[ Page 4431 ]

CONTENTS

Routine Proceedings

Tabling Documents –– 4431

Oral Questions

Robson ferry. Mr. Darcy –– 4431

Long-term-care user fees. Ms. A. Hagen 4432

Provincial Capital Commission. Mr. Blencoe –– 4432

BCTF high school course material. Mr. Long –– 4433

Mayors' program on silviculture. Mr. Miller –– 4433

Committee of Supply: Ministry of Education estimates. (Hon. Mr. Brummet)

On vote 23: minister's office –– 4433

Mr. Sihota

Ms. Edwards

Mr. Cashore

Mr. Rose

Mr. Loenen

Ms. A. Hagen

Mr. Lovick

Mr. Williams

The House met at 2:08 p.m.

HON. MR. ROGERS: In the gallery today is Mr. Dwight Mason, the deputy chief of staff of the embassy of the United States of America in Ottawa; and he is accompanied by Sam Fromowitz, the consul-general for the United States, from Vancouver. Would all members please make them welcome.

HON. MR. PARKER: I would like to introduce to the House today a friend of mine, Mr. Ed Hamaguchi, the administrator of watershed management of the Greater Vancouver Water District. Would the House make him welcome, please.

MS. MARZARI: In the precincts today are representatives of the Canadian Federation of Students. They are here from across the country to join with our B.C. students to talk about post-secondary education. Most notably, Tony Macerollo, national chair of the Canadian Federation of Students, and Robert Clift, chair of the Pacific region of the CFS, should be in the House right now, if they are not out making speeches on the front steps. I would like this House to welcome them — young people from across Canada to look at the state of our post-secondary institutions here in B.C.

HON. MRS. JOHNSTON: At the other end of the spectrum, I would ask the House to please welcome the chairman of the Surrey School Board, who is in the gallery this afternoon: Mrs. Laurae McNally.

MS. EDWARDS: I don't often have the opportunity to welcome a group of students into the Legislature, but 70 students from Laurie Junior Secondary School in Cranbrook were in the precincts earlier. I would like the other members of the Legislature to recognize that these students, with their director, Mr. Ken Ireson, and the student council president, who is a member of the concert band, Miss Laura Zeznik, were here. Earlier in the week they visited the community of Gibsons for an exchange band trip and, as I say, I'm sure we were all glad that they were able to visit the precincts.

MR. JANSEN: In the gallery today are three students from Vedder Junior Secondary School in Chilliwack: Dylan Cuff, Luke Zacharias and Danny Mitchell. Would you please make them welcome.

MR. MILLER: In the gallery today we have Mr. Hugh Robins and, if I'm not mistaken, his wife. Mr. Robins is a former Social Credit candidate in the Prince Rupert riding. I would ask the House to make him welcome today.

MR. CRANDALL: Mr. Speaker, in your gallery today is a class from the Mount Arrowsmith Adventist School in Parksville, accompanied by their teacher, Judy Walper. On behalf of their MLA, the member for North Island (Mr. Gabelmann), and myself, I would like to have the House welcome them.

MR. PETERSON: Mr. Speaker, this morning my good colleague the first member for Langley (Mrs. Gran) introduced the first wave of 150 students and eight schoolteachers visiting us from Brookswood Senior Secondary School in Langley. It's my pleasure to introduce the second wave, seated in the gallery at this time. Would the House please make them very welcome.

MR. JONES: Education has played such an important part in the debate in the House this week. In honour of that, I too would like to welcome Laurae McNally from the B.C. School Trustees' Association and Fred Herfst from the Federation of Independent School Associations, who has sat patiently through the entire debate of the estimates for Education.

MR. PELTON: Hon. members, in the members' gallery today are two very nice people from Saanichton, Mr. Gordon Howarth and Mrs. Marion Howarth. I would ask everyone to make them welcome, please.

HON. MR. COUVELIER: We have been fortunate to have in attendance today members from the Insurance Agents' Association of British Columbia. Their purpose has been to make the government aware and appreciative of the critical role they play in our B.C. economy. I'm pleased to introduce to the House — and confirm our abiding interest in their future successes — Mr. William Brown, president; Mr. David Bakes, first vice-president; Mr. Gordon Chambers, past president; Mr. Robert Minniss, second vice-president; and Mr. Jack Hamilton, general manager.

Mr. Speaker tabled the annual report of the British Columbia Legislative Library.

Oral Questions

ROBSON FERRY

MR. D'ARCY: I want to bid a welcome to anybody in the gallery it's remotely possible has not been introduced so far.

I was going to make a comment about how empty the cabinet benches are today, but maybe it's a good thing. We might have been another half hour on introductions.

Anyway, to the Minister of Transportation and Highways. Each year the Robson ferry carries, in safety, over half a million vehicles and over 900,000 people across the Columbia River. Of all the 18 inland freshwater ferries, only the Albion–Fort Langley carries more vehicles and more people. Indeed, only the two major crossings of Georgia Strait carry more vehicles and people. The ferry has been found to be mechanically and structurally sound, needing only some very minor repairs.

In view of this and of the very high usership of this particular crossing, will the minister reconsider his decision to unfairly and arbitrarily walk away from this service for the people in the Kootenays, who have been paying taxes for it?

[2:15]

HON. MR. ROGERS: Thank you for that totally unexpected question. The report that was done by Admiral Yanow and Dr. Kasianchuk on the inland ferry fleets of British Columbia recommended the termination of this particular ferry. Cabinet has agreed with that recommendation. I advised the mayor last week by telephone — and more formally by letter — that if the municipality and/or the regional district would like to take over the vessel and operate it, we would be prepared to make it available for the princely

[ Page 4432 ]

sum of $1. Failing that, if the private sector wishes to take it over and operate it, we will also make it available to them. Failing that, the vessel will remain out of service. It is a decision based on the fact that there are two alternate routes which are acceptable from the point of view of the Ministry of Transportation and Highways.

MR. D'ARCY: I suppose it could be argued that all of the inland ferry routes have alternate routes if the ministry wants to force inconvenience on enough people. The fact is that bridges all have a cost, and so do ferries; but the maintenance and capital costs of bridges amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The cost of painting just the upper girders on the Trail bridge would run the Castlegar ferry for four years.

In view of all of this, will the minister please agree to reconsider his decision simply to walk away from the ferry and dump the operating charges on the local taxpayers? It's not happening anywhere else in the province. This is the only one, and all the others have some alternative.

HON. MR. ROGERS: I believe the decision of cabinet is final.

LONG-TERM-CARE USER FEES

MS. A. HAGEN: To the Minister of Finance. As they have been forced to do on so many occasions with the budget of this government this year, officials are now taking a second look at the unfair 85 percent user fee for long-term-care services. Has the Finance minister had discussions with his colleagues about changing this unfair fee that he introduced in his budget in March?

HON. MR. COUVELIER: I am indebted to the hon. member for the question and will attempt to answer it, although as she appreciates it should more properly go to the Minister of Health (Hon. Mr. Dueck). She did adroitly incorporate financial considerations into the question, so I don't feel too constrained in trying to provide an answer.

The question was framed to imply that the changes made to the pocket money of extended care residents in British Columbia were somehow inaccurate compared to other jurisdictions. I can tell the House categorically that in that respect British Columbia is third best in Canada. That's another way of saying that seven provinces take more money away than we do in British Columbia for that service.

To the suggestion that the issue is being examined by the Minister of Health, it is my understanding that that is a proper assumption, and he is, I believe, involved with his officials in examining the details of how the budgetary ruling might be applied. I suspect that he will be in a position to provide the hon. member with that kind of detail in the fullness of time.

MS. A. HAGEN: The bafflegab of this minister can't hide the fact that this budget is unfair to seniors. For two months, seniors have been telling him and members of this government that. They have been waiting for this government to conclude its announcements about the unfair measures that they have announced and propose to announce. Could I ask the minister if the hard-hearted views pronounced by his Premier yesterday on hungry kids have permeated the Health ministry with respect to seniors in this province? Will the Finance minister explain to us in simple English why his government is proposing that these unfair measures be added to the long-term-care fees of seniors, and when he will confirm that those measures will be rolled back because the government has recognized its unfairness?

HON. MR. COUVELIER: I heard reference to "hungry kids." The position of the minister in charge of that is clear.

It's been repeated in this House constantly. The position of this government in respect to feeding schoolchildren breakfast — which I understand is the issue the hon. member inferred — is clear. We are saying that it is not our policy to feed every child in the province breakfast before they go to school.

May I infer that the opposition's policy is to feed every student in British Columbia breakfast before they go to school in the morning? Is that what the hon. members are implying? This government is saying categorically that we will not do that. We will make sure that identified students are adequately fed prior to going to school. The problem always has been that local school boards will not identify those students so that we can provide them the service. That's the issue, and you've been told that almost daily during estimates and question period.

To the issue of dealing with the unfair measures as they relate to extended care residents, we say categorically that they are not unfair. Indeed, if they are unfair in this province, then they are even more unfair in seven other provinces in this country. Furthermore, the line minister charged with that responsibility is, as I said, discussing the matter in some detail with his staff members. You will be informed, hon. member, in due course. But we do take offence at the rather political comments that you direct to us during question period.

PROVINCIAL CAPITAL COMMISSION

MR. BLENCOE: I've got a question for the Minister of Municipal Affairs responsible for the Provincial Capital Commission. As the minister is aware, the commission is deep in controversy, continues to close its meetings to the public and makes decisions that are totally unknown to this community. The minister continues to refuse to request that the Provincial Capital Commission open its doors to the people of this community, yet three of the four core municipalities have requested you to do that very thing and make sure it is open to this community.

My question to the minister is: will you announce today that the Provincial Capital Commission will do its business in public and be accountable to the people of this community and the province of British Columbia?

HON. MRS. JOHNSTON: There appeared to be two or three questions there, and I didn't really like any of them. In response to the first one, the answer is no. In response to the second question as to the responsibility of the members serving on the commission, I believe that they act in a very responsible way. For your information, Mr. Speaker and members of the House, I have not yet received official notification of concern from any of the local governments, although I understand through the research department of the Times-Colonist that I will be receiving some mail.

MR. BLENCOE: This government continues to attack the media in this province and continues to shoot the messengers. Of course, it is a great shame that the minister wants

[ Page 4433 ]

questions she is happy with. Unfortunately that's not our job. Our job is to assure that the people's business is done in the open. This government promised open government in the province of British Columbia.

The Provincial Capital Commission has spent millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. The St. Ann's Academy proposal has not had a public hearing. Will the minister agree, in regard to St. Ann's Academy — at least that site — to the council of Victoria's request for a full hearing on the St. Ann's Academy development proposal?

HON. MRS. JOHNSTON: There were public meetings held with regard to the St. Ann's proposal, and I understand that the negotiations are presently about to commence. As they proceed, and in the fullness of time, everything will be made available to the public.

BCTF HIGH SCHOOL COURSE MATERIAL

MR. LONG: A question to the Minister of Education. Yesterday the minister outlined a social studies research package from the B.C. Teachers' Federation which was nothing short of pure propaganda for NDP politics. It offends those who feel that the classroom teacher should not be putting forth biased one-sided opinions on either side of the political spectrum to their students.

Could I ask the minister to table the letter from the Leader of the Opposition outlining his and his party's rejection of this biased propaganda being circulated to teachers through classroom distribution?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: The answer to the member's question is no, I have certainly not received any such letter of denial from the Leader of the Opposition or from any other member, and I won't hold my breath either.

MAYORS' PROGRAM ON SILVICULTURE

MR. MILLER: The Vancouver Island and Sunshine Coast mayors' program on silviculture, with an expenditure of about $5.5 million dollars and a net benefit of about $9.3 million, added — according to a Sterling Wood report — about $26 million in value to the forest areas treated. Has the minister decided to make funds available for that program to continue the valuable work that is done?

HON. MR. PARKER: We have not made any decision to date; it's under consideration.

MR. MILLER: A supplementary then. The current youth unemployment figures are about 15 percent. This program took young people off welfare and gave them training, jobs and self respect. I would just urge that the minister give serious consideration to that program being continued.

Orders of the Day

HON. MR. VEITCH: Committee of Supply, Mr. Speaker.

The House in Committee of Supply; Mr. Pelton in the chair.

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
(continued)

On vote 23: minister's office, $211,618.

MR. SIHOTA: I have had the opportunity to go over the material and consider some of the comments that the Minister of Education made before we recessed for lunch. There seems to still be a fair bit of confusion over what actually transpired with respect to the Sooke School District. The tenor of the minister's comments would lead one to believe that the school board should have received a surplus of funds, whereas the reality, as the school board explains it to me, is that they received a deficient amount of funds.

[2:30]

Let's just go over the figures again in terms of the funding that was provided to the district. It's my submission that the additional funding which was forwarded to the district — let's call it a catch-up funding to make up that year's loss — was supposed to equal, of course, the previous year's deficit. Instead of dealing with the percentages, let's just deal with the actual dollars. We know that the Sooke School District got approximately $1.5 million from the provincial government. Also, I'm told by the school district, they were $1.8 million in need. In other words, they were short $300,000 when the cheque came in from the provincial government. So it wasn't a situation of them starting even-up with their deficiencies from the previous year; they were, according to the school district, $300,000 behind the previous year. Add to that inflation and salary increments and they ended up being approximately $1 million behind the eight ball going into this year.

That gets back to that compounding problem I was talking about. It wasn't as though they were even-up with all of the school districts in the province; they were $1 million behind, and they had to attend this year to that shortfall from last year, when they had to then, through no choice, effectively come up with a 19.23 percent increase. In other words, the amount of money the province provided them with assisted to the extent of $20 per taxpayer, but did not deal with the fundamental problem of their leftover deficit, because they didn't get enough money to catch up.

When you put in the $300,000.... The way I arrive at that figure, for the minister's benefit, is: $1.8 million was what they needed, $1.5 million was what they got, so they were short $300,000, and then they have inflation, and then they have salaries on top of that, and by their estimate they are about $1 million behind just getting into this year. The increase they came up with, the 19.23 percent, dealt largely with the deficiency left over from the previous year.

It's not a case, as the minister would argue, that the $135 million that the government put in plus the supplementary funding would bring everybody up to par. That certainly didn't happen with the school district. I'm providing the minister with the figures they have provided me with. That may explain the problem. I invite the minister to comment on that before I move into some of the areas that he addressed during his deliberation on this matter.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: First of all, I should correct the member. I said that they received a surplus, and he said that they received insufficient funds. I guess the argument will always be that they get insufficient funds for all the things they want to do. Our contention is that they get sufficient funds in the shareable formula for what they need to do. Of course, the problem will keep compounding itself. I tried to illustrate that this morning.

They said last year that there was an inadequacy of $2.16 million. They were given — you know, for the fiscal year

[ Page 4434 ]

$1.5 million, the school year $1.8 million — into their budget an additional $1.8 million. Some of that would cover inflation; some of that would cover.... There would have been an increase. I admitted that; I acknowledged that. There would have been a slight increase. But their wants exceeded the needs as we see them and went up to 11.1 percent of their budget this year as compared to 8.7 percent above what is considered the need to do a quality education.

The problem is being compounded because they added. They went up from $2 million to $3 million for additional spending. It really boils down to.... For instance, in the school year '86-87 they spent $759,000 over what the fiscal framework provided for a quality education. In '87-88 they doubled that. They spent over and above the fiscal framework $1.745 million. Then this year they've almost doubled that again — or one and a half times that: $2.65 million over the budget.

I said this morning to allow inflation at 4 percent in round numbers. We gave them 7.3 percent more. Some of that was to cover what they have already built in, and some of it might have been for some of the increases. Lo and behold, they have increased their budget by 9.7 percent — the total budget — of which a good portion comes under the supplementary. You have a situation being compounded by spending far above — and increasingly far above — the fiscal framework. It's a case of what are the needs, and what are the wants? They can't repeatedly say it's not enough; we're spending more.

They were a year behind on teachers' salaries, so we brought up the amount of money we gave them so they are now being funded for teachers' salaries this year. The teachers' salaries are being funded; that's a major portion of the budget. A lot of other things are being funded. All of those things are being funded. They say that's not enough. We've got to spend $3 million more or 11.1 percent more than what is considered necessary for a quality education.

We said we would fund their teachers' salaries as of this year, so we brought that up to date. We will allow 2.8 percent funding for increases in instructional costs for next year. We've brought it up to the teachers' salaries — what they are paying — and then we added 2.8 percent that we'll fund for the 1988-89 year. They said: "Thank you kindly." Well, they didn’t even say that. I assumed that they accepted that and then said: "Now we can spend more somewhere else." They boosted up their supplementary spending. Naturally it will compound, as long as they keep doing that. If they want to compound it, I have no problem with that. But they must be accountable to their local taxpayers. If you have spent more than your banker says you have in your account, I'm not going to deal with it; but you have to deal with your banker.

MR. SIHOTA: I started off my comments with thanking the minister, so I think on behalf of the school board, I have conveyed thanks at least for some of the stuff.

I want to go over the minister's comments. What the minister said, in my view, confirms what I am saying the problem is. We both acknowledge that the problem is compounding itself — when the minister produced the figures which show that each year the Sooke School District gets further and further behind. It is my submission that they are getting further and further behind, not because — as the minister would suggest — they are chasing after luxuries, but because the fiscal formula, which the province has come down with, doesn't meet their basic needs. In a nutshell, that’s the whole problem.

It isn't as if we have a school district out there that is chasing after opulence. We've got a school district out there that is very efficient and that has one of the lowest per-pupil costs in this province. I want the minister to hear this; he can get the per-pupil costs later on. We've got a school district out there which in 1981 — prior to the government's restraint program — voluntarily instituted its own restraint program. They started to cut back to the bone in 1981 and 1982. By the time the government's restraint program came out in 1982-83, they were already at the bone. We've got a school district out there that not only has low per-pupil costs and engaged in voluntary restraint in the early 80s, but furthermore, the teachers gave up $2.2 million in concessions. They reopened their three-year contract, gave up $2.2 million in concessions, and the current Attorney-General — then Minister of Education — applauded them for that.

We're not dealing with a school board here that's chasing after opulence or trying to build luxuries into the school district. In fact, it's the exact opposite. It's an efficient school district: good per pupil costs; instituting restraint before the government policies came in, and teachers reopening their agreements in good faith. It's a school board that has been prudent and responsible to the taxpayer.

In a funny sort of way, that's beginning to backfire on it now, because all those rich school districts which had padded their budgets and had a lot to cut and did not get into voluntary restraint were not penalized in the same way that the Sooke School District is now. We're not dealing with a district that's chasing opulence.

That's why I want to get back to the point. The problem, Mr. Minister, is with the fiscal framework. The minister said: "But their wants exceeded their needs, and that's the problem." That's not the problem. The problem is that the fiscal formula doesn't meet their basic needs. That's what's happening. Hence you have a situation this year where $70 of the $96 — I hate to repeat myself — went into basic, fundamental needs. If they did not satisfy those basic needs, and lived within what the ministry had said, they would have to have cut their budget by $1.5 million out of the basic bones. There's no fat there.

The minister says that the problem is compounding — I'm paraphrasing what he said — because they spent above the fiscal framework. The reason why they had to spend above the fiscal framework, as I see it, is that the fiscal framework did not provide enough to meet their basic needs. It gets back to what I've been saying all along: the formula of assistance by the provincial government is not sensitive to the years of problems that exist in the Sooke School District. I talked about some of those problems, and I want to demonstrate in a different way now how those problems with the fiscal formula manifest themselves.

The minister will recall that I talked about the differences in salary rates in Sooke versus Victoria and Saanich, and I talked about the low assessment base in Sooke versus Saanich and Victoria. I remind the minister that the salaries are higher in Sooke because, of course, we've got a better quality of teacher, a more experienced teacher. Surely the minister is not saying that we should get rid of those teachers and bring in inexperienced teachers, because that would of course affect the quality of education. I don't think the school districts should be penalized for that. The minister says that the formula takes that into account. Well, I say that it doesn't adequately take it into account if it does take it into account, nor does it take into account adequately the low assessment ease.

[ Page 4435 ]

As I said this morning, the cost to the taxpayer of raising $100,000 in Sooke is $3, whereas in Victoria it's 54 cents and in Saanich it's $1.65. The reason I'm putting that out again is to demonstrate to the minister the following problem. If you look at it from a global point of view, in the Saanich School District their budget went up approximately 7 to 7.5 percent; I think it's about 7.5 percent. Those are the figures that have been provided to me. But the school taxes to the average homeowner went up 10 percent. In Sooke this year the overall global budget for the school district has gone up 7.75 percent. There isn't much of a difference in how much the budget has gone up, but the impact to the taxpayer in the Sooke district is closer to 20 percent; it's 19.23 percent.

[2:45]

If the formula took into account adequately the matter of teacher salaries, and the discrepancies between the two areas.... The minister said this morning that the average salary in Saanich is $38,198, and in Sooke $40,658. If it took that into account adequately and if it took in the low assessment rate adequately, then the net effect to the taxpayer in Sooke compared to Saanich would not have been the differential that I just outlined. In other words, it would not have been twice as much in Sooke as in Saanich to come up with the same percentage increase.

I'll grant the minister, for the purposes of this debate, that maybe there is a built-in mechanism in the formula to try to deal with the salary problem and with the low assessment base. But I'm taking two adjacent school districts — and remember that Sooke has about a thousand more students — and demonstrating that if it took into account salaries and the low assessment rate, there's no way that people in Sooke should be paying twice the rate in Saanich. Therein lies the problem: it's with your fiscal formula.

I'll tell the minister what happened, and he can look at the figures there, because he's got all of his officials with him; I don't. In the Saanich end of it, they got more money for salaries for the teachers' end of it than Sooke did, in real dollars. Why? Because Saanich is below the average and Sooke is above the average, and that 2.8 percent translated into 1.13 percent for Sooke and obviously something greater than 2.8 percent for Saanich. The overall increase to Sooke was 5.7 percent, not 8 percent; whereas in Saanich it was 10 percent, when the average was 8 percent.

You have here the case of a richer school district — by richer I mean having a better assessment base — getting more money from the province in the case of Saanich because it has a lower salary base, and on the opposite side, Sooke getting a decrease in funding, below the 8 percent, in part because they have a higher salary base. It doesn't seem to recognize the fact that Sooke has a lower assessment rate. You have a higher assessment rate in Saanich and more money; a lower assessment base in Sooke and less money.

The program obviously is not sensitive enough to the problems of these districts; hence we get this problem in Sooke of 19.23 percent, and Saanich gets the benefit of 10 percent. As I say, that's the problem. If the minister has a comment on that, I will pause before I move into further debate of these education matters as they relate to the Sooke School District.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: First of all, I am going to threaten that member with.... I am going to tell the other school boards that you said we're padding their accounts. I am going to tell on you.

MR. SIHOTA: I didn't say that.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Didn't you? Okay, I may have missed that.

Secondly, I imagine that it will always be a case of what people consider as needs compared to what they consider as wants. It is true that in bringing the salaries up to currency, we took the middle between the provincial average salary and the district average salary. Some major discrepancies had crept in because of increments. CSP settlements and other factors, so we tried to do a little balancing there.

Sooke salaries being high, our allotment in the fiscal framework would have been lower than what they had. In Saanich, theirs being well below that, it would have come up somewhat. It still added up to a 17.3 percent increase to the Sooke district.

I know it's complex: it's fairly difficult. Sooke has a lower tax base than Saanich, so to raise money for education they would have to tax higher. That, I tried to say, is incorporated in the funding formula. In Saanich they have to raise 39.7 percent of the costs for the fiscal framework; in Sooke they have to raise only 19.8 percent. Because in the fiscal framework, the provincial funding covers 80.2 percent in Sooke and only 61.3 percent in Saanich.

That acknowledges the different size in the tax base. Whenever in the fiscal framework Sooke wants to raise money, it only has to raise 20 percent, and in Saanich they have to raise 40 percent — let's round it off — of their budget, because they have a greater residential tax base to raise it from. Whether you consider it enough or not, I don't know. I can tell you this: in the Saanich School District, with 6,414 pupils, if I can find my little numbers here.... For September 1987. I don't know what September 1988 will be, but we can probably project: the same parallel would apply.

In Saanich, on the basis of 6,414 pupils, they found it necessary to spend $1.5 million above the fiscal framework in their situation. In Sooke, with just a thousand more pupils — 7,453 pupils, or rounded off to 7,454 — they found it necessary, according to them, to spend almost $3 million more above the fiscal framework, when the fiscal framework already pays 80 percent provincial in Sooke and only 61 percent in Saanich. Proportionately, the big reason is that on a much larger tax base Saanich chose to spend less over and above the fiscal framework   Sooke with a lower tax base, and I wouldn't say they have an inadequate education system.

So yes, because that supplementary is paid 100 percent by the local taxpayers, the net effect on the taxpayers is a much higher taxation increase than in Saanich. But the choice to go that high above the fiscal framework was theirs. You say it's because we do not fund their needs. I guess I'm trying to say that the needs in the Saanich district surely are somewhat similar to what they are in the Sooke district or the Victoria district. Some districts say, "Our needs are far in excess of what you say a quality education can be provided for," yet in 61 districts out of the 75 they were able to spend less at supplementary than Sooke. Either Sooke is right or the other 61 are wrong.

Interjection.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: The thing is, if other districts can live at a lower supplementary and meet their needs, then surely Sooke can also live within those parameters. I don't

[ Page 4436 ]

know how we're ever going to settle about whether we're funding needs or wants, because people are never going to say they're spending a nickel on what they want. It will always be: "We're only including what we need." We're saying you can do it to provide a quality education. When we — when I say we, it's together with them — fund the teachers' salaries at what they are, we fund the other costs at what they are in the fiscal framework at the 80 to 20 ratio. We fund all of those things and say it can do the job. They say: "No, it can't." I guess that will always be there.

I think you had one other question, but I'm sure you may have another one.

MR. SIHOTA: We're finally getting to the point where the minister and I agree on what the problem is. The minister agrees with me that the problem, as he said at the outset, relates to the matter of the tax base and salaries. He agrees with me now that the matter of salaries will allow more money to be allocated to Saanich and less to Sooke, which is what I've been saying all along. He agrees with me with respect to the tax base being an issue — and a significant one — in terms of the formula. So we're in agreement on those points, in the sense that the minister now begins to see that what I've been saying all along is that until you address those problems adequately — and I want to underline that word adequately — you are going to have this continual compounding of the problem in the Sooke district.

I'll just go through each one of the minister's points. It's true that in many ways the crux of the problem here is the difference of opinion between the minister and the school board in terms of what are needs and what are what I call luxuries, because what the school board considers vital necessities is different from what the minister would consider vital necessities. That's the debate; I'll come back to that in a minute in terms of how I would suggest that that debate could be resolved. The minister then went into the matter of salaries. He has now acknowledged that Sooke will get less money for salaries and Saanich will get more, which begs the obvious question of why we are penalizing a district which has qualified teachers in it.

It seems to me that a district ought not to receive less money simply because a greater proportion of its teachers have masters' degrees, or are older or more qualified. I just don't think it's appropriate to try to penalize the district. Sooke gets a 1.13 percent increase for the salary component when the average is 2.8 percent, when the minister knows — and I know — that the salary increase is going to be greater this year than 1.13 percent. The ministry itself has implicitly recognized 2.8 percent. I agree that you haven't committed yourself to that and it's open to negotiation, but implicitly, by coming in with that 2.8 percent figure, you've come out with that. So you know that the Sooke School District is going to have to make up some money above that 1.13 percent to get up to 2.8.

It's interesting that last year this district had the very lowest of salary increases at 2.6 percent, while others were at 3 percent and 3.2 percent. The trustees in the Sooke School District held perfectly firm, and in the end they faced a work-to-rule campaign, which finally resulted in a conclusion by way of a transition clause.

I am saying that the effect of that formula is twofold. One, it penalizes districts like Sooke which have a high quality of teachers. I don't think that should be the case. Secondly, the formula gives you less money to deal with incremental increases for those teachers; hence you're always behind trying to catch up, or you've got to make it up from the taxpayer base in order to recover that money. Therein lies the problem with the component of the formula that deals with teachers' salaries.

Then the minister talks about tax bases. He says that in Saanich they have to recover twice as much as Sooke did — using those round numbers again, 40 percent and 20 percent. That is true; I'll accept the minister's facts on that, because I don't have any facts to the contrary to put forward to the minister. Anyway, it doesn't really matter; let's take those figures as they are.

But if the formula is to do what the minister says the formula ought to do, which is to try to equalize this matter of tax rates or low-assessment bases, then the formula obviously is not sufficient. It doesn't go far enough. I think the minister effectively conceded that. I think he said: "Well, fine, maybe the argument is we're not going to put up enough money."

Saanich can pick up twice as much money as Sooke through the 40 percent versus the 20 percent, but at the end of the day, the bottom line to the taxpayer is that the increase in Saanich is 10 percent in round figures, and the increase in Sooke is 20 percent in round figures. So the formula obviously is not adequately sensitive to the matter of assessment bases, if you follow what I mean.

I don't think the point ends at whether or not Saanich has to pick up 40 percent and Sooke has to pick up 20 percent, given the government allocation. I think the argument ends and the buck stops with the taxpayer, who in Sooke is faced with a 20 percent increase and in Saanich is faced with a 10 percent increase. That is why I say that the formula — we always get back to the formula — is flawed in the sense that it is not sensitive to problems of the sort they have in Sooke.

[3:00]

Therefore, it is not surprising that Saanich has to come up with $1.5 million extra and Sooke has to come up with $3 million extra, because it is always behind. I've just demonstrated that in terms of what happened last year. They got $1.5 million. They needed $1.8 million; they are behind $300,000. Then you build in inflation and teachers' salaries, and you're $1 million behind before you know it. Hence that's why you have this $3 million versus $1.5 million problem in Saanich; they're always behind.

The member from Vancouver South says: "Is Sooke the universe?" No, it's not, but I indicated to the minister at the outset that, because it is in my riding, I am going to confine my comments to Sooke School District. I'm not saying that Sooke is better or worse than 61 other districts in the province; I'm saying that the formula is not adequately sensitive to that district. The minister has to recognize that.

I suspect that probably terminates the debate on the fiscal formula, because I don't want to keep on going back in circles with the minister in terms of trying to explain the problem. I think now we see the problem, in that with what the minister said in his comments, which invited this response, we now tend to finally overlap in our analysis of the issue.

The minister says that the debate here is between wants and needs, or as I put it, necessities versus luxuries. I've got trustees in my riding who are telling me that $70 of that $96 is going to needs. That is just to preserve the status quo. Therefore it seems to me that part of this problem relates to what extent has the ministry's formula dealt with the concept

[ Page 4437 ]

of needs from the point of view of the trustees. To what extent is there an overlap between what the trustees feel are our needs and what the ministry feels are our needs? I think that discussion is best not had here; I think that discussion is best had with the minister and the school trustees. More importantly, we've quoted back and forth to each other all sorts of numbers....

Interjection.

MR. SIHOTA: The minister's right; it is complex. The minister knows I'm not our critic in this area, and therefore I'm certainly more prone to making an error than if we were to discuss the Attorney-General's estimates. But again, because of the frustration felt by trustees in my riding in Sooke over their feeling that they're not being adequately supported by the fiscal framework, I think that it would be appropriate, instead of us going on in this debate, for the minister to consider meeting with the chairman of the school board and perhaps some of the trustees and a couple of their officials, together with some of the minister's officials, so they can go over some of these figures so there's a better understanding of what the ministry is trying to do, what the board is trying to achieve. What are the needs, what are the luxuries, what are the numbers, and why is there a deficiency?

I think perhaps an appropriate way to end this segment of what I wanted to raise — because I want to deal with non-budgetary items in a second — is to say to the minister: will he agree that he will meet with the trustees in my riding? I don't think that's a major request. Since they liked some of the things that you did, I don't think you're going to be walking into a hostile board. Would the minister agree to meet with those trustees to discuss some of these matters further?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I must say that with all of the boards I have met in the last year and a half or more, I have yet to walk into a hostile board. I have always walked into boards that are concerned. Certainly they want to put their particular case forward, but I don't think I've run into a hostile board. The impression sometimes comes when you read it in the paper, but we generally have good discussions when we meet.

I have met with your board a couple of times and, of course, would meet in the future. I'm somewhat limited in the number of times I can meet with any board, but I can tell you this: every year there is a fiscal framework advisory committee made up of superintendents, trustees, secretary-treasurers, ministry people — primarily those people, the main players in the system. They look at the fiscal framework and the funding formula as it operates, and they then send in a report and say what they think should be the adjustments.

Last year they said we never did recognize in our grant system or our fiscal framework the cost of substitutes. They pointed out that the average is five days per teacher per school year — substitutes, who average around $100 per day — so this year in the fiscal framework we've incorporated $500 per teacher for substitutes. They said that there wasn't enough money for clerical and for aides; some of that has been recognized, because boards had to pay it. So in other words, that fiscal framework advisory committee has made recommendations, and each year some of them have been incorporated into the fiscal framework. So adjustments have been made.

Certainly I will continue to meet with boards. I will continue to seek their advice and their input. The only thing is that I can't at any one time sort of say: "I know you're not getting as much alimony as you want. I'm a good guy, so away we go. As much money as you want is available to you. Just convince your local taxpayers" — above the fiscal framework.

I'm just going to mention one more thing. You mentioned that I'm talking about luxuries. I don't think they're talking about luxuries in any district. There is a disagreement on what is necessary for a quality education system. But I think that almost every board.... Many boards do this. They say: "We think that we want to do this over and above what the fiscal framework provides. We think it's important, and our people think it's important, so we're going to increase the taxes, if necessary, to get that amount."

I might just try to clarify one thing: you know, this business of less and more that we give one district and another. Just using round numbers, let me illustrate. Some discrepancies had built up about whether increments or grid increases had affected districts, and they had in some cases. Now the member mentioned that there were a lot of concessions made. Well then, surely with the concessions made, there shouldn't have been the need for the continual overexpenditures. I'm not knocking the concessions; I think people have made some concessions. But to try and average this up: we brought the salaries up for the current year. Remember last year? Or remember this year? They were in effect paying for, from the local taxpayers, the total increase to teachers' salaries that was provided as of negotiations last year. They were absorbing the total. We have said that this year we are including that funding. We brought them up. Now the fiscal framework is paying for the increases, whereas it was always a year behind. They are no longer a year behind. In the averaging process — and maybe this will illustrate it — let us say that....

Oh, one other point. The member makes the case that we have so many teachers at the maximum, and well-qualified, and so on. Then he makes the case that the increments aren't allowed. Well, the more teachers you have at maximum now, the less you have in increments, and everything goes on the salary increases, so it tends to average out.

To make the point.... If the Sooke School District, say, was paying $42,000 for teachers and the provincial average is $40,000, we would say: "Okay, for '87-88 we will fund the difference; we will fund at the $41,000 level." Another district might have a $38,000 average salary, and the provincial average is still at $40,000, so we say: "We will fund at $39,000." Then we say: "We will add 2.8 percent." So in the case of the high district, say, we would now fund $41,000 per teacher — in the fiscal framework, remember — plus 2.8 percent for the next year. In the other district, it would be $39,000 plus the 2.8 percent. It does tend to mean.... That 2.8 percent, I think, is more on $41,000 than it is on $39,000. There is some effort to try and accommodate the actual situation as well as this relationship to the provincial average.

Then I point out that, staying within the fiscal framework — which we think can provide a basic quality education — in Sooke if they need an extra million dollars they have to go to their taxpayers for $200,000, or 20 percent. If in Saanich they need another million dollars for their program, they have to go to their local taxpayers for $400,000, because they're paying 40 percent as opposed to 20 percent. Where it hits

[ Page 4438 ]

hard is when they go above the fiscal framework into supplementary, and then they pick up the whole million in Saanich, they pick up the whole million in Sooke, and of course, it is twice the tax increase in Sooke as it is here. That's the point I'm making. But the amount above.... Maybe I said it would be twice in Sooke what it would be in Saanich. Did I say that wrong? If they spend a million extra within the fiscal framework, they need to raise $200,000. If they spend a million extra above the fiscal framework, they have to raise the whole million from the local taxpayers. A million in each district can have a different effect on the local taxation structure.

[Mr. Weisgerber in the chair.]

The point I'm trying to make is that they have chosen in the Sooke district, with a lower tax base, to spend almost twice as much above the fiscal framework as they have in the Saanich district. Some of that is built in — things that they needed in the past — and so they say they can't cut anything out. But at some point we have to talk about.... You can't just keep saying: "Well, we started higher, so we just have to keep adding on." No, you have to rationalize it at some point. The fiscal framework already recognizes a higher amount for the Sooke district because of the higher instructional costs.

That will always be the case, and the argument will always be: what are needs? We try to meet needs. We try to get an average across the province of what those needs are and what can be done. I don't know how much more I can do. I guess it is fairly complex. I'd certainly be delighted to sit down with the member and his school board, when the opportunity presents itself, to actually try to maybe explain how the fiscal framework works and how it does, I think, very fairly accommodate the differences between districts through the sharing formula, through the allowances for special programs, for all kinds of things along that line.

MR. SIHOTA: My office will arrange for a meeting, and we will proceed at that meeting.

I just want to raise one other matter, which is the adult....

HON. MR. BRUMMET: This afternoon?

MR. SIHOTA: Not this afternoon. I don't quarterback this debate, and I am well beyond the amount of time I told our critic I'd be spending on this, so I am going to be taken to the woodshed anyway after this.

[3:15]

I just want to make another comment to the minister on the adult literacy program out in Sooke. The government provided $4,600 to that program a year ago. The school district received $8,000 from the Vancouver Foundation and a further $8,000 from the school board, for a total of $20,000. The funding formula on this type of program is based on the adult education program, which, as I understand it, is predicated upon student enrolment.

This is a volunteer program where there is no registration required, to maintain and respect privacy. Because of the need to maintain and respect privacy for this type of adult literacy program, there has been no ongoing registration process. The Vancouver Foundation, when it first provided assistance, said that there would be no ongoing funding, that it was a one-shot deal only. The program includes volunteer tutors who teach adults how to read.

Recently, it's my understanding, the Quebec and federal governments have entered into a joint program of $240,000 to fund these types of programs. I don't know whether or not British Columbia has entered into this type of program, and I wonder if the minister can indicate to us whether it has. The reason I raise this issue is that it is a very successful program in my riding, and there are a lot of people, I am sure the minister would agree, who require literacy upgrading or literacy skills.

What's frustrating for people in my area is that their program was run on a very low-cost volunteer basis and lost its funding, whereas the program in Saanich, which is computer-operated, received $300,000 from the government. It was certainly felt, given what was available in the Sooke School District, that there ought to have been some support for the Sooke program as well, since it was at such a low level of funding.

Two questions to the minister. Will the ministry reconsider its decision with respect to funding for the Sooke adult literacy and provide funding for it? Could he advise us as to the status of any joint federal-provincial negotiations with respect to funding for these types of programs, as per the Quebec program?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: On the computerized adult literacy program, a number of players came into that one. Probably the best answer I can give the member is that we periodically get a request for a pilot program. We always get requests that people want to do a pilot program and would we put up the money. Generally the answer is no, but we still try and keep the door open somewhat.

In the Saanich case, they came in and said the computer companies or something were willing to put up some money, the federal government was willing to put up some money, and would the provincial government put up some money? We looked at it and said because it was a trial program and a pilot program, and we do like to at least test these programs, the Ministry of Education would put up $57,000; and then Social Services, because of the people that they would get into the program — it would be available to adults beyond the school system — put in some money. I think the upshot was that the government put in $90,000 or $300,000. I am not quite sure, but I know it was a joint Ministry of Labour, I believe.... From government they came up with a third of the cost. The federal government put up some costs.

That is a pilot project. It's not something that we have budgeted for. If that pilot project works out, I think it makes a case for expanding it. The federal government, of course, came and said they were very concerned about the results of the adult illiteracy survey and thought a great deal more should be done about it. I said: "I agree. Please send money. We've already got the idea." "No. We want a lot more done from a federal perspective on this, but we don't have the money." "We don't have it either."

Needless to say, there are several pilot projects that have been tried in different places. This is one where there has been funding from the computer companies wanting to prove that their program works, from the federal government, which has a vested interest in trying to serve the adults, and from ourselves if it can be used in the school system. Hopefully it will live up to all those expectations. If it does, then we've got a really good case for trying to expand it. At

[ Page 4439 ]

this point any pilot projects would have to consider who the other contributors were, what will it do, and whether we can scrounge up the money in our budget to do it. If somebody comes up with a good idea, I don't want to be in the position of rejecting it out of hand. Sometimes it may be a proven idea; other times it may not. 

I know we're trying to clarify this jurisdiction, this grey area between post-secondary and training adults. We're trying to fund the programs that deal with K to 12. That includes people who come back for Grade 12 equivalency or who come in and in effect take the secondary school courses. Beyond that, we're hoping to say we'll help, we'll cooperate, we'll coordinate, but it should really be a post-secondary function. That rationalization is in place now in many districts through support, through fees, through other contributions from federal upgrading programs and that sort of thing. Many good programs are running. We have to concern ourselves with at what level and in what area do we fund.

I think the member's question was, will I consider.... There may be one, but I don't have specific knowledge of an application from the Sooke district. I do know that in Saanich it was a one-time one. We said: "One time to get you going; after that, you build it into your standard operations." That was the agreement.

MR. SIHOTA: My allocated time for this has been quite surpassed, so I won't pursue it any further. I'll probably take up later with the minister, outside the House, the matter of the adult literacy program.

I just want to thank the minister and his staff for their candour during the course of this debate. It is much appreciated.

MS. EDWARDS: I want to talk about arts in the school system. It has been said that when our overcrowded curriculum eventually finds enough room for the arts, B.C. may start producing educated people again. I agree with that statement,...

MR. R. FRASER: Who said that?

MS. EDWARDS: ...which was made by Crawford Kilian, a broadly based and widely respected provincial commentator on educational issues. And he is not alone.

I want to put what I want to say to you against the background of what happens in the arts in British Columbia. I will begin with a statement that I'm not even going to bring up figures for, because it has become broadly recognized that British Columbia's governmental support of the arts is about the lowest in the country. If we don't come tenth, we usually come ninth; that is a pretty abysmal record as far as funding in the arts is concerned. But other figures show that people in British Columbia spend an average amount of their available cash on cultural activities and so on. In fact, B.C. comes third highest in figures that have recently been compiled. They're at the median number. In other words, there are five provinces in which 2.3 percent of the expenditures of its citizens are on cultural activities. What that says is that the people of the province put a higher priority on culture than does the government.

We should take a look at what else has been said, and the kind of messages that have been coming through. In their report, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra task force made a very strong recommendation that the orchestra should be doing school concerts, and that comes with a development of audience, as it says. That's a very nice way to put it if you have to have an excuse for it, but what it says is that we are not educating our students in the arts as they come up through the system.

"Cultural Directions for Vancouver: A Policy Guide for the 1990s," came out in the last several months — the city of Vancouver again — and one of its statements was that education is one of the most important determinants of cultural attendance. If that's the case, what we're talking about is a broad general education, and that should include the arts. The writer of that report also said that although a great increase in youth programs and general cultural training facilities had been made within the city of Vancouver, in fact, the services that were put forward by those programs and those facilities were not shared equally across the population. In other words, if you looked at the Vancouver Academy of Music's 1,500 students, you'd find that 70 percent of them come from the west side or the North Shore. That tells us that low-income families do not have access to some facilities that are available. The report says that the schools, constrained by provincially determined curricula and budgets, are not meeting the needs for the students in families of lower income.

Mr. Kilian also said that the creative and performing arts suffer from greater requirements for academic courses for university entrance. I think it's worth a look at this. Because of the changes in curriculum, only about a quarter of British Columbia students take arts courses. In fact, most of them are in junior high school. There are a number of reasons for that, such as the requirements in the senior high schools.

Besides that, he names the things other people have already mentioned — in other words, inadequate resources for the teachers and inadequate training for teachers.

Gary Rupert recently wrote a letter to the Times-Colonist. As you know, Mr. Rupert is the community arts coordinator for greater Victoria. He is also the producer for the B.C. Festival of the Arts and a well-recognized person. He opens his letter to the editor by saying:

"One of the most glaring deficiencies in B.C. education is the failure of the system to provide...high-quality arts education for all children. This failure means that generation after generation of our brightest minds have had creative and perceptual abilities restricted."

That deals with another of the reasons that arts education is so crucial within the education system. We're probably all well aware....

MR. R. FRASER: What do you mean by that?

MS. EDWARDS: I would think even the member for Vancouver South is probably well aware that the testing of children's abilities by IQ tests has been discredited. Teachers — measurers of abilities — have moved to try to measure some degree of creativity. Where do you train and where do you encourage creativity in children? Of course it's in the arts.

Mr. Rupert continues: "Tomorrow's children will need to be flexible, creative, multidisciplined imagemakers and willing to take risks to invent." How are we going to educate them to do that if we don't educate their creativity? He concludes by saying: "Providing a high-quality sequential arts education program for all children will both provide access to the richness of our cultural heritage and prepare our youth for the challenges of tomorrow."

[ Page 4440 ]

Mr. Minister, that letter did not go unnoticed. There was a letter the following week where a Mrs. Helen Andersen of Victoria said: "I am concerned for my grandchildren, who require the best art education possible. Gary Rupert's letter should be emblazoned on posters, on the desk of each teacher, each cultural minister, each education minister." I think that means that she thinks that poster should be pasted to your wall or right on your desk.

I could go through a hundred things. In a recent publication of Arts Victoria there is an article that talks about the arts program in one of the junior high schools. It talks about it because it's so unusual in that school. It mentions that although not all students are active participants, the emphasis on high achievement in theatre, art, dance and music has an influence on the cultural background of all students at the school and helps them appreciate and enjoy this enriching contribution to their lives. That's a good comment on it.

[3:30]

Mr. Minister, probably the main thrust that made me decide to make this presentation during your estimates was a recent study that came through the Ministry of Tourism, Recreation and Culture, where arts councils throughout the province worked to find some input on a case for community arts. This report very specifically says:

"The committee believes that the subject of arts in education deserves maximum attention in the overall consideration of this report. The treatment of arts programs in the schools" — is — "...the key to the development of a creative and productive society. It was a consistent theme throughout all of our discussions and meetings."

Mr. Minister, I know you're going to hear from those people, but I want you to be ready to have an answer when they come. The case is an extremely good one. "Concepts Relating to Education Needs," according to the Artreach report — and this is an earlier report: "Experience in the arts fosters creativity in young people." We all know that. We need creative young people. We need people who learn not just one particular way but another way. As we all know, there are a number of programs in schools, particularly in — or they used to operate in — alternative schools, where the arts were used to involve young people in school the way that they were never involved in an ordinary classroom.

"Our schools are not doing enough to educate students in the arts," says the Artreach report. There were a number of comments relating to the worsening of the situation since 1982, when the education system was hit by financial restraint. As I say, there are particular problems that have been noted in this and other reports about what needs to be done.

We need to educate our teachers because too few of them are trained well enough to present arts in the schools in a way that would be most creative, most accepted by the students. We need coordinators within the schools in order to have that kind of program work best from one school to another within districts throughout the province.

We need improved professional development. Once we have the teachers trained, they still need professional development, and those who have moved around need to be able to continue to learn how to work and use the arts best to delight and engage students in the elementary, junior and senior secondary levels of the public education system.

The Artreach report suggests the need — and it says need, Mr. Minister — for the Premier and the three ministries of Education, Advanced Education, and Tourism, Recreation and Culture to coordinate their efforts to ensure the effective education of our young people in the arts as well as in basic education. It suggests artists in the schools: that could be touring artists, it could be artists in residence; it could be any number of things. It suggests that there be particular funding, not just for performing arts, which are easier to handle, but that there be some particular attention paid to the visual and literary arts which are not so immediately striking and cannot be absorbed or become useful to a participant in such a quick time.

This, I think, is an issue that needs to be addressed by the ministry. I think it needs to be addressed by a broad group of people. I think, Mr. Minister, that you're probably going to answer that, of course, we need technical training, of course, we need all those things that we already have in high school. I think we need arts and creative training in our schools.

I would like to have you respond. I'd like to know whether you have some commitment to including some larger component of arts education in the school system.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I would like to use as my primary reference a gentleman who has been going to administrators' meetings in this province, to public meetings, to various schools, to the BCTF executive, to the BCSTA and to others, and who has been saying that our arts and fine arts program in the schools is inadequate, that we should be doing more, that it is important and can be incorporated. The gentleman I refer to is the current Minister of Education for the province of British Columbia. Unfortunately, he cannot be quoted when he says good things like that, as Crawford Kilian does and others.

I am a strong advocate of the arts, of improvement of arts in the system, the total education of the students. I have to be realistic as well. Someone says we should put more formal, structured art programs into the timetable. I get that request from about, I guess, 16 different areas. There should be more of this, there should be more of this. So I say I have some difficulty. I'm always saying there must be another body in the school to teach it; there must be another hour in the school day in order to provide it.

That is where I have my difficulty, not with the concept that we should have more art, drama, music in the school system. I try to use the examples of what does happen in this same system where some people are saying nothing can happen. I go around to schools, I see drama, I see wonderful productions, I see primary choirs, I see bands. I see all of that in the same structure.

I've used the example of the Langley School District where they responded to the request there for a school and they said: "Okay, we will focus on fine arts in this one elementary school." Or I guess it was a secondary school. They have focused on that and they have students from all over the district trying to go to that school. They have now run out of space. They have done it within the fiscal framework, within the structure, by simply putting that focus on the arts program.

I use that as an example because obviously there is an interest and a concern for it, and it can be done. When people simply say to me that you've got to put an hour a week of art into the timetable, then I have to realistically say, and I might say to you, Madam Member: which subject would you want out of there so as to move that in? I'm not asking you for an answer; I'm asking you to give that thought. That's the problem that I face.

[ Page 4441 ]

For instance, I'm interested in Langley School District. When I visited there and talked to the superintendent and others in the school district, I asked: "How are the kids holding up on their academic performance?" The answer was: "Great." They're not losing on their academic performance. They are getting a great deal of art, music and drama. They are not losing out academically, so obviously something is possible within the present structure.

When people say that we don't have enough about art and music, I said that we constantly have prescribed readers through the elementary grades. We have supplementary readers that can be approved and are authorized material. Suppose somebody said: "We will only buy a reader that has stories about six or ten artists or musicians in it." I think it can be incorporated. I maintain that it is incorporated. On Monday night I was invited to the highlights performance of the music festival for the Victoria district schoolchildren — from the little kindergartens right on up.

It was a terrific performance. They had dancers, music, singing, choir, choral recitation and a combination of these — a great performance. Last night, after my easy afternoon in the House, I decided to accept an invitation by the international parents of cooperative education at UVic. I went there and talked to people that are in the school. South Park school had a grade 3 choir there that sang. I asked if these were a select few students from the school. "No," they tell me. In that school they have a choir in each grade, and I don't know that they're losing out academically.

I am using a few examples along that line. Yes, I am a great proponent of more fine arts. I think it is important, partly because it was neglected when I went to school. I can't carry a tune in a water bucket, but I did — would you believe — teach art, drama and music because no one else would. I managed to incorporate it. The kids didn't get expertise, but at least they got some fun and some music, and they learned something about notes. I could do the mathematics of quarters, halves and that sort of thing, so they got some of that.

I might point out that we got students who played the piano — because I couldn't play the piano, and we needed somebody to keep us in tune — who had the opportunity to do that and move around. In my own experience, these things can be done — recreational, fine arts, drama and all of these things. At any school that I was principal of we had Christmas concerts. People say it takes so much time away from the studies, but somehow those kids measured up on the exams as well as anybody else.

I could wax poetic on this for quite a while. I can't argue with you at all, Madam Member. I think we need more arts in the school system, but if the discussion always centres on getting more art, music and drama in the school system, and we've got to kick out academic subjects and spend more money for coordinators, then you always run into a dead-end argument somewhere.

I think, for instance, that if music, art and drama got incorporated and showed their value, the money would come. People will put more emphasis on it. It's happening; there are schools doing all sorts of things with it. As I say, I have been promoting it for a year, sometimes even to the chagrin of my officials. They say: "You keep making these suggestions and promises, and somebody may ask us to live up to them."

I am saying that it can be done. I think a start should be made, and we should move in that direction. Yes, I would like to see it happen. I would like to have far more discussion on those educational items in our curriculum development and in our statement of philosophy about the total educated person. We believe in that. That reflects some of my views and certainly the views of many others. I know I can't meet with every group that comes in and says: "If you would just give us an hour on the timetable..." or "If you would just give us more money..." or "If you would just give us a coordinator...."

I have gone as far as saying to the teacher-training institutes — when I can, in informal or formal situations.... I will keep beating on them to say that an educated teacher is an all-round teacher, not just one who is an expert in science or biology or something of that nature. The universities want to be pure, and I guess they say that the best way is to have the person get his master's degree in science and then take a little bit of training in teaching. My feeling would be that it should be a combination. Yes, in grade 12 physics a person had better be very good at physics. But at the elementary level, surely to goodness these other factors, which will then feed up the system, are just as important.

MS. EDWARDS: Mr. Chairman, I'd just like to make a suggestion to the minister. I feel really sorry that he's been making all of these suggestions all this time and it isn't happening. I would suggest that there are ways a Minister of Education could probably persuade — by funding and that kind of thing.

I would like to ask the minister how he knows that these students are not suffering academically. I rather suspect that maybe that's not quite the way it is. I don't know if you have studies set up, but I would suggest that it's quite possible students are suffering academically. I know that as far as physical education is concerned.... In a similar way, it's been found that students who take some time out of the timetable.... And it's not the only way to deal with things; we don't have inflexible blocks of time that have to go in.... Students who take physical education — if that time is taken out of the day for physical education — do as well, we are told, reach the same standards, as the students who don't have physical education, spend that time in the classroom and do the same level of work.

You said you didn't want answers on what might be replaced, but I'll certainly tell you that I had 70 students today, and when somebody said, "What do you like about the school system and what would you change about it?" they said: "Take consumer ed out." So I can make that suggestion. I don't know how broadly based that opinion is, but it sounds pretty broadly based to me.

I would like to suggest to you as minister that you're going to have to have some better answers for the groups that are going to be pressing at your door, such as the arts councils in this Artreach program, and the other groups that are saying exactly the same thing: that they want some support for getting the arts back in the schools. I'd like to put the minister on notice that probably next year I'll be coming to talk about the phys ed program in the same way, so I hope you'll have a year of persuading, and next year maybe we'll have it, and you'll have an answer, and maybe you'll have some good results. That's another area where a lot of people are complaining. They feel that there should be more time set aside for the students and that they should be getting their physical education.

[3:45]

1 want to deal with one other issue, Mr. Minister: speech pathology and the availability of speech pathologists in the

[ Page 4442 ]

schools. You recently received a letter from the chairperson of our school board, in which she outlined a problem that the school board has in getting a speech pathologist. What she is asking for is some encouragement, some ways in which the government will see that there are more speech pathologists available.

Along with that, I have letters from a parent of a hearing impaired child. She speaks for the whole group in my community and works with the same group, which is provincewide, and brings up a problem that has been noted right across the province. There is a shortage of trained speech pathologists, and even if they are available, there has not been enough emphasis on getting communication training to not only hearing-impaired children but children who have other speech impediments and problems with communication abilities; in other words, a physical disability related to their speaking.

I would like to know whether the minister has some specific answers to this. I'm sure that the minister is going to say that he would like to have more speech pathologists in the schools. Are there any actions that are being taken immediately? Are there any plans for encouraging more training of speech pathologists in British Columbia? Are there any plans for improving the access to that kind of therapy for the children in the school system?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I know that the member could very well anticipate that I would say that I know there aren't enough speech pathologists in British Columbia. I know also that as we get more specialists of that type, they tend to gravitate to the metropolitan centres. So the problem is often how to get them out into the rest of the province where they are needed.

We don't have a pat answer as to how all of a sudden you are going to generate more speech pathologists. You would think there would be an incentive if they know there is a need, that people would train for that. The jobs are there as soon as they graduate. I do know that we and the Ministries of Health and Social Services, particularly in some of the communities, have said that if we can't each hire one, perhaps we could coordinate our efforts to try to hire one that is available to Social Services, Health and the school system.

So we are trying to get maximum mileage out of the speech pathologists. Last year or the year before, we convinced government that, in order to get people out into the northern communities, we would subsidize their education in these specialty areas, if they would promise to stay in those outlying areas for a couple of years. A few happened; not too many.

I have had an ongoing difference of opinion — let's put it that way — with UBC and others about physiotherapists. We are very short of physiotherapists in this province. UBC has finally moved from the 21 students that they would take per year to 42. There are jobs for 100. They say they can't adjust. In the meantime, they are turning out 1,600 lawyers a year, and we don't need any more lawyers. Their staff is there, locked into a faculty, and they can't just move over to where it makes better sense.

I don't have an answer as to how to provide more of these people. But some of the measures we've tried.... If you turned around and said, "Well, just double the salaries, and you will get people," I don't know that you would, because then they move out of the places where we need them, anyway. It may be, but I don't know where you end that. Is it strictly money that makes people want to help kids? Or are there other reasons? So it's a problem. I don't have a good answer for you; but I can share your concern.

MR. CASHORE: Mr. Chairman, I had a chat with the Minister of Education a little over a week ago, and I mentioned to him that I was going to be asking this question with regard to off-site servicing costs — just to get it on the record. I know the minister has done a lot of work on this issue, as has my colleague the member for Coquitlam-Moody (Mr. Rose). I also point out that the school in question, Glen Elementary School, is actually in the area represented by the MLA for Coquitlam-Moody.

The situation, as I understand it, is that municipalities now have the power under Bill 30 to charge developers, which includes school boards, for the cost of off-site servicing. This includes sidewalks, ornamental lighting and road reconstruction. It is my understanding that where this involves a facility that is being expanded — such as Glen School, which has been in the community for many years and where there was an $800,000 extension to provide much needed space for a burgeoning school population.... On February 9, the municipality issued an order halting construction until a security bond could be made available. I don't want to go into all the details about the very intense situation that developed within our community between the school trustees and members of the municipal council. As I understand it, the request was for $274,000 as a security bond to cover these costs, and given interest calculations, that amount has been calculated to be as high as $351,000, which is a very significant addition to the cost of an $800,000 project. As the minister knows, as a result of some of the work that my colleague from Coquitlam-Moody and the minister have done, a compromise was reached on April 25, and the two parties settled for, I believe, a bond of $40,000 being posted.

The situation continues to be a concern for School District 43. On the other hand, it continues to be a concern for the entire province where construction of additions to existing schools is contemplated.

These are some of the points I'd like the minister to cover in his response. Given the limitations on schools with regard to taxation of industrial properties, etc., and given the fiscal restraints that school boards are having to deal with, how can we expect school boards in district 43 and throughout the province to deal with the likelihood that this situation will be cropping up more and more? To my understanding this is the first instance in the province of this type of cost being applied to a school where there was an expansion project such as this.

Given that we all agree that the most important people in this entire situation are the students, what we had here was a situation of delay from February 9 until April 25. That was a hardship on all concerned, but especially on the students who very desperately need that space. I would like the minister to comment on whether we could be seeing in the future examples of similar delays. Does the minister have some thoughts on how this type of impasse can be avoided? I don't think our school districts are able to afford these costs. It's a very dramatic increase in the cost of a capital project.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Certainly I'm as pleased as anyone else is that the matter was resolved in a reasonable fashion so that the school construction could go ahead.

Initially the issue came to me, and it seems that autonomy is always sought until a problem develops, and then I am

[ Page 4443 ]

asked to deal with those other guys. Fair enough. The concern was that we had approved the construction — I think it was around $900,000 — for an addition to an existing service site, as we saw it, and all of a sudden they were faced with an injunction to stop construction. I took the position that it was a local matter between the two taxing authorities, the school district and the municipality, that they should resolve this and get on with it.

However, it grew and walls built up, I guess. I was getting indirect requests, and finally I was asked if I would meet with one side, so I did. Then I was asked to meet with the other side, and I did. I learned that one of the situations was that it might as well be because the province picks up 85 percent of capital costs, so why should anybody worry about it?

What generated this, of course, was Bill 30, the amendments to the Municipal Act. They tried to entertain the municipality's concern that when a development happens and generates necessary municipal infrastucture work, then as much as possible the development should pay for this. I guess that's a reasonable argument.

[Mr. Pelton in the chair.]

A clause was put in there that when an addition or development over $50,000 was requested — and almost any school addition would be over that; I'm well aware of that — it was subject to off-site servicing costs. For new schools and new additions, when the ministry staff and the school district budget, they generally budget for servicing and for necessaries and there's always a reasonable tradeoff. It also leaves the door open to all kinds of off-site servicing.

[4:00]

I suppose that in the act no one anticipated that one local body would really put a bill on the other local body. Whoever paid the bill, it's the same taxpayers. However, after the meeting with both parties, then with the full board on Thursday night, on Monday they announced the settlement. Yes, I guess I expressed some of my thoughts pretty freely, such as: while this adult argument was going on, kids were not going to get into school in September. There was absolutely no need for it. I must say that they settled very reasonably, and probably could have. But as you know, walls built up. Why should we give and why should they give...? These things tend to happen. I didn't solve the problem for them. It's still a local issue; they solved it. I guess I made known the question of what the real objective is here.

In the process, of course, I became well aware of the potential effects of that clause in Bill 30, and so I have asked the Ministry of Municipal Affairs to get together with our people. We've got to look at that, because it could create a lot of problems. I would hope that we can make some amendment to that, to prevent this sort of thing. We're working on it. I must say that the school district was concerned also about a precedent for itself and for the province. I finally had to say: "Well, get the school built; do that. Don't worry about the precedents; let me take the blame for that, and we'll go on from there." Maybe that helped.

I'm not shorting them. Both sides saw what was necessary there. But I'm glad that it was settled at a reasonable cost to the taxpayers and that it perhaps brought forward something not foreseen when the legislation was drafted. Now it's there; it could be wide open. The short answer is: you bet, we're asking to have that legislation reviewed as quickly as possible and amended as necessary.

MR. CASHORE: Mr. Chairman, I would like to say that I am very pleased to have that statement on the record and to know it is the approach that the minister is taking. I wish him every success in his negotiations to resolve this situation, because school boards, given the constraints of their financing situation, cannot afford that cost, and as the minister says, the taxpayers end up paying for it. But under Bill 30, it certainly is a situation that would create a further hardship for education throughout the province.

With some trepidation, I move back to a topic that has been quite contentious in this Legislature and during the Education estimates. I would hope that we might be able to have a little dialogue, the minister and I, around this issue, which doesn't necessarily have to get into shedding more heat than light. I really do think that there are a couple of topics I have to bring up that are difficult ones. The first one has to do with the issue of hungry schoolchildren.

First of all, I would like to say — and again this is for the record — that I think it's very unfortunate that whatever the context in which the Premier made the statement yesterday that was quoted in the Province regarding the parents of children.... Not having listened to that program, I would say that I didn't hear the entire context. I think it's important for me to acknowledge that. Nevertheless, the quote has gone out there: "They're lazing in bed when they should be up making their kids' lunches."

I would hope that the minister would in some way dissociate himself from that comment, because we're dealing with a comment that, if not corrected, could go a long way towards tarring an entire group of people with a very unsightly brush and a very unsightly colour. Mr. Chairman, this is simply inappropriate. Having recognized that possibly there's more to the story about what was actually said, I think it's extremely important at this time that it be clarified for the record that this is not the understanding of this government with respect to the parents of children who sometimes go to school hungry.

Before the Chairman calls me out of order for talking about something that might better be canvassed under the Ministry of Social Services and Housing, I would point out that my remarks at this time are in response to a discussion on the issue of hungry kids that has taken place in this Legislature during these estimates. The remarks I will be making will further tie the idea of nutrition to the idea of education. I say that so the Chairman will know that the comments I'm making are being made in the context of education and making the point that inadequate nutrition is a factor in the stewardship of education. When I say that, I mean that we have a resource in this province that this minister is responsible for, and it is the education system. The point I wish to make is that when children are able to learn because of the context, not only the learning conditions in the classroom but the conditions in their very bodies, the learning conditions that are affected by not only the quantity but the quality of food within them.... It is a factor in learning.

Mr. Chairman, the issue of starvation, which is a worldwide issue and a matter that needs to be addressed by education for our understanding starvation in the world, is one issue. The issue of hunger is another. Hunger, as I understand it, is not starvation in the sense of being life threatening; it threatens one's ability to appropriate the quality of life that should be available to a person in this society.

With regard to the issue of feeding hungry schoolchildren, I would like to point out that the point has been

[ Page 4444 ]

made on many occasions by the Minister of Social Services (Hon. Mr. Richmond) and the Minister of Education that if authorities in the schools know of children who are going to school hungry, that information should be made available to people in the Ministry of Social Services so they can make sure that proper counselling is taking place, so that some implied irresponsibility with regard to the number of dollars available to put food on the table.... Counselling will take place so those dollars will stretch further. On that point, it is clear that those children, given the amount of money available to them, and given the most diligent of parents, are not able to enjoy the nutritious meals they need to have through the month in order to avail themselves of the best our education system has to offer. Therein lies the rub.

MR. MERCIER: How do you know that?

MR. CASHORE: I would refer that member to the Schauss report, and I would be glad to make a copy of an article about that report available to the member. It was published in the B.C. School Trustees' Association newsletter. I don't have it in my possession at present, but the report will be coming into my possession very soon, and I would be glad to make the information available.

One of the things Dr. Schauss has found out in a pilot project that took place from 1980 to 1984, involving all New York schoolchildren — that's 800,000 kids — in a breakfast and lunch program.... This is the point where I feel there is an answer to the member for Burnaby-Edmonds. The children in this program showed a 40 percent increase in performance on national academic tests, a marked increase in attendance and fewer behavioral problems.

The study was conducted in the context of the education community. I'm not sure if the purpose of the study was to provide support for the things we've been arguing with regard to the feeding of hungry schoolchildren. I think the orientation of that study was more toward the effects of nutrition on a child's ability to learn. We have interministerial committees, where the Ministers of Social Services and Housing, Health, Attorney-General and Education sit down together to deal with some very difficult and contentious issues involving our children. The existence of such committees is a tacit awareness that all of these things are linked and connected; all of these things are one and the same. Nutrition is education, and education is nutrition.

This study points out that the 1.2 million children who received more nutritious breakfasts and lunches in school cafeterias made the largest recorded jump in academic improvements in the U.S. In California achievement tests, academic achievement climbed from 39 percent below to 55 percent above the national average. I'm sorry that I don't have more of the actual data of this scientific study, and as I said, I will be getting that data and making it available to the ministry.

The point I'm trying to make as rationally as I possibly can.... I admit that sometimes it's hard for me to curtail my emotion on this subject and be rational, but I'm making it as rationally as I possibly can. I think that a dispassionate look at such data would indicate that this government, by looking at such data, could really save face and make some very meaningful moves — not just gestures but concrete steps — toward building some factors into the education system especially for those children who are at risk because of poor nutrition.

I realize that, as has been pointed out time and again, there is a desire on the part of government to see parents counselled so they will do a better job with the funds they have available. But even if you can make the point that therein lies the problem, you can't entirely tie that point.... Even if you can make that point successfully, and I don't think you can — but for the sake of argument, let's assume that you can — I don't think in good conscience you can tie that argument to the continued deprivation of nutrition for children who need to be able to avail themselves of the educational program.

One of the reasons is this. If those children are not able to learn as well as they need to learn — and I think Schauss and others have made the point very effectively — then how can the government expect to achieve its goal of getting people off welfare? We want these people to finish their education and then to the best of their ability and potential go out into the workforce and take their places as responsible and responsive citizens. In so doing, they will become taxpayers, and they will be able to contribute to the development of our society.

Unfortunately, this type of common-sense reality does not show up in a one-year financial statement. Unfortunately, given the vagaries that we politicians have to address as we go about doing our thing, we become subject to a political agenda which usually averages somewhere around 3.5 years. Because we are subject to that political agenda and because we know the public wants to see immediate results, it's awfully hard for us to involve ourselves in an educational exercise, for instance, during an election campaign or even between elections, to try to make the point that the long-term savings are perhaps a generation away in some cases. Those savings really are a generation away if we can anticipate that, instead of doubling the number of people on welfare, as we have in the last 12 years.... As a result of good nutrition being one factor in enabling our children to have a good education, this could contribute to their employability and in the next ten years would help us to cut in half the number of people on welfare.

It's the penny wise and pound foolish concern that I am expressing here. It's our need to be able to look at the long-range positive effects of good policies that are put in place and followed consistently throughout the time that they need in order to mature and develop and be successful.

I see my time at this stage is up, and I will listen to what the minister has to say.

[4:15]

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I listened attentively. It would appear that the member will use every opportunity probably in every one of the estimates to make that speech. He's sincere. I don't think anyone quarrels with the fact that children who are not properly fed can't learn as well. No one quarrels with those statistics.

I've met Dr. Schauss. I spent an evening with him. I've got a whole book of his statistics. In scientific terms there are some questions I would have about the studies. It seems to me that in every case it was done, it was done at the local level to establish something. It wasn't at the state or federal level. People were sold by him on the thought that if we feed them, we will do those things. I have looked at the studies, and in pure scientific terms I don't know whether control groups or that were used sufficiently.

I was very impressed with the gentleman, nevertheless. He had some other ideas, too, that were great for helping

[ Page 4445 ]

people. I asked him for those, because if they were so great, they would be nice. Apparently they were for sale at a price — having found out some of that research which was done at taxpayers' expense in various places — and that turned me off a notch. If I had something that I had discovered through a research project that the taxpayers had paid for, and it could really help people and I really believed that it could, I don't think I would say: "For a fee, I'll tell you my secret or my formula." Anyway, maybe that's an unnecessary term, but since you put so much emphasis on that report, I would go without the statistics on that report with some of the questions that I have.

I will accept that if the kids are better or adequately fed, they will learn better and that they develop in terms of health and other things. I fully accept that. The basic issue here is — and this is where I have the problem — why has it become a political football that is being used by the Vancouver School Board and the NDP, if the concern is the kids?

MR. BARNES: It's not a political football; it's reality.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I'm sorry, but I see it that way, because I have not had or I don't know whether the government has had requests from any other school districts for a program to feed the kids.

Let me put it in perspective. In the Vancouver School District they rejected the idea that if people want help from a program that is in place, all they have to do is identify those people. They rejected that: "We are not going to tell who they are." The Social Services ministry deals with kinds of cases and they only help them when they are identified and there are programs in place. If people feel that they should not identify anybody, that's their prerogative, but the only way they could get help from the program that was in place was to say who they were. There has been a lot of rhetoric built around that.

Let me bring it down to the basic issue. In the Vancouver School District — the only district that has come forward with this demand, to my knowledge, at least in formal terms and through the media — the total school budget is well over $200 million. I ask: what would the tax effect be if they spent $300,000 on a program that they felt was necessary? I understand that the amount would be just over one-tenth of 1 percent of their budget. That's 0.14 percent of their budget. The effect on the local taxpayers would be $2 per taxpayer to make that program work. If the major and primary concern — and I know there are a lot of people who genuinely believe that — was to provide a meal service for those students, they could have gone ahead with it with nothing even noticeable in their total budget structure. I would say that probably in various ways they spill more money than the $300,000 that we are talking about here. The program could go ahead.

By trying to force the provincial government into doing a lunch or breakfast program in the Vancouver school system, you generate a whole Pandora's box, because you can't do it for one district without putting in a formula, without doing all of the things that put in lunch programs. Then you have to try and provide lunch programs with certified people to cook and provide them and with the health inspection in small schools as well, and you create an impossible situation.

There was a lunch program in the British Columbia school system many years ago. It was there when I was in the school system, and it was dropped because it became so onerous that it virtually killed itself. A lunch program is possible in any district for a tiny percentage of the budget and for $1 or $2 per taxpayer to go ahead and do it. It could have been done, in my opinion. It is analogous to the situation in Coquitlam, about the Glen Elementary School — a big furor. When it came right down to it, it was easily resolved when people decided to concentrate on the problem that needed dealing with, rather than trying to put the blame somewhere else, forcing others into paying. So now we have the Vancouver city council involved in a great emotional controversy. We supposedly have the provincial government, the federal government and everybody being blasted for not caring.

The arguments are constantly made that kids function better when they are fed. There is no question about that. But a lot of things can be done that way. When I put that problem in perspective, I really feel badly that so much heat has been generated with something that could have been done. What do the Vancouver taxpayers.... They increased the budget this year by $41, I read in the paper; $41 to the average householder. For a $43 increase they could have had the whole program, without all this furor.

MR. CASHORE: Mr. Chairman, the minister makes the point that if an issue such as this is going to be addressed effectively, it will be done with quietness, to quote his words in the Hansard Blues yesterday. He said: "Why would it not be done quietly, if people were really sincere?" He's repeated that just now. I'll come back to that in a moment.

I do appreciate the fact that the minister raised the example of the Glen school, as perhaps being a model or a parallel situation, an example of how something can be worked out. Yes, there was a furor. But given the minister's own very commendable response a few moments ago, there are two components lacking in a hungry-school issue, and those two components are: (a) that the minister, in the Glen school case, was willing to bring his leadership into effect to help resolve this situation; and (b) that he has given his undertaking that through interministerial consultation there will likely be some amendment, or some kind of action by government to facilitate a better situation. Having used that example, and the minister having brought that analogy forth on this debate, I would then say: let's really then apply that analogy to the situation we're now discussing with regard to the hungry children. Let us say that what is required is for that type of wisdom, the wisdom the minister applied in the Glen school situation, to be applied here.

The minister makes his point about it only being a small amount on the budget. What he needs to remember is that it is the provincial government that holds the key, under the federal-provincial agreement, to the Canada Assistance Plan. For the benefits of that plan to come into effect, it requires the provincial government to make it possible.

Mr. Chairman, the minister makes the point that the Vancouver School Board should take this responsibility onto itself. I think the point can also be made that they have taken a lot of responsibility onto themselves, and they have tried to come up with a workable solution, even though the provincial government has refused to participate. Let's remember that this is an issue that I believe members of the Social Credit Party, I would assume.... I do not assume that the majority of those people agree with the government's action on this. We have an NPA school board; we have a majority of NPA people on council; both of those bodies have voted to support this program. Although on the Vancouver city council

[ Page 4446 ]

they did not get the majority that they needed, it was still a majority of the councillors who stated that they support the program and would have favored the city of Vancouver's coming through with $200,000.

Clearly this is a provincial matter, because it has to do with the welfare system, and that is the system that functions under the Canada Assistance Plan. That is the system under which single parents are operating when they try to provide for their families.

Now let's take a look at a family of one parent and two children in Vancouver. We have calculated that that parent, on the basis of a 31-day month....

HON. MR. BRUMMET: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman. I'm concerned about the effect it has on students, but I don't want to go through the Social Services and Housing debate in this ministry. If the member so wishes and the Chair so agrees, then we can go on indefinitely. I can only respond from my perspective.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I don't believe there's a point of order there, but I would bring to the.... The member for Maillardville-Coquitlam has been very careful in his debate up to this point, but it certainly would appear to me that relevancy now has come into question when we're dealing with.... I think the Canada Assistance Plan was the one mentioned. We are, after all, dealing with the budget of the Minister of Education. In that respect, I would think the debate has become less relevant latterly. So perhaps the hon. member could bring his comments back in line with the matter under debate at the moment.

[4:30]

MR. CASHORE: Mr. Chairman, the minister has stated the opinion that the Vancouver School Board, as a board of school trustees that operates under the School Act, for which the minister is responsible, should have taken the responsibility themselves to come up with the funds. My point is that the proper place for that responsibility to be taken — the responsibility to which the minister referred — is under the Canada Assistance Plan.

I'm pointing out that a mother with two children has $4.70 per day per child to cover food, transportation and other essentials after rent has been paid. I would submit to the minister that if that mother is intent on providing the nutritious meals that are needed — the minister and I both agree that nutrition is a factor in enabling a person to appropriate educational opportunity — somewhere around the end of the third week the mother who is sending that child off to school is going to run out of sufficient food to feed that child nutritiously. I'm responding to what the minister said here when he made the point about counselling. No amount of counselling can make up for the fact that....

Interjection.

MR. CASHORE: Yes, Mr. Chairman, the minister said that when these people are brought to the attention of the Ministry of Social Services and Housing, then they can be counselled.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I didn't say that; check the Blues.

MR. CASHORE: I'm sorry if I misunderstood what the minister was saying. I felt that his comments had been in keeping with other comments from the Minister of Social Services and Housing (Hon. Mr. Richmond), where the point has been made that somehow these families were not managing their funds adequately.

I would like to ask the minister: does he think a mother who has to feed her children and provide for other necessities on $4.70 a day per child has a good chance of providing the nutrition needed for that child to go off to school and function well?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I hate to prolong this out-of-order discussion. The member says do I think this, and I don't know how it relates to my educational estimates or to the issue of this Vancouver school program. I know the member is milking this emotionally for all the political mileage he can get out of it.

Interjections.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: That's what he's doing, because I have basically said....

Interjection.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Well, it's certainly out of order in this debate. I said the Vancouver School Board — I didn't say they could do it quietly; I may amend that — could just have gone ahead and done it without creating all the political furor. They could easily have done that. So why they aren't doing it is beyond me. I used the analogy of the Coquitlam situation, and the member said why don't I.... I took an interest in that one when I was asked to take an interest, and I was willing — as he said — to lend my expertise and wisdom to the solution. I would gladly do that. I think I suggested that I would gladly lend my wisdom and expertise to the solution of this problem. It would cost you 0.14 percent of your budget in order to go ahead with the program, so why are you making a political furor out of it? If you want to use that analogy, I did not solve the problem for Coquitlam. I did not come in for that Glen school. I simply said, "Here are the issues; you people are capable of solving them," and they did. I said they were capable of dealing with it, and they did.

Why we're having all of this furor and then trying to translate it into how the province doesn't care, or things of that nature.... I've tried to say to the member that, forced into this in the Education ministry, you create a massive problem to deal with. Dealt with where it matters, by the people who can handle it, it can be easily resolved.

What more I can say on that, I don't know. I think it's a tragedy that these kids in the Vancouver school system have been used to give you as much political mileage as you're trying to milk out of this.

MR. CASHORE: I'd like to ask the minister if he thinks that a mother who has two children and $4.70 a day to feed those children will be able to send them to school for the entire month with the kind of nutrition in their bodies that they need to be able to make the best use of the education that is offered.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Hon. members, I do believe there is a real question of relevancy here. I think the matter has been very well canvassed, and I would ask the member for Maillardville-Coquitlam to continue his debate on matters

[ Page 4447 ]

which relate more directly to the budget of the Ministry of Education.

MR. CASHORE: The comments that I have been making are appropriate. They do relate to education, and we have been discussing this in the context of studies that have been linking nutrition to education. I am simply making the point that children who are not properly fed cannot make use of the educational opportunity that our minister provides through the system. Therefore, the point I am making is connected, it is appropriate, and the minister has not answered my question. He is not willing to answer it. It is an appropriate question with regard to education because mothers in this province are having to send their children off to school each day, mothers who only have $4.70 a day to provide for those children.

I would like to ask the minister, given that he does recognize that there is a link between nutrition and the ability to learn, whether, using the same approach that he's using in dealing with the Glen school situation — consulting with other ministers and so forth — he would agree to consider the possibility of conducting a study in British Columbia, made for British Columbia, that would seek to discover the facts on the linkage between education and nutrition.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I would not consider initiating a whole study because I think it would find, simply statistically, what everybody already knows: that there is a link.

MR. ROSE: I think it's sad that we can't solve that problem, if it is a problem. I think it's a bit unfair to accuse people who raise the problem of playing it for some political gain. In a democracy you talk about public issues. This is certainly a public issue.

The minister was very helpful, as my colleague has said, when it came to solving a little problem we had in our district 43 a few weeks ago, and I was very grateful that I went to both him and also the Minister of Municipal Affairs (Hon. Mrs. Johnston), and they were quite willing to get involved.

I'm not going to follow up the topic of my colleague as far as hungry schoolchildren are concerned, but I do know that when I went to school, and that's a long time ago, they had milk programs there for nutrition and for hungry kids. That was in the thirties. We had all kinds of services in school that weren't directly educational.

If learning is impeded by the fact that somebody is hungry, I don't see it's very different from the learning difficulty of near-sightedness, or dyslexia, or any of these other things that we look after because we're trying to enhance the learning process. I don't know where you draw the line on these things and what's health and what's education. Maybe we can compartmentalize too much stuff. I know we do that because we're set up to have the minister from Kamloops look after some things, and the Minister of Education says, "Well, it's not my fault; it's his. You'd better talk about it to the Minister of Health, because that's really his bag," while kids fall off the stools. There's no excuse for that in this country, as far advanced as we are. My comments on that one are finished, I hope.

I think that there are some lofty and emotional and profound contributions to be made on education. I doubt if mine will be one of them. I did that when I was critic, and I've passed those grave responsibilities over to my colleague the member for Burnaby North (Mr. Jones). I'm going to get into more of the sort of nuts and bolts and parish-pump politics — looking after my own school district and that sort of thing.

I was intrigued about some of the debate having to do with arts in the schools. I'd just like to remind the minister that a Christmas concert, however worthy, is not an art or music program.

Interjection.

MR. ROSE: No, it's not. It's no substitute. It's something which is a performance for the school, but it's no substitute for a real, serious program. You can put on a Christmas concert; even the minister said he could put one on. He admits he knows very little about music, although his brother was a tuba player in my band one time. As far as I know, his attendance was good. I don't remember how well he played. He always showed up. Probably the minister has more music in him than ever came out of him.

When you've got a school like Centennial Senior Secondary School in Coquitlam, which employs half a music teacher and the school has 2.400 — and I don't know what they have in drama or art — you don't have a very good program. Sure, it's possible to do that sort of thing in the Langleys and some places like Esquimalt where there's pretty profound support by the board and by your supervisors. In the main, it's possible, but I don't think music and art are encouraged anymore. First of all, you don't have enough electives to do it because you've got too many required options, such as consumer ed, that crowd people out.

We've been getting narrower and more academic the last few years because it's cheaper. It's cheaper to teach those courses than some of the other ones. The whole restraint program made our offerings in high school a lot narrower and more academic, and less focused on the people who were not particularly academic. School's for everybody's kids. It isn't a screening device where you teach the best and shoot the rest, nor should it be.

Interjection.

MR. ROSE: Well, maybe it is. My friend from Vancouver East probably doesn't think it should be. I think we should be encouraging these music programs. One of the things you do with that sort of thing is to provide opportunities on the timetable to do it. Look at the numbers compared to a few years ago, per school — not the total numbers. I started in music teaching there were five high school bands in all of British Columbia; I would say there must be 400 now. The total numbers have increased, but since restraint in 1983, programs such as art and music and drama have suffered, and they've suffered because they've been crowded out of the timetable.

I want to talk a little bit now about budget and restraint and the fact that school boards, including 43, are having difficulty, keeping within their budgets. As a result, more and more is piled on the local property owner. There are some reasons for that, and it's not just that school boards wish to solve their problems by throwing a lot of money at it. Sure, 43 hired about 70 teachers last year, but that was just catching up. Now they're trying to catch up on leaky roofs, because there's really been no maintenance or capital improvement there for a great number of years. That's been the problem. You can trot out all the figures you like to prove me wrong, but I don't think I am. That, they say, is their complaint.

[ Page 4448 ]

There's another major one that I'd like to deal with in a moment.

[4:45]

I'm getting letters like this from grade 5 kids. You can say now: "The teacher's put them up to it." Those unfair, bigoted, union-loving people who infest the classrooms put the kids up to this. Here's one from a little kid in grade 5 who says: "I wrote this letter to you because we need lots of repairs to our school. We need equipment for our gym." Here is another one that says: "I was wondering if we could have some repairs and have some more equipment. We need a bigger classroom for our displays and pin boards. Thank you for doing a great job and keep up the good work." He is one of the brightest ones, I imagine, in the class.

MR. REE: Is that your grandson?

MR. ROSE: No relative.

Here is one that says: "I want to ask you to try and help us make more money. We need more computers because every day at recess and lunch, we always fight for it." They've got one computer, I guess. "We also need new rugs, computer software, paper and a new vacuum." He wants a clean sweep, 1 guess. "I want the school to be bigger and better." This is in one of the better neighbourhoods in my riding. They are having problems in their schools, and the kids see it.

You can say it's just propaganda. They came over here on a school visit, and his teacher probably asked him to write me. I just hope that all teachers don't ask them to write me, because I might be in a fair amount of difficulty and require a bit of help from the typing pool — I know the minister has lots of extra people around there who can type — if I am to answer them individually. I said I would take these problems up with the minister, and I promised that our job was to fight for a more realistic budget and fiscal framework and try to get the minister to — as he has done — make things considerably better.

Don't forget we lost about $300 million during the restraint program. We are behind now about $350 million in terms of needed capital assets for the schools across British Columbia. If you put back $60 million at the same time as taking out — over the last five years — some $600 million, you've got a bit of catching up to do. If maintenance and capital projects have gotten behind, naturally there is going to be increasing demand. School boards have to face that, and the framework is not going to necessarily deliver it.

Another problem is that 2.8 percent is the maximum for settlements to the union. You put a lid on it. If that doesn't restrict collective bargaining, I don't know what does. The minister is going to say: "Sure, if they want to go over it, they can do it. " Just bang it on the property owner again. I don't think the minister would like that to happen, and I don't think it's very popular out there. One of the reasons it's not very popular — and I come back to it time and time again — is that we've had no increase in the homeowner grant for five or six years.

The homeowner grant delivers to the district of Coquitlam for the average-size home $102 less than they need per household. In other words, the homeowner grant does not pay the taxes to produce the schools and run them in that district, although in other districts it does. Where you have districts of high inflation, this is what happens. If we were just keeping up with inflation in the homeowner grant, it would be $175 more. Therefore Coquitlam would be about $70 or more ahead. In other words, the homeowner grant would deliver more than the school costs, as it does in many districts. As a matter of fact, it does that in about 20 districts right now.

1 know the minister has had recommendations on this matter. Some municipalities make money on the homeowner grant. There is a credit; they don't actually make money. I suppose it could be argued that they don't make money on it, but Trail, Kettle Valley, Keremeos, Princeton, Armstrong, Cariboo, Chilcotin, Lillooet, Merritt, Chilliwack, Powell River, central coast, Queen Charlottes, Nechako, Lake Cowichan, Alberni, Agassiz, Harrison, Fort Nelson, Stikine, Terrace and Nisgha all have school costs which are less than the homeowner grant.

Therefore there is nothing to be added to property owners in those rural areas. They haven't had the same inflation in housing, therefore they don't have the same assessments. Maybe there should be a variable in the homeowner grant; I don't know. Has the minister considered that? I know that his Ministry of Education financial management systems review report in August recommended that the total homeowner grant be used for the public school system and not be transferred for municipal purposes.

The leakage was $34 million last year and about $30 million this year. One of the questions I'd like to ask the minister is whether or not he is considering ways so that this leakage doesn't occur and that money from the homeowner grant will go to the school system. District after district — not all of them.... It's the same as when the framework was originally imposed. Some districts gained, because they weren't putting that money into education in the first place. Places like Abbotsford and Armstrong gained by the — may I say — Heinrich formula, the first fiscal framework. Others such as the Burnabys and the Coquitlams and districts that were urban and had a very nourishing, full and rounded program with lots of offerings and options for the needs of their young people lost. The money was transferred out of those and into those other areas, and their budgets gained. That's history, but some of the legacy is still with us.

The minister's own report — the management system review report, August 1987 — recommended that the total homeowner grant be directed to the school system. Has he considered a flexible homeowner grant relating to school costs and leakage, urban versus rural?

Interjections.

MR. ROSE: I just had an interceding speaker, didn't you hear him? Let's hear from the minister.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Mr. Chairman, I am trying to go back over what the member said about the flexible homeowner grant system. I don't know about that. Yes, as Minister of Education, I would like to see all of the homeowner grant go into education. Our ministry says it should all go into education and those horrible monsters over at Municipal Affairs shouldn't get any of it.

What it really boils down to is that the taxpayer gets the $380 on the homeowner grant and in some cases it applies. There is this spillage, if you like. Unfortunately, the government that would give the $34 million to the school districts to make them happier would have to take $34 million away from the municipalities in some way to make them mad. It's a government decision; I don't always get my way.

[ Page 4449 ]

The whole business of how the funding formula works based on taxation, equalization.... Everyone will agree with me that we should have an equalization formula in the province, but they usually add the rider: so long as it doesn't cost me any more than it costs them. I do have to scratch my head about how can you have equalization if it doesn't cost anybody any more than it costs anybody else. Yes, we are hit with that one.

I'll agree that as inflation, taxation and house properties go up.... Theoretically, in this tax structure, if the house values go up and the spending is held within the fiscal framework, the mill rate should go down. The member is aware that if the house doubles in value, you should be able to get that amount of money with half the mill rate.

In some of the growing districts, the assessment rate is growing all the time. There are hardly any more kids being generated from those houses. I'm talking in accountant's terms. As you know, the average family in Canada generates 1.7 kids, and I have never found the 0.7. And so it goes. But generally, if a housing development goes in, people try to work out a formula for so many houses generating so many kids to the school system. But more and more houses are being built. People like ourselves who are too old to have children don't generate any more children; other young couples don't generate children. I'm sorry, I'm starting to sound like the opposition House Leader.

The whole point is that as the assessment base goes up and the pupil enrolment does not increase correspondingly, then there should be a reduction in the mill rate and taxes should be held. I am never going to believe that taxes will go down. I would like to believe that, but all I hope for is that the increase will go down. So the system of property taxation, whether it is for schools or for others, does generate some of these differences and anomalies. I suppose the whole thing has to be looked at.

Going back to the member's comments about me teaching music without any talent, I want to go on record that I did not say it takes talent to be a bandleader, or that it does not take talent to be a bandleader — let me put it that way — but some people get away with it anyway. So I got away with it without talent. The whole point I was trying to make in that debate was that rather than nothing, I was able to provide something. The fact that I've been promoting this and encouraging it does not mean that it's going to happen immediately.

The one that I'd like to comment on is the one that has taken quite a beating here. The only example that has been given to me is: "Take consumer education out of there and you know we've got an arts program." That seems to be the feeling. Are members aware that they only have to take one consumer ed course somewhere between grade 9 and 12? One course in one of those four years on consumer ed, and in the rest of it they could take art or music— except there are other academic subjects and things of that nature. The consumer ed takes up one elective in four years. If that is all that it takes to create a fine arts program in our school, I wish it were that simple.

MR. ROSE: The minister knows that as far as consumer ed is concerned he has a detailed brief from a junior high vice-principal we both know — as a matter of fact from Rutland, his home town — that talks about this in greater detail. The pressure seems to be that kids are encouraged to take that as quickly and as early as possible rather than later — you know, one in four years — because there are other courses in the academic to qualify that are needed further on.

Yes, it is an impediment. The fewer electives you have, the more difficult it is, especially now. Job competition. "Let's get rid of the frills" — those are the art courses — is a lot of people's attitude: "Get down and get the good hard stuff in there. " I think it makes it difficult. It's tough enough to get a really good art program going in schools, in view of our culture, without added impediments. In some areas it's easy. Kelowna was terrific and even Rutland at one time. I don't know what they're like today.

[5:00]

To get back to the leakage, the range — you talk about equalization! — of the school costs, compared to the homeowner grant, goes from, with the Nisgha district, $92.... They make $230 on it, whereas for West Van they lose $177. You say: "What difference does that make? They can afford it." Well, some of them can afford it. But that doesn't say much for equalization, does it? There should be some mechanism. If we're desperately short of money in education — and we have been and we've been told we had to be — there must be some mechanism that's better. There must be better math teachers over there somewhere in the taxation department who can deliver that money to education rather than have it go for municipal affairs.

The simplest thing, though — and I think maybe next year we'll probably get it because it's closer to an election — would be to increase the homeowner grant, at least from the time you stopped at about '83, along with the inflation rate. That would remove a lot of problems for a lot of the districts, and wouldn't force the boards to go either to plebiscite or to adding extra property taxes. The resistance is becoming immense. It's going to hurt education. The dumping and the transfer on to the property holder has gone up year after year. I could give you the facts, but you know them as well as I do.

With those few, well-chosen, kind remarks about the ministry I will conclude.

MR. LOENEN: I too would like to speak on equalization payments. School District 38, my district, is a district that is operated in a very lean way. 1 must commend the board of trustees, the staff, the teachers and the people involved. Their teacher-per-pupil cost is one of the lowest. In fact, I could tell you: it is $3, 850. If you compare that to West Vancouver, their per-pupil cost is $4, 371. That's a difference of $521. Presumably the students in West Vancouver will get $521 more education than students in my district, and yet the average homeowner in West Vancouver pays $20 less than the people do in Richmond.

I would like to echo some of the comments made by the opposition House Leader. We have an equalization system, and I believe all British Columbians acknowledge that there must be some form of equalization, but the disparities that exist are really quite severe.

In addition to that, I might just say that in my own district the teacher-student ratio is very high. Again, it shows that we're running a very lean operation.

If you look at the assessed value per student that is available to district 38, which is Richmond, it amounts to $201,597 per student. In West Vancouver the assessed value per student is $520,870. That is almost three times as much; in other words, the people in West Vancouver, on an assessed value basis, are almost three times as rich as the people in my community. Yet they pay, on average, $20 less for their educational system than do the people in my community.

[ Page 4450 ]

I'd just like to draw this to the attention of the minister, because I do know that our board is truly responsible, and our staff are responsible, yet they get discouraged when they see these inequalities. There is simply no incentive for them to do better.

I might also point out that in terms of how my community relates to the rest of the province there are also some real discrepancies. If we look at Richmond, district 38, in 1987 the average homeowner paid $263 after receiving the homeowner grant. If you look at Central Okanagan, it's $27; if you look at Prince George, it's only $31; and in Kamloops the average homeowner got a credit of $16. It is very difficult to explain why the people in my community ought to be paying $263 whereas the people in Kamloops get a credit of $16. The discrepancies are really quite severe.

The same point was made by a recent study prepared for the Greater Vancouver Regional District, and this has set off quite a discussion about it. In fact, some people talk about the rape of the lower mainland in this regard. They have pointed out that when you look at income, greater Vancouver has an average household income of $29,552. In Kamloops it is $28,129, and in Prince George it is $33,516. So these areas that are getting these tremendous breaks are not exactly poor areas.

Their study also indicates that when you look at the tremendously high cost of housing in the Greater Vancouver Regional District or in the lower mainland generally, and you deduct from the average income what people pay for their mortgages and housing, and then look at what is left over as disposable income, the discrepancies become even greater. Greater Vancouver net income after mortgage costs, $20,468; Prince George, $29,763. Yet when you look at those earlier figures, the people in Prince George pay very little.

We can all see the need for some equalization. We want to ensure that there is a standard of education that is available to rich and poor alike. I think most people in this province will readily acknowledge that those whose incomes are higher and who live in homes with an assessed value that is much greater ought to pay more. We can all buy that. But this seems to. be overkill. We seem to have a system that produces instead of fairness, a certain amount of inequity.

We may well wonder, if we continue this, whether the time will come when people cannot afford to live in the lower mainland, or whether the only people who can live in the lower mainland are Hong Kong millionaires. This is a very serious problem that I hope we will be able to address. I look forward to seeing whether the minister is considering this whole equalization funding formula and whether or not some of those concerns will be addressed.

[Mr. Rabbitt in the chair.]

HON. MR. BRUMMET: The member points out some of the difficulties where the residential tax or property tax is not a measure of ability to pay. But it's there. Related to income tax at least, maybe it's a little fairer. The equalization started out, I guess, much closer together where districts had a bigger tax base. I think there was some tendency to spend more. The lid was put on all of that in '82-83-84, and then it was opened up. So you again have the spread.

I don't have an answer for the member as to why a taxpayer in one place should be paying $300 to educate their students while somebody somewhere else should be paying $21. All I can tell him is that in the equalization, if it takes $150 per taxpayer to educate the students, if somebody is paying $300, somebody else might be paying zero. If somebody's paying zero, somebody's got to pay $300 to come up with a $150 average. Those are the kinds of things that happen.

Now how to bring that about fairly, I don't really know. It means looking at the total structure of taxation, and I know that is being looked at. I share the member's concerns. I have some difficulty that if you eliminated the homeowner grant, you would have a taxation structure that looked after itself. The homeowner in Kamloops who pays $10, if you eliminated the homeowner grant, would pay, say, $390 tax. The one in Richmond would pay $600 tax or whatever, because they're paying $260-something after the homeowner grant, so you add the $260 on to the $380 and that would be their tax bill. So in a sense it would be relative.

The homeowner grant, I believe, was on residential properties only, so that people with their prime residence would get a break on their taxes and others wouldn't. The fact that it hasn't worked out equally for anyone is certainly fairly obvious. But if you eliminated it, I don't know whether there would be another formula. I'm certainly receptive to any formula, but I think equalization is essential. We have to have some form of equalization. If somebody can suggest a better formula, I'm sure that I and the government would be very interested in that.

MS. A. HAGEN: I'd like to shift our focus for a few minutes this afternoon. There are three issues I want to raise, and two of them probably are best defined as being long-term policy. The third has to do with an issue in my own riding that I want to bring to the minister's attention and get some comment on. I'm really aware that time is short. I'm going to try to focus my questions very briefly and I'd appreciate the minister responding as briefly as possible. I know that I have a number of colleagues who also want an opportunity to raise issues with him. Perhaps we can facilitate that in this extensive debate, which concerns every member of this House because this is an estimate area that I think hits all of us very clearly in talking to our constituents, being concerned about the future of the province and being concerned about those people who teach our children.

I want to talk a little bit about teachers. The first issue I want to raise is the issue of teacher supply in the 1990s. It is not too early to raise that particular issue, because we have five years of training for most teachers to go into the system. I have read a number of accounts from B.C., Ontario and the United States that indicate a very serious crunch coming in the next short period of time. I've heard that as early as 1991 we'll begin to see some of those shortages manifest not right across the system but in some of the particular skills that we need to have available in our school system — in math, science, speech pathology and English.

The reasons for it, I think, are fairly obvious. We do have an ageing teaching force. We know that early retirement is something that teachers are choosing. In fact, the ministry's own option was taken up at, I've heard, perhaps as much as two times the rate that was anticipated. People are leaving the profession. It's no longer as much a life-long profession. We're looking at a baby-boom echo and we're in competition with other jurisdictions that, let's face it, pay better and have better working conditions than we have in British Columbia.

I want to ask the minister what his position on this issue is, what role his ministry is taking in planning for the very

[ Page 4451 ]

real possibility of teacher skill shortages in the next decade, what studies are taking place and what role he sees the ministry playing at this time in taking pro-active measures to anticipate and prepare for potential skill shortages in the 1990s.

[5:15]

HON. MR. BRUMMET: To try and answer as concisely as possible, we've looked at the fact that we were told there was such a surplus of teachers just a year ago. But we were trying to do long-term projections, and we said, well, that surplus could be temporary — because we did have an ageing force; we saw all the statistics.

So what do you do to encourage people to go into teaching? One of the things was that you've got to get jobs for those who have had training. If people come out of teacher-training and there are no jobs for them, then obviously it's not going to encourage others to go into teacher-training. The early retirement program, the three-year program, was one of the very direct efforts to deal with that. The fact that we put out the information— I guess as much as a year ago — to say in conjunction with that that we could be facing a teacher shortage by 1991 in some areas was advance notice to people: "If you're going to go into a four-year teacher-training program, this is a good time to start; there should be jobs for you by that time...." Even with the early retirement program phasing out in June 1989, there will still be a certain number of people retiring each year. So we've done that.

As far as teaching-training is concerned, that of course.... Now the requirements for a teaching certificate are in the hands of the College of Teachers, and I would hope they would look at whether the five-year training program, say, is necessary for every teacher at every level — or the six year program. As UBC says: "To get a basic teaching certificate, you must spend six years here." I've questioned it; I've discussed this with them. Maybe people could go out teaching after three years and then go back for further training, once they have had some experience or internship or whatever type of program. Encourage all of those directly — awareness that jobs will be available in teaching, and trying to get jobs for people. I think that has worked fairly well.

I suppose the biggest thing is to try to convince people that teaching is a worthwhile, noble profession. I guess I'm even yet accused of....

MR. JONES: Tell some of your colleagues.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Well, I don't hear too many of my colleagues putting down teachers. That's a myth that was generated and that may have had some basis, but I haven't heard that much direct criticism. I've heard a lot of accusations from that side that we put down teachers, but I have not heard our people put down teachers. In other words, as long as it's in your political interest to keep generating that, I don't think you are really interested and sincere about trying to encourage people to come into education.

MS. A. HAGEN: The minister notes awareness and some effort to open up teaching positions through early retirement, but I don't hear any response that says there is any long-term plan in the ministry working with the schools of education to prepare for those shortages. If the minister is aware, one of the things I would like to hear him comment about is the way that awareness is going to be translated into action.

Let me comment about the issue of attracting teachers into the profession. I want to focus on this very specifically, Mr. Minister. There are a number of comments that we could share across the floor today about the difficulties that people have in a system which has been undervalued and, to some extent, under attack over the last number of years. Instead, I want to focus my comments on a very specific issue that I think will be very important to your ministry and to the future of education in the province within the next short time, and that is keeping people teaching in British Columbia.

One of the reasons for that is that the shortages we're talking about will not occur only in this province. They will occur in other parts of the country and on this continent. We already know that people are prepared to move — not only to another province but to another country — in order to be able to work in the teaching profession. When we look at the salary scales that teachers receive in British Columbia, we know that those salary scales are now at the very bottom of the range at the higher levels in this province.

That means you are going to be faced with teachers being drawn to other provinces or, perhaps, to the United States because the remuneration they are going to receive for their skill and training — which we have paid for as taxpayers of this province — is better recognized and acknowledged through their working conditions. One of the best examples of working conditions is the salary we pay. I am not making a political statement here; I am making a statement of fact. The salaries that teachers are receiving in British Columbia are now significantly lower than in the other jurisdictions of Canada. People look at that, and that's going to be one of the problems that you face.

Let me ask two questions specifically. Give me some indication that, in addition to awareness, there is an action plan to prepare for a teacher shortage. Please discuss the matter of working conditions, particularly salaries, and how we will attract teachers to stay in this province when there is such competition across the nation and the continent for teachers in short supply.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I tried to indicate to the member that we have been looking at long-term planning, and we have been trying to create an awareness about where there are going to be shortages, so that there will be jobs for teachers who wish to go into teacher training and to encourage people to go into teacher training, and that it is worthwhile. The member is saying the poor teachers are underpaid and are the lowest paid in Canada. As long as you try to perpetuate that myth, you're no help. Maybe you see that as correct. You say we're the lowest in Canada. We are not. If I push that, somebody says we're the lowest "except for." I've suggested that we're about the middle of the pack.

Teaching is underpaid. You mentioned that people are going to leave for the United States. Right now, I believe the average teacher's salary in the United States is about the equivalent of $30,000 Canadian per year. The average salary in British Columbia is about $40,000 per year. It's a fairly short year in terms of days that you have to show up at work. It has many advantages. All the medical premiums are paid. All the benefits are paid on top of that. Seven percent is deducted from their salaries to go into a very good pension plan. The taxpayers — government — puts another 10.5 percent into that pension plan. When you add it all up, that teacher is getting benefits in a year of over $45,000.

You say they're not being well paid. Compared to what? Compared to the highest salaries that you can find across

[ Page 4452 ]

Canada? You can find some. No matter where you go, you'll find higher salaries. The fact that I mentioned $40,000 or $45,000 as the average benefits package to teachers in this province means that some people are below it and some people are above it. That's how averages are determined.

I can tell you, for instance, that in the areas where there may be a teacher shortage, such as the northern areas and in specialized areas, particularly at the secondary level, there is now a program through Northern Lights College at SFU where yes, we had to fight for getting an off-campus program to train teachers. Those teachers are training now on the theory that people from the area who have a university degree and can take teacher training, or can get the combination and their teaching certificate in the area, are likely, because they come from the area, to stay in the area. So far, the indicators are that it has been very successful. There may be other programs of that type that we have to do.

If the member is simply negotiating for higher teacher salaries, we leave that to the boards. I do believe that the marketplace, in effect, does enter into it. The market will determine what we need to pay to keep teachers in the business and to attract them from other provinces. I don't think we need to attract teachers from other provinces. With a little bit of encouragement, we've got all kinds of people here who would teach; the benefits aren't that bad, and certainly the rewards and the satisfaction are far greater and far better than many people would.... It's that image that people support by seeing themselves as critics doesn't help.

MS. A. HAGEN: The minister twists my words. I am not talking about whether teachers are well paid; I'm talking about a competitive marketplace, and I think the minister knows full well that the competitive marketplace, as far a B.C. is concerned, is not good. We know from the kind of funding....

HON. MR. BRUMMET: It's not good in your mind; in the rest of the world it is.

MS. A. HAGEN: Well, Mr. Minister, we know that the northern areas are having difficulty getting teachers; we know that the competition from the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, in terms of benefits paid, is very attractive; we know the range of salaries that teachers can earn across the country in comparison to B.C. I'm simply quoting the facts to you, and you're fully aware of them. I think it will be a problem that you're going to have to address.

We will differ on that, not on the fact that teaching is an attractive profession. It's my profession, as it is yours. I think it is a very attractive profession, but let's recognize that it is a challenging one and that we need to pay in the competitive marketplace, whether we're talking about the public school system or the post-secondary system. When the government really acknowledges the importance of that system and funds accordingly, then I think we will be in a position to deal with the issue I have just raised.

I want to move on to another issue at this point, which is the minister's perspective on the role of women in administration in the schools of the province. The minister, as the policy-setter, if you like, and the leader in setting some of the goals that a system should have, should have some views on this matter.

First of all, I'd like to ask the minister what position he takes within his own ministry on the advancement of women into positions of administrative responsibility, and if he can advise me what the record is within his own ministry of women in positions of administration.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I'm sorry, I can't give the member the numbers, because most of our people are in some form of administration. I think my views are: fully equal opportunity.

MS. A. HAGEN: Mr. Minister, within the public school system, there are 30 of the 75 school districts which do not have one single woman in a position of principalship and 40 districts that do not have one single woman in a position of vice-principalship. In fact, I think if I went back to my own elementary school days, the records might very well have been better than they are today. I recognize that it's not a responsibility that is totally yours. But the government in Ontario, for one, has taken some initiative to encourage the promotion of women into positions of administration through funding initiatives and active encouragement. What's your position on that, and what are you prepared to do about it?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I'm sorry, I thought I had indicated to the member that I believe in equal opportunity. I guess that if we're looking at how many people are in these positions, I would have to make some sort of observation on how many women apply for these positions as compared to men. The one area in this province that has been equal, I guess, is teachers; men and women get equal pay. I would assume there's equal opportunity there as well, and I believe in that. I don't think I ever considered whether a person was a man or woman for a position, in my own thinking, above what their qualifications were.

MS. A. HAGEN: Mr. Chairman, is the minister prepared to take any kind of affirmative action program through leadership from his ministry to encourage women into positions of administration within the province?

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I guess I would have to say I'm not prepared to force the issue. I would like to provide every opportunity, on the basis of ability and qualification, for people to have those positions.

[5:30]

MS. A. HAGEN: I would just note, Mr. Chairman, that I consider that not a position of leadership, and I'm disappointed in the minister's answer. Equal opportunity is indeed something that very often needs to be manifested at various times with action. I would have been much more pleased if I had heard the minister indicate that that was something he would be prepared at least to consider as a course of action where he could show leadership.

I'd like to spend some more time just noting some of the discouraging figures that we find in many school districts; but instead, I am going to move on to some local issues for a brief moment. There have been some very important changes in the method of funding programs or services within the school districts this year — measures that are putting onto the shoulders of school boards additional costs that they didn't have to bear in the previous kind of cost-sharing that existed. They include some of the capital sharing, which I understand has gone from 75-25, in some areas of capital funding, to 50-50; in continuing education, which was not shareable but

[ Page 4453 ]

was a grant, and which has now moved into a shareable formula of 50-50.

The one that I particularly want to ask the minister to comment about today is the field of special education. When special education was captured in a particular function of the fiscal formula, the minister of the day indicated that special education would be funded up to the level of need within the district. It is my understanding that special education has now been capped for 1988-89 at an arbitrary level set by the ministry. The very concrete problem that that gives rise to in my own district is that in New Westminster — School District 40 — they have already identified and are serving at considerable cost more special needs children than will be funded under this capped special education formula, which goes into effect, as I understand it, in the next school year.

With the mainstreaming of students into the school system, a number of whom require full-time interveners, where there are also limits on the dollars that come through Social Services and Housing, the expanded burden on local taxpayers for special needs students — one of several causes of the expanded burden on local taxpayers — will be considerable.

I'd like the minister to explain to me what has happened with the commitment to fund special education up to the level of the needs of the children who are identified within the system, and how he has come to some decision about the arbitrary cap that I understand has been imposed on special education funding effective next school year.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: Statistics have shown across the province that approximately 3 percent of the students in the province require the special education assistance. Therefore we have said that in those areas we are providing 3 percent above the funding for special education. The member sees it as a limit. We have said we've added up to 3 percent.

In addition, the multiply-handicapped or special programs that don't fit into that normal special education category are not included in the 3 percent cap. It's an attempt at a rational system that says that on the average each district should be able, with 3 percent additional funding, to handle the special education programs. Districts say that it's not enough. If we find that the statistics change, then perhaps we should amend that. But we can't go and say.... Just as soon as you can label that many more students as special, your funding goes up. I think you can see the potential there.

Time and again, each district that wants more money will say: "This does not meet our needs; we have more special education pupils than that." Maybe in some cases it's true. If they are in special education, what's wrong with taking the regular funding of $4,000 per pupil and moving it over there and just using the special education? In other words, they want to count them in both places and get additional funding. There's nothing to stop a school board from varying money. We just say that for finding purposes, we will give them 3 percent above it for special education.

MS. A. HAGEN: That's the problem with averages. If you look at my school district, which is a school district that is a very easy district for families with handicapped children to live in because so many of the services that they need — health services, social and recreation support services — are near at hand, the proportion of students that we have is well above that average, and that is because people choose that district for that reason.

I want to ask if the minister is prepared to make a commitment to me to deal with this issue in relation to my school district if we find that that average is clearly not dealing with the reality of special needs within the school district's component of students.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I can certainly make a commitment to that member to discuss it with the district and to have my staff look at it, but if the member is trying to get me to make a commitment that a they have to do is ask and we will give them more money, I can't say that. I can guarantee you that if we said, "There is absolutely no limit; we'll fund the regular program and then we will give any amount at the district's request for special education," averages would change dramatically. There would be no averages; everybody would have more.

Interjection.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I did indicate to the member that if they are multiply handicapped, they don't fit under that. Another fund picks those up. There are quite a few opportunities, and I have people on my staff that can deal with the school board and say: "Which categories do these pupils fit into?" But to just lift the lid.... We did in 1985. We lifted the lid on supplementary spending, and it has hit the roof.

MR. LOVICK: I'm sure that over the last number of days, Mr. Minister, most of the important issues have been canvassed. I'm certainly not going to try to reintroduce a number of those things that we've already dealt with. Instead, I want to focus on a specific issue that was generated for me in my own constituency; but a little preliminary investigation tells me that it is not unique to my constituency. I'm referring to the issue of French immersion programs, and what appears to be a building crisis. I don't want to sound alarmist about this, but there's certainly a crisis or a major concern, not only in my constituency but in some others, as I say.

The minister and I have shared some correspondence on this matter. Simply to refresh your memory, Mr. Minister, if I might, I would just remind you that I sent you a copy of a letter from a constituent of mine, who is the president of Parents for French in my community, to the local press, talking about the predicament parents found themselves in. The basic contention of that letter, as you'll probably recall, is that governments, both federal and provincial it would seem, have given all kinds of encouragement to French immersion programs and to promoting bilingualism among our students. I commend the ministry for that and the government for that — both levels of government — because indeed that's desirable. I'm sure the minister shares that view with me.

The parents in my community, though — and, for that matter, the school board members as well; and I've spoken with them too — are caught in a kind of curious predicament. Although on the one hand they are being given encouragement to launch these programs, their problem is that because of the nature of district schools versus neighbourhood schools, if there is sufficient demand for the programs, this puts pressure on the schools that don't have sufficient space to accommodate the requests, which in turn puts pressure on neighbourhood schools to take in students.... No, I'm sorry; I'm probably mixing this up; it's complicated stuff, as I'm sure the minister well knows.

[ Page 4454 ]

Let me put it in rather blunt terms. The predicament is that because of the insufficient space to accommodate the demand for the French immersion program, there is perceived by certain parents to be a threat to their neighbourhood schools by students from the French immersion program. It's causing discord. It's pitting parent against parent, unfortunately — the French versus the English stream, and all of that stuff. Certainly nobody desires that. Certainly that's what we're trying to put an end to. The predicament, though, from the perspective of the ministry — and again I have a letter from the minister to me explaining that — is that though indeed we encourage, it is left to the local boards, of course, to accommodate the demand for the French immersion programs. As I say, there is a shortage of space which in turn produces this crisis where parents are saying: "It's because of French immersion that we don't have sufficient space in my school."

I'm not stating that as clearly as I would wish, Mr. Minister, partly because I wanted to be very brief. But I'm wondering if you might be able to respond to what I've said thus far, at least. Or I can go on.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I'm sure the member could go on and on and on. However, to try and answer the question as briefly as possible, yes, we encourage the French immersion. We don't push it or force it, because at the local level school boards should be in the position to make the decision of what the demand is in that district, rather than having us try to specify a demand. Yes, the school boards do this, and they have to allocate the space.

I am a little puzzled by the talk of closing some schools in Nanaimo. The member mentions that there is a shortage of space, and I would suspect, if I try to be reasonable about this, that it's a rationalization of where the space should be. School districts are funded for French immersion on the same basis as for any other student, and that seems ultimately fair. If we try to put the French immersion program with three kids here, you really have to boost up a class somewhere else. As in many districts, they try to bring them together for a while until it grows, and then they try to sort them into various ways.

[5:45]

[Mr. Pelton in the chair.]

There are some dual-track schools in some districts; there are some where French immersion is off in a school by itself. If there is pressure for space availability, if more pupils are going into French immersion, I have to assume that they are coming out of the other classrooms, so it's again a matter of rationalizing classrooms and total pupils.

I know that we get assistance from the federal government for introduction, materials, initiating programs and some of those expenses. After that, as soon as that initial little pot ... we keep asking them for more money for maintenance and that sort of thing. Once that has happened, they give us the same answer we give the school boards: "You can't have any more. You got that, now fit it under the regular program."

MR. LOVICK: I thank the minister for his answer. Certainly that's a clearer answer than was the question, and I apologize for that.

I've just been digging through some notes. My understanding is that the provincial Ministry of Education, when it allocates classroom space, does not recognize students who attend the school from other than that school's catchment area. Most French immersion students attend schools away from their own catchment area. These students exist in a void, it seems, as far as the ministry is concerned.

My school board people tell me that they really require some capital funding for district schools and that there is no funding for district schools; rather, the so-called rationalization has to deal with neighbourhood schools. That's the predicament they get into, I understand. The problem is just that we are apparently trying to promote all these good things called understanding and different languages, but we can't accommodate a French immersion program in a single school, because we don't have capital funding for a district school. Then obviously there is a spillover directly affecting the neighbourhood schools. That makes parents believe that their children are not getting a fair deal because of the competition from the French-speaking students. In other words, we're creating something that looks very much like a crisis of cultures — a clash of cultures or some such thing — which is, ironically enough, precisely what the program was designed to prevent. I'm wondering if that clarifies matters. Perhaps the minister could respond to that contention.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: We fund on the basis of pupils. That's what forms the base — the total number of pupils. Whether school districts put them in two, three or four schools, we give them that much per pupil, in effect, or allow that much in the fiscal framework. So there is nothing to stop a district from shuffling kids around so that they can designate one of the schools as a district school. As a matter of fact, that is done.

Some districts have achieved that by — where there have been declining enrolments in one neighbourhood — putting the French immersion into that. I know one district where one school has become entirely French immersion. It has, in effect, become the district ecole, instead of the regular school. So it is quite possible for them to call any school a district school and funnel and arrange as they see fit between themselves and their professional staff. If the member is asking if we fund the regular schools on the basis of numbers of pupils and then add one per district, the answer has to be no.

MR. WILLIAMS: At this hour, Mr. Chairman, I'm not sure I feel as keenly as I did earlier about opening up this area that I want to discuss, but I will.

It seems to me that when one reflects on the overall educational system we have, the dividends are fairly significant in some elements of it. I tend to think we get our money's worth or our talent's worth out of the elementary system. I think we do the same in the advanced education levels, other than some questions I might have in that area. I have real trouble with the area in between in terms of the high school. I don't think you address it enough. I don't think any of us address that question enough. It's a difficult time for children or young people. It's a time of sexual awakening, and that's a factor and a reality. I think the high school works for a minority, but only a minority unfortunately. I think it desperately deserves some review.

I think it works for the highly academic group that is in that stream. They have made up their minds that that's what they want to do. I think the alternate schools work quite well too for the kids that want that system and need it. I think it

[ Page 4455 ]

works in some specialized way for specialized students. For a very significant element out there, it is obviously not working. Kids are voting with their feet. They are abandoning the damn system. That is the stark reality of it.

I happen to think they're probably right to do so in all too many cases, I'm afraid. What are the numbers? You don't seem to have the numbers. Is it 25? Is it 30? Is it 40 percent of the kids in that age group. It's extremely high, whatever the number is. It's a shocker that you don't track it carefully, really carefully in a broader sense outside of the educational system in terms of young people generally. But they are disturbing numbers, whatever they are.

I think they are high for a lot of good reasons. I think kids are sophisticated in many ways, far more so than when you went to school and when I went to school or any of the rest of us went to school. I don't know that the schools are that sophisticated in the end, in terms of what their offerings are. I think that the kids — too many of them at the high school level — see this as a kind of a curiously irrelevant anachronism in their world. It's boring. That's what the kids say. And damn it, they're right. It is all too frequently deadly, deadly boring, and they vote with their feet. They get out of the system.

That's especially true in my neighbourhood on the east side. Track that stuff on the east side of the city in terms of those kids abandoning the ship. There's a range of reasons for this. I think the teachers are part of the problem and part of the opportunity. When I went to high school — I'll separate myself from the current generation — there was a small handful that fed the spark of talent that was there in kids. It was a minority, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid the curriculum is getting worse and worse and worse, because you add more junk to it. There's so much pap. You've talked about propaganda, Mr. Minister. from the teachers. Others have talked about propaganda from industry and the chamber of commerce, and it's true. You are getting fed that propaganda, and it's useless stuff. The kids are right to walk away from it, whether it's from the teachers, the Fraser Institute or the chamber of commerce. You add to that with the kind of dumb pablum you throw into the system all too frequently — like the Pacific Rim studies. I really find a lot of this stuff that is dumped into the system quite inadequate.

Worst of all is the unwritten curriculum that I suspect is there in the system. There is a heavy unwritten-agenda curriculum, within the high schools especially, that I don't think is acceptable. What it really is, when you get right down to it, is accepting the status quo — that's what a lot of it is all about — accepting order, accepting discipline, accepting timetables, accepting authority — being submissive to a very great extent. That may have appeal for the second member for Richmond (Mr. Loenen), but it doesn't have appeal to me, and it doesn't have appeal to a lot of the kids out there who are abandoning that ship.

It's a system that by and large has been preparing kids for a corporate world that no longer exists. They're to be the product for regular assembly-line jobs, and they are not there anymore. In B.C., youth unemployment is incredibly high. Young people know that. The corporations don't offer jobs to the kids as they used to in this system, so why should they become the old end product for corporations that don't want them anymore? So they are kind of right to rebel and vote the way they do — with their feet.

I think bigness is a serious problem in the system too, Mr. Minister. Just plain bigness. I don't buy the arguments that if we are bigger and bigger and bigger, we can provide more interesting programs and all that stuff. I think that's hokum. Bigness in almost anything in our society has a negative, costly side to it, and I think that's true in the high schools especially, where they've got bigger. I can't help but think that it creates an anonymity within the school that's a danger and a problem, and I think that the new social problems that are evolving are tied to that bigness, be it youth gangs or whatever, in that city of ours.

The reality of today is that more and more kids, in the end, are going to have to create their own job. Then the question is: how do we get them to the point where they are that independent, capable and creative to work at establishing their own jobs out there in the system that isn't providing it for them? That's a huge challenge.

I'm not convinced that, in that age category, high school is necessarily the place for a lot of the kids. I'm not convinced about that at all. We need some realignment, and we really need some monitoring of those kids in that age group, but we have to have a wide variety of opportunities for them outside the teacher establishment and outside the institutional establishment of the system, if we're really going to be relevant and meaningful for a growing sector of that age of our kids. I'm saying that I think there are all kinds of potential teachers out there outside the institutional system, be they garage mechanics, computer programmers, artists, rock and roll musicians or whatever.

All too often the system is simply a blender that is dealing with all kinds of pieces and conflicts that are real, but the blender mixes them up to a point of blandness. That's what the school system, all too often, is about. Our challenge is to get away from the blandness.

I was going to say a few more things, but I see the hour is coming nigh.

It's a tremendous. serious, frightening concern that we should have. All too many of our young people are not being well served by the middle part of this educational system of ours. I'm not at all sure that we're really willing to come to grips with it and face the difficult pieces that are really there for us to see if we look at what's happening in that system currently.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: I can be very brief on this. I tend to agree with many of the things that the member has said. I really think the curriculum, the timetable, the structure, the program — that the textbook becomes the course regardless of what pupils show us and that sort of thing. The only thing that I've been trying to do through what I call positive reinforcement is to try, whenever people show a variation or initiative or something of that nature, to commend that and say: "Hey, that's great. You've got a lot more freedom than you think you have. You're not locked in by an eight-to-five timetable. You really have a lot of freedom if you'll take it."

I think that member and any one of us here can agree. How many teachers do you remember from your own experience in secondary school? They stand out for some particular reason — because they attracted your attention, they interested you, they did something to stimulate people. Unfortunately, we do end up with structure above everything far too much, the lowest common denominator, because that's the only one that we can work with. We want a common denominator.

I guess if anything I could say I thank you for your very good support of our submission to the royal commission. I

[ Page 4456 ]

hope you did put one in yourself, and if you and I end up out of here at some point, maybe we'll set up a consulting firm to really open up secondary education.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Shall vote 23 pass?

Interjections.

HON. MR. BRUMMET: It would appear that we are not concluding my estimates today, so I would like to move this committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.

The House resumed; Mr. Speaker in the chair.

The committee, having reported, progress, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. Mr. Veitch moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

The House adjourned at 6:01 p.m.