richest citizens in Ontario and the poorest citizens in Ontario getting wider, all he can do is rhyme off the various achievements of the government, if he even does that, or he answers questions that were asked before.
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The fact is that there are no good answers that this Premier or this government has, because the only reason, essentially, they are proceeding with their agenda is not that they believe - maybe they do believe that this is going to improve the situation; if they do, then they are just wrong - but I think they know that what is key and what is at the heart of what they are doing is to change the balance within Ontario to ensure that at the end of the day most people are not going to be better off.
I think most people out there, if you ask them and if you listen to them, even if they agree that some cutting has to happen, would say to you that it doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't make any sense, common or otherwise, for us to be cutting in health care to pay for the income tax cut. It doesn't make any sense for us to be cutting out of our education system to pay for the tax cut. That's the fundamental problem this government has at the end of the day: They can't sell their message, because their message is anything but common sense.
As I was saying as I began - and I'm going to conclude, because I should have said at the outset that I'll be sharing this limited time with my colleague the member for Sault Ste Marie, and I want to give him a chance to use up the last moments left in this debate. We are going from here tonight and tomorrow night - and I, quite frankly, am happy to admit I am tired, so I am looking forward to the break and to the chance to have some more time to spend in my riding. But I look across, both tonight and on the other evenings we've been here, and I see a lot of fatigue across the hall here and I don't think it's just because of the long hours. I think it's because members of the Tory caucus are beginning to realize that their message is not selling very well out there. They're trying all sorts of things, the latest being this direct selling they're doing out there, sending out the various missives.
I say to the government members, when you're out there during the summer, listen to what your constituents are telling you. If you ask them and if you hear them and if you listen to them, the majority of them will tell you what they are telling me, which is that even if they believe we all have to bring our fiscal house in order, you cannot and should not do it by sacrificing our health care system and our education system. That's what the Tory government is doing. That's what Bill 15 entrenches because, as I say, at the heart of it is the income tax cut, which is the source of all of those problems.
Mr Martin: I want to say to the folks in the House tonight that I am happy to join in this debate and offer a few thoughts for consideration as we come to the end of this session of this Legislature. We're speaking tonight on the budget of this government, that piece of work that becomes in many significant ways the foundation block for everything else they will do, the indication of where this government feels its priorities are and what it feels will be in the best interests of the people of Ontario.
As I look at the budget that was delivered by this government and I put it together with the speech from the throne, among other things, I can say one thing: long on rhetoric, short on substance and hard, very hard, on targeting, targeting groups of people that it will continue to blame and to demonize as it moves towards an election again in this province, the same as it did the last time. This is no different. This isn't a change in strategy. These are the same old tactics of a party that seems to thrive on the politics of resentment, of division, of sowing the seeds of hard-heartedness and hatred.
What we're seeing with this government, supported by the budget it presents, is again the targeting of, I suggest to you, three different groups which it targeted in the last election, which it has targeted through its three years as government and which it now continues to hold up as the cause of everything that ails us. One of those groups, as the member across the way knows, my good friend from Kitchener, is the poor.
The first group you caught in your cross-hairs in your Common Sense Revolution, by way of some of the programs that you said you would introduce to deal with the question of people on social assistance, was the poor. The first thing you did when you got to be government was to take 21.6% out of the incomes of those already vulnerable, already poor, already struggling people in every one of the communities in which we live, every one of the communities that we call home. Then, soon after that, you took away the programs that supported them in their attempt to better themselves, in their attempt to keep their dignity and self-esteem intact, to keep their families together, to keep body and soul together. You took them away ever so slowly; you took them all away.
Then you came in with a program that you called workfare, which at its very best is nothing more than an attempt by this government to take people on social assistance and set them up on a platform, on a stage, so we can point at them and see in them everything that is wrong in the society in which we live, to call them names they do not in any way deserve.
The poor: Who are they? Most of the people on social assistance in this province are children. What you've done with children is you've removed them from their families, as if to say, "Okay, we'll take children here," and they are the major victims of the agenda of this government. You've tried to carve them off from the adults who take care of them. If you're not demonizing the children, you're demonizing their families and in particular their mothers and their fathers. You're pointing at them and saying they are the cause of anything that anybody can point to that ails us in this province today.
The poor: Some have mentioned tonight since I got up on my feet that many of them have gone off the social assistance system. The poor are those 9% to 10% of our citizens who cannot find work because there is not enough work being generated by what this government and the business community and the industry community are creating.
There is 20% unemployment in my own community of Sault Ste Marie. Who do you think those people are? They are the people who are on social assistance. They are the people at the bottom rung, the folks in our communities who, for one reason or another, have not been able to access the education system to better themselves, who have not been able to access a whole lot of the programs that were put in place by previous governments so that they might be able to participate in the new economy that is coming at us.
These are the people we sacrifice. These are the people we write off. These are the people who will never get a job. No matter what the government says, no matter what the members across the way say, no matter what rhetoric they throw at us or how loud they speak or how agitated they get, we still have 9% to 10% average unemployment across this province, people who need our help, people who need to be able to put food on the table for their children, for their families, people who need to be able to pay the mortgage, people who need to be able to pay the rent. These are the people we have targeted. These are the people we have set up on a pedestal and called all kinds of names and blamed in so many unfair ways for the things that ail us in our communities.
In my own community, as I said a few minutes ago, we have an unemployment rate of some 20%. I want to talk about my community for just a few minutes, because my community, under the courageous leadership of the Bob Rae government, had righted itself over five years. When we got to be the government in the early 1990s, with the recession that was coming at us - it was global in nature - all our major industries were struggling: Algoma Steel, St Marys Paper, the Algoma Central Railway. We took each one of those, worked with the community, with the workers, with management, with the financial institutions, and as government were at the table as a partner, giving leadership, bringing resources, so that at the end of the day we had in 1993 three corporations that stood out as examples in that community, of what it was going to take to enter the next millennium with some degree of enthusiasm and optimism so we might all take advantage of the new economy that was coming at us.
Interjections.
The Acting Speaker: Order. The members for Grey-Owen Sound, Kitchener and London South, come to order.
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Mr Martin: Those major corporations in my community have proved to be three very important success stories in the industrial restructuring and evolution of this province, but that story is very seldom told, that story is very seldom understood out there, because you get the kind of flak that comes at us, perhaps because we're from northern Ontario or some community that's away from the heartland of this province, that says for some reason or other, simply because we took three of the biggest corporations - Algoma Steel that employs between 5,000 and 6,000 people, St Marys Paper that employs somewhere between 300 and 500 people, and the ACR around 300 people, all major industries in my community that were restructured, that were given a new lease on life by a government that knew it had a role to play, that it could give leadership and that if it brought the right resources to the table, a different approach could be found.
What happened? Just as we were poised to take off economically, just as Sault Ste Marie could feel the wind beneath its wings, Ontario elects a government that begins to tear at the very heart of the community in which we live.
In the world we live in today, particularly in Ontario and particularly in northern Ontario, we have over a number of years discovered that if we're going to have any stability at all, if there's going to be any confidence at all in the economy we all depend on, there has to be a mix of public sector and private sector. That's what we had found in Sault Ste Marie in 1993 and 1994, that perfect mix of public sector and private sector.
We restructured the private sector, we put it on a course that was positive and constructive, and this government came in and began to hack away at the jobs in the public sector. Most particularly, they tore apart the Ontario Lottery Corp, the corporation that was sent up to Sault Ste Marie - and the member for Kitchener knows of what I speak because he was on the committee when I raised this - by a Liberal government to help us begin the very important process of diversifying our economy. It was a corporation that from the year it was conceived made profit and made continually more profit every year after that, including the years, I suggest to the member for Kitchener, that it was in Sault Ste Marie - unbelievable profit, all going to the general revenue of this province so we could pay for health care and education and social services and all the other valuable things we deliver as a government to the people who elect us here and who pay the tab.
What did you do? You ripped it apart. Why? Because you had an ideological bent to privatize anything that moved. The only reason you got away with it was that there was no organized labour group in that workplace to stop you, to raise the arguments, to present the arguments, to resist you as they did in the liquor control board instance and as they did in so many of the other very valuable public crown corporations that continue to operate in this province because this government backed down on its promise to privatize.
This brings me to the next group that is targeted by this government. It's so unfortunate because of what they've contributed to the quality of life of all of us who call Ontario home in this wonderful country of Canada. That's organized labour. I suggest to you, as I did the other night, that there isn't a member in this House today who can't say, if they trace their history back either directly or indirectly, that they're not here because of some contribution by organized labour to the life of their families, of their community.
Interjections.
Mr Martin: Are you telling me I'm finished tonight? I have so much more to say.
The Acting Speaker: Some other time.
Mr Sterling moved a resolution that was debated and passed on June 2, 1998. I'll read the appropriate part of it:
"That one sessional day shall be allotted to third reading stage of the bill" - that's Bill 15. "At 5:55 pm or 9:25 pm, as the case may be, on such day, the Speaker shall interrupt the proceedings and shall put every question necessary to dispose of this stage of the bill without further debate or amendment."
Mr Eves has moved third reading of Bill 15. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion is carried?
All those in favour, say "aye."
All those opposed, say "nay."
In my opinion, the ayes have it.
Call in the members. This will be a five-minute bell.
Interjections.
The Acting Speaker: Order. This reads, "Pursuant to standing order 28(h), I'd like to request that the vote on Bill 15, tax cuts for people and small business, be deferred until June 25, 1998." It is signed by the Honourable David Turnbull. So be it.
Interjections.
The Acting Speaker: Order. I'd ask the members in the chamber to take their seats. It being almost 9:30 of the clock, this House stands adjourned until 10 am tomorrow.
The House adjourned at 2128.