Friday, April 19, 1996

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF MANITOBA

Friday, April 19, 1996

The House met at 9 a.m.

ORDERS OF THE DAY

(Continued)

COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY

(Concurrent Sections)

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Mr. Deputy Chairperson (Ben Sveinson): Good morning. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This morning this section of the Committee of Supply will be resuming consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Education. When the committee recessed yesterday afternoon, the minister was going to introduce the staff in attendance and then the committee was to proceed with consideration of line 1.(b) Executive Support on page 34 of the Main Estimates book.

The honourable minister, to introduce her staff present.

Hon. Linda McIntosh (Minister of Education and Training): Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to introduce today at the table with me the Deputy Minister of Education Mr. John Carlyle. Along with Mr. John Carlyle, we have Mr. Jim Glen who is one of the assistant deputy ministers with finance and along with those two gentlemen, we have Mr. Tom Thompson. His exact title is director of finance with the Department of Education. Jim Glen’s exact title is assistant deputy minister, Administration and Finance. I would like to thank them not just for being here today but for all of the very, very good work they have done in the last year. They are very helpful and very professional people whose quality of work I feel is superb.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Thank you, Madam Minister.

Mr. Gary Kowalski (The Maples): I would ask leave to make a very brief opening remark.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Is there leave of the committee for the member for The Maples to make an opening remark? [agreed]

Mr. Kowalski: I will be very, very brief. First of all, a compliment to the minister about her effort as Minister of Education. Quite often, I do not agree with many of her actions and policies, but I will never discount her effort. I am one to put in long hours here and I continue to see her here working in her office quite late at night and quite early in the morning, and I commend her for the efforts she is making in her department.

Having said that, I am concerned about many of the directions that this government is going in. It bears mentioning just to remind myself, as well as to put it on the record, and I said it in my Budget Debate, that in the role of opposition, quite often we criticize government policies, and in the heat of debate sometimes members take the criticism personally. I want to put on the record that I separate my criticism of the minister’s policies from criticism of the minister personally. The role of opposition is very important. A dictatorship is probably a very efficient form of government, probably gets things done very quickly, very efficiently, but it is not the best form of government, and that is why we have opposition to compliment the government when we agree with the policies--and I have--and to criticize the government when we do not agree with their policies. That is our very important role here, and I will continue to do that.

Speaking about education in general, more and more in the past year as the Education critic for the Liberal members in the Manitoba Legislature and formerly as a school trustee and as a parent to a 15-year-old daughter, and now I am a student taking a certificate course at the University of Winnipeg to become a teaching assistant when I grow up--

An Honourable Member: You could do that after the next election.

Mr. Kowalski: The member says I could do it after the next election. Who knows what will happen after the next election. Re-election has never been that important to me. I am here to make changes to my community, to the province of Manitoba. I am not here to be re-elected; I am here to do what is important.

All those experiences more and more re-enforce that the most important element in the education system is not the minister, is not the curriculum, it is not even the policies, but it is the classroom teacher, the person who has day-to-day contact with the child. I do not think there is any educational system that could ever prevent a good teacher from teaching. I believe in some directions we might be testing the edges of that envelope. Good teachers, no matter what, will succeed, will care about their students, will do a good job, and it is becoming more and more apparent in sometimes difficult situations that teachers are going above and beyond the call of duty constantly.

Yesterday, I attended Forum ’96 in the River East School Division, and I think the Minister of Labour (Mr. Toews) was the guest speaker there. A presentation was put on about many of the internship programs, work experience programs, alternative education programs, and, of course, they had the usual--the representative from the school board, the representative of the superintendent team, and then from each high school, Miles Mac, Kildonan East, River East, they had one teacher talk about their program. In the most powerful part of the presentation, a student from that program came forward and talked about their experiences.

There was one young lady, I do not remember her name, from Miles Mac Collegiate who talked about last year. Her average was 41 percent. She had missed 17 days of school during the school year. As a result of this new program they have at Miles Mac Collegiate, my alma mater by the way, she now has an 85 percent average. She has only missed one day of school. This program--where instead of having a number of teachers, she only has two teachers. Last year, she only received four credits; this year, she will be able to get 12 high school credits. Most importantly, even more so than the marks and attendance, was her attitude. She was looking forward, she had a vision of her future, and she attributed it to the support that she received from those two teachers. That was the strongest element of that program, was the connection between the student and the teacher.

I am sure we are going to hear about federal offloading during these Estimates a number of times, and we are going to hear about the $2 million a day on interest from the deficit. I like what the Minister of Agriculture (Mr. Enns) said during his Budget Debate--get over it, get over it. All governments of all different political stripes in the ‘80s during a tough recession, whether it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the ’70s, whether it was Peter Lougheed, no matter who it was, whether it was Conservative, NDP or Liberal governments, that was the economics of the time and deficits were created and, yes, we have to deal with them. So let us get over it. It is a reality; it is there. Just as when I was a school trustee when the provincial government cut our spending, we could have spent hours upon hours complaining about it, but we had to get on with the business, the business of what we were doing in Seven Oaks School Division and we did.

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The other part is there is an inconsistency. The criticisms that the provincial government gives about the federal government cutbacks, it is funny how they do not hold true when we talk about the $120-million surplus and why it is important to not spend that and how the additional lottery revenues, we do not take that into consideration. There are choices there. At a speech I said to the Kelvin High School teachers’ public forum last night, I mentioned that Choices, who are not necessarily my best friends, created an alternative budget. There are choices; there are other ways of doing things so we do not have to suffer some of the cutbacks we are seeing in education in Manitoba.

Right now, my family is an analogy, possibly, of what is going on in society in that I am running a large MasterCard balance and I pay interest on that, but does that mean last summer when we were short of money, we were paying interest on a MasterCard balance, that it was not wise for me to spend the money I spent on mini-university for my daughter to send her to mini-university as an investment? Would it have been better to put that money to pay down that MasterCard bill so I would not have had the interest payments this year and would have more money to spend on her education in the future? The world does not stop. The needs, whether it is in health care, education, continue regardless of the interest payments we have to pay on any debt. So there are alternatives.

I will not go into detail repeating what I said in the Budget Debate about the common belief that taxes are bad, government is bad and public service is bad, therefore, if we had no taxes, no government, no public service, it would be a better world. No, that would be anarchy. That would be survival of the fittest. And yet, that seems to be the direction that we are going in public education in that because taxes are bad, so the less taxes we have, the less public service we have, the less public school system we have, the better off we are. Only the strong, the independently wealthy, the people who could afford it will succeed, will be able to go to university. I am concerned about that direction we are going in.

I said I would be brief, and I have gone a little bit too long. I will just finish by saying, with those criticisms, as is my duty as an opposition member, that I know all members here care about children, care about the province of Manitoba, and I will respect the minister’s right to make the final decision, but I hope she will continue to respect our right to oppose her policies.

Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): We are on line 16.1(b), I think. We are looking at Executive Support.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: I am sorry. It is 1.(b) Executive Support (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $631,900. Shall the item pass?

Ms. Friesen: This is a line which over the last three or four years has shown considerable increase. I note if we go back to 1993-94 that this line was at $361,000. We are being asked here to pass a line of $625,000. Could the minister explain some of these historical changes?

Mrs. McIntosh: The main reason is the creation of the second deputy minister for the post-secondary side.

Ms. Friesen: Could the minister explain the increase this year from $590,000 to $625,000 that we are being asked to approve here?

Mrs. McIntosh: At the time the Estimates were being prepared, the department was not at that time able to confirm the classification or salary level for the new deputy minister because it had not yet been decided, but that new deputy minister’s salary in fact has not changed from his old salary. In the meantime, this had to be printed, so to ensure the sum appropriation was sufficiently resourced and to avoid having to have a supplementary funding issue, the budget was based upon a DR3, a Deputy Minister 3, at the maximum salary and that is not really the case, as it turns out, because the new deputy’s salary is actually that of a DR2, the same as he had before. So that money will probably lapse. It was put in there because at the time of printing we were uncertain and we wanted to budget for the highest-case scenario which, in reality, is not the case.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could the minister tell us what the maximum salary is then that she budgeted for at a Deputy Minister 3?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the maximum that had been budgeted for was $116,000.

Ms. Friesen: And I believe the new deputy minister comes in at a salary of about $110,000.

Mrs. McIntosh: No, you are wrong. I know that the MGEU printed and distributed widely as fact a salary that in fact they had not researched and did not know, and you may be going with what the union is telling you. However, as those who are actually paying the money, I can indicate that salary is $99,000, not the figure that the MGEU has published as a fact. They probably should correct that because it is a disservice to the individual involved and a very, very poor reflection on their integrity and credibility.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, that DR2 salary, $99,000, is that a maximum?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, it is.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could the minister tell me what changes there have been in her staff this year, and could she give me the salary levels of the people she has in her department in this area?

Mrs. McIntosh: On all the staff? [interjection] Oh, just on this line, okay. The staff is looking to get numbers. I will give you the names of the people in the meantime and their position. We have Pearl Domienik, who is the administrative secretary to the minister. We then have two administrative secretaries in the outer office, Debbie Milani and Sharon Curtis Lesley. The two assistants who are traditionally assigned to ministers, Beverley Hares, executive assistant, Connie Hall, special assistant.

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We have, in the deputy minister’s office for Kindergarten to Senior 4 John Carlyle as deputy minister, and he has two people working in this office, Nicole La Roche, his executive assistant and Diana McClymont, administrative secretary to the deputy minister.

On the Training and Advanced Education side of the department, we have Tom Carson, the deputy minister and Yolande Choiselat, assistant to the deputy minister and Gail O’Neill, the administrative secretary there, and, if the member will just pause for a moment, I will get the figures.

Mrs. McIntosh: The salaries in the order that I gave the names--for the administrative secretary to the minister, $37,000. These are gross salaries that do not have anything taken off them. That was Pearl Domienik, $37,000; Debbie Milani, $31,000; Beverly Hares, $48,000; Connie Hall, $41,000; Sharon Curtis-Leslie, $31,000. Now into the two deputies’ offices--John Carlyle, $116,000; Nicole LaRoche, $49,000; Diana McClymont, $36,000. In the other side of the department--Tom Carson, $99,000;Yolande Choiselat, $49,000; Gail O’Neill, $34,000.

Ms. Friesen: Could the minister tell us what changes in salaries there have been in each of those positions over the past year?

Mrs. McIntosh: The staff will obtain last year’s salaries. They indicate to me that there were no adjustments beyond the normal annual increment that civil servants receive. So the annual increment is included in this from last year’s base, and what also is not included in this is the four days reduction. The base salaries, we will provide for you and table them as soon as they come--the base salaries from last year.

Ms. Friesen: The minister is asking us to look at an increase here of from $590,000 to $625,000 minus, I assume, the $17,000 difference in the deputy minister’s salary. Could she explain what that difference is for?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, it can be summarized in this way. The adjustments for salaries included money that was identified for the deputy minister of Training and Advanced Educaion which will not be applied. The merit increases, in total 13.5, the merit being the annual increment, the accrual--

Ms. Friesen: 13.5 what?

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Mrs. McIntosh: Thousand. I am sorry, 13.5 thousand. I appreciate the member’s request for clarification there. The department is switching to an accrual method of accounting. The accrual for one day is $13,200; miscellaneous, $3,000; and that is a total of $49,000. Those are the adjustments, those are the rationale for the adjustment for salaries.

Ms. Friesen: Could the minister explain the accrual method for accounting and how that leads to a $13,200 increase?

Mrs. McIntosh: I appreciate staff giving me the information here because my background is not in accounting, but I could explain it this way--and maybe it is easier for one layperson explaining it to another. To explain it simply: basically we used to pay 26 bi-weekly pay cheques for the year, but some years, of course, have 27, and so the accounting is changing to reflect the actual year, the actual days used in that year. That means that this year will have one extra pay that we distribute because we will have 27 instead of 26, and that accrual that I referred to earlier when I said one day’s accrual of $13,000--$13.2 it actually is--is that extra period.

Ms. Friesen: Is this then system-wide throughout both the department and the government, and should we anticipate this kind of same percentage increase in every line of salary in this department and in the government?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes.

Ms. Friesen: Could the minister tell me whether her staff or how her staff dealt with the issue of so-called Filmon Fridays, the work reduction weeks, and how that is accounted for in the Estimates as presented here?

Mrs. McIntosh: Here they are showing the salaries with the workweek reduction removed. That is the net salary that has been identified.

Ms. Friesen: I am sorry, I do not understand that. I thought earlier the minister had been giving me a list of base salaries, and now we are talking net salary. So I probably need some clarification on that.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable minister, to clarify.

Mrs. McIntosh: The individual salaries that I read out earlier are the base salaries. The summation that the member is looking at shows the summation of those salaries with the workweek reduction and other things removed, so that they are the total net total.

Ms. Friesen: Could the minister tell us a little more about how her department dealt with Filmon Fridays with that workweek reduction? We will stick to this particular line, to the administrative executive support. Did everyone take that workweek reduction? Was there a rotation of staff over certain periods of that time? Did everybody whose name the minister read out to me take that workweek reduction?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, everyone took the workweek reduction in terms of salary. The minister and the minister’s special assistant did not take the days off, but they did take the reduction. That was applied to everybody. If you are asking, did they take the time off? Most did, some did not, but they all took the workweek reduction in terms of salaries. The minister’s office was still open though, with the minister’s assistant and the minister.

Ms. Friesen: Could we come back now to the $13,000 adjustment for salaries that is in here?

Earlier the minister--just for the concern of staff, I see them puzzling over this--had said that what was included here in this increase was $13,500 for merit increases; $13,200 for the accrual method of accounting and then $3,000 for miscellaneous.

So I am going back now to that first item, that $13,500 adjustment for salaries, including merit increases. I wonder if the minister could give us a breakdown of how that is distributed in this group. Does it apply, for example, to the ministerial assistance? Does it apply to the deputy ministers? Does it apply to everyone whose name was read out?

Mrs. McIntosh: It applies to everybody. That is the figure that I indicated. If you would like the breakdown, staff will provide it. It might be later in the day though because they do not have it here.

Ms. Friesen: The minister mentioned it as merit increases. Could the minister explain to me, for the record, what merit increases are? How they are judged? How they are applied?

Mrs. McIntosh: The way in which that works, Mr. Chairman, is that annually, with each year of experience, the person becomes eligible for a merit increment. The supervisor must do a report on the employee and indicate the reasons why they feel that employee has worked to earn a merit increase. If it is felt that the individual has not performed in a way that merits an increase, then of course they do not get the merit increase. A form comes around to each supervisor asking them to do a report on the employee and indicate whether or not that employee should be granted the merit increase. Then that will continue for a specified number of years until they reach a maximum, and thereafter, there is no more eligibility for increments beyond that point.

Ms. Friesen: How many years does it take to achieve that maximum, or what is the average number?

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Mrs. McIntosh: It varies from one area to another, but it is proper to indicate that somewhere between six or seven and 10 years, depending upon the individual’s role.

Ms. Friesen: That report on employees, is it done--I know in some companies it is done in conjunction with the employee, that the supervisor will fill out a report on the employee. The employee will sign it, will discuss it with them. Plans are perhaps made for the next year, and then there is a subsequent evaluation. That is the level of discussion I am looking for. Could the minister explain to me what happens within her department?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, we have two procedures the member is referring to. There are performance appraisals that are done with employees and their supervisors, and if it is a full-fledged performance appraisal, which occurs from time to time but not on a stipulated time line, then for those the employee would be asked to sign. The merit increments, the employee does not have to sign those. The supervisor does that on an annual basis, and the merit increment is normally granted on that annual basis, the supervisor still has to send in the form and everything, but unless the performance is less than satisfactory it is not normally a case for interaction with the supervisor and the employee. So there are two different things going on here. Of course, there is usually ongoing dialogue between supervisors and employees. Most employees have a pretty good sense on a daily basis as to their performance.

Ms. Friesen: Is there an expectation in merit increases that the employee will have had some guidelines set in the previous year which will have been met? Is there an expectation that employees will have exceeded requirements or exceeded previous years? The minister used the word satisfactory, not quite in this context, but I am trying to get at what the levels of judgement are.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chair, employees have job descriptions, and the job descriptions will normally indicate fairly concisely what is expected of that employee on a day-by-day basis. The performance review process is ongoing. It occurs daily. It is normal between an employee and that employee’s immediate supervisor. But in short, merit reviews are summative that once a year you would pause and say, according to this job description, are the daily tasks being performed? If it is a secretary in the outer office, for example, is the correspondence being filed properly? Those kinds of things.

The performance review process could become a more in-depth thing on perhaps the mutual setting of goals, et cetera, for those whose job does not have routine tasks, but the job description is the ultimate indicator of goals and objectives.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could the minister explain how deputy ministers are evaluated and how increments are awarded in that case?

Mrs. McIntosh: Deputy ministers are also subject to the merit review. The deputy minister’s role is slightly different in that it is defined by The Civil Service Act and the merit increment for them would be governed according to the same rules as with other employees, that once a year pause when the supervisor--in this case it would be the minister--would look to see if the year’s work has been done satisfactorily. If there is no major problem, then the merit increment could be granted, or if there is a problem, discussion could occur to correct that problem.

Ms. Friesen: Is the time frame for merit increments for deputy ministers about the same, the six to seven years?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, as long they are not at maximum, it is on an annual basis.

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Ms. Friesen: It seems to me that there are strong similarities between what happens in the department and what happens to teachers. I know that the minister’s review and the minister’s proposals for changes to teacher compensation suggest departures from this, and so I wonder if the minister might want to comment on that, in the comparability between the civil service and the teaching profession on merit increments and evaluations.

Mrs. McIntosh: Oh, would that they were similar, because if they were similar then boards would be forced to sit down every year and evaluate a teacher’s performance to see if a merit increment was justified. That is the main point of departure that has been identified in the accountability document, that was identified by trustees; that is the main point of departure from the way the civil service runs.

The way the school divisions run is that here in government merit increments are only granted upon a signed document by the supervisor indicating that performance is satisfactory and that the job description has been well met. If there is any problem, it has to be brought to the employee’s attention and the merit increase denied.

I would wager that if the member searched the full breadth and width of this province, the member would have a very, very difficult time finding any teacher whose merit increment has been denied and would find very few instances in which a summative report has been done on that teacher before a merit increment was granted. In school divisions, the merit increments are more properly called automatic annual increments and, in fact, many boards now do refer to them as automatic annual increments because they occur with no obligation for assessment, with no obligation for a look at the employee’s work, with no obligation to inform the employee that anything needs improving. So the member is correct in identifying that those two procedures do need comparing.

I am absolutely delighted that she raised that comparison because that has been the main bone of contention, that in private industry and other levels of government, employees do have to have some sort of evaluation on an annual basis before they are given an automatic annual increment.

Ms. Friesen: So what I understand the minister is looking for then in terms of accountability is an annual signed statement, similar to that used in the civil service, which says that this employee has met the job description, that their job performance is satisfactory. I understand that that is what she said.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, that must be corrected, the conclusions drawn by the member, and I would ask permission that each time an incorrect conclusion is drawn by the member that I be given the opportunity to correct it for the record.

I am not saying that the school divisions should adopt the government’s model. That is an incorrect assumption. I have repeatedly, over and over, indicated to the member and to the opposition that we have no preconceived notions as to what the outcome should be. We do have some defined problems, and the document defines problems and asks the field to suggest ways in which it could be improved.

There are many who would feel that the government model does not do enough in terms of evaluation and merit and would say it does not go far enough and that what teachers require is far more than just the immediate supervisor indicating approval, but that they should include as well other factors for consideration in deciding whether or not a teacher should get an automatic raise. What we have heard loudly and clearly, and I know the member has heard it loudly and clearly as well, is that an automatic raise should not be given just because one more year of experience has been put in.

Experience is important and in most cases experience is a growing experience, but in some cases an extra year of experience using bad habits is an extra year to reinforce bad habits that will then be that much harder to undo. So there are many factors.

Because I indicate to the member that the government model of granting annual merit increases, if deserved, is a superior model to the school division, and I say it is a superior model to the school divisions, the member is incorrect to conclude that because this is a superior model in my opinion, it is therefore the model that I wish to impose upon school divisions. I wish to see school divisions, together with their members, come to an understanding that performance evaluations must take place on a more regular basis, with more defined criteria. They must be thorough and regular and more frequent than they currently are, and they should seriously consider tying increased monies received to the indication that the performance, in fact, has been good.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could the minister tell us when the last time was in this section of her department when someone did not receive their annual merit increment? One of the procedures that the minister established early on was that these could be denied and she would see I think as one way of an effective evaluation system that such increments could be denied. That is what she is proposing for the teaching profession.

Could she tell us how frequent an occasion this is likely to be, giving, for example, her own department?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, in my own branch, to my knowledge, the staff indicates there have not been any in recent years where they have been denied. The point I am trying to make is that there has been opportunity to deny them, and that is the critical point. We take very careful pains when we are hiring people for minister’s offices and for senior levels of government to ensure that we place people properly in the first instance, and that is another issue that we may like to talk about in terms of hiring and firing throughout the part of Education that is not directly accountable to government. Proper hiring in the first place will ensure that you do not have a lot of mistakes. Where you have a lot of mistakes in terms of hiring, normally what happens is the employee will ultimately not be there anymore and we may have some instances of that having occurred.

But the point that the member overlooks, inherent in her question, is the fact that I have opportunity as a minister and my deputies and the ADMs and the directors have opportunities as supervisors on an annual basis to deny a raise. They have that opportunity. The employees know that. The employees do not wish to see a denial occur on a merit increment form. Everybody is conscious of that time of the year when it comes around. I am not saying that is why performance stays high. I am just saying everybody knows it, and in the school division that does not occur. Hopefully, if everybody is doing their job right, there should not be very many denials.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I wonder if the minister would be prepared to bring, perhaps this afternoon or tomorrow, a copy of the employee evaluation forms that are commonly used within the department.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, we do not have them here, but I will try to bring them in this afternoon. If we do not have them this afternoon, we will have them at the next time that we meet. Apparently, we will have them this afternoon.

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I just want to indicate as well that many employees in government are appointed by Order-in-Council and they can be removed without cause. There is no tenure as there is in teaching, for example, where you are given job security in exchange for having been there for a certain period of time. So no tenure for Order-in-Council employees. They can be removed without cause, and normally if their performance is not satisfactory that is what happens. They are just let go and replaced by others. That is another difference, but then those are O/Cs; they are political appointments in that sense.

Ms. Friesen: I thank the minister for bringing in that form, and it is of course a blank form that I am looking for, the evaluation methods and procedures. I wonder if the minister could tell me whether the evaluation forms for deputy ministers are similar? Are they the same, I should say, or are they different forms? If they are different, may I also see a copy of a blank evaluation form for deputy ministers?

Mrs. McIntosh: The merit form for deputies is worded slightly differently. We will table that for you as well. Deputies, because of their close association with ministers and government hierarchy, are evaluated on a day-to-day basis, and the ultimate supervisor for deputies, of course, is cabinet. Many of the day-to-day interactions are verbal or oral in terms of the constant ongoing assessment, but the annual merit increment is done similarly to the other employees. The form is slightly different, and we will table that for you as well.

Ms. Friesen: The minister has also indicated that there is a ceiling which is reached, eventually, by most staff, I assume. I wonder what the minister’s thoughts are on that? Again, I am drawing the comparisons to the criticisms that have been laid about teachers’ evaluations and teachers’ ceilings and annual increments and those sorts of things. Now, we have that in the civil service. Is the minister arguing that in the civil service this is appropriate but perhaps is not appropriate for teachers, or is the minister, perhaps, not content with that in the civil service and would like to see changes there?

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please.

Hon. Jim Ernst (Government House Leader): The other Committee of Supply has recessed for about 15 or 20 minutes because of the Holocaust reading of listed names in the rotunda. Public Accounts has also recessed. You might want to consider it.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Is it the will of the committee to recess for 15 minutes?

Some Honourable Members: Yes.

The committee recessed at 10:04 a.m.

________

After Recess

The committee resumed at 10:30 a.m.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please. Now, where were we? 1.(b)(1). The minister was about to answer a question.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I think we are all pleased that we were able to take that break and join those who were reciting the names of those who died in the Holocaust, some of those millions of people who died. I think those kinds of remembrances do several things. They do help us focus in again on what is really important in the world, and sometimes some of our games here are not that meaningful in the light of people who have lost their lives under circumstances such as those, so I think the pause was a very important one for us to take.

The member had asked just before we went to the ceremony, or visited the ceremony for a few moments, about classifications and whether, I believe the question was, there is a cap or there is a ceiling on the number of increments in government. Therefore, do I believe there should be a ceiling on the number of increments in school divisions? Is that the question?

Ms. Friesen: No, not exactly. What I am trying to do, obviously, is draw some lines of comparison between the kind of evaluation system which exists in the civil service and the kind of evaluation system that the government is looking for in the teaching profession.

As the minister has outlined it, there are annual evaluations, which are written, which relate very specifically to the job classification. Satisfactory or unsatisfactory is the kind of criteria which are dealt with by the immediate supervisor. I thought that was an interesting form of evaluation. I have asked for the evaluation form and will certainly be looking at that.

The minister clarified beyond that, that was not exactly what she was looking for in the teaching service, that it would have to be more than that, but without any predetermination of what more than that would be.

Then what I asked was about the ceiling issues, because, again, that is something which has been raised in respect to the teaching profession. What happens to evaluation systems? What happens to that kind of accountability once a ceiling has been reached? So it was really that. Accountability beyond the ceiling was the issue I was raising.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, those are exactly the kinds of questions we are asking school divisions. Of course, I am accountable for government in these Estimates, so I will say that, in government, once the maximum has been reached is not to imply that performance evaluations or assessment of employees’ work does not continue. There are constant daily indications to supervisors as to whether or not an employee is performing the tasks that that employee was hired to perform, and there are procedures for dismissal of employees who are no longer capable of serving the government in the job capacity to which they are assigned. That is at the one end of the spectrum.

But I indicate that in case there is an implication that once you are at the maximum you no longer have a merit increment, it does not mean that your merits are not continually assessed and that measures are taken in place to correct that up to and including dismissal if necessary, and usually those are not the first choice, of course, in terms of doing a performance evaluation.

In the school divisions, we are saying that we do not have any preconceived notions. We have identified problems. There is a big difference in saying there is a problem when an increment is given automatically and the suggestion that the school divisions would then automatically best be served by some other model that exists--say, for example, if the member is making the comparison here in the provincial government. Because you are dealing with differing kinds of situations, you may require differing kinds of solutions. I think in terms of ceilings or caps to the number of increments, obviously, if there is a ceiling then there comes a point beyond which raises just do not continue to escalate ad infinitum in terms of automatic increases because, as the member knows, on top of the automatic increase goes whatever the negotiation for the year provides in terms of settlements.

So you have two things going in terms of money paid to employees here and in the school division. That would be the automatic raise in school divisions and the annual increment in government on top of which is added whatever is settled for that year, and traditionally that has been a raise. In latter years that has been a status quo, or with the workweek reduction it might be possible that some actually saw less pay going home. Although many indicate that they saw no reduction in pay, many that I know personally have showed me their pay stubs and showed no reduction in the actual amount of money going home, but that is because they got the annual increment and then the four days off and they netted out. So that did not happen in every case. It will vary from employee to employee.

A ceiling then will ensure that at a certain point, once a person has reached what is presumed to be a suitable number of levels of experience and increasingly satisfactory performances, satisfactory over time showing that it is not just a flash-in-the-pan performance but an over time consistent indication of satisfactory performance, that at some point in government it is deemed that you need to have a ceiling so that you do not continue to see raises going up and up and up until you find a secretary ultimately at the end of a 40-year career making $100,000 which is what could happen if there were no ceiling.

Similarly, it could be said that the same thing could happen in school divisions and that in fact you will often hear teachers say, all I have had for the last 10 years are my raises and I have not had my annual increments, so all I am getting is the 4 percent or 5 percent or whatever it was in those days that was being provided. Or otherwise you will also hear school boards complaining as they do most vociferously and most viciously when the teachers say to boards, you only gave us a 1 percent increase last year; boards will say, yes, but 45 percent of you in our division were also getting annual increments. So while you only got a 1 percent raise, the cost to the school division was more than 1 percent increase on the salary line. So those kinds of things are there to be debated and to be talked about.

I do not have a preconceived notion that the cap or the ceiling on the number of increments or the number of steps in classifications should be left, or removed, from school divisions. We have identified it as one of the chronic complaints that comes forward. The ceiling is not a complaint, but the steps within those levels are the chronic complaint. Trustees have not complained to government about the ceiling. Some teachers have because they want the ceiling removed and the classifications to be longer, but the steps within them and the length of time, would it be six years, 10 years, has been discussed and debated.

What we have said is these are the complaints we have been told, these are the problems that have been identified, and we would like people to tell us what they think about them, to see if, in fact, there is a better way of recompensing people justly and fairly for their good work in a way that is also designed to meet the employers’ needs as well as the employees.

So we can make comparisons, but we must also understand that when we talk about the way in which we recompense people who work for the civil service, we are talking about very different job descriptions than we are about people who are employed in schools. You can make comparisons, and I think you do need to make comparisons, between like professions, and I stress the word “like,” similar professions or the same job performed in other jurisdictions, but to compare an administrative assistant in a business office of the government with a person teaching in a classroom, to me, is not quite an accurate comparison in terms of the job descriptions.

Does that mean that the method of evaluation needs to be slightly different as well, is a question that I pose, in turn, to my colleague from the opposition.

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Ms. Friesen: The question I was really posing was what are the implications of ceilings for continued evaluations, as that is an issue in school divisions as well. I understand what the minister’s response is. That informal evaluation continues after ceilings are reached and that there are no written evaluations after that. Am I understanding that correctly, Mr. Chairman?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the evaluations and performance appraisals, whatever terminology people wish to use, but the process of supervisors being aware of their employees’ work and working with employees to improve performance which, hopefully, then would occur or to dismiss employees whose performance does not improve, that process is ongoing, as I indicate. Regardless of whether they have reached the ceiling or not, it should be irrelevant to the ongoing process of evaluation whether they have passed a certain step in the progression of the person’s career. So those evaluations that take place after the maximum has been reached could be oral, could be written, could be whatever they choose.

They have continued evaluation and sometimes that is definitely put in writing, particularly if an employee’s performance is in jeopardy. Performance appraisals are always designed to be positive in their outlook, to be taking the attitude that they would help to assist employees to improve, to correct problems that might be there, but even with good employees to assist them in improving and enhancing so that they become even better. So they are not designed to be punitive. They are designed to be supportive. They are designed to work to enhance performance and also to give an indication to the employee where they are performing well so the employee will have confirmed for him or herself that indeed they are on the right track.

I have mentioned that the ultimate conclusion of a severe ongoing problem with performance could be and probably should be dismissal but one does not go into an evaluative process with that in mind. One goes in with the desire to ensure that the team of people working together are functioning at full capacity and that there are adequate supports, both moral and instructive and any other thing that needs to be there, to assist that employee to become better and better and better in their jobs. Relating that and comparing that to school divisions, that I think is something that should also be there for teachers. I think teachers deserve to know if they are doing well and deserve to know that their performance is pleasing those with whom they interact and that it is deemed to be suiting the needs of the children properly. I think a teacher deserves to know if there is a flaw in the performance what the flaw is and how it can be corrected and that they be given assistance with that.

Regarding the paper that the member has introduced into this part of the Estimates, the Enhancing Accountability document, we are motivated at this point by questions, not answers, and that is maybe the simplest way to put it. We are motivated by the questions that have been put to us over the years and not by answers at this stage, although we are looking for answers. We have these kinds of questions. Should a teacher be granted an increment if a fair evaluation shows they are not performing satisfactorily? Now, we asked that question in the document, and I realize it has caused an uproar, but I still think it is a legitimate question to ask.

We ask it of our civil servants all the time. Should a teacher be granted an increment if a fair evaluation shows that that teacher is not performing satisfactorily? As I say, I know that question has caused an incredible uproar in the community, but I still think it is a legitimate question to ask, and because it is a question that has been asked of us as government so repeatedly, I think it is a question that, in fairness, we need to examine.

I think not to examine it is to do an injustice to the clients in education, the only people for whom the system was designed, the only reason that all of us are here in this room today, the education of our students. The system was designed for them. The system was not designed for those of us who work in it; not for teachers. The system was not designed to create jobs for teachers, or jobs for ministers of Education, or jobs for critics of education, or anybody in between those two levels.

The system was designed for students. Everything we ask ourselves about how the people in the system are evaluated and paid has to always have those students’ needs in mind as No. 1 criteria, No.1 priority. We have had other questions, such as, what is the relationship, if any, between experience, the number of years of employment, and performance? Do more years on the job make you a better person to do that job?

I would wage that, if asked, the opposition critic would say that the longer I stay on the job as minister, the worse things get. [interjection]

An Honourable Member: Well, there is maybe some truth in that.

Mrs. McIntosh: The member for Burrows ( Mr. Martindale) has just made my case because he says there is some truth in that, and I thank him, and that quote will be used quite extensively, I guarantee it, because that is the point we make about the questions being raised by school boards when they say, if we have teachers who year after year simply reinforce bad habits and bad direction, should we have to pay them extra for that?

I thank the member for Burrows on behalf of the official opposition for putting on the record their position on it. If it is not their position, then I expect that the opposition would clarify that that is not their position, and clarify it probably within the next statement. Otherwise, it will be assumed to be the position of the official opposition, and it will be extensively and widely quoted.

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The other question we have is, what constitutes effective performance in education? What is effective performance? There are so many ways that you can answer that. What is quality education? There are so many ways that you can answer that. How do you determine effective performance? We know that one way that you do not determine effective performance is to never observe a class with a teacher in action, never observe the work that is being done in the classroom, never look to see if the children are actually being able to improve their own performance, never listen to complaints or concerns raised by parents about a particular teacher.

Those are some ways that you do not determine performance. What is the converse of those ways of not determining effective performance? That is a question that has been asked of us repeatedly and consistently over enough years for us to know that they must have some basis in reality for legitimate concern.

We are motivated right now, as I indicated, by questions, not answers. So the member will continue, I am sure, as she has in the first few questions, to draw the parallel between the civil service and the teachers, and to indicate that things that are happening in the civil service are things that may be, or may be not, the minister feels should be happening in the public school system.

I say those are good comparisons to make, but one has to consider, when they make those comparisons, the fact that you may not be comparing like occupations. There may be some things in the processes in government that could be well-utilized by divisions, or vice versa, but when you draw comparisons, do try to compare apples to apples and we will have much better comparisons by comparing like professions or the same profession in other jurisdictions than dissimilar professions.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, so I understand the answer to my question then is that when ceilings are reached, that evaluation continues on an informal basis and that written reports are made on an as-needed basis.

The minister has suggested that we compare like professions and, of course, that is an important concept. The minister does not apparently believe there are any comparisons that are useful at this point between the civil service and the teaching profession, and she may be right in that. I think it requires probably more than the kind of discussion we are having here.

What I am trying to understand from the minister is what she does value in evaluation, what kind of procedure she thinks could be considered for the teaching profession.

She has, as she said, put out a document which caused considerable concern and has, I think, created a great deal of disunity in the teaching profession. So my concerns here are about evaluation procedures, the ones that are used in the department, the ones that are consistent with a system that has developed over 100 years essentially in civil services around the world.

I think some of the elements that the minister has suggested are different for teachers. She would be looking for observation, I think, she said, that if we are looking perhaps at the converse of what she did say, that we need a system where there are observations of teachers’ work, that there are recommendations or an understanding that children will improve, or have improved, and that complaints are taken into account, listened to and dealt with. Those were the three elements I heard her say.

I wonder if the minister might comment perhaps on divisions in Manitoba where she believes that is not occurring.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I first want to indicate that we are off line. You know, every other question the member has asked so far has at least made some fleeting reference to the line in the Estimates. This last question does not even bother to make any fleeting reference to the line in the Estimates. So I would suggest that it would be helpful for me if we could stay on the lines because I need to have the appropriate staff here for the line by line.

What happens when the opposition goes off the lines, is that I either have to do what happened a couple of years ago where the minister of the day had to bring all the staff in and sit endlessly for hours because the opposition was jumping all over the place, or I have the wrong staff here and have to go out and get others and bring them in. So it would be appreciated if we could keep to the schedule so that the work of government, and the civil servants who work in it, is not so consistently disrupted by going off line.

While we sit here in Estimates arguing these fine points, civil servants are called away from their desks to be here with us, and there is a lot of work to be done. I do not want to have people sitting endlessly waiting or to have to bring people up in anticipation that we are going to consistently go off line. I do not think that is fair to the government or the people of Manitoba, and I think it would be better if we stayed on line. As long as the point she is raising bears some fleeting connection to the line, I am quite happy to answer it, but this last question did not.

I also need to put on the record, and I am sorry to be taking up time doing this, and yet I do need to correct all of the assumptions the member comes to when she comes to them, because they get on the record and they are assumed to be something that they are not. The member started off her question by doing what she always does, and it is really, perhaps--well, I will not insult.

The member indicated, the minister apparently does not believe that there are like professions in the civil service and in school divisions. Again, she draws an incorrect, erroneous assumption from comments that I have made. She comes to a conclusion and then on the basis of the conclusion to which she comes, formulates statements or questions. When the basic premise or the basic assumption or the erroneous conclusion is wrong, then the questions and the comments that she puts forward are meaningless and have no substance because they are based upon fog.

I did not indicate that I do not believe there are not like professions in the civil service and teachers. What I indicated is that the process laid down for civil servants and government employees is, in the main, a generic form of progression through a career and that it may not have application to school divisions.

The member knows full well that in a body as large as the provincial government, that the majority of people in that body will not be compared accurately or consistently to teachers. There will, however, be some that might be able to be compared. They would be in the minority in terms of numbers, but the system here was designed for a standard for the majority, and the majority is not compared to teachers

For example, I sit here with my human relations head, a fine man who probably would relate very well to young people in a classroom, but the work that he does in helping decide where people are best placed within government is not like teaching Grade 3 mathematics. The secretary in my outer office, who I believe is superbly skilled as an executive secretary--one of the finest in government, in my opinion--with her knowledge of word processing and all of those things, telephone protocol. All of those things that she does so well may or may not be suited to teach in a classroom, but, certainly, one could never compare her job to that of a kindergarten teacher or a high school physics teacher. The comparisons cannot be made.

The majority of people in government fall into that category. There are some in government--a small number--where there might be some similarity between what they do and what teachers do and when I talk about the process of government being laid down in a generic way to meet the needs of the majority of government members whose jobs in the main are not like those in a classroom, I did not say nor did I imply that there is nobody in government that has a profession that might be similar to a teacher’s and for the member to extrapolate from my comments that that is what I meant is to draw, once again, yet another erroneous conclusion.

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So I would appreciate it, Mr. Chairman, having indicated that, if we could get back on line and at least have the questions bear some relevance or connection to the line under discussion.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I appreciate the minister’s desire to use her staff efficiently, but I think the fine points that the minister suggested I was raising are indeed the public business. I think the public business, particularly when it relates to the kinds of comparisons that have been drawn as a result of the public discussion the minister initiated, I think perhaps are worthy of discussion here and we can certainly continue them in other areas.

I would, secondly, point out that the issues I raised of observation, child improvements and listening to and reflecting upon and dealing with complaints were ones which the minister raised in her response to me. So, Mr. Chairman, perhaps just for your consideration, it seems to me that what the minister is saying is that she is permitted to comment at will on what I say, but when I respond to what she says she can then say that it is not on this line and we are wasting the time of her staff. I do not think that is my intent, but I do believe it is my responsibility--

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please.

Point of Order

Mrs. McIntosh: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, I am responding to questions and concepts raised by the member. So if the member raises a point, I have an obligation to respond. She is the questioner. I am the one answering the questions. I am asking that the questions be relevant to the line and I will answer the questions and try to address the subtle nuances in the questions, the assumptions, the implications and the innuendos in the questions, and I will do that. But I believe the onus is upon the questioner to keep these questions on line.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable member for Wolseley, on the same point of order?

Ms. Friesen: Yes, on the same point of order, I think what the minister is saying is that she is requiring you to rule that I may not respond to issues that she raises in her response. It seems to me, you know, it is one hand clapping here. Could the Chairman perhaps rule on this, or would he perhaps like to take this under advisement?

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please. I am ruling that the minister does not have a point of order.

I would say this, and ask all honourable members at the committee table, in the 1.(b) Executive Support (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits, in the past, they have been allowed to have reasonably widespread questions. I would say to all honourable members at this table, though, that I would ask you not to--[interjection] No--expand that too, too much. Let us spend some time there, but if you could work with me on this thing, perhaps we can get through this line.

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Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could the minister tell us how many of the Order-in-Council appointees are evaluated on an annual basis in this same way?

Mrs. McIntosh: All of them.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, could the minister tell us which of her staff that she laid out at the beginning are Order-in-Council appointees?

Mrs. McIntosh: The executive assistant and the special assistant--[interjection] Plus the deputies, of course. I just made the assumption that was known. The two deputies and the two assistants.

Ms. Friesen: So that would be Connie Hall and Beverley Hares, is it?

Mrs. McIntosh: Connie Hall, Beverley Hares, John Carlyle and Tom Carson.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, this is an area which has seen a change in staff this year, with the loss of one deputy minister and replacement by another. Could the minister tell us what the explanation for that is?

Mrs. McIntosh: The deputy minister of Advanced Education and Training was replaced by an Order-in-Council, as all deputy ministers are when deputies rotate, by the Premier (Mr. Filmon) of Manitoba.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, could the minister tell us why that last deputy minister in post-secondary education was let go by this government?

Mrs. McIntosh: I think some of these personnel matters, Orders-in-Council, of course, are different from the normal process that is undertaken in the civil service. I believe the member knows that, and I think some of these personnel matters are really quite inappropriate to bring up in this setting.

Ms. Friesen: Well, I appreciate the minister’s comments on this, but the removal of a deputy minister is an extraordinary event. This is not something which happens every year. It usually does not happen every 10 years. It is an extraordinary event. It is a deputy minister whom I understand, not just from members of the minister’s own department, but from staff with whom he had worked in other areas of government, that this was a person who was very well respected, that he had brought a great deal to this government.

I remember the last Minister of Education, the previous Minister of Education, speaking very highly of this particular new deputy minister. He brought him in to deal with post-secondary education, expected great things, thought this was the right thing for the department to be doing, and the minister, in her comments last year, when I did question the appointment of two deputy ministers in one department, argued that this was what was needed and this was the right way to go. So it is a surprise that within a very short period of time and with a change of minister, this particular deputy minister has not simply been shuffled but that he was, I guess a euphemism that is still used is, let go. So it is an issue of policy in my mind, and I am looking for some explanation from the minister as to why that particular decision was taken.

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, I am really very puzzled as to why the member implies that we have a change in policy here. I recall very clearly last year saying that what was needed and the right way to go--just quote the member exactly here. She said that last year I said having a deputy minister in post-secondary was what was needed and what was the right way to go, and I still believe that. We still have a deputy there, and it still is the right way to go. There is no change in policy. There is a change in person, but there is no change in policy. We still have a deputy minister in that capacity doing the job description that was indicated last year that I wanted done.

Last year the member said, will this be a permanent position? I said, absolutely. It is a permanent position. It has not been removed from government. The member did not say, will I forever and all time see the same person operating in that position? The member did not ask that last year, and it was not a concern to her last year. She wanted to make sure there would be a deputy minister position. I assured her there would be. There still is. Never once last year did she ask for assurances that we would forever and all time have the same people in the same roles. She wanted assurance that the role would continue to exist, and it does. So, please, again I ask that the member not put incorrect assumptions on the record with every question. Because the personality of the individual in the position has been changed from one to another does not imply a change in policy, and it is not correct nor is it fair, nor is it completely and totally within the realm of honesty to indicate that I have changed a policy--

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Point of Order

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I think perhaps the minister did not choose her words perhaps as well as she might on second thought, and I think she was perhaps moving towards language which was unparliamentary and perhaps she might want to consider that.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable minister, would you like to withdraw part of your statement?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I do apologize most sincerely for having used the words about honesty. I was grasping for a word that would reflect--

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: I would like to thank the honourable minister.

* * *

Mrs. McIntosh: As I said, Mr. Chairman, I do apologize. I am grasping for a word that I believe would accurately reflect what the member does when she draws conclusions that she knows absolutely are wrong conclusions and then puts them on the record implying that they are the truth when they are not. Maybe in her mind she believes them to be the truth--

Point of Order

Ms. Friesen: Yes, I think we need to conduct this discussion in a civil manner. I am doing my best to do that. The minister is suggesting there are a lot of assumptions being made. I think the assumptions are the minister. I would prefer to keep this in a civil manner, and I think it would be better if the minister stuck to answering the questions.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable minister, would you like to withdraw a part of your statement?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I would. Once again, I have to apologize. I perhaps should maybe use the words right and wrong, and that does not then impute any motive.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: I would like to thank the honourable minister for withdrawing those words.

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Mrs. McIntosh: I will attempt to rephrase without impugning motives. The implications the member allows to go on the record are wrong. I am compelled--the member says would the minister please answer the question. Well, when wrong implications are put on the record I believe it is part of my duty as a cabinet minister to respond in a way that will correct the wrong information and make it right.

When the member says that because we changed people in the position of deputy minister that we changed policy, then I am compelled to correct that and say no policy has been changed, no need has gone unaddressed, no right way to go has been altered just because a different person is now doing that job. The member I am sure knows that there was a mutual parting here of the ways. We are going into tremendous changes in post-secondary education. We are looking at establishing a council to oversee a system-wide, post-secondary education. We will be doing things differently than we have in the past. The member is quite right when she indicates that the former deputy had many good friends in the education system who thought most highly of him, and that is not being questioned.

The decision to have a new deputy is a matter that is always taken seriously. Every employee has strengths and weaknesses. We feel we are going into new directions, new changes. There are always skills to be matched and mixed, and the member knows that. We believe the former deputy minister deserves our support for all the excellent work that he did. He has our respect, and I think he deserves the respect of those for whom he worked so hard during his time in government. Order-in-Council appointments are not subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the member would normally have for employees who are hired and have a degree of job security.

Those who take on Order-in-Council appointments know when they take them that there is no job security. In fact, when the hearings for teacher arbitration were going on, many people said that the Deputy Minister of Education earned too much money. I believe, in one of the debates that occurred there, someone else responded, yes, the Deputy Minister of Education earns more money than a high school principal, but then a high school principal not only has job security but has tenure, and the Deputy Minister of Education could be fired tomorrow because O/C appointments have no job security. Therefore one of the things that people do when they take an Order-in-Council appointment is to weigh the $100,000-type salary against the fact that there is absolutely no job security. That is known and understood when the positions are accepted. When the government and the deputy minister decide to come to a parting of the ways and that is their decision, that can be done by simply revoking the Order-in-Council. I think that when a person leaves government to go on and seek future careers, delving into some of these matters in terms of his own personal career and making them public in a matter of record is not really in the best interest of that person’s future. I believe, as I indicated when I started, that some personnel matters are inappropriate to discuss publicly, particularly when in this instance if the member’s concern is, was process followed?

The member knows absolutely that process in O/C appointments is very different from process in other appointments. Does the member have any concern about the process that was followed in an O/C being revoked or put in place? Because those, I think, are the only legitimate questions she has to ask in this line. Is there a flaw in the process with this O/C appointment of Tom Carson or the O/C revocation of the former deputy?

Ms. Friesen: I notice in her response the minister again raised Enhancing Accountability, but I gather this is something that the minister does not want me to respond to. So I will not respond at this point--

Point of Order

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, my comment was absolutely relevant, because I was not talking about the Enhancing Accountability document. I was talking about a comment that was made at those hearings referring to the deputy minister’s salary and whether or not the deputy minister’s salary should be the level that it is. The response that was given was, the deputy minister’s salary should be the level it is because the deputy minister has no job security. It was totally and absolutely relevant to the question. It happened to take place at those hearings, and those hearings were only referenced to indicate the setting in which the totally relevant comments were made. The member has no point of order.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: I will determine if there is a point of order. The minister does not have a point of order. The honourable member for Wolseley, for her questions.

Ms. Friesen: No, the same point of order.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable member for Wolseley on a point of order that I ruled already is not a point of order. The honourable member for Wolseley, to continue her questions.

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Ms. Friesen: My concern is with the loss of a deputy minister who had built up some experience in this area and the consequences for the department of changing deputy ministers at this stage in post-secondary education when there is a transition period that is being made. Of course, my concern again, as I said earlier, is that this is an extraordinary situation. I did not question the procedures or indeed the evaluations, or indeed is this related to any personal issues or personality issues of either of the deputy ministers, the former one or the incoming or present one? It is really a sense of, why did the government do this? Why did it do it at this time? Why did it decide that a deputy minister whose work had been satisfactory and who was in a department which was in quite considerable transition not just in the post-secondary area but in Workforce 2000 and in apprenticeship, why did that happen now? It is an extraordinary thing, and I think something that perhaps should be drawn to the attention, in a sense, of the public record.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please. In making the ruling just a minute ago, I did not explain that it was simply a dispute over the facts. The honourable minister, to answer the question for the member for Wolseley.

Mrs. McIntosh: I already have answered the question. I have indicated that we are undergoing massive change in the system. We know, the member knows, that there are people who have wonderful talents and abilities for maintaining systems. We have people who have wonderful talents and abilities for changing systems, we have people who have wonderful talents and abilities for making systems smaller or making systems bigger, and the member should know that the person who is skilled and excellent at doing one particular task, that there may be somebody who can do a different sort of a task better.

Is she saying that government should, once a deputy by O/C is in place, that that deputy by O/C should remain in place ad infinitum, you know, because I think that is what she is implying, that unless we can justify to the opposition why a particular deputy is no longer in a position, that we should continue with that deputy ad infinitum. The whole nature of an Order-in-Council removes it from that type of scrutiny. As I say, the risk to the person becoming a deputy is high; there is no job security. That is why, as they say in the vernacular, they get the big bucks. They take tremendous responsibility upon their shoulders with no guarantee of job security; it has always been that way.

I believe the NDP might like to go back and check their records of the days when they were in government. I know the opposition member was not in government, nor was the other opposition member with her today in government at the time that there might have been similar changes made by the NDP governments. I would be very interested in having her examine the Hansard in Estimates to see how the NDP government of the day answered questions about deputies who were suddenly no longer deputies. I think she might find such a comparison very interesting indeed and very revealing, typical of the kinds of things that happen so often when you are in government and have to be accountable and when you are in opposition and have no need to be accountable. It is very easy when you are in opposition to sit and point at all the flaws--which is great. We need to have flaws pointed out, we need to have questions pointed out. Unfortunately, we also need to have some solutions suggested. It is just as with the time that the federal government indicated they were going to give $180 million to Manitoba, and the opposition stood up and said, you are going to have $180 million coming, we have been told verbally, therefore spend it on this, spend it on that, spend it on the other thing, and they end up spending about $300 million on--they spent that $180 million over and over and--

An Honourable Member: Relevance?

Mrs. McIntosh: It is relevant. I will prove the relevancy in a moment. They spent that $180 million over and over, and we kept saying, wait until you see the colour of their money, boys. Just because they said they are going to give it does not mean we are going to get it. Then of course we did not get the money but had they been in government, they would have spent it all, and if they did not get it they would have added that to the debt that they already left us.

So what I am trying to say is, it is easy to sit there and ask questions, but when you are in government you have responsibilities. I would suggest, for example, that the NDP government might like to go back and tell us the rationale that they presented forward for dismissing Ron MacIntosh as Deputy Minister of Education. Would you please go back and indicate why you did not give any public accounting as to why you dismissed Ron MacIntosh, a fine deputy minister, who had lots of respect in the field, had all kinds of accolades for his abilities. He was dismissed overnight on the revocation of an O/C and no public accounting was given by the NDP as to why they did that. I cannot imagine why they did it, such a fine person with an experienced background, highly thought of in the field.

(Mr. Gerry McAlpine, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)

I guess what I am just pointing out is that what is good for the goose, in terms of the NDP jargon, is never good for the gander. They can revoke O/Cs and feel that there is no need to give a public explanation and decline to give a public explanation and then they can come in--it was sheer, unmitigated gall--a demand that this government provide for them what they would never provide for the opposition when they were in government, a very, very inconsistent approach. There is an old saying that chutzpah, chutzpa, real true chutzpa is defined and exemplified by the person who having murdered his parents throws himself at the mercy of the court because he is an orphan, and that kind of chutzpa I see sometimes surfacing.

Relevance--very relevant, because what I am indicating is a double standard. You dismiss a deputy on an O/C overnight with no public explanation and yet then come with chutzpa and ask me to do what you declined to do, not you yourself, but the government with which you are aligned, your predecessors in government, your current Leader, who was a member of government at the time.

So I guess maybe what I could say is, I am simply following precedents set by you. Having answered that question, and I believe that that question has now been answered, earlier the member asked about other changes in my office. I will indicate that we had one secretary who wanted to move to a half-time job, and she has done that. So she has been replaced and moved on to that other job, and we have a new secretary there. One secretary had a name change. It is the same person, it is just a different last name, so that information is there.

Ms. Friesen: I think we have a situation here where this deputy minister had served the government for eight years and then there was a very sudden change. I think it seems that the minister is not prepared to answer any further questions on this, but I think, unfortunately, she has left on the record an implication, and she might want to correct that. She has said that there are skills for maintaining skills, for expanding skills, for bringing change to skills or talents, I think was the term she used, for different aspects of government policy for downsizing, et cetera, although she did not use the word “downsizing,” but for reducing.

I assume that the minister is not leaving on the record any sense that it was a particular mismatch of skill between this deputy minister and the government’s requirements that led to the sudden change of personnel.

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Mrs. McIntosh: For once and at long last, the member has made a correct assumption. I think we should note it in the history books. I was talking generically in terms of reasons that O/C appointments are changed. That was a generic statement, not referencing any particular individual, and, again, I have to correct--I am sorry I have to keep making these corrections, but I do--when she indicates that Ron MacIntosh was a different situation because the deputy who had been here, the deputy that is no longer deputy, had been a deputy for eight years, and that Ron MacIntosh had not, I submit that Ron MacIntosh had been Deputy Minister of Education for many, many years--many years more than the immediate past deputy had been Deputy Minister of Education. The immediate past deputy had been Deputy Minister of Education for only two years. Ron MacIntosh had been Deputy Minister of Education for much longer than that when the NDP revoked his O/C with no explanation.

The only point I am trying to make is that, when you take a man like Ron MacIntosh, who had all the fine attributes that were attributed to the deputy that has recently parted from government, and the NDP, again with the double standard, and that is part of the problem that we have, the double standard that is constantly presented. You dismiss Ron MacIntosh summarily as a government, revoke the O/C with no explanation after many, many years of fine service, highly respected, highly respected to this day in the field. You do that with no explanation and are not willing to offer an explanation, and yet when an O/C is revoked under this government as O/Cs can be without explanation, you then demand of this government the things that you were not willing to demand of yourselves.

That double standard is seen so often, and if you expect me, via your questions, to conduct a performance appraisal here and now in the middle of Estimates of the person under question, I will not do it, because I think all of us owe that individual more respect than that. I think, as I indicated, it is inappropriate for the Minister of Education to be asked to do a public performance appraisal in Estimates on an individual who is no longer an employee of government, who accepted an Order-In-Council appointment as all deputies do, with the knowledge and the understanding that Order-In-Council appointments carry with them no job security whatsoever.

I think, Mr. Chairman, I have answered this question. I have pointed out the double standard. I have pointed out the process was absolutely without question and that we wish the former deputy all the very best in his future career, and we do not wish to see this kind of discussion about his capabilities and performance put him in any way in any kind of discomfort. We do not do this with other employees and with O/Cs we do not have any obligation to, and certainly I do not see her asking me about clerical workers or other people who may also not be with the government and I would like to know why she feels they are not as valuable to the system in terms of the work that they do. I just do not think this is the proper place to do performance evaluations. I really do not.

Ms. Friesen: My questions dealt with policy issues. They dealt with the possibility of differences in policies between the minister and her former deputy. The minister has chosen to put a number of things on record which, I think, were quite unnecessary, and again I emphasize that I would like to keep these Estimates at a relatively civil level. I think perhaps if we stick to the questions and the answers, it seems to me that when a deputy in an area of government which has been downsized considerably, the post-secondary education area in terms of the staffing of this department, and when that deputy is let go, I would be remiss in my duty as the Education critic to not ask questions on the public record about the reasons for that. I think the minister should take those questions in that context, and we will simply leave it at that, but I do not think that this process is going to be furthered by the kinds of personal comments and assumptions that the minister rushes to. Again, all I can say is, let us conduct this at a civil level and let us stick to the questions and the answers. Let us remember what the role of a public record is and what the role of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition is in this process of government.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairperson, I am vastly relieved to hear the member now adopt that attitude because I think it is critically important that we do. I think it is quite important that we be civil, that questions not be filled with innuendo, assumptions and statements that call into question our mutual desire as government and opposition to do the best for the students of Manitoba. So I am vastly relieved to hear that she will no longer be asking questions that have those innuendoes in them, that they will be straightforward questions that come straight to the point without snide little remarks about, well, you have dismissed a deputy so you have changed your policy, which she knows is not correct. I am glad that she will no longer put those personal comments and those incorrect assumptions into her statement because I agree they do then go on the record.

So I thank her very much for agreeing to bring this to a higher level of straightforward, clean, constructive questions devoid of the innuendo. Once she starts to do that, and I will see her do that in the next question I am sure, then she can be assured that my responses will, again, echo the questions she has put forward. I will respond to her in the same vein with which she asked the questions. The questions start with her; the response ends with me. My response will always reflect the tone, the timbre and the insinuations that are in the question. If they are good, the answers will be good, and, if they are not good, the answers will be the same tone as the question.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, again, the minister cannot resist a personal attack, and I do not know how many more times I have to say this. It is not personal.

May I, Mr. Chairman, ask the minister about another member of her department, somebody whom I speak to fairly frequently on the phone, and that is Mr. Masters. Where is his line in this department?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, his staff line you will find appearing under the Colleges Secretariat.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, could the minister explain the job description of Mr. Masters? I do deal with him on a number of issues which seem to range mostly over the K-12 area rather than post-secondary. So I am surprised to find that it is elsewhere. Could the minister explain the job description?

(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)

Mrs. McIntosh: We are off line, but I do not mind deviating from that line in this instance. I know the member had indicated she would stay on line, but I do not mind.

Mr. Masters is doing the majority of his work with the post-secondary side of the branch. As you know, he is the immediate past chairman of the Universities Grants Commission. He is a former member of the Board of Governors of the University of Manitoba and has credentials in that vein on the post-secondary side. However, because we have the bulk of work that we have in K to 12, all staff have been pitching in and assisting. Mr. Masters also has considerable experience in K to l2, having been past president of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, a school principal, former executive assistant to the Minister of Education and a wide variety of background experiences such as that.

* (1140)

So Mr. Masters has on his form: And other duties as assigned. He frequently will assist with phone calls from members of the opposition or members of the public that are in areas where he would have some knowledge and expertise such as school management, those kinds of issues, but his main duties are with the post-secondary side of the department, and we do appreciate his wide-ranging expertise and his willingness to take on all those other duties as assigned. I should indicate that I find him a most valued member of my staff, frequently working till 11, 12 o’clock at night, frequently in to spend his whole day Saturday working on issues in the department, a very valued person.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Masters then is an Order-in-Council appointee on the minister’s staff but primarily for post-secondary education.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Masters is an O/C appointment. He is a term employee, pardon me. He is not an O/C appointment. He is a term employee with the government of Manitoba, and he has been with the department since last summer, June or July of ‘95. I do not remember the exact date.

His primary responsibilities or the place where he does most of his work is in the post-secondary side of the department. As you know, we will be soon announcing the establishment of the council on post-secondary education in Manitoba. That will see the Universities Grants Commission and the Colleges Secretariat rolled under the council. We have an interim transition committee working in the meantime. We have a lot of work to be done in preparation for that.

As well, we have many linkages now being formed in terms of articulation between colleges and universities and between colleges and high schools. That linkage is important as well. What was the other part of your question? Was he an O/C appointment? No, he is a term employee, and his duties are primarily post-secondary, although other duties as assigned see him frequently doing work in the K to Senior 4 area as well.

Ms. Friesen: Just a final question on that is, which line do I find his salary under?

Mrs. McIntosh: I am informed it will be 16.6.

Ms. Friesen: Thank you. I think 16.6 has a couple of sections. Could the minister ask her staff for which section that is?

Mrs. McIntosh: 16.6(b)(1).

Ms. Friesen: I want to pass the mike to the member for the Maples, but I have some other questions on this line as well.

Mr. Kowalski: I think there will be a line further in the Estimates, but when you were talking about assessments earlier, of staff, I just wanted to put some comments on the record. For the time that I was on the police force, we went through a number of assessment processes, and one thing, as a supervisor, as a sergeant who did assessments on people, it was always frustrating, the amount of time and energy that had to go into it, that it took away from other duties that I was also doing. So I had a choice of whether to do a poor assessment, because if you are going to do assessment properly you have to keep records throughout the year. You have to bring up the good points and bad points when they occur. You have to document them. You have to formulate them into a reporting structure, and then you have to follow up any recommendation and plans.

Because the discussion varied a little bit, I am going to take a little bit of leeway because other members did. When you go into the assessment of teachers, one thing I hope the minister and her staff are considering any plans for any mandatory assessment structure, to consider the amount of resources and time that it will take. Whether it be administrators, teacher team leaders, whoever does that assessment, that is going to take a lot of time. In the past year, with the standardized testing, we have taken educators away from a teaching function, a student contact function, to an administrative function, a testing function, which, you know, you could make an argument that testing is related to teaching. Now here another one that we might possibly be adding is this assessment function and, again, one more bureaucratic function that takes educators away from their primary purpose, and that is education.

My question simply put is, have the minister and her staff, in their discussions and considerations, taken this into consideration?

Mrs. McIntosh: I indicate yes, because of all the questions that get asked in terms of, what do you need to do out there in the system, you weigh the pros and cons. We start with a principle in making any decisions. Let us say for the sake of discussion on the point that you have raised, that we say there is a principle that teachers should be given the privilege of a regular performance evaluation and pick a time like once a year or once every two years or whatever the appropriate time is determined to be. Once you have decided on the principle, then you go from that and you say, how can we do this without wasting time, how can we do this without disrupting classroom time, how can we do this without getting so heavy into the administrative bureaucracy type thing that we are getting away from teaching? What are the pros and cons of doing it this way or that way? How, in essence, then can we achieve this principle in such a way that the students in the system ultimately benefit?

Always that last question has to be the question, how will the students ultimately benefit from this thing that we feel we need to do in the system? So that question is sort of a guiding criterion that has been behind all decisions we have been making. It is always tested against, how will the students ultimately benefit?

We know that sometimes we make decisions on our way to the ultimate benefit of students, that we may upset certain interest groups along the way, and we want to minimize that. We want to make sure that all of those who are in the system ultimately feel that the system is enriching their lives as well, but we must never forget who the system was created for.

* (1150)

If I may, Mr. Chairman, make a quick response to the member for The Maples’ (Mr. Kowalski) opening comments, I wanted to say two things. One, I very much appreciate, and I want it to go on the record, the member for The Maples’ style. He and I, as I say, do not always agree on the issues, although we do agree on some, but those areas with which we do have disagreement, I have found that the member for The Maples has been very constructive in his comments. He mentioned that we often bump into each other late at night in the hallways, and when he said that he indicated that--I will clarify that--when he is working hard in his office and I in mine, but he paid me a compliment which I wish to return, in that he said I work late, but the only reason he only knows that is because he too works late. The reason he sees me coming out of my office at midnight is because he is coming out of his at midnight, so I know he puts in long hours, but it is more than that.

I know that there have been issues come up in education where the member has had a concern and he has come to me and asked for assistance and I, without condemnation, without imputing motives, without sly innuendoes or any of those things that we sometimes see in this adversarial setup that government has, the member from The Maples (Mr. Kowalski), while he presents criticism and raises difficult questions, always does so, in my opinion, as a way of trying to get to an improved solution, not to try to score political points or to try to demean the government that I am sure he would like to have control of someday. I mean, I know that his party would like someday to be government.

I am pleased to see that on your way to following that quest, you do not at the same time demean and impugn motives to those who currently govern. I think a lot of critics could take your example as the best way to be a critic--constructive, positive, firm, and not necessarily making my job any easier by some of the questions you ask, but I thank you for the dignity and the obvious concern with which they are put.

You had indicated in your opening remarks, to one of the points of criticism that you made, that in terms of cuts, federal cuts, that we need to get over it and start making the adjustments, and I understand that and I agree. You used the example about, you know, it is not always wrong to have a MasterCard or to have a mortgage, et cetera, and again I agree. The only thing I would indicate that where we do, as we often do, say, when members of the opposition will say, you are cruel and unkind because you cut funding to education by 2 percent and you do not care about students, you only care about your big wealthy corporate friends, then by way of explanation we indicate we are faced with fiscal realities.

We have, I believe, been fairly consistent in indicating that we do not disagree with the premise the federal government has to get their financial house in order. We know that the federal government has a huge financial problem and that they must get it under control if the rest of us are to survive. We do not quarrel with their premise; we do quarrel with their priorities. When we are asked why we have been so unkind and cruel as to be not spending the same amount of money as we used to spend on certain areas, we explain this because we have far less revenue than we used to have. We will from time to time question the priorities of the federal government but never their basic premise of having to get their financial house in order. If people, in raising criticisms to us about funding cuts, would cease blaming us for not having any money, we would not even have to make the explanation.

So I just wanted to clarify that and indicate that, yes, a MasterCard and a mortgage are not bad things in and of themselves. They become bad when the MasterCard begins to be used in unwise ways and when you get MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and Enroute, and all of them to the limit all at the same time when your income does not allow you to be able to make all the payments. I am not saying that about the member’s personal finances because I know and I believe that everybody in this room would have a credit card of some part that is used wisely in order to make purchases that are felt to be wise purchases, sort of the buy-now, pay-later plan, which is part of a mortgage, a household mortgage.

The difference between us and the previous government here in Manitoba, the NDP government--because I have heard the Leader of the official opposition (Mr. Doer) make the same point, well, you have a mortgage on your house, what is the difference?--the difference is that most everybody who has a mortgage on their house works to pay it down. I would hazard a guess that if there is any person in this room that has a mortgage on their house that what they are working to do is to pay the mortgage off. They always have that end viewpoint that eventually they will pay the mortgage off. The previous government just kept taking out a second mortgage. They get the mortgage down to a certain point and then they just borrow some more, take out a second mortgage, and we think that has to stop. Anyhow, I will leave it at that. That is in response to the member’s opening remarks.

Mr. Kowalski: Thank you for the positive comments. I will try and get back on line, but I know the minister meant those positive comments with the best intentions but probably they are the kiss of death with the media, who like people who criticize the government and bring up the, you know, the dirt. It does not help me probably due to my inexperience as a politician to cause that. Maybe I will learn to be very confrontational and that in the future, and maybe that is what you have to do as a good opposition politician. Also, having been a police officer, I know the tactic of good cop, bad cop, and the minister has played both roles here today.

Going back to assessment and related to the minister’s staff, I am going to get the advantage of their expertise and knowledge here. My fundamental knowledge of management techniques was in motivation that pay, increases in pay, annual increases were found not to be a very good motivator of people. They are very short term. The impact they have on that person is just very temporary. Only if they do not get it, it is a negative, it is not a motivator. It is a deincentive if people do not get that. Is that still in the latest studies and the latest academic studies? Is that still true as a management technique, that increases in pay is not a good motivator of people?

Mrs. McIntosh: Just for clarification. You are talking now about in the civil service or in the school?

Mr. Kowalski: Well, anywhere.

Mrs. McIntosh: Anywhere. Mr. Chairman, I should indicate that first of all an employee needs to feel that they have been adequately compensated for their work. One of the things, I think, in the engineering ceremony when they are given their ring amongst all the ethical things to which they commit is, they commit themselves to accept without--I am not sure of the wording--but just compensation for their honourable work or words to that effect. I cannot recall it exactly. So certainly people need to feel that they are adequately compensated for the work that they do.

Adequate will mean something different to people, but there will be a range, I think, that could be identified for most people in terms of the work that they do. Doctors would see a range, for example, that would be a higher range than a school teacher just because of the fact that they literally take life in their hands when they are doing surgery if they are surgeons. But having said that, money, I agree with you, is not the main motivator, and it is one of the questions we have been asking in the public school system: Are there other reward structures in schooling versus other performances? For example, extracurricular activities, time during the workday to do work that other people might take home in a briefcase at night, those kinds of things. What are rewards that you can build in? If, say, a social worker has to take a briefcase home at night to do work at night and the teachers do not, is that a reward that they have been given, or is it just part of the working conditions? We do not know.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please. I will give the minister time to finish her response after we go for dinner. The hour being twelve noon, the committee will recess until 1 p.m.

The committee recessed at 12 noon.

________

After Recess

The committee resumed at 1 p.m.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This afternoon, this section of the Committee of Supply, meeting in Room 255, will resume consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Education and Training.

When the committee last sat, it had been considering item 1.(b)(1) on page 34 of the Estimates book. The honourable minister to complete her response--how about if we just continue on. I believe the honourable member for Wolseley was going to have some questions on this line until the honourable member for The Maples (Mr. Kowalski) comes back.

Ms. Friesen: I want to try some questions under the auspices of this section of the department providing policy and implementation advice to the minister. The minister is probably aware that I asked to look at the submissions, the written submissions, to the Norrie commission, those that were made to the second Norrie commission over the summer. Our staff was told on two different occasions, and I was indirectly told by a member of the Archives staff on a third occasion, that these reports, these written submissions, were confidential. When I spoke to Mr. Masters later on, I was finally, I think, told that they were not confidential, except for one or two items, and I am not sure in fact that those were actually removed from the set of documents.

I wondered what was behind that because it seemed to me that there was a policy issue here that the minister then continued in the issue of the Enhancing Accountability, that the written submissions to Enhancing Accountability were not to be available to the public except under Freedom of Information. If the minister may remember, I asked her this question in the House and in the House she said that, of course, they were available, and it was not a question of Freedom of Information, that is, the Enhancing Accountability written submissions. But, in fact, the minister had written to me with a letter that seemed to say the exact opposite, that written submissions would only be viewed under Freedom of Information, and I believe that letter has been published, I think, in one of the northern newspapers, perhaps in The Pas.

I remain puzzled, and I am looking for two things. One is the whole issue of the confidentiality of the Boundaries Commission. Are they open generally to members of the public? Secondly, what is the minister’s policy on the written submissions to Enhancing Accountability.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I do not recall having written to a northern paper and if the member would be good enough to provide me with a copy of that letter I will recall what she said, but I do not recall writing to a paper on this issue of reports or letters or whatever being public or confidential. So if you could provide me with that letter I am positive I did not write--the only letter that I have written to the editor as minister was one letter correcting some misinformation that was given out about the arbitration paper indicating that we had no place in the paper nor did we intend to effect rollbacks to current collective agreements of 10 percent. That letter was sent out in March to newspapers, but it was not on this topic. So if you could provide me with that, I will have a better sense of what you are talking about.

In the meantime, I should indicate that there are two kinds of submissions or two kinds of correspondence that will come to the minister on the topic that she is referring to, the Norrie commission and the arbitration paper. There are those written submissions that were intended to be presented publicly, so it might be someone who put a submission in because they could not appear in person or whatever, but they intended it to be a public presentation. Those there should be no trouble whatsoever in obtaining without having to go to Freedom of Information.

Then there are letters that come to the minister that are written to the minister by individuals who might say something in terms of an opinion on these topics but that were clearly written in such a way that I am convinced that those individuals would be extremely upset if they thought I then turned around and kind of gave them to someone who could then turn around and give them to the Winnipeg Sun or put them on the record at Hansard or something. So there are two categories in writings, and then there will be ones that are in between that you are not quite sure about when you read them if they were intended to be personal letters that the writer expected to have in confidence or written documents that they expected to be released and made public.

So I think in the beginning with a venture of this sort, the department took the side of caution rather than inadvertently release something that was written confidentially. They considered as personal correspondence those things addressed to me and sent to my office and, clearly, those that were sent to the Boundaries Commission or sent as official responses to Norrie or to the arbitration panel would be in a far different category from those. So I do not know if that indicates in terms of intent--if there is some confusion, I am quite happy to have that confusion clarified in some way, because we do not want people who had submissions that they are quite happy to be public to have their submissions withheld from the public if they have no objection to them going out.

On the other hand, when people write a confidential letter based on their own experience, drawing conclusions about either the arbitration paper or the Boundaries Review, and it is clear from the nature of the letter that they are sharing a personal experience that they really would not want public, and they have given no permission to make it public, all of those are considered third-party correspondence. The Freedom of Information Act, which the member I believe would be familiar with because it was drafted by her party, indicates some very clear comments about third-party correspondence or third-party writings, that they can only be released with the permission or at the request of the third party itself.

So we are simply applying The Freedom of Information Act exactly the way the NDP drafted it, applying it according to the way in which the NDP drafted it, and I think the NDP drafted that legislation consciously the way they did to make sure that no Manitoba citizen inadvertently had his or her privacy subject to any risk. Now, if it has happened that in trying to abide by the intent of the legislation which was to allow private citizens to gain access to information that might be on record about themselves or to allow people access to government documents that they think might be in the best interests of the public to know, if that intent is to be followed, then it is prudent of us to make sure we do not inadvertently--we would rather err on the side of caution and not release people’s writings than inadvertently release it, but that is not to say we are not willing to make public things that are written that we think were intended to be public or that the writers maybe do not mind having go public. There might be someone who wrote to me privately who would have no objection to it being made public.

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There is also the issue of cost, as the member knows, and that is why Freedom of Information Act legislation which her party drafted makes statements about paying for things, because there is the issue of cost. It is no problem; we can always add to the cost of government to photocopy reams of paper for the public if it is something that Freedom of Information allows us to do.

So there is no desire to withhold information that people wanted to go out, and if there is some confusion in messages going out, and if there is any way we can clarify it, we would be pleased to do that. If you have any suggestions in that regard, I would be most pleased to consider them because it is not our intent to keep people in the dark at all.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I think there are two different issues here. One is correspondence to the minister which is dealt with in a particular way, and the minister has outlined the principles that she follows under that.

But I think there is a second issue here, and that is submissions to a public commission of inquiry. That is really my concern with both the Enhancing Accountability and the Norrie commission. Both of those commissions held hearings over a relatively short period of time and encouraged written submissions in order to compensate for that, and I am speaking specifically of the second Norrie commission and the recent Enhancing Accountability.

It seems to me that when submissions are submitted to a public commission of inquiry or a consultation, is there not, and I am looking for some guidance from the minister and her staff on this, an assumption that those are public documents?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I think the member raises a very good point in her comments, and it might be of assistance if we indicated that the approach that we are currently taking with the accountability paper we feel is the approach that will address the balance that she is seeking.

With the Norrie report, as the member may recall, while the department took the side of caution initially, the department did eventually come to the conclusion that anything that was addressed, that had on the front, you know, to the Norrie commission--even if it was sent to me as a letter, we did forward them on to Norrie--should be available for public perusal.

With the accountability paper we were taking the approach that anything submitted in writing that said, this is a submission to the hearings, anything that was addressed to them would be considered to be deemed that the writer intended to have it be public. More than that, if letters were sent to me that appear to be in that category where they would write, you know, Dear Mrs. McIntosh, I have these views on what should be done in terms of the questions raised in the paper, and they do not cite any personal involvement with a student or a child or anything like that, that they were simply sort of factual, objective things sent to address the panel’s concerns, that those types of items could also be made public and that we would only retain as confidential those very clearly personal letters where they cite problems they have had with an existing process that affects them as individuals. Those we will still consider private. But I think that approach will address what the member is seeking to have addressed. She raises a good point. It is a legitimate concern, and hopefully if we take the approach that anything written that either says it is to be considered a submission or appears to be written in such a way that one could logically draw that conclusion would be seen then as, in fact, official response to the hearings and therefore available for public perusal.

There is one other category and that is if someone sends in something, no matter what its content, if it is stamped personal and confidential, even if it appears to be a written submission, if it has got personal and confidential, for your eyes only, then I would consider it to be that out of respect for the writer.

Ms. Friesen: My concern is that there be a public discussion in Manitoba and that people in Flin Flon, for example, know what is being said about the same issue in southern Manitoba or in western Manitoba. I think, perhaps, one way to address this in the future is to ensure that public discussions of this kind have an introduction at the beginning that says, written submissions are accepted, always. Written submissions are part of the public record. I think that would be helpful.

I think the second thing that is important is that that discussion be reflected back to the people. When we did the constitutional committee, and admittedly that was much longer, and it was certainly a great deal more expensive, we prepared summaries of the discussions that could be distributed to public libraries, and they were, and they were read.

Has the minister prepared summaries of the Boundaries Commission, first of all? Then, we will look at accountability.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Norrie did a summation in his report, and I believe that he made every effort to sum up the contents of the submission as accurately as he could. I understand what the member is saying, and I think it is important that as much information as possible go out, but there are some problems, and I will maybe just indicate what a few of them are so that it might help in understanding.

For example, if we take the fact that the Manitoba Teachers’ Society had an official position on the arbitration paper, and most of the submissions to the panel, of course, would constitute a reflection of that position. It would be the rare teacher who felt differently, who would have enough courage to come forward and take a public position indicating a difference, although some did. It is entirely possible, and I am not indicating any break in confidentiality here, that there may well be many educators who disagree fairly strongly with their union, who would choose to write a learned dissertation of some sort to the minister that, when read, would appear to be a straightforward learned dissertation on the issue, who most often in their correspondence would indicate that they would like it to be kept confidential, but, who, for the sake of the fact that they all have to belong to the same association and work together, would prefer that their comments that may take a different position from their unions and offer advice in contravention to the union position, that they would prefer that that not then be released and be made available to the Manitoba Teachers’ Society; or, conversely there may be trustees--although maybe there are not as many trustees as there are teachers so the imbalance might be for that reason. Let us say there was a trustee who disagreed with the trustees association position and would prefer not to have to go to the next meeting of trustees and have to work with peers when that person came out in opposition to their board’s corporate position.

So there are those kinds of reasons that people who would prefer that they want to get the information to the minister and yet they desire confidentiality. I am reluctant to reach that expectation of confidentiality for two reasons. One, I think it will stop the people from writing to me with what they really think. If people think that everything they write to the minister is going to be immediately turned over to the public so that (a) it can appear in the pages of the newspaper or (b) more meaningful to some of them, that it be sent back to the particular organizations of which they are members to cause them tension maybe with those with whom they interact on a regular basis might prevent me from hearing some personal opinions and private thoughts of people. Secondly, I guess just on principle, for all my life, I have always taken the attitude that unless someone gives me permission, I do not take letters that have been sent to me from anybody and give them to anybody else unless I know that they are comfortable with me doing it.

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So I think the approach we are taking now which will make assumptions that if there is no confidentiality requested and it appears to be a straightforward offering of opinion on a subject and we are confident that the release of this will not get the individual into trouble with any particular organization--or not into trouble, that is not the right phraseology--but maybe create tensions in the workplace for them, then that information would be made available. I think the member understands what I am trying to say in a diplomatic way about that very difficult balance between the desire to be as public and open as you can, which we will make every effort to do and at the same time the respecting of people’s privacy. It is a fine line and we will try to do our best, because we do appreciate the point she is making.

Ms. Friesen: But, again, we are looking at two different issues here. The minister has spoken of submissions to the minister and those are dealt with in a very different way and can be held confidentially, can be dealt with under a whole series of Freedom of Information rules that are the same for everyone. My point really is public commissions, submissions to public commissions. I think what is being confused is the difference between a letter to a minister and a letter to a public commission. What I am trying to do is to ensure that in the future there be no confusion of those crossings of lines and that public commissions, in fact, have a rider in them that says public submissions are welcomed, public submissions are part of a public record and that if people want to write confidential letters, they do not write them to the commission, they write them to the minister. In that way, they can be treated in a very different way.

Mrs. McIntosh: I think it is a good question and an important point. I believe I did indicate and I agree with the member that public submissions to hearings should be made public either in summative form or in their entirety depending upon the length.

The one point that does happen sometimes, however, and somehow I think this has to be taken into account as well, is that there will from time to time be private letters written to commissions--

Ms. Friesen: That is my question. Should there be?

Mrs. McIntosh: Well, it is hard to control. We could say, everything that is presented to the commission will be made public, and I think, by and large, that would hold with no problem. I would say in 95 percent of the cases that would be no problem, but then there will always be people who will send in a confidential letter. I believe it happens on a fairly regular basis. They will say: I am writing to the commission in confidence without prejudice just to say, because I was listening to the hearings, and I heard this and this and this; I have to tell you my point of view, but I do not want to appear in public, and I would appreciate my submission being held in confidence.

If that happens and it is spelled out specifically that they want it to be held in confidence then I think it should be, because you do want to get back all the feedback you can. Maybe there is a way of doing this in that you could say, unless submissions are specifically identified as being confidential, those submitting should assume their documents will become public and that way then people know that if they write they can expect it to be public. If they do not expect it to be public they are going to have to indicate an expressed request for confidentiality and that might get around it.

Most people who make a submission to a panel want their position to become public. The vast majority will make a presentation at the hearing in order for their comments to be part of the public record. We found that with the public hearings on the accountability document that teachers in great abundance wanted to have their opinions on the record even though they knew the point they were making had already been made sometimes word for word the same as an earlier presenter. They still wanted to have it put on the record to show that they too agreed with that perspective. It was very important to them that their words be heard publicly, and I think that would hold true for most cases.

Ms. Friesen: I think we probably have a difference of opinion on this and it is probably something that certainly in my case I would want to talk to Archives and Freedom of Information people about, because it seems to me that if you had put something like that in each of these papers, that is, in advance, that public submissions were publicly available, confidential letters go to the minister, that you might in fact have a different kind of setup.

I think what I need to know is or what Manitobans need to know is that when they see the public record of a public commission, they have got the whole thing. The minister may say that 5 percent is confidential. That is probably a high estimate for the kinds of ones that we are talking about, but unless we lay that out in advance and unless we are clear about it we will never know. There may be one commission where that then becomes 30 percent, and maybe the commissioners make their judgment upon that 30 percent rather than the other 70 percent. Now, the kind of commissioners we appoint, of course, we do not expect them to do that, but the public record is the public record. There is a level of accountability in the public record that I think Manitobans want to maintain, so I am really just flagging it for the minister.

I think the problems I ran into were not insurmountable. I think the department made the right decision, and I certainly had the opportunity to read those documents and found them very interesting. So I would just move on slightly, unless the minister wanted to respond.

Mrs. McIntosh: Just a very quick response. Depending on the kind of hearing--and the member made reference just now to other commissions and hearings--we do have other ones where it is more clearly obvious that people might want to make private submissions, and indeed arrangements have been made for private verbal submissions, on drugs, for example, is one. In any of the things that we do, we cannot override the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. We cannot, because the other side of the Freedom of Information Act is the right to privacy. Because Freedom of Information tells how other people can freely access information, it also has to indicate how those who desire privacy can retain that right to privacy. What the member is suggesting would, in some cases, lead people to believe that they would lose their right to privacy. I know that is not your intent, but I think it could be the ultimate conclusion.

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If you said that in public hearings all submissions would become public, you would then, I believe, not have some submissions come. Particularly in the accountability document, the member may not realize how very many educators do support some of the suggestions made by trustees, and certainly those people, I think, some of them never did even write a letter just for the very worry the member had. Some of them resorted to the telephone, gave their names and addresses and everything--of course, because I do not take information without a name or an address attached. Many of those people would come to, I am giving you a phone call, because I hesitate to put what I want to say in writing because it is not that I do not trust your department minister, but I do not want this getting back to the people I work with, but I want you to know that I think--and then they would give an opinion. I think the member might be surprised if she knew how many people felt that was the only way they could safely get information to me. But I think if there was a provision that said you will not be able to make submissions privately or have them considered held in confidence, then a lot of opinion might not get presented.

The member and I are used to a public forum, we are used to the give and take and the heated debate that goes back and forth, and we are both used to being sort of yelled at and chastised, and we are used to working in an adversarial situation, but most people are not. They worry that if they take a position opposite to what they feel is the official position of their group or one that group has decided to take, that they will then have to operate on a daily basis in an atmosphere of disharmony and tension, and that is very intimidating. To say that you will not be able to have anything you submit to this commission kept in confidence, I think, would be very intimidating for that minority who would otherwise then be afraid to speak up and share their views.

While I understand her point and I am extremely sympathetic to it, I assure her that we will do all in our power to make available all information we feel is truly meant for the public eye. I do say that we cannot override the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act which, along with guaranteeing the public access to information, also guarantees citizens the right to privacy in certain areas.

Ms. Friesen: What might be possible as a way out of this dilemma is that in its conclusions, if a commission, not these commissions in particular, but if a commission were to say X number of private or confidential memos were heard or so many round table discussions were held or so many written submissions were held which we kept in confidence, fifty years down the road they will be available through Freedom of Information.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, that might be a very good suggestion actually because it would do two things. It would indicate that the material being made available was the full extent of the material, which is a useful thing to know if it is the full extent of the material, and it would also indicate the degree to which privacy was requested, which would also be useful. That is a suggestion we will take under consideration. I think it may be a good one.

Ms. Friesen: To return to the Norrie commission--and, again, it is the record of the Norrie commission that I am talking about at the moment--the minister said that Mr. Norrie in his report made summations of opinions presented, and, yes, that is true, he did in his first report.

His second report, however, was much briefer. He was in a much tighter time frame, and the summations were certainly not full. In many cases, there were no summations at all, and this really was as crucial as the first Norrie commission, because these were people’s reflections on actual proposals, actual boundaries.

Has the minister prepared any summaries of the Norrie commission’s second version?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I should indicate that I agree, the second report was much briefer in its conclusions in that the Norrie commission basically indicated that with the exception of a few minor variations he really was not changing his recommendations to government.

In answer to the second part of the member’s question, we have not prepared summations of the pieces of correspondence we have received for a couple of reasons. One, the volume of correspondence is pretty extensive. We received hundreds and hundreds of letters from a wide variety of people, and the opinions offered pertaining to each division are very localized. They are basically talking about local circumstances as opposed to the overall picture.

We are, however, taking into consideration all of those pieces of correspondence and the cumulative effect of those pieces of correspondence. While we do not have anything at this present time, I think that when we are finally able to indicate the direction government feels it needs to go, I do not anticipate an extensive summation, but you will in all likelihood see something like, in analyzing the material put before us, we noted that the majority of people indicated a preference for whatever, a smaller group indicated this, and only a handful indicated that. So you might see those kinds of indications just to give people a sense of the flavour of the feedback that we have received from Manitobans on the issue.

I do not think at this point that you will see a detailed summation just simply because there is so much that would have to be gone through to do it, but we could give that smaller summary that I have just indicated that I think would give people a sense and a feel for the types of things we were hearing.

The submissions, I believe, for Norrie are available to the public. If they wanted to go through them page by page, that would involve some initiative on their part, but it would be a very big time saver and cost saver for the government to have them take the initiative to peruse the documents rather than our just publish them widely not sure if they would be picked up and utilized by members of the public.

Ms. Friesen: Just to clarify something, the minister said there have been hundreds of pieces of correspondence. Was the minister referring specifically to the submissions to the second Norrie commission or the overall body of correspondence that the government must have received on this?

Mrs. McIntosh: In that instance I was talking about the correspondence coming to the minister. Norrie, I believe, received a tremendous volume of mail and feedback on his second round, but the reference I was making there was to the mail that has come to the Premier’s Office or to other MLAs who forwarded me the correspondence that they have received.

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Ms. Friesen: So neither the Norrie commission nor the government has prepared summaries of the formal responses that were made to that second round, but you intend to provide some kind of overall analysis in the sense that the minister has suggested at some point.

Mrs. McIntosh: The ultimate report will be the decision made by government. When that decision is finally made in presenting rationale for that decision, whatever it is going to be, we do not know at this point, it will in all likelihood make reference to the feedback we have received from Manitobans as an influencing factor to whatever degree it was.

I think it would be at that time that that kind of summation would be made available, but I am not wanting to lead to an expectation that it will be a highly detailed analysis. In my opinion, it will be more of a generic indication of trends and feelings and opinion as opposed to X number of letters with this point and 12 with this, because that is a tremendous amount of work, and I think would take staff away from more important tasks to provide details that in my opinion the general public in most instances would not be that interested in. They would want to know what is the basic message you heard, approximate numbers, and that type of thing.

So we try to provide what we think the public would like to know in the most timely and cost-effective fashion.

Ms. Friesen: I would like to pursue some other questions on the Boundaries Commission. Is this the line to do it on?

Mrs. McIntosh: It is Policy and Planning technically which is not on this line. Yet we do happen to have the Policy and Planning person here right now, so in terms of my desire to keep staff available, it might be an appropriate time to do it with this particular staffperson here right now, if you wish.

Ms. Friesen: That was for clarification. I want to continue with some other things on this line that are specifically on this. Well, I think they are specifically on this line--but to see where that went. Again I am still on the area of documentation and public discussion of issues that the minister has raised in the public forum. Obviously the one that is currently underway is the Enhancing Accountability. So again I want to pursue the issue of the record of Enhancing Accountability. What kind of summaries will be prepared, if any, and when will they be distributed? How does the minister intend to handle that stage of the report?

Mrs. McIntosh: I do not want to pre-empt the panel in any way, but it is at this stage what I am expecting to receive would be more along the lines of what-you-told-us kind of report. I am sure you have seen those before, where I would receive in summary form, hopefully not an overly lengthy report nor one that does too much predicting but rather: Madam Minister, here is what people told us--because that was an information gathering panel, and it was sent out to try to assist in the process of information coming back to the minister. While I have received many pieces of correspondence, phone calls, et cetera, on the document, at the same time, we wanted to provide a vehicle whereby people could make the information they wanted to get us public, make it in a formal sense, and make it part of a process of information gathering.

So I am expecting a report that will say something like this. Here is what they told us when we went out to listen. People were concerned about this, this, and this--whatever it is that was heard, put in a generalised way, rather than saying Mary Jones from this place said that, because I, too, have access to Mary Jones’ comments, but rather an indication that we heard from so many teachers, so many trustees, so many private citizens, so many students, so many whatever, and generally they felt this, that, or the other thing, so that I can then analyze all that information and put it together with the other information that has come in, in forms of resolutions, et cetera, and use that to help formulate any decisions that might need to be made.

Inherent in all of this, of course, will be discussions with teachers and trustees as to their views on some of the things that I might surmise out of the information I have gathered.

Ms. Friesen: Is the minister expecting some recommendations from this panel, or is it simply, as she has just said, a reflection of what is said, essentially a summary of proceedings?

Mrs. McIntosh: The panel, if they feel that they have heard enough of a common thread running through the presentations that would warrant saying something along the line of, most people seem to have agreement on whatever and therefore you might wish to consider doing such and such since it picks up the common thread, there is nothing to preclude them from making recommendations to me if they feel, based on what they have heard, that there are some conclusions that can be drawn, and that would be most welcome, and they may wish to do that.

I am looking, basically, for the information that was gathered, and hopefully we will be hearing back from them very soon.

Ms. Friesen: The minister said she would be considering this along with resolutions that she has received from elsewhere. These, I assume, are the trustee resolutions and, I assume, if there are any MTS resolutions, Manitoba Association of Municipalities, any of the sort of provincial organizations, Council of Women, those kinds of level of resolutions. Is that what was meant?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, yes, those are the kinds of resolutions to which we are referring, resolutions from trustees. The teachers may have some resolutions they wish to bring to us, as well. We have resolutions from superintendents and from municipalities and the Union of Manitoba Municipalities and such like. Those we consider part of the public offering of information and opinion on this issue.

I continue to receive material from people expressing various views and opinions as to what they would like to see happen, and I think that as well as those formal resolutions, a more informal line of communication with teachers and trustees will be extremely useful in developing any ultimate conclusions as a result of what we have learned from feedback from the accountability document.

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Ms. Friesen: Is the minister pursuing informal avenues at the moment with any of these groups? Is this sort of part of the process of developing a policy?

Mrs. McIntosh: Absolutely. We have ongoing dialogue on a constant and regular basis with teachers and trustees, and this is certainly one topic that is of high interest to both of those groups at this time, so, yes, indeed.

Ms. Friesen: The schedule, I understand, is still for presentation of new legislation in this session; that is, before the beginning of June, I guess.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, as we have indicated initially, and we continue to indicate at this point, if we have a feel for what will help the situation out there, then we would be bringing legislation in this spring.

We have always said we never believe in change for the sake of change, but with this particular problem, the problem has in the last couple of years reached desperate proportions with trustees, so if there is a solution that can be obtained, it would be our desire to introduce it earlier rather than later, and with that in mind, we have indicated our intention, if we have something ready, to introduce it this spring. Of course, the key words are there, if we have something ready, but it is our intention to not have to wait forever to solve this problem.

Ms. Friesen: The initial document that was released, Enhancing Accountability: Ensuring Quality, could the minister tell me something about the origin of that document? Was it written in this section of the department, for example? Was it written in the department?

There are certain elements of it, as I am sure the minister is aware, that have caused great concern and much questioning, and I think certainly what I heard at the hearings was that many people were very concerned that such a document could have come from the Department of Education.

There was much searching around for an author, some sense that the author was not within the department, so I am looking for the genesis of that document. Was it worked upon by a variety of departments? Does the minister see that the questions that were asked might be responded to in some way?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I guess, ultimately, as with anything that is put out by government, it becomes a government document and, with anything that has this degree of complexity, there is always a crossover of abilities and jurisdictions. There are many aspects of the paper that have sources of information that emanate from other places and yet, ultimately, a document put out by government becomes a government document regardless of how many different sources were required to provide the information contained within that document.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: I would like to ask at this time and hope that it is the will of the committee to take a five-minute recess. Thank you. A five-minute recess.

The committee recessed at 1:56 p.m.

________

After Recess

The committee resumed at 2:04 p.m.

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Inkster): Mr. Chairperson, I wanted just to ask a question as a follow-up from Question Period, primarily because our research person attempted to get a response through the Ministry of Education. The question I had asked the other day in Question Period was with respect to We Care and how much money they would have been given. Our research person tried to get that information and the most recent conversation was that the minister will be provided that information and she could do what she likes with it. I would ask if the minister could possibly give an answer so I do not have to take the mike again. If she is unable to give an answer maybe she can request that her staff person share with us that information.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, we are just having the appropriate staff person to come up to see if we can determine an answer. I know after the question you asked the other day in Question Period I thought maybe it might have been a Workforce 2000 training and checked that route but apparently there was nothing in Workforce 2000. So I understand they are looking to see where else, and I will get you the information. I may have it here in just a few moments. If I do not have it here in a few moments, as soon as I get it I will provide it for the record. In answer to your question, if you give us just a moment, we will see if we can find out here.

We have someone from our finance branch who will go now and seek to try to find that source for you, and bring it back hopefully this afternoon for your information. The indication I received yesterday from the staff who did the first initial inquiries, they could not see anything under Workforce 2000, but the financial person who is with us this afternoon will go back through once again. I understand that you were quoting from last year’s Estimates in the House, and so we will go back and search that information, and, as I say, we will try to have that for you this afternoon. I do not have it off the top of my head, and the staff that is with me do not recall We Care as a specific group, but then there are so many organizations that have done training, particularly in the health care aides and that type of venture.

The only thing I will say in advance of knowing the specific detail is that our programs that offer workforce training or skills upgrading are generically designed programs designed to be available to any particular group that fits certain criteria. So it is not likely that there would be any sort of operational grant, but funds that are made available for training are not generally made available for just one group. Most of our initiatives in Workforce 2000, in fact all of them right now are for industry-wide or sector training where you will have a person learning transferable skills that are applicable to an area of work. As I say, I will bring back the details because I do not have it right now. Now, do you want to be present when that is provided? I know you are trying to go back and forth between two sets of Estimates here, or do you want it just put into the record when it arrives?

Mr. Lamoureux: Yes, if you do get it this afternoon--because I am in the Health committee--I would appreciate just being notified, but it is more important just to get it on the record, obviously. But as a courtesy I would appreciate being here, at least told, the page or whatever. Again I am just recollecting by memory, page 105 of the Supplementary Estimates from last year is what comes to mind, but again I am not a hundred percent sure. Thank you.

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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, what we will do then is, if you happen to be in the Health Estimates when the information arrives, we will table it here and send a copy down to you so that you know it has been tabled and you know what it says. Okay? Thanks.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I want to continue with again some issues of process and the proposals in Enhancing Accountability.

One of the things that concerned me was the selection of the deputy minister in this case to sit on that committee. Now I have conveyed my concerns to the deputy minister personally, and I do want to put them on the record. It seems to me that deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers are responsible for providing a minister with advice upon the consequences, the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses of policy choices that the minister is making. The deputy minister is a staff position. It is somebody who ought to be able to serve under a variety of governments. I think we all subscribe ideally to that kind of civil servant, and the deputy minister in that sense epitomizes what we require in civil servants.

My broadest concern is the politicization of the civil service in Manitoba. It seems to me to have gone further in Manitoba than in many other provinces and certainly than in the federal government. I have worked in the federal government, and even though that was a number of years ago, there is a very different ethos, I think, there in these matters. That may be the scale of the issues and the closeness of provincial governments, and there are strengths again and weaknesses to that, but the idea and the ideal of a nonpolitical, nonpartisan civil service, professional and professionalized, which can offer to the minister advice, the best advice, on a variety of issues, I think, is very important.

My concern is that the requiring of the Deputy Minister of Education to sit on a commission which I think would have been known to be very controversial--I could put it into more strong language than that, but I think the minister recognized that what she was doing was very controversial. It seems to me that the deputy minister has to maintain professional relationships with all parts of the education community, and my concern is that by having the deputy minister serve on that particular commission, which was gathering information and might be expected to make recommendations, that position was being jeopardized, and so it is the long term issue of the civil service, the long term issue in particular of this deputy minister.

There were many angry expressions at those hearings. The minister has probably heard of that. I think it was an extremely difficult position to put a deputy minister in, and I expect that the minister has some strong reasons for that. She may not have anticipated how that commission would develop, but I am drawing that point, as an abstract point in a sense, to her attention. I can understand the desire to have expertise. I think most commissions do desire that, and that is exactly the role that deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers do play, but not as part of the commission. They are there as staff; they are there to make recommendations on the advisability of certain directions that a minister may or may not want to take. So I am looking for some reflections from the minister on this, if there was a particularly strong reason that she saw that her deputy minister should be placed in this particular position.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I believe inherent in the member’s question is the response. I heard in the question that deputies are responsible for providing advice to ministers, providing information to ministers for doing all those very important jobs.

One of the things the deputies have done throughout time is to collate information and provide summaries of information to ministers in a situation like this, where information is being gathered and feedback is being gathered from the public. Much of that information, having in the very nature of the information educational components, it, in my opinion, was felt that someone who knew the department, knew school divisions, knew how the funding formulas worked through personal experience in dealing with the funding formulas, knew firsthand through having worked on a regular basis, as the member indicated in her question, with the various groups involved, and who had also participated in attempting to bring the two groups together under other circumstances to see if there was any sense there--it could be voluntary movement towards a consensus--that person it seems had the ability, the expertise and the knowledge to be part of an information-gathering body which may end up presenting conclusions and recommendations to the minister.

I know that we will frequently have deputies in government, many of whom, by the way, do exactly as the member has indicated. We have many deputies in government who have been with government for many, many years, who have been through administrations of differing political stripes, who have served with diligence and professionalism the government of the day with great care and concern for some of the generic things that happen in government. We say that government is political, and in some sense it is, but most of the time in reality, government does what government has to do, and it generally does not really have a wide variation in the needs that it tries to address.

I am thinking of my previous deputy, for example, in Consumer and Corporate Affairs, who is now Deputy Minister of Agriculture, who had been with the department for so many years, but the knowledge he had of the securities commission and all of those things that were pertinent to that department was knowledge and information that he would provide that would be based upon what was happening in the field. There is no control over how the people in the field view their role in society. They will view their role as they view their role. We cannot tell them how to view their role. You respond to the needs they bring forward, and you take the needs that have been identified to you as deputy and you identify them to the minister. I mean, that is all part of the role. So I do not see that we have a predisposition to be making deputies political, as is implied, and I just state my other department by way of an example that we do not, for example, dismiss a deputy immediately upon assuming office, as other governments have been wont to do.

I harken back to my earlier comments about Ron MacIntosh, who was deemed to be an outstanding deputy minister who for some reason had his O/C revoked very shortly after the New Democrats assumed power. The conclusion drawn by the whole education community at that time was simply one conclusion, and that was that the New Democrat government was politicizing the deputy ministerships,and so I state that with all due respect as an indication that we did not do that in coming to power. We have not attempted to politicize our deputies. We do feel that some issues of controversy are issues of controversy because there is dissension within groups within the community. It does not have anything to do with politics. It has everything to do with reality.

So when you have two groups governed by the government, teachers and trustees, who have a dispute that has become irreconcilable, and they turn to government and seek government’s assistance--at least one of the groups finally in desperation comes to government and says, we have now passed resolutions that reflect our desperation about the untenable position that you, the government, have placed us in; you have set legislation that binds us that we can no longer live with, and we are now telling you that we are ready to resort to strike as a solution which is not our first preference, but we are that desperate; we are ready to do that, and the consequence to us not getting that right or some other corrective action to this untenable situation in which you, the government, have placed us will be to start laying off hundreds of teachers--then I think the issue needs to be dealt with by government and by those senior in government who by the nature of their job want to see situations corrected such that both parties living under laws set by government are able to function in an atmosphere that they feel does protect their interests, as well as the other party’s.

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So in that sense I do not see this as a political issue. I see this as an issue where you have two bodies in the field unable to continue a working relationship together, that working relationship having been established by government, the rules of the game laid down by government. If there is no role for the deputy minister to try to delve into the rationale and thinking behind why those two key stakeholders in government are at odds with each other and to provide that feedback and perhaps some recommendations as to how it might best be resolved for the sake of the students in the classroom who are the main priority, the stakeholders for the government of Manitoba, then what role does the member see for deputies, that they sit in their offices and only follow instructions, that they give advice to the minister without having been subject to being able to be party to gathering information that will lead to that advice, that we isolate them from the problems in the field and--I mean, we need their expertise.

I hope that people do not see this whole issue in the accountability document as a political issue. I think inherent in the member’s question is that point also having been made, and that is the implication that by virtue of having a deputy minister sitting on a panel, we see the hearings on a controversial issue--that somehow the issue is not based upon a genuine dispute in the field but rather is somehow a political issue; so just those two points.

Ms. Friesen: I think I suggested fairly clearly what I did see the deputy minister’s role as, and I want to reiterate that. I think that the minister has suggested that she needs the deputy minister’s input from the field. Exactly, she does. She needs a deputy minister who will have the easy professional relationships with all those in the field, whether they are superintendents or trustees or teachers, the groups who the minister sees at the moment in a controversial position.

I do think that is important to maintain, and I am concerned that those easy professional relationships have been made much more difficult by the role that the deputy minister was required to play in this.

It is exactly the expertise and those professional relationships across a broad field in education which I think are important and which any Minister of Education would need. That was why I would have suggested that that expertise and those relationships be available in a staff position, rather than in a public position associated with a document which the minister may believe is not political, but obviously--we will come to that later--but certainly was controversial, and the minister knew it to be controversial and in a very public position.

I think I have probably made the point I want to make and will probably have to agree to disagree on that. I do think it has put the deputy minister in a long-term, difficult position, and I am sure it is something that he will, in the end, be able to overcome. The same expertise could have been there in a staff position. The same information, the same exposure to the issues that the minister will require, could have been there in a staff position.

I am curious. There are a number of other Conservative MLAs that the government might have put on that. The deputy could have been there in a staff position, as, for example, in the constitutional committee. The present Minister of Labour was there in a staff position, came to all the hearings, was there for discussion, had input into questions that obviously come up in those kinds of areas, a very important role to play.

It struck me, just from my experience there, that this was a different kind of approach that this minister had taken. I wonder if there is some particular defence of it in this issue. The minister made reference, for example, to what is called out there as the Carlyle committee, the bringing together of the trustees and the teachers, over I think it was about a 12-month period, to try and see if there could be some resolution in an informal way.

Does the minister think that that alone, that that role that the deputy minister had played, required him to sit on that next stage? Is there something there that I am not seeing, that was not there in the constitutional committee, for example?

Mrs. McIntosh: The constitutional committee, of course, was very definitely a political committee. All three parties sitting on it definitely determined at the beginning of the outset that they would come up with a political conclusion and course of action at the end of it, a very different issue than this.

The flip side of the coin to the member’s argument, of course, is that by virtue of having a deputy on a three-member panel, which was essentially an information gathering panel, there are many who would argue that having the presence of the deputy minister there kept that panel from being political. Having a nonpolitical person on it signalled or should have signalled in the minds of some very clearly that this was not political. That is the other side of the coin that could be argued if this issue were being debated.

We know that there are many instances when deputies communicate with the public and chair committees and chair things of that nature in order to compile data or do a number of other tasks.

The member indicated that it was important for the deputies in government to have easy relationships with the stakeholder groups inside their portfolios. Yes, it would be very nice if all relationships with all groups could be easy. But the member knows, I believe, that in every portfolio where you have groups that by the nature of their mission are adversaries of each other, that it is rare that all deputies can have consistently easy relationships with the stakeholder groups. I can cite a number of examples just from my own portfolios that I have had.

Take a look at landlords and tenants. We did a new revision to The Landlord and Tenant Act. It is now called The Residential Tenancies Act. During the course of doing that, it was necessary to communicate both with landlords and with tenants, and landlords and tenants did not always agree with each other. In fact, in many instances, they did not agree with each other.

The deputy or the senior government official--it did not necessarily always have to be the deputy--working and trying to find the common thread that would produce legislation that would be fair and balanced and seen to be correct for both, at one time or another will run into conflicting points of view with various stakeholder groups. That is impossible to avoid.

So while I would hope and wish that all deputies could have friendly and easy relationships with all stakeholder groups in their portfolios, I would even more wish that the deputy could have productive relationships with those groups, and productive and easy are not always equal. They do not always equate.

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For my part, in watching this particular deputy, Mr. Carlyle, I have seen him work on a wide variety of issues with teachers and with trustees, but mostly with teachers because we tend to interact with them more because of the wide variety of things we are doing with curriculum and all of those things that involve teachers, and we second some 80 teachers a year into the department to assist with a wide variety of educational tasks. I have seen that he is conciliatory and he listens and he provides honest and courteous feedback to the stakeholder groups, and they are able to converse well with each other on items that are highly sensitive--on items of teacher discipline, on the issues of suspension of certificates, on issues of curricula, on issues of all manner of things that The Public Schools Act dictates that this department must do to provide leadership to the field.

In my opinion, a deputy minister is not just there to follow blindly orders from the government. The deputy minister, of course, must administer those decisions made by government, regardless of how the deputy feels about them, but I see the deputy’s role as much more than that. I see that the deputy also provides leadership, and I have seen that over and over, the leadership that deputies provide.

I also have become increasingly concerned about the degree to which decisions made by government are being called political decisions as if they are not being made with the motivation being the best interests of the students. Education is not a partisan issue. Children learn in a certain way. Society evolves in a certain way, and it is important that education keep pace with society and provide students with education that is relevant to the world in which they are going to live. That means that there does need to be adjustments from time to time and changes in the way in which education is delivered in order to make certain that the expectations of the world in which these children live are being met for them. I am increasingly concerned that every time we make a decision that involves change, the official opposition says that it is “political,” and I put political in quotes.

Any decision made by government ultimately is political because we are a political process. Decisions made by the official opposition to fight every piece of change as being political is in fact a political position taken by the official opposition. When the official opposition stands up and says, we do not want to see standards exams, we do not want to see teachers marking standards exams in a centralized location, they are taking a political position according to the way in which decisions are categorized by them. I would submit that what we are taking is contradictory views on educational philosophy, and each of us can go back and quote learned experts to justify the positions we take, for example, on examinations or assessments, and I could come back and list all of the excellent rationale for assessing and for marking and for centralized marking and the member could probably come back and find reams of writing on why it is best not to test students at all and, certainly, if you do test them, it should be individualized marking that is based upon the individual teacher’s assessment and not against any outside criteria or any wider outcome than just what the teacher has for that child, no comparisons for example.

I do not think those are political decisions, but I would hold to the view that if the member feels that decisions as to how to resolve the current problem over the mechanism used to resolve disputes between teachers and trustees, if the member chooses to call that political, then I would have to submit the corollary is that her criticism of it is also political because one cannot be and the other not. Similarly, since I do not believe these are political decisions but, rather, decisions being made about education and the system of education, then it holds that I do not see having a deputy minister being part of the information gathering team would be performing a political action but rather an action for the education system.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, that was a very interesting discussion and interesting I think general assumptions that the minister makes. I think it enables me to see some of the things more clearly that I had not seen in the minister before. I will be coming back to some of those things earlier. I think the minister’s view that decisions are not political except when they are opposition ones, I think that is quite--

Point of Order

Mrs. McIntosh: A point of order, Mr. Chairman, you may feel this is a dispute over the facts, but what I am saying is that incorrect information has just been put on the record and I would encourage all who read what the member just said, go back and read what I said before it.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable minister does not have a point of order. It is a dispute over the facts.

* * *

Ms. Friesen: I expect one day we will have an instant screen in front of us in which these things will flash up and we will all be able to verify things right away, maybe sort of an instant replay. It would be good.

But the minister’s view that education is a nonpartisan issue and that it is really a debate over philosophy, I know that is a view shared by many people. And, of course, there are differences in philosophical approaches to education, and the minister and I clearly would disagree over many of them, though perhaps not as many as she thinks.

I think, however, the position of a minister is to distribute resources. It is to distribute the wealth of this province that is accorded to education and it is to distribute those resources between departments and between areas of government, and those are political decisions.

So, the distribution of resources and its effect upon different parts of our community are political decisions. The nature of examinations, for example, and the way in which this will affect different parts of the community are decisions which are made based upon, I think, to some extent, political decisions. Certainly there are philosophical decisions as well involved in that.

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But I do believe the minister’s job is to distribute the resources and I believe that those are being done as every minister does, in a political way, in accordance with the underlying philosophical approach to society that each government and each minister would have.

In this particular area, though, what we are looking at is whether or not this particular commission was conceived as a nonpartisan commission. The minister said that the presence of the deputy minister would signal to people that this was not a political decision, but if that was the intent of the government, why were there not three civil servants? That would have been a nonpolitical commission. If it were to be nonpartisan, why were there not members from different parties? If it were not a political document, why were there five elements, proposals that the government was putting forth?

If it were to have been an information-gathering approach which said, here we have a deadlock, here we have a dispute between two partners in government, we are looking for solutions, we want to examine some solutions, which I believe was the general intent of the MAST resolution which the minister referred to, help us find some other solutions, perhaps there could have been open commissions on that, an open commission that said, what other solutions can we look at?

A written document from the government which looked at collective bargaining across the country or looked at collective bargaining in education in other parts of the world might I think have given people the sense that the government was in fact looking at this in a nonpartisan and a nonpolitical manner.

But that did not happen. That paper does not discuss the context of collective bargaining, for example, in British Columbia or Ontario where there are very particular and quite different systems of collective bargaining in education. It does not look at what happens in our larger provinces like Quebec and Ontario.

It does not have that context that says, here is how these relationships are looked at around the rest of the world. It took a very limited, and I think most people who have responded to that committee have said, a very political view and suggested five options. So that sense of information gathering, that sense that this was a nonpartisan approach which was interested in a broad range of solutions from which the government might then pick out one or two and then discuss those with the partners involved, I think that opportunity was lost. I think the selection of a committee which was two Conservative members of the Legislature, plus a deputy minister was the wrong direction to go on this.

Mrs. McIntosh: I think for indication, based on what the member is saying is that if she had been minister she would have done it differently, and I can see that she probably would have, but again I just want to correct something.

I said, and I believe if you check Hansard you will see that I said that the presence of the deputy minister on the panel could signal that the panel was nonpolitical if the subject were to be debated. I believe the record will also show that I indicated that I put forward that observation as a counterpoint to the member’s statement that we should not have had the deputy minister on a political panel, that his presence there forced him to become political. I indicated in return that other people might argue that the presence of the deputy kept the panel from being seen as a political panel.

I did not say what the member indicated I said, so I just encourage you to go back and check and recheck what the assumption was that I said versus what I actually said. To address the point that she just made, that we presented five options, and I would indicate that what she did not say about what we said was this: We said, here are five possible alternatives. If you have any other suggestions or other ideas to alternatives that might be better than these, we would invite you to bring them forward. So we made it very clear in writing in the document that we presented five alternatives, and we are looking for more and would welcome having other models be put forward.

There again, the presence of the deputy on the panel with his knowledge of how the system worked was in a position then to be able to ask questions because he was not just a staffperson, he was not just an observer, he was a member of the panel, and therefore in a position to say, well, you have presented an alternate model that says we should do this, how would that interact with that. He was in a position then to ask questions, to solicit detail on the finer points because he had the experience of knowing how the system works and that is why we had him there.

It was not to fulfill a political role on a panel that we did not feel was a political panel, but rather an information gathering panel, and he was there because of his knowledge of insensitivities to the field. He had come from the field, had knowledge of the field, that he could speak to and ask questions about the things that were going on. He could also bring to the table the things that a staffperson would do in assisting the other two panellists on a wide range of issues. But in the end, and I stress this because I think it is important, it is not the deputy who is going to make the decision. The minister and the government and the cabinet and the caucus and all of those people who govern Manitoba will make the decision. So in that sense and in that sense only, this is a political decision because it was made by people who by definition are politicians, just as the member, in bringing forth the opposite point of view and promoting her point of view, by virtue of her being by definition a politician, puts forward political positions to the public on this issue.

In terms of the make-up of the rest of the panel, the member asked, why was it not an all-party panel? It is not an all-party panel because it was not an all-party initiative. The constitutional panel that went around was the result of an all-party decision. All parties together decided that they were going to do that, so all parties together did it. In this instance, only one party, the governing party, felt that it would be good to go out to the field and have people come to them with views on this issue and, therefore, it was governing people who went out.

The only reason two MLAs from my governing party went out instead of me was simply because of time. If I could have done this the way I really wanted to have done this, I would have gone out myself with my deputy and any other senior staff person that I thought might be knowledgeable of the issues and met with all these people myself and heard from them myself. But my schedule did not permit me to do that. So I asked two of my colleagues if they would go with my deputy and hear what people had to say and if they would come back and tell me what the people said, while I continued to gather information via letter, phone and so on in my office and am able then to carry on with my other duties which prohibit me in many instances from having the flexibility to do the kinds of very valuable jobs that our upper benchers do. Our upper benchers, as you know, chair committees, do a wide variety of things that their scheduling permits them to do because they do not have to run a large and complicated government department.

I would venture to say that my regular visits to schools, which I book regularly and force into the schedule, have given me incredibly good feedback on this issue in a very meaningful way, a way that I would not have been able to achieve by sitting through formal presentations which the others could do for me, thereby allowing me to keep my own schedule and permitting me to go into schools, see children, watch the curricula in action, watch the teachers in action and talk to the teachers, talk to the principals, talk to the custodians, talk to the school secretaries, talk to the clinicians, talk to the parents, talk to those people who are in the schools. Within the confines of my time, I think I learned as much doing that informally were people saying, by the way, while you are here, may I tell you what I think of this, or me saying, by the way, while I am here, what do you think of this?

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So I suppose, if we have government initiatives and the member feels that they should become all-party initiatives, it would be very egalitarian, but I suspect that not much would get done because by the very nature of the political adversarial situation in which we find ourselves, my certified, honest opinion is that after five years in this building I have come to the conclusion that no matter what initiative government puts forward, with very, very rare exceptions, the official opposition will always oppose. [interjection]

The member for Elmwood (Mr. Maloway) said that is not true. I would challenge the member for Elmwood to tell me, when he was critic of Consumer and Corporate Affairs when he ever once took a position in support of anything that I was doing as minister in that department, yet many of the things that we do in government are exactly the kinds of things--for example, I will give you a really good example, one from earlier today when the member was criticizing us for following The Freedom of Information Act. We were getting criticized for following The Freedom of Information Act. Who wrote it? I ask you, who wrote it? Their government.

Point of Order

Ms. Friesen: The minister is again putting words into other people’s mouths. My criticism was not of The Freedom of Information Act. My criticism was of the decisions that the minister had made, and they were put in the form of questions.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable member for Wolseley does not have a point of order. It is a dispute over the facts.

* * *

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The honourable minister, to finish her remarks.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I submit that, yes, the minister did not say, I criticize you for following The Information Act. She criticized us for taking actions that reflected our following The Information Act, a fine difference but a difference.

Ms. Friesen: The minister suggests that this was not a political panel. Presumably, I think she would also say it did not have a political intent, yet the minister herself says it was deputizing for the minister.

Does the minister intend to say that if she had gone out to hear these opinions, that this would not have been a political act? When a minister acts in that way, that is not a political act?

Mrs. McIntosh: Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, I think we are getting into a realm of semantics that is really not doing us any good or anything productive in terms of the Estimates, but if we wish to take up our time in Estimates philosophizing on the definition of political and avoiding going through the numbers, I have no objection to doing that.

I would indicate, as I did indicate earlier, that by virtue of definition, any decision made by her or made by me could be called political because we are by definition politicians, therefore the decisions we make are political. Perhaps the word the member wants to use instead would be the word “partisan” or “ideology”or some other word that would more accurately reflect what she really means. When I was a little girl, “politics” was not a dirty word. “Politics” has become a dirty word. People who become politicians become instantly villainous. People who--[interjection] Pardon me.

An Honourable Member: You are reflecting on the Chair.

Mrs. McIntosh: I take that as a humorous comment intended as wit.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: I did not hear that remark.

Mrs. McIntosh: We will hope the Chairman did not hear it because I think-- actually, that was a good one-liner, Jim. It is not bad, but we will not read it into the record and spare the Chairman the agony of a decision here.

Over time politicians, who used to be seen as serving the people and giving of themselves for their friends and neighbours--I do not mean giving like literally giving them something as a reward, but giving in terms of service to their friends and neighbours--seemed to be a very high calling and the individuals elected therein treated with respect; it has come to be a derogatory thing. We foster it here in this Chamber to our everlasting sorrow and to the sorrow of democracy. We foster the image that those who govern are evil. We foster that image by virtue of playing to the cameras in the Chamber, by virtue of framing questions in such a way as to reveal the evil, ugly intentions of those who govern, and those who govern respond in a very defensive fashion to show that if the opposition were to govern they would be just as evil and ugly as the opposition implies the government is. Where we can we will point out the awful, ugly, evil things the opposition did during the days that they governed. It is easier for us than them--a little aside. A joke, a joke. It is meant to be a joke.

When we do that and we have children in the gallery, as we do quite frequently, they look down and they say, and they will say it to me as Minister of Education, why do all those ladies and men scream and yell at each other in the Chamber? We are not allowed to do that. What is the answer? Well, it is because they are politicians. They are scum of the earth. They are evil, ugly people. They do not know any better. They do not care about you. They ran for office because they hate people, and they hope they can govern so that they could hurt them. That is the image that we have been perpetuating in our communities for many, many years, and we do tremendous disservice to the system. We do tremendous disservice to democracy, all of us together, when we allow that to happen. We discourage good people from running. I have known good people that I have said to, you are so gifted and you care so deeply, why do you not run for elected office? The answer that I am more often given than not these days is, why would I ever subject myself and my family to the kind of abuse that politicians have to take? Why would I ever do it? Why would I give up a good, decent job, maybe take a cut in salary, to become elected and have abuse hurled at me, if I govern, by the opposition, have my family members hurt, have my integrity called into question at every second of every day? Why would I do it? I am not going to and they do not. That is what we do with our silly game playing. We are like unicorns out in the rain, playing silly games, and we are all going to drown in the end and destroy democracy in the process, unless we start being more positive and constructive in our dealings with each other.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please.

Ms. Friesen: Thanks, Mr. Chair. The hour is closing; I can see that. I wanted to ask some questions about where the minister wants to see certain topics discussed. So can we just run through a couple of things?

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: If you would do it quite quickly.

Ms. Friesen: Yes. I mentioned that I wanted to discuss some more material on boundaries and on Enhancing Accountability, so which line would the Minister like to see those under?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, if I am reading my staff correctly, and I will seek to maintain eye contact with him when I relay this message so I do not inadvertently screw up their daily schedules here, I believe we can handle those under this area, unless we get into some very fine, detailed questions that would mean your funding formula information and so on in which case we would need to get some of our financial experts back. And staff seems to be indicating that that is all right with them.

Ms. Friesen: And another area would be private schools. There is not a specific line for that. Where would the minister like to see it discussed?

Mrs. McIntosh: That would come under Support to Schools 16.5 is the reference there.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Okay. I would just like to thank everybody for their cordial way of putting questions and answers. I wish you all a very nice weekend.

The hour being 3 p.m., committee rise.