Mr. Edward Helwer (Gimli): I move, seconded by the member for La Verendrye (Mr. Sveinson), that the composition of the Standing Committee on Agriculture be amended as follows: Findlay for Ernst; Dyck for Rocan; Tweed for Toews.

Madam Speaker: It has been moved by the honourable member for Gimli (Mr. Helwer), seconded by the honourable member for La Verendrye (Mr. Sveinson), that the composition of the Standing Committee on Agriculture for this evening, 7:30 p.m., be amended as follows: the honourable member for Springfield (Mr. Findlay) for the honourable member for Charleswood (Mr. Ernst); the honourable member for Pembina (Mr. Dyck) for the honourable member for Gladstone (Mr. Rocan); the honourable member for Turtle Mountain (Mr. Tweed) for the honourable member for Rossmere (Mr. Toews).

Agreed? Agreed and so ordered.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 39 (The Labour-Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations Act; Loi sur les corporations à capital de risque de travailleurs), on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism (Mr. Downey), standing in the name of the honourable member for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale).

Mr. Tim Sale (Crescentwood): Madam Speaker, was it clear that the bill will remain standing?

Madam Speaker: No, it is standing in your name, so if you stand up to speak, automatically it cannot remain standing in your name.

Mr. Sale: Right, but we are not passing the bill through.

Madam Speaker: Okay, then somebody will have to take the adjournment motion after you have finished debating the bill.

Mr. Sale: Thank you, I just wanted to be clear for everybody.

Madam Speaker, in rising on this bill, I want to remind members where the whole idea of labour-sponsored venture capital corporations came from. This is a very important piece of history for all members to be aware of. In the 1980s, there was a rash of plant closures and removal of profitable operations to other countries or other locations in Canada.

People in the House might remember, for example, here a battery plant out by the airport, used to go under the name of Varta Batteries, was one of those kinds of plants. The plant was profitable, the product sold well, but a company whose headquarters were not in Manitoba decided simply that they were going to consolidate their operations elsewhere.

Many such instances occurred in Ontario and in Quebec, and the labour movement became very concerned that good jobs and profitable investment were simply fleeing or moving with no good grounds other than the increase in profit for parent corporations. Workers had invested a great deal of skill and energy in those companies, had made them profitable with their labour and their abilities to produce effectively, productively. Yet, with no reasons and no emergency, their jobs were yanked out from under them, and communities suffered the loss of employment, suffered the loss of enterprise.

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So, Madam Speaker, a number of organizations, particularly under the leadership of the Canadian Labour Congress, moved to enter into discussions with governments including the then Pawley government here and governments in Ontario and Quebec in particular to encourage them to make it possible for labour to gather capital, both from its own sources of its pension funds and its members and from the broader public, to invest in what was essentially community economic stabilization, community economic development. These are principles for which labour and our party have stood from our earliest days, the notion that communities are better served, are more stable, are more human places in which to live and work if they have some measure of control over their own economic decision making.

So the history out of which labour-sponsored investment comes is a proud history of which our party has had a proud part. We were very pleased when the government opposite supported the Crocus Fund initiative in Manitoba and underwrote Crocus's initial development with a secure line of credit. That enabled Crocus to develop the most rapidly growing base of capital of all venture-capital labour-sponsored funds in Canada. Crocus went from a stop position from its initial year, and in only four years it has reached capitalization of over $60 million in Manitoba investors' money and has a record of successful investments in Manitoba enterprises. The unit value of its shares has increased by an amount of approximately 15 percent since inception. While not a particularly sterling record of increase in investment value, that was never the purpose of labour-sponsored funds. Labour-sponsored funds were to stabilize employment, to offer new employment opportunities, and to work, as I have said, at community economic development.

So, Madam Speaker, I think the starting point of debate on this legislation has to be the purpose of labour-sponsored funds. Last week we passed through the bill that followed this one, Bill 40, which made some amendments to the Crocus act, amendments that were made with the consent and involvement of the Crocus Fund and its officers, and which will strengthen and adapt the Crocus Fund to be effective in the new situation in which it will find itself, should this Bill 39 pass and become law.

So beginning from the notion that labour-sponsored investment funds are essentially collective efforts on the part of the residents of a jurisdiction, whether it is a town, a city or a province, to mitigate the effects of large corporate decisions to remove investment from a community, first; and second, to provide opportunities to new investments and investors from that jurisdiction to invest and to create employment and to make that community a stronger economic as well as a stronger social community. But beginning from that premise, Madam Speaker, let us look at what good labour-sponsored funds do and Crocus is a good fund.

Good funds use a very solid investment screening process. They look at how the proposed investment would affect our environment, and they screen out anything that would have a negative impact on the environment. They look for employment policies that contain employment equity, equal opportunity for people of equal ability regardless of their gender, their race, their cultural heritage and other factors. They look for the opportunity for employee groups to become owners in the new company or the new enterprise. They look for some process by which the employees become integral to the company in which investment is going to be made. They look for solid pensions and fair benefits. They look for at least those things in screening investments. They look for participation of workers in the management of the company. They look for workers councils or for workers seats on boards of directors. In other words, they follow what might broadly be called a European model of economic development, rather than a North American model. So, Madam Speaker, those are the kinds of criteria a good labour-sponsored fund employs in making its investment decisions. It is not easy to find sound investments, but Crocus has done very well in this regard, and its track record speaks for itself.

Now Bill 39, the bill before us, seeks to put in place in Manitoba the opportunity for many more funds, many more labour-sponsored funds, to begin to operate in this province. In and of itself, neither Crocus nor our party oppose the notion that there should be more such funds operating in Manitoba, but there are serious problems with this bill. For example, the definition of a labour-sponsored fund or an enterprise, an employee enterprise in the case of this bill, allows what might be called the rent-a-union approach to venture capital in which a venture capital fund--a group of venture capitalists with money to invest--could go to any employee organization no matter how small or how large and say we have some money, we would like to invest it and we would like to get tax credits from your province, because that will encourage more people to put in more money. So loan us your sponsorship, rent us your name, and we will give you some kinds of offsetting benefits whether it is some employment for a few people or simply a good name in the community. So the definition of employee organization in this act is so broad that any employee organization, whether it is a trade union or whether it is even a true employment union within a company--that is, a company union--anything, no matter how small or how large, would qualify as an employee organization.

So that opens up the problem that Ontario has faced in which there are some 20 labour-sponsored funds, so-called, in operation. Many of them are simply venture capital corporations being sheltered under the aegis of a willing employee organization loosely defined. They may have good investment criteria. They may have lousy investment criteria. They may make wise choices or poor choices, but they are not in any meaningful sense of the word a labour-sponsored investment fund, Madam Speaker.

They did not come into being to do community economic development. They did not come into being to sustain high quality jobs. They did not come into being to operate responsibly within our environment. They did not come into being for good pensions or worker benefits. They did not come into being to turn over the investments they might make progressively to those who work in those settings.

We do not think it is a very good idea to have such funds operating in Manitoba, Madam Speaker. In particular, we do not think it is a very good idea for this province to spend tax dollars giving investors a break in corporations which under one of the other sections of this act need not have any level of investment in Manitoba. In fact, in that particular section, all it requires is that 50 percent of the employment be within Canada. It does not require any of it to be in Manitoba. It simply says, and a prescribed amount, which means prescribed in regulation. So there might be some, there might be none, and there is nothing that suggests that the regulation would be the same for one company as for the other.

Madam Speaker, what that really means is that Manitobans would be giving out a tax preference in the form of a tax credit for an RRSP investment to companies which might not even be headquartered here. They might not have more than a token number of Manitoba employees. They might not do business in Manitoba, but they would get tax credits in Manitoba. We do not think that is a very good idea. We think that it would be better to have a strong fund based in Manitoba that has the kind of investment screens that Crocus has developed and has that kind of quality of investment approach maintained by the Crocus Fund.

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Madam Speaker, another problem that this act opens up is incredibly cheap registration for new funds. Apparently, under this act, it would be possible to seek incorporation with only $25,000 in capital. Now, why would one set a threshold as low as that when this government recognized that it needed at least $2 million in a guaranteed line of credit to start up the Crocus Fund? Crocus took a while to get going. In fact, in the early days, it was criticized because it did not make investments quickly enough. Since that time, investment levels have picked up, but Crocus did not make its first investment until it had almost $10 million in capital on hand, because to make wise investments takes a fair amount of time, particularly if you have high ethical and investment standards, as Crocus does. So why would we allow a new fund to come into Manitoba with only $25,000 in capital to get registered? I do not think there are very many companies which would try to start business with that amount of capital let alone venture capital funds. So we have some problems with that.

Contrast the approach that the Province of Quebec is taking to labour-sponsored investment funds in which the province of Quebec has decided that it will now establish nine regional funds under the overall aegis of their one labour-sponsored fund, which means that they are going to have the kind of regional community economic development initiatives that we think are so important. So, by analogy, Quebec is going to set up a structure which in Manitoba might look like a fund based in the province as a whole but with regional offices in Parklands and Norman and Eastman and Westman and Winnipeg, et cetera, so that the initiatives and particular priorities of those regions could come before a regional board for investment choice and decision.

That is not what is proposed in this act, Madam Speaker. This act proposes essentially open season, rent-a-fund, rent-a-union approaches to labour-sponsored investment. Unfortunately, that is also a recipe for hemorrhaging tax losses to investors who take advantage of this new broad definition and invest in whatever funds set up business here and get registered here, heedless perhaps of whether those funds actually invest in useful, environmentally sustainable, employee-supportive ventures.

So, for all of these reasons, Madam Speaker, while we have no problem with the notion of having some level of competition in this province, we think there are serious problems with Bill 39, and that it needs much more serious and detailed consideration and amendment before it is passed into law. Thank you.

Ms. Becky Barrett (Wellington): I move, seconded by the member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak), that debate be adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 47 (The Adoption and Consequential Amendments Act; Loi sur l'adoption et modifications corrélatives), on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Family Services (Mrs. Mitchelson), standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona (Mr. Reid).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing? [agreed]

Mr. Doug Martindale (Burrows): Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak on The Adoption Act, and I have also listened as the minister spoke on second reading debate on Bill 47.

The purpose of this bill, as the minister has said, is mainly to separate adoptions from The Child and Family Services Act and, I think, to separate in people's mind the difference between adoptions and child welfare or child protection. I think that is a good purpose for having a separate bill.

It is quite a lengthy bill, and I do not intend to comment on all of the 70 pages. In fact, I do not need to because one of the things that this minister has also done is to take many of the existing provisions in The Child and Family Services Act and put them into the new Adoptions Act.

I would also like to thank the minister for sending two staff to brief my colleague from The Maples and myself and one of our research assistants, and to give us some explanatory notes, which are quite interesting and helpful because they identify the places in the bill where there have been changes, so it made it very easy to critique the bill.

Of course, as I said, the first major change that was made was to proceed with separate adoption legislation. In my mind, there are really only two major changes. Some people might think there were lots of major changes, but I would only like to separate two and talk about two. One of those is that not-for-profit agencies will be allowed to provide adoption based on a fee-for-service model, and the second major change that I see is that the post-adoption registry will become fully active.

My concerns about the bill centre around those two items as well. The first, being the not-for-profit model of delivering adoption services, gives us a number of concerns. First of all, I see this as offloading to the not-for-profit sector. What it is that I think is going to be offloaded--and the minister will certainly have the chance to correct this impression at the committee stage or on third reading--is that these agencies are going to get the children that are the easiest to adopt.

From talking to front-line workers in Winnipeg Child and Family Services, it is my understanding that these children are already adopted fairly quickly already, and probably that will not change. If a child is healthy and is not a special needs child in any way, they will continue to be very quickly adopted. The Child and Family Services agencies will probably continue to have the bulk of children who might be described as not so easily adopted or even adoptable, including many special needs children.

As we know, there are more and more children being born with fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effect. Parents do not always want to adopt these children because they require so much more in terms of parenting and many more resources. Frequently, parents do not feel that they have the resources or the resourcefulness in order to handle that kind of adoption. So it would seem to me that those children will continue to be part of the Child and Family Services system and will not end up in the not-for-profit sector.

The other concern that we have is the fee for service. We do not know how much it is. We are being told that it is on ability to pay, but I wonder what that does to poor families who are trying to adopt. I do not know. I will get a chance to ask the minister in clause by clause. How much will the maximum be, and will this benefit rich parents who want to adopt and discriminate against poor children who want to adopt? I look forward to being able to ask the minister questions about that in the committee stage.

Another concern that I have is about the home study which must take place before a child is adopted. If we have a number of not-for-profit agencies out there in the community, would parents who failed the home study for one organization be able to shop around and find another agency who might give them a passing grade? For some reason, they might be accepted by another agency. So that is one of the questions that I have that I look forward to the minister answering for me. I think that this might, of course, benefit those who had the ability to pay, those who could afford to go to more than one not-for-profit adoption agency, but I do not know. We will find out in the committee stage in due course.

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The other major change that I have identified in this bill is the post-adoption registry. This has been a very interesting learning experience for me, because I attended two meetings of post-adoption Links. I also had a constituent come to me for assistance in finding a birth daughter who was adopted out many, many years ago. When I first went to the Links meeting, I really had no familiarity at all with adoptions. Quite frankly, I was not terribly sympathetic to what I thought they were trying to do, but during the course of the first meeting that I attended, people went around the circle and everybody told their story. The stories were amazing because of their poignancy, because many people in the room either were still looking and had been looking for many years, and those stories were poignant, or they had found a birth parent or a birth child, and those stories were equally poignant.

So my view has changed. I became quite sympathetic to their lobbying efforts in that they want totally open information. However, I think there are advantages and disadvantages. Certainly the review committee struggled with this. I am sure that the minister and people in her department struggled with this. What I think they have done in this bill is to strike a compromise, so that, for example, if I can look at the minister's media backgrounder, which is quite helpful and I thank her for that as well, we know that the post-adoption registry will become fully active, allowing for searches on behalf of all members of the adoption triad and siblings.

I believe that this is true for adoptions starting now and going into the future. I guess I do not understand what fully active means, but my understanding from talking to people in post-adoption Links is that there is a gap, there are a number of years whereby the information is still kept confidential. I believe that is covered in the bill. What they are looking for is the B.C. model where all the information is open and available unless somebody puts in a veto. The veto, I believe, is part of this bill, that if people, starting from the time the bill is proclaimed, want a veto on access, they can do that, but all the people who had adoptions in the past will continue to have that information kept confidential.

I guess the exception to that is, and I am sort of talking off the top of my head here because I am going by memory, is that if somebody is searching, the adoption registry is fully active in the sense that they will contact people and ask them if they want contact. So, in that sense, it is fully active and open, and I think that is a suitable compromise as well.

Now it is going to be very interesting and very difficult for the minister and for us as critics at the committee stage of the bill, because certainly we are going to have people from post-adoption Links, and we are going to have individuals coming out and telling their stories, some of whom have what they would consider happy and successful stories where they did make contact and they want that available for everyone. We are going to have people who are trying to make contact and cannot find a birth parent or a birth child and asking the minister to make the information totally accessible and open.

We will not hear at committee from birth parents who might have had a child born 20 or 30 or 40 years ago coming out and saying keep it closed, we understood that it was confidential, we do not want you to change it, because those people are going to continue to have concerns about confidentiality, and so they will not go public. They will not come out and tell us their views. So we are really only getting lobbied from one side. We are not hearing both sides, and I think the minister has taken that into consideration, and obviously that is the compromise that is in the bill.

Of course, we will listen very carefully to all the presenters, and maybe the government and maybe the minister will be convinced that there should be more openness but I doubt it. We have a majority government. Usually, when they introduce a bill, they stick to it through all the stages until it is passed and very seldom are there amendments, although there have been some sessions when there were some very interesting amendments and some very interesting processes. I think the member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak) was the Justice critic when one night in committee we had 200 or 300 police officers and their spouses, and while people were presenting at the committee, the minister was out in the hallway--I believe now the current government House leader--negotiating with the police association. Within several hours, the minister had successfully negotiated some amendments, and that precluded hundreds of people from presenting.

That does not happen very often around here and I do not think it will happen with this bill, so I do not anticipate there will be major changes. I mean, we know that this government does not listen to the public even when there are, like, 289 presenters on the sale of the Manitoba Telephone System. There was only one or two who were in favour, and the government still ignored public opinion and did not make any amendments to their bill. [interjection] Well, they made amendments I think to the pension provisions, but they probably had to do that. Otherwise, the bill never would have got out of committee. We would still be debating the--[interjection] Well, I do not know about that either, given the kind of closure that this government used, but we should not rehash ancient history here. I think we have rehashed it enough times already in this Chamber.

There are also a number of other things that have been changed in this bill which may be significant but I think are more of a minor nature. The minister has pointed out in the briefing notes that not only did she and her department listen to the people who presented at the review committee hearings, but people who have expressed concerns since 1986 since The Child and Family Services Act was introduced, that someone has been keeping track of complaints about the adoption part of the bill, and some of those changes have been brought in as well.

Private practitioners will be licensed to conduct adoption assessments providing they work under contract to an existing agency or a licensed not-for-profit adoption agency, and although we are opposed to the not-for-profit sector, I think it is a good thing that they work under the guidance of an existing agency. Now it will be interesting to know if those people are going to have to have any qualifications, and certainly this ties in with a note that I have about administrative issues which says a committee will be established to consider the issue of standards for Child and Family Services workers, including possible regulatory frameworks and certification programs.

So we know that has been an ongoing issue with people in the social work profession, both those people who are in favour of a regulatory body and those who are opposed to a regulatory body. I also got lobbied on that issue, in fact, by one of the minister's staff who is on the executive or was on the executive of the social work association for Manitoba.

Once again, this minister has shown her interest in compromise and has appointed a committee or will appoint a committee, so that kind of stretches the process out. You know, you wait until the session is over, and then you think about who you might appoint to the committee and then you appoint the committee. They have public hearings, and that takes up to a year, and then they submit a report to the minister, and the minister thinks about it, and then you may or may not introduce legislation. If you introduce legislation, that takes another year, so we have prolonged the final decision about a regulatory body, and certainly that decision is not an easy one for any government or for any political party because there are pros and cons about having the social work practice regulated.

I am not sure that even with a social worker in our caucus whether we have a caucus position on that one. It is something that we have discussed, and I guess we will discuss again. When the minister brings in legislation, we will have to make up our minds about--[interjection] Licensing, I am talking about, yes, of the social work profession. The member for Wellington (Ms. Barrett) is quite aware of the controversy of this particular issue. But eventually it has to be addressed, and it looks like the minister will be addressed. I am pleased to see that she did not use a word like "soon" in this background here so that we will not expect that this will happen tomorrow. As I have said, it will probably stretch out over a number of years, which is understandable.

So I would be interested in knowing what the qualifications are for people who are the private practitioners who will be licensed to conduct adoption assessments, and hopefully they will be people who will have some professional training, who will be social workers, so that we know that at least they have met some academic standards.

The briefing notes say that the confidentiality of existing adoption records will be maintained, and I have already commented on that.

Another change is that minor birth parents will be able to consent to the private adoption of a child through a licensed, not-for-profit adoption agency.

The waiting period for adoption consent will be reduced from 10 days to 48 hours after the birth of a child. The time period for withdrawal of consent will be reduced from anytime prior to the order of adoption to a period of 21 days following the giving of consent. The time period for private-adoption parents to be able to apply for an order of adoption will be reduced from no earlier than six months and no later than 12 months to no earlier than 30 days and no later than six months from the date of placement of a child with the adoptive parents.

Adoptive parents will be required to pay a fee for service on a sliding scale based on their income level for adoption assessments conducted by existing agencies and not-for-profit adoption agencies, which I have already commented on. A concerted effort will be made to ensure consistent application of adoption subsidy provisions throughout the province.

I think I have covered the two major issues that we have concerns about and I have read into the record all the other minor changes in this bill. Our concerns about it will be recorded at a later date, but certainly the committee stage of this bill is going to be very interesting because there will be a number of presenters. I do not know how many have registered, but I have spoken to some of the people who have already registered, and I know what they are going to say, and I know what they are going to ask the minister to do. The minister is certainly aware that post-adoption Links has done a lot of research and that they have obtained legislation from other countries, as well as other provinces, and they will certainly be recommending some of those models, especially the B.C. model. They will probably have the wording and everything and be prepared to give it to the minister, but I am quite sure that it is not going to happen with this piece of legislation.

With those few remarks, I am going to let one of my colleagues speak on this bill because I think we need more than one speaker on this bill because it is important legislation. We will be getting it to committee. I think the people who want to present are aware that it has been introduced and have registered and are registering, so they will be ready when we are ready to send it to committee, which will probably be within the next week or so. Thank you.

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Ms. Becky Barrett (Wellington): Madam Speaker, I would like to put a few comments on the record about Bill 47 in three areas, not necessarily the three areas that others might pick to talk about, but the first one I would like to talk about is the change of the waiting period for signing of a surrender to 48 hours instead of 10 days.

I would like to commend the minister on this particular part of the legislation because, as an adoptive parent myself, whose son was six weeks old when we adopted him, I can attest from first-hand experience to the problems that you can experience as a child and as a family when there is a long delay between the time the child is born and the time they are placed with the family that hopefully will be their family for the rest of their life.

When my son was adopted 27 years ago he was six weeks when we received him, when we first had him, and nobody then thought this was a long time. Babies were babies and as long as he was well taken care of and was nurtured and given his food and that kind of thing, that was okay.

It was not long after that that research started to show, no, no, no, babies need bonding very, very quickly, and they showed that mothers, birth mothers, who for one reason or another could not physically bond with their child right after birth sometimes had problems with the connection there, that there is a physiological imperative that needs to be addressed. Then the process is moved to shorter and shorter time periods, and I think the movement from 10 days to 48 hours is a welcome one and maybe, I do not know that you can get it any shorter than 48 hours, but there is a recognition there on the part of the legislation that this is a critical time period, and I appreciate that. I think there are a lot of problems with this bill, but this one particular aspect of it I would, as an adoptive mother myself, appreciate that particular element.

The second area that I would like to talk about a little bit is the post-adoption registry, which was, according to the minister's comments, established in 1981 and has been changed to a semiactive one and will become more active if this legislation is passed. The concern that I have, and I do not have the details, but I remember hearing people talk about this, and I think that probably the situation is the same if is not worse than it was when I was talking with people, is that there is an enormously long waiting list. It is huge. It is years and years and years.

So no matter how open the post-adoption registry becomes, it is really on paper, as long as there are not resources there to facilitate the process, however open the process is, then it does not matter really, because if you go in and say, I want to find my birth mother, or your birth mother wants to find her child, you have made an enormous commitment here.

This is a huge decision that you have reached, and to wait for years after that decision has been made by you to even begin the process or to carry it through to fruition or to closure of some sort or another is really verging on unconscionable, and I am not for a moment suggesting that the previous government or the previous government before that or the previous government before that, which was our government, because this government has been the previous government and the previous government before that, that it has never been adequately staffed.

I would alert the minister to pay very careful attention to this post-adoption registry because, however open it is going to be, it cannot be truly open unless there are people on staff, resources available to enable that process to go through expeditiously. It is essential that that happen, and, unfortunately, I think our experience with this government and the previous government and the previous government has been that the language in the press releases and the language in debate in the House and the language in the committee is one thing, but the actual putting of resources to implement that language and the theory and the philosophy and the principles in legislation has been sadly lacking.

I think nowhere has that been more in evidence than in the entire Department of Family Services. The ministers have always trotted out how much more money goes into the services provided by the Department of Family Services and the vast majority of that additional funding is additional funding for the statutory requirements of welfare, of social assistance. It has not been to provide more services to expedite the vital work of the Department of Family Services. So, again, I would like to alert the minister to this. The post-adoption registry, in order to be effective, has to be resourced with staff and money to enable that unconscionable waiting list to be reduced.

I would like to next talk about the whole process of privatizing or taking away from the role of government the adoption process or a portion of the adoption process. This is an area that I have a great deal of trouble with this whole legislation. The minister is talking about the fact that we must clearly distinguish between the matter of adoptions and the matter of child abuse and protection.

I think that, yes, the whole process of adoption should be one that has as its end a positive outcome. A birth mother who makes a very serious decision to put her child up for adoption and adoptive parents who make an equally serious decision that they want to adopt a child, it is a very complicated, emotional process that needs to be looked at to make it as easy for everybody as possible. There is no question about that.

However, and in the minister's comments, I have not seen why you need to go outside the government provision of this service in order to have it more effective. In her words, I do not see that linkage there, and that only leads me to conclude--and if I am erroneous in my conclusion, I am sure the minister will elucidate me on this matter, but I can only conclude that as with virtually every other aspect of services for people in Manitoba, the government is convinced that the private sector, the nongovernmental sector can provide services better, more efficiently and more cost-effectively than can the public service. I think that it has been proven time and time again that that is not the case; that what the government is doing, I would venture to say, in this piece of legislation, as they have done in so many other pieces of legislation, is to downsize the role of government. I guess my stand here is that there are some things that we as a society are responsible for if we want to have a community.

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I think an active government can provide many of those things that allow us to act as a caring community. Child protection, yes, no question about that, and the government has not said, at least not in this piece of legislation, that they are not continuing to provide at least the bare minimum of child protection services, although with their changes to the definitions of children at risk, and the reduction, in effect, of resources over the last almost nine years, they have, in effect, changed the definition, so that fewer and fewer children can take advantage of or have access to the services that the government provides. However, there still is a recognition on the part of the government that for child protection services, the government is responsible for providing that and pretty much in the realm of social assistance.

I do not understand why the government should not continue to have responsibility for adoption services. I do not understand why there is a need--and the minister states in her comments, and I quote: Consultation processes revealed that there is a need for private practitioners to undertake the required assessments in order to shorten the processing period.

Maybe I have answered my own question here in this one sentence. Two parts to this sentence--in order to shorten the processing period. No one will deny that the processing period for adoption is way too long. It takes far too long for the system to work itself through, but the government is saying in this sentence that only private practitioners can do this processing in a shorter time period. I do not know where the minister gets this information or gets this idea, but I do not think that it is necessarily a given that private, not-for-profit groups can do any better a job than adequately resourced, trained professional social workers under the government department. Nothing has been proven to my satisfaction to show that this is the case.

I am not for a moment trying to denigrate nonprofit organizations. That is not my role here. I am saying that the government has a basic role to play, and it is a role in much more than just regulation or overseeing the broad child welfare. I think that government has to be directly involved with the adoption process, as they are with the rest of the processes, in the Child and Family Services legislation. If you want to make a delineation between the child protection element and the adoption element, you can do that, but you do not need to take adoption out of the government department. The other thing is that they have split, the government has split, again, which children will be placed for adoption through the not-for-profit, fee-for-service private practitioners and which will not. Children that are permanent wards of Child and Family Service agencies will remain under the government aegis.

I do not understand why only some children will be adopted through the government and other children will not. It would appear to me as though a certain element of creaming might be underway here or as a result of this piece of legislation; clearly, two separate categories. There is no reason for it, and there is no rationalization for it except for the ideology that less government is better government which is the mantra of this particular government.

The member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale) touched on another concern and that is the staffing and the training of people. I am a trained social worker, have not done a whole lot of direct practice, but I know many good, solid, committed social workers in the Department of Family Services. Social workers who are losing their faith, I must say, in many cases in the system because of the increased workloads, because of the critical nature of the children that they are seeing, because of their lack of ability to make effective interventions for these children and their families, because they are not allowed to do prevention work, they come in at the very crisis tail end of the situation.

I think in the case of adoptions that the government-hired and government-employed social workers are more than capable of continuing to do the adoption processing and working with the post-adoption registry, if they have the resources made available to them. Now, what the government is doing by putting it on a fee-for-service is they are reducing their own costs by taking this part of the adoption process out of the government. They are reducing their costs, at the same time, they are attaching a fee to families for going through the adoption process.

But there will not be fees, I assume, for adoptions that are carried out with children as permanent wards of Child and Family Service agencies, children who are by the very nature of their age, their situations the most difficult to adopt. But for parents who have money, even on a sliding scale, there are some families that probably will not have the kind of money that will be required to go to the fee-for-service agencies. Again, I would like to say that to my thinking, and I think my caucus colleagues share this concern, the minister and the government have not shown one bit of real legitimate reason for taking out of the government-provided service one portion of the children placed for adoption.

As I said, there is one very good part of this legislation, the reduction to 48 hours of adoption consent. That is an excellent situation, but I think that there are some major concerns. The member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale) touched on one that is going to be critical for all of us when we discuss this legislation, and that is the openness of the post-adoption registry process. There are good and legitimate concerns on both sides of this particular issue.

I think perhaps the wisdom of Solomon would be useful in this situation, and I will again echo my colleague's statement that the presentations by their very nature will be one-sided here because families, mothers, adoptees, people who want to retain their anonymity are, by definition, not going to come to, or make presentation to, the public hearing.

So I think that, when we get to committee on this bill, we have to acknowledge that fact that, unlike the public hearings on the MTS bill, when virtually every single person, with two exceptions, was opposed to this piece of legislation--and that, I believe, was a real expression of the public concern in the province--this bill will not be balanced in the presentations. I think it is incumbent upon us as legislators to balance that on their behalf when we get to that part of the legislation.

There are some major concerns with the legislation in my mind, and although it is outside of the scope of the legislation, I have not seen anything in the last seven years or anything in the last nine years of this government that will make me convinced that there will be enough resources to deal with the implications of this piece of legislation. So I am hoping that the minister will be able to assure me on that regard, but words are cheap and responsibility often does not come cheaply.

Madam Speaker: As previously agreed, this bill will remain standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona (Mr. Reid).

Hon. James McCrae (Government House Leader): May I talk for a few seconds?

Madam Speaker: Does the honourable government House leader have leave not to see the clock for a few seconds? [agreed]

Mr. McCrae: Madam Speaker, I wish to announce that in addition to the bills already scheduled for consideration by the Agriculture committee tonight at 7:30, which are Bills 18, 57, 31 and 54, the committee will also consider Bill 37.

Madam Speaker: Bill 37 will also be added to the bills to be considered in the Standing Committee of Agriculture this evening at 7:30 p.m.

Mr. Edward Helwer (Gimli): Madam Speaker, I move, seconded by the member for Pembina (Mr. Dyck), that the composition of the Standing Committee on Agriculture be amended as follows: the member for Morris (Mr. Pitura) for the member for Steinbach (Mr. Driedger).

Motion agreed to.

Madam Speaker: The hour being 6 p.m., this House is recessed and will reconvene at 7:30 p.m. this evening.