Hon. James McCrae (Government House Leader): Madam Speaker, I would like to ask that Bill 38, which had been referred to the Law Amendments committee for--did we pull it already? [interjection] We never referred it, okay. I think we can just strike that.

I think there might be a disposition to waive private members' hour today.

Madam Speaker: Is there leave to waive private members' hour today? [agreed]

Mr. McCrae: Madam Speaker, would you be so kind as to call the bills for second reading debate as listed on page 4 of today's Order Paper?

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Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 11 (The Northern Affairs Amendment Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur les Affaires du Nord), on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Northern and Native Affairs (Mr. Newman), standing in the name of the honourable member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale).

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 12 (The Manitoba Water Services Board Amendment Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur la Commission des services d'approvisionnement en eau du Manitoba), on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Rural Development (Mr. Derkach), standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona (Mr. Reid).

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 15 (The Government Essential Services Amendment Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur les services gouvernementaux essentiels), on the proposed motion of the Minister Labour (Mr. Gilleshammer), standing in the name of the honourable member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing?

An Honourable Member: No.

Madam Speaker: Leave has been denied.

Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): Madam Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak on Bill 16--

An Honourable Member: You have got the wrong one.

Ms. Friesen: I thought it was not there yet.

Madam Speaker: Order, please. Is there leave to revert to Bill 15? [agreed]

Leave has also been granted to permit Bill 15 to remain standing in the name of the honourable member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale).

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Education and Training (Mrs. McIntosh), Bill 16 (The Council on Post-Secondary Education Amendment Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur le Conseil de l'enseignement postsecondaire), standing in the name of the honourable member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing?

An Honourable Member: No.

Madam Speaker: Leave has been denied.

Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): Madam Speaker, I am glad to be able to speak on Bill 16, the post-secondary education bill of this session, and I note with interest the minister's speech on this. When the minister spoke on this, she talked about the importance of articulation, and that is the linking of post-secondary institutions across the province. This was one of the recommendations of the Roblin committee and one of the purposes, not the only one but one of the purposes of the committee on the post-secondary education council which this government has finally established.

I was interested, Madam Speaker, to see the minister's emphasis upon the articulation of an entire post-secondary system and the desirability of bringing in independent colleges, which she names in her speech but not in the act, of bringing in these independent colleges into the realm, or at least the partial realm, of the Council on Post-Secondary Education.

It is always interesting to hear the minister talk about articulation, because it is something that we have supported, we have urged, we have argued that the government should have moved with all speed on this as other provinces have been doing, particularly British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, where the system of post-secondary education is the most well linked, and in economic terms it has served those provinces well.

But what is the characteristic of this government has been the delay in the linking of post-secondary education. A minister who wants to talk about articulation in 1997 might well have been expected to have acted in 1988, '89, 1990 and all the years between 1990 and 1997, but this government, of course, has been characterized by its desire and its choice to limit its action in post-secondary education. It has dragged its heels, and it has been extremely slow in moving on any kind of planning in post-secondary education. All of the institutions have suffered because of it, because over the period, from 1988 to 1997, there have been enormous changes in post-secondary education. Some of those have been as a result of the development of new forms of communication. Some of them have been as a result of the changes in the kinds of students who have increasingly been able to take advantage of post-secondary education. Some of it has been as a result of the decisions by successive federal governments, both Conservative and Liberal, to withdraw from the national redistribution which had characterized post-secondary education in Canada since 1945--so in economic terms, in social terms and in terms of technology, enormous changes in those years.

Yet these were the years of the government of Premier Filmon, the years in which this government chose to do nothing other than review and delay articulation in post-secondary education. In all those years from 1988 to 1997, they have achieved two things. They have, first of all, produced a manual which describes for students the linkages that may already be achieved through various agreements between institutions, and that is a good thing. It is a good thing to lay them out for students. It is a good thing for them to have them in one place. It may, indeed, be a good thing because it will encourage others to think of ways in which departments and programs can be linked across the system.

So I commend the government for that, but I do find it a bit thick that a government who wants to talk about their activities and articulation and linking of post-secondary education institutions has been able to achieve so little in the years of its mandate, and as its mandate comes to a close, I do not think that we will be looking at post-secondary education as one of the achievements of this particular government. There certainly will be a pile of paper. It is like their urban aboriginal strategy. There will be a great pile of paper which we can look at and which future historians will be able to examine, but, in fact, what actually happened is very, very limited.

The government, Madam Speaker, as we all know, got through one election by promising the Roblin commission. It delayed then by two years the appointment of the commission. The commission then took longer, as is often natural, to achieve the kind of report that it felt it needed to deliver. Then that report, the government sat upon it for several more months, and finally they appointed after many, many delays an interim transition committee. After increasing delays, the interim transition committee then developed secret reports on student financing and legislation which was very hotly debated and very hotly contested in the Legislature last session. It was not a committee, in my view, which was representative of Manitoba, nor was it a committee which chose to compensate for that lack of representativeness by consulting very widely. So we got a much flawed bill last time which, as a result of enormous pressure by many groups across the province, the minister had to revise and revise and revise.

So the government, its record on articulation, I think, bears examination very carefully, and I hope that future students of this will do so. A dismal record, in my view, Madam Speaker, of constant delay, of constant promises and very little to show for it at a time when post-secondary education, in fact, called out for planning, called out for co-ordination, and it called out for substantial and appropriate funding that had strong public support. I do not see that the government, in fact, has made any advances on any of those fronts.

However, the government is now offering us a further addition to the Council on Post-Secondary Education, and this is in the form of another version of an amendment that the minister tried to introduce in the midst of the hearings on Bill 32 last time. What the minister wants to do is to enable the Lieutenant Governor in Council--that is, the cabinet--to designate post-secondary institutions to come under this granting commission, and in so doing the minister specifically intends these institutions to be outside the normal accountability provisions, the normal planning provisions, the normal provisions for review and for designation by specialization of the other institutions which come under the post-secondary education council. So, just like the minister's amendment last year, which was ruled quite appropriately out of scope, what this bill will do is to create two classes of institutions--those which are accorded by the minister a public status; that is, the three colleges and the three universities, although in fact there are reasons to consider universities as they have in the past as semipublic bodies and, to some extent, now that the colleges have their own governing bodies, they too are far less directly tied to government.

Both sets of institutions are no longer entirely provided for--if the universities indeed ever were--by public funds. Increasingly, they are going to private funding, fundraising, reliance upon student fees, another form of private fundraising. The nature of their programs will in the long run be affected by their ability to raise those kinds of private funds.

However, the minister has, through her legislation, essentially designated one group of institutions as public institutions, the three colleges and three universities, which will come under the post-secondary education council for all forms of accountability. There are quite new and extensive powers in Bill 32, which will require universities and colleges to develop policies in conjunction with a post-secondary education council for specialization for review and evaluation. My sense is that they are going to be asked, as they have in Alberta, to provide particular forms of review of accountability in all aspects of universities.

What the minister is trying to do with Bill 16 is to introduce a different type of institution. She calls them independent colleges in her speech. In her speech, she refers to six specific institutions. These are areas that give me cause for concern because the bill itself does not list those six specific institutions. We would have to take upon faith that the minister intended only to designate as the second class of institutions--I do not mean second class in a hierarchial sense but as a different type of institution--that the minister intends to designate only those six colleges of which she speaks in her speech.

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When this goes to committee, Madam Speaker, I would like to discuss with the minister how we can ensure that the six colleges she discusses in the speech will be those which are designated and only those which are designated under this bill, because Bill 16, as we look at it, gives very wide powers to the Lieutenant Governor in Council to designate any institution as a post-secondary institution and to enable the post-secondary education council to distribute monies to that institution and to require from them a limited form of accountability. So that blanket kind of ability for the Lieutenant Governor is something which gives us serious cause for concern.

I want to point out a number of things. Bill 16 does in fact go further than the minister's amendment of last session did. When the minister brought her amendment into the committee last year, I was concerned whether or not it was in scope or not, and eventually the Chair quite rightly ruled that it was out of scope. I think it was out of scope from my perspective because it did create two different types of institutions, and it was doing so after second reading. So it was appropriate that it be ruled out of scope and that we, as the minister quite appropriately has done, has now brought that in a second bill. We are having the formal discussion of that, which I think is required. The public has had advance notice of this, that this is the government's intent.

The bill that the minister is presenting is also different from the resolution in that it does require some accountability. At committee last time, when there was some discussion on this, I raised the issue that these institutions which the minister was proposing in an amendment were not being required to have any accountability to the post-secondary eduction council. So I am pleased, very pleased that the minister has introduced some elements, a limited form of accountability, a different form of accountability than is being required from those institutions, the three colleges and three universities, which are considered generally more public institutions.

The kind of accountability that is going to be required is the requirement, first of all, to answer questions, any questions that the council requests. So the council may request information. The council may request information about budgets, about programming. I assume they may also request information about courses and about programs and about criteria. So that ability of the council to request that information I think is a useful one if the minister's goal is articulation, if it is linking into a broader system. That was not there in the amendment that she brought, the out-of-scope amendment, last year. So I think perhaps our concerns have been listened to, and I am glad to see them.

It is also my sense, in speaking to the representative of the independent colleges who spoke that evening at committee, that the kinds of proposals that the minister is making in Bill 16 would be acceptable to that group. The provision of a financial--not of a budget but a provision of a summary financial statement, an audited financial statement, and the ability of the council to request information I think would meet some of the needs that they would like to see. My sense is then that the minister did listen and has provided some elements of accountability.

The second point that I would like to mention and that I will be raising questions with the minister is that the independent colleges that she names are, of course, all Bible colleges. They are colleges which have in the past received money for academic courses. Now neither the bill nor the minister's statement gives us an assurance that the funding of those colleges through the post-secondary education council will be limited to academic courses. My understanding is that common sense would indicate that that would be the preference of Manitobans, that Manitobans would be prepared to fund the academic courses but would draw the line at funding particular religious denominations. I think those principles are there in the post-secondary education council insofar as they deal with St. John's College, St. Paul's College and St. Andrew's College, the affiliated denominational colleges with the University of Manitoba. So my expectation, Madam Speaker, is that those principles will be respected, but I would like the minister in committee to be able to devote some time to that and to give us that kind of assurance.

I notice also that the minister in her speech says that these colleges are affiliated with existing post-secondary institutions, and again I think we might want some specific confirmation of that in the committee. It is my understanding that not all of them are. The majority are but not all of them, and for funding by the post-secondary education council, I would like to see some discussion with the minister of whether or not that affiliation with the universities or colleges, which she so highly prizes in her speech, is something that is intended to be part of the general context of decision making for the post-secondary education council, because if there is to be articulation and if there is to be funding of the academic courses at the Bible colleges, then I think there must also be some sense that they are linked with degree- or diploma-granting institutions and that there is some element of comparability.

It is my understanding of the ones that I know, and I certainly do not know all of them, but of the ones that are affiliated with the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, the cross-referencing of courses, the cross-referencing of programs and of teachers is one that is done on a common basis. Now I am not sure if that is done with all of them, and it is something which I would like the minister to review and to give us some responses to in committee.

So, finally, Madam Speaker, I would like to express concern about the very blanket opportunity that this gives to the cabinet to designate any institution as a post-secondary institution. I think the fears in the community are that this opens up the funding of the post-secondary education council, and it is essentially the idea that there is one pie and that, the more people who come under the post-secondary education council, the smaller will be the portions that are divided up.

So it is an issue of funding, and if a blanket opportunity is given to the Lieutenant Governor in Council to designate any institution as a post-secondary one, not just the six which the minister speaks about in her speech, then the way is opened without any reference to the people, without any reference to this Legislature to the designation of private vocational schools, of driver training schools, of the whole range of schools which are designated by the minister for the purpose of student loans. It is a very broad range. It includes correspondence schools. It includes a wide variety of vocational activity.

If any institution is to come under the post-secondary education council, the assumption is that the pie will be divided in many more ways. It will be divided, if this is the case, amongst institutions over which the public have had no reflection, no ability to say that, yes, these are the people we want to be involved in articulation, this is the kind of range of post-secondary education institutions which we want to look at.

So the financial issue, I think, is an important one, and it is one that we shall look forward to discussing with the minister when this comes to committee, because I mentioned at the beginning the very big changes that we have seen in post-secondary education since this government came in in 1988. The amount of activity and time and energy that now has to be devoted by post-secondary institutions to raising money is enormous.

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Those people who were in charge of those institutions in 1988 I do not think would recognize the scale of activity which now goes on. Manitoba in many ways was late in that, and of course during the period from 1988 Manitoba lost many head offices. If we look down Broadway, for example, there are far fewer head offices here than there were 10, 15 years ago. When you have a head office such as Calgary does, such as Toronto does, such as Vancouver does, when you have a head office in your city, when they are hiring your graduates, you have a much better opportunity to make your case and to make the continuous partnerships which are required to ensure that post-secondary funding, private funding of universities and colleges is made on a continuing basis.

If you look at the activities of places like McGill, for example, which, of course, has a very long history of a private foundation, or the University of Toronto, or particularly the University of Calgary, you will see that such universities have an enormous advantage over places like Manitoba where the share of corporate capital, shall we say, and the share of head offices has been shrinking over the period of this government's incumbency. So we are a little late in the game. We are facing obstacles which I think other communities do not face.

We also have the additional difficulty, one shared by Saskatchewan, that our colleges have never had the share of student enrollment that we would like to see. I know that the government shares this concern as well. Certainly, former Premier Roblin did. It formed one of his major components of his recommendations, and that was an element of his report that we supported strongly. Expand the post-secondary enrollment in the colleges.

The government at one point looked as though it was set to make that kind of support necessary, but it was a very brief and very small attempt, to add two and a half million dollars to the colleges' funding, and of course it has diminished since then. Again this year, in a number of areas, we have seen the funding for the colleges diminish. It is very difficult under those conditions to see the doubling of enrollments that the government spoke of, to see the doubling of enrollments that Premier Roblin wanted to see and that we certainly on this side of the House also wanted to see.

So the colleges, as they have elsewhere across the country, even in places where they have been well established, where, for example, like Alberta or British Columbia, they have, over the past 15 or 20 years, taken 20 percent of the enrollments at the post-secondary level, a goal I think that we should be aiming for but from which we are very, very far at the moment. I do not even think we are up to 10 percent at the moment, and it is something that Roblin spoke about very eloquently and which the government has paid lip service to but which has really, in fact, moved in the opposite direction.

Colleges compared to universities have some advantages in raising private funds. They certainly are linked to particular workplaces quite closely, but they as a whole--and there has been a recent report on this at the national level--are well behind universities in establishing private fundraising. All colleges--and there are, of course, hundreds of them across Canada--have now moved in the last--I would say in the last five years into rather large emphasis upon private fundraising. They are, in many cases, many of them looking at the same pocket and they are increasingly competitive and finding it very, very difficult. So the funding issue of Bill 16, the funding elements of this I think are significant and should not be underestimated by the government.

Those institutions that we have now, three colleges and three universities, which are increasingly struggling under the cuts--and we saw again in Question Period today the implications of cuts at the University of Manitoba for the residency program in the Interlake for medicine. Those cuts are increasingly affecting all aspects of Manitoba's society and to offer a blanket opportunity to designate many other institutions, which we are not yet sure what the minister means. If she means the six that she says in her speech, that may be a different case than the very blanket opportunity that this particular bill offers.

I have to express in this House the concerns of those people involved in post-secondary education--whether it is staff or students, whether it is parents or families and the industries and the parts of Manitoba economy which depend upon the universities for the flow of graduates, for access to knowledge and for access to the universe, to the world of ideas that our colleges and universities provide--I have to express their concern that the addition of a very large number--if it is more than the six and if it is more than the academic courses that the minister has previously talked about, or the bible colleges--if it is a vast number, the potential for a vast number without public reference, then it is a cause for concern, and people have expressed that concern to me.

In conclusion, Madam Speaker, I want to express my concern at the concluding remarks of the minister. I am not surprised at them, but I am nevertheless shocked. She said our education system has produced the kinds of graduates that industry wants. It seems to me, for a Minister of Education, that is a very, very limited understanding of the place of post-secondary education. I would hope that a Minister of Education would have had a much broader understanding of the place that post-secondary education plays in the society and economy of Manitoba. I would hope that a Minister of Education would have had a much broader understanding of the needs of industry, not only in Manitoba but in Canada as well.

If we look, for example, at the new aerospace program, which has been established in part with the co-operation of this government--and I acknowledge that--in conjunction with Red River College. If you talk to, as I did, the instructors there and to the students who are going through those courses, what you saw was a demand and you saw, in fact, in very practical ways, the necessity of students who are flexible, students who can think quickly, students who are able to work in teams as well as having the individual initiative to take charge, to plan their work, to plan their work day as well as their careers, students who are adequately served in English, their ability to communicate not just to team members but to the variety of people that they must deal with in the course of their workday as well as in dealing with the technical English, the instructions that came as part of the workplace, and that is a very narrow framework for looking at exactly the same kinds of qualities and skills that people like Bill Gates, people like the heads of major corporations, Art Mauro, for example, have spoken of as the requirement for our education system. Yet the Minister of Education (Mrs. McIntosh) seems, in this, her major speech on post-secondary education in this session, to have what seems to me a very narrow understanding of the requirements of both industry and of the community in post-secondary education.

Post-secondary education, whether it is at the college or the university level, should be producing students who will be in demand by their country, by their province, by their families, by industry, by community work, by governments, by nonprofit agencies, by volunteer organizations. The minister, however, wants to see an education system which produces graduates for industry. It is a far, far narrower perspective than one would hope for the Education minister of a province of this scale.

We look for students from our post-secondary education institutions, Madam Speaker, who can think creatively, who are innovative, who can take responsibility and do so for themselves and for the planning of their own education. We want them to be able to think critically, to examine received wisdom, to ask for evidence, to look for the argument, to examine from all sides the arguments that they are being presented with, to be able to discern critically amongst the enormous mass of information which is now presented to them, whether it is on the Internet, whether it is in the vastly expanded output of books and textbooks. One of the major elements that we want from our institutions is to provide students with the ability to discern what is necessary, what is required, what is true, what is just, what has been examined, what has been critically argued and what can be accepted.

That seems to me, Madam Speaker, to cover many disciplines. It also covers many functions in society, and those are the goals which we should be looking for from both colleges and from universities.

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We should also be looking I think for an education system, a post-secondary education system which is increasingly linked to the international world. The government wants to talk in economic terms about going global, but it never seems to make the connection between the globe, between the world and its institutions of post-secondary education. University means the universe. It means all; it means the examining of all. It means being part of an international system of universities, of international systems of understanding--some are discipline based, some are not--but internationally accepted standards of evidence, of critical examination, of the advancement of science, of the advancement of mathematics or of the social studies.

So, Madam Speaker, I would have hoped that the minister, both in Bill 32 and in Bill 16, would have taken account of that and that she would have taken steps, I think, in her mandate, in the mandate of all the ministers of Education we have seen since 1988--and I think we must be up to five or six by now--that that sense of Manitoba as one place in a universe of learning is something that is very, very important to the future of the people of this province, and it is very important I think to the direction in which our post-secondary education system should be moving.

So, Madam Speaker, I would like to conclude with that and to indicate to the minister that we have asked a number of specific questions about aspects of the bill, and we look forward to discussing those with her in committee.

Madam Speaker: Is the House ready for the question? The question before the House is second reading, Bill 16.

Is it the will of the House to adopt the motion?

An Honourable Member: Agreed.

Madam Speaker: Agreed? Agreed and so ordered.

Hon. James McCrae (Government House Leader): Madam Speaker, a little while ago I began to make an announcement which I discontinued at the time, but, as you know, the Standing Committee on Law Amendments is meeting tonight at 7 p.m. to consider certain bills. I would like to remove Bill 38 from the list of bills being considered by that committee this evening.

Madam Speaker: Bill 38 has been removed for consideration from the Standing Committee on Law Amendments being held this evening.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate, on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Justice (Mr. Toews), Bill 21 (The Jury Amendment Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur les jurés), standing in the name of the honourable member for St. Johns (Mr. Mackintosh), who has 28 minutes remaining.

An Honourable Member: Stand.

Madam Speaker: Stand? Leave has been granted to permit the bill to remain standing.

Mr. Doug Martindale (Burrows): I would like to put a few brief remarks on the record on the jury bill because, even though it is a short bill, I think it is an important one, and certainly one that affects my constituents since I represent such a large number of low-income people. In fact, if I could start off with an illustration for what I am going to say about what this bill does, it would be to tell you about a constituent of mine who phoned me for advice because she did not want to serve on a jury, and I explained to her the process for having her name removed as a potential juror. The reason that she gave was the financial hardship, that she could not afford to miss work because her employer was not going to compensate her for lost wages. She did phone, and she was successful in getting her name removed.

Now that is not something that I want to encourage as a member of the Legislature or as a citizen of this province, because serving on a jury is both a privilege and a right and a responsibility that all citizens should take seriously, because it is very important in our judicial system that we have the right to be judged by our peers. If we are not being judged by our peers, if we have some other system, then that is a major change in our judicial system. I would argue that if you do not have low-income people and you are a low-income person being tried, then you really are not being tried by your peers.

By way of background on jury fees, the base regulation to The Jury Act states that every person who attends the court for selection as a prospective juror be paid a fee of $20 per day, and every person who serves on a jury and attends the court shall be paid $30 per day.

These amounts have remained the same over the last 10 years. This government has been in office for nine years, nine out of the past 10 years, and there has been no increase, no recognition of the increase in the cost of living. According to the minister, the average jury trial lasts six days. So, if someone is losing six days wages, that represents a substantial amount of money, especially for a low-income person or someone working at minimum wage. It would be very interesting to have a study of the people who request that their names be dropped, that they not serve as jurors and to see if there is a preponderance of low-income people who request to be excused from jury duty.

Except in proceedings of criminal matters which have not been concluded, no juror shall be required to remain in attendance at the court for more than one month. The minister has stated in his argument for Bill 21 that many employers will continue to pay employees serving jury duty. There are thousands of employees who do not have this arrangement. No employer is required to pay, even partially, an employee while they are serving as a juror. The act states, every employer shall grant to an employee who is summoned to serve as a juror a leave of absence with or without pay. So the employer has no legal obligation to pay an employee. Why not keep jury fees only for those that can prove that they are not still being paid by their employer while serving as a juror? I think this would be a compromise that the minister should have considered.

Also, by way of background, I note that in British Columbia the fees are $20 per day for the first 10 days and $30 a day if over 10 days, and in Alberta, $10 a day for the first five days and $40 a day if over five days. So we are falling behind what is happening in at least a couple of other provinces.

According to the act, Section 25(1)(b), a person may apply to the sheriff to be exempted if serving as a juror may cause serious hardship or loss to the person or others, and I presume that is referring to financial loss or loss of wages. During jury selection a potential juror may request to be excused for reasons of financial hardship.

Jury trials are supposed to provide a random cross-section of the community with the ability to scrutinize and participate in the criminal justice system. The Aboriginal Justice Inquiry report has identified the problem of unequal representation of aboriginal people on juries.

Bill 21 risks shutting out low-income individuals from serving as jurors. Certainly it really makes no difference whether we are talking about First Nations communities or the city of Winnipeg. We have large numbers of low-income people in both places and, if they are going to be asked to be excused because they are not compensated for their wages, then we have a distortion of the justice system in that people will not be judged by their peers. It seems to me that this is one more example of a good recommendation or a concern being raised by the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry report that has not been acted on by this government.

Now the government claims that they have acted on many of the recommendations. In fact, one delegation that met with the government were told that the government had implemented a hundred recommendations of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry. I believe that our critic has asked for that list in Estimates, and we are still waiting for that list of a hundred recommendations. We believe that there have not been a hundred recommendations. In fact, I believe it is our contention that very few of those recommendations, if any, have been implemented.

The Canada Law Reform Commission, in a study called The Jury in Criminal Trials in 1980, says, if the fees are too low jury service will impose an undue economic burden on many jurors or make it difficult to obtain a jury that represents a true cross-section of the community. Even the former Minister of Justice here has commented on this. Perhaps I should say a former Minister of Justice, because there have been several, but in 1993, the former Minister of Justice said, we do not want to see people punished by virtue of having to serve on a jury. He said this in response to questions on an earlier but abandoned attempt to abolish jury fees.

So at one time it appears the government had a concern but that concern has evaporated into thin air. So I think that what is going to happen is that more people will be obliged to make a request to be excused for financial reasons once this bill comes into effect in spite of the fact that juries, as I have said, are supposed to be democratic institutions representing the province's population. They will no longer become as representative and therefore less democratic.

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Taking away jury fees for trials less than 10 days encourages low-income Manitobans not to participate in the criminal justice system, and the government is going to save money. Of course, almost every change that they make means they are going to save money, but I think that they need to also look at our democratic institutions and the responsibilities that individuals have and decide. I guess they have decided. They have decided that saving money is more important than the democratic institution of juries and people's rights and responsibility to serve on a jury. They could have required compensation where employers do not compensate but they chose not to do that.

So we are disappointed with this bill. We are disappointed that it is going to discriminate against low-income Manitobans. It is going to make juries less democratic and less fair and so we are opposed to this bill.

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

Is there leave?

An Honourable Member: Leave.

Madam Speaker: Leave has been granted.

Also standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona (Mr. Reid). Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona?

An Honourable Member: Leave.

Madam Speaker: Leave? Leave has been granted.

An Honourable Member: Stand.

Madam Speaker: Leave has been granted to permit the bill to remain standing in the name of the honourable member for Thompson.

Mr. Doug Martindale (Burrows): Madam Speaker, I am going to speak briefly on Bill 27, although I note that our Education critic, the member for Wolseley, made quite a lengthy speech on this short bill, but an excellent speech, which I would commend to the minister and to all members. I just recently read it, and I am going to use it for guidance in the remarks that I put on the record because, in spite of the fact that this bill appears to have minor and innocuous amendments, our critic has very capably pointed out that some of these amendments have some importance.

The first part of Bill 27 allows public school trustees to apply to the minister to vary the terms of election, and we believe that this is something that will be beneficial to school boards, and we do not have a problem with that. We think that it will be used in a judicious way. I guess, if it is not, the minister has the ability to make sure that they do, since I understand it will be left up to the discretion of the minister since the school divisions have to apply to the minister.

Another feature of this bill is that it creates an amendment to allow the South Winnipeg Technical Centre to have a superintendent or rather to designate as a principal. I think all of us probably know who the principal is at the South Winnipeg Technical Centre, a good individual, a former member of the Legislature, someone who we continue to see from time to time, and I understand that he is doing an excellent job there. One of my constituents is a student at South Winnipeg Technical institute, a former football player by the name of Randy Gill and if you ever have a chance to hear him at a public speaking engagement, please take advantage of that opportunity. He is doing an excellent job. I am promoting him on the speaking circuit, especially at sports events. He was a guest at the Canadian Polish Athletic Club at their annual awards ceremony and certainly had some very worthwhile things to say to the young people in attendance there.

He has turned his life around in a very dramatic way. I will not go into his life story except to say that he has gone from being functionally illiterate to a student at South Winnipeg Technical Centre. He upgraded himself at an adult education centre, and now he is getting excellent marks at South Winnipeg Technical Centre. He is to be congratulated for his academic progress, and I am sure that he is going to get a good job when he graduates.

One of the things that this bill does is to remove the special levy. Now the special levy was extremely contentious when it was debated in this House, and one of the arguments that we used was that it took away the responsibility for taxation from duly elected trustees and therefore was not democratic. Since school boards were empowered to raise taxes and to do what they were elected to do and be responsible for what they did, we were opposed to it at that time, and since it has been removed, we do not have a problem with that.

We are concerned about user fees in schools, and certainly we have raised this in Question Period on numerous occasions, particularly the member for St. James (Ms. Mihychuk) has made this an issue. Once again, this is an issue that affects my constituents more than the constituents in many other parts of this province because so many of them are low income. If we are looking at user fees, sometimes $20 but sometimes much more, $200 and $300, then it discriminates against these students because it is a financial hardship. It probably means that they can take part in their basic academic program, but it is going to make it very difficult for them to participate in other aspects of school life. It is also a problem for parents in immersion programs, especially when it comes to transportation.

This bill enables school divisions to dispose of buses. We know that is an extremely contentious issue right now, and we see this as another attempt by this government to offload responsibility as they have in so many other areas to other jurisdictions and levels of government, in this case, to school divisions.

This bill also removes the definition of what is a full-time equivalent student, and that is something that our Education critic has commented on, and I will leave it to her to provide the expert advice to this minister. The bill also argues that students will have the right to attend school from the age of six to the age of 21 or whenever a diploma is achieved, whichever comes first, and this is a problem for students who may drop out of school and go back again. There are a number of schools, including R.B. Russell School, which have a number of adult learners. They are over 21. They have dropped out of school. They may have been unemployed. They may have been in the paid workforce, and they are going back to school, and we are concerned that this may eliminate those students.

They may have a diploma and go back to take another course or another trade, and I have had teachers at R.B. Russell School express concern about this to me. I will certainly be asking them about this when I present an award at their graduation ceremony later this week, because it is very good to see adult learners going back where the high school is prepared to accommodate them, where they fit in with the high school so that they can take training and upgrading, because we know that many students in the inner city, they drop out of school. They get into activities that they should not be involved in if they are unemployed, and going back to school is probably the best possible thing that they can do. So anything which makes it impossible for them to go back we are opposed to.

We are also concerned about special needs students, particularly older ones who have benefited and have been able to return to school or have been maintained in school by the public school trustees until the age of 21.

So with those brief remarks, we will continue to let this bill stand so that other people can speak on this bill which has apparently minor amendments, but according to our critic, she has pointed out that these amendments have some major importance. Maybe I should say brief or short amendments, but they are important, and they have implications that one might not think of initially when looking at the bill, but our critic has pointed out in great detail in an excellent lengthy speech the importance of these amendments. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 32, The Workplace Safety and Health Amendment Act (2) (Loi no 2 modifiant la Loi sur la sécurité et l'hygiène du travail), standing in the name of the honourable member for Dauphin (Mr. Struthers).

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

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Mr. Doug Martindale (Burrows): Madam Speaker, it looks like I am going for a record today, but it is just coincidence that I was prepared to speak on these bills in sequential order today.

Workplace health and safety is very important in every workplace, and workplace health and safety is of great importance to workers. It is important to many of my constituents who, unfortunately, have to work in unsafe work situations.

So, once again, I would like to begin my speech with an illustration about one of my constituents, and I have raised this example before, but this example keeps going on and on and gets more amazing as it goes on, so I would like to repeat the example. It has to do with my constituent who phoned me and was telling me in the course of a conversation about her husband and how every night when he came home from work he was tired, and she was afraid that his workplace was affecting his health. I said, well, I can do something about that. I will phone the director of Workplace Safety and Health, and I did, and they sent out an inspector. It turned out that the reason that he was tired every night was because of carbon monoxide poisoning. So a work order was issued, and the company was required to put in ventilation, to put in exhaust fans, and when they did that, he was not sick anymore. So it really was the cause of his problem, and, presumably, it affected fellow employees who were getting sick, and the exhaust fans hopefully had a positive effect on other employees in that workplace.

Some months later, I saw this same woman when I was leaving St. Boniface Hospital after visiting Bill Kardash, a former member of this Legislature, and I asked her why she was at the hospital. She said, did you not hear, and I said, no. She said, well, it was my husband who had his hand severed in an industrial accident. His hand was cut off entirely by a cutting implement that he was operating, and the surgeons at St. Boniface Hospital reattached his hand. Since that time, he has had surgery several times, and he may still lose his hand because there are many problems with getting use of his hand in spite of physiotherapy and the surgery. So I phoned Workplace Safety and Health and I said, you know, what is happening with this industrial accident and they said, well, charges are being laid against the company. The victim in this case, the employee went to the trial to see what happened, and, amazingly, the company was acquitted. It was quite a surprise.

So I phoned the director of Workplace Safety and Health again, and I said what are you going to do about this? They said, well, we have to study it for two or three months and see if there is a basis for an appeal. So they did. They studied it, and then they put in an appeal. I do not think it has gone back to court yet, which is why I said this story is an ongoing story. But the director of Workplace Safety and Health did tell me something that I think is absolutely amazing and that is that it was the first time that they had appealed. Now I can hardly believe that in the history of Manitoba it is the first time they had appealed, but that is what the director told me. If it is true, I think it is appalling. I have no way to tell whether it is true or not, but I have no reason to doubt the veracity of what I have been told by a senior civil servant in this government.

It seems to me the government should be appealing these cases much more often if that is the case, because we have had some amazing events unfold even in recent years in Manitoba. For example, we know that there was a company that had violated various laws regarding scaffolding, and in fact the union had threatened or had pulled the workers off the scaffolding construction site and the scaffolding collapsed on the emergency department at the Health Sciences Centre, and yet very little came out of that, which is very disappointing. I think the company was acquitted in that situation as well. That is the reason why we need much stronger enforcement, we need more inspectors doing more inspections, we need tougher enforcement, and we need to raise the fines. In fact, that is what is being done in this case, the fines are being increased.

There are many issues in Workplace Safety and Health, and all you have to do is read up on some of the literature to find out what some of the occupational hazards are in many, many places and to know that there is a need for these kinds of laws to protect workers. We know that the fines in the past, before this bill, have been quite meagre and really are not a deterrent, especially to large corporations. In fact, Manitoba currently has the lowest workplace safety and health fines in the country at $15,000 for the first offence and $30,000 for second and subsequent offences and an additional fine to $2,500 for each day the offence continues. Manitoba also compares poorly with other industrialized countries. The current Workplace Safety and Health Act also allows for a person convicted for an offence to be imprisoned for up to six months, but no one has ever been sent to jail. There is no whistle-blower protection, although the act does allow workers the right to refuse unsafe work.

It seems to me that workers are much better protected when they belong to a union than when they do not, because in the union they have a grievance process, they have people, shop stewards who can go to bat for them on workplace safety and health issues, whereas in nonunion shops they do not have those kinds of internal advocates, and that is why we need good legislation in this area.

When the current Minister of Justice (Mr. Toews) was the Minister of Labour, he asked the advisory council on Workplace Safety and Health to review only Section 55 of the act, the penalty section. The council advised the minister to raise the levels of fines by 10 times with no other changes proposed, but the labour part of the council wanted other substantial changes to match other progressive provinces like B.C. but were unable to convince the business reps. Left with no recourse, the labour reps voted for at least some improvements in the act.

Unfortunately, when it comes to this government and this minister, they will listen to business, but they will not listen to Labour contrary to what--[interjection] Well, I am not making a personal comment here. I am talking about the minister in his representative role as responsible for the Department of Labour, and therefore responsible for all decisions of the Department of Labour and of his government whose decisions he must defend.

This reminds me--in fact, I got out my file on labour, and I came across the bishops' statement, which, I believe, was around New Year's in 1981. One of the ethical reflections that they offered, I think, is quite timeless in that it has not changed its importance or significance since it was first put into print by them; they said that the participation of marginalized groups takes precedence over the preservation of a system which excludes them. They also said that the rights of workers are more important than the maximization of profits, but this government would rather help business to maximize profits, even at the expense of workers, than to protect the rights of workers, even if it meant this government spending more money on hiring more staff and doing more inspections and enforcing the existing laws and improving the existing laws and not just in the area of fines but in all areas.

We are pleased to see that these amendments will increase the fines. We hope and we encourage the government to look at all aspects of the legislation, not just at the fines section.

Thank you, Madam Speaker.

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Justice (Mr. Toews), Bill 33 (The Executions Amendment and Consequential Amendments Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'exécution des jugements et modifications corrélatives), standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona (Mr. Reid).

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 36, The Wildfires and Consequential Amendments Act (Loi sur les incendies échappés et modifications corrélatives), standing in the name of the honourable member for Transcona (Mr. Reid).

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

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Madam Speaker: On the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism (Mr. Downey), Bill 39 (The Labour-Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations Act; Loi sur les corporations à capital de risque de travailleurs), standing in the name of the honourable member for Wellington (Ms. Barrett).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing?

An Honourable Member: No leave.

Madam Speaker: No. Leave has been denied.

Mr. Gary Doer (Leader of the Opposition): It is my honour to speak on Bill 39, The Labour-Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations Act.

Madam Speaker, I have asked questions in the Premier's Estimates, and, to be quite honest, I have not been satisfied with the answers of why we are changing the venture capital and investment for pension funds and other investments here in the province of Manitoba.

It seems to us, Madam Speaker, that the success of Crocus and the comparison of where Manitoba is going and where it has been and comparing it to other jurisdictions, for example, Ontario and Quebec, that we seem to be following the Ontario model, which has led to a proliferation of funds, and which, we think, in the long term, is not in the best interests of Manitobans. In the long run, it could inhibit what we may be intending by passing this bill in terms of potential community economic development.

When we look at the due diligence and the amount of funds and the leverage that the Quebec pension plan or the solidarity fund has, we notice that they have evolved now from one fund, one labour-sponsored fund, into a fund that has nine regional funds, and now moving into 98 community economic development funds administered in the regions.

Now granted, the Quebec example is far advanced to the Manitoba in terms of years, but Manitoba has done quite well, $50 million, $60 million invested in three or four years. At this juncture in its development, we should be looking at the forks in the road and deciding what road to take. I do not know why we are taking the road that Ontario has taken. I do not know why we are rejecting, in my view, the ability to have a provincial fund and to have long-term regional economic development. Maybe what we should be doing with this bill and looking at the Crocus Fund is looking at the regional and community economic development model that has been established in Quebec, rather than trying to force-feed those funds with the amendments that are proposed in this bill.

We think that the success of Crocus means that we should look at its potential, business and labour and certainly labour-sponsored funds having the key authority in these funds, with the obvious agreement of the provincial government through the tax provisions that are available, that we should look at taking the Crocus Fund to its next level of development. We do not see the need--in fact, we think it is counterproductive in the long run--to water down this entity and to leave open an example of what we have in Ontario where we had nine separate funds administered on a province-wide basis but not having a regional economic component to it.

So, when I look at the two examples, I do not think people across the way have done their homework, because I am sure that the goal of the members opposite, as would be our goal, is to take the positive example and look at a vehicle for more community economic development and look at a vehicle to get more investment into communities, particularly when you look at the transition in the agricultural community for more value-added jobs in agriculture and other rural and other northern communities. So I do not understand the reason to go to province-wide, labour-sponsored funds instead of going and keeping the province-wide Crocus Fund and moving to community economic development authorities.

Now I would point out that in Quebec the model, which, of course, was the model that was used first to implement the Crocus Fund and has been used by British Columbia and other provinces and certainly was the model for Manitoba, they have a certain sophistication of investment, a certain sophistication in terms of due diligence, a certain sophistication of results that has meant that they have moved this expertise and these funds into the local communities.

They now have local labour-sponsored funds in communities. For example, let us take Dauphin. A community like Dauphin would have their own local executive with their own amount of money from the pension investments where the local community and the local labour people that have invested this money would have the ability to have the due diligence and have the investments made in their community for community economic development.

The Crocus Fund has been successful in terms of Manitoba. We started this process; the government carried it on. The bill was passed with agreement from all parties in the Legislature, and I think it has exceeded the expectations that we all had. It has certainly raised more capital and investment than was first claimed or asserted as its financial goal, and it has had tremendous success in terms of investing those funds in maintaining jobs in Manitoba and creating jobs in Manitoba.

Now I have not agreed with every investment they have made, and the operative word is "they." They have made the decisions. The labour representatives and their experts have made the decisions. Sometimes they are maintaining jobs in Manitoba and sometimes they are attracting jobs to our province. Sometimes they are investing in a manufacturing operation or an agricultural operation or a computer operation. Other times they are investing in a restaurant or they are investing in a sports team. I believe they are one of the major shareholders in the Manitoba Moose, one of the predominant shareholders in the Manitoba Moose.

I also had an opportunity to meet with the business owner a couple of years ago. We bumped into each other, and he talked about his dealings with the Manitoba Crocus Fund. He had a unionized business operation, and he felt that the Crocus Fund was going to allow him to maintain the employment levels in his plant and expand into new operations that were going to be successful for both his workers and for our collective community.

So, really, Madam Speaker, the government has not answered the question about why they are choosing the road of Ontario and not choosing the more successful road of Quebec in looking for more mature models of pension investment and the opportunity for community economic development. I do not know why they are doing it. As I say, I raised this with the Premier (Mr. Filmon). He said we just want to have different options under this fund, but, really, they have to make a fundamental decision in terms of what they are doing and how they want to proceed. Do they want one labour-sponsored fund as we have in Quebec where the money goes to the community economic development programs with local labour community representatives and business representatives, or do they want to go the nine major fund route of Ontario which are all province-wide programs?

I am surprised this government opposite would choose a kind of downtown Toronto view of labour-sponsored funds and use the downtown Toronto model for investments. It may work well in terms of the return to the investor--there is no question about that--but surely when the public is giving a tax break to union workers to invest money in a pension fund and when that tax break is generous, surely there has to be other economic goals besides just the tax break and the money being maintained in your own jurisdiction.

There should be other longer-term economic goals, we believe, and we believe one of those longer-term economic goals is to make sure it is not just downtown Winnipeg decisions like downtown Toronto but that we have over the longer haul the regional economic development capacity which is not administering taxpayers' money but rather is investing union labour funds--pension funds, if you will--in our communities, in our jobs, with the obvious necessity of having reasonable returns on those investments.

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But there is a tax policy decision being made by the government to give a tax relief beyond the federal registered retirement savings plan in the administration of these funds. That decision I support, but I want to see its social objectives being employment for rural and northern communities along with the central fund.

Madam Speaker, we could talk at length about policies dealing with tax breaks and pension money. Members opposite will know that there has been a debate in this country about the whole registered retirement savings plan issue itself. In the United States, a country that is much admired by members opposite, they do not allow a tax deduction to take place for a retirement fund that leaves their country. It is a very simple matter. If you want a tax break, you invest it in the good old USA in terms of its policies. You cannot take that money offshore and get the tax deduction.

In Canada, the Mulroney government started to change this and developed a 10 percent, I believe, I am just going by memory, but a 10 percent ability to invest those registered retirement savings plans out of the country. The Liberal government carried on this practice and doubled it to 20 percent. Now, the fund managers, and people here will know this, have calculated ways of using the 20 percent exemption and flow-through kinds of mutual funds to get it up to about 36 percent offshore in Canada. In other words, we give a tax break for a pension plan. Fair ball. I agree with that, but I do not agree with taking billions of dollars and allowing that money to go somewhere else to create jobs in some other jurisdiction when we know in Manitoba and in Canada that we have capital requirements to take the many good ideas we have.

The government itself commissioned a capital report, which I think is a good report in terms of some of the issues of capital and borrowing and banks and small business, et cetera. So there is the need for capital. We have good ideas and we have capital, and we should not allow it to go out of Canada and go to other jurisdictions for investment.

I would say to the member for Lakeside (Mr. Enns) that I was surprised that Jean Charest--maybe this is the influence of Mike Harris as opposed to the so-called, the sort of Reform Tories in Ontario as opposed to the Progressive Conservative Tories that seem to be a dying and endangered species in Canada, but they, the Charest Conservatives, promised to go to 100 percent ability in their so-called platform, no restrictions on registered retirement savings plans. Now I do not know how many brokers voted for that in downtown Toronto or downtown Winnipeg, but it is not the kind of vision of Canada that perhaps Tommy Douglas or John Diefenbaker would have where we fought to keep our money in our province, in our own communities and controlled by our own people. That to me is kind of a slippery slope of losing the purpose of a tax deduction that has both the benefit for the potential retiree and also has the great benefit of having a person retire with income and also should create jobs and investment in our own communities. So you have a win-win-win situation.

Regrettably, Madam Speaker, when we look at the microsituation with the Crocus Fund, we think we are going in the wrong direction again, just as Canada has moved these little thresholds up and up and created less capital available for social and economic purposes. We think that this bill is well intended by the government but is wrong headed.

Madam Speaker, we have some ideas about how we can help that. We can put the head back in their heart in terms of this bill. We will be proposing some positive changes to this bill in committee with always positive alternatives about the Community Economic Development Fund.

I would recommend to members opposite that they take a second look at this bill, particularly rural members that were sold a bill of goods on the Manitoba Telephone System, if you look at what is happening in Alberta and Telus. Particularly rural members of their caucus should ask their urban leadership, the member for Tuxedo (Mr. Filmon) and the member for--his good, close friend. What constituency is the Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson)? Kirkfield Park. The old ICEC gang. You know, the old City Hall gang. They should ask them in caucus some questions about whether in fact the Quebec model with its Community Economic Development is better for rural and northern Manitoba than this downtown Toronto model.

I am afraid that members opposite are being controlled by one Jules Benson and his downtown Winnipeg Bay Street-Main Street kind of attitude. I am a little afraid that members opposite are just becoming automatons across the way, and everything Jules Benson, through the two horses of doom and pestilence that are running this government come forward to--two out of the four horses. I am just asking members opposite to ask some tougher questions in caucus. They are not here now. Do not be afraid of them. You know, I know they try to intimidate members opposite, and I know what they did to the member for Steinbach (Mr. Driedger) and I know what they did to the member for Charleswood (Mr. Ernst), but do not forget who sent you to this Legislature. Many of you were sent by rural members, none from northern Manitoba, and I think you are short-shrifting rural economic development.

So I am just suggesting that we voted with the government for the original bill. We are suggesting that the next step forward should be well thought out, and we will make some positive amendments on behalf of rural economic development. All I am asking for is a clear head and a strong mind to take on the downtown bias in the Tory caucus and vote with rural Manitoba for the potential of rural and northern Manitoba with one fund with regional economic development and not go to the Ontario model.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, and with those few comments, we are willing to allow other people to speak, but we are certainly willing to have this bill pass through to committee, subject to what the member for Lakeside (Mr. Enns) says, because there are other members ready to debate it if we do not agree.

Hon. Harry Enns (Minister of Agriculture): It is certainly not my intention to delay the passage of the bill, but the contribution just made by Her Majesty's loyal opposition Leader and the comments made by the member for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale) yesterday prompt me to put a few words on the record with respect to this bill. I think I sense certainly there is kind of an acknowledgment or a willingness to look at the positive aspects of this legislation and to recognize the positive role that this legislation has already played in the formation of the Crocus Fund--[interjection] Madam Speaker, I am prepared to acknowledge I was interested in a bit of the history that the member for Crescentwood correctly put on the record that was the motivation for this kind of legislation in the mid-'70s when regrettable plant closures were taking place in different parts of the country, always bringing along with it some of its attendant hardships on the working force.

There was an understandable desire to provide some government leadership that would enable capital formation to take place, specifically by those most directly impacted, organized by the labour component to industry.

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I can acknowledge, and I do that quite freely, that this kind of legislation was in the mix, if you like, at the time of the Schreyer administration, New Democratic Party administration left office and the Sterling Lyon administration took up the reins of responsibility in Manitoba. We looked at that, and we believed it was good legislation, and we subsequently brought it forward, and as the Leader of the Opposition just indicated, it was a piece of legislation that was, I believe, unanimously supported in this Chamber--[interjection] It understandably took time to develop the Crocus Fund, and I do not fault the managers of that for any reason. I think we are dealing with people's investment dollars. One has to exercise a considerable amount of diligence, and that certainly was the case, to the point that the Crocus Fund was attracting some criticism for its lack of aggressiveness in the investment field. But I agree with the comments that have been made. The Crocus Fund, I think to all our satisfaction, stands out as a sound, Manitoba-made, Manitoba-bred investment mechanism that should act as encouragement for expansion of this kind of investment. I cannot help but note, though, that in recording the acknowledgment of the motivation for this legislation was plant closures that took place in the mid-'70s or late-'70s, well ahead of the arrangements that were entered into a decade later, such as the Canada-U.S. Free Trade or the NAFTA agreement, which, regrettably, caused further rationalizations in industry to take place. We are sometimes led to believe that those were the only reasons why plants chose to close or move elsewhere were because of the international trade agreements that were entered into in 1988 and later on expanded to the NAFTA agreement in '93.

Madam Speaker, as the Minister of Agriculture and certainly sensitive to what is happening in rural Manitoba, I think we need to do everything we can to encourage our own people to invest in our own province, and there are certainly opportunities, as my colleague the Minister for Rural Development (Mr. Derkach) will readily attest to, particularly in this post-Crow era, as I like to describe it, where we have awakened the excitement and enthusiasm throughout rural Manitoba about opportunities.

Successful Rural Forum days that were just recently concluded by my colleague's department in Brandon, the task force report that looked at and talked to 26 communities all tell us that there are opportunities out there. The problem still is very often, not the only problem, but certainly one of the big problems is pulling together the necessary investment dollars. Any vehicle that we create or help create can and should be supported from that point of view.

I just want to conclude by one other comment, because I honestly believe this very sincerely, that regrettably in our economy there is too much of an adversarial situation between the labour force and management, business, and labour. That is to be understood from some perspective but it is not always the most admirable thing. I view an instrument like the labour-based Crocus Fund, that has working people investing in their company, sharing in the profits of their company, surely that has a tremendous appeal to all of us in terms of overcoming some of these sort of naturally built-in adversarial systems and labour-management negotiations.

I cite the one sterling example in Manitoba, and that is the one that we just acknowledged a few weeks ago in this building, the 500-plus workers at the Pine Falls Paper Mill. Here you had a multinational, Abitibi Price, the kind that the honourable member for Crescentwood just referred to, was prepared to walk away from their still profitable plant that had served as part of their big paper empire well over many years for their own corporate reasons and own corporate agendas but leaving in real difficulty a whole community, 500 employees who were carrying out their jobs without any significant problems that anybody could point their fingers to.

What happened? The workers together with management put aside their kind of traditional labour-versus-management positions, organized labour recognized the seriousness of the situation and set aside wage demands for a period of time, I believe even accepted wage rollbacks for a period of time, although I am told that the success of the company in the relatively few short years that they have managed to pick up all that was put on the table, and the company prospers. It is good for the workers, it is good for the company, it is good for the Manitoba economy, it is certainly good for the community of Pine Falls.

I simply say that I think that in this Bill 39 there is a genuine opportunity for those of us in this Chamber who also often operate on, and understandably so, an adversarial basis. From what the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. Doer) has just put on the record, what the member for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale) has put on the record, from what the purpose of this bill is on the record, there is no real reason that we could not support this bill in a unanimous way. The caution that the honourable Leader of the Opposition puts on the bill is one that should be and can be checked and monitored. That is a retrograde force if what he suggests that capital is being diverted outside of the province. I tend to agree with him: the tax benefits ought not to accrue. If that, in fact, is happening, then subsequent ministers of Finance, subsequent governments, can alter those changes, but if, in fact, what I believe this bill wants to do, by reducing and making it more available, is to have multiple opportunities for investment take place in the smaller communities throughout rural Manitoba, then it is accomplishing what we hope this bill will accomplish.

So, Madam Speaker, I invite the honourable members in the opposition to take that kind of an attitude and ask those further questions at the committee stage of this bill, but it is a bill that, particularly at this time in the province of Manitoba, is worth supporting.

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Inkster): Madam Speaker, I, too, want to say a few words on this particular bill before it goes to committee. Much like Bill 40, Bill 39 gives me reason to believe or reinforces the fact that, yes, there is indeed a role for government to play. When I look at this particular bill, it makes me think about the Crocus Investment Fund as a fund that has been highly successful, and what the economy needs today is individuals who are prepared to invest into venture capital. By doing so, what we are going to see is the potential for greater job creation and better increases in overall lifestyle by allowing for Manitobans to be able to invest in a more local fashion, and that is what I see.

In most part, what the amendments are doing is reinforcing. I understand that the Crocus management committee, in fact, had made mention of a number of the different clauses or amendments that we are seeing here today in trying to, in part, redefine to take into consideration what is happening in Ottawa, on the national scene, at the same time.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, Madam Speaker, what is being anticipated is we are going to see more dollars being contributed toward venture capital. Like all members of this Chamber, we have a great deal of confidence in the different labour organizations, in particular, dealing with the Crocus Fund and their abilities to watch that fund, in essence, grow.

So it is something that is well worth the government's effort, and at times it is needed. Everyone benefits by it. A person who is prepared to, obviously, invest is going to be receiving some tax relief, while at the same time will have an opportunity a number of years from now to be able to derive also, hopefully, a decent rate of return on that particular investment, but, most importantly, for Manitobans we are seeing jobs that are being saved in some areas, new jobs that are being created in other areas, and that is because of a fund like the Crocus Fund, and, you know, the integrity of the fund is absolutely critical because it is through that integrity that we are allowed to see further expansion.

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I know in the past, for example, there has been a great deal of concern about the Grow Bonds and how the government has been able to handle the Grow Bonds, Madam Speaker. If only the government was as successful with the Grow Bonds as the Crocus Investment Fund is successful in their funding ventures, I think that we would probably have that much more of a better overall performance on government dollars and investments in general because there has been a great deal of concern in some areas in which the government has ventured into. But this one particular area, and I believe this was somewhere in 1991, 1990, when we had first seen the creation of this particular fund, has demonstrated that it has been very successful. We anticipate that it will continue to be successful. It will receive that support, because we believe through these amendments that we are going to see an increase ultimately in funds going into high-risk venture capital.

I want to be very sensitive to what the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. Doer) was saying in terms of some of the concerns that have been raised, legitimate concerns. Hopefully, the government will listen to potential amendments to this legislation, keeping in mind that it is important to have an open mind as we all want to see this particular fund, this whole area grow, because we all realize the positive impacts for all of us in the province.

With those few words, we are prepared to see it go to committee. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker: Is the House ready for the question? The question before the House is second reading, Bill 39, The Labour-Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations Act.

Is it the will of the House to adopt the motion?

Some Honourable Members: Agreed

Madam Speaker: Agreed? Agreed and so ordered.

An Honourable Member: Stand.

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

Mr. Tim Sale (Crescentwood): Madam Speaker, the bill before us extends the function of The Regional Health Authorities Act, which was passed last year so contentiously by this Chamber, against the advice of virtually every group that appeared before the committee. I had the privilege of sitting on that committee during a good deal of its deliberations.

Essentially that act, Madam Speaker, has removed one of the most precious elements of our medicare system, one of the most historic and precious elements, and that is the role of boards of directors and volunteers who had a deep sense of community ownership, community commitment to their hospital or their personal care home. Now we have Bill 41, which takes that bad principle and extends it across all of the city of Winnipeg and all of the institutions of the city of Winnipeg that provide health care.

Madam Speaker, health is, according to the United Nations and most observers, not simply the absence of disease, but a positive state of body, mind, and spirit that is rooted in a community's economic well-being, its environmental well-being, and the well-being of its families in recreational, spiritual, and other pursuits. One of the things that makes that function in a social sense is a dense web of networks, a web of involvement in those communities.

(Mr. Marcel Laurendeau, Deputy Speaker, in the Chair)

The Whitehall studies in Britain, which were studies undertaken in the 1980s to try and discern why some people seem to be more prone to illness than others, the Whitehall studies are termed Whitehall because they were studies of all of the employees of the head office departments of the British government, some 20,000 employees in all.

They studied permanent secretaries, which are our deputy ministers, and they studied the most low-paid positions in that civil service down to the casual support staff. Now, none of these people in that particular study could be deemed poor. They were lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy, but there were no people who were genuinely poor in this group, so it was very interesting to try and then track the patterns of illness in the 20,000 staff that were studied over a 10-year period.

The findings were very interesting. Even among those members of the civil service who were relatively well paid but not at the top of their department, there was more illness than among those at the top. So even civil servants in British terms who were making perhaps in our equivalent $70,000 or $80,000 nevertheless had higher rates of illness than the permanent secretaries did. It was almost as though there was a straight hierarchy with wages. So the experimenters who were running this 10-year longitudinal study thought at first that illness was simply a proxy for low income, that income and wages would be a very good predictor of health. What they found, however, was that this was not true. Wages were just a proxy, and what was interesting in the final results was for what they were a proxy. They were a proxy for a sense of control and mastery. The deputy minister, as anyone who has worked for one knows, is the master of all she or he surveys. When the deputy minister wants something done, it generally gets done, and fairly speedily. To a great extent, the way our civil service is organized, virtually everybody else exists to serve upward through the hierarchy and ultimately the deputy minister.

So the Whitehall studies, again, in concert with other studies that have been done in Canada, such as the Canada health study in the mid-1980s and other studies in other parts of the world, confirmed that wellness comes from a variety of sources, but it comes in particular from people having a sense that they are in control of their lives, that they have some power over what happens to them, that they have some say over how their lives are ordered.

Studies in Italy of community strength, community adaptation, community prosperity take that same principle and generalize it into a community. The findings there are over a 25-year period in a book called Making Democracy Work, a very interesting study of the co-operative movement in northern Italy, which found that you could predict the health of communities if you looked at the density of the social networks, particularly what they called the "horizontal networks," meaning the relationships between groups like a community club and a football club and a labour union and a lodge and a serving group. They were all small support groups located in a community, and the denser those support linkages were, the more a healthy community resulted.

I think that all honourable members can probably also just understand that from their own experience in communities. Where a community has a dense and rich network of voluntary associations, community clubs, home and school associations, parent advisory groups, service clubs and so forth, that community almost always is a better place to live in, has lower crime rates, has less social disruption in it than a community in which there are virtually no such organizations and all that exists are the formal structures of government, a hospital, a school, but no networks in which people really get a sense of how they belong, how they fit in and get a sense that they have a say in their community.

Mr. Deputy Speaker, that is what taking away the boards of community hospitals does. It removes one of the really important networks in a community that reaches out, forms linkages with other groups in that community and makes that dense web of relationships that makes communities stronger and better places in which to live.

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Bill 41, unfortunately, takes the principle that government knows best and government can control and direct from on high and enshrines it not only for rural Manitoba but now for urban Winnipeg as well. Anyone who has followed this government's history, as I have, in the area of health policy is not sure whether to laugh or cry. I listened to the Premier (Mr. Filmon) today rewriting history, attempting to reconstruct reality in his own self-defence.

I was here in 1985, Mr. Deputy Speaker, when the Pawley government did their homework, unlike the opposition of that day headed by this Premier. We did our homework. We and the province of Quebec alone in Canada recognized that the Mulroney cuts to health and higher education had only one ultimate consequence, and that was the ending of all federal cash transfers some time early in the new millennium.

Now, in 1985, that seemed like an age. It seemed like far too far in the future for most people to really get concerned about. So what happened with these members opposite and their Premier? They mocked the mathematics, which they came to rue because they came to understand finally that the mathematics were correct, the transfer payments were declining and running out. It is just that, because of the way the formula was constructed, it started very slowly; the erosion started slowly. It was only a few million dollars in the first year, and, as the Premier (Mr. Filmon) never tires of saying to the Liberals, $240 million over the last couple of years. Well, that was predictable in 1985.

This party and their government did the homework on the mathematics to point that out, and offered to all members of the House briefings to help them understand the technical details and offered to all groups in Manitoba the opportunity to get engaged in fighting the cuts. Mr. Deputy Speaker, 36 organizations from the Health Sciences Centre to the University of Manitoba to the Health Action Coalition to the nurses to the doctors, citizens' groups, university student groups--36 major organizations joined that coalition and worked together for more than a year to alert the public to what was happening and to fight the cuts, while these members opposite and their then Health critic mocked the analysis that had been done--the analysis that satisfied virtually everyone else in the country, but did not satisfy them.

Now today we hear this Premier saying that he fought the Mulroney cuts. Well, what rhymes with Mulroney? Baloney rhymes with Mulroney. This Premier defended the Mulroney cuts, and his Health minister, the Honourable Jake Epp, told us we could not do our arithmetic, and now they would like to reconstruct history and to try and convince Manitobans that really all along they knew what was happening and they fought the Mulroney cuts. Well, that is simply trying to remake history for the convenience of current political expediency. It will not wash with Manitobans because they know the battle that was fought on behalf of health care, and they know that this Premier and this government and this Finance minister said nothing about the Mulroney cuts. They only became concerned two years ago when the Chretien government made the Mulroney cuts worse. So let them not try and reconstruct history to their own advantage in regard to the whole problem facing our health care system.

So now we have their next plan. First, we had the 1991 white paper. Then we had the emergency debacle. Then we have had the rural doctor debacle. Then we had the home care debacle. Then we had the Pharmacare mess. Now we have got regionalization, and what are we going to do under regionalization? Well, first of all, Mr. Deputy Speaker, we are going to wait another year. We are going to wait until 1998 to do anything. I am not sure whether to be glad or sad about that. I am certainly glad that they are not going to try and make wholesale changes on top of the mess they have already created with the urban services plan and all the other things, the closure of obstetrical wards, the closure of emergency wards; but, on the other hand, I cannot help but think that by 1998 they are not going to be very far from an election.

So I think that health reform will just continue to drift along, cut, cut, cut, and then suddenly before the election, they will find their election slush fund, this time in their fiscal stabilization account instead of in their lottery trust account, and suddenly there will be all sorts of things that will be possible that have not been possible for eight or nine years. Regionalization will be just a kind of quiet subtext to all of this until they hope they can skate home to another election, but we know that that is not going to happen. Manitobans are no longer prepared to put up with removing their say about their health care system: no elected boards; no accountability; no more volunteer boards; no more local control of health facilities, nursing homes, hospitals; no understanding that health does not come from a bureaucratic top-down system, that it comes from a grassroots, community-up system. Bill 41 does absolutely nothing to strengthen the health care system in Winnipeg.

Mr. Deputy Speaker, if the government had been intent on strengthening the delivery of health care in Winnipeg, they would have done something that their third-past Health minister talked about, Mr. Orchard. Now, Mr. Orchard made a lot of people mad, but he did know the health care system. Mr. Orchard said, we are going to strengthen community clinics and, you know, that was one of the few elements of the health care plan for Manitobans that at the time seemed like a good idea because it is based on the notion of grassroots, community, bottom-up health.

You build community health centres; you build a sense of stake in the community. You build a sense of understanding of what is driving health patterns; you staff the clinics with the appropriate mix of people, and you get the community involved. That is what health clinics do very well, but we have not seen any strengthening of any health clinics over the past eight years. Certainly we have not seen any since the white paper came in, in May, I believe it was, of 1992.

So, if regionalization is going to have any kind of beneficial effect, and it could, regionalization could be an effective tool for strengthening the health care system, but not a regionalization that starts at the top with a CEO at $160,000 and an assistant CEO and a retinue of civil servants taken from the health care department talking down to the system, saying, do this, do that, move this unit here, move that unit there, move this doctor here, move that nurse there. Top-down systems like that do not produce health; they produce chaos.

If regionalization was going to be a good thing, I would look for something in this act that said the basis of the regionalized health care system will be a set of neighbourhood health initiatives, neighbourhood health districts funded appropriately to develop neighbourhood health primary care services. You know, if they began to do that, they might see why it is so silly to not talk in this context about public health nursing, about all the other things that build a community's ability to take charge of its own health.

I met not very long ago with a group of parents in a parent council room at a school in my district. They were bemoaning the lack of health at a primary level in their community. They used to see a public health nurse. They do not see them anymore. They used to have a sense of health in their community, but they do not have that sense, because it is walk-in clinics and hospitals that are now far distant from them. They do not have a sense of a stake in the health of their community.

So, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I think that The Regional Health Authorities Amendment Act misses the mark by a great, great, wide margin, because it sees health in a top-down bureaucratic mold, government appointed, no citizen elected, no sense of the way in which a community could take a stake in and take control of its primary health care system.

I appreciate the opportunity to put these remarks on the record.

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Mr. Doug Martindale (Burrows): This is an important omnibus bill, as our critic has said, and he has identified three important concerns in this bill, but I am going to limit myself to just one of them, an area that greatly affects my constituency.

Our critic, the member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak), has pointed out that it appears in this bill that the government is going to give itself the authority to amend The City of Winnipeg Act so that the province will take over responsibility for health in the inner city. Now, I do not think that we know that for sure. Certainly we will find out at clause-by-clause stage in the committee. However, if that is the government's intent, I have a number of concerns about that.

The first one is that there was supposed to be, or I understood that there was, an agreement between the City of Winnipeg and the Province of Manitoba regarding the delivery of social assistance and the delivery of health services. My understanding was, and I was told, that the province was going to take over the city Social Services Department, or welfare, and, in return, the city was going to get jurisdiction for health, not just in the inner city, where they already deliver health services, but in the entire city. That was apparently some sort of trade-off. If our critic is right with these amendments, that agreement is off.

The concern that I have about that is that the City of Winnipeg environmental health department is an excellent department delivering a very high quality service. In fact, as a member of the Legislature, I deal with all levels of government, and I would have to say that the city environmental health department is the best department that we ever deal with in helping our constituents. The staff are in their office every morning from 8:30 to 9:30. So you always know that you can phone them and get them in their office. The rest of the day they have voice mail and, if you leave a message, they will get back to you the same day and, if you request an inspection of a restaurant or a residential address, they will do the inspection within 24 hours and get back to you about the results of the inspection and tell you whether there were work orders issued and what the work orders were. Now, I think that is an extremely impressive record for any government department. In fact, if we are looking for a standard of service, I think 24 hours turnaround time is an amazing goal that perhaps more government departments at all levels should try to implement.

Now, I know that is impossible for some levels of government and for some departments because there have been so many cutbacks. For example, if you look at the federal government, where they have laid off 45,000 civil servants, when you phone their offices you get a telephone menu. You do not get to talk to a real person until you listen to five minutes of a telephone menu. I was in a federal government department, I think it was Immigration, and there is no secretary-receptionist. What there was was a shelf with five telephones, and you had to use a telephone to get to a real, live person. So how could they possibly deliver that kind of effective service that the City of Winnipeg's environmental health does deliver, and believe me there is a great need for that kind of service delivery in the inner city. We phone the city health department frequently because of complaints that are generated, usually by neighbours, because we have some very serious problems in the inner city, and those problems are starting to creep into the constituency of Burrows.

In many of our inner-city constituencies we have booze cans, we have shooting galleries, and we have sniff houses. Now, some people may not even know what those slang expressions refer to, but I would be happy to expound on some of them in my brief remarks on this bill. For example, we have a slum landlord who has properties in Point Douglas and in Burrows. He owned about 16 properties until he recently went bankrupt, and in at least two of those properties that I am aware of because they are in Burrows constituency, he has people on social assistance who are sniffers. This particular slum landlord owns a grocery store and, when his tenants who are on social assistance get their cheques, their welfare cheques, he goes to the address, he picks up the cheque, he gets the tenant to sign it over to him and then out of that cheque he repays himself for the credit he has given them for groceries and he sells them sniff. I do not know if he gives them any cash, but they continue to buy groceries at his store.

Now, I phoned one of the program specialists in income assistance, and I said, how can you possibly let a tenant sign over a welfare cheque to a landlord when we know that the tenants are going to use that money for sniffing? The program specialist made inquiries and got back to me and said, well, there is nothing illegal about a tenant signing over a cheque to a landlord, even if they are using it to buy sniff. Well, I think we need to push the government on this absurd loophole, because I know that when people are abusing their welfare cheques by spending the money on alcohol or drugs that people can be cut off and put on vouchers, where they are forced to only buy groceries at specified grocery stores, and I think we need to do the same thing with people who are buying sniff products.

These individuals cause great problems because of their sometime bizarre behaviour. For example, the tenants at 651 Burrows Avenue are involved in things like fights and drinking in public, throwing beer bottles at people, taking showers naked in the rain, because they have great difficulty coping and living because of their sniff addiction. So what can we do? Well, we can phone the police. If they are not doing anything illegal or they are not doing it outside their suite, there is nothing that we can do. If people are doing things illegally in their suite, then the police may need a search warrant, and so the police are hamstrung. Sometimes there is very little that they can do, and they do not get any co-operation from the landlords. In many cases these places, especially shooting galleries, are barricaded, and you get the most pathetic excuses from landlords who say, well, I could not get in. Well, if you cannot get in and you suspect that something illegal is going on, then why do you not give the tenants an eviction notice or why do you not say, I am giving you 24 hours notice and show up with the police? Well, it is because the landlords do not care.

I had a tenant who had a gang house next door to him, and he alleged, he said the neighbour told him that they were paying the landlord a thousand dollars a month, presumably cash under the table, in addition to the money that welfare was paying. So what is the other thing, the other remedy? Well, phone the health department, because the health department has a lot of power. In fact, they have more power than the police, because they do not need a search warrant. So what do they do? Well, they do some very creative things. The health inspectors take the police with them. Now, sometimes they need the police for protection, but it also means that they get to see the inside of the premises and they can issue work orders. In many, many cases they have done that for addresses like, I believe it is 921 Manitoba Avenue and 651 Burrows Avenue. It is a very effective way of cracking down on slum landlords.

Now, there are still some problems. There are changes that are needed to the health act. For example, in Burrows constituency we have a house that has been boarded up for about 10 years, 733 College Avenue, and the neighbours are fed up because the boards get taken off, the plywood gets taken off the windows and the doors and people go in and then there are allegations about gang activity and about young people hanging out there and about partying. Fortunately, we have the city environmental health department. We can phone them up and they will go and board up the house and put the cost of that on the taxes for the landlord, but some of these landlords are terribly unrealistic in the case of 733 College. The landlord lives in Florida and he is trying to sell the house. He wants $60,000 for it. Well, the house is not worth $40,000 in that neighbourhood.

So I phoned him and I suggested he donate it to Habitat for Humanity, but he would not donate it to Habitat for Humanity. So I wrote a letter telling him what the neighbours thought of him about being a slum landlord, an absentee landlord and his house being an eyesore and the effect on property values in the neighbourhood and how unrealistic he was about the asking price and suggested he sell the property and get out of it.

An Honourable Member: A man of the cloth.

Mr. Martindale: A man of the cloth. I wrote a nasty letter, and I sent a copy to everybody for two blocks on College Avenue, but my letter may have had an effect, because now he is prepared to sell the house to the north end housing project.

But it is a good example of where both the health inspectors do a good job of trying to do their best with these slum landlords but where they need more power. For example, there is nothing illegal about boarding up a house for 10 years. I think we need to amend the legislation so that after a year the health inspector can get in so that they can issue work orders and force the landlord to either fix the place up or sell it, because what happens now is, a place may end up being boarded up for five or 10 years and that eventually it goes to the city for unpaid taxes and then they bulldoze it, but it is a long and complicated process. The landlord who I was speaking of for 651 Burrows and 921 Manitoba Avenue went into receivership or bankruptcy and so a credit union got about 16 properties and--

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order, please. I do have to ask the honourable member where the relevancy is with Bill 41, The Regional Health Authorities Amendment Act. I am sure he is getting close to it, so I am sure he will bring it back.

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Mr. Martindale: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for reminding me about the rule on relevancy. I can tell you that public health is very relevant, and the point I was trying to make is that the health act is one of the very few things that we can do to combat slum landlords. I believe that if the province is going to take over jurisdiction, then we want the same level of service that the City of Winnipeg provides, and that is why we are concerned about this. We want the same level of service or better, and if it is going to mean worse service, then that is going to have a detrimental effect on my community.

As I was saying, we were having a meeting with the manager or one of the staff at a credit union about these 16 properties that the credit union has for sale, and the community was saying, we would like you to donate one of these properties to the north end housing project. We will fix it up and sell it and make it a single-family dwelling, and we will not have the problems with these tenants, because it is next door to Strathcona School, it is next door to Splash daycare and is of serious concern to the safety of the children in our community. I said to the staffperson in this credit union, I said, you have a choice. You can donate the property to the community or you can have a demonstration outside the credit union, and you do not need that kind of bad publicity. I suppose it was kind of a good-cop, bad-cop routine where the people from the community were trying to be positive and I had the role of being the bad guy, which I quite willingly pursued because we believe we need to put some pressure on the credit union to do the right thing. They certainly do not want the bad publicity of being known as a slum landlord and mortgaging a property that is only worth $40,000 or $50,000 to the tune of $250,000, which is quite amazing, and we think that this credit union lost in the area of $500,000 to $800,000 on 16 properties. It is just amazing that slum landlords can get that kind of mortgage money from a financial institution. It defies belief.

So we need a strong and effective health department; in fact, we need to give them more power. But I think I will conclude now, because I think I have made the point that we need a strong, effective health department and I believe the City of Winnipeg is delivering that service. Certainly the Deputy Speaker and other members here, who are former city councillors, would have experience in calling various health departments, either the province for the suburbs, or the city for the inner city. We know that it is one of the few ways that we can put pressure on landlords and pressure on tenants, especially where we have slum landlords and especially where we have booze cans and shooting galleries and sniff houses.

I am looking forward to the private member's bill being introduced and spoken on regarding solvent abuse legislation. We hope the government takes that seriously, we hope they allow it to pass, because we need those kinds of tools in order to stop those kinds of slum landlords that I have been describing today, who sell sniff to their tenants, which is an absolutely abominable practice and should be made illegal. So I hope that the province will do the right thing and either not proceed with taking over the health department in the inner city or, if they do, that they provide an equivalent degree of service or a better level of service. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Ms. Marianne Cerilli (Radisson): Mr. Deputy Speaker, I, too, want to put some comments on the record with regard to Bill 41. This bill, for the main part, is about creating two regional boards in the city of Winnipeg, one to deal with hospitals and one to deal with personal care homes. The other parts of the bill are also of concern in dealing with public health in the city of Winnipeg. I think most of my comments will be dealing with the regionalization or the elimination of the local community boards for our community hospitals, but I also want to deal briefly with public health, as the member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale) has just completed talking about public health, which is a very broad topic and has all sorts of considerations from all sorts of different areas and departments, and it is of great concern.

First of all, I want to talk a little bit about this government's record and history in terms of health care. They have been talking about health reform since they came here, and we have not really seen health reform as we would want to when thinking that "reform" means something is going to be improved. It is going to be made more accessible, more community based, there is going to be more participation. That is what they want to make us believe that this regionalization of health care service is about, but that is not the case. We know from our experience with this government when we look at what they have done with home care, trying to privatize home care services, their agenda is very clear, and that was a fiasco. It was a failure, and indeed they had to back down and slow down, but we know that their real agenda is to continue to try to privatize services like home care.

We have also seen their attempt to close parts of the community hospitals, the emergency rooms. Again, that was fought by the community. We were out there in our communities, at our community hospitals. There were rallies in 40-below weather. There were hundreds of people who came out to protest what this government had in mind. Even over Christmas, if you can believe it, they wanted to eliminate emergency room service in our communities.

What they have done with Pharmacare, where we have had over two-thirds of those requiring medication lose their benefits. The deductibles have gone up. There are many more medications that are not covered under Pharmacare, and that has been a real hardship on families in our province.

The same with personal care homes. They have increased the fees for nursing homes and personal care homes. They have been forced, due to serious, severe situations in personal care homes, to bring in some provisions of the bill which our Health critic aptly calls the Holiday Haven amendments which are now going to put in place some kind of complaint provisions and allow the minister, as he has had the ability to do but to mandate it more clearly, to intervene in the case of situations where patients are being abused.

I must say that I have had calls from my own constituency about concerns with the overcrowding in personal care homes, the way that the staff were being run off their feet and cannot attend to the needs of patients and the way that patients are being forced to live in rooms together with other patients in situations where there are all sorts of conflicts because of the illnesses and the state of some of these patients, and the staff are forced to deal with families who are legitimately upset and legitimately have grievances.

In many cases, it puts a tremendous amount of pressure on a system where we need to have more options for the elderly and for seniors that this government just does not seem to recognize. They do not seem to recognize the importance of linking housing and health care, and they have done very little to really start reforming the system to make provisions for our aging population.

I have great concern for what it is going to be like down the road when my parents are not able to stay in their homes independently or are not able to live independently. I am sure all of us would be thinking about our family members and those friends whom we know as we start to see them age, and if it is not dealing specifically with constituents, then it is going to be down the road. We will all come face to face with these problems in the health care system, if not already through our own families, then it is very close at hand.

One of the other fiascos that this government has created is the whole issue with the SmartHealth card and the whole issue of the privacy of health care records and the legislation they are bringing forward now which is after the fact, when they have already signed this contract and now have realized that they have done that ahead of having legislation in place.

I have also wanted to mention, in talking about changes that have been harmful and unfair is their new requirements for fees for orthopedic devices. Again, I have had calls from constituents who were outraged that this is now being foisted upon them, who, on top of having to pay increases for medication, are now having to pay fees for equipment or for devices that they require as medical necessities for lifesaving, and in some cases, they allow people to participate in our community, to earn their own living and have a livelihood. This government, though, has seen fit to further penalize people and tax the sick and the elderly by putting more fees on these kinds of products.

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The other thing that is part of the legacy of this government is the highest level of waiting lists in the country. It is interesting when we look at how this government deals with health care and we look back to the last provincial election when suddenly they had $500,000 to put towards the waiting list just prior and during the election. When you tell people in the community about that, they are appalled. A lot of people did not know that. When you are canvassing, particularly in the federal election, when I mentioned this and would talk about this occurring, people were appalled that they would politically use funds in health care to try and dilute an issue as important to people as waiting lists for serious surgery, whether it is for heart surgery, hip replacements, knee surgery or other surgeries, and we find that the government was willing to do that in the election. We have said that maybe they should call it election surgery, not necessarily elective surgery, because this government seems to respond to the timing of elections and not necessarily the health needs of Manitobans.

So that is the context of this legislation. That is the history of health care under this government, some of the lowlights, I guess you could call them. Now we are having them bring in this twisted principle of what they are calling health reform and trying to create the impression that this is somehow community-based health care when they are centralizing health care in the regions. They have done this in rural Manitoba, and now they are really centralizing health care of all the hospitals in the city of Winnipeg. No more elected community boards. They have appointed people very undemocratically; they are creating a new level of bureaucracy, paying people more than a hundred thousand dollars in positions that are really, at this point, unnecessary. What they are really doing with this is creating a shield around the government so they have a new level of bureaucracy to blame for all of their cuts and for all of their underfunding and for all of their changes that are reducing the quality of health care in our province.

Again, they are bringing in this legislation belatedly. They are bringing in the legislation to be enacted in '98 when they already have this whole process in progress and have had it in progress ever since we have had Connie Curran visit our province and take with her--what was it?--$4 million--

An Honourable Member: U.S. tax free.

Ms. Cerilli: U.S. tax free, and now we are seeing the results as they implement this Connie Curran model for health care.

I want to talk specifically now about how this is affecting Concordia Hospital in my constituency. I have raised some of these issues here in the House. This has been one of the last hospitals to really implement this model. They have resisted it; they have tried to continue on.

One of the concerns that has been brought to my attention is the way that this government is dealing with the boards. They did this in the rural areas where they tried to buy them off by saying: If you come in under regionalization now quietly, we will pay off your debt. We now know that in Concordia Hospital they have about, I believe it is, $90,000 debt, and they are going to get some help with it this year, around 85 percent. Next year only 50 percent of debts in community hospitals will be paid, and then after that the community hospitals will no longer have any assistance from the provincial government on their overruns. They have had, then, to seriously limit the amount of surgery they can perform. We know that there are beds that have been closed, and it does not make sense to people why we will have the facilities there and we will not have the staff or the provision to ensure that all of these facilities can be used to their utmost and we do not have to have these long waiting lists.

In terms of Concordia Hospital, one of the things they have been dealing with recently, since about I think it is May 19, is new staff complements. So they laid off all of the staff, over a 160 people--no, I think it is 195 people--all the nurses, all the support staff, all the LPNs laid off. They are going to eliminate the LPN positions, and then create two new categories so they could pay people less. They are going to be able to pay the nurses aides and the unit assistants less money. They claim that this is going to be able to save them $400,000.

The minister, when I raised this, had the nerve to say this was not cost driven. I find it hard to understand how--they say they are creating more positions, and that is why there is going to be more people there, but in fact what is happening, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is all these positions that are being created are part time; they are not full time. So when they talk about creating approximately 200 or more positions to fill the 195 that were eliminated, these are not full-time positions; they are part-time positions.

The real serious concern is, as I raised in this House, now we have people who are trained as clerk-typists who are having to perform duties that are essentially nursing duties. They are under tremendous stress and pressure. They are forced to work their hours in the hospital and, at the same time, they are trying to take some courses so that they can upgrade. They have to do this, they have to pass or they lose their job. That is the kind of situation that is creating high stress, low morale and, I would say, is affecting the quality of health care tremendously.

I have had concerns expressed to me that Concordia Hospital already has a very high rate of Workers Compensation claims for back injuries. This is because the staff there are rushed and run off their feet, and oftentimes are not able to take the precautions that they need to and take their time when they are lifting patients and using heavy equipment. So, in the long run, it is very expensive to cut staff and try to cut corners, and then you have to pay, on the other hand, huge expense bills in terms of Workers Compensation.

The situation with the staffing now where they are able to pay--for example, an LPN, previously at the top end, was making $17 or so an hour. These new positions will start at $9 or $10 an hour and work up to $13 or $14 an hour. So that is where their savings are coming, off the backs of health care workers who are having to do more work, have part-time positions and, in some cases, have in their job descriptions work that is required of them that they have previously not been trained to do.

I have made reference in the House to manuals that were provided to me. The Concordia Hospital patient transfers, unit assistance, a self-learning package, and they had a part-day workshop in how to learn to lift and transfer patients, how to make beds when someone is in them, how to perform these types of duties, and there is a lot of concern in that hospital that the quality of care is going to be compromised.

One of the other concerns that I want to raise--I have also a letter drafted, and I am just waiting to get some more clarification from Red River about this--but one of the things that was provided for the LPNs that were laid off at Concordia Hospital, 17 of them, mostly from Concordia Hospital, are being upgraded to qualify for their certification as a registered nurse, as an R.N. Again, they are in this pressure cooker to complete this course, which includes some upgrading at the high school level for courses in biology and mathematics, and then to move on to other courses through Red River, and they have to complete this by--let us see here--I think it is September.

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They have requested that they would get an extension until December, and I hope that would be considered seriously. Otherwise, what we have is a situation where the federal government is investing, through the EI program, thousands of dollars, and they are almost like these people are being set up to fail. Because the burden being placed on them and the pressure being placed on them is so onerous that they are not possibly going to be able to perform and get the kind of academic standing that they would be able to if they could take these courses over a more reasonable and realistic period of time. So it is going to be interesting. I mean a couple of these people have already been forced to drop out because they just feel that there is no way they can comply with these requirements. As I said, it would be a waste of money and a poor return on the investment if they are set up to fail and they do not succeed and end up being able to perform as R.N.s. in our health care system.

One of the other issues that is currently underway as well at Concordia Hospital is the contracting out of food services and other services that have now been taken over by the--what is it?--the urban, USSC, I think it is called, where they, already ahead of this legislation, centralized all the support services for all the hospitals in the city of Winnipeg. Of course, this is another issue that is very clear to the public when they look at the possibility of going into the hospital and having to get warmed-over toast that is made in another province and then shipped here and warmed up for them. There is a lot of uncertainty of what is going to happen to the staff that are currently working in the hospitals if we are going to see again more layoffs as they centralize.

I must say with all this centralization this is a trend with this government. They have done it in Housing when they eliminated all the regional housing authorities; they have done it in Child and Family Services when they wiped out all of the regional volunteer--very successful, I might add--boards for the regional Child and Family Services offices. Now we are seeing this in health care where they are wiping out the community hospital boards for local hospitals. If you look to see what has happened in those other departments, I would argue that there have been increased costs. For example, in Housing, where you now have supervisors and maintenance people that are having to drive all over these huge regions to try and do the necessary maintenance, there is going to be increased costs for this amalgamation of the boards in the province, and we have seen that already with these $100,000-or-more CEO salaries. The same thing was going to happen when they wanted to amalgamate the school divisions. The studies were done, and there was going to be no cost saving because there were unforeseen costs elsewhere.

Now in the bill there is a provision for the minister to step in and take over the management of a health care facility if patient care is being compromised or is a problem, and I would say that patient care already is deteriorating in our health care system. We hear of it day after day. We get phone calls from our constituents who have been on waiting lists. One of the other ones I had is a family who were on a waiting list for seven months to have an ultrasound for a woman that was pregnant. By the time she would get the ultrasound, she would have had the baby. She had to go out of the city of Winnipeg.

An Honourable Member: Was that a Concordia baby? Concordia Hospital?

Ms. Cerilli: No, it was not at Concordia. She would go out of the city of Winnipeg to Selkirk in order to get that ultrasound.

So, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I know that you are listening, and you are also concerned about the community hospital in your community, and you want to ensure that we are not going to see further deterioration of services and people being able to access services locally in their own community. As we have seen, this government has also had to slow down with their centres of excellence--concerns that have been expressed over that--which is all part of this same Connie Curan model and plan that they are implementing in the province.

One of the other concerns that I had expressed to me when I was at a meeting with some people in the St. Adolphe and St. Anne area is the concern about them being able to access the St. Boniface Hospital en français so that they would be able to continue to do that and would not be forced to go into another region, and that is an issue for the City of Winnipeg regional health boards as well.

I just want to make a correction. When I was talking about the deficit at Concordia Hospital, I think, I made a mistake that it is a $900,000 deficit for this year, and I hope that can be corrected in Hansard. The hospital received from this government this year $412,000 less, and it is interesting when you look at that number, it is almost exactly the same as the amount they anticipate saving when they move to this Connie Curan model of eliminating the LPNs and creating these new positions of the unit assistants and the health care aides. Time will tell and we will see if that comes to pass, if indeed there is that kind of savings, because the staff that I have been talking to think that there are all sorts of other costs that the hospital has had to provide for. They have had to provide for even counselling services for the number of people that have been laid off and have had to deal with the stress of that, and those were not costs I think that were foreseen when they were anticipating saving money with these changes.

I just want to conclude by making some final comments about the other section of the bill which is to eliminate the requirement for the City of Winnipeg to provide health care services in public health. This government has many reports that are recommending to them such things as having nurses in schools. Even though they have moved away from that in the cuts that they have levied to the City of Winnipeg and to public health in the past, they have got reports that are talking about all the wonderful things that can be accomplished by early intervention, families that are in poverty having programs through public health, well-baby clinics, programs working with tenant associations or other groups where families would have ongoing contact, especially in the early years of their children, with community-based nurses or other health care practitioners. I hope, and I am not confident this government is going to do that, but I hope that this is going to set up for some of those kind of provisions and that it is not going to continue with the trend that they have of cutting back in services and funding for community health and public health.

We have got all sorts of reports from this government, from the Children and Youth Secretariat, from other reports, the Postl report, that talk about the benefits for early intervention and good primary health care, and with this provision in the bill to eliminate the City of Winnipeg's public health care services, we will again have to see. I do not think we have had many answers from the government as to what this really means for public health in the city of Winnipeg. We will just have to see what their plans are and how they are going to implement the many recommendations that they have for increasing public health and primary care for the many families and neighbourhoods that require it in the city of Winnipeg.

With that, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I thank you for the chance to make comments on Bill 41 and conclude my remarks.

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Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): Mr. Deputy Speaker, I also would like to add a few comments on behalf of my community on this particular bill. We have had a number of speakers on this, and they have, of course, outlined the major concerns that we have, those first of all which relate to democracy in Manitoba. What we are seeing here is an enormous amount of power and indeed trust being transferred to regional health boards that contain no electoral principle. They are boards which are being appointed by the provincial government. Many of them are headed by people who are extremely close to this government. Some of them, I believe, are also boards which may or may not be representative of their communities.

That, I think, is very important. If these regional health boards are to conduct the needs assessment in their communities, if they are to keep up with the changing demographic nature of their communities, then they must be representative, and in a government which is unable to appoint boards, which even at first glance seem to be unrepresentative, the communities ought to be, I think, listening to an opposition which says that there should be an electoral principle here and there should be some consistent representation of the components of the people in each of the communities.

There are very few women on these boards, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I do not believe that a woman chairs any of these boards, a very interesting anomaly when we look at the number of women who are working in health care, the number of women who are caregivers at home, and traditionally the role of women in medical services in Manitoba has been very strong. Yet, for some reason, this government was unable to find any women to head one of these regional health boards. It was unable to find very many women and very few aboriginal people who could be part of these regional health boards. It is an indication, I think, of the very narrow basis of representation of the present Conservative Party, and it is one, I think, that ought to give cause for concern in many areas of our society.

So the issue of democracy in an area of health care is one that is of great concern. Health care has to be representative of the people. It has to be able to move relatively quickly in accordance with changing requirements in health care, and it has, I think, to give people confidence that their concerns are going to be dealt with. I do not think that the government's boards pass this test on any count, and so people are concerned. They are very concerned about the amount of power that has been transferred out of this Legislature and into the hands of unelected bodies.

(Mr. Jack Penner, Acting Speaker, in the Chair)

This is not an unusual occurrence. As we look at the legislation of this government, both in this session and in previous sessions, the tendency of the government has been to speak in regional terms but, in fact, to be transferring and to indicate that this regionalization is, in fact, a greater democratization, but when you actually look at most of the changes, Mr. Acting Speaker, these changes are, in fact, reflective of a much more authoritarian government, one which wants to transfer important areas of public policy out of the hands of elected people and into the hands of those who are unelected and, in most ways that people would recognize, unaccountable to the people of the province. So that is a serious cause for concern and one that is being expressed, I think, throughout the province, not just in the city of Winnipeg.

Secondly, Mr. Acting Speaker, I want to look at the process by which this regionalization came into place. The government will argue that it had consultation. Now, consultation in the hands of this government is a bit of a, what should we say, it is not quite a self-defeating prophesy, but it is one of those inventions, you know, that really is the opposite of what it says.

(Madam Speaker in the Chair)

Consultation in the hands of this government meant in terms of regionalization of health care meant consultation with those people whom the government chose to consult, hand-picked people, one-day luncheons with sessions that were created by the minister, questions which were to be asked in a particular order, in a particular way, and reported by and reported upon by the consulting firm. It was not very widespread consultation, and it was, I think, narrow in its base. This is not to take away from the work of the people who attended those consultations nor indeed of the consultants, but simply to say that this is only one small part of consultation.

The government as a whole seems to shy away, in fact runs quite quickly in the opposite direction, from public meetings. We have heard the Minister of Education (Mrs. McIntosh) speak about what she believes public meetings accomplish and basically they simply accomplish the opposition's agenda. What a horrible event, the idea that people might express some opposition to the ideas of this government. So she does not like public meetings. She does not appear to like the kinds of sentiments which are expressed at committee unless they are approving of her committee. There is a wonderful speech which she made, two or three paragraphs of quite revealing comments which reflect I think the position of this government on the role of the public in public discussion in Manitoba.

As we look again at this transfer of authority and responsibility out of the hands of this Legislature, out of the hands of the people of Manitoba and into these narrowly conceived appointed boards, what we are looking at again is a retreat from the public and a retreat from public accountability, which rests in this Legislature. This bill is very characteristic of many, many aspects of government policy and of government changes over the last five or six years.

My colleagues from the City of Winnipeg have expressed their concerns about the potential changes that might come about as a result of the enabling potential of this act for the City of Winnipeg to retreat from, to withdraw from public health. And at a time of the financial constraints in the City of Winnipeg, the enormous offloads that are coming from this provincial government, whether it is in infrastructure, whether it is in education, whether it is in many aspects of urban policy, city government feels itself very, very constrained financially. That is leaving aside its ideological proclivities, but let us just look at the financial losses that they have suffered as a result of this particular government's disdain for dealing with the larger City of Winnipeg issues.

So the City of Winnipeg, it seems to me, is likely to be tempted by the enabling opportunities that are offered by this act. I hope they will not be. I hope that there is in the City of Winnipeg, as there is in many parts of the city, a devotion to the public, a devotion to that sense of public accountability and of the importance of public health in a city of this scale. I think there is. I am particularly cheered I think by the responses to city workers during the flood. I think it is a indication of the great value that people in the city of Winnipeg place upon public institutions and public workers. I do not know if you have been at any meetings recently, Madam Speaker, where CUPE 500 has been introduced, where the city workers have been introduced and thanked for their work during the flood; they became heroes during the flood. They were there 24 hours a day; they were there with knowledge; they were there with their equipment; they were there to instruct people, to guide them, and not in an authoritarian way. The city workers arrived and things seemed to merge. People found their way to the sandbags, they found their way to the lines, and things went in a manner that was orderly, respectful, and recognized the leadership role that those city workers were playing.

So on one hand I will understand the financial constraints that the City of Winnipeg has had placed upon it as a result of the abandonment of many aspects of urban policy by this government and the cuts and the offloading that have occurred over the last eight or nine years, but I also remain hopeful that the people of the city of Winnipeg have a strong attachment to civic values, of which public health is one.

We go back to the time that the City of Winnipeg was founded in the 1870s. That was the period in Europe when the public health movement, as it was called, was being initiated and spread through many of the cities of Europe, and the major cities, Berlin, Hamburg, particularly Germany, parts of The Netherlands, parts of Scandinavia and in the United Kingdom as well.

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The public health movement came about as a result of epidemic disease, which the upper classes recognized could affect them, that began in conditions of poverty and conditions of ill health in the increasingly crowded industrial towns of northern Europe. Disease spreads. It knows no favour and no class, particularly, for example, in Hamburg, as the cholera spread at the end of the 19th Century. As smallpox, tuberculosis in particular, the diseases of poverty spread so quickly through those increasing urbanized and densely populated cities, the public health movement was born. It came to Canada, as our cities too began to industrialize, as they began to incorporate people from many parts of the world not often having a common language but increasingly put and placed in conditions of poverty, many of them unable to read or to have access to the education that was available to the minority of others. I am speaking now particularly in the context of western Canadian cities.

What the public health movement did, as the healthy communities movement does today, is to make clear and to understand the connections between environment and epidemiology, between environment and health. Here is where the transfer of public health from the City of Winnipeg to regional health authorities I think may pose a difficulty. Public health movements are able to incorporate many elements of public responsibility. They are not just looking at disease; they are not just looking at disease prevention; they are not just looking at medical assistance, but they are looking at the conditions of health.

As they began, in the 1880s and 1890s, to draw together the powers that an urban authority has for safe environments, for healthy environments, for space, for light. In fact, one of the best reports that is done on this was done, I think it was 1919, and it is a report on the health conditions of the communities and what then comprised Winnipeg. It is a remarkable report. It was done by public health inspectors. It looked at and compared--and the ones that I have looked at are the north end and my own community, Wolseley--it looked at the statistics on space that each family had; it looked at whether each family had a fireplace; it looked at the light, the number of windows that each family had; the number of rooms that they had per child; it looked at the condition of each piece of housing, the dampness; the ability to withstand the winter; it looked at the prevalence of vermin, the number of rats per house that were counted across the inner city of Winnipeg. Of course, Madam Speaker, what it found was enormous distinctions according to income.

The City of Winnipeg began, in part as a result of that study but not only that study, to draw together all of its powers of regulation for the number of rooms that a family should have, for the space and light allocation that were prerequisites to maintaining the health of all the people of this city, not just the people of the south end. That is where we may be losing if the regional health authorities take over public health. We are losing that link between the ability to regulate housing, disease prevention, the infrastructure that creates safe communities, all the things that people at the end of the 19th Century or the beginning of the 20th Century understood it was so important to creating a healthy society in the city of Winnipeg.

The City of Winnipeg has over the years extended its public health authority into schools. The schools in my community have public health nurses. They are, for example, in the case of Mulvey School, nurses who have an office, who teach in the classroom aspects of health, who are available for consultation for students and who do play an enormous role, not just with the children in the school but with the families. Now, can a regional health board do that? Can a regional health board understand that that is what is necessary. Will it have the ability and the opportunity, given the kind of funding that it is going to have, to give some priority to that relationship between education and public health? Madam Speaker, I have very, very serious concerns that that is going to be possible.

Another element I think that is important to consider is the role that public health has played in the prevention of disease, particularly important now with the spread of disease so quickly across continents. I do not want to go into the nature of the diseases that are spreading. They are extremely alarming, and they do depend upon regulation over and above that which our regional health authority is going to be able to provide.

It depends upon widely available and freely available vaccination and immunization. Will a regional authority be able to provide that, and will it give that priority? It depends also upon the provision of early intervention. The well-baby clinics of the late 19th Century continued through into the 1920s and '30s, very, very important during the Depression when very little else was available to families--but public health institutions concerned with the health of all the population and distributing the resources of a society so that all children were brought into a safe and healthy environment with a family that was able to feed them at least a basic minimum and which had a physical environment that was not dangerous to the child. All of those were provided with home visits, with nutritional information, with constant guidance of parents where required or requested, and as well, a home visit and a public health nurse who was educated in the connection between the environment, between the broader community, the ability to distribute resources across that community and the child and the family with which they were faced as their most immediate patients.

So that sense, I am afraid, may be lost. I think that is one of the most important things that the city has done. If we look back at the history of the City of Winnipeg, the provision of public health nurses, the provision of public health clinics, the provision of freely available vaccination, of freely available treatment for certain types of diseases, those which are very easily spread and become epidemic, has been very, very important. We are not alone in that, but we may well be alone in creating a regional authority, unelected, appointed by a very narrowly conceived government which may enable that great legacy of the City of Winnipeg to be lost.

Finally, Madam Speaker, I want to discuss the difficulties that have been placed in the path of my local hospital, the Misericordia. Misericordia is, has been, always was a community hospital. It is not a large hospital, although at certain times in the history of Winnipeg it has of course been one of the larger hospitals and has played a role beyond its community. Certainly in obstetrics, it played a role beyond its local community. It has in recent decades been very important in the provision of health services or obstetrical services to certain northern communities.

It began as a hospital for what was called in those days unwed mothers. It always took its mission and its sense of purpose from the provision of sound obstetrical care and in the aftercare of those mothers and their children who were often sent into a society which was most unwelcoming, which assigned to them a stigma which perhaps has only in recent decades begun to diminish. So the Misericordia role always went beyond the boundaries of the hospital, and its sense of purpose was defined by that kind of obstetric care.

What has happened to the Misericordia in the last 10 years or as a result of this government's policies has been a great deal of upset for staff, a great deal of confusion. Conflicting messages have been sent out by the government. There were reports on emergency services. There were reports on obstetrical services. They did not seem to be leading in the same direction. The government seemed to speak with several voices and with several purposes when it looked at the Misericordia.

There were reports from urban hospital committees which did not take account of the statistics that the Misericordia offered on its emergency services. There were obstetrical reports which seemed far more concerned with the primary teaching hospitals than with any historical community role that the Misericordia had or could play.

So what has happened as a result of this, apart from the tremendous pressure that there has been on the staff of that hospital, is that the Misericordia eventually, after eight years of disorganization on the part of the government, to put it mildly, no longer has obstetrics services. It has wonderful birthing rooms. It has beautifully equipped rooms. It has a fine staff with a long history of care of patients from a variety of communities, but particularly from the inner city. That expertise is now not being used in that way. Those nurses--midwives, some of them--have been assigned to other areas. The birthing rooms lie empty.

Yet, Madam Speaker, the hospital, I think, has struggled with other areas as well. I think as they look back on this period of Conservative government rule, those are the kinds of things that they will remember. They will remember the great demonstration that they brought to the Legislature. They will remember the petitions of thousands and thousands of people who asked for the maintenance of the Misericordia as a general hospital.

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They will remember, I suspect, the actions of Mr. Orchard who I think, to put it charitably, led a community committee who began many years ago, I would say about 1990, 1991, to begin a committee to convey the opinions of the community about the Misericordia Hospital to the government. I would say that Mr. Orchard, quite deliberately, quite consciously, delayed, obstructed, led that community committee around by the nose, and finally produced a report on the Misericordia which took no account of what they had to say. It was, I suppose he would think, a very clever piece of politics.

But as the people of that community look back upon the events of the last few years, the last eight or nine years, they will remember their deputations to the government. They will remember those delegations. They will remember the ad hoc community advisory committees, and they will remember the petitions that were presented to the minister. They will remember the large public meeting that was held over at St. Stephen's Broadway.

What they will take from all of that is that this was a government which did not listen, because out of all of that, Madam Speaker, what happened? The Misericordia is left with birthing rooms which are no longer used. It is left with experienced staff who are no longer used in that area. It is left with an emergency ward which was the third busiest in the city after both of the big teaching hospitals, but which now is no longer allowed to be an emergency ward. It was a hospital which dealt with inner city patients, many of whom have no other way to get to hospital other than to walk. Yet it is a hospital now which has many, many closed beds and a mission which is much diminished by the actions of this government.

At the same time, I think that we may have some hope. I think everyone in the community is impressed by the way in which the Misericordia, after a few years, has been able to approach the ambivalent situation in which it has been placed, the misguided missiles from the government, the directions which are contradictory, the ignoring of various reports, and the deaf ears which have met their petitions.

In spite of having faced all of that, the hospital has tried to find itself a mission within whatever could be conceived of as government policy. So they have created an ambulant and emergent care centre. They have created a Health Links line which links people in the community by telephone to a nurse for referrals. They do go out into the community through the Care-a-Van to try and be available at events.

An Honourable Member: Anytime.

Ms. Friesen: Does that mean now?

An Honourable Member: Yes.

Ms. Friesen: Well, what are you saying?

An Honourable Member: If you want.

Ms. Friesen: Talk about ambivalent messages.

Madam Speaker, I am not sure how much of this Hansard is recording, but perhaps it should be indicated that this is such a bill of such great importance that I have a number of colleagues, I believe, who would also like to add some words on it.

Madam Speaker, with that, I rest my case.

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

Madam Speaker: To resume debate on second reading, on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Justice (Mr. Toews), Bill 42 (The Provincial Court Amendment and Consequential Amendments Act; Loi modifiant la Loi sur la Cour provinciale et modifications corrélatives), standing in the name of the honourable member for Swan River (Ms. Wowchuk).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing?

An Honourable Member: Leave.

Madam Speaker: Leave? Leave has been granted.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate, on the proposed motion of the honourable Minister of Justice (Mr. Toews), Bill 43, The Law Society Amendment Act (Loi modifiant la Loi sur la Société du Barreau), standing in the name of the honourable member for Swan River (Ms. Wowchuk).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing?

An Honourable Member: Leave.

Madam Speaker: Leave? Leave has been granted.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 44, The Municipal Amendment Act (Loi modifiant la Loi sur les municipalités), standing in the name of the honourable member for Burrows (Mr. Martindale).

Is there leave to permit the bill to remain standing?

An Honourable Member: No.

Madam Speaker: No? Leave has been denied.

Mr. Clif Evans (Interlake): I am pleased to add a few comments to Bill 44, The Municipal Amendment Act. This act has a purpose to provide the Employees Benefits Board with the authority to administer the municipal employee pensions through an amendment in The Municipal Act. This bill, we support the concept of this bill, as we also agree with UMM and MAUM that this bill and the municipal employees of Manitoba who have requested this when we were amending and changing the whole Municipal Act as a whole the last year, Bill 54. Because of the time element and other issues that were before us at that time, we were not able to address this aspect, the municipal pensions, employee pensions in municipalities when we were dealing with Bill 54.

The government of the day has listened to the different communities and has agreed and put forward these amendments to support the changes to provide the employers, the municipalities, and employees to administer their own pension plan. In my discussions with UMM and MAUM and with the union employees, this is something that they have wanted to do, and we certainly support that and hope that we can go on to committee with this. If there are any people that might want to present and make statements to this bill, this amendment, we look forward to that also.

Looking through the bill and discussing it, really, we at this time see nothing that can deter the possibility of providing sound administration and a good future for the municipal employees pension plan. There are amendments to the act that provide the municipal employers and employees the opportunity to be able to work together through their board, work together to make sure that the plan, the pension plan goes in a positive, strong direction for its employees and their spouses.

As we all know, employees, municipal employees are municipal employees that do a lot of the work within the communities that deal with infrastructure, that deal with services that are provided in each community or each municipality.

I want to say, make a comment, the fact that we have to make sure that not only are the municipal people, the employers and employees have a sound, sound base to work from. Why I say that is that it is my hope that our employees, municipal employees, will be able to increase because of the needed services for our rural communities and our municipalities as our municipalities increase in size. That is a hope that I on this side of the House wish for, hope for and certainly encourage. Municipal pension plans or any pension plan of any kind does not serve well if there is no one to pay into it, and what we are seeing in some areas--and I certainly hope that this stops--is the downloading of employees in certain areas, whether it be in municipalities and of course within the different departments because employees are important, an important cog of a municipality, of a community, of a town or a village or an R.M. Their work, their service that they provide is important to make sure that that community strives and has the services that they are mandated to provide to the people whom they serve.

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Madam Speaker, we are looking at a situation in certain areas of rural Manitoba that see some of our infrastructure going down, our roads, education costs to offloading and all of this ties in to the employees in the different areas. They are all affected. So, hopefully, these employees in the municipalities will have the opportunity, will have something to work for and with, so that they can pay into this pension plan so that they increase, so that when they are going to retire that they have the availability to be able to live comfortably after they have retired. They also want to retire, I am sure, in the communities that they live in. With the continuation of some of the services that this government and its departments have stopped providing, and have stopped providing the resources for, and increasing the costs to municipalities, it is going to make it even tougher for people to be able to work and to live in some areas of rural Manitoba.

Even though we support--I certainly do support--this bill, Bill 44, we hope that it works, but I can tell you that rural Manitoba as a whole is in a tough spot when the fact of the matter is that a lot of the services that the government is to provide are taken down and taken away from our municipalities, Highways people, health, environment, natural resources. We want to say that we hope that employees in rural and municipal Manitoba will be there for a long time to be able to provide these services and be able to have the opportunity to deal with their employers in having a superb pension plan for when they retire. I hope the employees pension, the municipal pension plan, increases and increases with more employees who are able to work.

Madam Speaker, with those very short words, we look forward to the committee and hearing anybody who wishes to make a presentation. Thank you.

Madam Speaker: Is the House ready for the question? The question before the House is second reading of Bill 44.

Is it the will of the House to adopt the motion?

Some Honourable Members: Yes.

Madam Speaker: Agreed? Agreed and so ordered.

Mr. Steve Ashton (Opposition House Leader): Madam Speaker, on House business, I am wondering if there might be leave to revert to Bill 41. I was not here at the time it was brought up, and we may be able to have this pass through to committee.

Madam Speaker: Is there leave to revert to Bill 41 to afford the member for Thompson (Mr. Ashton) an opportunity to speak to it? [agreed]

Bill 41--The Regional Health Authorities Amendment and Consequential Amendments Act

Mr. Steve Ashton (Thompson): We have had a significant number of people speak on this bill. I know my own position on regional health authorities is very clear. I believe it is important that they be elected and accountable to the people of Manitoba. It is unfortunate that the government has ignored that. I will, I want to indicate, be working with the regional health board in my own area. I know this deals with Winnipeg largely, but I will be working with the regional health board. I find it interesting that--and I want to put this on the record--the chairperson of the regional health authority in the Burntwood area in Thompson has already come out and stated publicly that he hopes that the Minister of Health (Mr. Praznik) will re-examine policies on such issues as recruitment of rural and northern doctors.

I think that is an encouraging sign, and even though I would like to see some changes to the way the regional health authorities are structured, I am concerned about the funding of the regional health authorities. I did want to put on the record that I believe that the minister cannot pass the buck to a lot of the regional health authorities. There is a lot of responsibility that rests with the provincial government. That is where the buck stops in terms of health care in this province. We believe that there are many changes to health care that need to be made, rural and northern physicians just being one example.

With those few words, we are ready to pass this on to committee.

Madam Speaker: Is the House ready for the question? The question before the House is second reading of Bill 41, The Regional Health Authorities Amendment and Consequential Amendments Act.

Is it the will of the House to adopt the motion?

Some Honourable Members: Agreed.

Madam Speaker: Agreed and so ordered.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 45, The Manitoba Evidence Amendment Act (Loi modifiant la Loi sur la preuve au Manitoba), standing in the name of the honourable member for Swan River (Ms. Wowchuk).

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 46, The Criminal Injuries Compensation Amendment Act (Loi modifiant la Loi sur l'indemnisation des victimes d'actes criminels), standing in the name of the honourable member for Swan River (Ms. Wowchuk).

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

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 48, The Child and Family Services Amendment and Consequential Amendments Act (Loi modifiant la Loi sur les services à l'enfant et à la famille et modifications corrélatives), standing in the name of the honourable member for Thompson (Mr. Ashton).

An Honourable Member: Leave.

Madam Speaker: Leave? Leave has been granted.

Madam Speaker: To resume second reading debate on Bill 49, The Statute Law Amendment (Taxation) Act, 1997 (Loi de 1997 modifiant diverses dispositions législatives en matière de fiscalité), standing in the name of the honourable member for Swan River (Ms. Wowchuk).

Is there leave? No? Leave has been denied.

Mr. Leonard Evans (Brandon East): I have a few words to say about Bill 49, The Statute Law Amendment (Taxation) Act, 1997, which was introduced by the Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson). As usual, it is a grab bag of various tax changes usually related to the budget and, indeed, this is no exception. It relates to some various announcements made in the 1997 budget and, of course, it provides for some minor technical and housekeeping changes as well.

I would just like to make some comments about some of the major features of the legislation, one of which, of course, is the corporation capital tax exemption. I might add that, basically, we are in agreement with these proposals in the bill. I do not think we have any major objection. We have some comments, but I do not think we are necessarily opposed to what the government is intending to do in this bill.

I would only say though that the corporation capital tax exemption, which is meant to give a break to small corporations--as I understand the minister in his introductory statement, this will increase the exemption, those exempted, to 700 small corporations. The increase will take 700 small corporations off the capital tax roles. But my comment is this, when you look at the budget document and ask yourself, well, just how effective is this? What is this going to mean to small business? What kind of relief are we getting? According to the minister's own documents, it is only $1.5 million.

An Honourable Member: A lot of money.

Mr. Leonard Evans: A lot of money. Madam Speaker, $1.5 million. This year they are collecting $108.1 million; $108.1 million is being collected, but you are only giving up $1.5 million. So it is no big deal, as they say. It is no big deal.

Well, it is significant for those people, but we are saying, well, why not raise the exemption a little bit more? I mean, $1.5 million, you are not necessarily being Santa Claus to small business in this. It is a step in the right direction, yes, but you are not being Santa Claus to the small corporations. It is pretty modest.

Then the question is, well, to what extent do we see some real, tangible benefits from this? That, again, is very difficult to measure. Just what impact does this tax relief give? You surely hope that you are going to stimulate economic activity among those corporations, help them be more profitable, have them expand and employ people and so on, but that does not always happen.

Madam Speaker, the other item here is the payroll tax exemption, which is something that we did when we were in office. Previously, we did raise the levels of exemption and we would have done it even further as the years go on, I am sure. This particular provision increases the exemption from $750,000 to $1 million of annual payroll, effective January 1 of 1998. This is going to exempt 600 more employers, or about a quarter of those now paying the tax. As the minister advises, another 200 will pay less tax, but, again, this is a far cry from what this party in government promised when they were on this side of the House. I should have brought Hansard with me.

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We listened many a time to Brian Ransom, to the now Premier (Mr. Filmon), the then Leader of the Opposition, that this was a terrible tax. It discouraged employment creation, and it had to be gotten rid of. Shades of Jean Chretien and his GST--we will kill it, we will eliminate it, we will run it off the face of the earth. Well, the Premier made those kinds of speeches, too. It was not going to be tinkered with, we were not going to raise exemption levels, we were going to eliminate it, period. It was no longer going to exist. Yet, here it is, alive and well in the year 1997. It continues to exist. Even with this exemption, the exemption means the government gives up $3.8 million, a little bit more than the other item, the corporation capital tax; but, again, $3.8 million is a relatively small amount of money, and they are still tinkering with it.

Madam Speaker, this year the government anticipates getting even more from the payroll tax than they did last year. Last year they got $206.5 million--at least that was in the budget--and this year it is going up to $209.4 million even with this additional exemption level. So, far from getting rid of the payroll tax, this government is actually benefiting by increasing revenues under this particular health and education levy.

We have said it before and we will say it again, this government will never ever get rid of the payroll tax, in spite of the commitment made by the Premier when he was on this side of the House. So Mr. Chretien has company. He has a lot of company in this Chamber on the government side, because this was a clear commitment that was made that was not maintained, that was not kept. So, therefore, we are still paying this.

Of course, there is good reason why the tax stays, and that is because it is meaningful. It provides a lot of dollars, over $200 million, $209 million provided to the Treasury of Manitoba. It is just too good a source of revenue for this government to give up.

So, Madam Speaker, it is easy for them to say one thing when they are in the opposition. It is another matter of being in government when they come to face the reality of managing the finances of the province and realize that they could not maintain, they could not possibly give up this levy. Just as Mr. Chretien has told us, no way he can now fulfill his promise to get rid of the GST.

The manufacturing tax investment credit is extended for another three years until the year 2000, and here we are talking about a little bit more money. It is estimated to cost the province $14.8 million. That is the manufacturing investment tax credit. But one has to ask oneself, just how does this translate into more investment? Now I know we have heard many a speech from the Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson) and the Minister of Industry (Mr. Downey), glowing reports about expanding manufacturing in Manitoba and how the industry has grown and so on, but I would say that they should be very concerned about what is happening in manufacturing because right now in terms of jobs--I am talking in terms of employment--manufacturing is not expanding, it is contracting. According to the figures we have now from Statistics Canada for May 1997, there were fewer people working in manufacturing than in May of 1996. We dropped by 4.6 percent. In 1996 we had 63,700 people working in manufacturing; today, May 1997, there are only 60,800. That is a drop of 4.6 percent, while at the same time the country as a whole expanded manufacturing jobs by 2.9 percent. Even if you take it on a year-to-date basis, there is a decline in manufacturing jobs.

So I say, well, just exactly what is happening in the manufacturing sector? What is the impact of this manufacturing investment tax credit, anyway? I am afraid that this is the story of the economy under this government. We have fewer people working today than last year. We have fewer people working than when they were elected in 1988 in the manufacturing industry. So much for their policies of industrial development. So much for their policies of--[interjection] Well, there is a lot of PR. I give them credit for PR. There is a lot of PR. They are forever talking about--[interjection] There are a couple of other initials one could use besides PR but, at any rate, there is continual propaganda coming out of the mouths of the members opposite, the ministers opposite about how great our employment picture is, how many more jobs we have got.

We are getting more jobs, Madam Speaker, but unfortunately they are the low-paying jobs, you know, more telemarketing centres, more jump-to-the-pump gasoline stations, other small businesses, personal community businesses that tend to pay very, very low wages. If you look at the figures again from StatsCanada for May, you will see that is where the growth is. The growth of jobs is definitely there, but, in the meantime, we are losing manufacturing. As I said, May over May, we lost 2,900 jobs, May of 1997 compared to May of 1996. While we are losing jobs, all of Canada has been increasing.

We also lost jobs, Madam Speaker, incidentally, in the construction industry, and we have lost jobs in the transportation, communications and utilities industry. In other words, we are losing the high-paying jobs in those industries. We are gaining in the low-wage area, which means that likely there is to be a dampening effect on the average wage, the average industrial wage in the province. Regrettably, this average industrial wage, I might add in passing, is not increasing as rapidly as inflation in this province. We have got the highest rate of inflation in Manitoba of any of the provinces, if not the highest, very close to the highest, and at the same time our average wages are among the lowest in terms of rate of increase. As a result, the people of Manitoba, the workers in Manitoba, are actually experiencing a decline in their real purchasing power. They are experiencing a decline in their real wages.

Madam Speaker, this has to be a concern. I am not quite sure how this manufacturing tax credit, investment tax credit, is going to be the answer for more jobs in that particular sector. There is another proviso here for a film and video production tax credit. This is a new refundable credit, and I give the minister credit. I congratulate the minister for this particular item. This is an industry that has a lot of potential, and it has a lot of advantages, not only employment, but it enhances the culture in the province and I think that this is a very good idea. I see it is going to be available for at least the next three years. So let us see how this enhances the film and video industries in Manitoba.

The other item is the Manitoba learning tax credit, which I gather is somewhat in line with changes made by the federal government. Again, we have no complaint or criticism of it per se. At least, offhand I cannot see any reason why we would want to oppose this. Among other things, this proviso allows for the parallel wording of new definitions in increased amounts provided by the federal government, so this is bringing provincial regulations or legislation in line with the federal. At any rate, this is fine. We could probably argue for a different arrangement, but at least it is a step in the right direction.

In terms of the first-time buyer retail tax rebate, this goes back to 1994, Madam Speaker, and I see it is now being extended to March of 1998 with the actual rebate being $2,500. But really, there is very little impact, it seems to me, from this particular rebate. Again, I am not opposed to it, but it is pretty modest. The government is anticipating an expenditure of $900,000 for this particular rebate, and I say, in the spectrum of things, to put it in perspective, it is a very, very modest amount of money.

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An Honourable Member: But they have made a big deal out of it.

Mr. Leonard Evans: Yes, they made a big deal, a lot of money, maybe more money spent on advertising this and blowing it up than there is spent on rebates. We would not necessarily go for this kind of a rebate. There are a lot of other ways to stimulate housing construction in this province, and we are not necessarily happy with this particular kind of rebate, the definitions and the parameters of the rebate. Nevertheless, we are not opposed to it. But I say, it just will not do the job.

You know, Madam Speaker, when you look at what has been happening to housing, it is just incredible how weak our housing sector has been over the last many years. I have back to 1992, housing starts--this is just in urban areas, but that accounts for about 80-90 percent of the total, but it gives you a pattern anyway. In 1992, we just had over 1,800 starts; 1993, we dropped to 1,700; 1994, we dropped to 1,664; 1995, we dropped again to 1,215 starts; and 1996, we edged up slightly to 1,243. Now as of this year, we have gone, the first five months, we had 317 starts last year. We are up to 633 this year. So people opposite could say, hey, that is almost a 100 percent increase. We just about doubled. Is that not great.

Well, maybe it is fine, but this is a long way, a long, long way from achieving the housing start levels we had back in the previous NDP government's reign. We were in 4,000 or 5,000 housing starts a year. I am sure we averaged nearly 5,000 a year, and most of these were private starts. Some may have been social housing, but most of it was private starts, and here we are down pathetically to 1,200. I mean, what is happening in this province? Why are we having a housing industry, new residential construction industry, that is pathetically small?

An Honourable Member: They are voting with their feet.

Mr. Leonard Evans: They are voting with their feet. We may be losing a lot of people in that category, young families and that who are potential buyers of homes who are leaving. I read a while back from one of the banks, I do not recall which bank, but it was one of the chartered bank's analysis of housing, and they related it to the lack of effective income, the depressed income situation that we have, and that has got to do with something.

Our personal disposable income has declined since 1988. Personal disposable income in real dollars, constant dollars, is way below what it was back in 1988 when this government first got elected. As a matter of fact--I had a figure here somewhere. I may not be able to put my hand on it right at the moment, but there is no question that real disposable income, which means the income that Manitobans have after we take into account all taxes, all transfers of payments to and from--yes, here we are. We are only at 96 percent of where we were when this government took office. This government took office in real dollars, the per capita--in other words, without quoting any more numbers, I am just saying, Madam Speaker, that Manitobans have fewer dollars in their pockets today than they did when this government was elected. So that is a concern and that may explain why housing starts are so pathetically weak in this province. Pathetic, absolutely pathetic.

As I said, over the years, we have ranked among the lowest in the province. Like last year, 1996, we were ranking No. 9; that is, in terms of change, that is the rate of expansion. Now this year, because of this expansion from 3 to 600, it is like 100 percent increase, we are ranking No. 1, but that is ranking No. 1 way at the bottom. You know, we have gone from one foot to two feet, so we have had 100 percent increase, but in the meantime we used to be up there around 5,000 or so starts--4,000 or 5,000 starts--now we are down to getting close to 1,000 starts. That is a long, long way down.

There is reference to aircraft gasoline. The tax rate is being reduced by one cent a litre. This is going to cost the taxpayers $2.1 million, but I assume that it was deemed to be necessary to stimulate activity at the Winnipeg Airport. Again, we cannot complain too much about that particular measure. As usual, it does not amount to very much money; it is $2.1 million. The motive fuel tax is going to increase about $5 million from last year even with this rebate. So you are talking about $64 million--and I think I have got the right category, it is called motive fuel tax in here in the budget of 1997, and we are talking about a reduction of one cent per litre which translates to $2.1 million. So it is not a large amount, and maybe it is more symbolic than anything.

I see that the minister is proposing the use of tax-exempt coloured diesel fuel for off-highway trucks that are engaged in off-highway mining activities, transporting from a mine in Manitoba to a Manitoba processing centre and also for mining or recovery equipment. Again, we do not oppose this, perhaps it will help the mining industry. I note though that there is quite a significant drop regardless in mining tax; of course, that is essentially related to the amount of activity in the mining industry. This will likely help the industry on the cost side, although actually the most important thing for the mining industry is what happens to the world price of metals. What happens to the price of nickel? What happens to the price of copper? That is the determining factor in the health and the level of activity in the Manitoba mining industry.

Madam Speaker, we are prepared to pass this legislation. Of course, it will go on to the Committee of the Whole in this House where we can discuss some of these items in more detail and ask the minister some more questions. As I said, over all, we are supportive of the bill. We have some reservations, and we wonder whether the government is going far enough in some areas such as the learning tax credit or whether they are really getting any value for their money such as the manufacturing investment tax credit. But, having said that, we are prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt and see it continue as it has for the last couple of years.

Madam Speaker, with those few words, I will terminate my comments and have something more to say when it reaches the committee stage.

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Inkster): Madam Speaker, I, too, wanted to say a few words on this particular bill. I would echo a lot of the comments in terms of what the member for Brandon (Mr. Leonard Evans) has put on the record with respect to some of the positive things that this bill actually does in certain areas of tax relief. But what I wanted to do was just to talk a little bit about some of the principles, if you like, of taxation.

When you review the table of contents at the beginning of the bill, it touches on a number of different ways in which the government collects its taxes. What I want to focus some attention on--for example, it talks about the retail sales tax. We have not seen very much from this government in terms of what it believes should be happening in the province of Manitoba with respect to the GST. The member for Brandon made reference to it.

I have had discussions in dialogue with the Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson) with respect to the GST, the PST, the potential harmonization of those two taxes. We have seen in Atlantic Canada, Madam Speaker, movements towards the harmonization of those two taxes where in essence avoidance of duplication of services. There has been a net decrease in the amount of sales tax being collected at the till for the consumer. Yes, there have been, in areas, taxes being applied, that were not being applied previously, under just the PST. But the bottom line is there has been a reduction in duplication, there has been a more consistent policy in dealing with that particular issue.

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We have groups within the province of Manitoba, advocacy groups, that have been trying to express to the government that there is a need to revisit or to look at this particular issue. Now that we have seen the federal government, or the federal election is now over--

Hon. Eric Stefanson (Minister of Finance): I have explained this to you, Kevin, time and time again.

Mr. Lamoureux: Well, Madam Speaker, I would like to think that the Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson) would in fact have an open mind with this particular issue. To stand back or to sit back in his chair and say, no, I have explained it to the member for Inkster and I am not going to say anything more on this issue is highly irresponsible. The Minister of Finance has a role to play in this particular debate. In fact, in going through the western Finance ministers' meeting, I do not see anything in terms of what is tangible as to how we can overcome, because I believe that there is a problem here. The Minister of Finance might not recognize the problem. I believe there is a problem, that it is not proper for us to be having two consumption taxes, complete duplication of services. There are some aspects of the GST that are more positive than what the PST is. There are some aspects of the PST that are more positive than with respect to the GST. There is a need for this Minister of Finance and this government to go to the table and to start seeing if in fact there are some things that could be done that would be of benefit--

Mr. Stefanson: We have been to the table, Kevin; we have been to the table.

Mr. Lamoureux: Well, the Minister of Finance needs to go back to the table. A lot of things have happened in the last three or four weeks that might change his opinion at dealing with it. When I say that he has to go to the table, he has to go to the table with an open mind, not a predetermined agenda in terms of what he believes or this government ultimately believes is politically advantageous for any sort of re-election, Madam Speaker. What they have to do is they have to go to the table in such a fashion in which they want to resolve the issue. They cannot just sit back believing nothing is going to happen because nothing will happen. There has to be a higher sense of co-operation, and I would appeal to the Minister of Finance, as I would appeal to the Minister of Finance in Ottawa, that you have to start working together in order to resolve this particular problem because there are some things that could be done.

Now, Madam Speaker, there is also the other issue. You know, we talk about The Health and Post Secondary Education Tax Levy Act. Well, I would want to extend that to the property tax. You know, we have a government that--and I know the Minister of Finance has heard this from me on numerous occasions--continues to rely on the financing of education through property tax. So I look at it and say, yes, there are a lot of positive things within this particular piece of legislation, but there needs to be a lot more brought into future legislation, because every year we get this particular act and it touches on different aspects of taxation.

What I would like to see in it--a wish list if you like--is to deal with the whole property tax issue, not only in terms of just the school tax--[interjection] Well, one has to be persistent with this particular government, I must say to the Minister of Finance as he says something to the member for Turtle Mountain (Mr. Tweed). You have to be persistent with this government because it just does not seem to want to sink in. What they have to start doing is taking a look at some of the broader issues facing taxation.

You know, they are doing a somewhat admirable job, somewhat admirable. I would not want to be misquoted on the payroll tax, Madam Speaker--somewhat admirable. They are improving the situation. Well there are other areas, those broader principles, those broader issues that the government has to address, and the property tax is one of them.

Their first attempt to deal with the property tax I believe was to get rid of a certain percentage of the rebate. At one time--and I just do not know my figures; I do not have any notes in front of me, so the minister will have to excuse me--I believe it was somewhere around $70, $75 which they had taken away from the property tax payers. It was a tax increase. So, on one hand, they will list off and they say, well, we are not increasing the major taxes. They had to qualify it, Madam Speaker. We are not increasing the major taxes, but what is property tax? Many would interpret that as a major tax. Not only would they interpret it as a major tax, many would say that it is a regressive tax.

Not only do they take that sort of action, they completely ignore--just like they do with the PST and GST--the issue of trying to resolve the broader issue of property tax. What this government could be doing to put municipalities, in particular the City of Winnipeg, but other municipalities on an economically level playing field with other provincial jurisdictions or municipalities such as Calgary or Edmonton, when you compare property taxes--we drive people out of the city of Winnipeg because of some of the actions. [interjection] No, because of the lack of action of this government on dealing with issues of substance with respect to the property tax issue. It is not a wake-up issue. The minister across is the one that should be waking up, and that is the type of discussions that they should be having in their cabinet.

It surprises me, Madam Speaker, that the Minister of Rural Development (Mr. Derkach), I believe it is, does not even understand what it is that I am talking about. That tells me that this sort of discussion is not even occurring within the cabinet meetings, and one has to wonder why. Maybe that is more and more the reason why we need to, in opposition, bring this issue time and time again to the floor in the Chamber. Once again, I am pleased to bring this particular issue to the Chamber, and I am quite prepared to see the bill go to committee.

Madam Speaker: Is the House ready for the question? The question before the House is second reading Bill 49, The Statute Law Amendment (Taxation) Act, 1997.

Is it the will of the House to adopt the motion?

Some Honourable Members: Agreed.

Madam Speaker: Agreed and so ordered.

What is the will of the House? Is it the will of the House to call it six o'clock?

Some Honourable Members: Agreed.

Madam Speaker: Agreed? Agreed and so ordered.

The hour being 6 p.m., this House is adjourned and stands adjourned until 1:30 p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday).