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HALIFAX, WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2008
MR. CHAIRMAN: Good afternoon. I welcome back the Minister of Environment, staff and all members of the Legislature. We will reconvene now with the member of the Liberal caucus for 13 minutes.
The honourable member for Preston.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm going to ask the minister today some questions on biosolids. I was wondering if the minister is aware that the Halifax Regional Municipality is in the process of trying to promote biosolids, in other words, the waste from their sewage treatment plant, as a fertilizer to be applied to land to improve, or supposedly be able to sell that product and make some money from it. I think the name they looked at - I don't know if this is going to be the case - is Enviro Soil, and supposedly made from sewage sludge and concrete dust and some other materials. Is the minister aware of that?
HON. MARK PARENT: Yes, thank you. Yes, I have had meetings, staff have had meetings, quite extensive meetings, but I recently had a meeting with our biosolid expert in the department, Mike Langman, and the Minister of Agriculture and his staff to discuss the issue. The Minister of Agriculture of course has an interest not only as Minister of Agriculture because you mentioned, quite rightly, its use in fertilizer but also because the company that processes it, that treats it, is in his riding.
MR. COLWELL: Does the department have any concerns about using the sewage sludge and it being promoted as fertilizer?
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MR. PARENT: The department has set up an advisory committee on biosolids, as you know, as a result of concerns in the Cutten farm up in the Old Barns area, and have been meeting. It's a highly regulated activity, through the department's activity designation approvals and through the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
We do note that the plan that HRM is looking at is a proven method and has been in operation in Upper Canada, in Ontario, for about 10 years now.
MR. COLWELL: It's very similar to one that is in operation now, you say?
MR. PARENT: It's very similar to the methodology or the method they use is very similar to what they've been using in Ontario for about 10 years. I don't know if it's the same company.
MR. COLWELL: Have there been any studies done as a result of that activity? Any time that you use chemicals, as you are well aware, any change at all in the chemical composition of something, all of a sudden changes things dramatically, not just a little bit.
If we compare it with Ontario, will it be exactly the same product or will it be slightly different?
MR. PARENT: We've been approached by HRM for it to be considered as a fertilizer and if they meet all the various qualifications, that designation will be given to them. I have asked about the difference between biosolids and manure and if there's any difference and the answers I get back are, there's not a lot of difference, there are heavy metals, more heavy metals in human biosolids. But I'm not sure if we've received the application already we but we are aware that HRM has a lot of this material and wants it to be approved as fertilizer that could be used by farmers.
Farmers are approaching HRM, I guess, because of the cost of fertilizer, with the high cost of oil, and trying to find all sorts of ways to bring their costs down. However, the dairy farmers are quite concerned about it simply because they're worried even if it's proven safe, will there be some sort of stigma placed on the use on their farms.
I had one farmer approach me concerned that a bank had asked his family if they had ever used biosolids and gave the message that if they had, that the bank wouldn't consider their farm for collateral. I investigated that and that doesn't seem to be the case but even in the farming community there's a lot of people who want to use it because it's less than half the price, I think about one-quarter of the price, but the dairy farmers in particular are concerned about any stigma attached to it.
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[4:15 p.m.]
It needs to be approved as a fertilizer, I'm not sure that has happened yet. I know they will be approaching us and we've had a committee looking at it for quite a while, as a result of what happened, really, up in Old Barns.
MR. COLWELL: Yes, the activities in Old Barns are, to say the least, not acceptable, or they hadn't been acceptable for some time.
The other thing is, as soon as you start talking about fertilizer from sludge, from a sewer system, a municipal sewer system which gets everything dumped down the drain and down the toilet, I would think there would be no consistency because someone could dump some chemicals down this week and next week there's something else down, and something else the next week. How would you ever police this? As soon as you start looking at that, the possibility of doing that, you may not find that these problems are evident for many, many years.
I mean 30 years ago nobody thought they would get sick from smoking and look at the scientific facts on that now. So many people have cancer and there are so many new cancers and other diseases that are triggered by something as we move forward. If this is approved and happens to get in our food supply, you'll never get it out if there's a major problem.
Then you just have to look at the mad cow disease that has happened and how supposedly simply that got started and look at the devastation that it has been on Canada. Basically it stopped shipping beef into the U.S. for a long, long time and almost destroyed the beef industry in Canada, something that didn't start here. So if you look at that and if you look at milk production and vegetable production, even apples or anything that they may use this material on, it's pretty risky business, in my opinion. Now I'm not an expert on this, I'm not proposing to be, but it just seems like it's really dangerous and scary possibilities that are connected with this that could cause a lot of problems.
I know your staff are very diligent but this is one thing that I would have to question even considering it, even if there was something in Ontario in place, until it's about 25 or 30 years old, to see if there has been any kind of problem from it. Then I'd want to know for sure that the same product that you may be considering in Nova Scotia is exactly the same product as is being used in Ontario, which I would doubt it is, because of the possibilities of different chemicals at different times in the product.
You can do a lot of testing but if you're not testing for the right thing, you may not find it. I know the chemical analyses on these things are very complex and if you're looking for certain things, you can measure those but if it happens that there is something in there that you're not aware of and you don't look for it, you won't find it, and then you have a real serious problem. How concerned is the department over this?
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MR. PARENT: Just to correct you, the designation of fertilizer would be by the CFIA - the Canadian Food Inspection Agency - but we have established a biosolids committee that includes Clean Nova Scotia, the Federation of Agriculture, the forestry industry, the Truro Concerned Citizens that arose out of the concern over the Cutten farms, the municipal wastewater managers and that committee has included university scientists with expertise in biosolids, from the National Research Council and they've identified eight areas of broad concern. One is, what is the actual role of the Environment Department versus the CFIA.
The second one, you'll be pleased to hear, is the need for enhanced analysis of biosolids for contaminants, prior to anything going forward. So I think, to sum it up, there certainly is concern and a lot of work being done. There's also a recognition of the call for farmers for less expensive forms of fertilizer and the need for HRM that has, what - I don't know how many tons of this materials on site - 8,000 to 12,000 dry tons is what they're going to have annually. So cautiously moving forward but no final decision has been made that I am aware of.
MR. COLWELL: I'm just concerned about the whole thing because there are so many unknowns. If there were no unknowns in it and this was something that had been used for 100 years and there had been no proven problems with it, we may even want to consider it. But just because HRM has a problem doesn't mean we should create a long-term health problem. Just because farmers want cheap fertilizer, we shouldn't create a long-term health problem, and that's really what we're talking about.
As you know, our health costs in this province are skyrocketing and never mind the cost, it's the pain and suffering from the individuals who have gone through it, and I know you personally experienced that in your family, as probably everybody in this room has at one time or another.
So it's a really serious concern that we even have to consider this. There must be another use for this material that would keep it out of the food chain, there has to be. It's like when you were burning tires, it was a poor solution at that time and hopefully the department, with the industry groups, will find a solution for that and I'm very confident that you will, but there has to be some other way to do this.
Has anything else been looked at, or have they just decided they are going try to dump it on the ground?
MR. PARENT: Well the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment is looking at this nationally, in terms of risk management of this material because more and more calls for land application are being received across the country. The two leads on that are British Columbia and ourselves. So as I said, our committee has been meeting with both extensive provincial involvement and federal involvement and they've identified some key issues which many of you have touched on right now - what's the role of the provincial
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regulator versus the CFIA, the need for analysis of contaminants, the need for other land applications besides agriculture.
Maybe it might be suitable, for example, on turf farms or golf courses but not suitable on agriculture. The need to see if there's cross-contamination as a result of biosolids with other wastes, is there some interaction that is harmful? Consistency with regulations, clear definitions of what biosolids are when you talk about sludge, so clear definitions. Then, of course, the most important one, the need for more study about the potential health risks of biosolids. So all those sorts of things are going forward and when I say they're going forward, the study is being done but there is no final decision until all those studies are done and the most important one, of course, is the health risks.
MR. COLWELL: And I go back again to things like asbestos. When asbestos was found, it was a fantastic thing, had great heat resistance and everything else and they found out that asbestos is probably one of the most dangerous things we can have for our health, and it looks so inert when you deal with it.
It is the unknown that makes me nervous about something like this. I'm pretty progressive on a lot of things but when you talk about different chemical concoctions that can come out of this, that makes me even more nervous. You have no control over what's going in, so you really don't have any control over what is coming out. If it was a controlled environment, that you knew for sure that it was only certain elements that were going into this to create this sludge, then maybe you could do something with it and be confident on a regular basis.
But when it has been admitted that there has been a problem with dumping chemicals in the sewer system, there's all kinds of things that run off the roads because here the sewer system is tied into the storm drain system in Halifax and Dartmouth. That causes a problem. There are anti-freezes going in there in wintertime and all kinds of oils and other contaminants, and it has already been proven that oils on your hand - used oil can cause cancer, and all kinds of other things . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: Excuse me. The time allotted for the Liberal caucus has expired. Are there any further questions for the Department of Environment's estimates?
Hearing none, I'll recognize the minister to close debate on his estimates.
MR. PARENT: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and thank you to my critics. I apologize if I was a bit testy yesterday to anyone.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Shall Resolution E7 stand?
Resolution E7 stands.
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On behalf of all the committee members we wish to thank the honourable minister and his staff for their co-operation and information they provided.
That concludes debate on the estimates for the Department of Environment. At this particular time I would like to begin the estimates on the Department of Labour and Workforce Development.
Resolution E14 - Resolved, that a sum not exceeding $62,443,000 be granted to the Lieutenant Governor to defray expenses in respect of the Department of Labour and Workforce Development.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Welcome to any new staff that have just recently visited us and we are now ready to start the resolutions on Estimates and Crown Corporation Business Plans for fiscal year April 1, 2008 - March 31, 2009.
The honourable Minister of Labour and Workforce Development.
HON. MARK PARENT: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I thank the committee members, I apologize if there was any mixup in the order of the departments. It has been difficult, as we moved into departments, getting all of the information, and the business plans in place. Certainly I know it must be hard for the critics, it has been hard enough for us, so I appreciate the tolerance that has been shown to me.
Mr. Chairman, in the past week or so I have been asked on several occasions why we've divided the departments, the former Department of Environment and Labour. Some people have suggested that it wasn't working and that's not the case at all, in fact the Department of Environment and Labour had an interesting synergy so it wasn't because it wasn't working. The reason was because two issues have risen to the top, as it were, in terms of concerns of both individuals and concerns for government and I know for Opposition Parties as well - I use government in the broad sense of all of us. Those two issues have been the environment and the demographic challenges that we face on the labour side.
[4:30 p.m.]
There's a strong desire in Nova Scotia and Canadians as a whole to meet the environmental challenges head on and to turn them into opportunities. In every poll I've seen, Mr. Chairman, Canadians rate the concern for the environment near the top of their concerns and they're willing to put resources into meeting them. But another challenge that is just as big is the demographic challenge that we're facing that puts a premium on all aspects of managing our workforce if we intend to have a healthy economy in the future. So the creation of new departments brings a fully dedicated infrastructure to both the environment and the labour files. Both of the new departments have been expanded with the Labour and Workforce Development Department being expanded even more than the
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Environment Department in order to cover the new challenges that have come our way as a government and as citizens of Nova Scotia.
So we've reacted to those challenges by trying to show some leadership and I'm pleased that when the Premier announced the new Department of Labour and Workforce Development in the Throne Speech that he noted the challenge that we had in retaining and retraining and recruiting skilled workers and that was vital to the new Nova Scotia. When the new department was announced many of the labour organizations that I work with told me that they were pleased to see this come to fruition.
I just had a meeting with my new deputy and I'd like to welcome the new deputy Margaret MacDonald, well respected not only in government but outside of government. The deputy and myself met with Robert Chisholm and Rick Clarke and had a good talk about possible synergies that they saw taking place between business corporations, labour and government with everyone understanding now that one had to have training as an essential part of doing business. So the creation of the Labour and Workforce Development Department positions us to make a key contribution to the goal that has been set before us. A fully integrated Labour and Workforce Development Department will better align the training and skills development with current and with future economic needs. At the same time it will continue to protect Nova Scotia's employment rates, health and safety, from youth to retirement, at work and at home.
So broadly speaking what we're saying is that we now have the mandate to bring capable people into the workforce and the mandate to ensure that their experience in the workforce makes them want to stay here. We want to ensure that every Nova Scotian's experience of the workplace is safe, fair, productive, that they have support and an avenue for recourse when things go wrong.
Mr. Chairman, this coming week actually is North American Occupational Health and Safety week and last week we marked the National Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured on the job. It was sad to note that 12 Nova Scotians lost their lives last year, the year before that was 24 and I mentioned I think last year how it made me realize that when soldiers lose their life in Afghanistan how we pause as a whole country to recognize that and yet in some ways we're a bit cavalier when people lose their lives in the workforce. I know that my honourable critics, in particular my critic from the NDP, has been a champion for occupational health and safety and raised these concerns throughout the various networks that she has.
Safety is the responsibility of every employer and employee in this province but our Occupational Health and Safety Division is responsible for enforcing our job safety laws. So this year funding for the Occupational Health and Safety Division will increase by about $250,000. Most of that money will go - in fact, all of that I think will go - for new activities for underground mining safety as the plans for the possible reopening of the Donkin coal mine continue to move forward. It will also support the development of new underground
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mining regulations and it will be spent on hiring qualified staff in this area as well as commissioning any expert engineering reports or studies required to ensure the safe commissioning of the mine. So this is a new challenge that we haven't faced for awhile, underground mining, undersea mining actually, and it's a challenge that we've had to put extra resources to. It's hard to disentangle the budgets of the two departments, this is one area that we have added $250,000 to in order to help fulfill our responsibilities if the Donkin mine goes ahead as I know my colleague from that area would very much like to see it happen.
The other large addition to our budget is the addition of the Skills and Learning branch which was formerly with the Department of Education. It's dedicated to ensuring that we have the workforce we need for a successful economy. I passed out little yellow stress hats earlier with the new logo on it from the Skills and Learning branch. Someone stole mine, I was going to put one here just for you but they were so popular that someone stole mine. The Skills and Learning collaborates with partners across the province to develop and implement policy programs and services that help Nova Scotians connect with the labour force and to create a province of lifelong learners and a world class labour force. Skills and Learning coordinates the implementation and integration of the Skills Nova Scotia framework and the government's corporate strategy to address the labour market issues that influence productivity, increased skill demands and changing demographics.
The branch is structured into four divisions; adult education, apprenticeship training and skill development, labour market partnerships; and the Labour Market Development Secretariat. The adult education branch of Skills and Learning offers adult Nova Scotians tuition-free programs that help them improve their literacy skills and the Nova Scotia School for Adult Learning that's under that division has helped thousands of adults graduate with their high school diplomas at about 150 sites across the province.
The apprenticeship training and skill development division ensures that the training offered through education and training institutions and industry is of the very highest quality and focuses on our current and also on our future economic needs.
The labour market partnerships division acts as a catalyst for strategic investment in the skills development of the labour force. It identifies opportunities and challenges and develops appropriate strategies and partnerships with government, business and communities to meet those challenges and to take advantage of those opportunities. That division also creates resources for Nova Scotians to research careers and you all have received as MLAs a very detailed book on career options in the future. It always makes interesting reading and it delivers retention and recruitment programs such as Opportunities Nova Scotia.
The Labour Market Development Secretariat, the fourth division within Skills and Learning, provides policy support and coordination to the Canada-Nova Scotia Skills Learning Framework, a partnership that supports skills and learning initiatives for Nova Scotians. In addition to the work that's done in the Skills and Learning branch, setting and maintaining standards of fairness is at the core of supporting Nova Scotians at work. So our
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Labour Standards division ensures Nova Scotians have the benefit of our labour code on such matters as minimum wage benefits, hours of work and working conditions. Just as an aside, I was very pleased that this year I'd asked the committee to take a look at a three-year plan for minimum wage and to try and then tie it to some sort of objective standard. They came back with agreement from employers and employees for three and a half year to getting it to what is known as the low-income cut-off and then pegging it to the cost of living. I've had some push-back but by and large it has been interesting, the acceptance across Nova Scotia of the minimum wage.
So our Labour Standards Division works at that, it works at hours of work, working conditions on behalf of non-unionized employees. Our Labour Services Division supports a number of key labour related tribunals and boards and provides a highly successful conciliation service. Our conciliators in this province, although few, are second to none and are rather unique creatures. I talked to one up in Ontario once and they'll work around the clock for 24 hours in very stressful situations. When they're successful, this fellow from Ontario told me, everyone forgets that they're there and they celebrate together. When they're not successful, the headline is the conciliator failed to get consensus, so we're well served with highly successful conciliators.
Our Public Safety Division within the department is responsible for a variety of safety concerns including the Nova Scotia Building Code, the Office of the Fire Marshal, amusement devices, construction, cranes, electrical installations, elevators - Mr. Chairman, I noticed that there wasn't a proper sticker in the elevator in the Centennial Building where offices are and that has now been fixed, the paperwork hadn't been done so that has been taken care of - steam boilers, and pressure vessels. If we have time we might get into a discussion on fire services because there are challenges to our volunteer fire department due to demographic challenges and the increased need for training. I may be asked about that and would be happy to entertain dialogue about that.
Our Pension Regulation Division which administers and enforces the Pension Benefits Act which covers private sector and municipal government plans that have members in Nova Scotia is a division that is a small division but increasingly it has become one that has taken a lot of time. Its functions include reviewing filings from plan administrators, in particular to ensure that plans are properly funded if an investigating member complains. This division is dedicated to protecting the interest of plan members and we've, in conjunction with many other jurisdictions across Canada, had a lot of calls on solvency, to relax solvency, to change pension requirements and we finally, after having agreements with Acadia University and an agreement with HRM and others, decided that we shouldn't be looking at these in a piecemeal fashion so I appointed a Pension Benefits Review Committee that will consult with stakeholders over the next year, make recommendations about how we can improve our legislative and regulatory framework.
I was hoping to do that in conjunction with New Brunswick, they were supposed to come in and pay $100,000 with our $100,000 but they're being cheapskates and they are
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wanting the work we've done for free. Nonetheless we're maybe doing the same thing in that the timing of our pension review committee is timed to take advantage of the work that Ontario is doing so we'll be taking their work for free. They've put about $1 million towards their pension review committee. The members of the committee are Bill Black, Chairman, Ron Pink, who is a labour lawyer, and Purdy Crawford. They have expertise and they'll be consulting over the next year and make recommendations about how we can improve our legislative and regulatory framework.
Our Alcohol and Gaming Division, as the name implies, is responsible for regulating those divisions in Nova Scotia that tend to get in the news now and then. In its function is a gaming regulator. This division will receive an additional $250,000 in funding this year as we respond to the disproportionate number of ticket lottery vendor inside wins found in B.C., Ontario and also in Atlantic Canada. Our government is committed to taking steps to ensure that Nova Scotians can have confidence in the integrity of ticket lottery systems. We want to address the issue comprehensively from a better regulation perspective, keeping in mind the comments that my Environment Critic from the New Democratic Party said, that regulations need to be done properly, they need to be in place but properly and not provide an onus that's not necessary. We will have consultation with retailers who sell tickets. The initiative will allow us to ensure player protection while at the same time being fair to retailers.
In addition we continue to be the lead department for a socioeconomic study of the impact of gambling in Nova Scotia which was commissioned as part of the province's gaming strategy, which when I was a backbencher I pushed for very strongly. It has only taken about seven years to come to fruition. Government, I found Mr. Chairman, moves very slowly, I thought church moved slowly, but government can move even more slowly. Anyway it is coming to fruition, we're excited about it, it should be completed this year and it will contribute valuable science to future government decisions on gaming.
We like to say in Labour and Workforce Development - and particularly when we were Environment and Labour - that we regulate everything from poop to porn. The environment side now is able to focus more specifically on environmental issues, on climate change and on the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, the labour and workforce development now inherits the label of having a wide range of activities under it all the way from pension benefits to fire services to skills and development training to labour standards. So a wide variety of activities but all centred around the theme of protecting the health and safety of Nova Scotians and of educating to compete which are two of the five broad themes that the government has stressed as their priorities.
[4:45 p.m.]
So with those introductory words - and I forgot to introduce Laurie Bennett last time and we welcome Laurie and as I said we're glad to have Margaret here. This was her first Estimates and I didn't realize it was Nancy's first Estimates because Bill Lahey always did
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it so I had to apologize to Nancy for being testy on her first Estimates. I shall be very relaxed and try and give you as straightforward answers as I can this time.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you for your opening comments. Questioning will begin and I want to turn the microphone over to the NDP caucus.
The honourable member for Halifax Needham.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the minister for his opening comments and I'd like to welcome the deputy and other members of the staff who are here from the department. I want to start first by saying that I'm delighted to be the NDP Critic for the Department of Labour and I'm delighted to see a new Department of Labour stand alone.
I've always been of the view frankly that the Department of Labour never is given the respect or the recognition it deserves as a department of government. I cannot think of any greater responsibility than the occupational health and safety of the working people who create a lot of the wealth and the prosperity of this province as well as all of the other forms of regulation that your department has responsibility for. I respect that and members of the NDP caucus certainly respect it and we're very pleased to see the government go back to a stand-alone Department of Labour and an enhanced Department of Labour with the Skills and Workforce piece which I think is very exciting, it is a progressive move in terms of the challenges that we have, in terms of building a modern day workforce that will be able to face the challenges of an increasingly competitive, unstable kind of labour market. So this is something that we really have high hopes for I guess and we want to ensure that the resources to carry out the important work of your department are in fact in place. It's always a bit of a challenge doing Budget Estimates, particularly when you have a new department coming out of the configuration we had last year. My colleague yesterday spoke to some of the challenges of figuring out how the numbers flow and I'll have a chance to talk to you about that.
I think the first thing I'd like to say to the minister is that in spite of my unbridled enthusiasm for the government's initiative to set up a stand-alone department and enhance it I was disappointed in the Minister of Finance's Budget Address because there was not one single syllable about the Department of Labour or about labour initiatives. I've read this Budget Address over and over again trying to see whether or not I was being unfair reflecting critically on that Budget Speech and I think every other department and initiative of government was mentioned but there was no mention in here of the new Department of Labour, the Workforce and Skills Development piece, that kind of stuff.
I was disappointed in that because I think again that speaks to the concern that I have that the Department of Labour never gets the recognition or the respect that it is not only entitled to but is absolutely critical given the importance and the heavy responsibility that your department bears for health and safety and all of those other things. So that is something
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I wanted to say and I don't think I'm wrong, I'll give the minister an opportunity to correct me and tell me where in this Budget Address his department actually appears that I could not find any mention anywhere.
MR. PARENT: Actually you are dead right. I've teased my deputy a bit because she was on Treasury and Policy Board which had a large part in writing the Budget Address. I know that she had talked with them originally and it was originally included in first draft, why it didn't appear in later drafts - because it's an exciting new initiative and we appreciate the emphasis that you're putting. We both have talked about it, Margaret and myself, and vowed that next year we'll have a very prominent place in the Budget Address. I think that sense of - when you perform well may be part of the reason - being taking for granted. I think the Skills and Learning branch also have sort of felt that as they've been coupled with Education that they go do their work quietly and well and are overshadowed by P-12 concerns and higher education so they're very happy to be part of the new Department of Labour and Workforce Development.
One of the first things I did was let the Speaker know whenever he referred to my department it had to be Labour and Workforce Development. But we do have a job to do in order to get the attention that we need. Part of that I think is coming as a result of the demographic challenges and the lack of skilled workers and the changing work conditions which helped be the genesis of this department. I think that too is starting to seep out beyond just academics and politicians like ourselves who are aware of those things in the general public. I think that will put a lot more highlight on the department, it will also put a lot more expectations.
I was up in Cape Breton and people came to me talking about loved ones working out in the oil patch and how it was destroying communities and we had to do something. So we know that as that realization of the demographic challenge comes that there will be more attention to us. We welcome that part but we also know there will be higher expectations. We welcome that part but we also know there will be higher expectations. We welcome that but we're also somewhat intimidated by it as well but we will rise to the challenge we hope and we have a lot of eager people doing that.
I guess I share your disappointment. We had it in there originally and final editing, when budgets come out at the tail end things are done in a great rush - original drafts - sorry we have no idea what's in the budget but we had mentioned it. But we will make sure next year and we will do best to make sure it's prominent.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Well you will have a lot of additional money to spend next year as well with the labour market agreements.
MR. PARENT: Well yeah we now have these little helmets which we never could afford before.
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MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: This is an opportunity for really members of the Legislature to examine as carefully as they can the choices that have been made for expenditures and the priorities that the government is setting in the various departments. It's one of the features of our responsible government that we've had for about 250 years that the appropriations of public money be examined in this way before a decision is made whether or not the people of the province should have trust in their government.
I'm going to ask as many questions as I can about the budget but I'm also going to ask other questions about policy that members of the public often bring to us about concerns they have around perhaps labour standards or whatever, pensions, decisions around pensions, so there will be a variety of questions. I know yesterday I was a little bit testy at times, I don't want anybody to take any offence from these questions, I'll try not to be testy in the way I put them.
MR. PARENT: I will reciprocate in the same manner.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: But the idea is to try to ask the questions that if a member of the public was here they would ask. They ask every day about are they getting value for dollar and where is public money being spent and is it being spent wisely and what the outcomes will be. So the first thing I want to ask is kind of a general question about the entire department's budget. When I look at the budget from last year for the labour part of the department it would appear that the global budget for last year was approximately $50 million and this year the department's budget is about $62 million and that has the skills piece in there. So that's a $12 million increase over last year yet when I go to the Department of Education budget for last year and I look at what the skills piece was in the Department of Education it was about $17.7 million. It would look to me as if there has been a loss of revenue somehow in perhaps the skills piece coming into the Department of Labour. So I'm trying to understand where the decreases are, there has to be some decrease in revenue some place. Am I wrong on that?
MR. PARENT: I do apologize and I do understand now your colleague's frustration a little bit with the environment because although it was clear to me having gone through briefings perhaps it wasn't as clear. There is no decrease, what has happened is that the budget items that you see there were for both E&L so you add on Skills and Development and then take out what's transferred over to Environment. There was a reduction of C-48 money of $2 million. So there's no reduction in our Labour budget. You can see if you have the budget context document maybe that would be helpful, it's the one page.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Is it in the business plan?
MR. PARENT: I think it's in the business plan, yes. If you look at that we see other divisions transferred to Environment down at the bottom, $16 million out, so that helps in a broad way. Where is that document for the honourable member?
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MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: It's Page 29 of the budget context.
MR. PARENT: I had it on its own so I don't know.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I think I have.
MR. PARENT: Page 29.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Of the business plan, yes.
MR. PARENT: Yes, that's the one I'm referring to, you can see other divisions transferred to the Environment, $16 million, so that makes up about 90 per cent of the difference that you've noted there. When Skills and Learning came over there was about $3 million or so that didn't come over with it that went into a trust fund for scholarships and $250,000 that went to the Youth Secretariat in DCS. So there is a difference of about $3 million as a result of that going to a trust fund and then $250,000 to the Youth Secretariat and then transferring out from the combined DEL money for Environment which was then added to. So I know that's not clear but if you look at that line Transfer to Environment you will see that.
Your colleague was interested in what new money was in Environment. I tried to highlight that in my speech at the start. The new money we have in Labour, so the Skills and Learning branch almost all of it came over but there's a $3 million slippage that went into trust funds and $250,000 DCS and then all the rest of what was traditionally Labour came over. There were two additions: $250,000 really to help with the OHS division to help with Donkin with undersea mining and then $250,000 additional that went to the Alcohol and Gaming branch in order to deal with the whole issue of the integrity of the ticket lottery system.
[5:00 p.m.]
There was also some additional money that had to come to both Departments of Environment and Labour that was divided between both of them to help set up respective offices so that they're fully independent departments. We have two deputies now, secretaries for both deputies and offices for both deputies on floors 4 and 5. The Labour floor that you've visited beyond is still the Labour floor but Environment's now totally out of that, or will be by the end of this week. So about $600,000 divided between the two departments is the new money. I hope that explains it a little bit and I know it isn't clear and I'm sorry about that.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you, that does help. How many executive assistants did you as minister have before and how many do you have now?
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MR. PARENT: I had one executive assistant before. Traditionally the minister before me had two but I had one, Cethlyn MacKay. Then when I found out I was going to become minister of both departments there was money for an executive assistant in Labour. So not knowing really what the future was at the last minute using that money we have put in a 3-month contract employee, basically paid on an hourly rate, to serve as an executive assistant to help out on the total package but to help out with Labour.
So yes are two deputies, two secretaries for the deputies, two secretaries for the minister and two executive assistant positions that are all budgeted for and part of the increase.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: How many staff were dedicated to communications before and how many are dedicated now?
MR. PARENT: We had five before in the combined departments, three stayed with Environment and those are Penny McCormick, who is the acting head, Bruce Nunn, and Janet Lynn McNeil. Then on the Labour side we had Jacqueline May who is staying on the Labour side and we had Danielle who's an import from Australia and unfortunately she misses the warm weather and is going back. I think on the Labour side we've added on Chrissy White who was with Skills Development so it's not new, it's just transferred over to us, and they're advertising for a head of Labour right now, Bill Turpin is handling that on a temporary basis because it's such an important position.
The word I'm hearing is CNS really is a separate department, it's sort of odd, you don't control the CNS staff they're controlled by a different department. While you make suggestions and encourage things that you want in your department the decision is really made by Communications Nova Scotia. I'm hearing rumours that the Labour side will have four but right now it has two and one leaving at the end of this week.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: So it does mean there is an increase in communications staff. Separating the departments has resulted in at least. . .
MR. PARENT: Well if we add in Chrissy who was already there, there were six. There's six now, there may be one more on Labour but I've not had that confirmed. Right now we know for certain only six which is what we had before, well we had five before and then Chrissy from Skills and Development, so right now we only know six, it's the same as before. I have heard rumours but no confirmation. The reason on the Labour side is there's just so many things that need to be covered; pensions, fire services, A&G, so if that department stays as it is then it may well be that a case is made to CNS. I don't think would change CNS's global figure, I don't know how they run that, but they might reassign an extra body from some other department where they weren't being used as much. Right now we have three on Environment, three on Labour, we had five before and one has come over from Skills and Development.
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MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you. I want to ask a few questions around labour standards and the whole question of you've had the minimum wage review committee and they've done a great job, I think we all are pleased that they, first of all, in fact reflect a broad perspective from business and labour and they do their work based on evidence, they collect some information and they look at a whole variety of considerations when they look at establishing minimum wages. They certainly I think have tried to find a balance between moving toward a living wage and not putting such a burden on those industries where minimum wage is a fairly typical wage to be paid, that they're not driving employers out of business and then harming the very workers who are in minimum wage work, but at the same time I think their reports have certainly highlighted the fact that the minimum wage is only one piece of all of the considerations that need to be looked at in terms of labour standards.
We have not seen a real comprehensive review of labour standards in Nova Scotia. There has been sort of a piecemeal approach to reforming the labour standards code over a long period of time and other provinces, certainly the Province of Manitoba for example, have done a very comprehensive review of minimum wage that has been quite consultative.
I'm wondering, particularly given that we have a fairly significant piece of our labour force in low pay and, as well, there is a growing labour shortage even in the low-pay sectors of our economy, will the department be undertaking any form of comprehensive review of labour standards to look at, for example, part-time and non-standard workers who end up being casual employees for years and years and years without any benefits, without any prorated benefits in different workplaces and a number of other issues?
I want to bring, for example, to your attention, an e-mail that one of my colleagues had from a young person in a small town in Nova Scotia. He had written one of my colleagues because you will find employers that tend to be franchises, for example, who hire a lot of young people, they often have a period of training when people go to work and they work but they may be in training for as much as a few months. Typically, they are either not paid for parts of that work or they have income withheld and it is classified as training money. The e-mail that he sent my colleague kind of surprised me but then I talked to some young people and they say this is fairly standard practice in a lot of the franchises, the McJobs around the province, that they have these policies that, in some ways, they appear to me to be subverting our Labour Standards Code.
So I don't know if the department is aware, if you have complaints like this that come into your Labour Standards Division and if you have had opportunity to investigate that. So that is sort of two questions around labour standards, the need to, I think, have a comprehensive review of labour standards but also looking at upholding the labour standards that we have now and making sure that there aren't processes that sort of subvert the Labour Standards Code, which is the law.
MR. PARENT: I agree with you and, in fact, I think last year you raised the issue and I indicated that I agreed, at that stage, and we are looking at it. I feel so much chagrin that
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that is the same answer this year. The federal government finished their labour standards study. We are waiting for that. The only defence is that establishing the new department took up time but it is important and we are in agreement that the labour standards needs to be looked at across the board and hopefully next year we will be able to report some progress.
We have done piecemeal amendments, in large part because of minority government where Opposition Parties have been quite interested in improving the lot of workers throughout the province and have brought forth legislation. Much of the legislation that is brought forward by Opposition Parties supported by government has to be labour legislation, which I find quite interesting. So hopefully we will have a better answer for you next year.
We are not aware of any complaints on the training and using training not to pay employees but one of the problems that we have and I am not sure, I hope the labour standards can maybe deal with this, if there is a full review, is that it tends to be called - and Labour Ministers will say - it is really a post-labour standards. By the time you hear the complaint, someone is out of a job because they are usually low-income, vulnerable jobs. They don't complain in the middle of it when we can do anything and that is understandable. How to tackle that, I don't know. I know I have talked to other Labour Ministers across the country and some of them, at least, have shared the same frustration so hopefully the review with our new deputy minister, she is reading the briefing note that we promised to review, to get reviewing, so I am sure she is taking this down as one of the priorities but hopefully find some solutions. Any solutions that, as Opposition critics, you have access to on the issue of getting those complaints to our department when we can do something about it and when it's not sort of post-labour, would be helpful. Maybe those will come up as part of the labour review. As minister, having noted that, I would like to see that as part of any review that came forward.
I do apologize, we're certainly in support of it. One of the things we knew when we were creating two departments was that the staff told me what it will mean is that you're about seven months behind on a lot of the other things you're working on because all your attention gets diverted to that.
But, we're getting into place now where the two departments are operating as two departments and with the new deputy, who is listening carefully, we've committed to this and next year we'll have a better answer for you. We do have a little bit of news that is good, we've obtained the services of a Master of Public Administration student intern for the summer to begin work on it. So, I'm not appearing totally empty-handed, but I'd hoped to have been further along, but that is the start of it, so this . . .
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Working on?
MR. PARENT: Working on labour standards, on research on labour standards. It'll be a Master of Public Administration student intern and they'll carry out preliminary research and generate a research paper that will form, we hope, the basis of an eventual discussion
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paper. That should be available near the end of the summer or early Fall. We'll make that available to you.
[5:15 p.m.]
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Interesting. It's an important area and often because it's an area that doesn't necessarily, unlike workers that are organized and have a voice, it's much more difficult sometimes to make the changes because workers, as you say, they often don't feel as powerful, certainly, in bringing forward their issues.
I want to turn now and talk a bit about pensions. I note that - I think the superintendent of pensions isn't here . . .
MR. PARENT: I think I might be able to answer most of your questions, since I've met with her so often.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Okay. Essentially, I have two areas of questions, one which I think is fairly straightforward, the other may be a bit more complicated.
You mentioned in your introductory remarks that you have appointed a Pension Review Committee and I'm wondering if you would tell me what has been budgeted for that committee, what the remuneration - for example - of the chair is for that committee?
MR. PARENT: It's $135,000 and the chair of that committee has refused any honorarium. Bill Black is not receiving any money, he wanted to make that well known. So, there's $135,000 - that would include the work of the community secretarial support, honoraria for the two members and meetings they'll be holding.
We are hoping that New Brunswick would come in and we asked them to contribute $100,000 because the two provinces share similar challenges and that would have given us a bigger budget to do a better job. We feel $135,000 will do the job, but it will be a challenge because it is a big task.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I note that we have some challenges around pension coverage, for example. The percentage of workers covered by registered pension plans in Nova Scotia in 2005, I think, was just roughly more than 40 per cent - 41.1 per cent. This represents an 8 per cent decline in the number of workers that were covered in 1991, at which time about 48 per cent of the workers in the province had some form of registered pension plan.
This is a concern for us in the Opposition, and I'm sure for you as well. I want to ask some questions about the administration of the pension plans in your department, under the superintendent of pensions.
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You will be aware that the HRM pension committee had made a request to the superintendent and she made a decision - it's a public decision - they were looking for amendments to their plan so that it would be possible for them to pay a 2 per cent increase to their members as well as altering the ceiling, I think, for members of their plan. It's very complex, but the thing that we most hear about, as members representing parts of the HRM, are from pensioners who are very concerned. They haven't had an increase for a long time.
I'm not going to ask you about her decision because I think I'm fairly clear about her decision and the reasons she gave which pertain to the law and pertain to the solvency test she has to apply in looking at whether or not she's going to grant any amendments to pensions. However, this is the problem that I would like some answer for, there is a belief in the membership of the HR pension that somehow - I'm not saying this is accurate, but there is a perception, there is a belief - that the superintendent of pensions is more favourable in her treatment of the Public Service pension plan when it comes to applying solvency provisions than to the HRM plan.
I can say this with a fair amount of confidence because people have written me, they've stopped me on the street and constantly, as I explained what the law is, as I understand it, what the superintendent's application of that law is as I understand it, what her decision was in their case, the fact that their pension committee made a decision not to appeal - which they have a legal opportunity to, under the legislation, but they made that decision based on the fact that they didn't think they had a very strong case and they said as much to me when I spoke with them.
So, I explain all of this, but at the end of the day, the members of the public, my constituents, the people we're all responsible to, have this perception, they feel there is some favouritism, I guess you would say. That there is more favourable treatment to the provincial plan. What I would like is to be able, in the clearest and plainest language that I possibly could find, be able to explain to the members of the public the circumstances of our provincial Public Service plan and the circumstances of the HRM plan, to be able to demonstrate whether or not their perception has any basis or not.
I know that may not be an easy thing to do, but I think that is what is required so that people can feel assured. I think it's important that people need to feel that there's fairness in the system. If they feel it's unfair, then it's incumbent on us, I think, to be able to prove or disprove that all of the plans are being administered in a fair way, with the same rules in place, shall we say. I know that the plans are often different, which adds a level of complexity to these decisions, but I want to be able to have something that I can provide to people, to say these are the circumstances of the provincial plan, and these are the circumstances of the HRM plan, and here is why decisions are made here and here is the contrast and this is why. I don't think it's an unreasonable request that members of the public would want to know that there's fairness.
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MR. PARENT: I appreciate your comments because for the first time the penny dropped for me in terms of the concerns of the HRM pension plan which, I mean I certainly knew the details, they wanted a 2 per cent increase to the pension plan members who hadn't had an increase for a long, long time but I couldn't really understand the rationale when it was pretty clear we had made an arrangement with them on solvency relief and that any additions to the plan would have to be prepaid and that they knew that. I couldn't quite understand the intensity they're feeling and now I do, having listened to you, because the HRM pensioners would be looking at provincial pensioners and wondering what's the difference.
I just in my blinkered way hadn't thought of that because the public pension is administered under different legislation by a different department. So what I've asked the deputy to do, if there's some way to get maybe some details on one sheet that might help explain that so that Nancy has no say over the public pension or regulations, or over that plan, and vice versa, and so I concede but people wouldn't differentiate that, particularly with municipal pensioners. They might with a private company be open to that difference but when you're in HRM and that's one of the arguments HRM has made to us several times, that the solvency test shouldn't apply to a municipality because they have a right to tax and they will not go out of business. If they're in trouble on their pension plan, they just have to increase taxes.
Our response has always been, both provincial and federal governments, as you know, are exempt from solvency because of sort of the Crown, I forget the exact term for it, but the Crown exemption basically and municipalities aren't. HRM has said, you know, we're about one-third, well, more than one-third of the province. If HRM goes bankrupt, then the whole province is in trouble. The problem we've always had is, well, we have the legislation that governs us and the legislation would have to be changed for that but the problem we've always had is that while HRM may not go bankrupt, there are certainly towns that have, like Lockeport and Canso threatened to, and they're all governed under the same plan.
So the confusion on the street is really that there are different regulations and different plans administered by different administrators. I've asked Nancy anecdotally about that and she claims that actually the HRM pension plan in some ways is better than the provincial plan. But maybe what we'll see if we can do, if Nancy could do for you, is get you a sheet that we could give to all the HRM MLAs that would at least allow you to answer why on the street because the penny dropped for me that the HRM person is seeing themself as a civil servant similar to a provincial civil servant and may not realize that there's different legislation and, therefore, differences in the plans. So we'll try to get you a one-sheeter. It won't go all the way to solving the questions but it may be of some help.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Yes, it will be I'm sure very helpful and it will be a start at least. I'm going to move away from the pension case and I want to ask some questions about occupational health and safety. There are several groups of workers, I know
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that the department has had an initiative, we have the Violence in the Workplace Regulations and many employers, myself included as a really small employer in the NDP caucus, for example, where we're going through the process of doing risk assessment and developing a plan to make sure that our workplaces are as safe as we can possibly make them and to try to ensure that the people who work for us are safe when they come to work. I had the opportunity though to meet with a group of workers whose circumstances I feel quite concerned around and that's the transit drivers here in metro. The Halifax metro bus drivers tell me that there was a time when they might have one incident a month where a driver would be in some sort of an altercation, assaulted, maybe have a pop can or a pop bottle, something like that thrown at them, but it has gotten to the point where it is pretty much a daily occurrence on a number of the bus routes.
They have, as a group, looked at two or three different initiatives that they think would make a difference, in terms of trying to reduce the incidents of violence against bus drivers. One would be to have camcorders of some kind, video recorders placed on buses; another would be a screen, some kind of a screen between the bus driver and the passenger. They had a third that they were recommending, which is kind of a piece of technology that would help them. I can't remember precisely at the moment what it was.
It has been costed what these measures would take and I think it is approximately, here for Metro Transit, it is something like $1.4 million, it wouldn't be cheap. But the municipality is not moving to implement these things immediately, they're doing it in a phased way. While the transit workers are happy that they are moving in that direction, I think they would be much happier if they could do it a little more quickly. I have to say that I concur with this idea that we need to provide more safety for Metro Transit drivers and bus drivers.
[5:30 p.m.]
Not so long ago I actually was driving in my car and I saw a Metro Transit bus pulled over and there had been something happened. There was a female driver and the police were on the scene and it was quite late at night and I really felt for this person who is by themselves, they are in their workplace and they were alone. They didn't have anybody else that they really could turn to when the incident occurred. It can be quite traumatic for a long period of time after you have an incident like this, where you are assaulted at work and to imagine that you've got to get up the next day and go back into a similar situation.
I know that the province provides very little funding, direct funding to transit, that any of the federal money that's coming flows through the province to the municipalities, but I'm wondering if the department has ever considered the possibility of tying any of that money to measures that will assist in complying with provincial policy and provincial regulations, so that we can, in fact, not only have great transit but we have great transit that is also safe for the drivers.
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To me this is a fairly important issue, it's a very important issue. I would hate for any of us to get up some morning and find out that one of our bus drivers has been injured, terribly injured or assaulted or even, God forbid, murdered, which we have seen with taxi drivers. I know the department has worked very hard with the taxi industry to start improving the conditions under which they work, to prevent injuries.
MR. PARENT: What we'll commit to here is the deputy will speak with their counterpart in Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations which is where I believe the money flows through and see if there's anything we can do to do that. It's a worthwhile suggestion to look at so we'll commit to that.
It was interesting at the last meeting of Labour Ministers that Nova Scotia was the lead on presenting on workplace violence. As part of the presentation, along with the small presentation that I did, we had Dr. Kellough - I believe I'm pronouncing his name properly - he specifically mentioned the rise in violence with transit workers, had no real reason for it. He just mentioned it as something that he had noted and almost out loud, said he couldn't understand why people would want to - like pouring hot coffee, throwing it in the bus driver's face, things like that. So your suggestion is a very good one.
I do know, anecdotally, that Kings Transit is putting in the cameras to monitor and see whether that cuts down on the violence. With late night alone, I'm not sure if that would be a sufficient deterrent, as opposed to a cage.
Your suggestion is a good one and the deputy will meet with her counterpart and see if maybe there is some way that when money is allotted to transit systems - I know Pictou County is after me, through environmental coffers, to see if there's any help. One of your colleagues met with me to see if there's any help to get a Pictou transit system, which I thought they had, I was quite surprised to learn that there's no transit system for that urban conglomeration. Maybe that could be tied to making sure that they also have their workplace violence regulations in place. As you say, HRM has it in place and is phasing it in but it would be better if it was done faster. So the deputy will speak with her counterpart and see if there's anything we can do to help influence that process.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Excellent, thank you. With that, continuing on in the same theme around safety in the workplace, we've had the service stations and convenience store clerks, late at night in particular, working and we've seen some fairly violent assaults. We've had that unfortunate situation in Dartmouth with the gas station attendant, a woman was working and how that individual survived that particular assault is a miracle, really, because that was a very, very violent assault by an individual who I think has a long history of difficulties with the law.
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Now some provinces have gone to a mandatory prepayment system at gasoline stations. British Columbia has brought in legislation and I think it's referred to as Grant's law, where a very young gas station attendant was attempting to stop a customer who had come to the service station and had driven off without paying for the gas. This young person was dragged and died as a result of the injuries he sustained, a very tragic situation.
The family of that young man did a lot of work lobbying and the British Columbia Government has adopted some changes in their legislation so that, in fact, there is now mandatory prepayment systems for certain businesses and it has to be for late at night, after a certain hour of the day. I understand that quite a few American States have moved to this kind of prepayment system and I'm wondering if the department has had any discussions with the industry here. I know that some of the retail gasoline dealers, in fact, are somewhat interested in moving in this direction. They don't want to be in a situation where their employees are unsafe and they realize that this is a growing problem. Often with young people, in particular, they feel like they're supermen, they can do whatever, they can run after the perpetrators of these kinds of offences. So have you had any discussions, are you thinking about what we can do to ensure that people who are working, especially unsociable hours, later at night and on weekends, have protections and maybe more so some people have suggested this is more of an urban problem than it is in the small towns and more rural areas? I don't know if that's the case but I'm wondering have you looked at this, would you consider this?
MR. PARENT: It's currently under discussion right now with the Retail Gasoline Dealers Association and they've been asked to consult with their membership on whether this should be. I believe there's a bill before the House that was put in by Keith Colwell, Bill No. 18, on this. I talked to the minister for British Columbia when she brought this in. She's now retired voluntarily but I was interested in seeing whether it made a difference in helping to cut down on incidents like that. So there are consultations going on right now. I haven't heard back if there's any consensus from the Retail Gasoline Dealers Association whether this would be the way to go.
I was very interested when I pulled into a rural gas station in my riding, one of the few that are left as they're all concentrating in New Minas, and on several pumps they had a notice that they had to prepay on that pump but not on all the pumps. I realized why, it was sight lines and the pumps that were within the sight lines, they didn't have to prepay. So some were obviously going that way on their own which would seem to indicate that maybe there is a broader consensus developing that this would be helpful. So the discussions are going on right now and we've been lobbied by Grant De Patie's father. It's being looked at and we should have some sort of response. (Interruption) What we would be looking at though is not separate legislation unless we needed it to get you to vote for the budget, Mr. Colwell. We might do it through regulatory change. So that's why the consultations are going on right now.
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MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Which brings me to an issue that has some connection but it also is a little different and that's the whole question of bullying in the workplace and the growing recognition I think of the psychological harm and damage that can come from being in a work environment where there is bullying going on either from a co-worker or from a supervisor, or someone in an administrative position, toward someone who doesn't have the same amount of power.
We really haven't taken that next step to expand our own protections for workers who experience bullying in the workplace and I've met with a number of people who have developed fairly serious disabilities as a result. Often they're psychologically traumatized for a long period of time and find themselves just mentally not able to continue in a particular work environment and maybe even go into a new work environment as a result of the kind of intimidation and harassment and verbal reprimanding and what have you that has no substantive connection to particular actions that they are taking at work.
[5:45 p.m.]
I'll give you an example. I had a constituent come to see me who was in just an incredibly bad state when I met her. She works for a public service agency, not one of ours, not a provincial government department but she's employed with a very reputable public service agency. She had been there for 13 years and she was constantly, when she brought me her file, she had a file with a fair amount of correspondence, reprimands on her file, and when I read her file, I was really shocked. She was being reprimanded constantly for the tone of her voice, for using slang. For example, on the telephone she might say yeah. When I started reading these pieces of correspondence, after I had her in my constituency office, just in a flood, she was so upset, I realized that what I was dealing with was a case of workplace bullying - no question about it. It just, you know, leaped off the page at me.
Thankfully in her case, she was a member of a union and so there was a grievance procedure and I was able to help her get access to how you do this process, but she had been in this workplace for 13 years and I would say that the file indicated to me that this had gone on for about seven years. She was about as close to having a mental breakdown as anybody I've ever seen.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please. Can you wrap that up? Your time pretty much has expired but I'll let you finish that up, that particular one.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm sorry, I lost track of time. I will come back to this question in the next round.
MR. PARENT: Do you want me to respond?
MR. CHAIRMAN: If you want to, if the honourable member for Preston doesn't mind.
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MR. PARENT: Or do you want to come back to it?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay.
MR. PARENT: It's an important discussion and I don't cut it short.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: It's up to the member.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So you're finished with that one? Okay, good.
The honourable member for Preston.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: Mr. Chairman, there are a lot of issues in Labour and with the expanded responsibilities of Labour it's going to be interesting I'm sure for staff for a little while until they get accustomed to all the problems. Again I want to pick up where my colleague left off on late night workers and, as you mentioned, we did put a bill in to that effect and if it can be corrected through regulation, we would be very pleased with that although we would like to have our bill passed, of course.
MR. PARENT: All things are possible in minority governments.
MR. COLWELL: Just on late night workers, I used to travel to Boston in my former business on a regular basis and I can remember about 17 years ago in the daytime coming up to a gas station and it looked normal until you tried to get gas out of the gas pumps and there's no way it would work. There was no prepay on the gas pumps or anything and you went to a window, it was bulletproof glass and they would only take credit cards, they wouldn't take cash even then and they put your card in there and there was a slot that they slipped it through similar to the bank except it was a lot more secure. The one question that the young gentleman had who was there, what are you doing in this area of town, in the daytime. So I don't know how they got in and out of the building when the shift change came but it must have been pretty interesting.
This is a problem that we had hoped would never come to Nova Scotia but it's here, it's real and, as was indicated with the bus drivers, it's a serious situation and there has to be a balance between safety for workers, which is number one on the list, of course, but it also has to be done in a fashion that employers can sensibly provide the protection to the workers. I mean it has to be a combination of things and I know that it's difficult. I know some employers don't want to spend any money on anything, which is very unfortunate, but when you get a good employee today, it is probably the most valuable asset and always is the most valuable asset a company can have. So if they are not willing to protect that employee, maybe they shouldn't be a business.
There is nothing that the department has done on an interim basis to address this until you can get some regulations in place, is there?
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MR. PARENT: No. We have the Violence in the Workplace Regulations but in terms of Bill No.18 and the prepay, we haven't done anything but the consultations are ongoing. I don't have a timing on that and I'm not sure if the deputy would either, being new to the department. It may well be that as early as Fall we could begin to look at something but we will get back to you, personally, as to where the timing is because that is important since you put in a bill.
I guess the larger sort of issue is one that I think about quite a bit because you can get in this sort of strange treadmill where you have more violence, therefore you put up more walls and because you have more walls, you separate people from each other and it just, I don't know what the answer is that would see - because I think most people want, on the prepay, it was a convenience to pump their gas, go in, chat, say to the clerk how are you. Now we have the very few but there are the few where that is no longer possible. So the few are dictating what the many have to do.
That is when we put in the workplace violence regulations, we are very clear. One of the ways we could have done it was with a prescriptive list for every occupation that was covered by that. There are about six of them but we knew that, particularly on the health side, for example, with nursing homes and one of the issues they face is violence from patients who may have Alzheimer's, we knew that we didn't have the expertise to be able to give a prescriptive list to all the many workplaces that would be covered by them so what we did is we asked them to assess and they had to do that by law, and then to provide a plan which they have to have when our inspectors go around and we offered help with them, too.
With certain industries, such as the taxi cab drivers and other industries, we offered a template because they were saying to us they were smaller businesses. We don't have the resources to assess the risks and we want to be in compliance and so we said, okay, you still have the freedom to assess your risks because somebody who has a convenience store in one location may have a very different risk than another location but if you want a template that you could adopt that you could say this is our regulation, you can do that. So we tried very hard to make that balance that you are getting at between safety for workers and being individualized.
I will just close with this comment because last time I talked too long when you asked me questions and I don't want to do that to you now. When I was down in Sao Paulo on a trip to investigate ethanol, sugar cane ethanol and hopefully in the long run, cellulosic ethanol which would be from wood waste and from seaweed and from other things, but I was fascinated because in Bolivia, where I grew up, and in American cities, you would have very poor parts of town that could be very rough that you knew you should stay away from, much as the area that you are talking about. Detroit, for example, scared me more than any place I'd ever been in Bolivia when I took a wrong turn but they were separated.
In Brazil, you have the favelas, the slums, right next to the wealthy homes and, in fact, the wealthy in Sao Paulo have become so scared they have moved out of their single
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family units into big condominiums with electric wire and all sorts of things. They won't even drive cars. If you are rich, you buy three cars: one with bullet proof glass that you drive and then an outrider behind you and a fore-rider in front of you and if you are really wealthy, you use helicopters. They are on this treadmill. They are afraid of the favelas. The favelas are poor people next to these rich people who won't share. They are on this awful treadmill where nobody seems to be able to say, is this the society we want for everybody? I worry about that happening here. There is more violence so we resort to bigger walls and to stiffer sentences and that then leads to more violence which leads to bigger walls. Somehow we have to get at the root cause.
I know we're trying to do that in our plan because we don't want a society where you have to have walls and locked doors and all that, but then we also want to keep workers safe. So that larger issue, which I know you wrestle with as well and which lies behind your question, how do you find that balance of protecting workers and not imposing undue costs not only on the business owner but on the client? It's a hard one. The prepay seems to be, you know, something that is a minor inconvenience that would provide a safety feature.
As I say, the discussions are going on and after the session I'll make sure I get you the information on what the timing of that is since it was your bill in part that helped stimulate and move that along.
MR. COLWELL: I'm glad to hear that and I'm glad the department has been stimulated a little bit. I have some very distinct views on the problems with increased violence and it goes back in part to the adult education you're doing. In reality in this province, we shouldn't have to do adult education - really in reality we shouldn't have to do that. If our education system was sufficient and worked well enough it would be a non-issue but it doesn't.
This is a scenario that I've been looking at for a long time and I think I'm correct but one never knows in this business whether you're correct or not, and one hopes that you are close to correct and that over time things will change and it will be better for everybody, but the teachers in high school and junior high tell me that if a student shows up basically one or two days a month and sort of shows that they might be interested in that, if they're in Grade 7, they push them to Grade 8. Then in Grade 8 do the same thing, push them to Grade 9 and it goes right through to Grade 12. Basically then you've got a graduate who can't read or write, doesn't really understand how to learn, or do anything else.
According to what the statistics are, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's something like a 40 per cent illiteracy rate in Nova Scotia and I think that this is adding to the illiteracy rate. Then if you take that individual who hasn't been served properly by the education system, put them on the street after Grade 12 and say, okay, go make a living, the choices are really simple. They work at a convenience store, they work at Tim Hortons, or they work at Wendy's, or any of the fast food stores, minimum wage.
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Well, you're not long working at minimum wage, no matter what it is, and I have some different views on minimum wage than my colleagues do, but all of a sudden they realize they can't raise a family, they can't buy a car which is the standard thing that people want in this area, and if they do get married they're in big trouble because usually they marry someone in the same sort of social-economic position which is not bad. I mean I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that because we need people in the workforce that do a lot of different jobs but they shouldn't be there their whole lives. They should be there for a short term so they can gradually improve themselves and make more and more money but that isn't happening.
So if you don't give somebody the most precious tool you can give them in education, we've failed. We have miserably failed. So then a person looks at things and they look at their neighbours that they went to school with and they're driving a new car, they've got a new home, they've got a couple of kids, they're travelling, doing all the stuff. They might be in debt to their ears but at least they can borrow the money to do that. So what do they do? There are two or three choices. They can go back to school - which is virtually impossible financially for someone to do that or they turn to crime, really simple. Just got to run the math.
So then you make a lot of money all of a sudden, a real risk of going to jail or being injured, or injuring somebody else, but after you get to a point in life, you don't care any more, and not all criminals are like that but I would say a large percentage of adults face that situation. So I don't believe it starts with the Department of Labour. I don't believe it starts with adult education, although I'm strongly in favour of adult education, I think it's a very good program and I've seen major results from that and it has helped a lot of people, but we've got to start back in the school again.
I've got a friend of mine, a school teacher, who dropped in to see me the other day and he was saying, you know they've got some real bad kids in the school and they put them in detention. His immediate reaction was, I can't say "detention", it's not allowed to be said any more, it may demoralize the student.
Well I spent time in detention and I'm sure everybody who went to school, my age and a bit older and a bit younger than me, have spent time in detention and I guarantee you it didn't hurt me any, it probably smartened me up a few times, but now you can't even say that. So you've got a student there who doesn't care, put him in a school, disrupts the rest of the school, don't give that individual time or the energy that's needed to help the student, and it could be a learning problem the individual has, it could be a problem at home, it could be disinterest, it could be all kinds of different things that make that student not interested, then you have a perfect candidate for crime. Then you have to put the walls up, then you have to do all these things that we talk about that we shouldn't have to do.
When I was growing up in Dartmouth and it wasn't even Dartmouth, it was Westphal at the time, you could leave your door unlocked, you could leave stuff out in the yard.
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Nobody ever bothered anything, if it did disappear it usually came back a week later because one of your neighbours came along and needed it and brought it back. You could go anywhere and any family that you knew would invite you in for lunch, if it was lunchtime, and that's the way it was, that's just the way it was. That sure has changed.
I really believe it goes back to the education system. I know not Department of Labour but it does affect things. When you go the apprenticeship training program, I can remember, I ran a manufacturing facility and we needed highly skilled people. It got so bad after a while that when someone came in, I would ask them to write me a note; to see if they could write, number one. I'd give them some written instructions to see if they could follow them, pretty simple stuff. If they couldn't pass that, I would just drop the situation.
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I remember one young gentleman I hired from the vocational school at the time in the Valley and he came in, he was a top student in the class. We hired him because we really needed someone, this young boy seemed like he wanted to work and he had a really good work attitude. We started him off at the lower rate on the apprenticeship program and told him we would put him on the apprenticeship program as we did with everyone who came into our business. At the end of the second week my shop foreman came to me and he said, you know this young fellow can't do anything, he's a two-year graduate of this program and that doesn't make sense. My foreman had gone through a similar program in Dartmouth and was a very intelligent young man.
So I started checking on things and come to find out, in training for machinists - now machinists are very difficult individuals to train, it is more difficult than any other trade there is, there's so much to learn, it requires a lot of mathematics, a lot of geometry, it's a tremendously difficult thing to learn - we found out that the instructor was a millwright. Now a millwright is not a machinist; they do some machine work but they are not a machinist. So we've got a millwright teaching the program.
My solution to the problem was, we let the young man go, unfortunately, it was a shame for him. It was bad for us because we needed bright, young people, we needed people who were partly trained. Every time a resumé came in from that school, which happened on a regular basis, we immediately put it in the garbage can. We didn't even have the courtesy to - and this was the way we operated because we didn't have time to fool around with this - we put the resumé in the garbage can because we didn't have time to fool around with an interview, send them a letter or anything because we knew if we hired someone from there, they would be absolutely useless to us, and that was approved by the department.
Now I don't know whatever happened to that young man, hopefully he went some place and worked in a shop that wasn't as precise as we had to be, and he did do well because he was a very nice young man. If he would have had the opportunity in school, he would
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have been an excellent employee and we would have kept him. That's what we were faced with.
I met several times - I spent a lot of time on this trying to get the education system to understand we needed tradespeople, we needed doctors or lawyers and because those young people usually rise to the top and they move forward. To train a machinist takes eight years, eight years to train a machinist. That's a long process. So you have to have someone who is dedicated, who is smart, and there are so many factors to it.
So you start talking to these people in the education system who are making decisions on this stuff and they look at you like you're stupid. Well what do you mean people can't read or write? I said, come and I'll show you. They don't believe what they see, and they're in the system making things happen.
So if you're going to fix the system, you've got to get that fixed. The government is going to have to make some tough decisions. They're going to have to decide that the young people that need help, we help. We help them in Grade 5, Grade 6, right up through high school, so when they do graduate, they graduate with an education that can move them to another level, whether they don't want to go back to school again but at least they have the ability to learn and apply the things they have, or it could be to go to a trade or into university, whatever the case may be for the individual.
We've basically stopped; we took all the home economics equipment out of the schools, we took all the workshops out of the schools, and then you wonder why we're not getting enough plumbers or electricians or carpenters or machinists or whatever, because people aren't exposed to it unless their family was exposed to it, it doesn't happen. So unless they're willing, as government, to say to the education system, you can fail people, yes, fail them; if they don't pass, fail them.
My son failed Grade 3, the best thing that ever happened to him. He came back in Grade 3 and he was determined that he was not going to have his friends leave him behind again. After that it was never an issue and he moved forward and did very well in life. But if it hadn't been for that, he probably wouldn't have. Now we supported him at home, we were there to support him but a lot of families, for whatever reason, can't do that or don't do that.
So when you talk about adult education, I think it's fantastic. Unfortunately we need it, we need more of it and we see the programs that are going in place to help people but if we don't get at the bottom of this problem, of properly educating people so they can learn, down the road we're not going to fix it. Now I don't know if anyone has ever talked to you like this before but this, in my view - and I could be all wrong but I don't think I am, I've spent a long time, it cost me a lot of money sorting out people who could work and couldn't work and could learn and do things. If you've never been faced with that and you've had production schedules to keep and you have to keep everything very precise and to a quality
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level beyond anything you've ever seen in government, I mean beyond anything you can imagine, you've got to have people who are willing to work and willing to learn and have the capability of doing both, so it's a big, big problem.
So in adult education, did you take that over totally from the Department of Education? I know they had the program and just maybe you can give me short answers on this cause I have a lot of things here - if you can.
MR. PARENT: You packed in an awful lot of them, the O2 Program, societal responsibility, the work ethic, but I'll leave those, they may come out. It is interesting, my EA, Cethlyn MacKay, gave me for Christmas a subscription to The Walrus, which is Canada's number one alternative magazine, it's a good magazine. One of the issues is why you can't flunk out of university any longer and it was dealing with the same thing that you're talking about.
Since you want a short answer, we took over the adult education. I think our staff would agree with you, we'd love to see the day when adult education could morph over into adult education not in the high school equivalency but adding on new training. In fact one of the reasons why this new department came into being was what you're putting your very finger on. I will just mention that one of the things we're excited about is as the labour market development agreement right now is about $80 million, that's currently being spent by the federal government in co-operation with the province. That money is already spent and that will devolve over to the province so that they become provincial employees, federal civil servants, et cetera.
As a result of signing off that deal, whenever that is formally signed and it will take about a year to devolve, we will be able to access $14 million under what is called the Labour Market Development Agreement for a period of six years. That Labour Market Development Agreement allows us the freedom, because the LMDA is really, as they tell me, part two of the EA Act, or it used to be UI, and basically you have to be on EI to qualify for that money. But the upgrading that needs to be done because of some of the factors that you've pointed out, we don't have access to a lot of programs, we're doing some of that, we have about 170 projects in the province already in workplace ed but we'd like to do far more and that $14 million won't have those strings attached. You won't have to be on EI. You could still be working but be functionally illiterate, because about 40 per cent of Nova Scotians are functionally illiterate or compromised literacy. They can read and write but not at a level where they can participate in the new jobs and they end up, as you say, stuck oftentimes. We don't want to see that happening.
The O2 Program, which is under Education, is one good thing that is happening. I don't know if you are aware of that but I have done some research on that and it seems to be working. The pilot projects are being phased in in various parts of the province and I am watching that one very carefully because it's interesting. Nova Scotia has the most educated population in the country and the least educated in the same province.
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Getting back to the school system, it's too bad we didn't have Minister Casey here and we could put her on the spot. I'm not sure she would disagree with you too much, to tell you the truth. But we are proud of our adult education department. As you mentioned, it does great work but I am sure they would love to see themselves where everybody had a high school education and they were able to concentrate on improving that for the new jobs. That will be a while away. There is a big challenge in front of us.
Since 2003, we have had 3,000 grads from that. I don't know if you have gone to any graduations. You have. Yes, I have gone to a couple. Very moving. The people have worked their way through very difficult circumstances and are so proud, and it's a full Grade 12 degree. It's not just equivalency, it's their full Grade 12. Boy, it does your heart good. That being said, your suggestions are important ones and I'm going on too long so I will stop.
MR. COLWELL: We have a program in our area, the Preston Area Learning Skills, which I would assume would be under the Department of Labour and Workforce Development now. I have been to every one of their graduations since I have been elected and we have everyone in that program from about mid-to-late 20s to 85. Every student is just as enthusiastic as the other and I really want to give the instructors credit in that because some of the people are so afraid and so shy and some of the people in this program were not functionally illiterate, they were just totally illiterate because they never had the opportunity to go to school. They had to go to work to help support their families. It was just a fact of life at that time. So they have done well in life, a lot of them, most of them actually, and it is just another thing they can do to enrich their lives more.
But I really want to credit the instructors for that and I would like you to pass that along to them as well. They will go into someone's home and teach them at home, one on one, where people are absolutely at home and comfortable, until they get them to a point they can attend a classroom with equivalent levels of training in that sort of environment. So they really go above and beyond to help the individuals in the community. In some cases, nobody even realizes, except the instructor and the person they registered with, that they are actually doing this. Sometimes not even their family. I would say that program should be enhanced, if possible and anything like that in the province, not just the one in my area, because it has made a huge difference.
I know I talked to one gentleman, you know, I couldn't write my name until I did this. I used to have to sign an x and I know, for a fact, that people have taken advantage of this individual because he is a very, very nice man. He can write his name and read a contract now. He still had some difficulties but he could read it and it made a big difference and it makes a big difference in the community and it sets an example for the young people in the community, too, that someone who is respected in the community admits, yes, I couldn't read or write and now I can and this is why I can.
So it has been very successful. I can't say enough good about the program. I wish we didn't have to have it. That's the only thing. Some day, maybe not.
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The minimum wage, just for information, I ran into a very irate business owner the other day and I will just tell you exactly what he said. I don't really want any comment, I don't need any comment back on this. He said, what are they doing? They are going to put me out of business. I have three students I hire every summer. My choice is hire three students or one full-time person. I am going to hire a full-time person and no students this year or ever again. Just so you will know.
This gentleman, I know, is a person who would hire a student in a minute to help them but he has to make sure that he looks after the business so he survives because basically he is having difficulty, putting prices up on anything to cover more costs and at the same time, with all the extra taxes that the regional municipality is downloading on everybody, the costs are going up so fast that it is more and more difficult for businesses to make money. Now if they don't make money, they don't survive, as everyone knows. So I will just pass that along and I know the gentleman very well and he is not kidding and he is not just saying that because he wants to save money. He really wants to hire the students because he knows how, in our area, we don't have a lot of job opportunities, it is very important for a family to get that help.
There are so many issues with this. The next one I want to go to, and this one I want to have a discussion on, is the HRM pension plan. I remember the discussion we had here in the Legislature. HRM, when I was a regional councillor, the total budget was $450 million a year. Now that was four or five years ago, five years ago now I guess. Time goes real fast. Their budget this year is almost $700 million. They should have been funding this pension all the way along and they decided not to. What is going to be the resolution of that because indeed the pensioners deserve to have an increase but we can't afford to have HRM jump taxes any higher because I think we are maxed out on taxes now although every year they keep pushing them up.
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What is the solution for this for HRM? Because in reality, with the cost of everything increasing, if pensioners don't get some minor increases, even they are talking 2 per cent but if 2 per cent isn't enough to keep up with the costs, they can't even keep up with the property taxes in HRM that are 6 per cent, so if you get a 2 per cent, you can't even pay your property tax increase. So what is the solution to this without breaking the backs of the taxpayers? Maybe they should spend their money wiser and put some money in the pension plan instead of travelling on the Commonwealth Games. Maybe that would have been some money well spent.
MR. PARENT: I do know I have talked to the superintendent and anecdotally she is concerned. I think it is about $130 million underfunded, if I remember the figure correctly. If I'm wrong, one of my staff can correct me. I guess I found it quite frustrating, the letter that went out. I know it didn't come out directly from Mayor Kelly, it came out from the members of the pension committee. But that letter, I thought - was first of all a very personal
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attack on Nancy MacNeill Smith, who is a civil servant who was simply doing her job - but didn't take ownership, in some ways, of the issues that you bring to the fro and simply tried to blame the province and to blame specifically one provincial employee.
I did, as a result of discussions with colleagues in HRM, including one sitting to your right, we did decide that we would extend the opportunity for HRM to appeal the decision, if they so wanted to appeal it. I understand they haven't done that. Well, have they appealed it? It is appealed now? Okay, so they filed a notice to appeal and we will see where that goes. I mean, certainly the employees have been without an increased pension for what, nine years or some period like that, and we know the cost of living has gone up dramatically. So the solvency deficiency is about $110 million, the funding deficiency $41 million. On a windup basis, it would be about $239 million, so higher than what I said if you put it all together.
In HRM's defence, a lot of the pension plans have this problem for the very reason that insurance rates went sky-high because when stock markets were making huge profits, they oftentimes gave pension holidays to employees and if they were making 20 per cent returns on their investments, then they gave holidays and then all of a sudden when the bottom fell out of that, a lot of pension plans found themselves in trouble.
So without speaking specifically to HRM because it's not my place to do so, I do support what our pension superintendent has done. I do think there's an onus upon HRM to deal with their pension and to make sure they have an affordable pension and that they put enough money towards the pension and that needs to be something that they do. Our job is to make sure that pension plans are healthy and if they're not healthy, we will raise the red flag as we've done on this case and, hopefully, that would then lead to looking at it from their side and saying what can we do to make this pension plan healthy.
As I say, a lot of pension plans are in that position because of the roller coaster stock market where it was double digit returns and people didn't realize I guess that that was an anomaly and now we're, you know, if you get 5 per cent or 6 per cent, you're doing well, well, a little higher. I think the provincial pension plan is what - about 8 per cent or something, 7 per cent. So I don't want to chastize HRM too much but our job is specifically to state is this plan healthy, will this pay out and if it won't, we have the tools to put pressure on it but it's really then up to HRM to figure out do they change the pension plans as more affordable or do they, you know, put more money into it, what do they do. That would really be up to them to make those decisions.
MR. COLWELL: Well, the thing that concerns me about that is that if I recall right, and I would like your recollection of what happened with this, when we were going through the pension changes in the Act, HRM came with hat in hand and said, you know, don't make us pay any more money, don't make us pay any more money. Then they turn around and vote to give an increase on the pension, which I think is justified. So you can't have both worlds. Am I recalling this correctly?
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MR. PARENT: Yes, that was absolutely the decision that was made. They came and I'm quite concerned they wanted solvency relief and more time to meet the solvency deficiency, similar to what we had given to a university. So it was a valid request. We considered it, did it, and one of the conditions was that if there are any new benefits to the plan, that they would be prepaid. So clearly they can add 2 per cent on to help previous employees who deserve it, we all agree with that, but as part of the arrangements, at least that's how we felt and I guess the appeal will decide that. They're appealing. We'll see if that holds up but our decision was that that had to be prepaid. So if there was $10 million put into the pension plan, then they could do that if they wanted. The agreement we had on the solvency relief was that no new benefits be added unless they were fully paid. Now, that's being appealed so we'll see where the pieces fall in the appeal.
MR. COLWELL: From the time we discussed the pension plan and they came in with hat in hand, until today, has their pension plan got worse, better or stayed the same, the unfunded liability?
MR. PARENT: I'm not sure if we have that information, we'll ask Nancy. If we have it, we'll get it to you because we only have to do the thing every three years and so I'm not sure if we have information whether it has gotten better or worse. Certainly the agreement we had, or the agreement we felt we had with them, was that any new benefits would be totally prepaid in the period that they were experiencing solvency relief. I will get you the information if we have it from the pension superintendent. We'll make that a note and get back to you if we have any indication of whether it has gotten better or worse, I just don't know, I can't answer that question.
MR. COLWELL: The only concern I have if it has gotten worse for whatever reason, and them supporting increases, they really have to take some action here to get this resolved. I mean this is an important topic for the people who are on pension now and the people who will be on pension in the next four or five years or even further beyond that. So I'm sure that your administrator of pensions is well aware of that concern.
MR. PARENT: The administrator of pensions, if she was here, would probably not disagree with you. It was interesting, the letter that was sent out, which I responded to which I felt inappropriately targeted a civil servant but it raised a lot of questions amongst the pension members because we got letters saying you bums why are you standing in the way of us getting our 2 per cent, which was how the letter was phrased. To others who read between the lines and wrote in and said, is the HRM pension plan in trouble, this letter worries us.
The HRM pension plan certainly has challenges but it's stable and that's why we put in the solvency relief and felt that that could be afforded and with that proviso plan it would be strong and be able to over time be topped up. But we didn't feel, or at least our superintendent of pensions didn't feel, that they could afford new benefits during that period unless they were fully prepaid. So I don't want the message to go out that this pension plan's
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in catastrophe. It has challenges and as a result of those challenges the solvency relief was put in place. As a result of those challenges we felt we had an agreement that no new benefits would go in unless they were fully prepaid from some other source.
MR. COLWELL: That's what my understanding was. It just seems like it goes back and all the pensioners got that letter which I sent you a copy of, you probably already had it, but they're very concerned of course because they think that the big bad guys in provincial government are causing trouble for them and indeed that's not the case, it's HRM not properly funding this whole thing. There's some way we've got to get that on the record out to the public because one letter back to the HRM pension group won't do it. I don't know how you're going to do that but I think it's important because there's quite a few people in this situation that were employees of HRM. They're very concerned, some, like you said, that have seen and are smart enough to realize indeed there may be a problem here or the other ones who just don't realize and really need some extra income where they haven't got any increases for such a long time.
MR. PARENT: Because of privacy concerns I can't write a letter to all the pension plan members so I wrote back to Mayor Kelly who will take it and copy it to the two pension plan members who wrote to me. Hopefully it will go to the committee at least. I don't know if they have meetings, annual meetings or some way of communicating back to the membership in a way where the membership can ask them questions as well. I did commit to Mayor Kelly, when he met in my office, and two members from the pension plan who were there from their committee, that while I agreed with Nancy MacNeill Smith's decision that nevertheless I would ask the review committee to take a look at the issue. Even though the review committee was going to take a full year I'd ask them to look at that issue first and see if they could speed up some sort of answer but that wasn't satisfactory. I thought we had sort of a satisfactory arrangement but it wasn't satisfactory - at least it wasn't satisfactory for the individuals who wrote the letter which they sent out to all the plan members.
MR. COLWELL: If I could just make one suggestion, being a former councillor, sometimes the information that goes to the plan and sometimes to the mayor you don't get it as a councillor. Council actually makes the decision and not the mayor, that's the way it's structured so if you could possibly send that to each one of the councillors maybe with an explanation of what transpired here it might be very helpful. I think that they would take the appropriate action to make sure that the plan is funded.
MR. PARENT: That's a good suggestion. We'll take a look at it. I don't know with the appeal on right now, I don't know the timing on that, but certainly we've noted the suggestion.
MR. COLWELL: What I'm suggesting is just information for the councillors, what the situation is, what it was, what transpired to get it to this point so that they have all the information.
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MR. PARENT: Well the letter was fairly comprehensive, in fact, to Mayor Kelly copied to his members, so that letter could serve I think for all councillors but whether we're able in the middle of the appeal or whether it's wise, we'll check.
MR. COLWELL: Okay, I think that would be very helpful. You indicated the gambling impact on Nova Scotia, exactly what is the Department of Labour responsible for now? I'm still trying to figure out all of the things you're responsible for. Is it the regulation of the gaming or is it the addiction to gaming? Just in a few words.
MR. PARENT: It's regulation. It becomes a little confusing in part because Part I is under the Minister of Finance and at times it has appeared as if I've been speaking to Part I simply because of his health problems. The addiction piece is under the Minister of Health Promotion and Protection, our piece is regulatory. We regulate, we're the regulators of alcohol and gaming but the promotional piece, the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation is under the Minister of Finance. If at times I've spoken to it, it has simply been because of his health and probably inappropriate because we are only the regulators, I don't mean only but we are the regulators.
[6:30 p.m.]
MR. COLWELL: I used to be the regulator so I understand where you're at so I just want to understand that. It is complicated even when you're in the midst of it, it's complicated.
We talked about fire departments and in particular the volunteer fire departments. Has the province had a standard for training for volunteer fire departments now, a minimum standard that they could achieve over time? It's something that I wouldn't want to see forced upon them but over time.
MR. PARENT: What we want is a Level 1 training and the challenge that we've had is two-fold. One, there's a federal bill out there that the fire chiefs association claims is being interpreted to hold fire chiefs accountable if they send someone into a situation where they don't have the appropriate level of training and this is basically going into a burning building, this is what we are talking about. So if they don't have the Level I training to do that this federal bill they claim to me holds them accountable if there's any loss of life or anything. So we have pressures that way coming from federal government and also I would say that we would want to do that anyway. Just because they're volunteers you don't want to send somebody into a situation without the adequate training, that would not be the ethical thing to do.
At the same time we have demographics of some fire departments that don't have enough volunteers. Some fire departments have been approached by one fire department in Cape Breton where one of the members, a well known news media person, is a volunteer firefighter and said most of them are older duffs like myself and we don't want to do the
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Level 1 training, we want to help out but we don't want to do the Level I. So if there's a real fire where you have to do Level I, that there's only one or two people who will go into it and they're burning these young people out.
We're faced with real challenges on that. The other thing that we're faced with is that if you go within a 90-kilometre radius of Halifax because of the fire training school in Waverley - I don't know if you've ever been to the fire training school but if you want a tour we can arrange that because Margaret's getting a tour upcoming and she'd be happy to include you - within a 90-kilometre radius of Halifax a lot of the firefighters, the majority, would have Level I training. Once you go outside that radius it drops dramatically because of financial commitments, they have to come spend the night, pay for a motel, et cetera, but more time commitment that they have to spend the time away, they can't get the training after work or something because it's not close to them.
So there's a real challenge on training in Nova Scotia and the fire chiefs have put together a plan to try and address that. It's a fairly expensive plan and I've asked them if there's some way we can do it and still get the work done at less money and they're in the midst of refining or deciding whether it can be refined now. I hear there's sort of a division of opinion whether they need fixed fire stations, fire training schools throughout the province, or whether the Waverley school with mobile burn units could do the trick. That will be coming back to me and I will be trying to lobby with whoever I have to and the Minister of Finance to see if we can begin to fund that training plan because there is a real training crunch. At the same time you have the older firefighters who maybe want to help out in ways where they don't go into a burning building, don't need that training so our compromise was yes, you don't need the training if you're not doing that particular job we'll train you to the appropriate level of job that you want to go into. Then I was accosted in Cape Breton that that solution, which we thought was a good solution, maybe ended up putting enormous pressure on the one or two people who have taken the Level I.
So we have a challenge and I'm not sure what the answer is. It may well be that in some communities the best we can do is train the individuals to contain the fire so it doesn't spread to other buildings but that they won't be able to go and actually fight within the building because of the lack of training and because of lack of individuals. But there is a challenge, our volunteer fire department is one of the jewels in the crown but it is being challenged on both training demands driven by this federal bill and by demographics.
MR. COLWELL: The other issue is has there been any move to standardize the communication equipment in the volunteer fire departments? I know I work closely with our volunteer fire department and the ambulance service and the RCMP to see if we could coordinate things better. We thought we were doing really well until we had one incident. During that incident we found that the whole thing fell apart because the fire department had a two-way radio and they had to change channels to talk to the ambulance and they had to change to another channel to talk to the RCMP, they had to change it back to talk to their own guys so by the time they were all done changing all around nobody got the proper
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messages and there was a lot of frustration and indeed some losses that could have been avoided if they could have just picked the radio up and they could have talked directly to the ambulance, the paramedics and the RCMP very easily.
Now they have since resolved that in that area but they had the money to do it. That has got to be a real challenge and the challenge too, in talking with the RCMP, is they get a lot of scrambled radios as they should have now and that's a security issue for them. Is there any move or is that not a problem anymore? I initially thought it wasn't a problem but after seeing it first-hand it is a major concern, it's as big a concern as the training problem you're talking about.
MR. PARENT: I wish the fire marshal were here because he could respond better to that. That would fall under Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal but I recollect that there is some money, or there has been new money recently, but rather than lead you astray what I'll do is get a response to that for you or if you want to pop in on the Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, I think they're going to be in the main Chamber, you may want to ask. I recollect there has been some money put towards standardizing that but my memory, I wouldn't want to trust it, so we'll get you a response to that question.
MR. COLWELL: I'd appreciate that. It is a serious concern as we go through the whole process and you don't think of it first as being a concern because you figure everyone has a radio, they have cellphones, and all these communication things today and it's not an issue but when it gets in an emergency situation everything seems to break down or can break down if they don't have that set up properly. I agree with you, I think that the volunteer fire departments we have, the composite fire departments and the regular fire departments are one of the best things we have in this province and it's important we support them in any way and every way we can.
Back on the apprenticeship training programs, I have seen over the years a reduction in the level of training that was in place and in some trades that may be okay and some trades it isn't. I mean you can't water down a course that took two or three years down to six months and expect you're going to get a student out of that who can go to work and then be productive the first day they go to work. Actually, usually you have to spend a tremendous amount of time training people once they come out of school and augmenting the training that they received in school.
One of the things that I always thought was inappropriate is when you go to, say Akerley Campus, or the Nova Scotia Community College in the trades training, one thing they don't do is they don't train you in the same sort of atmosphere as they do in industry. In other words, industry works basically eight hours a day, five days a week, approximately 50 weeks a year, 48 weeks a year, depending on how many holidays they have, and you can't get a young person ready for that type of environment unless they train them in that type of environment.
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Now, it's different because you're not producing like you do in a business and you need classroom time which is equally as important as hands-on time, but if you train someone to work five hours a day, that's what they expect when they go to work and I think it's time we really started looking at this apprenticeship training and make it more intensive so when an individual does go out, very shortly after they go out, maybe a few months, they can become somewhat productive as compared to the tradespeople who are there. They don't need to be completely productive but to a point that they can hold their own and there are some things that they can do quite well and they can learn the other things as time goes on which has been the normal way for years and years.
Has there been any consideration for doing anything like that? We've really got to get this resolved and the other thing is we've got to stop pushing everybody into university, and if we get some people who just don't want to go we should make it possible for them to go into trades training. I would bet, within the next 20 years, a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter is probably going to make the same as a doctor does today because the doctors won't be able to get their cars to run, or their plumbing to work, and they're going to have to pay a big price to get it done. So I think there are going to be some careers for people in the trades that were always a good place to work but maybe even more financially rewarding, let's put it that way, as time goes on.
MR. PARENT: There are I understand two pilot programs. You're really, I believe, talking about the pre-employment training that moves into the apprenticeship training. There are two pilot programs to try to move into that pre-employment training more apprenticeship work so they come into the apprenticeship workplace, as you say, more prepared. Those two pilot programs are both in Truro. Why Truro got both of them I don't know, the wealth wasn't spread out. Let me just get you a timing on when those pilot programs will be finished so we could assess and we can get you the information.
So one we'll complete this Fall, one of the pilot programs, and we'll have some data on it which once we get, we will share with you, if we could note that. The other we'll complete next Spring and if they're successful in taking care of the problem that you put your finger on, then I imagine we'll extend them across the province but we haven't got the data back from them yet.
MR. COLWELL: I think too that I've come across some very intelligent people who just didn't like school for whatever reason and probably related to some of the problems I potentially identified earlier and if you can get them into something that they see has a real meaning to what they do, in other words they can see how to make something or to produce something, something they enjoy, it's that pre-training program and then the apprenticeship program is probably an ideal way for those individuals to go but today with the computers, technology that's in everything and the manuals you have to read and understand, it's getting more and more complex.
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So it's important that these type of programs are there and, hopefully, that they're structured so they're successful. When I say success, I don't mean that everybody goes into it graduates, I mean if you get 50 per cent graduation and they continue on, that will be success as far as I'm concerned and then you pick out the cream of the crop and they move forward and the other people go on and do something else, hopefully something else and maybe a different trade or a different career that they want and make it available for them.
But the trades training itself has been seriously watered down and there are more and more things you have to know as you move forward to these things. Has there been any indication at all, I have had this discussion with the President of the Nova Scotia Community College more than once. I have had that discussion with some of the instructors. I used to be on the advisory board for the old Halifax Vocational School and the Akerley Campus. The instructors in the class shared my concerns. They just didn't have the support from management to move these things forward and then I sent a young student back to them and said, we don't even want them here on work experience because they don't know anything and they are almost ready to graduate out of a two-year program. It's pretty scary. Again, the instructors have done everything they can to do this. I think it's a serious concern that has to be addressed.
MR. PARENT: In some ways, it's similar to the issue you raised in the public school system of . . .
MR. COLWELL: The same people run both things.
MR. PARENT: . . . pushing people through. But there is an interesting program that is being put in place in the community college system where in the trades, faculty can go back into the trade for six months as a sort of sabbatical in order to make sure that they are aware of all the new demands in that particular trade and then when they come back, hopefully reinvigorated as teachers, it should hopefully solve some of the problem. So that is new and that is being rolled out recently and we will see how that works. If you have been out of that profession for a long, long time, you may be teaching a curriculum that is out of date and, as you say, the trades are becoming more and more complicated and the demands upon tradespeople are growing all the time. In fact, I think they are the ones who do the sort of lifelong learning better than anyone. They have to because their trades are transitioning so quickly.
[6:45 p.m.]
So this was one way that the Nova Scotia Community College saw to sort of solve the problem is to allow these six-month sabbaticals where they went back to the trade they taught, heavy machinery, whatever, and went right back into the workplace for six months and then came back, renewed, reinvigorated and hopefully able to do a better job at the very . . .
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MR. CHAIRMAN: The time has expired for the Liberal caucus.
The honourable member for Halifax Needham.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to go back to the issue I had raised just before my time expired which was around bullying in the workplace and the need to broaden out our definition of violence in the workplace a bit to capture this serious problem in some workplaces. I had given you the example of the person from my constituency who, for a long period of time, had been subjected to a fair amount of bullying. I'm happy to say that scenario has been resolved and she is very happy at her job today but it was a big eye opener for me to encounter a real situation. I know that sometimes there is a fear that the floodgates will open if you change some of our definitions and you broaden the circumstances under which employers are required to provide workplaces free of violence.
I think that we have to understand that, first of all, this is a problem, it does exist and not every sort of stressful interaction between a worker and a co-worker or a manager, let's say, necessarily would be captured by our definition. I guess what I am saying is we have the ability, I think, to frame the problem to capture what we really intend to capture and not trivialize the problem, but to use it to deal with real instances of workplace bullying where there is real psychological harm occurring. I think it is incumbent on us to move in the direction of capturing this because it does exist and there are people who are really being harmed because of that.
MR. PARENT: We discussed this quite fully, my deputy, Bill Lahey at the time, when we were bringing in the workplace and violence regulations. Certainly, the NSGEU, for example, wanted us to move far further than we did. What we did was two things; one, we put into the definition any activity that would lead you to feel you're at a threat of violence. We expanded the definition slightly so that if someone was bullying you in such a way that you were scared that it might lead to physical violence, it would be captured by the definition, so we did that, we expanded that. We also, the Human Rights Act, I don't know if you know it has been changed so that harassment now is not just sexual harassment, it has been broadened out so they can appeal to the Human Rights Act. The third thing we did was we said we would monitor this and be open to expanding the violence in workplace regulations, basically looking at what happens in Quebec.
The Quebec minister has told us that there are certain issues they have had with it. They are still proud of it, I wouldn't want to misrepresent it, but trying to get that in place properly has been a challenge for them. They are supposed to be presenting at a future First Ministers' Conference and I have asked, I said we were quite interested in Nova Scotia because we're open to it, we said we've been open to it, we want to get the workplace and violence regulations up and running, we're open to it but we know that it's not as easy as physical violence to make regulations to cover and we'd like to learn from you and your experience. I think Quebec is - is Manitoba? You said Manitoba may have something now,
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my understanding was it was Quebec - supposed to be at some future First Ministers' Conference be presenting on that and I have told them we are very interested in Nova Scotia and if you have contacts with Quebec, you may want to ask them about it.
I do agree with you that the problem exists out there. In a religious educational institution which will go unnamed, the director, the principal, the president, the head honcho - just to try to hide the identity of the person - went through six individuals and I counselled a few of them in tears, broken people, it took them all about a year to recover. Clearly, that was a case that somehow we should capture, we should be able to stop. It wasn't just a trivial case, it wasn't a case of people disagreeing about small things, it was a case of someone destroying individuals and that made a big impression upon me.
When we put the workplace and violence regulations forward I kept saying, can we move in this direction. We did amend the definition a little bit, so that if someone slashed your car's tires, that would be captured, or if they said if you don't do this I'm going to whap you, that would be covered. But we're really looking to Quebec because they have signalled to us that they're proud of their legislation but there are problems and that they've had a number of complaints and have been unable to deal with all of them and we have limited enforcement officers on it. We are aware of the problem, we've signalled we're open to amending the regulations, but we're searching for the proper way to go.
I did notice that our Public Service, the public servants which is under a different minister, have adopted statements about bullying in the workplace and how it is unacceptable. That may be another avenue how they are able to do it, may be able to help us with private employers.
The third thing I think that will be helpful in itself is just the fact that you're no longer going to be able to take workers for granted, not that most employers did, but you know the minority who did won't be able to do that or they'll be out of business because the employee will just go somewhere else. That's not the best way to solve it, but that will help solve some of the problem.
I agree with you and we're monitoring Quebec carefully and I think they are supposed to be presenting at the next meeting and certainly, there are other provinces that said, we'd like to learn from you, we're interested, we're scared of the challenge, as you stated, that in opening the definition up too far do we become HR departments rather than a regulatory body. There must be some way of doing it, so they'll be presenting and we'll continue to look at the issue to see. Any suggestions that you have that may come to you from labour connections in other jurisdictions, I'm sure the deputy and I would be willing to listen to them and see.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I welcomed the Violence in the Workplace Regulations when we finally got them. I think they represented a significant improvement from where we were, but I would say that surely, if an employer or employee is threatened
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physically in the workplace, then surely that must be a Criminal Code violation, I would think. None of us here can say to somebody else, I'm going to punch you in the mouth, with impunity, if we're making threats then I think we do have some remedies. I'm not sure that putting stuff in the Violence in the Workplace Regulations necessarily captures the things that there are already remedies for, it's just a duplication, when what we really need is to look at kind of the important, but also realistic, pragmatic kinds of remedies that we can give to people who really suffer unnecessarily when they go to work.
It's often not that easy to just up and leave your workplace. If you've been in the workplace for seven years or 13 years and you have a supervisor who is abusive in this kind of way - I just think of my constituent, there are pension implications for people and it's a very difficult situation they find themselves in.
MR. PARENT: I agree with you and I agree that union workforces have recourse, but my son-in-law is in one where the employer right now is just every day belittling him, anything that goes wrong, yelling at him. He's newly married to my daughter, neither one of them have good-paying jobs, his self-esteem is being slowly broken down and yet he feels they can't leave, they are paying every cent they can on an apartment. So yes, we need to do something on it. I can't guarantee, it will be faster than the workplace violence regulations, but we are looking very much to Quebec to learn lessons on what to do and what not to do. They have signalled both that they know what to do, but also that there are some things that shouldn't be done, but they haven't really laid that out in a way that we could examine it fully. They're still putting their data together.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I'd like to talk to you just for a few minutes about the number of inspectors we have and the amount of time it takes to investigate complaints with respect to crane operators. The minister will probably be aware that there has been an exchange of e-mails from a gentleman who is a crane operator with respect to concerns he had on the job. I don't necessarily expect you to respond to that individual situation because I believe an investigation of his complaint is underway, I understand that, I respect the integrity of the investigation process. I guess what I'd like to know is whether or not we have enough inspectors in the various districts around the province, whether or not the department has an average benchmark in terms of the time frame from which a complaint comes in and then the department responds by getting out on the work site, or whatever the process is to start the investigation and look into complaints?
First of all, all concerns about workplace safety, I think, and I know you would agree, are to be treated seriously, but it seems to me that there is kind of a hierarchy of complaints that I would take probably more seriously, would be more concerned about. Operating big, heavy pieces of equipment like these cranes, which I understand can be quite unstable - and stability is a very important issue - and, of course, just the weight of these things in terms of if a boom lets loose or something like that, what does that mean for people in the area, the operator, but let's say people also around on that work site. It is certainly something I started thinking about more, as I was party to some of the e-mails that were flying around with
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respect to this particular complaint. I'm wondering, how many inspectors do we have? What is the average time to investigate a complaint? From the time a complaint is made, how quickly do we get an inspector into the field to follow up on that complaint? Is there sort of a benchmark that it needs to be done within a 24-hour period, or 48-hour period, or two weeks?
[7:00 p.m.]
MR. PARENT: Good questions, both of them. I can speak to the first one easier than the second one. In terms of the actual incident, which we're not really talking about, but with the two cranes, and there's an investigation right now of a discriminatory action complaint, so we can't speak to that and you've signalled that you're not going to ask about that which is good.
In terms of staffing we have 35 OHS positions, five of which are occupational hygienists. We are almost fully staffed on the OHS side. In Central Region we have 12, one officer is on secondment to Alcohol and Gaming and will be back. In Cape Breton we have six, that's full strength. In Northeast we have six, that's full strength and in Southwest we have six, that's considered full strength, although one senior officer is on medical leave, but we have just recently hired a new officer on a casual basis to fill that.
The area where we have problems are on hygienists. I didn't realize, I thought a hygienist was a dental hygienist, but hygienists, actually, are very, very highly trained and you obviously know about hygienists. We're having a hard time, I think we have two out of the five and the problem we're having there is just across Canada there is a shortage of hygienists, so that's causing some delays on the hygienist side. But on the occupational health and safety staffing side, we are up to complement with the two exceptions that I noted.
We try to respond within a week of receiving a complaint, but it can take a long time for the complaint to wind its way through and that's hard on the employee, I understand, on the person who made the complaint. We try to respond within the week and I'll try to see if I can get you an average time for all complaints put together, how long, that would include serious ones like the Englishtown Ferry - they're all serious, I don't mean that, but you know, ones that resulted in death - to other ones and see if we can get you a sort of average time figure. I'm sure we probably have that at some stage. So we'll get you that and see if we can break that down any further in any benchmarks, if there are classifications of complaints, then we can break down, but we try and get back within a week, at least to initiate the process.
We do have a real problem with hygienists, I mean two out of five, and that's why the Skills and Learning branch that has come into Labour and Workforce Development will hopefully help us on that side because we need more hygienists. It's not just an issue here in the province, it's an issue across the country and beyond, I understand. I didn't realize how much in demand they were and how important they were.
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MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Do you think you have enough - do you think 35 inspectors is enough to ensure the kind of safety that we require?
MR. PARENT: The OHS Division tells me that's enough, when they're up to full complement. I'm not sure if I'm qualified, as a minister, to say that. I do know that I feel on both the Environment Department and the Labour and Workforce Development Department that people are working at full capacity and beyond and working extra hours, and Alcohol and Gaming, I mean all of them.
I don't have staff who have extra time on their hands and seem to attract staff to those departments that like to be really busy. So when they tell me they have adequate staffing, I sometimes wonder if perhaps we could use more, but they are telling me that if all the positions are full, but there's no slack there, really, that's the problem because you have 35 positions, you're not always going to have them full so there's not a lot of slack built in because over time efficiencies in government have been demanded and demanded. So the amount of people are adequate to the task but there's no slack if you have people off for medical reasons or whatever. So I can only respond that they tell me that with 35 it is adequate, the problem is on the hygienist side. I do know that they are working at full capacity and there's not a lot of room in the system if anything goes wrong.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I'm fairly close to the end of the questions that I had to ask you. I do have one or two, probably smaller points and I haven't prepared a lot of questions around the skills training piece. I think as I become more familiar with it in your department, I might have a lot more to say about it.
I'm not sure that I totally agree with my colleague from the Liberal caucus, though, with respect to the problems that we have around numeracy and literacy. I think probably because I worked in the social work field for a long time, I think there are a lot of reasons for why people, as adults, don't have literacy and numeracy that can't be pinned on the education system and the failure of the education system.
I feel sorry for teachers in a way. I think we ask teachers to deal with kids who are coming to school without breakfast and many of the teachers I know are doing breakfast programs to try to get children adequate nutrition so that they can teach them and have them pay attention in the classrooms. Teachers are dealing with so much, they're dealing with kids with mental health disorders and no treatment and marital breakup in their families and not enough social workers and psychologists in our school boards, so the teachers are often expected to fulfill those roles and be role models and counsellors and therapists.
You know I think that when you pile all of these things onto the classroom teachers, then certainly there are kids who are going to fall through the cracks. Eventually they are going to become adults and they are not necessarily going to have those skills, you know, numeracy and what have you. So I think it's complicated why we have high levels of adult illiteracy and problems around numeracy and what have you. Not that we can't all do a better
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job, including our school system. I know that we attempt to do that but I think that the problems we have are complex. I think we'll have to address some of those problems systemically, in order to deal with the numeracy.
I've been to a lot of the graduations for upgrading programs and I'm always humbled, as my colleague, Mr. Colwell, said about his experience going to the graduations, they are probably the most humbling experiences that we'll have because many of the students come into these programs with very low self-esteem and no confidence in themselves and their ability to learn. I'm always struck at the beautiful speeches these people give.
I have a number, as we all probably have in our constituencies, a number of the kind of - I think of one program in particular, Options I think it is called, in my area and I've often gone to those graduations. They have a practice where every student who is finishing the program makes a little speech. It's not like they pick one person to be the graduation speaker - everybody gets to say something. They all speak so beautifully and I often think they could come down to this Legislature and give better speeches than many of the members here in the House. They're eloquent, they say what they mean in a clear and well thought through, well presented way and it is truly humbling.
The reason I know what people were like in the beginning when they came in without confidence in themselves, is my constituency office was in a building where one of these programs existed, so I often saw people when they first came to the program and they wouldn't look at you directly, eye-to-eye, and say good morning. They were so really broken down sometimes as people, feeling like they had not a lot to offer and not a lot of confidence. So these programs do make a tremendous difference.
One thing I would say, it's probably not good to generalize for everybody, it's not true for certainly everybody but the majority of people in these programs have had difficult lives as children and as young adults. So these other factors are very much a part of why they haven't been able to complete their education early on. They have been in broken homes, they have struggled with addictions, they have had mental health disorders, sometimes they have disabilities and they're probably over-represented from equity-seeking groups. They come from Aboriginal or African Nova Scotian or they are single parents or what have you.
I totally value these programs that are being offered to help people gain better literacy, numeracy and get their GEDs, for example, and what have you. It's a second chance for so many people who, as children, were unable, for whatever reason, to complete the P to 12 system when they were kids.
I know my colleague from the Liberal caucus knows this and I know he feels this as well, I don't say this to be partisan or something like that but I think it is true that these are the things we see when we go to these programs. Of course, if we had some way for our school system, at an earlier point, to be able to provide adequate supports when people are
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children then that would be great but that hasn't happened. I don't know that we will see it in my lifetime, so we need to give people a second chance.
So, as I said, I am not going to ask questions around the skills and training piece and what it is you do or that part of the department does but in the coming months, I will have an opportunity to learn more about that part of the department and I would love to have an opportunity to talk further on these topics.
MR. PARENT: I think I did mention an invite and if I didn't, I was remiss, but you're warmly invited to either come tour the Skills and Learning branch or if you want a briefing in your constituency office or in the NDP office, I would be happy to do that.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I am sorry, I didn't hear.
MR. PARENT: I just said if I didn't extend the invitation to both to come tour or, if you want a briefing at either your constituency office or at the NDP or Liberal caucus office, I would be happy to set that up for you because it has taken me a little while. The Skills and Learning branch is, to use an analogy, to me like COGS. I don't know if you know COGS in Lawrencetown. It's an unheralded jewel in the educational system and I think the Skills and Learning has suffered some of that same fate. So they would love to give you a tour, if you want to go there, or if, for time constraints, because as MLAs we have so many demands on us, if you want a briefing at the caucus office, they would be happy to come, or I think even to your constituency office. I will make that on their behalf because you are both in the city. That could be done as well.
[7:15 p.m.]
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Sure, I would be happy to take you up on that. It is an area that I have a lot of interest in and would like to learn more about the various things. I looked at the business plan from the department and I find a lot of the programs that are mentioned very interesting and some are familiar to me but certainly there are a number that aren't familiar to me at all. I noticed one here around parents being mentors for young people around career choices. I never heard of this before and it sounded very interesting. So I would look forward to learning more about these.
MR. PARENT: I will make sure - the director of that branch is here and they will contact both you and Keith to set up, at your convenience, a briefing.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: There are a couple of other things I just want to really quickly touch on. I notice that the business plan makes reference to developing information for foreign workers in several languages. I am not sure at what stage that particular initiative is. I would certainly welcome it. I know that this is going to be a growing situation here as different employers look to address their skill shortage by entering into various agreements to bring in workers from offshore. As I understand it, workers who come
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to Nova Scotia are covered by our labour standards but if they don't know what the rules are, then it leaves them probably in a more vulnerable position than we would like. So we want to ensure that people understand what their basic rights are and entitlements. So I am wondering where that particular initiative is.
MR. PARENT: There are a few things we are working on. One is for temporary foreign workers, for them to know their rights. That is simply their rights and right now we have a pamphlet in French, English and Gaelic. (Laughter) Oh no, French, English and Spanish, sorry. Gaelic wouldn't help anybody.
AN HON. MEMBER: Maybe the Premier is going to be unemployed soon. (Laughter)
MR. PARENT: Well, I'm going to get myself in trouble here. Gaelic, forget that - I'm glad we're not in the main Chamber - French, English and Spanish, that needs to be expanded but I doubt if Gaelic will be one. We also have a guide for internationally educated professions that's written now in English and it's being translated, but we're in the middle of discussions right now. There is the PLA, the Prior Learning Assessment, which I think we helped put about $107,000 to them recently to help them because they're having some financial trouble.
So we're sort of an unofficial partner with them to a certain degree but there's a much wider plan going on right now that we're looking at across Atlantic Canada and there may be some federal money. It's a beginning sort of stage so there's not a lot I can tell you but maybe a year from now, or sooner, I don't know, I'll be able to share more about that but the PLA does some work. We've done pamphlets for foreign professionals, pamphlets for foreign workers on their rights, and we are working on this larger sort of plan but it's so preliminary that I'm not sure which direction it will go in at this stage. We realize the problem and we realize the opportunity.
When we had talked about our literacy programs at the celebration in Kentville just this weekend, the Mile for Literacy, the fundraising that we've had I think for about three years now, the Valley Literacy Community Association, one of the speakers was a girl from Mexico who was taking advantage of that program to help her to upgrade her English skills and so they're doing some of that work but this plan as it evolves, I have a phone call with the other ministers to discuss whether we move forward and the working group has suggested that the ministers discuss it. So there is some activity there and there may be federal funding over a four-year period.
Apprenticeship has a PLA officer to guide international persons through our system. So we do have a prior learning assessment officer in the apprenticeship program and maybe when you're briefed, we can have some briefing on that and, of course, although it looks like now we'll probably be moving towards passing the fair access legislation in the Fall to get
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more consultation in, although I'm not sure if that decision is formally made at this stage but it looks very much that way, that that too we hope will be helpful to help with immigration.
We have in Nova Scotia the largest number of immigrant workers of all the Atlantic Provinces. There are 2,500 full-landed immigrants along with 1,300 temporary workers who work mainly in agriculture but in other areas, which pales in comparison with Ontario or Alberta, but in the Atlantic context we are the highest number. So we're eager to do something and New Brunswick is eager to do something, and P.E.I., and Newfoundland and Labrador would be part of this program, but it's at such a preliminary stage that really it would be not very useful to you for me to elaborate on it too much because I'm not able to talk about the shape of it, but we are working at that - so the pamphlets, the regulation, the apprenticeship, PLA officer in the Skills and Learning branch, and the help from the PLA that we're able to offer and then this new thing that's starting to develop.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: Okay, well, I'm going to end now and turn the remainder of my time over to my colleague.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The honourable member for Cape Breton Centre.
MR. FRANK CORBETT: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good evening, minister. Surprise, I'm going to ask a few things about WCB. You're shocked, I'm sure.
MR. PARENT: The WCB expert, I finally can say workers rather than workmen, you've trained me.
MR. CORBETT: On the line of what we usually call the short snapper, the transitional services team that are dealing primarily with chronic pain, do you have an idea of the amount of cases that are still pending over there that are waiting for hearing officers' decisions?
MR. PARENT: Yes, I do. I thought I had a note, I'll have to get you that information. We don't have it here. We'll get that information to you.
MR. CORBETT: I appreciate that. I know - I almost used the word accosted - you were accosted this week by an injured worker, he met you here and I appreciate the difficulty of that when someone is asking you to directly intervene in their case and the frustration. I'm sure you are empathetic to their needs when they come to you. Has there ever been a consideration since you've had the Labour portfolio of changing the appeals system at WCB?
For a while they tinkered with an alternative dispute resolution process which didn't end all that successfully. Previous to the Act coming into effect February 1, 1996, there used to be what people commonly referred to as a board. Have you, in your wisdom, looked at seeing a system that's more reflective of the one that's used at Canada Pension appeals where
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it's filed, reviewed and then again, it can go to the office of the review tribunal. Then, if that fails, it's similar to a court case, but it's not in court, where you can ask for leave if you have grounds and go to the Canada Pension Plan Review Tribunal. Have those types of discussions ever taken place with you?
MR. PARENT: They haven't risen to my level, there may be some discussions going on that I'm unaware of. The work that we've been working at our level is basically making sure the new governance structure is in place, then the chronic pain thing became something that had to be dealt with and getting a new Chair - I sound like I'm making excuses, don't I?
But, we haven't done anything on that. With a separate Labour and Workforce Development Department, we'll have, I think, more opportunities to do that. I think, Tim McInnis, God bless his soul, does a wonderful job and I . . .
MR. CORBETT: You don't pay him enough.
MR. PARENT: We don't pay him enough and I'm thankful for him every day he's at work. He had a week of holiday and I noticed it right away.
But, there needs to be a better appeal process that gives people the opportunities, as you say, because no one's perfect and even Tim, as wonderful as he is, isn't perfect. He's sort of like the ombudsman on our behalf, helping out. I know at times he gets a little frustrated too.
Certainly we'll hear that. The WSIS system has been meeting and the last meeting that they had had moved forward very much on common agreement. One of the things they actually came into agreement on was including workforces under the WCB, smaller workforces than previously had been included, which was quite a breakthrough and this is made up of employers and employee stakeholders on the WSIS. That would be a place where this sort of discussion could go forward, I would think. I would encourage you and I'll certainly encourage the deputy to speak to Nancy and I'll speak to Ray about that, looking at the Canada Pension model. I've been involved with it, I think as you have when we chatted. It does give at least an appeal process, it can be a bit onerous on the person who is appealing, but at least they feel they are appealing to someone else. So surely, I will raise it, but it hasn't really at my level been discussed and this will be one of the advantages of having a separate Labour and Workforce Development Department.
I know Bill Lahey, for example, was just run off his feet with both responsibilities and never felt he could really give proper attention to either. Nancy was carrying both for a while and then she's so relieved now she says, finally I can concentrate on moving forward on some of the environmental issues. I know Margaret is feeling the same way about this, so we'll put that on our list, we'll have conversations. I would encourage you, Ray Ivany is very
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open to talking about how to make it better. I didn't realize his training was in occupational health and safety, so I can get you his number too.
MR. CORBETT: I have it.
MR. PARENT: Oh, you have it already, yes. I will speak with Ray, Margaret will speak with Nancy and we'll raise the issue and see, there is some movement. As the WCB reaches - they've slid back a little bit this year because of chronic pain, but mainly because of investments not getting the same return - but as they start to reach toward that full funding, which is the year 2016, as they start to get closer, they're starting to feel that they can begin to do more things. For a while it looked like the system was dead, it was funded at 29 per cent it was down to or something.
MR. CORBETT: Probably even further.
[7:30 p.m.]
MR. PARENT: So now is the time when some of these things - and I know my colleague, Murray Scott, has come to me about some improvements that can be made on the benefits system and there's now a little more flexibility to look at those, although there is still a lot of concern that, you know, we don't want to slip back, we want to get fully funded, but I'll speak to Ray to see if there's any possibility of putting in some sort of appeal system.
The gentleman who spoke to me, I asked if my EA would quietly speak to the WCB, I don't want to become the court of appeal because that would just gum up the system, so there needs to be something better and different and I'm not sure if Tim McInnis can handle it totally on his own either.
MR. CORBETT: Thank you, Mr. Minister, because if you can appreciate, these are items of concern to me, I don't expect you to go with a big sword tomorrow and clean it all up. Back in 1999, in particular, when WCAT had such a huge backlog because of chronic pain and through Bill No. 90 of that day, how it was trying to relieve those backlogs and, as you know, because of a court decision it was found that sections of Bill No. 90 were not constitutional.
At the end of the day what we have, what I would say to you, Mr. Minister, are two levels of injured workers and I would hope that folks at WCB would look at it as such. It may be oversimplifying, but one group is an injured worker that is being readied to return to the workplace, they're on a turn and it's a matter of maybe a couple of days, a couple of months and they're back to work, that's one level. Those forms of appeals should be dealt with in another way, I feel. The other group are the ones who will not be returning to the workforce. Within that group we have another group because coming effective with the government getting rid of mandatory retirement we have another problem down at WCB and that would be for the older employee who decides to stay in the system and work. That person gets
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injured past 65, what happens to that person? The board basically, I think it's a maximum of 24 months benefits and they're out. I guess my question to you is, has the department looked at the possibility of that being a Charter challenge?
MR. PARENT: It's an interesting question you raise because it was a Human Rights issue and also frankly, to be selfish, we need to transition people in retirement over a couple of years in order to deal with our demographic challenge. The Labour Minister, federally, had done a study and Jean Pierre and I chatted about it and he told me that instead of people retiring at a set date, they could transition over two or three years, that that would take care of the worker shortage we had at that time and that was based on a study he had.
When we brought in the mandatory retirement extension, it really didn't affect the WCB issue, as you stated. Ontario and Quebec are now moving at extending the time and you may or may not be aware of that. As they move in that direction it will put pressure upon us to do the same. I'm not sure we thought that piece out, they were sort of exempted, but a Charter challenge could arise, so we will be monitoring Ontario and Quebec as they extend the time that WCB covers employees and see what happens in that regard. If we're saying to employees, you can work beyond 65, but your WCB coverage is gone at 65, then we're giving mixed messages, aren't we.
MR. CORBETT: Obviously and I guess with that then, any post-Hayden injuries are wage loss and wage loss ends at 65. I guess the second part of that question then is, has that been considered as a possible Charter challenge, does wage loss now have to stop at 65? Do I have to go back to the old meat chart system and it goes on forever?
MR. PARENT: I understand WCAT has written a few decisions and maybe I'll just leave my comments at that, that you do have a point.
MR. CORBETT: I understand, you'll appreciate I'm not doing this to put you on the spot, Mr. Minister, as we often talk on aside that I am involved, for some reason, I fell into doing a lot of WCB and WCAT hearings and these are issues that injured workers have often come up to me with. The things that are coming before WCAT now, especially in the area of the province that I'm from where heavy industry isn't what it was, there are no coal mines, there are no steel plants, hopefully, there will be a coal mine shortly. Those types of disabling injuries and those types of workers who would end up through their lifetime having up to 10 WCB numbers were not uncommon. A lot of those people who are in that system, there's a mix of them who are pre-Hayden and post-Hayden, these folks have a grapevine and one of the questions often asked to me is because of the movement away from mandatory retirement, what's your take on age 65 and I said, I'm no lawyer.
MR. PARENT: Basically right now it's what, two years and then they transition over to CPP, but as I said, Ontario and Quebec are looking at lengthening that two-year period. We are monitoring it and there is a possibility of court challenges and WCAT has been asked to rule on it a few times I hear. So that's an issue.
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MR. CORBETT: I guess more specifically though, WCAT being Justice and Workers Advisers being you guys, is Workers Advisers taking any cases to the court of appeal?
MR. PARENT: We'll try to get you, we're unaware of any discussions at Workers' Advisers right now. There is a case in New Brunswick on the Potash Corporation that we think our lawyers may be sitting back to wait and see what the decision of that is, but we'll get you that information if there has been any sort of position put forward by the Workers Advisers Program to WCAT, so we'll get that back to you.
MR. CORBETT: I'd appreciate that. Just a couple of quick ones, this isn't small in financial matters, but it's one I think the Liberals may still have a bill in front of the House on, it's retroactivity for the widows that have remarried. I find with WCB there are two lines, I guess, one is the very strict, stern law of the land, if you will, and then I think there should be in some respects a moral code that should be reached there.
I remember one of the past CEOs at WCB once told me quite directly that we're not a social agency, we're an insurance agency. While I respected that person, I could never disagree more with somebody because with the Meredith Principles, it's much more than just a no-fault insurance scheme. We've debated this, as I'm sure you remember, Mr. Minister, is it ever the intention of your government to come back and reconsider your position? I know you have a legal opinion that you do not have to do this and as I prefaced with this, it's obviously a legal opinion, but I believe there is a moral obligation to these women. I just wanted to ask, is there any intention to revisit that?
MR. PARENT: I met with many of the widows myself, not all of them, up in Cape Breton and certainly, there is a moral case. I've talked to the minister - who was minister at the time, sitting to your left - who brought in the settlement and he's busy reading the paper right now, but I'm sure he's listening to me. He has made the claim, and staff have, that the arrangement that was made actually may be more beneficial to the widows in Nova Scotia than say, the arrangement that was made in other provinces.
I have asked since we last talked last year, I've asked WCB once again to give me some decision on it because not only have you been pushing me on it, but someone whose good graces I need to stay on the right side of if I want to stay as a minister, has been pushing me hard on it. As a result of that, I did ask WCB. We could always bring in legislation, I realize that, but I did ask them would they reconsider their decision and they claimed, in a letter from Ray Ivany, that they were standing by their decision and so the ball was back in the government's court to pass legislation.
At this point in time there is no intention on our part to pass legislation and there are a couple of reasons for that. One reason is that we're very cautious in government about the autonomy of WCB, that may sound like an excuse, but we're very cautious about it, so that's the main reason, that while we could legislate them, we're very cautious about moving in that direction. Frankly, I have advised the Premier that that would not be a good move for us to
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make. If WCB, in their own wisdom, decided that they would reverse their decision or that they would make a new decision, that would be one thing, but for us to force them, to legislate them, would give a signal that perhaps we didn't want to give in terms of the Auditor General who is looking at the relationship between WCB and government and wants to make sure the WCB is independent in that, or as independent as they can be.
So that is why we have not made legislation but I did write WCB again saying would you re-look at this, would you confirm or deny your decision or your advice and they wrote back and I can get you a copy of that letter. So then I put it back in the "do we legislate or not legislate". Frankly, I have told the widows this myself, that I cannot recommend it, as minister, for reasons which I explained to them. They certainly were not happy to hear it. The moral argument that they had was compelling. It is one of those positions that I was in where I made a decision that was not an easy decision to make, having listened to them.
It's about $10 million, what we are looking at, that would be the cost to WCB. I don't think the decision was made by the board totally on finances. I think they felt they had been very fair in the plan that was put in place but certainly they were aware it would be a $10 million hit to their unfunded liability. I really do think, in their defence, that they made their decision completely with no thought to the finances. So a short answer, I have given the long answer, there is no thought on the government's part of bringing in legislation to force them to change the decision.
[7:45 p.m.]
MR. CORBETT: In closing, it is my recollection, in discussions with WCB the other day, that financial considerations were a factor, that because at that point in the late 1990s, the unfunded liability was spiralling out of control. So that was one of the mitigating factors.
I am going to just leave you with a comment. First of all let me say, as someone who deals quite often with the staff of WCB, the vast majority of people employed at that agency go above and beyond the call of duty. I know they get maligned by people like myself and injured workers but I realize that the job they do is not an easy one. I don't think anybody gets up in the morning, puts their feet on the floor and says whose benefits are we going to cut off today?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Excuse me. The time has expired for the NDP caucus.
MR. PARENT: Can I just respond to that?
MR. CHAIRMAN: With permission from the honourable member for Preston.
MR. PARENT: Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. You are quite right and I was being presumptuous, so thank you. I agree with you that 99 per cent, of not just WCB but all of our provincial employees, deal well with people, particularly in Community
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Services but that there are certain employees, for one reason or another, maybe through stress at home and that often complicates because a lot of times people will take a no but they want to be heard. So I don't know if we have ongoing training in that regard in WCB but I will certainly speak to Ray about it because it is an issue.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The honourable member for Preston.
MR. KEITH COLWELL: Mr. Chairman, first of all, I totally agree with my colleague from the NDP, which is a shock to everybody, about the appeal process for Workers' Compensation. I think it should be, and I have said this for a long time, very similar to the Canada Pension process, it's a lot simpler, it's a lot easier to understand and it's a very fair and equitable process. The Workers' Compensation one seems to be convoluted and very difficult even for us to understand, who work with it every day, never mind an individual who comes into it and has the stress of an injury and income loss and all the things that go with it. So anything that the department can do or the Workers' Compensation Board can do to move to that simple process - it's very fair, and I haven't seen a case that I've worked on ever refused as long as the medical information is there.
It's very clear what the benefits will be. It's very, very clear - the whole thing is very clear. It takes a little while to understand how it works, but once you understand how it works, it's a very good process. It's gotten to the point that, with the cases I work on, I'm sure my colleagues of all Parties would find the same, I often discuss the cases, with the permission of the individuals, with the Canada Pension people in order to come to some kind of resolution and someone that is ill or injured on the job or whatever the case may be, can be properly classified as totally disabled. That's really what their classification is.
I would strongly suggest that the department look towards that, take away all these problems that people have, make it very simple. Indeed, it would probably save the government a lot of money. They'd probably end up paying more people quicker than they are now and resolving these issues a lot faster and probably end up at the end of the day that you don't have to go through all these appeals with the same result.
I had a question around chronic pain. The Workers' Compensation Board hired an extraordinary number of people, and I understand why, to handle their backlog of chronic pain. As this backlog gets eliminated, are those positions going to be eliminated? Are they contract positions? What will the situation be there?
MR. PARENT: Yes, they've already started to reduce their workforce. I think the backlog, post-Charter, has caught up, it's the pre-Charter that they're working on. But, I understand that - I don't have the stats of how they're reducing, but I'll get that for you.
In some sense, the WCB is so big, it's the tail that wags the dog in our department. I'll get you that information, but I understand they've already begun to reduce a bit as the post-Charter's gotten under control and now the pre-Charter is being worked on.
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MR. COLWELL: Okay. I also want to talk some more about what my colleague from the NDP talked about, learning difficulty with students and I totally agree with that. That's all part of the process - the point I was making earlier was there's really no incentive for anybody to study and work hard because you're just pushed through anyway and once they figure that out, a lot of people just don't bother.
But, there is a problem with early intervention with students in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 level to make sure they get the proper resources in place. Quite frankly, the schools do not have those resources, although the teachers try very, very hard to help. In some cases, the school board hasn't been very helpful in supporting the students, teachers and parents in their efforts. I just want to make sure I have that on the record.
Back to the trades training issue again, this is a very serious issue. If we're going to grow the economy in Nova Scotia, we have to do it in many ways. We've been quite successful at higher education here, more high-tech jobs which are extremely important to our economy. I still feel we're falling down on the trades training process.
I have several friends who are in the contracting business and they have an awful time finding skilled people. It's not because the people have disappeared to Alberta, it's just that there are none. It's just impossible to get someone that knows how to do the work, is willing to work - most people are willing to work - and have the skills so they can actually do the work.
Again, I think that goes back to the trades training being not as strong as it used to be. We're definitely a long way from the old European model. I can remember when I first started in the trades, I worked with a gentleman that worked on a lathe, a metal-working lathe, he started in Yugoslavia as a young student - I think he was 13 or 14 when he started. He wasn't even allowed to clean the machine for the first year, that's how intense the training was, but by the end of the fifth or sixth year he was making parts better than anyone I have ever seen in this province, the training was that good. But I don't think we have to go back to that sort of model, but I think the model of working in industry, taking courses - and I was quite interested with the comments you made about the instructors and I would like to elaborate a little bit more on that, where they work for a couple of years and then take six months leave. I would be a little bit tougher than that. I would make them work for two years and then go to industry for a year and if they can't make it in industry, they don't get their teaching job back because in reality if they can't make it in industry, they shouldn't be teaching - with the proper benefits that go with that, you know, accumulating the pension and all the things they would, but it's that critical.
If we have a really strong, well-trained technical workforce here, it will attract businesses, and businesses in the aerospace industry and a lot of other industries that are in manufacturing, like Pratt & Whitney and a lot more companies like that, but if you don't have the trained people or the ability to train them to a level that they can start producing almost immediately when they go to a business, that's not going to happen. We don't have
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to give people incentives to come here, we just have to have the environment for them to come here.
MR. PARENT: I'm almost frightened because you're making such a good case for why we put Labour and Workforce Development together that maybe you're planning on taking over my job or something. But really that's one of the main reasons that we put those two together because it made so much sense in order to meet the challenge that you're talking about. As Margaret whispered to me, he's really making the case for the reason why this department came into existence as a new department and the need to get co-operation on it.
The head of our Skills and Development branch, who's sitting behind me, told me - and this is anecdotal - that a high-ranking federal civil servant said that the program that they were administering, the Labour Market Development Agreement, was really only working at about 65 per cent efficiency and he thought there were far more things that could be done to improve and we feel as that devolves to the province and we've put Labour and Workforce Development that we can do even more exciting things.
Now, having said that, you know, we would put expectations on ourselves and next year, if I'm still in this position, I'll be having to answer what have we done to make it better but you are making the case very much on why this new department is needed and hopefully - well, I don't have to say hopefully, I know you'll hold us to some of these - next year when we have our first year and getting back to the colleague from the NDP, we certainly hope that we'll have accomplished a lot in a year, that we will get some very prominent space in the Finance Minister's speech. So, yes, you're just making the case really of why this department needs to be in place and I know that the director of our Skills and Learning branch is listening very carefully to your suggestions.
MR. COLWELL: Just to give you an idea what it's like to run a manufacturing facility in Nova Scotia because most of the people who are here have never done that - I have and I did for some time. To start with, in Nova Scotia our taxes are too high; property taxes, personal income tax, corporate taxes are too high as compared to other jurisdictions. Our labour costs are too high. I was competing internationally and the only way we could compete was to automate and train the staff better internally, and the red tape is too much. There's too much red tape.
Now, every government, including the government I was in, the government you're in, dedicated to change that and there have been some changes in it but not enough and if you've got to designate an employee to look after red tape and all the stuff that goes with that one, when I say red tape, it's all the things you have to do to report to government and not just provincially but federally, municipally, whatever, that's a loss that you have. In order to make money in a business you have to have a three-time ratio. So this new minimum wage that you put up, you if put the rate up $1, you've got to charge $3 an hour to make up for it. If you don't, you'll go broke. It's that simple, there's no magic to it but that's what it is here
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in Nova Scotia, it's a three-to-one ratio. It really should be higher than three-to-one, if you're going to make money and grow and expand and do the things that businesses do.
So when you take all those things into consideration; number one, you don't have time to train somebody who comes out of school who is not properly educated, you just don't have time for that because you're competing with someone in the U.S., for instance, which is the nearest competitor, that will train people for you to a level that you're happy with, and guarantee it, with a lower labour rate. They have a lower labour rate, lower taxes, and when I say "incentives to business" I don't mean money, but other things that help businesses flow.
Then if you look at what's happening in China, we simply can't compete, we just can't. We're up against an economy that's automated, that the labour costs are low and very well trained, much better trained than we are in Canada. I know that for a fact because I hired a lady, in my business, who was a machinist who came to work with us and she was incredible. She was better trained than any of the people I had who had been with me for 15 years. She was just an incredible tradesperson, but that's what we're up against. So if we don't put all that combination together, and training is such an important part of this, we can't compete. If we can't compete, our economy dies. If we don't really sharpen up on these things, on the education up through high school and the universities - and we have a very good university system and I think that works very well - but in the trades training, if we don't improve those things our economy is going to be in such a shambles that we cannot compete.
[8:00 p.m.]
You can't dig yourself out of it overnight, you just can't. That's why I was very serious when I said that an instructor should work two years in the school and one year in the industry - a job he has to get himself, he or she, if they can't get that job they don't have a job at the school, it's that simple. Or, if they can't maintain that job for a year, they shouldn't get their job back at the school, someone else should be there doing the work. You could rotate different instructors and that would also allow students to see different instructors and have a different concept of what is needed in the industry.
It also brings the people in industry back to reality. I could tell you, if I could hire someone like that when I had my business, who had that ability, for a year, I would gladly jump at the offer and also help train them better in the new technology that we would have in place that the schools definitely don't have.
So those are the things you really have to aim at. I'm pleased to see that the department is moving in that direction. I just hope that it goes and really has some successes here because we need them, we really, really need them.
When I was running my business I was also involved in the Enterprise Forum for Nova Scotia , I was one of the founders of that. I was in the CAD/CAM collegiate which
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promoted computer-aided design and manufacturing in the province, way ahead of the time when it came in place and we mentored many, many business people. People want to work in Nova Scotia, they want to work here, they want to make money here, they want to make the economy grow, but we haven't set the environment for it.
Off this topic, but I think our regional development agencies are a disaster. I've thought that from day one and they've proved it because they haven't really generated any new employment, so I know it's not your responsibility but it's part of the responsibility of Labour. If we don't work all of the departments together, it won't work. I can give you, off the record, some examples of directors who aren't suitable.
MR. PARENT: Speaking to that, working all together, we agree with you and we have, as a Labour Department, for example, on some of the economic development initiatives that NSBI does, said you need to include us, in terms of your discussions, because we can begin to do some of the work of training for jobs that you're attracting here, right? So we need to get people to think of that.
The LMA, as I said, the $14 million over each year for six years, will allow us flexibility to do more of that. We're going to have to be very strategic how we spend that money because it can go very quickly. We've had some preliminary discussions already with, as I said, Robert Chisholm and Rick Clarke and we're going to be talking to businesses about whether there's some sort of model that they're using in Quebec, some partnering that can leverage that funding so we're already beginning to work on that.
The LMA funding won't come for about a year, so it gives us time to prepare to begin to spend it wisely but we're really very hopeful that that will help extend. We're already doing a lot of training in workplaces already, when a workplace identifies, say, a literacy problem and invites us in. We're willing to go in right now and do that work but we need to do more of that because of the fact that the businesses are changing and don't have time, in the midst of the business, to devote a lot to the training if they're going to maintain a profit level.
Now in terms of the differential on labour costs, in this room I can perhaps be a little freer to say it but the labour co-operative agreement, the bill I have before the House, one of the reasons we've done that and I've pushed for that, is because as we go overseas and help work with them to raise their labour standards, there's a very selfish benefit that comes out of it, and I didn't want to say this when I was unveiling the bill before, but as they raise their labour standards in different countries, then the differential, in terms of labour costs, goes down.
I think a similar thing maybe should be done on the environmental side. We have very strict environmental regulations here, many other countries we're competing with have very lax environmental regulations, so our companies are competing on an uneven playing field, basically. So the answer, a lot of people say to me, is lessen your labour standards,
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lessen your environmental standards. I can understand the reason why businesses sometimes say that to me, because it is frustrating when you're competing with someone who is employing someone at - well, we saw it with Trenton, for example, when they went down to Mexico.
I think there is a different way of handling the same problem and that is saying instead of us lessening our standards, let's work with those countries to raise their standards and so there is a very selfish reason why I was pushing the labour co-operative agreement because as we do that, workers in those countries - who deserve every much protection as our workers - will start demanding it; it will push their wages up and then the competition will be more even. So it has two benefits; one to businesses back here but two, a very humanitarian benefit to workers there who deserve the protection we have.
That will take a long time to happen but I think we're beginning to see it happen already in various countries where - I know I was in Abu Dhabi on an environmental mission paid for by the federal government and I was the lead minister for it, it was an Atlantic one, in part because of our leadership on the environmental file. So I was in Abu Dhabi as the lead minister paid for by federal money because of our leadership on the environmental file, so it was environmental companies that were there, from Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia - I don't think we had any companies from P.E.I.
I noticed when I was in the hotel, a worker on an 18th floor building that was all cement, no windows, nothing, standing on a scaffolding with no fall harness, fixing something overhead. Certainly in Abu Dhabi their economy is built on these temporary foreign workers who aren't allowed citizenship - about 80 per cent, 85 per cent of the population - and increasingly those workers are demanding proper labour protections.
It's a very small thing and when I unveiled the plan I think the media thought, well, this is pretty small, will this do anything? As a province, I think that we can help share ethically, do the right thing and share with other countries some of what we learned, and learn from them as well, they may have things that we can learn from but it also helps level the playing field a little bit.
Certainly we've seen that discussion in the United States, as Clinton and Obama have been duking it out and talking about reopening NAFTA and the two areas that they talk about are labour and environment.
MR. CHAIRMAN: At this time, with approximately two and a half minutes remaining, the Chair will recognize the minister for closing comments in the debate on his estimates.
MR. PARENT: Thank you. I've given the deputy and staff a lot of work to do, more work than I think on the environment, to get back but we have a new deputy who is eager and excited about it and a new Department of Labour and Workforce Development, so we'll get
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the answers that we've promised. It may take us a little longer in some cases than in others, but we'll get them to you.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Shall Resolution E17 stand?
Resolution E17 stands.
On behalf of all the committee members, we wish to thank the honourable minister and his staff for their co-operation and information provided. That concludes the debates on the estimates of the Department of Labour and Workforce Development.
I wish everyone a safe drive home, anyone who is travelling. Good night.
[The subcommittee adjourned at 8:09 p.m.]
