Journal des débats 1998-nov-25 | Assemblée législative de l'Ontario

Mr Frank Miclash (Kenora): Last week the member for Timiskaming and myself spent an evening sponsored by the Rainy River Valley Safety Coalition in Fort Frances. In attendance were well over 200 citizens from the Rainy River, Emo, Atikokan and Fort Frances area. These citizens are striving to get their district accredited by the World Health Organization as a safe community and get a "Safe Community" designation by the year 2000.

We were also joined by the president of the World Health Organization, Dr Leif Svanstrom. He certainly brought a great message to the group. He was on stage with the president of the coalition, Doug Anderson. Doug indicated to the group that when you look at the safety movement, it's one of the biggest movements in the world today. This was certainly reinforced by Dr Svanstrom.

It was a very informative evening. We had a student choir performing a safety song. We also had a senior group from Fort Frances that did a very unique play. It's called Pills and Spills. It delivered a message to the entire audience about the abuse of prescription drugs.

Again I would like to wish the Rainy River Valley Safety Coalition all the very best as they strive for their accreditation as a designated community. A very great evening and a very sincere message.

HOTEL DIEU HOSPITAL

Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold): Make no mistake about it: It's Mike Harris and the Ontario Conservatives and this Conservative government who plan to shut down Hotel Dieu in St Catharines. It's Mike Harris and the Ontario Conservative government who plan to terminate those highly successful programs in oncology and dialysis and palliative care which Hotel Dieu has pioneered and developed to a sophisticated level and for which it serves all of Niagara region.

You can hide behind the restructuring commission, but at the end of the day the decision is this government's. The restructuring commission is only serving this government by administering and delivering this government's policies to hospitals across this province, and in the case of Niagara region to Hotel Dieu.

Jim Bradley, the member for St Catharines, and I have been firmly and consistently and persistently standing together in condemnation of this government and its hospital closure policies and in support of Hotel Dieu's survival. I call upon the four Tory backbenchers from Niagara region to do the same. The fact is that Jim Bradley and I have from day one defended not only Hotel Dieu's right to survive, but the need for it to survive to protect the health care interests of this generation of Niagara region residents and future generations.

I challenge other Niagara MPPs, those four Tory backbenchers, to stand up and condemn those policies of this government that are going to shut down Hotel Dieu, condemn it to death and condemn the residents of Niagara region to consequences in terms of inadequate health care.

RIDING OF QUINTE

Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte): It is my pleasure to inform the members of the Legislature that the Quinte area was recently rated as the best place in Ontario to live by the Ontario Social Development Council.

The council created an index consisting of 12 indicators. Each is assigned a value of 8.33, for a total of 100. This represents the base year of 1990.

Everyone in the Legislature should be happy to know that the report reveals that the quality of life in Ontario is improving after the havoc wreaked by the previous government during the first five years of this decade, but what is particularly pleasing to me, as the member for Quinte, is that the quality of life as measured by the council is higher today than at any other time in this decade. The index for Quinte was 115.

Quinte has recovered from the devastating recession of the early 1990s faster than Toronto and certainly much faster than neighbouring Kingston and The Islands. When I look at some of the indicators used by the council to measure the quality of life, I can see the positive impact this government has made on Quinte, from job creation to an investment of $12.26 million in long-term care.

I have every confidence that Quinte will continue to have the high quality of life that makes it the best place in Ontario to live.

NURSES' BILL OF RIGHTS

Mr Rick Bartolucci (Sudbury): The record of the Harris government concerning the protection and appreciation of nurses over the course of the last three years has been abysmal. Hospital closings and reductions to hospital budgets have led to unprecedented job losses in the nursing profession, with up to 10,000 nursing positions lost in the hospitals of Ontario, while this government continues to waste $50 million in advertising.

The Harris government, by its actions, has clearly shown that it doesn't value the enormous contributions nurses make to the health care system. If they did, we in Ontario wouldn't have the dubious distinction of having the lowest number of nurses per capita in the entire country.

We must show our nurses that we care and that we appreciate the very demanding and valuable contributions they make. We must enshrine their rights in provincial legislation and that's why, later today, I will be introducing an act entitled the Nurses' Bill of Rights.

My fellow Liberals and I want to ensure that every nurse has the right to be given the opportunity and the means to provide high-quality nursing care. We want every nurse to have the right to be heard and consulted by other hospital staff on health care issues relating to their patients. We want every nurse to have the right to participate in health care reform. We want every nurse to have the right to carry out his or her duties without fear of reprisals and in a setting free of harassment and that promotes professionalism and teamwork.

The question is, does Mike Harris have the courage to call this act?

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EDUCATION FUNDING

Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine): Mike Harris and Dave Johnson might think they've pulled the wool over the eyes of the parents in this province by the tinkering they've done with the education funding formula, but I've got to tell you, it's not working.

Parents are continuing to meet on a nightly basis in my riding, and I've talked to my colleagues and the same is true in their ridings. Last night I was with a group of parents; tonight Kew Beach school is meeting on the issue of school closures.

You see, you didn't really fix the funding formula. Your own panel of experts said that you should have in place an appeal process to deal with characteristics of buildings. What did Dave Johnson do? He just moved from 100 square feet per pupil to 106 square feet and said, "OK, that'll take care of it." But the calculations are still based on the ministry determination of school capacity and school space. So the ministry has decided that if you have a parent resource centre or if you have a dedicated music room or a dedicated French-language room that should be used for a classroom instead, you have to do that. That's empty space and that's space that you'll be penalized for and you won't be funded for.

Do you know what? If they included a boiler room like they did in some of the schools in Toronto, a basement boiler room, then you'll be penalized if you don't use that. You see, tinkering with something that's fundamentally wrong won't work. Putting off a problem until after an election only builds cynicism in the public, and it's a well-deserved cynicism and a cynicism that will be paid back to you in spades.

VOLUNTEERS

Mr Ernie Hardeman (Oxford): I am pleased to rise today to pay tribute to six individuals in Oxford riding who were recently honoured by a local church community.

Each of these six women has volunteered her services to the South Zorra Baptist Church for more than 50 years. Collectively, they have given more than 300 years of service to help make their faith and their church community stronger and more viable. Certainly these volunteers have shown their leadership through example as they have been involved in many groups, organizations and events in their church. They have also made a positive impact on the lives of their fellow congregation members, young and old alike.

Today, I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Vera Hook, Sunday school teacher, volunteer driver, president of the ladies' aid and prayer warrior; Pauline Mattson, choir member, prayer warrior, president of the ladies' aid; Eugenie Watson, Joy Club, prayer warrior, Sunday school teacher; Audrey Carter, church treasurer, Sunday school choir leader, organist and pianist; Hazel Taylor, mission field worker, Joy Club founder, junior church teacher and prayer warrior; and Kae Goodall, Joy Club storyteller, Sunday school teacher and prayer warrior. Vera, Pauline, Eugenie, Audrey, Hazel and Kae have made a valuable contribution to Oxford county and to society through their volunteer efforts.

Volunteers are an important part of many local groups and organizations. Without their efforts, many of these organizations would be unable to function effectively. Certainly they are to be commended -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Thank you.

EDUCATION FUNDING

Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): This morning, the Premier decided to take a whole bunch of loonies and show the people of Ontario where their supposed tax cut is coming from.

This statement is about the school funding formula. As much as the Premier would like to come out with some kind of late fix-it program, the reality is that his supposed tax cut is causing new user fees right across the board, and the latest is last night's decision by the Peel board to charge a $50 user fee for lunch supervision for kids, most of whom are taking buses to school and can't get home even if they wanted to.

The truth is that this school funding formula is in the same bunch of money as principals, secretaries and vice-principals. What choices do these school boards have when they need to find the funding to hire people to supervise hundreds of children over the lunch hour?

The truth is, this funding formula simply doesn't work, and this is but one example of the new user fees that are now in the field and that parents are having to deal with. We heard from one parent who has three children in one school within the Peel school board. That's $150 more that she'll be paying in a user fee so that her children can remain in the school.

All we can say to that is, when he decides to take loonies, we want to say: "This is about user fees. This is not about a tax cut."

CHILDREN'S CAR SEATS

Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Riverside): I wanted to inform the House of a course that's being run today and tomorrow at the CAW child care centre with respect to the safe installation of child car seats.

As a parent of a five-year-old son, Brett, I did what most parents do. I borrowed a car seat from a friend, put it in the back seat of my car, made sure that the seat belt was strapped on correctly, and away I went.

I received a letter this summer from Brenda Godier in Windsor, who told me a little bit about the dangers children are exposed to if the car seats they are riding in are improperly installed. She told me there wasn't any place in the Windsor area where she could bring her vehicle to get an opinion as to whether it was safely installed.

As a result of the research that I did, I found that 25% of infant car seats are improperly installed, and most of them don't have tether straps, which is an important safety feature. Motor vehicle crashes are the number one killer of children between the ages of one and four.

I think it is incumbent on us to ensure that child seats are safely installed. I want to thank Earl Dugal from the CAW child care centre, Heather Boyer, and Elsie Gailbraith and Marianne Hamelin, who are with the Head Injury Coalition, who joined with me in announcing this program in Windsor, and call upon this government to ensure -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Thank you.

FRED GIES

Mr Wayne Wettlaufer (Kitchener): It is with pride that I stand today to recognize and pay tribute to Mr Fred Gies, a World War I veteran who lives in my riding. Fred is one of 620,000 Canadian soldiers who fought to defend freedom in the First World War, in which 173,000 Canadians were wounded and 66,000 gave up their lives.

The heroism of the men and women who fought in the world war should be a beacon of light to each and every MPP in this House who believes, as I do, that this place is one of the truly great centres of freedom and democracy in a country which today is recognized as having attained the highest quality of life for its citizens of any country on earth.

The men and women who fought in the world wars fought to ensure their legacy, a legacy of democracy, of freedom of speech, of freedom of religion, of a free and independent press and of compassion. This is a legacy which our modern military forces are working diligently to maintain and this is a legacy which every member of this House strives to exemplify.

Fred Gies is a very active 102-year-old veteran who flew to France for his first-ever flight. On November 11, the 80th anniversary of the Armistice, Fred, who served in the killing fields of France, received that country's highest distinction, the Legion of Honour.

I want to thank Fred Gies and his compatriots for their contribution and sacrifices and to congratulate him for the honour they bestowed on him in France.

It is important that we make a conscious and concerted effort to ensure that the history of this country's contribution to freedom and democracy throughout the world is enshrined in our educational system. Let it be part of our legacy. Thank you, Mr Fred Gies.

REPORTS BY COMMITTEES

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

Mr Jerry J. Ouellette (Oshawa): I beg leave to present a report from the standing committee on administration of justice and move its adoption.

Clerk at the Table (Ms Lisa Freedman): Your committee begs to report the following bill, as amended:

Bill 68, An Act to incorporate Legal Aid Ontario and to create the framework for the provision of legal aid services in Ontario, to amend the Legal Aid Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts / Projet de loi 68, Loi constituant en personne morale Aide juridique Ontario, établissant le cadre de la prestation des services d'aide juridique en Ontario, modifiant la Loi sur l'aide juridique et apportant des modifications corrélatives à d'autres lois.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Shall the report be received and adopted? Agreed.

Pursuant to the order of the House dated Monday, October 26, 1998, the bill is ordered for third reading.

STANDING COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): I beg leave to inform the House that today the Clerk received the 12th report of the standing committee on government agencies.

Pursuant to standing order 105(g)(9), the report is deemed to be adopted by the House.

INTRODUCTION OF BILLS

NURSES' BILL OF RIGHTS, 1998 DÉCLARATION DES DROITS DES INFIRMIÈRES ET INFIRMIERS DE 1998

Mr Bartolucci moved first reading of the following bill:

Bill 84, An Act to protect the rights of nurses providing services in Ontario / Projet de loi 84, Loi visant à protéger les droits des infirmières et infirmiers qui offrent des services en Ontario.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? Carried.

Mr Rick Bartolucci (Sudbury): The purpose of this bill is to establish a bill of rights for nurses providing nursing services in hospitals in Ontario, and to remind the government that priorities are extremely important in health care.

The Speaker: I've got a ruling on a point of order from the member for Fort William. I'll read it when she arrives if that's OK.

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Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I rise to seek unanimous consent for a motion in which this House would add its voice to the international outcry against the imminent execution in Texas of a Canadian citizen, Stanley Faulder. This is a case that has striking parallels to such cases as Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall and David Milgaard, who were convicted of murders only to have it proved later that they were innocent. Those innocent men are now free.

But in Texas, or anywhere else which maintains the brutal practice of capital punishment, some judicial mistakes will inevitably be fatal. Thankfully, Canada has abolished the death penalty so there was a possibility to correct the errors that occurred in our courts. In Texas, however, where Stanley Faulder sits on death row, his execution is scheduled for December 10 despite growing concern that he may also be among those wrongly convicted.

Amnesty International has assembled a dossier challenging the fairness of Stanley Faulder's conviction. He was denied a chance to contact the Canadian consulate for advice. No physical evidence has ever linked him to the crime. The Criminal Lawyers Association and the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted spoke out today here at Queen's Park. James Lockyer, whose courageous defence freed Guy Paul Morin, explained the situation at a news conference today and urged all of us to take immediate action. It will soon be too late.

I'm asking the House for unanimous consent to place a motion that would support Amnesty International in its appeal to stop the scheduled execution. It would call on the governor of Texas, George Bush, to conduct a full and fair clemency hearing in the case of Stanley Faulder. I ask for that unanimous consent, Speaker.

The Speaker: Can I get a copy of that unanimous consent, please? Thank you.

Hon Norman W. Sterling (Minister of the Environment, Government House Leader): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: We really would have liked to have some advance notice of this so that we could consider what in fact is being asked for. I'm therefore somewhat pressed to take action on this without really knowing all of the facts.

The Speaker: Same point? Leader of the third party.

Mr Hampton: The reality here is, the press conference was held today to bring international attention to this. This person will be put to death on December 10 if we do not act on it. If the government House leader is asking for some time for people to read the motion such that it might be dealt with later on today, I'd be willing to entertain that. I have extra copies of the motion if anyone would like copies, or you may read a copy of the motion now. The point is that December 10 is the date scheduled for execution. There is rising evidence that this may be a wrongful conviction case, and we should take action on it now.

The Speaker: I certainly don't want to insert myself into the discussions about this issue. I understand the gravity of the situation. But I'll tell you, at the moment we are seized with this because you're seeking unanimous consent. We must dispose of it at this time, one way or the other. I have no alternative but simply to move unanimous consent.

Mr Hampton: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: If that's the will, we will stand this down until the end of question period, and we'll ask for unanimous consent then. I'll withdraw now and ask for unanimous consent at the end of question period.

The Speaker: That's fine. Any time you want to withdraw, you can withdraw.

ORAL QUESTIONS

APPRENTICESHIP LEGISLATION

Mr Dalton McGuinty (Leader of the Opposition): My question is to the Minister of Education. I want to speak to you about your apprenticeship act, which today I understand you have tabled amendments to which will exempt the construction sector. What we're talking about here, just so we know, means this act is no longer going to apply to the stonemasons, the boilermakers, the millwrights, the electricians, the carpenters, the ironworkers, the lathers, the limeworkers, the painters, the plasterers, the plumbers, the sheet metalworkers, the steamfitters, and many, many others.

What you have effectively done today is gutted your own bill. What I'm asking you to do out of kindness to your own bill is to admit that you've gutted it. It's now on the ground, it's bleeding. Do the right thing: Put it out of its misery and kill it.

Hon David Johnson (Minister of Education and Training): That's a very fanciful interpretation of what happened today. The construction industry made a good case. The committee listened to the construction industry across Ontario, in Toronto, in Windsor, in Sudbury and Ottawa, and felt that a good case was made. The committee has conveyed those views back to me, I might say, and the government has responded. I could say that the remainder of the bill that doesn't deal with the construction trades deals with a good many trades in Ontario. Regulated and unregulated trades in Ontario amount to about 200 across the province.

I quote the Alliance of Manufacturers and Exporters Canada, representing many tens of thousands of employees across Ontario: "Removing the rigidities of the old apprenticeship system and replacing them with a flexible, relevant and customer-focused training initiative is a positive step to help create an environment in Ontario that meets the needs of the next millennium." That's exactly what we're doing through the apprenticeship act.

Mr McGuinty: Minister, you can't save this bill. It is now beyond redemption. You have no choice but to kill it. You've dealt with the construction sector. Let's look at what the largest employer in the province has said about this. Let's look at the auto sector. The CAW said that Bill 55 will cost Ontario jobs, that you should withdraw the bill. Yesterday you got a letter signed by the people representing the personnel departments at General Motors, Chrysler Canada and Ford Motor Co. They said, "We urge you to delay passage of Bill 55 until such time as constructive, meaningful consultation can take place with all significant stakeholders." It's not just an issue of the construction sector. Now it's the auto sector. They're saying, at a minimum, delay it and allow for a meaningful consultation. Will you do that?

Hon David Johnson: I have a submission from the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association supporting Bill 55. I have a letter from the training sector in GM supporting Bill 55. I have a letter from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, representing 40,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across Canada, supporting Bill 55. I know it's difficult for the opposition to contemplate change. This apprenticeship act has been in place for over 30 years, through the jurisdiction of the NDP, through the jurisdiction of the Liberals. The world has changed. We need more apprentices. We need a more flexible approach to the apprenticeship system.

Mr McGuinty: There is general acknowledgement worldwide that we've got one of the best apprenticeship systems in the world. Suddenly you arrive on the scene, johnny-come-lately, and you say you're going to dabble and you're going to make - it's more than dabbling - tremendous changes in the area.

I want to go back to the letter sent to you by the vice-president and general director of personnel of General Motors, the vice-president of employee relations, Ford Motor Co of Canada, and the vice-president of human resources, Chrysler Canada Ltd, DaimlerChrysler. They're saying the bill can't make it. They're saying it's going to do more damage than good. They're saying it's not in keeping with the times. They're saying we need to do more to make sure that we've got the best-skilled and the most highly educated workers. They're saying this bill doesn't do any of that.

I'm asking on their behalf and on behalf of all those who may be entertaining going into an apprenticeship program at some time in the future in this province to kill this bill.

Hon David Johnson: That's clearly the approach of the Liberals - I hope that's not the approach of the NDP - to do nothing, to sit on the status quo. That's not the approach this government has taken.

The Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association has indicated a tremendous shortage of skilled labour over the next five years. They have been pleading with this government to proceed with this bill, to proceed with changes to the apprenticeship system, to encourage more apprentices to come into the system. That's exactly what this bill does.

We have the support of the automotive parts manufacturers, we have the support of the Alliance of Manufacturers and Exporters Canada, of the CFIB. The world wants to get on with the apprenticeship reform. Maybe the Liberals don't, but the world does. It's time to bring us up as we approach the new millennium and prepare our skilled workers for the future that's going to be there in the next century.

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RIVERDALE HOSPITAL

Mr Dalton McGuinty (Leader of the Opposition): My question is for the Minister of Health. Today in the Legislature there are representatives and patients from Riverdale Hospital. You have ordered the closure of that hospital. You know that is a chronic care hospital. There are 435 vulnerable Ontarians who find themselves as patients in that hospital and who make their home there. They are very anxious and they are very worried. They want to know where they're going. They want to know where their new home is going to be and they want your assurance that they'll receive the same quality intensive care in their new home as they're receiving at present in the Riverdale Hospital.

They arranged to have a meeting with you. You cancelled that meeting. They came here today to try to meet with the Premier. They were unable to do so. Would you please stand now, Minister, and tell us where those 435 vulnerable Ontarians are going to go after you've finished closing the hospital, which your Premier promised he would never do.

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): I think it's very important to put this in the proper perspective. First and foremost, our concern is for quality health services and to make sure that patient care continues to be delivered to these individuals.

As you may know, staff from my office and staff from Minister Jackson's office have spoken with Riverdale officials on many occasions. In fact, the staff from Minister Jackson's office advised the Riverdale officials on several occasions that until hospital officials have been formally debriefed on the long-term-care tender matter, a meeting with the minister - any minister - was inappropriate. This position is based on a very clear legal opinion that we obtained from the Ministry of Health lawyers.

Despite your antics today, there was communication with the hospital on November 20 indicating that a meeting would take place with Mr Jackson and myself on December 4.

Mr McGuinty: That is completely unacceptable. You are the minister responsible for the health and well-being of every single Ontarian. There are some here whose hospital you have ordered closed. They want to know where they're going to go.

I don't understand what chronic care patients have to do with the minister responsible for long-term care. The very fear that these patients have and that their families have is that these patients are going to be transferred into a long-term-care facility. Do you know what that means? Chronic care beds cost us $240 a day, long-term-care beds cost $60 a day.

There are 3,500 patients Ontario-wide that you have determined will be transferred from chronic care hospitals, public hospitals, into the long-term-care sector. You know what means? That saves you over $200 million. This isn't about better health care; it's about discount health care.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Question.

Mr McGuinty: Stand up and provide every assurance to these patients and their counterparts in hospital today that these patients will not be transferred into a long-term-care facility and tell them where exactly -

The Speaker: Thank you. Minister of Health.

Hon Mrs Witmer: Obviously you had your second question crafted and you didn't bother to listen to the first response.

First of all, let me say -

Interjections.

Hon Mrs Witmer: If you had listened to the first response, you would have heard me say that on Friday, November 20, there was a communication with the officials from Riverdale indicating that a meeting would take place with Mr Jackson and myself on December 4, after the debriefing regarding the long-term-care tender had taken place, as was advised by the Ministry of Health lawyers.

However, in response to our concern that the patients continue to receive high-quality care, I'd also like to share with you a letter that was written to Mr James Wilson, the board chair at Riverdale, on October 22, where we indicated to him that we would establish a joint process with the hospital where Riverdale would be a full participant and implementation of a plan would obviously dictate the final closing date, and we would undertake to accommodate all patients based on their need and there would be no closing of any hospital -

The Speaker: Answer.

Hon Mrs Witmer: - until such time as each and every patient had been determined -

The Speaker: Final supplementary.

Mr McGuinty: There are 435 chronic care patients presently resident at Riverdale Hospital. You have ordered the closure of that hospital, notwithstanding your Premier's promise to the contrary that he wasn't going to close any hospitals. Please stand up right now and tell us that these 435 patients will be transferred, at minimum, to another public chronic care hospital, that they will remain your responsibility under the Canada Health Act, not the other guy's responsibility under long-term care. Provide us with that assurance, that these 435 patients will be transferred into chronic care beds and there will be no reduction in the quality of care they are receiving at present.

Hon Mrs Witmer: We have always given our assurance that the needs of these patients at this hospital and elsewhere are first and foremost. In fact, in this letter we indicate that we will accommodate each and every patient based on their need and they will get the highest quality of care, because that's the only quality of care that we are going to be providing for anybody in this province: the best care.

FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY OFFICE

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): I have a question for the Minister of Community and Social Services. I want to ask you about Jan Donovan. You should remember Ms Donovan, because you met with her on August 21 of this year. Ms Donovan was having trouble getting payments from her ex-husband to support their daughter. She went to the Family Responsibility Office. She told you about the months and months of frustration, of phone calls never returned, lost files, computer breakdowns, and on and on.

She went to you because you talk about cutting red tape, about rooting out bureaucratic inefficiency, about getting children their fair entitlement. You told her you would ensure that her case would go straight to Charlie, meaning Charlie Harnick. You said Charlie would help. Minister, it's three months later, November 25. So much for action. You haven't called her back. You avoided her calls. Charlie sure hasn't gotten in touch. Talk about inefficiency. Tell me why the children of this province aren't getting your help.

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Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Community and Social Services): I'd be very pleased to look into the circumstances of this case. There have been many women who have come to my office who have received very good support and care from the Family Responsibility Office, where we've contacted the ministry, we've contacted the department and we have had very good success at resolving those issues. I'd be very pleased to look into what has happened to this case and why it has not yet been resolved.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Supplementary.

Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold): This is outrageous. You already made a commitment to look into it. It has been two years now since your Attorney General has bungled the family responsibility and family support plan office, and you just shrug this off. You make excuses. Your government's incompetence has resulted in an office that isn't operational.

Jan Donovan is a very careful woman when it comes to working with you and your government. She has documented every call, every interaction with your office and the Family Responsibility Office. I have a gift for you from Jan Donovan: her notes, her correspondence, all wrapped up in your red tape. I'm sending this over to you now, because it tells a sordid tale. Ten months later, her case still isn't properly registered. You've lost her file twice. She has had to provide the FRO with her application, court orders and letters over eight times - countless telephone calls, hours on hold, being bumped from one office to another.

Your government has cut staffing, has shut down the regional offices of the FRO. Why don't you come clean? You're not cutting red tape; you are adding to it by your incompetence and your indifference to the women of this province.

Hon Mrs Ecker: Mr Speaker, I refer this question to the minister responsible for family support, Mr Harnick.

Hon Charles Harnick (Attorney General, minister responsible for native affairs): We at the Family Responsibility Office increased our ability to provide enforcement. In fact, the number of dollars that we are collecting has considerably increased: a 36% increase over October 1994, almost $40 million collected last month. We are endeavouring, as always, to deal with all the phone calls that come in. Last month we assisted over 2,100 people phoning the Family Responsibility Office on a daily basis. The average wait time has been reduced to just over eight minutes. Through the new enforcement techniques, we are collecting more money for women and children than we've ever been able to collect in that office before. Certainly, if the details are provided, I can find out what the issues are in dealing with this particular matter.

Mr Kormos: Ms Donovan, that, by the way, was the "Charlie" that the Minister of Community and Social Services was speaking of.

This isn't just one case; it's a horrible, desperate situation, but there are thousands of cases like Ms Donovan's. There are over 80,000 cases in the FRO where mothers aren't getting their support payments. The FRO knows where Ms Donovan's ex-husband lives and works. They haven't even investigated. What good is it to provide all this information when there's no enforcement? Why would the employer respond if there's no threat here?

I want you to know that in the last year alone the NDP has handled well over 1,000 calls from desperate mothers about the mess at your Family Responsibility Office. My office gets over 500 cases a year; the member for Sudbury gets another 800. We can't keep up, and clearly these people don't even bother going to their Tory MPPs for help. A lot of good that would do. Ms Ecker has demonstrated that. You've done a grave disservice, a serious attack on women and children in this province. When are you going to straighten this mess up? It's over two years, Attorney General. Straighten the mess up or resign so somebody else can do it.

Hon Mr Harnick: A larger percentage of cases within the Family Responsibility Office today have money flowing in them than ever before, including when the honourable member's party was in government. We have over 73,000 people who have been reported to credit bureaus. We have people who have their driver's licences being suspended on a regular basis. In the first week of October we had 177 matters in court for collection. Eighty-four of these were default hearings; 24 were first appearances. We are in the course of sending out 23,000 of the hardest-to-collect files to collection agencies - files that when the NDP was the government they had given up on and left in cabinet drawers.

We are doing more today to collect money that has been uncollectable for more than a decade than the NDP ever did when they were the government. We have more money flowing today to women and children in this province than has ever flowed from the Family Responsibility Office. We are doing far better than they ever did.

SPECIAL EDUCATION

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): My question is to the Minister of Education. On Monday I raised with you the case of Harry Bellemare, a disabled 11-year-old grade 6 student who for the first time in his school career no longer has a full-time educational assistant. He is not eligible for that special help under your new funding formula. In your answer you said, "The parents, last week actually, well before the article appeared in the newspaper, did sit down with the local school board...and sorted out that situation...to the satisfaction of all concerned." Well, Leslie Bellemare, Harry's mother, called my office and said simply, "The minister lied."

Minister, not only has the problem not been solved, but the day after I raised the case with you, Harry fell and hurt his hand when he had to go to the washroom by himself. Harry is not alone. The Advocacy Resource Centre for the Handicapped is getting call after call on this issue. Your new funding formula is putting special-needs students, their safety and their education at risk. When are you going to so something about it?

Hon David Johnson (Minister of Education and Training): Let me say at the outset that I'm sorry to hear that this particular individual has suffered a fall and an injury. I was informed by staff that there were meetings last week that dealt with this matter and straightened it out. I'm sorry to hear that apparently is not the case, and you can rest assured I will be having the ministry investigate this matter further.

Beyond that, I would say that the monies through the special education grant - the basic facts are unchanged: over $1.2 billion has been allocated. This government, I think for the first time in Ontario, is taking special education very seriously, to the extent that we have allocated a specific amount of money to each and every school board, and this money must be directed towards the individuals who need the assistance, and they need assistance at various levels. We have earmarked that money and we are insisting that it be spent, in terms of assistance, to the very kinds of individuals you're describing.

Mr Hampton: Minister, your answer couldn't be further from the true facts. Harry's case is not alone. I've got the form letter that you send out to parents, telling them you're earmarking the money, but when you read it carefully it says that you have not protected special education funding, that some of the money has been put under different funding envelopes, like transportation and administration grants, which means it's not protected at all.

Here's the real story: The budget line for teaching assistants was cut by $1.2 million in Kingston-Frontenac; by $200,000 in Algoma; by almost half a million dollars in Wellington Catholic schools: by more than half a million dollars in Niagara Falls schools; by $600,000 in Ottawa-Carleton; by more than $1 million in Peel; by more than $100,000 in Superior-Greenstone; by more than $1 million in Halton public schools; and just less than $1 million in Halton Catholic schools.

That's your funding formula. You admitted it was wrong and tried to fix it where school operating costs were concerned. Will you now do the right thing and fix it with respect to special education?

Hon David Johnson: I stand by the statement that this provincial government has earmarked the money for special education. Some of the money - for example, those involved in special education need transportation as well as teaching. So, sure, some of the money is allocated to transportation for those who need special education. There's no question about that. I don't deny that. It's an obvious fact.

We've gone to the extent of setting up a special audit for special education, over the summer months, of former superintendents, existing superintendents, people with expertise, people who have worked with special education for many years. They have reviewed on a board-by-board basis each and every board in Ontario and asked for submissions on special education. They have made a recommendation to the ministry on what should be funded to each board. We have said yes to those particular recommendations on a board-by-board basis and those monies are in the process of being flowed to the boards, some $127 million in total above and beyond what was originally allocated to the boards specifically for special education.

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The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Final supplementary, the member for Algoma.

Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): Last month I asked the minister about support for children with communication disorders. The minister said, "There is more money for special assistance such as speech pathologists in the funding formula." I think the minister should throw away his spin lines and read his mail, because the Ontario Association for Families of Children with Communication Disorder wrote to the minister recently to show that there are still problems.

He wants to talk about a board-by-board basis. The Upper Canada District School Board has only two speech-language pathologists to cover five counties. In the Near North board a child who has cerebral palsy no longer gets speech and language services because he does not qualify for individual funding under the funding formula. Parents are reporting similar problems in York region. In the Upper Grand board, after amalgamation the number of schools each speech-language pathologist services has been increased with no new staff hired.

Minister, these parents and their children want to believe that you're listening to them. They know you are reviewing the funding formula. Prove you care and fast-track your review and give the kids the chance they need. Will you improve the funding for special education in the province so these boards will have enough money to give the proper services that students need?

Hon David Johnson: The member opposite alludes to the fact that we are reviewing special education, and there is an expert panel looking into special education. We've gone to enormous steps to ensure that the special education funding is appropriate. There was an initial envelope of well over $1 billion assigned. There was, during the summer months, the audit I referred to - I directed my comments to the leader of the third party - which has gone on a board-by-board basis. In addition to that, yes, there is an expert panel which is looking at the circumstances around special education. I look forward to the comments from that panel. I can only assure you that this government has been willing to allocate the resources to special education in the past in response, for example, to the audit this summer, the resources that are required to support the children in their need across the province.

The Speaker: Answer.

Hon David Johnson: There is more money across the province for speech pathologists, but if the review that comes forward from the expert panel suggests that more support is needed in some particular circumstance, then I -

The Speaker: New question, leader of the official opposition.

CANCER TREATMENT

Mr Dalton McGuinty (Leader of the Opposition): My question is for the Minister of Health. Recent studies show that our province has fallen behind others when it comes to treatment of cancer. I want to provide you with the opportunity now to provide Ontarians with some reassurance on a specific front. The recommended maximum wait time for radiation treatment for people with cancer from referral to treatment is four weeks. Can the minister tell the House what percentage of cancer patients here in Ontario receive radiation treatment within the recommended maximum wait time of four weeks?

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): As you know, cancer has been one of the priority issues for our government. In fact, any money that has been saved has been reinvested into cancer care. We are very pleased that we were able to set up Cancer Care Ontario in order to ensure that all people in this province, no matter where they live, would be able to access the same level of service everywhere and that there would be complete coordination. I am very pleased at the leadership that Cancer Care Ontario is taking and at the reduction we are seeing in waiting times, and also the comprehensive level of care we are able to provide.

Mr McGuinty: The answer I'm looking for is absolutely vital to cancer patients in Ontario. The fact of the matter is that only 32% of all cancer patients receive their treatment within the recommended time period. In fact, two thirds of cancer patients in Ontario are now waiting up to 11 weeks to receive radiation treatment. That is seven weeks beyond the recommended maximum.

You talk about Cancer Care Ontario. Here's a quote from Dr Fitch, the coordinator of supportive care at your Cancer Care Ontario. Dr Fitch says, "The government has no sense of urgency with respect to the needs of cancer patients and the service that they need." In fact, Cancer Care Ontario is presently looking for an additional $16 million for their budget so they can extend the period of time offering radiation treatment to cancer patients. Sixteen million dollars. How come you can find $47 million for political advertising in Ontario but you can't find $16 million for cancer care patients?

Hon Mrs Witmer: Our government has invested more into cancer care than any previous government. In fact, I am very pleased to say that we announced $24.3 million over four years into the Ontario breast screening program, and that means that 30% of the women who are going to be screened will now be in a position where they won't face the death that they might have if they hadn't been screened.

I also want to indicate to you that recently we expanded funding for paediatric oncology in this province. We have also added $11 million in annual funding to improve anticancer drug therapy. And the list goes on and on: $300,000 for cervical cancer, $700,000 to target women not currently screened. We also contributed $5 million for cancer research through Cancer Care Ontario and Princess Margaret Hospital.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Answer.

Hon Mrs Witmer: We have proposed three new cancer centres in this province. That means that people will not have to travel as far. They will be in Peel region, they will be in Durham, and they are proposed to be -

The Speaker: Thank you, Minister.

VISITORS

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): I'd like to inform all members of the House that we have in the Speaker's gallery a delegation from Sicily led by Dr Antonio Cammalleri, mayor of Cattolica Ericlea. Welcome.

ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES LEGISLATION

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): In the absence of the Premier, a question to the Minister of Citizenship. Your government's shameful bill on persons with disabilities comes from a Premier with shameful attitudes towards the disabled.

I'm quoting from an article that was in the Toronto Star on Tuesday, May 30, 1995, where Mike Harris, leader of the Conservatives, says:

"Now here is a disabled person, only 50% as good as an able-bodied worker, but you must hire them and pay them as much as an able-bodied person. That's nonsense. Why should that employer? It doesn't make any sense."

That's the Premier's attitude towards the disabled, a shameful stereotype.

Minister, I want to ask you this: Did the Premier tell you to produce your bill? Did he tell you, the Premier who thinks that people with disabilities are only half as good, to produce a bill that's not even half as good?

Hon Isabel Bassett (Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation): I would say that I totally disagree with what you say about the Premier. He has been totally supportive in moving forward to make Ontario more accessible for the disabled. We have been the first government in Canada to move forward with legislation to reduce and remove and prevent barriers for people with disabilities. I am proud of our bill.

I want to say that in addition to the bill, what people tend to overlook is that we are also bringing in an employment committee that is going to work for employment for people who have disabilities. We are announcing an $800,000 incentive fund that is going to work towards broad-based and community access projects that again are going to reduce barriers for people with disabilities and lead to their employment.

I have had the total support of the Premier in moving forward with this bill.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Supplementary.

Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine): No doubt you have the total support of the Premier in doing nothing, because that's what you're doing for persons with disabilities: nothing, a big, fat nothing.

You say you're going to strike a committee. Bill Davis's government had the same committee in 1980. There's nothing in your bill that the NDP Bob Rae government wasn't already doing. In fact, there's nothing in your bill that you are not committed to do by virtue of the charter. The charter compels you to do it.

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Minister, in your own discussion paper you said: "Getting to work, borrowing a book from the library, using a pay phone, going to the movies, eating in a restaurant, these are ordinary activities for most citizens, but this is not the case for many Ontarians. Barriers can prevent Ontarians from participating in the community." Well, your bill doesn't do one thing to address any of that. It won't help them get to work, it won't help them borrow a book, it won't help them use a pay phone, it won't help them go to a movie or eat in a restaurant.

They are tired of talking to you. They want to meet with the Premier face to face. Will you withdraw this bill, will you set up a meeting and will you have the Premier answer directly to persons with disabilities in this province?

Hon Ms Bassett: Of course I will not withdraw the bill. We are doing more than your government ever dreamed of doing.

ONTARIO TRILLIUM FOUNDATION

Mr Bill Grimmett (Muskoka-Georgian Bay): My question is also for the Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation. I have had inquiries in my riding from community leaders - these are municipal politicians and also the leaders of local charities - who have been asking me about the unprecedented $100-million fund that our government has brought forward for charities.

My understanding is that the decisions to distribute this $100 million are to be made by local people on local teams. Minister, I wonder if you can advise the House where these people are being recommended from. Where are you getting the names of these volunteer decision-makers?

Hon Isabel Bassett (Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation): I want to thank the honourable member for Muskoka-Georgian Bay for the question. I want to clarify that the new Ontario Trillium Foundation will be the organization administering this exciting new fund and hundreds of volunteers across the province in local communities have been organized into local grant review teams. These volunteer members, on the advice of our summer consultations, are coming from municipalities, key charities like the United Way and the March of Dimes, and the recommendations of local MPPs on both sides of the House.

I sent out a letter informing all MPPs that this is the process, and MPPs on both sides of the House have sent in their local people in their areas to be members on these grant review teams. It's the process that people asked for and it's the democratic way to go about it.

Mr Grimmett: It certainly is reassuring to hear that the decision-makers are going to come from local organizations and that the recommendations are being made by members from both sides of the House. Minister, can you advise when the local charities in my riding will have an opportunity get this money and when these teams will be set up?

Hon Ms Bassett: I want to say to the member for Muskoka-Georgian Bay that the local grant review teams are going to be up and running as soon as possible. We've already received over 200 applications from people from across the province. We want to get them operational early in the new year so that the $100 million will be flowing through to fund the very valuable programs that so many of the local charities run and that are so necessary to our communities. Again, I'm pleased to report that we've extended the deadline once for these volunteer teams and I expect the grant review teams will be ready probably shortly after the new year.

ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES LEGISLATION

Mr Dwight Duncan (Windsor-Walkerville): I have a question for the so-called Minister of Citizenship about her failed sham of an Ontarians with Disabilities Act. I want to quote to you from a letter dated October 26 that you received from the Ontarians With Disabilities Act Committee: "This was brought home to us most pointedly when attention turned to the feedback that you received from the late Chief Justice of Canada, Brian Dickson. You agreed...that you could receive advice from no greater legal authority then he. You are well aware that he advised you during the consultation process that this legislation must be compulsory. Yet you indicated during our...meeting that you were given parameters for the project - parameters set out in" your own "discussion paper." Among other things, that discussion paper said in its introduction, in its very first sentence, "Getting to work, borrowing a book from the library, using a pay phone, going to the movies, eating in a restaurant, these seem like ordinary activities to most citizens."

Can you tell us how your bill does these things? Can you tell us how your bill responds to your own discussion paper?

Hon Isabel Bassett (Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation): I would say to the honourable member, as I said again and again yesterday, that we are going to mandate a systemic review of all government activities in all government ministries. Literally thousands of activities that affect the lives of Ontarians directly and indirectly will be changed because of this legislation that we brought in.

In addition to that, what we're also going to be doing is bringing in other initiatives such as our employment committee. We are going to be having an information service referring people to how they can alter their workplaces. Since taking office in 1995, we have also brought in many initiatives that are going to help move forward the agenda for people with disabilities.

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Mr Duncan: We in the Ontario Liberal Party are disappointed that, like the NDP before you, you failed to deal with a real Ontarians with Disabilities Act, completely failed to deal with that.

Minister, you just outlined a number of initiatives that refer -

Interjections.

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Order. Is that a prop? Yes, that's a prop. Member for St Catharines. Who wrote that book?

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): Oh, I didn't realize it was a prop.

Mr Duncan: The minister's bill provides no legal authority for meaningful, certainly not compulsory, enhancements. The minister, on the second page of her two-and-a-half-page bill, provides for $800,000. Minister, can you tell us why it is that you've got $800,000 for the disabled in this province when you've got $47 million for your lousy advertising campaigns to sell your own propaganda? Will you withdraw your bill and bring forward meaningful ODA legislation before this Legislature dissolves?

Hon Ms Bassett: I will not withdraw the bill. I am proud of this bill. This moves the agenda forward for people with disabilities and it is going to change what happens in this province for people who formerly have not been able to move forward because of their disabilities.

VISITORS

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce Mr Bill Barlow from Cambridge, in the members' gallery, a member of the 32nd and 33rd parliaments. Welcome, sir.

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: Kelly Da Silva and her students from Oakwood Collegiate.

The Speaker: Welcome. Well, one of us was in order.

RIVERDALE HOSPITAL

Ms Marilyn Churley (Riverdale): My question is for the Minister of Health. In 16 short months, Riverdale Hospital is slated to close. The 435 severely disabled people being cared for there have nowhere to go. I have discussed this urgent matter with you and the minister responsible for long-term care on several occasions. You know that I want to work with you to find a solution to this problem. I sent you a letter today, asking if you will request the Health Services Restructuring Commission to reconsider its decision, given that the hospital was not granted long-term care funding, as recommended by the commission, and that it remain open as a chronic care hospital.

There are some patients here today who came to see the Premier about this matter. I'm hoping you can give us some comfort today and say that, yes, you will ask the commission to do that.

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): Yes, I do want to congratulate the member. She has been very concerned about the patients at Riverdale and she has certainly endeavoured to ensure that these individuals would continue to receive the high-quality care they have been receiving.

We have been in communication with the officials at Riverdale. We have indicated that we will work with them. We want to make sure that in any planning and any implementation of the commission directives, they are fully involved. I want to assure you that all the patients there right now are going to have their needs assessed, and their accommodation in future will be based on their specific needs.

Ms Churley: Minister, you know that some patients came down today with a letter to the Premier expressing their deep concern and anguish and frustration at the response they're getting from you and the Minister of Long-Term Care. You know that. They need answers now. They're severely disabled and they're frightened about what's going to happen to them. I want you to know that I will not give up and that these patients will not give up. We'll be on your case every single day.

I also ask in my letter if, at the very least, you will delay the closing date for Riverdale Hospital to give the hospital and the community more time to plan for the future. You have shown in other circumstances that you have the flexibility and the ability to do this. Please, Minister, I am pleading with you now for the patients of Riverdale Hospital that you will at least give us that today. Say that you will announce the delay of the closing of this hospital.

Hon Mrs Witmer: That assurance was already provided in the letter of October 22 that went to Mr Wilson from Mr Sapsford, the assistant deputy minister. It states that "if this plan" - the plan dealing with the implementation of the direction - "requires adjustment to the...closure date, the Ministry of Health will undertake to secure this change with the commission. The hospital will not be closed until all patients are accommodated based on their needs." So I give you my assurance that this will indeed happen. We've already confirmed this in our letter of October 22.

POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION

Mr John Hastings (Etobicoke-Rexdale): My question is directed to the Minister of Education and Training and it is in regard to the Maclean's magazine annual review of the state of our universities across Canada, including Ontario. That survey indicates that at least three Ontario universities are in the top five medical doctoral universities, two of our Ontario universities are in the top primary undergraduate university status and three are in the top five comprehensive universities overall.

My question to you, Minister, is, what specific benefits and advantages through the Ministry of Education and Training and the Ministry of Finance have we made in creating this state of affairs and how does this contrast with the deliberate intention to describe our universities not as centres of excellence but as centres in decline?

Hon David Johnson (Minister of Education and Training): I think the question indicates that sometimes, if you listen to the rhetoric on the other side of the House, everything is doom and gloom in terms of our post-secondary institutions, whereas the reality is that we have among the best post-secondary institutions in the world right here in Ontario.

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The Maclean's rating that they do every year looks at a number of different categories in terms of class size, faculties, finances, library support for students, and I'm really pleased to say that institutions such as the University of Toronto, Queen's, Western and McMaster are all institutions that really do well. In other categories, Guelph, York, Carleton and Windsor are universities that do outstandingly in terms of the situation right across Canada.

I'm pleased to say that last year there were well over 400,000 students attending post-secondary institutions in Ontario -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Thank you. Supplementary.

Mr Hastings: Combined with our major improvements in the state of university affairs -

Laughter.

Mr Hastings: - contrasting with the laughter, the hysterical gales of indifference from across the way, what specific improvements have we made in terms of reform for student assistance to make our learning institutions much more accessible today compared to where they were many years ago?

Hon David Johnson: The opposition may consider this to be a laughing matter. I consider post-secondary institutions to be a most serious issue. I'm pleased to say that this government has directed about $3.3 billion this year to student support, $3.3 billion in terms of tax expenditures and ordinary expenditures to support our students: the Ontario student assistance program, well over half a billion dollars a year directed to students who need that sort of support; the Ontario student opportunity trust fund, over $30 million this year; the set-aside for any tuition increase if any institutions go that way, some $85 million this year.

We have just this past week announced the access grants to various institutions, amounting to $29 million over the next three years, to institutions such as Brock University, with over $4 million to Brock University in extra assistance just this week; to Laurentian, over $2 million; to Wilfrid Laurier, over $2 million; to York University, about $12 million in additional support.

The Speaker: Answer, please.

Hon David Johnson: That's why we have the best institutions in Canada, and that's why we have the highest participation rate ever in the history of Ontario -

The Speaker: Thank you.

DOCTORS' SERVICES

Mr Michael A. Brown (Algoma-Manitoulin): I have a question for the Minister of Health in regard to your visiting specialists clinic program. In a letter dated November 5 from your ministry to hospital administrators you say, "Expenses relating to clerical support staff and professional assistance will no longer be reimbursed through the underserviced area program for clinics after December 31."

Do you know what that means? That means the specialists who now visit the communities in rural Ontario will not be visiting; they cannot afford to. In Algoma-Manitoulin, over 25,000 patients now take advantage of this service. They will now have to go to the Sault or Sudbury or Toronto. It means diminished access to care. It means a net cost to the government of Ontario, to the taxpayers of Ontario of over $1 million, and a huge and unacceptable inconvenience to the people I represent. Why are you doing this?

Hon Elizabeth Witmer (Minister of Health): We actually have been expanding the opportunities and the funding for the underserviced areas. In fact, yesterday I made an announcement of $5 million where we were allocating additional nurse practitioners, about 121 nurse practitioners in this province, who were primarily going to be assigned to underserviced rural northern communities.

As you know, we have been expanding our globally funded group practice initiative as well. We have done work in collaboration with the Ontario Medical Association in order to ensure that we can get the doctors, the specialists, the nurse practitioners, all members of the health team, into the places where they need to be to serve the people.

Mr Michael Brown: What colour is the sky in your world? All but one of the specialists who have been contacted have said they will not be visiting under these circumstances; they cannot afford to. In my constituency alone, it amounts to 25,000 people; across northern Ontario it's probably in the hundreds of thousands. That means they will not have access locally to the specialists they need. You will be requiring them to drive through all kinds of weather, hundreds of kilometres, to see specialists they can now go to their local hospital to see.

This is your policy. This is wrong-headed. You could afford, if you weren't paying the travel grants that you're going to be able to afford, to spend even more money on your useless propaganda. Put it into patient care. Put the specialists in our communities. We deserve to have those specialists coming out and seeing us. They want to. They want to be able to afford it. Minister, will you stop this wrong-headed policy and reinvest that money in patient care in my constituency and the others across northern Ontario and rural Ontario?

Hon Mrs Witmer: Our government has moved forward in a way that we have recognized the very unique needs of northern communities. As you know, we provided $36.4 million to the globally funded group practice and we have provided other related funding initiatives. We have also provided the Scott sessional fee of $70 per hour to 78 hospitals. Every year we have the underserviced tour in order that specialists and physicians can be encouraged to locate in the north.

We also have an Internet registry to encourage doctors to go north. We have been moving forward in a way no previous government has done in order that we can identify the unique needs. As I said yesterday, we took another very significant step in order to increase access to health services to the people in the north by our investment of $5 million for 121 additional -

The Speaker (Hon Chris Stockwell): Thank you.

Hon Norman W. Sterling (Minister of the Environment, Government House Leader): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: During question period, the leader of the third party alleged that the Minister of Education lied. I would ask you to ask him to withdraw that remark.

The Speaker: Hold on. I didn't hear it. If it happened, I'd certainly give the leader of the third party an opportunity to withdraw it.

Mr Howard Hampton (Rainy River): Speaker, I quoted from an article. If he wants me to withdraw it here, I will, but I'll say it outside.

The Speaker: Now that you've said that you quoted from a direct quote, you did say it in the House. I have to ask you to withdraw it now. Can you withdraw if please?

Mr Hampton: I will withdraw it but it is a true remark. The parent in question heard the minister's answer.

The Speaker: Now we're into debate. Thank you very much.

Mr Hampton: Mr Speaker, I'm asking for unanimous consent for a motion in which the House would add its voice to the international outcry against the imminent execution in Texas of a Canadian citizen, Stanley Faulder. I'm asking the House for unanimous consent to place a motion that would support Amnesty International in its appeal to stop the scheduled execution. It would call on the governor of Texas, George Bush, to conduct a full and fair clemency hearing in the case of Stanley Faulder, who is scheduled to be executed on December 10 of this year.

The Speaker: Is that agreed? I heard a no.

PETITIONS

HEALTH CARE FUNDING

Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview): I have a further petition addressed to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"Whereas the provincial government cuts have caused a major decline in our health care system; and

"Whereas our hospitals no longer provide attentive, compassionate care to patients; and

"Whereas severe cuts to hospital staff and nurses have often caused very ill patients to wait long hours; and

"Whereas access to quality health care can no longer be provided and the government's cuts to the Ontario health care system are a real barrier for the people of Ontario;

"Therefore, we urge the Premier and this government to stop the cuts and give us a universal and accessible health care system. We pay for it and we demand to be treated fairly and equally by our own government."

I agree with the content of the petition and I will affix my signature to it.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): There's too much noise; we'll just wait for a few minutes.

REMEMBRANCE DAY

Mr Joseph N. Tascona (Simcoe Centre): I have a petition to the Parliament of Ontario which reads:

"Whereas it is important to honour the courageous memory and sacrifices of Canada's war dead and of our veterans who fought in defence of our national rights and freedoms;

"Whereas there is a need for succeeding generations of young, school-age Canadians to learn more about the true meaning of Remembrance Day;

"Whereas Ontario veterans' associations have created excellent education materials for use in Ontario schools on the meaning and significance of Remembrance Day;

"Whereas a special Remembrance Day curriculum for all grades in Ontario's education system, developed on the basis of the programs by the Ontario veterans' associations and involving their direct participation, would increase awareness of and appreciation for Canada's wartime sacrifices in the hearts and minds of all Ontario citizens;

"Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Parliament of Ontario as follows:

"That the provincial Ministry of Education and Training ensure that a suitable Remembrance Day learning unit be included in the curriculum of all grades of Ontario's education system."

I support the petition and I affix my signature.

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CHILD CARE CENTRES

Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): I was pleased to receive this petition last evening at a child care meeting in North York. It reads as follows:

"To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"Whereas providing daycare spaces is critical for the families in Toronto that need access to them; and

"Whereas the well-being of children should not be sacrificed for tax cuts; and

"Whereas the provincial government has significantly cut the budgets for Toronto school boards; and

"Whereas under the provincial government's ill-conceived Bill 160 there is no flexibility for boards to make up for the cuts; and

"Whereas daycare spaces in schools are now threatened by these cuts with the prospect of full-cost recovery arrangements with daycares and the threat of school closures;

"Therefore be it resolved that we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly to repeal Bill 160 immediately; and further be it resolved that the Legislative Assembly of Ontario instruct the Minister of Education and Training to restore meaningful and flexible funding to the Toronto school boards to ensure that they are able to continue to accommodate our community daycares; and further be it resolved that the Honourable Dave Johnson, Minister of Education and Training, take responsibility for his government's funding cuts rather than passing the buck to school boards who have no control over provincial government spending cuts."

I am happy to sign this petition.

EDUCATION FUNDING

Mr John O'Toole (Durham East): I'm pleased to present a petition to the Legislature from Kristy Surge of Bowmanville. The petition is from the students at Bowmanville High School under district board 14. It reads as follows:

"I hereby sign the following petition to protest Mike Harris's cuts to our educational system. We want our sports and extracurricular activities back."

It's signed by Mark Hamilton and Teresa Potier.

I've written a letter to Judi Armstrong, the chair of district board 14, supporting the students. I just want for the record to read, "I've urged the board to listen to the concerns of students and not to use them as pawns in this situation." Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to put that on the record.

HEALTH CARE

Mr Mario Sergio (Yorkview): I have a further petition addressed to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. It says:

"Say No to the Privatization of Health Care.

"Whereas we are concerned about the quality of health care in Ontario;

"Whereas we do not believe health care should be for sale;

"Whereas the Mike Harris government is taking steps to allow profit-driven companies to provide health care services in Ontario;

"Whereas we won't stand for profits over people;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:

"Do not privatize our health care services."

I concur with the intent of the petitioners and I will affix my signature to it.

IPPERWASH PROVINCIAL PARK

Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): I have a petition signed by 55 Canadians. It is to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

"Whereas many questions concerning the events preceding, during and after the fatal shooting of Anthony Dudley George on September 6, 1995, at Ipperwash Provincial Park, where over 200 armed officers were sent to control 25 unarmed men and women, have not been answered;

"Whereas the officers involved in the beating of Bernard George were not held responsible for their actions;

"Whereas the Ontario Provincial Police refused to co-operate with the special investigations unit in recording the details of that night;

"Whereas the influence and communications of Lambton MPP Marcel Beaubien with the government have been verified through transcripts presented in the Legislature;

"Whereas the trust of the portfolio of native affairs held by Attorney General Charles Harnick is compromised by his continued refusal for a full public inquiry into the events of Ipperwash;

"Whereas the promised return of Camp Ipperwash to the Stoney Point Nation by the federal ministry of defence and the serious negotiation of land claims by both the provincial and federal governments could have avoided a conflict;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario that a full public inquiry be held into the events surrounding the fatal shooting of Dudley George on September 6, 1995, to eliminate all misconceptions held by and about the government, the OPP and the Stoney Point people."

I support the demand for a public inquiry wholeheartedly and add my name to this petition.

PALLIATIVE CARE

Mr Bob Wood (London South): I have a petition signed by 50 people:

"Whereas most Ontario residents require adequate access to effective palliative care in time of need;

"Whereas meeting the needs of Ontarians of all ages for relief of preventable pain and suffering, as well as the provision of emotional and spiritual support, should be a priority to our health care system;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to resolve that a task force be appointed to develop a palliative care bill of rights that would ensure the best possible treatment, care, protection and support for Ontario citizens and their families in time of need.

"The task force should include palliative care experts in pain management, community palliative care and ethics in order to determine effective safeguards for the right to life and care of individuals who cannot or who can no longer decide issues of medical care for themselves.

"The appointed task force would provide interim reports to the government and the public and continue in existence to review the implementation of its recommendations."

HOTEL DIEU HOSPITAL

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): I have a petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

"Since the Hotel Dieu Hospital has played and continues to play a vital role in the delivery of health care services in St Catharines and the Niagara region; and

"Since Hotel Dieu has modified its role over the years as part of a rationalization of medical services in St Catharines and has assumed the position of a regional health care facility in such areas as kidney dialysis and oncology; and

"Since the Niagara region is experiencing underfunding in the health care field and requires more medical services and not fewer services; and

"Since Niagara residents are required at present to travel outside of the Niagara region to receive many specialized services that could be provided in city hospitals and thereby not require local patients to make difficult and inconvenient trips down our highways to other centres; and

"Since the population of the Niagara region is older than that in most areas of the province and more elderly people tend to require more hospital services, even of the acute care kind;

"We, the undersigned, request that the government of Ontario keep the election commitment of Premier Mike Harris not to close hospitals in our province, and we call upon the Premier to reject any recommendation to close Hotel Dieu Hospital in St Catharines."

I affix my signature, as I'm in complete agreement with the petition.

HIGHWAY SAFETY

Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): I have a further petition that has been circulated regarding the dangerous situation with regard to Highway 17 north in the vicinity of the so-called Mile Hill in Goulais River. I have previously introduced a similar petition with almost 2,000 names. There are a further 38 names on this petition, requesting that the government of Ontario install appropriate lighting and ensure better maintenance to prevent accidents in this vicinity. I'm signing my name to it.

REGIONAL GOVERNMENT RESTRUCTURING

Mr Toby Barrett (Norfolk): I have additional petitions - previously 10,000 - calling for a tax freeze and restructuring of municipal government in Haldimand-Norfolk:

"Whereas the Haldimand-Norfolk region has downloaded a 17% tax hike on residents, without attempting to cut its own costs; and

"Whereas for the past 25 years, there have been meetings, petitions, referenda, and studies calling for a restructuring of regional government; and

"Whereas 80% of the residents did not want regional government in the first place, and in recent referenda, 75% of the residents of the city of Nanticoke, and 60% of the residents of the town of Simcoe voted against retaining regional government; and

"Whereas residents in the region do not want and clearly cannot afford two levels of municipal government;

"We, the undersigned, respectfully request that provincial legislation be passed to freeze taxes and eliminate regional government in Haldimand-Norfolk, and institute a form of restructured local government in keeping with the wishes and the financial means of the local residents."

I sign this petition.

DIABETES EDUCATION SERVICES

Mr Frank Miclash (Kenora): Seeing that the funding for the diabetes education services is going to be curtained on March 31, I still have a great number of people who are interested in seeing that funding put on a permanent basis. I have a petition here that reads:

"To the Legislature of Ontario:

"Whereas the diabetes education services at the Lake of the Woods District Hospital in Kenora, Ontario, is an essential component of health care, we, the undersigned, petition the Minister of Health of Ontario as follows:

"For permanent funding for the diabetes education services at the Lake of the Woods District Hospital."

I've certainly added my name to that petition.

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PROTECTION FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS

Mr John R. Baird (Nepean): I have a petition to present on behalf of Margaret Marland, the MPP for Mississauga South, who as a minister cannot present petitions, but I'll do so on her behalf.

"Whereas nurses in Ontario often experience coercion to participate in practices which directly contravene their deeply held ethical standards;

"Whereas pharmacists in Ontario are often pressured to dispense or sell chemicals or other devices contrary to their moral or religious beliefs;

"Whereas public health workers in Ontario are expected to assist in providing controversial services and promoting controversial materials against their consciences;

"Whereas physicians in Ontario often experience pressure to give referrals for medications, treatments and/or procedures which they believe to be gravely immoral;

"Whereas competent health care workers and students in various health care disciplines in Ontario have been denied training and employment, continued employment and advancement in their intended fields and suffered other forms of unjust discrimination because of the dictates of their consciences; and

"Whereas health care workers experiencing such unjust discrimination have at present no practical or accessible legal means to protect themselves;

"We, the undersigned, urge the government of Ontario to enact legislation explicitly recognizing the freedom of conscience of health care workers, prohibiting coercion of and unjust discrimination against health care workers because of their refusal to participate in matters contrary to the dictates of their consciences and establishing penalties for such coercion and such unjust discrimination."

MUNICIPAL RESTRUCTURING

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): This petition is to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

"Whereas the Mike Harris government has announced its intention of dumping the financing for ambulances, social housing and public health care services on to the backs of municipalities;

"Whereas the irresponsible action of this government will create a shortfall of more than $18 million for local governments in St Catharines and the Niagara region; and

"Whereas local representatives in St Catharines and the Niagara region will be forced to either raise property taxes or cut services or both; and

"Whereas the Mike Harris Conservative government called municipal representatives `whiners' when they tried to explain to him that his proposal was unfair and would create gaps in important services such as the delivery of public health; and

"Whereas the Minister of Municipal Affairs accused local representatives of being opportunistic simply because they attempted to point out that the Mike Harris proposal was unfair and primarily designed to fund his ill-advised tax scheme; and

"Whereas the Mike Harris government refuses to listen to the representatives who work most closely with their constituents;

"We, the undersigned, call on the Mike Harris Conservative government to scrap its downloading plan, which will cause either an increase in property taxes or an unacceptable cut to important local services or both."

I affix my signature as I am in complete agreement with this petition.

BEAR HUNTING

Mr Joseph N. Tascona (Simcoe Centre): I have a petition to the Legislature of Ontario, a petition to end the spring bear hunt.

"Whereas bears are hunted in the spring after they have come out of hibernation; and

"Whereas about 30% of bears killed in the spring are female, some with cubs; and

"Whereas 100% of the orphaned cubs do not survive the first year; and

"Whereas 95.3% of the bears killed by non-resident hunters and 54% killed by resident hunters are killed over bait; and

"Whereas Ontario still allows the limited use of dogs in bear hunting; and

"Whereas bears are the only large mammals that are hunted in the spring; and

"Whereas bears are the only mammals that are hunted over bait; and

"Whereas there are only six states in the United States which still allow a spring hunt;

"We, the undersigned, petition the Parliament of Ontario to amend the Game and Fish Act to prohibit the hunting of bears in the spring and to prohibit the use of baiting and dogs in all bear hunting activities."

I support the petition and affix my signature.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

FAIRNESS FOR PROPERTY TAXPAYERS ACT, 1998 / LOI DE 1998 SUR LE TRAITEMENT ÉQUITABLE DES CONTRIBUABLES DES IMPÔTS FONCIERS

Resuming the adjourned debate on the motion for second reading of Bill 79, An Act to amend the Assessment Act, Municipal Act, Assessment Review Board Act and Education Act in respect of property taxes / Projet de loi 79, Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'évaluation foncière, la Loi sur les municipalités, la Loi sur la Commission de révision de l'évaluation foncière et la Loi sur l'éducation en ce qui concerne l'impôt foncier.

The Acting Speaker (Mr Gilles E. Morin): Questions or comments on Mr Rollin's speech.

Mr James J. Bradley (St Catharines): I well recall the speech from yesterday, as I was in the House, and I found it very interesting, as always. I was surprised that the member didn't note - perhaps he didn't have time because we have only 20 minutes now - that this was in fact the seventh bill which this government has brought in to deal with property taxes, and indeed if it had been done appropriately in the first place, if it had been thought through carefully, if the impact studies had been shared with everyone, then probably we would have seen this House deal with one bill.

The member will recall, I'm certain, that the previous bill really left the situation where the huge bank towers in downtown Toronto were getting a wonderful break in their property taxes. Now of course we had a large outcry from smaller businesses, who said, "Mike Harris has given a windfall to the big banks, to those huge towers." It was hurting the small business people. So at long last the government, in its seventh attempt, is now trying to redress that, though I must say only temporarily, because what it's going to do is postpone the day of reckoning.

Small businesses will take any crumb they can get from the government, the government having made that mistake in the first place, but they have to know that essentially what Mike Harris did over the long term was shift the burden on to smaller businesses and give a break to the big banks. With all those bank towers out there, that's a lot of lost revenue for the municipalities.

Mr John R. Baird (Nepean): I too, like the member for St Catharines, was pleased to hear the speech last evening by my colleague the member for Quinte. I thought the member for Quinte talked about all the salient political issues in this debate. He talked about some of the municipalities in his constituency which chose to use the tools and how they were able to assist the small business, but he also chose to speak about some of the municipalities in his riding that did not, and how he and other members of the government caucus were simply unprepared to sit by and watch some big businesses get huge rebates with the cost being borne immediately by small business. I certainly agree with the member.

The member does this regularly, and very effectively represents a good number of small business people in his constituency. The member has a lot of experience in this regard, because unlike myself he's run a small business and he knows what it's like to create jobs. So it's very important that he brings that perspective to our deliberation here today and gives those of us who have not worked in the small business sector what it's like in the reality on the front lines of business life in small-town Ontario and medium-sized towns and cities in Ontario.

I was, however, extremely shocked with the member's speech and surprised to learn about all the tax increases on small business by the Liberal and NDP governments over the last 10 years. The member spoke at great length, listed them all off. He spoke of the commercial concentration tax that whacked businesses here in the city of Toronto. He spoke of the employer health tax, the killer of jobs. I think that's the number one target of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, because it's a real job killer for small business. The 30% he spoke of, Workers' Compensation Board premiums: I know he shares my enthusiasm for cutting Workers' Compensation Board premiums by 5% and the importance of this government's plan to cut corporate taxes for small business by 50% over the next eight years, because small business creates jobs.

Mr Frank Miclash (Kenora): As it has been said many times in this House, we are dealing now with the seventh bill in regard to property taxes and I've noted the great amount of confusion out there. Just yesterday I spoke to a clerk-treasurer in one of the communities in my riding. He still wasn't sure when the appeal date was: "Is it October 30? Has it been extended to December 31?" Again, he just did not know. He's been having questions coming to him from small business. He's had a good number of property owners questioning him as to where the government is in terms of taxation of small businesses.

Small businesses are anxious out there. When we start talking taxes, they get very anxious. The confusion that has been created by this government is to no end and it seems that every time we turn around people are wondering where they're going, why they didn't get there in the first six bills, and a lot of questions around why the first six drafts were not able to be forwarded on and become law.

Again, a good amount of confusion, not only among the small business sector but among the general public, and a good amount of confusion around what is being dumped or downloaded on to the municipalities and exactly how this is going to affect their taxation and their user fees within those municipalities. You speak to one clerk-treasurer, you'll get one answer; another one will give you another answer. None of them is happy with this legislation and the confusion that it has created.

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Mr Wayne Lessard (Windsor-Riverside): I think the member has made an excellent point that the government still hasn't been able to get its property tax assessment scheme straight, after six previous attempts. In fact, we hadn't even finished dealing with bill number six before bill number seven got called and put on to the order paper. You'll recall that bill number six was to extend the date for appeals. Originally that was going to be extended to October 30, and that was as a result of the urging of Tony Silipo, the NDP member from our caucus, who urged the government to do this. Even October 30 wasn't a long enough time for people to put in their appeals.

What this government has done has really thrown the property tax assessment process into chaos. This is a government that likes to pride itself on good management, but once again, we see legislation that is ill thought out being rammed through the Legislature hastily and then having to be amended at some later date to fix up the mistakes.

We're seeing a similar process with respect to Bill 55, the apprenticeship legislation, as well. The government has had two years to work on these reforms to apprenticeship legislation and just today is starting to introduce substantial amendments to that legislation. You would think that after two years of this extensive consultation they like to pride themselves, that they would have had an opportunity to get this right, but they didn't. This property tax assessment bill is just another example of the government hastily putting through legislation that's ill conceived and ill thought out.

The Acting Speaker: Member for Quinte, you have two minutes.

Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte): I would like to thank the members for St Catharines, Nepean, Kenora and Windsor-Riverside for their comments.

The member for St Catharines was worrying about the bank towers getting back so much money and they were going to have a windfall. This is one of the reasons that we as a government have seen fit to put in classifications. If those people would have put those bank towers in the classifications, they had the opportunity in that bill to freeze their taxes to where they were previously and make sure that there isn't a windfall profit for those people to have their taxes go down at such an exorbitant rate and for the smaller people to have to pick up the assessment or their tax dollars. If the municipalities had chosen to use all the tools in the tool kit when the first bill came in, and to work with us as a government to make sure that we were trying to achieve the same goals, we wouldn't have had that.

The last previous governments, be it the Liberal government or the NDP government, both felt very strongly that they needed to do something with the taxation problems in the province of Ontario, and what did they do? They looked at it. They looked at it and then said: "It's too big, it's too scary. We're going to move away from it."

Yes, we brought in two or three bills or six bills, as you say, or even seven, to make the thing right, but so be it. Is it not better to bring in seven bills and get the thing right than to sit there for ever and ever and let it go by without having it right? Because that's what the last two administrations tried to do. They looked at it. They said: "It's too big of a problem. We're not going to tackle it. If we tackle it, we're going to be taken to task over it. There are so many people in the province who are going to be up and down and it's not going to be fair."

It doesn't matter when you do something; if you do the right thing, you're never wrong. Even though it is going to take us a few times to do it to make sure that it is right, the taxpayers and the people who create jobs in the province will be the winners.

The Acting Speaker: Further debate?

Mr. Bradley: The point I want to get to in this, and I leave off where my friend from -

Mr Bud Wildman (Algoma): On a point of order, Mr Speaker: Is there a quorum present?

The Acting Speaker: Would you please check if we have a quorum.

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, Speaker.

The Acting Speaker: The member for St Catharines.

Mr Bradley: Thank you. I appreciate the member for Algoma scaring some of the government members into the House to hear what is obviously going to be a landmark address in the House of sorts by somebody somewhere along the line.

Mr Steve Gilchrist (Scarborough East): Landmark or landfill?

Mr Bradley: "Land mine" is perhaps a better phrase. As you can see, all my own colleagues are here to hear this and the government benches are full, so I'm delighted to be able to participate in this debate.

I want to start off where my friend the member for Quinte left off. I want to start there, because he was talking about the fact that the government - he didn't use these words - had botched this on six previous occasions, had fumbled the ball, as they say in football, had bungled with this particular bill, which deals with property tax reform. This is the seventh bill. I can't even keep track of how many; they've got different names every time. Now it's called Bill 79.

Interjections.

The Acting Speaker: Order. When the members who are not on the floor are talking louder than the person who is addressing the House, there's something wrong.

Mr Bradley: I'll try to speak in a louder fashion, then, Mr Speaker. But I know there are other important conversations that must go on.

One of the criticisms of this government, even from the people who agree with it, and I don't agree with it -some of the Conservative members are nodding right now; I don't know whether they're nodding off or they're nodding in agreement - is that this government moves too quickly, too drastically, too recklessly and without looking at the consequences of their actions. I know my friend from Etobicoke-Humber probably thinks, in his heart of hearts, that that's the case. He would have hoped that Mike Harris and the cabinet would have taken just a little bit longer to assess the impact of the property tax reform and would have implemented it without seven bills.

Most governments, when they're bringing in legislation of this kind, bring in one bill. The first bill they get it right, because they do extensive consultation, ordinarily they do some impact studies that will give them an idea of what the results of the bill would be, they consult with their own backbenchers and the civil service and everybody in the province and then they come forward with a reasonable bill. Maybe not everybody will agree, but it's one they can live with. This government is now bringing in its seventh bill.

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A lot of municipal councillors used to think, "One thing you can say about the Tories is that they're competent and businesslike." Then they see seven different bills coming in and they don't know what to make of that. They've lost faith.

I want to quote to you from the clerks and treasurers of Ontario. They're a non-partisan group.

Laughter.

Mr Bradley: I'm laughing because my colleagues on the other side are laughing. The clerks and treasurers are the impartial people. I can't think of one who carries a political card, and the member for Dufferin-Peel agrees with me.

Here's what they had to say about this situation. The Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers said the following:

"This government, in its haste, is making legislation by the seat of its pants, without proper thought or planning. Yesterday's bill is amended by today's, which will likely be amended by tomorrow's."

These people must have a crystal ball, because they have seen what's happened. They have changed several times; we're now on the seventh bill. The members of the government caucus have had to be briefed seven different times now to find out what they're supposed to say when they get home to their municipal councillors, who are flummoxed and flabbergasted by this turn of events. First of all, they had to withhold their tax bills this year. They couldn't send them out because they didn't know what was going to be in those bills. Finally, some of them said, "We have to send them out, no matter what." They just got the bills out and the government came back again and said: "Guess what. You've got to change again."

So the ball gets fumbled by about 15 different people in this government and finally they think they've got the seventh and final bill. We'll see what happens.

There was a call out there, a reasonable call from many people for moving back the deadline for appeals of assessment. When the Liberal members of the committee which was dealing with another bill dealing with property tax moved a motion which would have extended the deadline for appeals to property taxes, the members of the government turned it down, slammed the door shut on it; and today they are crawling in, rather sheepishly and having to postpone until the very end of this year the deadline for appeal. That's what we said they should have done in the first place, because of the mess they've made of so-called property tax reform.

As I mentioned a little earlier, the bill as it was forthcoming, I think it was the sixth bill, still meant that the big bank towers, the big businesses, the big box stores, were to get a tax break from the government, and the small businesses as a result had to pay more. I know the people who are in charge of the big bank towers in downtown Toronto were delighted. They probably came to the big Tory fundraiser in Toronto, shelled out the money and said: "Thank you, Mike Harris, for giving us a huge tax break. After all, we've only made hundreds of millions of dollars in profit this year, but it's nice to know we don't have to pay more in property taxes." They should be thanking Mike Harris, and they probably sent a letter to the Premier in this regard.

Unlike the letter that came from Ford and General Motors and Chrysler today, which said that you've botched -

Interjection.

Mr Bradley: Chrysler-Daimler, the new name they have now.

Hon Al Palladini (Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Tourism): DaimlerChrysler.

Mr Bradley: DaimlerChrysler is the new name.

All these top officials in these companies today sent a letter - at least we had the letter read in the House today - that said: "You've botched another bill. You've botched the bill on apprenticeships." Just when the government thought it had appeased people, because there were a couple of big business groups that said it was good, the Big Three in car-making in Ontario said: "No way. We're standing shoulder to shoulder with the brothers and sisters" from the CAW, in this case, "to say this won't work, that you shouldn't proceed with this bill as it is." That's what I think many of the small businesses said about this bill when they found out that the big bank towers were going to do so well and the small businesses were going to get kicked in the shins by Mike Harris and the Conservative government.

What happened was that the structural shift in tax burden was from large to small businesses. We think the small businesses need that kind of tax break. The shift was implemented knowingly by the Harris government and was done, so-called, in the name of fairness. In other words, people weren't being fair to the big bank towers.

As tax bills finally went out this summer, it was clear that small businesses across the province were facing huge tax increases and that something had to be done to address the situation. These policy changes are going to mean the following. Many businesses that were expecting decreases now have to pay more taxes. They're all mixed up; they don't know what to believe from this government. The government is saying, apparently, that the 20% tax increases for small businesses, due to the elimination of the business occupancy tax, are acceptable. I don't think many people in the small business community will agree with that. Municipalities will have to revise and reissue all commercial and industrial tax bills. Again, another chaotic situation. Municipalities will have to calculate downloading related tax costs separate from the remainder of their expenditures.

What we are seeing then is a complete mess. We warned the government about this several times. But as is so often the case, the members of the Harris government don't listen. They have a small group of advisors that I call the "whiz kids," the 20-something and 30-something YPCs, Young Progressive Conservatives, who have all the answers to the world's problems and have the Premier's ear, apparently, but not the ear, necessarily, of the caucus. They said: "Come on, just let's press forward with this. Don't worry about those impact studies. Let's keep them a secret. If people find out what's in those impact studies they're going to be up in arms."

I remember the marches in west Toronto, led by the former minister and now the member, Tony Ruprecht through the riding of Parkdale, and Mike Colle, the member for Oakwood. These were people who led the march against that original bill, the fight against that bill. I know those small business people appreciated that very much.

What we have to cloud the situation is the downloading provision; that is, the government decided it was going to take a number of responsibilities that it previously had - that's the provincial government, Mike Harris - and they were going to download or thrust them on the municipalities. In exchange, they would take some other responsibilities. Some of the municipalities said, "Well, that's fair as long as it's revenue-neutral." Mike Harris said, "Don't worry, it's revenue-neutral." He complained that the municipal people were whiners. The Minister of Municipal Affairs said they were "opportunistic" just because the municipal people were saying, "Come on, we're seeing a huge increase in our financial responsibilities."

I'm going to relate that to an announcement that was made yesterday. The Premier reannounced something about 1,000 police officers in Ontario. We all heard that announcement before but he reannounced it again with some fanfare. A lot of the front-line police officers I talked to said, "We'll believe it when we see it." Of course, the only new police officers many of them have seen are those cardboard cut-outs that are seen around Toronto now. They're the only new police officers that we're apparently seeing.

Those front-line police officers from Niagara region know, for instance, that because the regional municipality of Niagara's council has had $18 million more in terms of responsibility downloaded upon it by the provincial government, there's no guarantee that the regional government will take up the offer of paying 50% of the cost of new police officers.

On one hand, there's a lot of fanfare, big-time announcement; on the other hand, the government has placed the regional government of Niagara, for instance, in a difficult position by downloading all these responsibilities and then running away.

My colleagues in the opposition will all know that the tactic that the Conservative government members use is they point the finger at the local government. Indeed, the member for Haldimand-Norfolk, Mr Barrett, is bringing forward a motion on Thursday to abolish the regional government in his area because, he says, "The regional government has been responsible for a tax increase." If anything, he should be bringing in a motion or bill chastising Mike Harris for downloading all the responsibilities on to the regional government.

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I'm no fan of regions. I have not been one to defend them in the past, but I'm going to tell you fair is fair. I want to be fair to them now and say I understand why they increased taxes. It's because Mike Harris and his colleagues downloaded so many responsibilities, to the tune of $18 million more for Niagara.

What the local governments have to do as a result - and they've already cut. We know local governments have already made deep cuts in their services. What they're having to do now is make even deeper cuts and start charging user fees, which of course are fine for rich people. If you're Conrad Black a user fee doesn't bother you. You've got millions of dollars, maybe billions, and you don't have to worry about user fees. But for the average person, for the person of a modest income, user fees have a marked effect, a tremendous effect.

In St Catharines now in one of the popular house leagues, if a girl or boy wishes to sign up for hockey, I believe it's now $260 in terms of a registration fee.

Interjection.

Mr Bradley: That's fine for Rob Sampson. That's fine for somebody who's on a cabinet minister's salary or an MPP's salary, but that's very difficult for young people in the community of modest means whose parents can't afford it and who have to shell out the $260 for that particular person.

What has happened is the municipalities, because of the downloading, have had to increase user fees for the use of the - I just had a note sent to me here that says: "Be dynamic. We are taping the Jim Bradley Christmas video." I don't know who says that here.

Interjection: Let's give him a big hand.

Applause.

Mr Bradley: You're just trying to make me lose my train of thought this afternoon, I know that. Where was I? Was I on the Hotel Dieu Hospital or not? I forget. That reminds me. I'm wondering how these tax changes might impact on hospitals, because, as you know, the Hotel Dieu Hospital in St Catharines has been ordered to close by Mike Harris's hospital destruction commission. That's all I'll say on that, because I know nobody wants to get up on a point of order. I'm just wondering how that would impact. I will have a petition tomorrow with 6,000 additional names on it, a real petition with 6,000 names on it from people opposed, in addition to the 60,000 who have already signed a petition opposed to the closing of Hotel Dieu Hospital. But I digress and I wouldn't want to do that, because I'm noted for staying on the bill very closely that we're talking about.

I do want to say that as a result of user fees that are now becoming the vogue for municipalities, people of modest means are not able to access services provided by municipalities as well as people who are wealthy and powerful, and I mentioned just as an example Conrad Black. The name just comes to mind quickly, although there may be others in that category as well.

I look at what we have happening here. I feel bad for some of our municipal councillors, strong Conservatives. When Bill Davis was around they could say: "We're pretty proud of what Bill Davis is doing. He's listening to municipalities. He's helped us out in certain ways." They could sit there with pride and smiles on their faces and say, "We're proud to be Conservatives," in those days. Now municipal councillors are in hiding very often if they are Conservatives, unless they're Reform-a-Tories. But if they are the old-style Conservatives, the people who understood the importance of the community, who understood smaller units as being important, who didn't believe that big was automatically better when we're talking about government of any kind, those individuals have been embarrassed by seven different bills coming in and by the downloading exercise.

Some still are apologists, I understand that, but most have abandoned those apologies and are now standing up for their local people. They're not pointing the finger at their own council or at other municipal councillors; they're pointing the finger where it should be pointed, at Queen's Park, and at the fact that Mike Harris has downloaded all of these responsibilities on municipalities and has not provided the funding that would go with those responsibilities.

The government has the power to pass any bill. It keeps trying to correct its legislation. I know the big bank towers and the big businesses will be sad for at least a couple of years, because now, instead of getting the huge tax break from Mike Harris that they were going to get all in one year, they're going to have to have it staged in.

Small businesses should know, however, that the day of reckoning is coming. While there's a cap, they're still going to get zapped by Mike Harris and the Conservatives. They used to like to think they were going to be friendly towards these small businesses. I can tell you, in terms of property taxes, they certainly aren't. That's something all of them have noted so far.

The Acting Speaker: Questions or comments?

Mr Tony Silipo (Dovercourt): It's always a pleasure to listen to the member for St Catharines, particularly when he, as he did today, talks so clearly about what the Harris government is doing. I know he likes to remind us from time to time about where the real enemy is. There is one thing, at least, on which he and I will agree, and that is what Mike Harris has been doing in terms of downloading. He said that downloading millions of dollars of costs on to the property tax base is what has been at the heart of the mess the Mike Harris government has got itself, but most importantly municipalities and taxpayers, into.

Gone are the days, it seems, when the government members used to remind us of the fact that there was only one taxpayer. It seems that Mike Harris and his government have forgotten that when it comes to what they've done with this whole issue of property taxes, because they have conveniently been able to push many costs, some $600 million worth of costs, on to the property tax base. That, coupled with the changes they have made to the assessment system, has meant that many thousands of homeowners and small businesses have seen their property taxes increase substantially, not by virtue of getting any more service than they were getting before but simply because of the changes that the Mike Harris government has brought about.

Secondly, we've had the charade here of the government coming in with bill after bill, trying to fix the situation and the problem that they created, each time making the situation worse. Now we have the final episode of that, or perhaps the final episode of that, coming in at this late juncture in the year, in the calendar year as well as the tax year, which is actually going to result in situations where people who actually received decreases as a result of this Mike Harris tax scheme are going to have to actually pay it back to the municipalities, all of which is going to cause great consternation, great problems across the province and, I'm sure the member for St Catharines would remind us, equally so in his area of the province.

Hon Jim Wilson (Minister of Energy, Science and Technology): It's always a pleasure to listen to the member for St Catharines, except that I've never heard such misrepresentation of the facts in all my life. Both members who just spoke talked about downloading from the Harris government. I remind the honourable members that this government took seriously the Association of Municipalities of Ontario's challenge to respect municipal governments and to ensure that we delayered all the bureaucracy we have in this province and passed on the savings to the property taxpayer.

Downloading is absolutely revenue-neutral. You've been provided with those figures. There were some small savings targets that municipalities like the ones you referred to had to achieve. I tell you and remind you that we have a deficit in this province. If they couldn't achieve those savings targets, then God help us, because we have a debt. Once we've gotten rid of the deficit a year from now, we still have a huge debt, well over $100 million, that all parties have accumulated in this province.

We have to find those 2% and 3% savings every year for the next 25 years to deal with that debt. So, if your municipality wasn't up to it today, then God help us in the future. Mike Harris did not download anything that would cost your municipality additional dollars, because we sent the dollars with it. It was revenue-neutral and the facts speak for themselves across this province.

We had to move to current value assessment. It's the only system that makes sense. I know in my municipalities in Simcoe county, the county council itself has said this will be an excellent system once we're through these transitional years. They realize that any property tax increases that occurred in this round were their responsibility, not Mike Harris's. He didn't download anything to the municipalities that cost them extra money provided they found their savings targets.

I think the honourable member deserves to tell his constituents the whole story and not just a partial, rather slanted story as the one he presented here in the House this afternoon.

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Mr Miclash: It's always a pleasure to comment on the speeches of the member for St Catharines. We know he doesn't make too many of them in the House and it's always a pleasure to actually comment on them.

It was very interesting to listen to the speaker just previously who was making comments on the member for St Catharines' speech. To listen to him talk about the debt is quite interesting, and to know that this government is adding, through their tax cut, $5 billion a year to the debt. To listen to the member suggest that the debt has to be tackled when they're increasing it by that amount per year is really something else.

The member for St Catharines talked a little bit about advertising as well. What this government is paying out in terms of partisan advertising and going out to sell Mike Harris and the Progressive Conservatives is truly unreal. When you listen to all the problems we have in the province, when you talk about the problems in health care, when you hear about different situations in terms of what we heard earlier today about cancer treatment, in terms of education, the money being taken out of the classroom, just think of the amount of dollars that is being spent on partisan advertising that could actually go into those classrooms and into those hospitals.

Hospital closures is something else the member for St Catharines has touched on. We go back to that famous promise made by Mike Harris, "Yes, Robert, it is not my plan to close hospitals," when the now Premier was asked about that during the last campaign. I also remember the now Premier saying back then as well, "There is only one taxpayer." With the dumping and downloading that this government is doing, that taxpayer is certainly feeling it at the local level.

Ms Shelley Martel (Sudbury East): I want to commend the member for St Catharines for his remarks today and hope that in the half-hour that he spoke he had at least a 30-second clip that will be good for his Christmas message. I'm sure there will be something there that we can pull from.

I want to reinforce two points that he made.

The first is with respect to the complete incompetence demonstrated by this government in dealing with its introduction of market value in any number of communities across the province. I wonder if the word "fiasco" has any meaning for the Conservative Party today. People who are watching this afternoon should understand that we are dealing with the seventh bill introduced by this government to try and fix the mistakes it has made in dealing with market value - the seventh bill. Each bill has been introduced to try and fix mistakes that came in the last, because the government was too rushed, too hurried and never did want to listen, as is usual for this group, to what others had to say about how to deal with this.

We had drive-by assessments that were done all across this province that have resulted in market value assessments that are very discriminatory, very different from one part of the province to another, and people understand that this is what's happened. But we are here today dealing with yet another mistake of this government and another bill to try and fix it, and God knows if we will fix it even with this bill.

Second, with respect to the download, you would have to be living in la-la land not to acknowledge that there is an impact of the download. The download is not revenue-neutral. Even with the savings that municipalities found, any number of northern municipalities had to receive money from this government so they would not have to cut services and not have to increase taxes. That's the reality. It has never been revenue-neutral.

The Acting Speaker: Member for St Catharines, two minutes.

Mr Bradley: I appreciate the remarks from all of my colleagues. I thought the member for Sudbury East chose the correct word when she chose the word "fiasco" to describe what has happened with property tax reform under the Harris government.

What I fear is if we make any noise about this we'll get more government advertising. I remember a tape or a television commercial with the Premier in the arena. The only arena I've seen him in is full of people for a fund-raiser for the Conservative Party - the wealthiest people in the province - when I talk about a political arena.

Hon Mr Wilson: He brings his kids to hockey.

Mr Bradley: I say to the Minister of Energy, who intervenes, the former staffer to a Conservative Mulroney government minister, that I understand when he takes a very partisan view of these things. He's a minister, he defends the government position well. I don't agree with him, but he's unyielding and a true believer. I want to give him credit for that.

I also want to mention that the advertising campaigns that we have seen right now, if you took the money from those advertising campaigns - we're not talking about the overall advertising, which is probably over $100 million, but we're talking about the strictly partisan ads that we've seen on television and in the newspapers, and the pamphlets that come to our doors once a week now and they want people to fill it out so they'll have a database, they'll be able to send information back to those people, more propaganda to the people. Wouldn't it have been nice if the municipalities could have had access to some of those funds that are being squandered on clearly partisan ads on television? Wouldn't it be nice if hospitals could have been kept open and if services could be provided to people? But instead the Harris government has chosen to squander it on self-serving political advertising.

The Acting Speaker: Further debate?

Mr Silipo: I'm glad to be able to join in this debate and want to thank the House for agreeing, as they did last night, to allow me to complete today the portion of our lead speech on this that was begun by my colleague from Cochrane North, our municipal affairs critic.

I just wanted to have the opportunity today to talk about this bill because it deals with an issue that all of us have been fairly involved in. Certainly I have in my own constituency of west-end Toronto, in Dovercourt. As I know from my colleagues, in many parts of the province this has been and continues to be a major issue, the whole rejigging of the property tax system that the Mike Harris government has spent so much energy on.

It's caused incredible uproar out there. It's caused also incredible hardship for many homeowners and many small businesses. In fact, as we've gone through this debate - and the debate has been a long one. It started way back at the beginning of the last calendar year when the government brought us back in early January to begin the famous Who Does What legislative process, which came about as a result of the government making decisions that it wanted to swap the costs for certain services between provincial taxes and property taxes. All of that has then played itself out through a number of bills. Who could forget the whole megacity debate that we had here in this House? Who can forget the many other pieces of legislation that we have had?

One important aspect that has run throughout all of that has been the rejigging of the property tax system, the changes that the Mike Harris government has made, first of all with respect to the costs that they have shifted back and forth between property taxes and provincial income taxes, as well as then the whole restructuring of the way in which we go about assessing property taxes per se, that is, the introduction of this new system which the government likes to call current value assessment, but which they from time to time have actually admitted is nothing other than market value assessment. What's the definition of current value assessment? It's simply the market value of the property, in this case, as it was in June 1996 and to be updated every couple of years, which is the same thing as what current value assessment is. In fact, one could argue that this isn't current value assessment because it's already dated by a couple of years.

Be that as it may, the point is that what we have seen as a result of the complexity of changes is the government creating an incredible problem, not just the political headache for itself, quite frankly, but also a real problem for many residents of the province.

I saw this in a significant way in my own community as we began to see the impacts of the download. We have been able to trace this back now, not just through our own number-crunching, but that which comes from municipality after municipality and indeed from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. There are clearly some $600 million that in this trade-off between what should be paid for - or what is being paid for, because what should be paid for is a whole other discussion, but what is being paid for through property taxes versus what is being paid for through the provincial income taxes and sales taxes and all the other forms of provincial taxes.

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At the end of the day, when all is said and done, even after you're taken into account the various transition funds, the various mitigation grants, the various ways to soften the blow, if you will, the bottom line is that municipalities collectively are going to be paying and property taxpayers in particular are going to be paying some $600 million more of those same services than they were paying before, and that's without even beginning to take into account what might happen to some of those costs in the future.

I remind you that one of the significant costs that has been transferred on to the property tax system in a greater way than it was there before is the cost of social services, the social assistance system. Although the overall costs of that system have certainly been going down, in great part due to the cuts that the Harris government made to the monthly amounts that people are entitled to, the reality is that if over the next couple of years times become difficult again, as they may - none of us hopes that they will - given the cycle that our economy goes through, we will see municipalities in a harder position, in a more difficult position than they are today and certainly than they were before all of this started in terms of being able to handle those additional costs.

I remember when we were in government and during the depth of the toughest recession since the 1930s, that even with the 50-50 cost-sharing that was there for social assistance costs, we had to resort - rather to the 80-20 split; what am I saying 50-50? - to picking up a larger share of those costs, of the municipal costs, simply because municipalities were not going to be able to carry on those additional costs. So imagine what's going to happen if we find ourselves in that same cycle again and a situation this time where municipalities now, by law, have to pick up a greater proportion of the costs than they did before. That is going to create an incredible increased hardship on to the property tax base and it's going to mean increased costs on to the municipalities.

All of that brings me more directly to the bill that we have in front of us. Again we need to remind people that what we have in front of us is the seventh iteration of property tax reform from the Mike Harris government. This is bill number seven in a sequence; not in a sequence that says, "We're going to do this piece today and that piece tomorrow and that piece another day," and therefore you require a number of different pieces of legislation, but a sequence which comes about simply as a way to correct the mistakes that were in the previous pieces of legislation.

Many of the things that are now in this bill - not necessarily the specific details of the caps of 10%, 5% and 5%, as the government has set out here, but certainly those pieces are there simply because the government did not take the advice, not of the opposition parties, because I wouldn't expect them, quite frankly, to take the advice of either our NDP caucus or the Liberal caucus, for that matter, but because the government refused to take the advice of people out there in the field who actually have to implement this piece of legislation and, more significantly, the previous pieces of legislation, as well as the politicians locally, many of whom certainly I would not count as New Democrats, many of whom are small-c conservatives or big-C Conservatives. Yet they told the current government, they told the Mike Harris government that what they were doing with respect to the whole property tax reform was wrong and it was going to cause significant problems.

Small business groups, associations across the province, individual associations - certainly my own local associations whether on St Clair or on Bloor Street West or anywhere in between - have said to this government that their livelihood was being put in jeopardy, their very existence as small businesses was being threatened by the actions that the Mike Harris government took.

Homeowners: How many seniors have I had come into my office and tell me that they are simply not able to pay these increases, and yet this new system does nothing to allow those people to deal with that reality? For them the reality is they either figure out a way to pay it - when I talked to them about the fact that they have an ability to postpone the increase in the taxes, that is something that doesn't mesh with the psyche of many of the seniors in my area, and certainly from what I'm hearing throughout the rest of the city, where people are saying, "No, if it's a bill that I have I don't feel comfortable simply putting that off until the time when the property is sold."

They don't want to leave those debts to their children, so they force themselves to find ways in which they can make those payments, or as some are choosing to do - or having to do, not choosing to do - they are looking at selling their properties. But for those who decided that they are going to make these payments, I know that it's going to cause them hardship. I know that an increase of $300 a year, which many of them are facing not just for this one year but another $300 next year and potentially $100 or $200 even the year after that, in the kind of way in which the city of Toronto has phased in the increases - and I give the city credit for trying to make the best of a bad situation and trying to put in, at least, this ability to phase in these increases. But I know that those increases of $300 and upwards for people on fixed incomes, for seniors, are not going to be easy. It's not money that they can easily come by. It means that people are going to have to dip into their savings even more. People are going to have to do with less in order to pay these increases.

That's what the Mike Harris tax system means to people out there. Inside this chamber people can talk all they want about what they're doing to help this group and what they're doing to help that group, but out there, when we find out the real impact of these changes, the story is a very different one. I haven't met too many people who have come to me and said, "I'm really happy with the tax decrease that I've received from the Mike Harris government." I know that there are a few of those, and ironically enough if they're small businesses they are now going to be in a situation where if they've got some decrease they're going to have to pay it back. That just adds to the kind of incredible mess that's been created. My colleague talked about the fiasco and she's absolutely right. That's what's happened. But beyond the incompetence is just the sheer unfairness of this.

People can say: "The property tax system needed to be updated. The assessment system in Toronto particularly was way out of date." Sure, it was. It does need to be updated, there's no denying that. But what I guess I find completely appalling is that if the government of the day had chosen to embark upon a serious reform of the property tax system, then why not make it a serious reform of the property tax system? Why not begin a serious discussion that we need in this province about looking at what services does it make sense to pay for from the property tax system and what services should be paid for through the provincial taxes?

Why the distinction? Because, for example, things like the greatest portion of the costs of education, health care, social services, those kinds of things that have little to do, in fact have nothing to do, with a property ought not, I would argue, be costs that are based on the property taxes, because the property taxes are not based on how much money you make or what ability you have to pay any taxes.

If you have chosen, as many constituents in my riding have chosen to put a lot of their energy and a lot of their savings into buying and maintaining and keeping up their own home, if they've chosen to do that as opposed to invest their money in other ways over the years, those are the people who are being penalized because of the changes. Those are the people who now have to be put in a position where they either add more debt to their house or are forced to make cuts in their livelihood elsewhere in order to meet their property tax bill. That's the problem that's been created with this.

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What about small businesses? We had hundreds, thousands of small businesses across the city, and I know in many other parts of the province, that had to go to the point of rallying, had to go to the point of protesting in the streets before this government even began to listen. Even while that was happening, in the early stages, it took about two months before the government even acknowledged that there was a problem. I found it incredibly appalling that the government that pretends to be the supporter of small business would even put small businesses in that position, where their very existence was threatened.

As happened, as I say, in my own constituency, many of the small shop owners and shopkeepers along St Clair, along Bloor Street, along Dundas, along College Street - these are the people who had invested a lot of their livelihood, a lot of their life-savings into operating a variety of stores - found themselves in a situation where the increases under the scheme in taxes was going to be more than what they were actually bringing in on a monthly basis or on an annual basis from their businesses in some cases. That's the kind of situation we found ourselves in, and it wasn't just here in Toronto. This is the other incredible thing that we've seen throughout all of this.

When government finally realized they had a political problem to deal with, that they could not afford to see many of these small businesses go under, we then finally had the government back last winter, and in the early spring, come forward with the last version of this bill and say, "OK, we're going to put in place a scheme that allows a cap of the taxes at 2.5% a year for each of the next three years."

Except that in doing so, while they resolved the immediate problem - they gave some relief, because 2.5% a year, 7.5% for three years or 8% or so if you compound it over that period of time, certainly looked at lot better than 50% or 100% increases - it put off the problem for three years, conveniently beyond the next election. It left and still leaves unanswered the question of what will happen at that point for small businesses as well as for homeowners.

It created the further problem that municipalities that chose to opt into that scheme had to put themselves in a position where, if they had to increase taxes because they needed to have a larger budget to provide increased services or to maintain some of those services, again taking into account the cost of the download from the provincial government, the only place they could go to for those increases would be the residential side of the property tax system. So while the small business side was resolved, or dealt with for at least a three-year period, it left the problem there to simply be shifted on to the residential homeowner.

It was no surprise that right across the province - it was only here in the city of Toronto where the problem was the most acute in its first iteration that that was the only municipality that chose to implement that 2.5% cap. Other municipalities still kept saying to the government: "This is still going to cause problems. We're not comfortable going with this 2.5% cap. We're not comfortable that you've given us all the tools," to use a phrase that the government likes to use "to be able to deal with the problem," and the government at that point stopped listening.

The association of clerks and treasurers, the people who actually have to administer this legislation, took the unprecedented steps of coming out publicly. This is an organization that tends to do most of its work, appropriately so, in a quiet way, giving their solid advice to whoever the government of the day is, giving their advice to the politicians locally about what needs to be done and what the implications are if provincial governments or municipalities choose to do certain things. They took the perhaps unheard of steps of coming out publicly, not once, not twice but three times, in letters and eventually in a press conference, lambasting the government because they were not listening to their advice. They were saying to them, "If you proceed with this legislation, it's going to cause chaos out there."

What happened? The government chose, by and large, to ignore that advice; again, not the advice of the opposition politicians, but the advice of the clerks and treasurers, the people who actually have to implement this legislation, the people who are really above, by and large, certainly above all partisanship and are there to try to do the best job they can to implement decisions. They told the government: "Do not proceed in this way because you will cause problems. We cannot manage this. The timelines are too short but, most significantly, what you are doing is going to cause problems out there on the small business side and on the residential side." The government didn't listen and what happened? The chaos evolved. While things subsided in the city of Toronto, we then began to hear problem after problem develop and come to the surface in municipality after municipality outside of Toronto.

We had the occasion only a few weeks ago to talk in this House on a private member's resolution by Mr Christopherson about the situation in Hamilton. We saw examples brought to our attention through the media and through all sorts of other ways from other parts of the province. What was going on in the region of Peel is another example that comes to mind.

You have the situation where the current mayor of Markham, Mr Cousens, a former Conservative member of this place, threatened to lead a march of mayors and other politicians down to this place if the government did not bring in further steps to deal with this problem, if the government did not acknowledge that this was a problem they created and they therefore had a responsibility to fix. It was only at that point that the government began to pay some more attention to this.

I could just imagine what must have been going on in the backrooms of the government where problem after problem kept coming up and politically the government had a real problem, because every time they admitted that there was a problem, it meant they had to do something, and often that meant bringing in another piece of legislation, as has happened here again. That, quite frankly, among other things, shows how incompetent and how unable they have been to deal with this file.

I can understand the hesitation on their part, but yet they were then brought to the point where they had no other choice but to bring forward what is now the seventh piece of legislation dealing with property tax reform. This puts what the government likes to call a further set of tools out there. It provides municipalities now with the option to go back to the 2.5% cap scheme if they want to do that with the concomitant shift of any further increases on to the residential side, or they can now opt into this new scheme that the government is proposing, which is to cap increases at 10% for 1998, 5% for next year and 5% for the subsequent year on businesses, and to keep this essentially within the business category and not have any increases shift over to the residential side.

I have no doubt that some municipalities now will take advantage of this, but I also have no doubt that is not going to resolve the problem because you now have an added situation, an added problem, in that because we are dealing with this towards the end of November 1998, the government is basically giving municipalities two options with respect to how to make this apply for 1998 because, let's be clear, if municipalities opt for this, one way or the other it's going to have to apply beginning in 1998 because the 10%, 5% and 5% is a cumulative amount that's based on an increase from the 1997 taxes that people were paying and so you have to start applying it on the 1998 taxes.

The government is saying to municipalities: "You can do two things. You can either send out an additional tax bill in the remaining five or six weeks of 1998 or you can readjust it on the first instalment payments in 1999 retroactive to 1998," which I suspect most municipalities will do, as opposed to sending out another tax bill. But even if that's the course of action they take, we are now going to have the added situation where people who receive decreases under the present system are going to have to actually pay some of that back. I don't want to be the municipality that's going to have to deal with that part of the reality as well.

This has been a situation which has just continued to be reflected in problem after problem for this government, and it stems again from the attitude that they had going into this, which we have seen in the health care area, which we have seen in the education area, which is that they just ram on ahead without either realizing or caring about the consequences of their actions and then only after they are brought kicking and screaming to realize that what they are doing is actually hurting people out there do they then try to make some steps to remedy the situation. It's hardly what you'd call a competent government. It's certainly not what you would call a caring government.

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One of the things that I also want to add in the remaining moments on this is what's happening here to the appeal deadlines. I just want to be clear with anybody who may be following this, because I know that many people are still very much interested in what I've been saying on this issue, that the appeal deadline, the deadline to appeal the assessment that one has received, whether that assessment is on the residential or on the commercial or industrial portion of their taxes, now is being extended by this bill to the end of December. I'm glad that's happening.

We brought to the minister's attention way back last year that the deadlines they put in were going to be problematic because we knew, again on the advice of the municipal staff, that the time lines were not going to allow the information to get out in time for people to be able to see whether the assessments were correct. The government again chose to ignore that collective advice and went on and implemented deadlines that fell in the middle of the summer, when nobody knew that they were there. They then had to agree to extend the deadline to the end of October and when they introduced that piece of legislation we weren't able, for a variety of reasons, to get even that through. So I'm glad at least that we have this further extension to December 31. It will give people an opportunity to again decide whether they wish to appeal the assessments on their properties.

In my office, we have been spending a lot of time helping seniors and others fill out those forms for reconsideration as well as the appeal on their property taxes. I just want to say to people that they still have an opportunity, if they want to do that, to be able to do that before the December 31 deadline. I hope, on that point, that the government and the minister particularly continues to maintain what I gather has been the position to date, which is in light of the hundreds of thousands of appeals that have been launched - and I know the people at the Assessment Review Board are doing their best to try and deal with those, with that incredible workload that's being created for them - that where they're able to deal with those by reconsideration as opposed to allowing them to go to the formal appeal, as I know they're trying to deal with many of those, then even in that case they're prepared to waive the $20 fee that otherwise people would have to pay for the appeal.

I hope that's a position that continues, and probably has to be carried on beyond the end of December in order to be fair to the people who are trying to process those files as well as to the individuals who are making those appeals.

Let me conclude by saying that this is a bill that for the seventh time tries to fix the property tax system but it tries to fix it in a way that simply compounds the problems that are out there. Giving these tools, while it may help municipalities to fix the problems in the short term, is going do nothing to address the fundamental issues that I for one believe have to be addressed over some period of time to really get at what services we should be paying for through our property taxes and what services we should not be paying, or otherwise should be paying through the provincial income taxes because they are services that apply across the province, apply to all, and have really nothing to do with property.

That's the real reform that we should engage in. In the meantime, all that the government has done is mess up a system that I will admit was not perfect and was certainly not working in the fairest of ways. But what the government has done is simply compound the problems that were there, create more hardship for people, create an incredibly wrong workload for people at the municipal level, whether they're politicians or whether they are the staff who have to implement those decisions. They have created a situation particularly where many homeowners on fixed income, whether they're seniors or otherwise, and indeed many small businesses, have come face to face with a real inability to pay their taxes.

That is something that people in this place can choose to ignore, they can choose to put to the side, they can choose to pretend is not a real issue out there, but in the area that I represent it's a real issue. It's a real issue because people cannot afford to simply pay more for fewer services, because that's what they're getting. They're not getting more services. People would be happy to pay what more they can and need to if it meant more services, but what we're talking about here is less in the way of services, more in the way of costs for the people who can least afford to pay those costs.

If we're serious about talking about reforming the property tax system then I hope to God the day comes when we can actually begin a serious discussion of that. This certainly doesn't do it. All this does is simply show how incompetent this government has been, how uncaring this government has been. I hope people will not forget that, come the next election.

The Acting Speaker: Questions or comments?

Mr Jack Carroll (Chatham-Kent): I appreciate the opportunity to make some comments on the dissertation just given by the member for Dovercourt. I need to keep reminding the people in the House about what is possible. What we hear from the opposition members is what isn't possible. The member for Dovercourt said, "Serious reform of the property tax system is needed," and then he goes on to criticize at great length what reform we've brought in.

My community of Chatham-Kent is ample proof of the fact that real change is possible, that real change results in less cost to the taxpayers and an increase in services. Unfortunately there are too many people, supported by the members of the opposition parties, who refuse to get involved in real change. I talked to the mayor of a small separated city the other day and he said, "We looked at amalgamation and eliminating the county, but quite frankly we rejected it."

Interjection: Why?

Mr Carroll: Well, it doesn't make any sense. We all know we have far too much government. In my particular community we went from 156 municipal politicians down to 18. We knocked $11 million off the tax bill this year for the citizens of Chatham-Kent. So the savings are there. We can find a way to deliver better services to the taxpayers of Ontario. But the opposition parties would sit there and say, "Everything you're doing is wrong because it involves change."

I must caution the member for Dovercourt: Pretty soon we're going to start thinking that maybe he has joined the ranks of the Liberal Party, because he's getting into the flip-flop thing. His leader is going around actively campaigning on increasing taxes. He's been upfront about it. He said, "I'm going to increase taxes if you elect me." Today the member for Dovercourt stands up and with great passion talks about protecting the taxpayers and not increasing their taxes. It's got to be either one or the other, member for Dovercourt. You either believe in increasing taxes or you don't, or we'll call you a Liberal.

Mr John Gerretsen (Kingston and The Islands): Let it just be said to the last member who spoke, we are in favour of change; reasonable, rational, well-thought-out change.

Let's just hear what the Clerks and Treasurers said today in their 14-page memo to you. They say:

"It has been the AMCTO's consistent position not to engage in a debate with the government on matters of policy." In their view, "Policy decisions are the preserve of elected officials. The AMCTO has always tried, however, to help government achieve its stated policy objectives by providing constructive criticism of its legislative proposals.

"The AMCTO regret that the supportive approach cannot work in the case of Bill 79. In our view, Bill 79 is fundamentally flawed, poorly drafted and will contribute to administrative chaos. It is the AMCTO's position that Bill 79 is beyond redemption and should be withdrawn."

If you don't believe me, how about the member for Halton North? What is he saying was reported in the Spectator today? Apparently Halton wants to be exempted from this 10% cap. Do you know what it would mean to Halton? It would mean that about $9 million too much has been collected, according to the cap, and about 2,000 property owners would have to pay the $9 million that would have been lost. Most of the shift would be felt by small business. The four chambers of commerce in that area have already agreed that this bill shouldn't apply to them, as well as the four MPPs in that particular area who all happen to be government members. They don't want this bill. Why? Because it doesn't make any sense.

If I have to take the word of anybody on this, I would much rather take the word of the Clerks and Treasurers than the government propaganda that we've been dealing with.

Your bill is flawed and you should withdraw it immediately.

Ms Frances Lankin (Beaches-Woodbine): Here we are at bill number 7 and they still don't have it right. The mind boggles.

I have a particular concern, something that's brand-new, that's not even part of that fixup of the previous mistakes, and that's part III, section 38. I'm hoping the member for Dovercourt might respond to that. This is the section that says, "Despite the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, we're going to give the Assessment Review Board the ability to dismiss complaints whether or not a hearing has even been held," and on a whole bunch of grounds like, "Well, we think the complaint's frivolous and vexatious." Who's going to determine that? If you're a property taxpayer and you're real angry and you write a letter that expresses that anger, someone's going to say, "That's frivolous and vexatious," or if there's no legal basis to the claim. Let's say I write a letter and I say I'm appealing this: My taxes are too high compared to other people's. I should have said that my assessment is too high. Legally, if I said my taxes are too high, I don't have legal grounds. Without having a hearing, they can dismiss it.

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There's only one other board or tribunal I'm aware of that has this ability despite the Statutory Powers Procedure Act. That's the Ontario Municipal Board. Now with these cross-appointments, we've got the OMB mentality, that higher level tribunal sinking down into the Assessment Review Board, which is supposed to be a place where ordinary people can come and can get justice, where you don't have to have the high-priced lawyers and consultants and assessment experts.

This is changing under the Harris government. Joe Smith out there, if you're angry about your assessment, if you know it's higher than a comparable house next door and you don't word it right and you say too many angry words in your letter, you can be dismissed without even getting your day in court. This is nonsense; this is anti-democratic; this has got to be changed.

Mr Baird: I would like to comment briefly on two or three issues, to congratulate the member for Dovercourt on his speech, and to give a man a little bit of credit, the member for Cochrane South, who gave a very good leadoff speech for his party.

With respect to the powers of the Assessment Review Board to dismiss a frivolous case: These are powers, the member for Beaches-Woodbine mentioned, that the Ontario Municipal Board has. I participated as a member of the Agency Reform Commission, which heard from adjudicative agencies right across the province. We dealt with the central agencies themselves and the clients of those agencies in a very non-partisan process. The commission was chaired by the member for Ottawa-Rideau. I think we heard just about universally that there should be the option for that, if it's just simply put to the wrong commission or the wrong board, that they should have the ability - obviously the wrong place or not the right way to go. That's not new; that's done in the OMB right now. It certainly formed a central part of the Agency Reform Commission's report. That was more than six or eight months ago.

I'd really like to discuss a second issue with respect to taxation. I give the member for Dovercourt some credit. His party has come forward with some plans on taxation. But I did want to tell the honourable member for Dovercourt that I was reading in the National Post on the 23rd, "Liberal MPs nervous about bucking Harris." It talked about a lot of MPs.

"Veteran Liberal Dennis Mills, MP for the downtown Toronto riding of Broadview-Greenwood said he won't rush out to help his provincial cousins because he likes some of Mr Harris's policies. `I am a passionate believer in comprehensive tax reform, and some of my tax ideas are not inconsistent with the Harris thought process on tax reform....'" Here you have a Liberal member of Parliament from the part of Toronto that the member for Beaches-Woodbine is privileged to represent saying that his views are not inconsistent with Mike Harris.

Ms Lankin: That's true about Dennis. That's absolutely true.

Mr Baird: "Absolutely true," the member for Beaches-Woodbine says, and I agree.

The Deputy Speaker (Mr Bert Johnson): The member for Dovercourt has two minutes to respond.

Mr Silipo: I want to thank the colleagues who chose to comment on what I had to say or what I didn't have to say. I just want to say to government members particularly: We can play the numbers game a lot around here. I don't know why it automatically sounds good or sounds like it translates into better service to say there are now fewer municipalities across the province than there were before. Sometimes having fewer doesn't mean that they're actually doing a better job.

I can tell you what I'm seeing here in the city of Toronto. The new megacity council is doing their darndest to try to keep some sense out of this whole craziness that the Mike Harris government has created. But I would not say right now that the citizens in the city of Toronto are getting better government than they had before.

Equally, I can tell you in terms of what's happening on the school board side, that what we are getting is not. That's not because of any efforts of the school boards; that's simply because when you're trying to manage 500 schools and dealing with the reality of 250,000 students, you simply cannot do the job that you have to do, especially when you're not being given the tools to do it. It's not a numbers game here; it's a question of what makes sense.

To my colleague the member for Beaches-Woodbine particularly, let me say that she's absolutely right that this issue of the rights of people to appeal has to continue to be looked at. I believe that in the legislation in front of us there is a provision that says people have to be notified, but I certainly will be interested, when this bill gets to committee, to see what that actually means and to see why they excluded the Statutory Powers Procedure Act. Of course, we know this bill will get to committee, because I forgot to mention earlier that the government did indicate that they have one further amendment to move to this. Despite the fact that this is bill number 7, they still forgot something else, with multi-residential, that they have to deal with by another amendment to the bill, so we'll look forward to those hearings.

The Deputy Speaker: Further debate.

Mr Ted Arnott (Wellington): I'm pleased to speak this afternoon to second reading of Bill 79, An Act to amend the Assessment Act, Municipal Act, Assessment Review Board Act and Education Act in respect of property taxes. As you are well aware, this bill is intended to protect small business from crippling and unnecessary property tax increases. That is exactly the intent of the bill.

Small business is the backbone of Ontario's economy. All members of this House would agree with that statement, I think. Something like 80% of the new jobs that have been created in recent years in Ontario were in small businesses. Certainly the small business sector merits our support, and we need to do all we can as a government to encourage small business people, small business owners in particular, to create the new jobs we need in this province. With an unemployment rate of still 7% l, we need to continue to work with small business in particular and large businesses to try to remove the impediments to job creation, which is what this government is endeavouring to do. The sum total of all our policies for the last three and a half years, I would argue, have been an effort to promote job creation.

This bill, as the members opposite have indicated, is part of a number of bills which have been endeavouring to correct the many unfairnesses in the property tax system in Ontario. I think it's fair to point out that a number of previous governments have reviewed this issue, privately or publicly acknowledged that there is a serious problem with property tax in Ontario - there were huge discrepancies, huge inequities - and for whatever reason, whether it be expediency or whatever they would suggest now, decided not to proceed with the reforms that were necessary in order to create the fairness this government is trying to promote. I think the government deserves full marks for at least taking the steps to try to move forward and remove the inequities. I think the member opposite, from Kingston and The Islands, is prepared to acknowledge that, and I'm pleased to hear it.

The survival of many of our small businesses has been threatened as a result of explosive property tax increases. Certainly this bill is designed to cap those increases, 10% the first year and 5% and 5% the following two years. That is why the government has had to move forward with this legislation. The government listened to what small business people told us. The government responded by proposing mandatory measures that, if passed by this House, would provide the protection they need. This protection would provide small businesses with the certainty that they need to make decisions about investing, expanding and creating jobs.

Since we began our mandate, the government has worked to create this positive environment that I alluded to earlier, a positive environment where small businesses can grow, prosper and create new jobs. If passed by the Legislature, Bill 79 will guarantee that no commercial or industrial property taxpayer would face a tax increase related to property tax reform of more than 10% this year and a further 5% next year and the year after that. These proposed limits will apply to the municipal and education portion of property tax on commercial and industrial property in all municipalities across the province, save and except the city of Toronto, which of course used the 2.5% cap for the three-year period. That was one of the tools that was provided for in provincial legislation, and they were quite correct and responsible in doing so, and we were pleased that they were able to take that approach.

When the Minister of Finance introduced Bill 79 and it received first reading earlier this month, on November 5, he said at the standing committee on finance that he would propose amendments that would also protect multi-residential properties under this same formula, which again is something I think most government members would support and certainly I support and understand the need for.

Bill 79 should help to protect residential ratepayers as well, because municipalities will be required to ensure that the limit on tax increases on business properties be funded from within the commercial, industrial and multi-residential property classes.

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Through the passage of Bill 79, any municipal property tax increases beyond the proposed limits would be the result of decisions made by municipal governments to either increase their own spending, which of course is within their purview to do or, presumably if they felt it was necessary and prudent to do so, perhaps to enhance their reserve funds. But I don't think it's fair for those municipalities, if they feel they have to raise spending or enhance their reserve funds, to blame the tax increases that result from those decisions on the provincial government. It is patently not fair, and I think the members opposite would agree that that's the case.

The only other reasons that property would experience increases above the 10%, 5% and 5% limits are if there are physical changes to the property, such as new construction or renovation; a change in use, such as from commercial to industrial; or a change in vacancy, such as vacant property becoming occupied, all very reasonable assertions, I would submit.

To achieve the 10%, 5% and 5% limits, municipalities, under Bill 79, will still be able to choose from the range of tools available under the Ontario fair assessment system, the tools that the government urged them to use all along. Let me quickly review what these tools are. I think it's important for members opposite to know what these tools are and reflect on those tools. Municipalities may choose from a number of options: a phase-in of reform-related tax increases and decreases over an eight-year period; they may elect to use the option of graduating property tax rates to allow lower tax rates to lower-valued properties; they may adopt any or all of the optional property classes and set different tax rates for each class; they may offer rebates; or they may adopt the 2.5% cap per year, as Toronto did for the years 1998, 1999 and 2000.

If passed by this Legislature, Bill 79 will provide municipalities with yet one more tool which they may consider to use. It's the 10%, 5% and 5% cap, which would cap increases at 10% this year, a further 5% next year and a further 5% the year after that.

All of these tools are optional for municipalities to use as they see fit. Municipalities have had the flexibility to choose a combination of these tools to ensure that moving to the new system was going to be fair to their ratepayers. We have encouraged the municipalities to make use of these tools; however, there are some municipalities in this province that have, for whatever reason, not used these tools to assist their property taxpayers. That's one of the reasons this bill has to come forward. As a result, when municipalities issued their tax bills in August, September and October many businesses faced unmanageable tax increases. Bill 79 will give those municipalities even more time - to the end of this year, December 31, New Year's Eve, 1998 - to choose the tools needed to achieve the 10%, 5% and 5% limits.

I'd like to take a couple of minutes of the House's time to inform the members of the experience that we had in Wellington county with respect to this issue. Over the summer, our county wanted to access some of the tools that the government had employed and, I think quite responsibly so, were doing what they could to try to protect their ratepayers from the immediate impact of some of these changes so that they could be phased in over time.

What they decided to do was to employ the graduated rate for small business. They took the assessed value of all the business properties, and if the assessed value was $150,000 or less, it was given preferential treatment in the form of a reduced tax rate, 0.25, I believe, of the overall rate. That gave the small businesses in our municipalities the protections they needed, and they weren't faced with exorbitant tax increases in the main. However, it had the effect of giving a number of the higher-assessed properties, the top maybe 5% or 10%, an exorbitant tax increase. The county recognized that while trying to solve its problem and trying to do the right thing, another problem had been created. They certainly advised me of their concern, and I brought it to the attention of the Treasurer, obviously, to see what could be done. With this new legislation, it appears now that we'll be able to work within the parameters of Bill 79, if it's passed by the Legislature, to effectively solve our problem.

There are perhaps a number of drawbacks to what's going to happen in the next few months, but I'm quite confident that the small business owners in Wellington county will understand the rationale for what is happening and will be responsible and supportive of what the government's trying to do with this bill. If Bill 79 is passed by this Legislature, the government will continue to work with municipalities to ensure that 1998 taxes are adjusted quickly, whether by refunds, supplementary tax notices or adjusting the 1999 interim tax bill. The government is prepared to assist with the cost of doing this.

To provide immediate relief to business, under Bill 79 business property owners who have not paid already billed reform-related tax increases of more than 10% in 1998 would not have to pay interest and penalties on those amounts above 10%.

We recognize that some taxpayers expecting decreases will not get them as quickly as they may have anticipated. However, the government could not stand by idly and allow some small businesses to face property tax increases of up to 600%, which effectively would have put them out of business in very short order. We support small business. We could not stand by idly and allow that to happen. Hence, we have Bill 79.

I wish to conclude by saying that Bill 79 ensures that fair property taxes for small business will be the result and that this bill will play an important part in creating Ontario's positive business climate, which has made Ontario the best place in the world to invest, to create jobs, to raise a family and to live.

The Deputy Speaker: Comments and questions?

Mr Gerretsen: I have a high regard for the member for Wellington but he's got it all wrong. I would once again like to go back to the 14-page submission that was made today to the government by the Clerks and Treasurers, a professional organization that operates in each one of our municipalities, in which they state, amongst other things:

"Bill 79 constitutes a direct intrusion by the government into municipal tax administration." The Clerks and Treasurers "was not supportive of the role assumed by the provincial government in setting an education levy."

I think it ought to be understood by the people of Ontario that about half of your property tax bill is now set by the province - that portion that deals with education. The Minister of Finance can decide behind closed doors what that amount is going to be from year to year. Your local councils have absolutely no say over that at all.

They go on to say the Clerks and Treasurers are "not supportive of the limitations being placed on municipal councils and their decision-making responsibilities under Bill 79."

Let me again remind the members who have just drifted in here of their final conclusion. They say: "The AMCTO" - the Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario - "regrets that the supportive approach cannot work in the case of Bill 79. In our view, Bill 79 is fundamentally flawed, poorly drafted and will contribute to administrative chaos. It is the AMCTO's position" - the Clerks and Treasurers of this province - that it tried to work with this government on this issue for the last two years. They first offered to work with them in February 1997. It is their position "that Bill 79 is beyond redemption and should be withdrawn."

If the people of Ontario don't want to take the word of any of the members in this Legislature, let them at least listen to the professional administration that we have at work for us on a day-to-day basis in the local municipalities. They're saying that this bill is totally flawed. This is not going to help small business. It's going to help, as a matter of fact, big business. Big business tends to gain something like $300 million as a direct implementation of Bill 79.

I once again ask the government, do the right thing. Do what the Clerks and Treasurers want you to do. Withdraw the bill.

Ms Lankin: I'm glad to have this opportunity to respond directly to the member for Wellington. He's one of my favourite government members, and I always appreciate his participation and appreciate the opportunity to tell him what I thought of that participation.

I want to say to the member it's sometimes hard to keep a straight face. He says that he and the government are listening to small business. Yes, you listen to them when they hit you over the head with the picket signs after they were marching up and down the streets. This is the seventh bill to fix this fiasco. It truly is new, staggering heights of incompetence.

I say to the member for Wellington that you've got these protections in place that you're putting in place with these caps now. We understand that there's going to be some disruption and there are people who are concerned about the administrative nightmare, and there are people concerned about the delay in their decreases as a result, but there are some other people who are really concerned.

Member for Wellington, I specifically want to ask you to respond to this issue because tenants have been saying to me that they're no longer going to be covered; they're not going to get the same protection as all of these other categories. Those tenants are in multi-residential apartments and here is this bill, which fixes all of the problems that you said still remain - the seventh bill - and tenants aren't going to be protected. Multi-residential units are not included under the caps in this bill.

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Interjection.

Ms Lankin: I'm sorry. Member for Wellington, what was that you said? An amendment? There's an amendment coming to this bill that's fixing all the problems that exist - to the seventh bill? You mean there's a mistake in the bill that's fixing all the other mistakes in all the previous bills and you have to amend it in committee. The minister is going to bring the amendment in committee. So you will fix that problem. I'm glad we're able to bring these issues and the government listened so effectively to us. It's an important exercise in democracy.

Mr John Hastings (Etobicoke-Rexdale): Thank you, Speaker, for allowing us to engage in this monologue, as you sometimes think it is, because the other side keeps saying, "Seven bills; withdraw the bill," and some then say, "Adjust the bill." But when we go back and look at the fundamental motivation for changing the system, all we have to do is look at some of the numbers for the old Metro school board on the education costs between 1970 and 1997.

The costs of running the school system in Metropolitan Toronto in 1970 was approximately $450 million. At that time they had nearly 298,000 students. By 1997, that had dropped down nearly 100,000, yet the costs, including inflation, had gone back up to $2.25 billion. Cost per pupil 27 years ago was about $1,100; in 1997, nearly $7,600. That tells a story right there, without going to any other school board, why we had to make changes in the system. The system was fundamentally flawed, inequitable and unfair, but we have yet to hear from members opposite one solid alternative of a system that they would propose if they don't like the current value assessment system. We don't hear anything. They're silent over there.

Last night I made comments about why not at least push for the locational unit factor-type of approach to assessment. But no, we don't hear anything like that from members opposite; a little bit perhaps from the member for Beaches-Woodbine. It's the first time we've had any enlightenment from across the way, aside from their traditional nitpicking of a system that needed change.

Mr Dwight Duncan (Windsor-Walkerville): I'm pleased to have the opportunity to respond to the member for Wellington. I wanted to begin by saying that the issues that have been raised not just by the opposition but by the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario, municipal politicians and small businesses aren't trivial. They're not minuscule. They constitute what has been a very flawed process that started all the way back with the Who Does What reforms and they have led us now to our seventh piece of legislation dealing with the question of property taxes.

The reforms that the government initially contemplated didn't work. The reforms the government contemplated in its second bill didn't work. The reforms that the government contemplated in its third bill didn't work. The reforms that the government contemplated in its fourth bill didn't work. The reforms that the government contemplated in its fifth bill didn't work. The reforms that the government contemplated in its sixth bill didn't work. The reforms the government is now attempting to bring forward won't work. In fact, the government is again acknowledging today that yet again they have to reform their own bill.

Government members cite their pride having dealt with this tough issue that other parties, other governments, hadn't dealt with, which again is patently false. Other governments have wrestled with these issues in a much more cautious and, I would submit, prudent fashion, recognizing the pifalls. What this government has done has left a legacy of higher taxes for small business. Regardless of what you say, regardless of the tools, everything you've done has gone contrary. I remember members in Toronto saying they would never support market value assessment, government members - Leach, Bassett, the names go on and on. This is bill is fundamentally flawed.

Mr Baird: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I would just like to bring the regrets of my colleague the member for Wellington, who had an important meeting with constituents and was not able to able to hear the response to the concerns. I know he would particularly want to thank the member -

The Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order. Further debate? The Chair recognizes the member for Windsor-Walkerville.

Mr Duncan: I am pleased to have the opportunity to join in this debate and review where we have been, what we have done and where the government proposes to go, and add some of my own comments to this debate and what I think it means and what Bill 79 means, both in terms of this bill itself and in the broader context of municipal reform and property tax reform in general.

I recollect, as I'm sure other members of the House do, since this is the seventh time we've dealt with this issue, that the government undertook their Who Does What reforms, which began as and still is a massive reform of our province's property tax system. The reform, as I understood it and I believe the government intended it, was primarily directed to deal with a few municipalities, such as the city of Toronto, which had not updated their property tax base in decades, leading to large tax variations between similar properties.

The government calls the package "current value assessment." That's an interesting term. Having campaigned against market value assessment here in Toronto particularly, I recollect the various members, the now Minister of Municipal Affairs, the now Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation had very strongly stated that they would never support market value assessment. What did they do? They brought in current value assessment and they voted in favour of current value assessment, which is market value assessment with a different name. I find it particularly ironic that, given the broken promise on an Ontarians with Disabilities Act, here is yet again another broken promise, a very major broken promise to the constituents of the Minister of Citizenship here in Toronto.

In January of this year, it became clear that there were major problems under this new system. I want to start by focusing on the elimination of the business occupancy tax and remind members of the government just what that means. It meant that large businesses, banks, would see 20% reductions in some cases, while small business would see corresponding increases. Additionally, the definitions in the new tax classes resulted in a greater burden being placed on small business property in cities such as Toronto, and I should say not just Toronto.

In my own community of Windsor, when all of this began to unfold and the property tax bills finally hit - I think it was in August of this year that they hit in Windsor. The government mucked up the entire assessment roll system so businesses weren't getting their tax notices until August in my community. All of a sudden, in some of our oldest and most respected neighbourhoods - Erie Street, which is in the heart of my riding, Windsor-Walkerville, or Via Italia, as we call it. It's the heart of the Italian community: a beautifully redeveloped part of our inner city; a vibrant, thriving restaurant/entertainment district that still is the heart and soul of our Italian community. We had businesses on Via Italia/Erie Street getting tax increases in the vicinity, some as high as 200%, small businesses. Of course, they immediately responded. They knew where the blame lay. It didn't lie at city hall.

Our municipal government in Windsor has done a good job in getting the city's debt down. They've worked hard over a number of years to take Windsor from being one of the highest per capita debt municipalities in the province and country down to one of the lowest. It was through a series of tough decisions; it was through a series of planned public policies, and I'm pleased to say that unlike the province of Ontario the city of Windsor's credit rating has consistently improved over the last five or six years. But all of these reforms taken together have left that municipality in a perilous situation.

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My predecessor from Windsor-Walkerville, a gentleman by the name of David Croll, was first elected to the Legislature in the 1930s. He got elected because what were then the border cities - Windsor, Walkerville and Sandwich - were facing bankruptcy and it was then that the province of Ontario first started removing some of the higher-priced social service tickets off the property tax base and putting it on to the broader income tax base of the province. Like so many other communities at that time, they were faced with bankruptcy and the government of the day recognized it and began to deal with it.

We have gone in exactly the opposite direction in Ontario today. We have downloaded an additional $600 million of costs. Municipalities don't know how they're going to deal with all of this. So in January the business occupancy tax came off, again favouring the banks, favouring large business over small businesses such as those businesses on Erie Street. Then this year's budget: The government promised to spend $500 million over eight years to help lower education property tax rates in communities where they were significantly above the provincial average, again, most notably in Toronto. This did go some way to reduce the anger of the Toronto business community, but that act in and of itself points to the poor planning of this government, which had been refusing to deal with the problem under its own reforms. It's important to note that the cost of this property tax reduction is offset through expected assessment growth over the next eight years.

This tax reform that we contemplate today was promised to simplify the property tax system. As additional tax bills were brought forward to patch flaws, that system quickly became more complex than the existing one. This is patchwork number seven, the seventh bill, and it's not trivial. It's not enough for members of the government to suggest somehow, "We've been listening and we're changing, we're adjusting." On something as important as this you ought not to invoke or begin the change process until you understand the consequences.

The final note I wanted to raise with respect to the backdrop for all this is that it's now the provincial government that sets the education tax rate for business. That means the Harris government is setting the property tax rate for 55% to 65% of total business property tax. Even though the Premier said in 1997 that he wanted to have total control of education spending to provide equity, the government announced in early 1998 that they had decided to tax business at widely different rates across the province. The chaos and confusion that was created by that announcement is what led to the 1998 budget announcement to spend $500 million over eight years to lower business property tax rates to the provincial average. This policy reversal, flip-flop, to help business came just months after announcing that local communities were to blame for their own problems.

That is what this is about, isn't it? It's about a government that wants to blame municipalities. It says, "They didn't use the tools available to them." When you discuss that property tax reform and you don't do it in the context of the net $600-million download to municipalities and the net cost increases that are going to be borne on the property tax base in municipalities, you're not discussing the whole picture.

I'd like to spend a few moments with the specifics so that we have a full appreciation of what we are doing. Under the Harris property tax reform there is a structural shift in tax burden from small to large businesses. This was done deliberately and with planning, and the government indicated it was done in the name of fairness but as tax bills finally went out this summer, it was clear that small businesses across the province were facing huge tax increases, and this bill we are dealing with today is designed somehow to alleviate that.

I want to go back again to my own community and share with members of the government what this means. Where did those taxes go up? They went up in inner cities. I spoke of Via Italia before. One small businessman who owns a restaurant called Spago, and I know some of the government members have been there when they've travelled on committee and enjoyed the great hospitality afforded there and the wonderful ambience and food, said to me: "Dwight, I invested tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade my business, to help rejuvenate a neighbourhood that had become a little bit tired, as did my neighbours. Now, having done this, we find ourselves being penalized for investing in the future of our community." That happened in the Wyandotte Street East business improvement area, the Fordtown business improvement area, the Riverside business improvement area, and the downtown business improvement area. In addition to taxing small business more, this policy, this type of reform helps to undermine the growth and redevelopment of our inner city neighbourhoods.

I find it appalling that the government tries desperately to blame municipalities, alleging that they're profligate spenders, that they're not dealing with the tough issues that confront them. I can't speak for other municipalities, but our municipality prides itself now on its very sound financial management.

What is the government saying to small business? What is the government saying when it says this is fair? The government says that a 20% increase for small business is fair when in fact, because of the elimination of the business occupancy tax, you are letting large employers, large organizations such as the banks off the hook. Compounded by what the government has done in downloading, this has made the past year, I would think, one of the most - "interesting" certainly isn't the word - discombobulating years imaginable for municipal planning purposes.

We've heard again today from the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario. I'd like to remind you of what they said before: "This government in its haste is making legislation by the seat of its pants, without proper thought or planning. Yesterday's bill is amended by today's which will likely be amended by tomorrow's." To my colleagues opposite, that's not an opposition member saying that, that's not a rabid tax-and-spend Liberal saying that; that's the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario, in my experience a very astute and august body that has represented the interests of our municipalities and the clerks and treasurers of our municipalities in a very distinguished way for many years. But again, isn't this a bit of a pattern that we see, not listening, barrelling ahead?

We've seen today on Bill 55, the apprenticeship bill, that the minister guts his own bill and tries to pretend that it's minor reform, having recognized that the original bill they introduced simply wouldn't work. Even their friends in the corporate community chastized them, saying it's bad legislation. That's what this is about.

The government would have you believe that anybody who doesn't agree with them wants to protect the status quo, doesn't want to deal with the tough questions, doesn't want to make tough decisions. I would rather make the right decision than the wrong decision, and I would rather make the right decision for the right reasons than make the tough decision for the wrong reasons. That's what this government is about. Under the false guise of change, of reform, of dealing with the tough questions, this government not only has not dealt with the tough questions, they have not brought about property tax reform that can be sustained in the long term.

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Again I come back to this notion that we are now on bill number seven. How many times does it take before you get it right? We're apparently going to see another amendment today. We've had a full year of property tax chaos. Municipalities that I've spoken to in the course of the last several weeks say to me they still don't know what to expect in the coming year in terms of their planning processes, in terms of their budgeting processes.

I will predict that the question of property tax increases will be one of this government's Achilles heels. The other two obviously - and I see the Minister of Health here - will be health care and education, two other areas where the government simply doesn't get it. Notionally advocating change to improve the system, not only do they not improve the system, they create chaos in the process.

We look forward to debating property taxes in the next election and we look forward to debating health care issues in the next election. Let me say to the government, we welcome your television ads asking what our position is. We'll let you know what it is in our good time, when we're ready to do that. So you just keep spending all that money - 47 million government dollars into advertising. I spoke to the Minister of Health earlier today about the need to get on with improving the emergency room at Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital in Windsor. We can run multi-million dollar ads at the drop of a hat but we can't somehow free up the money to get that emergency room rebuilt, as everyone agrees it has to be rebuilt.

School closings: I'm quite pleased that last night the trustees of the Windsor board of education did the right thing and voted to keep W.D. Lowe Secondary School open in Windsor for another year - the chaos that again was created by the government in its funding formula, a funding formula I'd like to remind government members of. I'll ask them this question. That funding formula calculates funding based on a square-footage-per-student calculation. I wonder how many government members realize that the only other government agency that calculates funding for large institutions of that nature is the Correctional Service of Canada, the nation's jailer.

That's why when we see this government talking about the need for change, somehow advocating that this property tax reform, their so-called health care reforms, their so-called education reforms are for positive change, they're not. We now have a more regressive, backward property tax system in this province than we've had for years. We have had chaos in the municipal sector now for the better part of two years, ever since the government decided it was going to reinvent how we do municipal government.

The same in our health care system. The government advocates that we have to close hospitals to reinvest the savings in important other areas. The problem is that the hospitals are being closed and the reinvestments aren't happening. The government will tell us that they're spending more than any other government in history on health care. What they won't tell us is that it's not keeping pace with the cost of health care; it's not keeping pace with growth; it's not keeping pace with an aging population. That's why people across this province know that there are serious problems, despite the government's assurances.

The chaos created in education, through a whole variety of initiatives on the part of this government, led initially to school closures, and now they're going to go back and look at the formula and try to get out of that. It's that kind of chaos, it's that kind of mismanagement that will be an issue in the next general election. I believe that managing change is as important as the change itself. I believe that we have to make changes. We have to be progressive in our changes. This government has failed miserably in managing change. Bill 79 is an admission of that fact.

Ms Martel: I want to reinforce particularly a specific point that the member for Windsor-Walkerville made in his comments here this afternoon, and that has to do with the fact that here we are dealing with this bill, which is the seventh bill in a long line of bills trying to fix the mess this government has made as it has tried to implement property tax reform in this province.

I don't know how the government members could not but be extraordinarily embarrassed by being here today and being put in this position. This government, when it started off on this whole direction, told people in the province that they were going to bring in property tax reform because there was an inherent unfairness in the system, that there were many municipalities and many ratepayers in those municipalities who had not seen a change in tax assessment for some time and were not paying what they probably should be paying if that same house were located in another community where in fact the tax rolls were more up to date.

The government embarked upon this process of trying to implement, in a very hurried fashion, in a limited amount of time, tax reform across the province. The government was warned from the beginning that this is not a direction that you step into or take lightly, that it requires a great deal of work, a great number of people to do the reassessments and that we should be very careful in how we proceed. But the government chose not to listen to anyone, as is the case with this government in issue after issue, and here we are, a number of months later, dealing with the seventh bill to fix the six before, which have all had mistakes too. We find out this afternoon that the government still has to bring forward an amendment to fix the bill that is before us. When will the government learn? This has been so badly bungled. You are completely incompetent on this issue.

Mr Rollins: I don't know if the member for Windsor-Walkerville happens to remember, but other members in the House know that the Honourable Hugh O'Neil is one of my constituents. Hugh was one of the people who phoned me with a very large concern when he got his tax bill, because his tax bill went up some 250% on a restaurant that he and his son had chosen to go into to build for business purposes. This weekend - and it's very hard for Hugh to come up and put his arm around Doug Rollins and say: "Thanks for doing what you've done for me, because I think we would have had to refinance the whole operation if we had left the tax bill the way it was. Thanks for bringing that cap in at 10%, because now at least we don't have to worry about that. We can hold on to it."

I want to say to the member for Windsor-Walkerville that it's very easy to sit there and say, "Well, we'll take lots of time to do something." I'd rather be part of a government that's prepared to do something than just sit there like the last two governments and let us have an $11-billion-a-year deficit to try to operate. We have asked ourselves to take cutbacks. We've asked this whole operation on this hill to take back money and do a better job, do more for less, and we expect the municipalities to do the same kind of thing, to do a little bit more for a little bit less. In many cases, if they had used all the tools that were in the toolbox in Bill 106, they wouldn't have a problem.

You can always look at Metro Toronto and say, "Yes, I don't want to be like them," but they're a shining star on this bill, because they used the 2.5% cap, and their mayor is very complimentary of how they're looking after business in the city of Toronto. If more municipalities had done the same thing, we wouldn't have had to bring this bill in.

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Mr Sean G. Conway (Renfrew North): I want to make a few comments in respect to the comments made by my colleague from Windsor. Earlier today I had the opportunity to sit in and listen to a group of municipal clerks and treasurers from the province of Ontario. They would agree with my friend from Belleville that changes were needed to the property taxation system in the province. But they were here today to repeat what they have said before, that this bill aggravates the very problem you're trying to fix.

I think we are obligated as a Legislative Assembly to pay particular attention to those specialists whose job it is to make this system work. I repeat, the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario have told us again today that Bill 79, however well intentioned, is a cure worse than the disease it seeks to fix. We'd better listen to that.

I can cite the individuals in my county - as my old friend and colleague from Belleville has cited, Hugh O'Neil, who is happy that there is some capping - yes, let there be mitigation. But the Clerks and Treasurers told us today that they specifically recommended to officials in the Ministry of Finance and municipal affairs other mitigating measures that would have solved most of the problem without inflicting the kind of pain and misery and dysfunction that Bill 79 is going to impose.

Let me repeat what those Clerks and Treasurers, a lot more knowledgeable than I am about these subjects, told us this morning: "This is going to make a bad situation worse. This is going to spread the problem across into the residential taxpayer next year."

The member from Belleville says no; the specialists say yes. More than that, I am told that officials in the Ministry of Finance and municipal affairs know that this is a problem that is not going to be fixed. It's only pure pre-election politics that has brought us to this point today.

Mr Carroll: It's too bad that all the municipalities in this great province of ours hadn't, in the initial go-around, used the tools that were supplied to them to in fact provide the protection that the taxpayers need. Many municipalities did use the tools. Chatham-Kent was one that did use the tools. When implementing fair market value assessment, implementing restructuring, implementing area rating, we ended up with a tax system that was fair to almost everybody involved because we used the tools.

Unfortunately, many municipalities seemed to think - I'm not sure they even knew the tools existed. As a result, we had to come along, because in many municipalities that didn't use the tools, we had these exorbitant increases in property tax. It's hard to imagine how local councillors, local politicians, could possibly have agreed to passing on those kind of tax increases when they had those tools available to them to make sure that did not have to happen.

We end up with another bill that is designed, put forward, specifically because in many municipalities, not all, the tools provided by the provincial government to make sure that we had a fair system of tax were not used. Consequently we had these huge increases in taxation that weren't necessary, should never have happened. The province was left to come along with another piece of legislation.

I agree with some of the comments opposite. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. But it does provide for protection for local taxpayers that was available before, but unfortunately municipal government, through some particular oversight, in many cases decided not to implement.

Mr Duncan: If there has been mismanagement around the issue of property tax reform in this province, the blame rests squarely at the feet of the Mike Harris government. Municipalities have been left in an absolutely untenable position. The know-it-alls across the way will continue to criticize cities; they will continue to criticize anyone who doesn't agree with them. They won't listen to organizations like the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario. They will bully through yet another piece of legislation that is fundamentally flawed.

Let me remind government members that this issue is not going to go away because next year it's going to be even more difficult. Next year, those municipalities that have in fact been responsible, that have in fact brought down their costs and have been responsible in terms of taxation, have been responsible in terms of program management, having foisted upon them a property tax system that doesn't work.

The government can pretend all it wants that it's their fault. The bottom line is you've created bigger problems than you had before. You're leaving a property tax assessment system that will have to be rebuilt yet again, and it will be rebuilt. It will reflect a better and fairer system. Government members can try all they want to put the blame for their own mismanagement and incompetence on to the backs of municipalities across this province. It won't wash. It doesn't wash in this House today. You've got the Association of Municipal Clerks and Treasurers; you've got mayors; you've got municipal councillors in large municipalities and small municipalities saying to you, "It doesn't work." It doesn't work now; it won't work next year. You'll pay the price for this at the polls for what you've done to the property tax system in this province.

The Deputy Speaker: Further debate?

Ms Martel: I'm just waiting for the correct time to appear on the clock.

Clerk Assistant: It's 10 minutes.

Ms Martel: We are now down to 10 minutes? OK. Thank you very much. This is another effect of the rule changes.

I want to focus my remarks on Bill 79 in two areas. I want to comment again on the government's complete mismanagement in the whole area of property tax reform. I also want to bring to the House's attention concerns that have been raised very directly and very specifically by the regional municipality of Sudbury, both in a meeting that the new chair of the regional municipality of Sudbury had, along with other chairs, with the Minister of Municipal Affairs, Al Leach, several weeks ago, and in terms of a resolution and a number of council debates that have occurred as a result of the finance minister's musing about the changes which would come, and now the bill actually being before regional council.

Let me deal with the first point first. Surely, members of the government, as they sit in their places in this House - those who are here - have to be embarrassed that we find ourselves in a position this afternoon of debating Bill 79, a bill which, in effect, is here before us to fix a mess that came from the sixth bill that was dealing with property tax reform that was before us to fix the fifth bill that was dealing with property tax reform, and so on. We are using up legislative time today with a bill that is here because the government has so badly handled and so badly mismanaged property tax reform that we have had a series of bills to fix the mistakes in the bill before.

We learned as well that not only are we dealing with bill number seven that is before us to fix bill number six, but when this bill goes to committee we will also have to deal with a government amendment, because the Minister of Finance forgot to put in this bill, Bill 79, the fact that he was going to be capping residential units as well. So not only have we dealt with over the past number of months and used up a whole bunch of legislative time dealing with bills that were meant to fix one after the other, but the government already has had to admit that the bill that is before us today is flawed and will require amendment.

That has nothing to do with the fact that the people who are in the know out in the province - the municipal Clerks and Treasurers who deal with issues like this day in, day out in their municipalities - have come again to this government and said very publicly, as they did today, that this Bill 79 will not work either, that all of the ills it is intended to fix, in a long litany of bills that have plagued the government since they started in this direction, will not be fixed by the proposal the government has before us today. So that will mean, unfortunately, continued confusion, continued chaos, continued trouble in municipalities right across the province, because the government has yet to do this right. The government was in such a big hurry; the government was bound and determined not to listen to people who know about these issues, who deal with them every day. The government was just bound and determined to off-load, to download, to try and redo property tax in the province in such a hurried fashion that we have spent enormous amounts of time trying to fix it, and we are going to be no better off in many municipalities after the passage of this bill than we were when the government started this whole process. In fact, in many municipalities, we're going to be worse off.

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That leads me to my second point. This is a specific case of the regional municipality of Sudbury. The regional municipality of Sudbury is in an interesting position because it was the first in the province to undergo a region-wide reassessment. The region did that in the mid-1980s and since then has been on a four-year reassessment. So the information with respect to the region was updated and in a much better position than were I suspect many municipalities across the province. We have been in the fortunate position that we have not seen the very significant highs and lows with respect to assessment and then with respect to tax bills that many municipalities have seen, especially during this rollercoaster ride we have been on as this government has tried, and proven not to be able to do very effectively at all, to implement tax reform. The region, therefore, had good information and had an up-to-date assessment base. We were probably most fortunate with respect to many other municipalities.

What has happened now is, with respect to this particular bill that we are dealing with here today, any number of people who have commercial properties, who have industrial properties, who were going to receive a tax decrease because our rolls are up to date, are now going to be in a position where that decrease is entirely wiped out because they are now going to be in a position to pay for the cap which this government wants to impose on those same classes of industrial and commercial property. In fact, a whole number who would have had a decrease are going to be affected, probably more than those who will now find the cap placed on the increases they would have had to pay for.

The regional municipality of Sudbury is quite concerned about this because they were in a position to have good information, to have up-to-date assessments. They did use any number of the tools that the government put before them. They have tried to manage the very turbulent change that we have seen in the last three years as the government moved to try and reform, allegedly reform, the tax system in the province. They have done everything they have been asked to do and now they are in a position of having to go back to any number of people who would have got a rebate and telling them: "We're going to claw it all back. We have to claw it all back now because we have to deal with the cap that the province has imposed because of the problems we have in any number of other municipalities."

They put a resolution forward to this government because their concerns result in a number of problems. They believe that it will destroy entirely the credibility of the new property assessment system. The legislation before us does not allow for any kind of local solution to local problems; in fact, it just puts forward a broad brush that sweeps across our whole province and everyone is caught in the same way. It could result potentially in major payment-in-lieu revenue losses to municipalities that will result in major tax increases for other property owners. It will anger those taxpayers who have already received their tax decreases if a phase-in is imposed and these decreases are clawed back. If the tax rebates are given instead, then tax rates will have to be increased to pay for those rebates, thus increasing taxes for those who have already been given a decrease. It will delay the 1998 appeal deadline, which will result in delays in the delivery of the 1999 rolls and that will have a negative impact on municipal cash flows, resulting in increased interest expense. It will be some time before municipalities are even able to work out adequately the details because much of the information in the assessment data provided by the province to many municipalities is so flawed and has to be corrected.

That is why regional council, and the regional chair in particular, came to Toronto some weeks ago to try and lobby the Minister of Municipal Affairs to make clear what the problem is, particularly in two-tiered municipalities, which is the situation we are in, and particularly with respect to a community that had up-to-date assessment data.

The changes that we will see across the region are as follows: Property reform increases above 10% are worth about $2.8 million, or 58.5% of the decreases of $4.9 million. If only those properties experiencing decreases were required to fund the increases above 10%, then 58.5% of all decreases will have to be clawed back. The city of Sudbury will be required to fund the cap in all other municipalities, as it is the only municipality where the proportionate decreases of 58.5% exceed the increases. There are 1,300 properties that have increases above 10%, 824 that have decreases. In the industrial class you see the same type of gap: increases that are worth above 10%, about $1.6 million or 69% of the decreases worth about $2.4 million. All of the changes in that case are going to be absorbed by the city of Sudbury and the town of Onaping Falls because they are the only municipalities where the decreases of 59% exceed the increases.

In Sudbury we will see about 1,000 commercial-industrial properties that are affected. About half of those are going to lose their anticipated tax break. It also means that the local councillors are going to have to go back, rework budgets that were settled on months ago and send out a second property tax bill. They believe, frankly, the province should pay for all of the problems that have been caused here to date. They have specifically recommended that it should be the province that deals with all of the costs above the cap versus having to go back and take money from people who had decreases and the -

The Acting Speaker (Mr W. Leo Jordan): Member for Sudbury East, time has elapsed. Further comments or debate?

Mr Baird: I listened with great interest to my colleague from Sudbury East. She certainly spoke at great length about this whole issue of property tax reform. One might have the view that everything with respect to our property taxation system was perfect before this government was elected. There were certainly substantial inequities and this government is seeking to tackle what is an extremely tough issue. I suppose, politically, it would have been the easier thing to just sit back and do nothing. But to make an earnest attempt to move forward in the right direction, to bring greater fairness and equity to our property tax system, that's certainly the attempt of this government's policy in that area.

I would compliment her and her party. At least they have a taxation agenda. She spoke at great length about wanting to go back to people who are expecting a decrease and now they're going to tell them they're going to get whacked.

I suspect that's just like the NDP's income tax policy. The New Democratic Party wants to go back and increase taxes of hard-working men and women. Where did they choose the threshold to take the Mike Harris income tax cut back? Exactly within 2% of what MPPs make, right at $80,000 a year. So MPPs would be able to keep their tax cut, but anyone making more than MPPs wouldn't get their tax back. I wondered how they came up with the number. I looked at the number and I noticed that it was remarkably similar and it's quite interesting.

I know the member would agree with me. She noted the quote from Dennis Mills, the Liberal MP, when he said, "I am a passionate believer in comprehensive tax reform and some of my ideas are not inconsistent with the Harris government." Most interesting.

Mr Gerretsen: I would just refer once again to the 14-page document that the association of clerks and treasurers came up with today. This is the professional civil service that works in each one of our municipalities. One of the interesting comments they make in that document is that with this bill, in effect, there will be no market value assessment. I don't know where that leaves us but even if you were to take the government's view that this is doing that, the Clerks and Treasurers don't agree with you on that.

It's also interesting to note that in the Spectator, in an article dated today, November 25, 1998, Halton has asked for an exemption, including the four chambers of commerce that represent Halton, including the four MPPs, all government MPPs from Halton, who somehow don't want Halton to be involved in this legislation, they want it to be exempted. You know why? I'll tell you why. The 10% cap means that Halton would have to collect about $9 million from about 2,000 properties that had seen their taxes decrease this year. Most of that shift will be felt by small businesses.

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I think that people have to understand that if you are in a business category whereby you're going to benefit from the 10% increase, that money that's going to be lost is going to have to be made up among the same businesses that got a decrease. So here you're hurting the businesses in your own municipality that feel they've finally got some equity, their tax bill is lower and now you're forcing the municipalities, in effect, to send out another tax bill this year in which they'll have to say: "I'm sorry. Remember that bill that you got and which was much lower than last year? We'll have to increase it again because of this new legislation."

Here is a municipality that doesn't want it, there are four influential government members that don't want it, and what does the minister do? He just plows right ahead against the recommendations of just about everybody who knows anything about this bill.

Mr Silipo: I'm glad to comment on the presentation made by my colleague and friend the member for Sudbury East, who always comes to these debates not only well prepared, but armed with a lot of very useful information. She talked a fair amount, and would have talked more had she been allowed to under the rules, about the situation in her own area of Sudbury, which she has certainly been talking with me about as we have been talking about this bill and the impact it will have across the province.

As she pointed out, one of the problems that comes now as a result of the government not having listened earlier to the mess that it was creating out there, with this change upon change upon change and not even knowing what each change meant until well after they were put in place and then having to come back and fix the problems that they created, is that now you have a situation where there are going to be problems even in dealing with rolling back the decreases that some people did receive, whether they were on the commercial side or in the industrial classes.

As she pointed out, in the Sudbury area, 50% of all decreases would have to be clawed back in the commercial class and 69% of all decreases would have to be clawed back in the industrial class. It sets off in that particular part of the province a dynamic which I don't want to see anywhere in the province, where you have one municipality, in that case the inner municipality, being pitted against the surrounding municipalities because of the regional nature of government there and the fact that the assessment is applied across the whole region.

This is again just a very clear example of the kinds of problems that the Mike Harris government has created for property taxpayers and for municipalities right across the province, which my colleague from Sudbury East outlined very well as it applies directly to the Sudbury region, and it's one more reason why what this government is doing is completely wrong, completely incompetent and completely insensitive to the real needs of property taxpayers across the province.

The Acting Speaker: Member for Chatham-Kent.

Mr Carroll: I'm in the speaking rotation.

The Acting Speaker: Questions and comments?

Mr Hastings: I think the thing we need to keep focusing on is the fundamental rationale for changes to the property assessment system. What we need to look at is the context in which that fundamental change needed to be brought about. Not only are we dealing with responses to problems that we're dealing with today, but also an accumulation or a legacy of neglect that should have been dealt with many years ago. Then we wouldn't be dealing with one, two or seven bills.

If we look at the record of the two parties opposite, what progress did they ever make in fundamentally changing the system of property assessment in this province? What specific progress did the members of the official opposition make between 1985 and 1990? The only thing I can remember is their great introduction of a land concentration tax. The commercial concentration tax really was an effective addendum to the whole method of taxing people in this province. What did it do? It had the great effort of killing jobs in our own community of west Toronto. It put a tax - can you imagine? - on parking lots attached to hospitals, attached to hotels. It really helped a lot of job creation. That's the only tinkering they did.

The other party at least got started, but then they got sandbagged along the way. Around November 29, the last Saturday of November 1993, is when I recall was their last gasp at trying to get some reform of the property assessment system in this province. What happened? They failed. Now we pick up the ball and are doing something about it, fundamentally positive.

Ms Martel: In response to some of the comments that have been made, let me say to the member for Nepean, who talked about the reversal of the tax scheme and how he felt that MPPs might not be included in this, I can say to you categorically here today that if you manage to get re-elected, we will guarantee that you will be included in the reversal of the tax scheme and we will ensure that the benefit that you've seen as an MPP under the Mike Harris tax scheme will go to the greater good, to make sure that hospitals and the education system in this province continue to be publicly funded and continue to be adequately supported.

The point I want to make about what is before us is that here is a community, namely, the regional municipality of Sudbury, that for many long years now has been doing things right. They were the first region in this province to actually undergo a region-wide reassessment so that they would have a relatively up-to-date assessment base, yet this same municipality that took those steps a decade ago also finds itself in a position of now being worse off under the so-called reform in property tax that this government has gone through over the last number of months; they are worse off than they were before. So your scheme all through the seven bills, including the one we are dealing with today, has not helped them, and as we stand here today, your scheme presented in the bill that is before us is going to make the situation worse.

We are going to see far more people who would have got, in the industrial and commercial classes, some kind of tax relief actually having that relief clawed back to deal with those people who are above a 10% cap. Far more people are going to lose money than the group that this bill is supposed to protect or alleges to protect.

So I just say it's about time the government steps back. Would you listen to the people who know what's going on for a change and try to do this right for a change?

The Deputy Speaker: Further debate?

Mr Carroll: I appreciate the opportunity to make a few comments here just before the dinner hour arrives. I'd like to start off my comments on Bill 79 by quoting David Crombie. All of us in this House have come over the years to respect Mr Crombie for some of the things he does; not necessarily for all of them, but for some of the things that he does. He was quoted in the Toronto Star, that bastion of conservatism, back in 1997 as saying: "The province took over assessment...in 1970 to fix it up and give it back to the municipalities. They've still got it, 27 years later, and it ain't fixed because governments backed away from the consequences."

That is so true. The assessment system in our province has been sorely in need of reform for many, many years, and every government prior to ours backed away from the task of reforming it because of the consequences. We are now, of course, dealing with some of those consequences, because it is an enormous task that needed to be done, and with the courage of our government we took it on to do it.

It's interesting to hear the opposition parties be so critical of our efforts in that regard. When they had their kick at the cat, they chose to just ignore it.

I'd like to speak for a few minutes about our particular government and its legacy. Obviously with Mike Harris's moniker of the Taxfighter, our government is known as a government that believes we have too much government, we have too much tax, and we are committed to reducing both of those areas. As you know, Mr Speaker, since we've been elected, we have reduced taxes in the province on 66 different occasions. We've honoured our commitment to reduce personal income tax. We've honoured our commitment to reduce employer health tax. We believe fundamentally that our province is overgoverned and overtaxed, and we are doing what we can to solve that problem.

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There are some municipalities that have picked up on the lead that is being taken by our provincial government, and they too are dealing with these issues of overgovernance and overtaxation. At the risk of being repetitive, I would again like to bring attention to my municipality of Chatham-Kent; I'd like to talk about our mayor, Bill Erickson, the chair of our budget committee, Doug Sulman, and our city manager, Hugh Thomas. I'd like to compliment them for embracing change, for coming to grips with the fact that in our municipality of 100,000 people, we had more politicians than the whole province of Ontario has in Ottawa. It did not make any sense that our small area of Chatham-Kent needed 156 political positions to govern itself.

Our community came to grips with that. They took the lead of our provincial government and said, "It is time, on behalf of the taxpayers, to make some changes to reduce the level of government, to reduce the burden of taxation on the people of Ontario," and we went ahead on that. I take my hat off to these gentlemen, because they embraced the change.

The other thing they did, when confronted with the challenge of fair market value assessment, when confronted with the challenge of a restructured municipality and the challenge of area rating as far as services go, was they took a look at the package of tools given to them by the province and said, "How can we use these tools to mitigate the impact of all these changes on the taxpayers?" So over and above the fact that we found $11 million in savings at our municipality as a result of restructuring, savings that are directly refunded back to the taxpayers - they are the people who pay the bills; they are the people who receive the services, and they're tired to death of the bills we've been handing to them. We did it - I shouldn't say "we" did it, because in actual fact it was the people in our municipality who did a great job making sure we maintained the level of service, reduced the taxation, and they did it because they embraced change.

The Liberal position is always so interesting. They stand in the House and say, "Yes, we need change." Then, as soon as they have acknowledged the fact that we need change, they say, "But not your kind of change." Our friends in the New Democratic Party - I admire so much the fact that they take positions. They say: "Here is what we believe in. Here is what we would do if we were re-elected: We would raise taxes." We've been through five years of their government. It was rejected by the people of Ontario. But we know what they believe in. They have positions. They're passionate in their positions, and I admire them for that. The official opposition across the road - we have no idea where they stand. As I've so often said in this House, a Liberal position politically is an oxymoron; they don't have any. They talk about the need for change, and then they oppose every kind of change that comes in.

I'd like to quote Judith Andrew, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. This is a comment she made on October 24 relative to Bill 79, that we're talking about tonight. She said:

"The business community welcomed the province's intervention.... The municipalities should have used the tools. They should have done something to protect their small business clientele, and frankly, this provincial override is very, very important."

What we have is a situation where the province of Ontario said: "The change to the assessment system that we currently have is long overdue. We're going to put in that change. We're going to give the municipalities the tools they need to make sure change is made in an orderly and a fair way." Many municipalities, mine included, said: "OK, we're with you on this one. We understand the need for change. We appreciate the tools. Thank you very much." They used the tools. In my riding, Navistar, one of our largest employers, that produces those wonderful international trucks we see going up and down the highway - just as a little aside, we'd all be happy to know that currently Navistar is sitting with an order bank of 24,000 of those heavy-duty trucks, absolutely a fabulous situation.

Small retailers: Bill Rossini at Rossini's Restaurant, my personal favourite restaurant in Chatham-Kent -

Ms Lankin: Jack, you're being reported.

Mr Carroll: One of the opposition members is up in the press gallery cribbing my notes here. He's obviously turned on to the press. He gets an opportunity to speak on every issue that's in here, and now he wants to report on all of them besides.

Eddie Mariconda of Boyes and Herd, the local haberdasher in town that I buy my clothes from - all these people have embraced the change. They appreciate what our government has done on their behalf. Wouldn't it have been so nice if all the municipalities - and Toronto did a great job. The politicians in Toronto said, "We have to protect our small businesses," and they came up with a plan to do that.

To sum this whole thing up, we set out as a government with an incredible amount of courage to change a system that everybody admitted was sorely in need of reform and that previous governments did not have the courage to deal with. We said we would deal with that and we brought forward Bill 106, I believe it was initially, to lay the groundwork for that. Was Bill 106 perfect? Absolutely not. We were dealing with an incredibly complex issue. But instead of hiding our head in the sand and saying, "No, we were right the first time out, we don't need to make any changes," we listened to the feedback that we got and we subsequently made additional changes so that the taxpayers of our great province would be the benefactors.

When we got to the final piece of legislation, we thought the municipalities would use the tools. Unfortunately, they didn't all use the tools. I think in some cases the local councillors weren't even aware that the tools existed, but they were there and they didn't get used. We've now said, "We're going to give you one last opportunity on behalf of your taxpayers" - and your taxpayers are the same as our taxpayers, Mr Speaker - "to do the right thing and make sure that the taxpayers of this great province pay less tax."

When I hear about tax increases like Haldimand-Norfolk's, a 17% tax increase, that's absolutely unconscionable, and I support what the member for Norfolk is doing in his private member's bill tomorrow. I'm sure the opposition members who are now very interested in reducing taxes will also support that.

It would be nice if we hadn't needed to do this particular piece of legislation but we did, because the municipalities didn't use the tools we gave them. Hopefully this will be the end of reform of the tax system.

The Deputy Speaker: It being almost 6 of the clock, this House stands adjourned until 6:30.

The House adjourned at 1758.

Evening meeting reported in volume B.

25 novembre 1998