Mr. Edward Helwer (Gimli): Madam Speaker, I move, seconded by the member for Pembina (Mr. Dyck), that the composition of the Standing Committee on Public Utilities and Natural Resources be amended as follows: the member for Portage la Prairie (Mr. Faurschou) for the member for Sturgeon Creek (Mr. McAlpine).

Hon. Darren Praznik (Government House Leader): Madam Speaker, the deputy opposition House leader and I are doing some work to see if we can reach an agreement to waive private members' hour. That may or may not happen today, and that is part of the negotiation of House business. I would ask if, at five o'clock, the Committee of Supply could be suspended to allow Madam Speaker to take the Chair to determine whether or not in fact there is leave at that time rather than end the committee. If there is not leave, then we will be back for private members' hour. If there is, then we will continue. It is just, I think, a much easier way to do it as discussions progress this afternoon.

Madam Speaker: Is there unanimous consent of the House to have the Speaker return to the Chair at five o'clock to determine indeed whether private members' hour will be waived at that time or not? [agreed]

Mr. Praznik: Madam Speaker, I would move, seconded by the honourable Minister of Rural Development (Mr. Derkach), that Madam Speaker do now leave the Chair and that this House resolve itself into a committee to consider of the Supply to be granted to Her Most Gracious Majesty.

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Mr. Chairperson (Gerry McAlpine): Order, please. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This afternoon, this section of the Committee of Supply meeting in Room 254 will resume consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Labour. When the committee last sat, it was considering item 11.2. Labour Programs (a) Management Services (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits on page 115 of the Estimates book. Shall the item pass?

Mr. Daryl Reid (Transcona): I want to go back for a few moments, if I might, dealing with the desktop computer issue. I looked at the numbers that the minister referenced with respect to the costs for this year. Last year we were told it was going to be $250,000 a year, and this year we learn that the minister is talking about over $320,000. So I would like to have an indication why there is a discrepancy between the numbers that were given to us in Estimates last year and what the minister is referencing this year.

Hon. Mike Radcliffe (Minister of Labour): I can advise my honourable colleague that last year the figures that were circulated were best-estimate figures. There was no amortization issue yet computed or introduced. The correct figure this year for the desktop is $299,000, which is an amortized cost, which I am told is an accurate cost now from the department. The $21,000, which is an additional figure, is an amortization of the SAP, which is the accounting software which has been introduced into the department, which is something separate and distinct from the desktop. So the two figures are 299 and 21.

Mr. Reid: I did not quite understand. The 299–I missed the last comments; $299,000 I think the minister is referencing there, perhaps he can go over what he just indicated, and the $21,000 was for the software. The acronym SAP, I am not sure the meaning on that, so perhaps you can–

Mr. Radcliffe: The $21,000 for the SAP is the systems application programs, which I am told is a technological accounting program which has been introduced into government departments so that information is inputted at the department level. There is still the overriding control from Finance, but it eliminates the necessity for preparing paper vouchers, batching them, having them entered and the somewhat cumbersome system that we experience at this point in time. It is a much more direct technological issue.

The desktop management initiative is amortized at $299,000, and that is the cost for hardware. It is amortizing the cost of the hardware. This is fresh information which is now hard and specific information whereas last year the information that was given to my honourable colleague, I believe on the record I am told by the department, were best guesses or estimates of the proposal. Nothing at that point had been costed out. It has now been costed out.

Mr. Reid: Then I take it the $299,000 or $300,000 a year, that is the amortized cost over the period of the four years that the minister had referenced to me when we were in this committee last week.

Mr. Radcliffe: Yes.

Mr. Reid: I thank the minister for that information, that clarification. I want to switch back to the focus that we had here in this committee when last we sat on Thursday, dealing with the issue of minimum wage. We had just started our discussions at that point, and we did not conclude that particular topic as I wanted to raise it here again. The minister referenced that there was somewhat sensitivity on the part of the government with respect to wanting to strike a balance. I know he has used that phrase and so had his predecessor when the announcement was made with respect to the minimum wage at the beginning of this year or end of last year.

I want to go back to the report that the Minimum Wage Board that had been struck by the Ministry of Labour came back with a report and had referenced that the minimum wage should be increased, and it should be increased to over $16 an hour. I believe that the minimum wage report, which I have a copy of here in front of me, indicates that if we were to keep pace with over the last 11 years, for example, since 1988, the minimum wage in the province of Manitoba would have to be $6.19 an hour.

Now I guess the question that would come to mind from that, since the government has only increased the minimum wage and we are only at the $6-an-hour point right now: would it not be fair and reasonable for the people that are working at such a low income level and having to eke out a living at that point to expect that the least that they should have as an expectation would be to maintain pace with the cost of living? The question is: why has the government opted not to at least maintain that particular level?

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Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, in response to my honourable colleague's suggestion, arising out of his analysis of the minimum wage report, suggesting that a more appropriate level would have been $6.19 for a minimum wage, I believe he referenced at one point in his question or his preamble, or at least I heard the figure $16 and I believe he meant $6. So may the record show that, in fact, we are talking about $6 and $6.19.

With regard to addressing the issue of $6, I would advise that, in fact, what this government did was look at the sister province of Saskatchewan, look at the market that we were competing for. We took into account a number of issues that impress or prevail upon this question, one of which is that many of the people who are involved in the minimum wage, who receive their earnings at the minimum wage, are people in the service industry who receive a significant earning by way of tip. There are a number of individuals involved who are students or people who are entry workers into the job market. I will repeat what I said last week, that if the bar is set at too high a level, then the economic impact will be to reduce the number of positions that are available because employers will not be able to have the means. They only have a limited number of dollars which they can devote to this level of employment.

So we looked at the market available, what was being paid in Saskatchewan. We looked at an analysis across the country. We looked at the level of costs, at the cost of living, which I think has euphemistically been referred to as the Manitoba discount, and took this into account as well, because everyone knows very well that it is far cheaper to live in Winnipeg or to live in some of the other urban centres or even in rural areas of Manitoba, it is far cheaper to live here in Manitoba than it is say in the streets of Toronto. A lot of our fixed costs are significantly less. The issue of the general inflationary rate was taken into account. So all of these issues played a force or played a factor in the decision to come to $6, and it was on a consideration of all of the issues, not just the inflationary engine of computing, doing the mathematical computation from the last time the minimum wage was adjusted and then moving that one forward, because that process suggests more of what my honourable colleague was referring to last week, of the fact that we should build in or legislate or mandate an automatic increase year by year. My response at that point was no, because government wants to have the discretionary factor, the discretionary authority to be able to control or speak to the issues of inflation in our economy.

Mr. Reid: If you want to speak to the inflationary pressures that are there, then one would think keeping up with the cost of living for our province would be the minimum point you would want to maintain. You do a market comparison between Manitoba and Toronto, which I think is an unfair comparison. There are many other centres, northwestern Ontario, for example, or Alberta, which has obviously a lower minimum wage and is not as interested in maintaining a minimum wage level like Manitoba. In fact, I think Alberta was even talking about scrapping the minimum wage there for a period of time. That may still be their position.

You talk about the reduction in positions, that employers have a pool of spare people just kind of floating around a business and not doing any real productive work. That was the impression you are leaving with, if they are going to reduce positions. I do not know a business in this province that just keeps a pool of people there and that if the labour costs go up, then they just dump people out the door and lay them off. To me that is not a reality. I do not think businesses operate that way, and they just do not keep spare people around. For you to say that they are going to reduce positions, if they have customers to serve and they require X number of employees to do that, they are going to have X number of employees there regardless of what the minimum wage level is. Yes, it is going to be a factor in their decisions with respect to how they run their business, but I do not expect it will be a decision in how many employees they require realistically and efficiently to run their business operations. I would expect that they would be running very close to the line in that regard in the first case.

I have to say that with respect to the position Manitoba discount, I do not think it is realistic for us to compare Manitoba's cost with Toronto, for example, that is just one small market when compared to the overall country. We have the same situation in Vancouver. You could use that as an example, or Montreal, any of the large population centres where you have different influences.

Yes, perhaps our housing costs are somewhat cheaper than other jurisdictions; the larger jurisdictions like Toronto, that may be the case. When it comes to the overall costs of housing and other jurisdictions of Canada, I think we are probably somewhat competitive in that regard. So I am not sure why you made that decision with respect to not keeping up with the inflationary pressures in the province, but I would expect that that would be the point you would want to at least maintain. When you look back to the minimum wage report that came out earlier this year, two of the parties, the chair that the government chose to sit in on that advisory committee recommended the minimum wage be higher than the level that you have currently set, as did the labour component that the ministry also appointed to sit in on that advisory body.

The question that I have is: if you have two out of three partners at least recommending that the minimum wage be set at a minimum, at a level that would keep up with the cost of living, why would you not accept that recommendation, essentially since you chose the parties to sit in on that advisory committee? You are discounting the opinions of the majority of that committee.

Mr. Radcliffe: First of all, I would like to respond to my honourable colleague's reference, I guess, to the averaging or the comparisons that I used. I would like to put on the record and share with my honourable colleague that in fact, as of June 1, 1999, Alberta's minimum wage was $5.65, New Brunswick was $5.50, Nova Scotia $5.50, Prince Edward Island $5.40, Newfoundland $5.25. So those were all significantly lower than Manitoba. Saskatchewan is at $6 and Manitoba is at $6.

The other jurisdictions which are paying above Manitoba is Northwest Territories at $6.50, Ontario at $6.86, Quebec at $6.90, B.C. at $7.15 and the Yukon Territories at $7.20. One of the points I am trying to make is that Manitoba tries to gear its economic decisions in relationship to where Manitoba rates in the economy. One can clearly see that the cost of doing business or the cost of supporting oneself in the Yukon Territories is far in excess of something that would happen down here in the south. I only chose the issue of Toronto to show that there are radically different costs of supporting oneself. There was an illustration to the points of the cost of living between Winnipeg and Toronto and not to be blindly accepting it.

The issue of the labour representative on the board and the chair on the board making recommendations, I believe, only goes to show that many of the individuals that are appointed to committees to advise government do come in. They are independent free thinkers, and they come in with their best knowledge that they have available. They advise government, but ultimately it is a political decision. It is not something that is blindly accepted.

There was a divergence of opinion, I believe, on the board, and so this also was something that this government weighed at the time when the decision was made. I can only point to the fact that we do not blindly follow every scintilla and iota of advice that is given to government. We try to absorb it and be guided by it, and then come up with a rationale decision which makes sense, having in mind the broader picture, which I have tried to explain today on the record, of showing where Manitoba rates in the whole spectrum across Canada.

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Manitoba tries not to be a leader. Manitoba tries to match its expenses and its environmental decisions or its economic decisions, I should say, in the context of where the majority of opinion seems to be going in Canada and matching other populations of a similar demographic and economic base. I can only point to our sister province to the west of us, which is governed by a party of a different philosophical persuasion than ours, which has chosen to adopt $6 as a reasonable minimum wage.

Mr. Reid: Does the minister feel that an individual or a family living on $12,480 a year is a reasonable level of income on which to survive?

Mr. Radcliffe: I cannot give an absolute yes or no answer to that, because it would have to depend upon the expenses that that individual or that group of people were experiencing. I can only recommend to my honourable colleague's attention a book that I happen to have read this winter entitled The Millionaire Next Door. If he would like, I can get the name of the publisher and the author on that. But the context of that was that you can have somebody who is earning $90,000 and $100,000 a year or even $150,000 or $200,000 that is living from pay cheque to pay cheque because of their style of consumption. You can get somebody who is living on a very modest income–and I agree, I do not for a moment decry the fact that $12,480 is a very modest income. But the point is that somebody living on a very modest means can still save. They spend less than they earn, and their expectations are much lower than somebody at the other end of the economic spectrum.

So, to say in black-and-white terms that $12,480 is or is not acceptable, I think you have to qualify that and look at the frame of reference in which that person is living, what their expectations are, what the demands on their income are. For somebody who is retired, who has all their assets paid for, who has no children, who has no demands upon themselves, access to public programs, $12,480 might be a reach. Somebody who does fit that context has no demands. Mr. Chair, $12,480 might very well be very appropriate. In fact, I know individuals who do live on $12,000 a year because a lot of their fixed costs are covered.

So you have to put that in context, and I think to ask the question simplistically with no frame of reference does not really bespeak a truthful answer, an honest answer. I think it has to be framed in the context of some other more individualistic description.

Mr. Reid: All right, I will give you that description. Do you think that an individual employable under the age of 65 years or the earliest possible retirement age which can vary in our workforce, sometimes down as low as 55, that an individual or a family, a sole-support individual should have to live at $12,480 a year, knowing what our cost of living is in this province?

Mr. Radcliffe: Well, I think again I would challenge my honourable colleague's supposition –and I can only be guided by what I have found in the community of River Heights–but I would suggest to him that probably 90 percent to 95 percent of our working-age community today, both partners are out in the labour force working, and both are bringing in an income. I think the days of the single economic producer with a stay-at-home parent who raises the children and goes out and does charitable works is a thing of the past. That whole lifestyle has disappeared, partially because of ever-ascending and ever-increasing demands and lifestyle that we are taught, and that around us we want a high-end consuming lifestyle, that it is quite appropriate today for everybody to have a microwave oven and CD player and probably two cars in the garage and a lot of electronic toys, possibly a computer and a lot of software. So, no, you cannot do that lifestyle on $12,480.

But, if you were living a very simplistic, reduced, minimalist lifestyle in a rural setting where you did not have any education demands or that they were met solely by the state, that there was no emphasis on transportation, that you could produce a lot of your foodstuffs out of your own garden from your own sweat and toil–and I can only cite for my honourable colleague the example of a large group of people in Manitoba for whom I used to work as a solicitor, and that is the Hutterian Brethren. I would suggest that these people lived a very complete and very comfortable lifestyle on–

An Honourable Member: And so do monks.

Mr. Radcliffe: My honourable colleague says, "and so do monks," but I do not know the relevance of that response.

But the communal lifestyle of the congregationalist communities in our province–they live very frugally and yet very completely. There is never anybody who leaves their table without a full belly. In fact, if one goes calling at these communities, you often drive away with a full trunk of foodstuff. They have very adequate clothing. It is very plain and very simple, but nobody goes without their needs being met. Their housing is very comfortable and decent and clean and very, very adequate, I can advise. So, to arbitrarily peg somebody's living style, their dignity, their worth, their needs, at an economic level, an arbitrary economic level and numeric level, I would suggest, is not appropriate.

With regard to the minimum wage earners, I can shed some light on, some statistics on, that issue. In the last year, there were 16,900 people who earned the minimum wage or less in 1997. That is 3.9 percent of the total number of employees in the province of Manitoba. Mr. Chair, 68 percent of this class were 24 years or younger; 46 percent were students; and 58 percent were sons or daughters of the family head. That puts some context around the type of people we are talking about. One has to take into account the individuals who are involved in this.

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Now I would not want my honourable colleague to think for a moment that I am minimizing the modestness of a $12,400 figure. It is modest. There is no doubt about that. I know that a lot of our students and a lot of our young people, as well as family heads who are earning close to or at the minimum wage, are hardworking, honest people who are struggling trying to pay their bills, but I would ask my honourable colleague to take into account some of the reference that I have tried to bring to this question.

Mr. Reid: Well, it is interesting to note that in the minimum wage report, the labour representatives recommended that the minimum wage be increased in two steps, first to $6.15 per hour and then a year later in the year 2000 to $6.90 per hour. The chairperson of the board, which the government chose, recommended that the minimum wage be increased to $6.19 per hour and that further considerations be undertaken to increase the minimum wage to $6.25 per hour in October of this year. Yet the business community recommended raising the minimum wage from $5.40 an hour, in two steps, up to $6 an hour. That was the position the government took, to increase it to $6 an hour.

So I guess the question is: why did you choose the business community position in that regard and ignore the other two? It is very clear that there were recommendations that were somewhat comparable that the government could have chosen and at least achieved a semblance or an appearance of wanting to maintain the cost of living in that regard.

I guess the further question in that regard is: is the government giving any consideration to the other recommendation that was made by the chairperson that the exemption under The Employment Standards Act be reviewed with respect to coverage for the minimum wage?

Mr. Radcliffe: I am having a little difficulty with the information that my honourable colleague is bringing to the table, because my information of the recommendations of the Minimum Wage Board report, which was filed and completed in November of 1998, I believe, late 1998, was that the chair was recommending an increment to occur on the 1st of April at $6 and a subsequent increment on the 1st of October at $6.25. The employer representative was recommending $5.65 on July 1 and $5.90 on December 1, 1999. The employee representative was recommending $6.15 on July 1 and $6.90 on July 1, 2000. [interjection] Oh, then I misheard my honourable colleague, because I thought he was saying that the chair was recommending $6.19. I thought he must be meaning $6.90.

But, in any event, that was the range that I received and that helped me to make a decision. There were in fact opinions that were all over the map on this, ranging from as low as $5.65 by the employer representative to $6.90 by the employee representative.

So, in fact, government chose, because we had a wide range of opinion here, a middle ground, which was $6, increased effective, I believe, April 1, 1999. This was announced in January so that employers would have an opportunity to adapt their menus or their costing and bill this into account and prepare their economic basis.

With regard to employment standards and the exemptions, I believe that exemptions are granted to minimum wage earners or lower than minimum wage, to people who are working in sheltered workshops or who are in peculiar circumstances because they are intellectually challenged or handicapped. So this is done on an ad hoc or case-by-case basis in order that these people have the advantage of a job and the respect for a job and that they are in fact valued and respected in their workplaces.

I can share with my honourable colleague that I have had the opportunity to go to annual meetings of Sturgeon Creek Enterprises, which is an employment agency which takes handicapped people and puts them in mainstream employment situations. We heard a number of reports from a number of people in the workplaces as to how successful this has been. But in fact special economic circumstances are taken for people in that condition. Other than that, employment standards apply to all minimum wage individuals. I point to the regs on employment standards. It says that the employment standards do not apply to people who are in a training scheme which is approved jointly by either the provincial or federal government or by an authority from those governments. Other than that, or for agricultural individuals, employment standards do apply.

Mr. Reid: The minister referenced exemptions to the minimum wage for the province. Can you tell me how many exemptions have been approved by the department, and what were the criteria, the circumstances for those exemptions being approved and the applications?

Mr. Radcliffe: I am told that there are approximately 65 permits at this point in time. They are done on a case-by-case basis, and the criterion by which the wages are assessed is that a rehabilitation individual, somebody who has some degree of skill in this field from the Department of Family Services, considers the individual involved who is seeking to be employed and assesses their ability to perform the task which is being assigned and then assesses a rate of reward comparable to the ability of that individual to function. For example, if there were a job that normally commanded an $8 wage or reward and the person could function at 50 percent of the normal capacity because of handicap, then that person would be paid $4 an hour. I said there are 65 of these individuals. Yes, so that I believe covers the criteria and the number of cases at this point in time.

Mr. Reid: So then, if I understand correctly, the 65 exemptions that you have given to the minimum wage in this province are dealing strictly with Manitobans who have disabilities or are delayed in some way or unable to meet the full job requirements as a result of a disability. Am I correct in my interpretation of how those exemptions are applied?

Mr. Radcliffe: I am told that these exemptions do not apply to the sheltered workshop environment. They function on a totally different basis. The employment standards that we are discussing right now speak to Manitobans with disabilities. They are individuals functioning with mental handicaps, mental challenges. Approximately 40 percent of these individuals are found in the retail business or the hospitality business. The balance are in either personal care or light manufacturing. The only exemption is the exemption as to the minimum wage. All other rules governing the workplace apply to these individuals. So the only thing that is exempted is the rate of return.

Mr. Reid: Do you have an indication in your notes or information that you have, do most of these applications come from within the city of Winnipeg, or are they spread evenly throughout the province and the various communities? I am just looking for an indication here where a lot of these 65 applications may be effective. I know in my own community I think Palliser Furniture perhaps may be one of the operations that have people with disabilities working in there. I have seen and spoken with them in their worksites. I am trying to get an idea here of where these exemptions are occurring throughout the province.

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Mr. Radcliffe: I am told that in fact there is a 50-50 division between these exceptions being found inside the city of Winnipeg and outside of the city of Winnipeg. Of those individual exemptions that are found outside the city of Winnipeg, they are confined, for the most part, to urban centres because these are where the jobs are found for these individuals, i.e., Portage la Prairie, Brandon. I would not want to leave on the record any misapprehension that we are thinking that anything outside of the city of Winnipeg is rural. In fact, they are all in urban centres of one degree or another.

The permits used to be issued by the Minister of Labour. They are now, I am told, issued by the executive director for Employment Standards.

Mr. Reid: I am trying to get an understanding here too. I would hope in situations where there are exemptions that are applied for and granted, there would be some flexibility here. Is it left up to the employer in these cases where the exemptions are applicable to determine the level of wage, or is the individual who is fulfilling those job duties trapped at that income level, that minimum wage exemption level?

I am trying to get an idea here on whether or not they have to remain at that level. Or is it up to the discretion solely of the employer whether or not they move beyond that? Does anybody evaluate whether or not the individual perhaps is exceeding what the job requirements would be, in other words on a merit-based system to allow them to progress at least up to the minimum wage level or perhaps beyond?

Mr. Radcliffe: I would direct my honourable colleague's attention to 13, paragraph 1 of the regs for minimum wage, which basically outlines the authority for what I have just explained of the evaluation that is done by the director.

I am told that Family Services does, on a periodic and intermittent basis, evaluate the individuals who are the subject of this inquiry. If there is a change in their capacity then this information is shared. So in response to my honourable colleague's question, are these individuals trapped, no, they are not trapped. Is there an evaluation? Yes. I am told that there is a database that Family Services has just introduced which is an improvement in order to electronically record these individuals and to share this information. We do not have any further information as to the frequency of this evaluation or any of the particulars as to how it is done. In fact, any further questions on that issue I think would be more properly found in examination of Family Services.

I guess what I did want to key off of was the verb "trapped" that my honourable colleague mentioned. In fact, I have had the opportunity to meet and discuss with a number of individuals who work in this sort of environment. They are very proud of the fact that they have these sort of jobs, that they have this life cycle. In fact, two doors away from me on the street where I live is a group home with a bunch of young men who were young boys when I moved onto the street with my children. They are Down's syndrome, they are FAS individuals.

I think of Gary, who is one of the lads, one of the young men today. He is very proud of the fact that he now is competent to take a bus, city transit. He goes to his workplace every day, and he comes and tells us about it. From his perspective, it is the doing and the dignity and the worth of living that lifestyle and being like everybody else as far as he can see in his eyes that makes him an important person. So it is not a question of the pejorative of being trapped at an economic level. These people are very proud of what they do.

On the other side of the scale, I had occasion when I have gone to the Sturgeon Creek Enterprises AGM of listening to the testimonials from Bison Transport, which I know is one enterprise here in the city of Winnipeg who does employ people with significant handicaps. These people were giving testimony to what happens to a workplace when you have somebody in the workplace of diminished intellectual capacity. They bring a cheeriness, they bring a commitment, they bring a sense of pride which often in our workplaces with the individuals that we relate to every day, many of our colleagues suffer from the vagaries of mood swings and depression and things like this which many of these people do not. These people are really cherished in their workplaces. I guess I just wanted to put on the record how important I see this as a facet of our employment opportunities in Manitoba.

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Mr. Reid: It was not my intention to denigrate the contribution that individuals make both in terms of quality of lifestyle or their contributions to the work environment. I am just trying to get an understanding of whether or not the individuals that have exemptions applying directly to them have the ability to achieve a higher level of income. I mean, if their expectations are similar to what ours are in this room, they would want to improve their quality of life as well.

One of the ways to do that is to increase their level of income. If it gives them the opportunity to achieve that, I am trying to get an understanding of whether or not, when I use the term "trapped," it means that they are locked into that and that they have no room or growth potential as a result of this exemption in effect. That is what I am trying to determine here, whether or not they are locked into that and is it left solely to the discretion.

Now, the minister references Family Services and the new database that they have implemented to track. I would hope that the Family Services department would review this. I guess the next question that follows out of that is: are these exemptions that the Department of Labour grants to the minimum wage reviewed annually and do they have to be renewed annually?

Mr. Radcliffe: There is no annual reassessment at this point in time. The exemptions, once they are issued, are issued and they are open ended. I can tell my honourable colleague that there have been discussions between the Department of Labour and the Department of Family Services with the very point that my honourable colleague raises of reviewing these situations on an annual basis. Nothing specific has come of that yet, but this is a topic that has been raised and is under consideration.

The Department of Labour has done a general mailing to all 65 exemptions in the province setting out the specifics of information of the minimum wage to the employers. There have been several responses from employers seeking more information so that there is a line of communication that is open to the individual employers in the workplace on this issue, but the focus and the thrust of it is more from the Family Services side than it is from the Department of Labour side.

Mr. Reid: I thank the minister for that information. I hope that Family Services will conduct those reviews to make sure that things are handled in the appropriate fashion to which they were intended when the exemptions were granted. Are there other reasons or other exemptions that may be granted to the minimum wage as a result of actions of the department? Are there other criteria that are taken or used other than people that are displaying disabilities? I am trying to get an understanding of whether or not the exemptions are granted in other cases.

Mr. Radcliffe: These are the only exemptions that we have discussed.

Mr. Reid: Dealing with the minimum wage, does the minister see that the level of the minimum wage in the province affects the poverty level of the province?

Mr. Radcliffe: Again, I think that question raises issues. When we say poverty level of, you have to define what you mean by poverty. I do not want to sort of paint a rosy, glorious picture of love in a cottage and all that sort of stuff, but you can go into a home where people are again making a very low income. These are proud, proud people who are very self-sufficient and very competent and very satisfied and very happy. Are they poor?

By standards of somebody living in Transcona who worked in the shops, who had a union environment, or somebody who came out of River Heights who is a professional and earned a professional income, maybe they are, but if you are an agricultural worker who lived by shooting a moose every fall or a deer every fall, who has a back garden, who share their community of goods, who lived a subsistence lifestyle and only went out and got cash when they needed to buy something, that came from some of the remoter regions of our province, are they poor? I do not think so. Would they be insulted or angered if you called them poor? Quite possibly.

Now, are we talking about somebody who is in the inner city, who is marginalized, who has no skills, who is a refugee from violence, who is feeling despair and hopelessness? Those people are poor in many cases, but can we equate that absolutely to minimum wage? I do not think so. I think that there are many, many other social issues, cultural issues, spiritual issues that play on that fact, and that it is too simplistic to just say, well, the minimum wage drives everybody to the bottom of the barrel. So I think that to ask that question or respond to that question, one has to look at the broader spectrum of human activity and human relationship.

Mr. Reid: I take it then you have statistical information here with respect to the number of Manitobans that are earning minimum wage, and I know you gave me some global numbers just a short time ago. Do you have a breakdown on, for example, the number of Manitoba women that are working at minimum wage jobs? Do you have the number of youth that are working at minimum wage jobs, people under the age of 25, and I say youth, to me that is youth. So I am trying to get an understanding here of the break-down by numbers of Manitobans that would be in categories that you would have a breakdown for minimum wage jobs.

Mr. Radcliffe: Our best figures are 1997, and that was 3.9 percent of the employment workforce: 62 percent were female, 38 percent male, 71 percent are single, 68 percent were under 24, 33 percent are between 17 and 19 years of age, 16 percent are between 15 and 16, 46 percent were students, 43 percent work full time, 57 percent work part time. I believe I said already that 58 percent were sons or daughters of a family head, 26 percent were the head of a family, and then we did discuss the breakdown of food services, retail, et cetera.

Now, here is an interesting point that I think bears out, touches on part of my previous answer. Forty-eight percent of minimum wage earners did not complete high school, 19 percent are high school grads, 18 percent have some post-secondary education, and 14 percent have completed post-secondary. Minimum wage earners worked on the average of 26.6 hours per week and earned an average of $6,872 over the year. Those are the stats that we have on these sort of people.

Mr. Reid: You referenced I think earlier the total number of people working at minimum wage jobs in the province for your latest statistics which is '97, I think you said.

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Mr. Radcliffe: '97. It is 16,900.

Mr. Reid: So we have a fair number of people, and I am looking here, one-quarter of the people working at minimum wage jobs are head of families, over one-quarter, and of those, 57 percent of those numbers are working part-time jobs at minimum wage. That is a fair number of families that have an impact on their family incomes. I would take it that 26 percent as head of family. I do not know if your statistics have this, whether or not these are single-parent families or not.

Mr. Radcliffe: All I can tell my honourable colleague is that 26 percent of the 16,900 people were the head of a family, and 71 percent of this class of people are single persons. So I think that statistically, although I am not good at computation of statistics, I am sure that a good percentage of these people would be single wage earners, would be heads of families that would be single parents, single individuals.

One of my employees has indicated, Mr. Chair, that in fact these figures, and quite appropriately, deduce that 1 percent of the group of individuals of 16,900 would fall into the category which my honourable colleague is referencing. What we have done is 26 percent, or the head of family, which is roughly one-quarter, and 3.9 percent of the total number of employees or 4 percent. So a quarter of 4 percent is 1 percent and that is very rough figuring.

Mr. Reid: The other startling statistic that the minister referenced here is involving women: 62 percent of the 16,900 are women working at minimum wage jobs. The other issue is 71 percent of them are single. So if you go back to my original argument, living on jobs that are $12,000 a year, the minister knows full well what it costs to rent an apartment complex here in the City of Winnipeg and the associated costs with respect to that. I use my own community which is an average residential community, middle income to a large degree. To survive as a single person your costs would be a little under a thousand dollars a month. If that is what you have got to live on, at $12,000 a year I am not sure how these individuals, even as single people, are able to survive at that level. I know the minister references lifestyle and quality of life. I am still not comfortable that that argument holds much water, carries much weight with respect.

I guess it depends, as he says, where you live in the province, but if you can confine yourself where the majority of our population is, we have two-thirds of Manitobans living in the city of Winnipeg, and if you want to count the other major population centres of Thompson, Brandon, Flin Flon, Dauphin, Swan River, et cetera, not to mention our First Nation communities that are also very much underemployed and have horrendous unemployment levels, having visited many of them in this province and the conditions under which they live, I would think that there would be an expectation to want to take steps to assist with respect to the standard of living, and I see the minimum wage is being one of those ways that we could address those problems.

The other question that I have resulting from the minimum wage report is there were several other recommendations that were contained in the report. For example, the business community wanted to have a limitation on the number of terms a person could sit on the minimum wage review board. They wanted to have some consideration given for those people that are working earning tips and also further consideration dealing with a training wage rate which would be substantially or somewhat less than the minimum wage level of the province. The chairperson has recommended pursuing the federal government for changes in the income tax act to allow for exemptions for individuals that are living at such low–his terms–poverty income levels. Also dealing with other issues, linking the minimum wage to the composite wage for the province or the consumer price index. Is the department or the ministry or the government making considerations to address any of these other issues that were contained within the minimum wage review board report that came to the minister earlier this year–or end of last year I should say?

Mr. Radcliffe: In response to these other issues that were contained in the report, first of all addressing the issue of the number of times an individual can sit on the particular board, this goes to the general policy, I guess, of government appointing individuals to serve government. This particular board is now functus or complete and its job is over. So when there is a requirement for reconsideration of this topic, government will go and appoint a new board. Government tends to like to rotate the individuals that serve on all its boards and committees so that nobody gets stale, so there is no one particular point of view that is represented in perpetuity. My experience in dealing on a general basis is that people do sit for a term or two and then they move on. Depending on how often or how intensely they are called upon, the government tends to rotate them. I do not want to be deprecating in using them in terms of inventory, but there really is an inventory of knowledge and skill that is recycled through advice to government. Often individuals themselves will come to us and say, all right, I have served my term on this board, on this controversial or contentious issue, I now want something different, or I want another challenge because I am not getting challenged enough. So there is a constant ebb and flow or flux of people. Again, government hesitates to handcuff itself or tie its hands to saying that one can only sit once or twice or mandate it, and we get into, I guess, the difference in political thought between what is flexible and what is crystallized, written down and engraved in stone. I guess that would be the difference, I would reflect, between a British constitution and an American constitution. By the time the American constitution evolved, everything was solidified in a code.

An Honourable Member: The right to bear arms.

Mr. Radcliffe: Ah, yes, indeed. My honourable colleague says the right to bear arms, and I would hesitate to say I prefer a nation who came into being by evolution and not revolution because if you are born in violence you tend to die in violence, but that is another reflection for another day.

In terms of board appointments, this is something that is flexible and is subject to the demands and needs of the moment from time to time as government sees fit. With regard to both tips and the training wage, I can tell my honourable colleague that these issues were both considered by government. The recommendation that we heard and listened to was that if we were to make a particular exception or class or stratification for people earning tips, No. 1, it might be challenged under the Charter as being discriminatory, and that was a warning that we received. But as well, we were creating an administrative nightmare for employers, and it would just be onerous, I guess was the best case.

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With regard to the training wage, one of the fears that one runs into there is, and again I guess I cross over to the other side of the coin on this, saying, well, there might be some predation going on, that employers might say, well, employees are continually in a state of training. So therefore this can be used as an authorization or justification for not employing the actual fixed minimum wage and you get into trying to assess and measure what is training, what is full value. So rather than getting into complex stratification, the thinking was to broad-brush it and make no exceptions for fear that we would be then employing people to go out to look at, to try and assess and measure cases, and to try and be fair to individuals, so instead we are saying the minimum wage is what the minimum wage is, and it is a broad-brush fix rather than levels and stratas and exceptions and complications.

Mr. Reid: So then there is no work underway and no policy planning within the department, the Ministry of Labour or the government to move on any of these other issues that have been identified and not resolved at this point with respect to the report that came out from the Minimum Wage Board last fall.

Mr. Radcliffe: I think that government is a composite of many, many individuals in policy, and it is always ebbing and flowing and flexing and changing. Is there anything on the order paper now coming out of policy management for adopting these recommendations? No, there is not. Is it something that could form the subject of a future consideration? Possibly. Will there be future changes to the minimum wage act? Yes. Is anything on the books right now? No, but it is something that is never discounted, and reports like this and recommendations like this are always taken seriously and are readdressed from time to time to see if in fact decisions that we made in 1998, are they still valid or should they be readdressed? And I always call it reviewing the bidding. One is perpetually going back and touching base and saying, all right, are the values and the principles on which I predicated a decision in 1998 still relevant in the community today or should I be readdressing it because there has been a shift or a change in what is our reality or our relationships or our values.

Mr. Reid: So there has been no policy direction given by the minister or his senior department staff to the department to undertake a review or a consideration then of these issues that are outstanding with respect to the latest Minimum Wage Board report?

Mr. Radcliffe: No is the quick answer. The report was considered in its entirety by cabinet, and government took it very seriously, looked at it and came up with the conclusions it did mindfully, seriously and conscientiously, discounting none of the recommendations that were made. They were looked at, and if we chose not to follow some at this point in time, that was done conscientiously.

Mr. Reid: Can you tell me, because the statistics that you referenced a few moments ago, while they are disturbing in some of the content of someone looking at the number of people that are affected, I am wondering, can you tell me what the unemployment levels are in First Nations communities of the province? Are they taken into consideration when you are using the statistics that you referenced here today?

Mr. Radcliffe: I am told that, in fact, the Manitoba Department of Labour obtains its information, the source of its information, is Stats Canada, and this is a body or pool of information that is purchased from Stats Canada.

In fact, the individuals who reside on reserves, who are First Nations or treaty people, who reside there and stay there, are not computed in these figures. These people form part of the federal responsibility and are governed by the federal Department of Labour, so therefore do not figure in the statistics. If somebody leaves the reserve and moves to the city of Winnipeg or any other centre or, in fact, just basically leaves the reserve, then they fall into the Manitoba jurisdiction and are computed and contained in these figures.

So do I have any knowledge as to what the level of unemployment is on reserves? I have nothing first-hand. I can only share with my honourable colleague, and I am sure it is common knowledge, that I know it is to be very high. In many cases, especially on some of the northern reserves, and I had a window or picture to that when I was assisting the Minister of Family Services chairing a small committee that went around the province, taking testimony with regard to reform to the child welfare act, or The Child and Family Services Act as it was, and that gave me certainly a picture, in some cases a very bleak picture, of individuals in some of the more remote communities.

One thing that I just want to repeat on the record, because I think it really bears repetition and is very significant, is the education levels of people at the minimum wage, and the fact that 48 percent of these individuals did not complete high school. I think that has got to send an incredibly important message to us as government, to my honourable colleague as a critic in opposition, to administrators, to all of us, that education has to be the key to freedom. I know our Premier says that there is no other social force that can change a group of people inside of a generation than that of education, so we see this, as a government, to being one of the primary engines to effect change so that it is not going out and mindlessly handing out handouts. It is, in fact, educating people so that they have the skill and ability themselves to help themselves which has got to be the final determinative factor which will improve our social lot.

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Mr. Reid: In part I agree with the minister on the effects of not completing high school and being stuck in what many might call dead-end jobs with no room for advancement or progression in quality of life, based mostly or in large part upon level of income. I tried to raise this in the House with the Minister of Education in the past with respect to off-campus programs or post-secondary training and trying to make sure that those programs are available for upgrading of skills.

I have one of those programs in my own community functioning out of the high school in Transcona, Murdoch MacKay Collegiate with their off-campus program. That program I think provides crucial service to people that need and want to retrain, to give them the marketable skills. Yet portions of that program have been begging for provincial government assistance in the sense of continuation of the programs. We had many letters from employers utilizing skills from students or young people, not only them but others that come back for retraining, a variety of ages, that want and need to have people with those skills levels, but the Department of Education has not lent them the support necessary to allow them to continue. That particular off-campus program has been floundering. I would not want to see it dissolve and disappear because I think it provides a useful support for not only the east end of Winnipeg, but also surrounding rural communities in Springfield, for example, where residents can come in and take advantage or use those facilities that are already paid for by taxpayers but are there and available if there was some guidance and support lent through the Department of Education. So I am making a soapbox statement here about that particular program. That is why I have raised it with respect to retraining, looking at the 48 percent who do not complete high school, that we want to make sure that they have opportunities, but also for the others that would require some upgrading as well.

With the respect to the issue of minimum wage, I will leave that for now, and I have another question with respect to out-of-province contractors. Perhaps if the minister wants, I will just hold off with my question for a moment, Mr. Chairperson, to allow him to attend to this piece of business.

I will leave the minimum wage issue behind, even though there are perhaps many more questions that could be asked. The most recent report that I think came out of–perhaps it is The Globe and Mail from last week, talking about the effects of a flexible workforce, in other words, flexible in the sense of having part-time jobs at lower wage levels for those who may be seeking full-time employment, I think is probably one of the issues that still needs to be dealt with.

Even though our unemployment stats that came out just recently on June 4 last week indicate that–the way they paint the picture at least, using the Statistics Canada data, there is perhaps still room that we need for us to give further consideration to those who are actually underemployed inside of our workforce. If you look at the numbers of people who are unemployed–I should say those who are perhaps employed in the workforce but not fully utilizing their time available for work and perhaps are seeking out full-time employment. So these statistics can be somewhat misleading. I think we should always take them with a grain of salt and look further or deeper behind the first-blush message that they are giving to us.

The other issue that I want to raise in this part, because it deals with policy, I have had calls, and perhaps the minister's office has, with respect to out-of-province contractors. This has been a problem that has been lingering for some time. I had asked this question some time ago dealing with out-of-province contractors bringing in out-of-province labour. I am not sure what the government policy or the Department of Labour policy is with respect to this, but I will reference two cases. One is dealing with the pipeline work that is going through the province of Manitoba. There are several contractors that are involved in that work. Some of them are Alberta firms, and they have brought in their own labour, which does not assist Manitobans who are seeking out work and have the skill and qualification level to do that type of work. I know I have talked to the plumbers and pipefitters association with respect to skilled tradespeople they have who are seeking work. There are people who are looking for work, yet we have out-of-province contractors coming in and bringing in labour with them to do work within Manitoba's borders. So I would like to know what the minister's and his government's policy is with respect to that issue.

Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, just before I move on as well, I wanted to respond on one last salvo I guess to my honourable colleague on something, an experience that I underwent this winter. I had occasion with my colleagues to do caucus and cabinet tours across southern Manitoba, and I was particularly struck with going into firms in the Steinbach area who were desperate for employees. These were light manufacturing, highly skilled workplace environments.

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The Winkler area is another area which has a similar work ethic, where these employers said to us: ladies and gentlemen, we are desperate for people who want to learn, who want to move to our community. We will pay them $12, $15 an hour to learn in our community. We will take a high-school grad and make them into a lathe operator or to a computer-assisted technocrat on an assembly line. This is clean, inside assembly line work, high-end work, to my mind, from a labour perspective, at a good wage for those communities where you could live very comfortably. They said we cannot get people who are willing to cross the glass boundaries of their own home communities and travel the 40, 50 miles to our community to live and work and raise their families in our community. Part of that I know is an insular parochial attitude that we all have to some extent, that if we cannot find work within our own communities, we tend to sit back and say woe is me, instead of following the opportunities. I think that many of our ancestors who settled this country followed the holy grail of opportunity.

So I know right now that there are areas of our communities, of our province, that would gladly snap up individuals who have a minimum of technical education at this point, or training or skill, but who are willing to learn and are willing to work and are willing to move. I guess those are big criteria.

I do not want to be deprecating of people who are suffering because too often we do blame the victim. Sometimes people who find themselves in straitened circumstances, either through lack of knowledge or lack of courage or lack of perspective, confine themselves to ghettos of poverty and despair, and part of the job of government is to overcome those feelings. I have often heard our Premier (Mr. Filmon) say that the biggest thing he can do is to help people change their attitudes of themselves, and all the rest flows once they gain confidence in their own innate, inherent ability.

Moving on to the issue of out-of-province contractors, Manitoba is a signatory to what is called the AIT, which is an interprovincial trade agreement which, among other things, speaks to the mobility of labour work forces, so that the provinces of Canada are not silos unto themselves, but in fact we are enjoined from discriminating against individuals who are employees from another province coming into Manitoba.

My honourable colleague references the issue of people working on the pipeline, and in particular I know that firms that have expertise in pipeline work often emanate from Alberta. But if we were to raise employment walls at the edge of Manitoba on the east and the west, then there is that old adage that what you do unto others gets done unto you, that our employees would not be able to migrate to the oilfields of Alberta to get jobs.

I know many, many young students who have put themselves through university working as muckers and labourers in the oilfields. I know young people today still looking for opportunity and fast, big dollars head to Alberta. I think that the interprovincial trade agreement is well founded in saying that we are in fact one nation and that we ought not to throw up interprovincial boundaries against one another when this is our own people.

I have heard, and I do not know this first hand, but there was a pipeline that was doing work out in the southeast part of our province with a pipeline that was going through. They were being picketed, and there was labour action, labour violence on the lines where local labour unions were trying to prevent employees from out of province crossing these lines to do their properly appointed work. I find that abysmal; I find that disgraceful; I find that just obscene. This should not happen, and especially when we are signatories, as a government, that we are members of a larger community than just the parochial issues and interests of Manitoba.

So I hope I have made myself clear to my honourable colleague as to where I stand on this issue, that I think it is a very important issue and I think that we probably will end up disagreeing on this issue.

Mr. Reid: The minister talks about people who are parochial and perhaps not wanting to relocate. My experience is that when people work on pipeline projects, pipeline projects do not occur inside the city of Winnipeg to any significant degree, and the people that work in that chosen field are more than willing to relocate to where that work is. So that is not a factor in these particular situations. What I see happening in this situation is that–and there is a difference in the way I define what is occurring here, because where you move, as the minister references, to work in the oilfields of Alberta, the term "move" is what is occurring. People actually relocate their homes. They are no longer a resident of this province. They become residents of that province. So, in other words, they are residents of Alberta, for example, in that case.

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What I see occurring in this case is that there is labour coming into this province. There is not a relocation of the families. So they have not moved here and set up shop and raised the families and are contributing to our communities and to the well-being and the future prosperity of our province. What we are seeing is an export of the wage out of this province, back to the home province where the individual resides, so are net exporters of dollars in those circumstances.

If it was a case of the families relocating here and the company hiring people that relocate, fine. I mean we have an increase in our population for the province and they bring a skill level with them to our province. But the difference in these situations is that we are importing the people from other jurisdictions and we are exporting their wage dollars back to those provinces, and those tax dollars and those monies are spent inside of that province, not for the benefit of the province of Manitoba, but for the benefit of the provinces for which those families and those dollars go back to.

So I am trying to get an understanding here why you would have a policy that would allow for firms to bring in their employees when it in no way enhances the province of Manitoba in the sense of those dollars going out of the province. Yes, they may spend a few dollars on lunches and perhaps the odd pair of work boots or coveralls to do the job, but for the most part those monies are spent back to where the families are residing.

Mr. Radcliffe: I understand the concept. I have my honourable colleague's concept, but I just invite him for a moment to think what would happen to our country if we were to say that only people resident in Manitoba would be allowed to work here, and vice versa, that this would be reciprocal, so therefore no Manitoban could be employed outside the boundaries of Manitoba. Manitoba would then become a sovereign state, and I think we would condemn ourselves to a race to the bottom of the pail economically.

This would mean that no individual whose family reside in Manitoba could take a job in the Northwest Territories or up in the Arctic. I think of all the young people and I think of a number of wage earners, head of homes, who have jobs on the DEW line and in some of our far-northern communities. They go up for six months at a time to do a tour of duty, and that would not be allowed. I think of people who live in border communities, say The Pas or Russell or areas along our western boundary, who may very well earn their living in Saskatchewan. I think of people who live in West Hawk Lake and Falcon Beach, who could not travel to Kenora to earn a living or vice versa. I think that this type of thinking leads too quickly to a silo mentality, to a protectionist society.

Philosophically, I come from the other part of the spectrum where I applauded federally when we entered into a free trade agreement with America, where we opened up opportunity, and I think that a protectionist mentality leads to introspection, to ultimate failure of a community. I can only look from an historical basis to, say, medieval Spain. Medieval Spain sowed the beginnings of its decline and eventual collapse when it drove the Jews out of Spain, when it stamped out every foreign thought in that one must be a pure Christian as determined by some intellectuals living in some university. When you start down this path, that is where it leads to, and that leads ultimately to social collapse.

I think that in fact today we are members of a global village. We are members of something much larger than ourselves individually and socially from a selfish perspective. We are members of a planet and we happen to live in a province, but a country. I think that we have organized ourselves into a country where there must be freedom to move from province to province to seek your opportunities. If we restrict that, then we will be throwing up artificial borders and artificial limitations which will tend to destroy the human spirit, will diminish opportunity, will diminish economic prosperity.

In fact, we can only point right now, I can point to the prosperity that Manitoba has enjoyed since the passing of the free trade bill federally, to what that has meant to us as a province with exports. I am sure that many colleagues on the opposite side of the House had many fears, and legitimate fears, of free trade opportunities–and I relate free trade to free employment– but they were groundless. They were in fact without any substantiation on and over provincial. Yes, there were adjustments, but on a pan-provincial basis their fears proved to be groundless, so I think to prohibit individuals who were working for companies, who were the most efficient, the lowest bidder doing work on a Pan-Canadian basis, would be iniquitous.

If we started to restrict movement of employment opportunity across the country, we would then very quickly move to restriction of goods, so that we would not be able to use goods that were not produced and manufactured in Manitoba or that the people in Ontario would not be able to consume finished goods that came from Manitoba, and then we would balkanize our whole state. I would predict that would be the demise of the Canadian entity as we know and treasure and enjoy it today. I think what my honourable colleague touches on is a serious philosophical issue, and I see it as probably one of the definitive differences between my colleagues and my honourable colleagues, associates, who form opposition to date, because we hold this principle very importantly, very dearly. In fact, we have entered into an interprovincial treaty which goes to the root of our being. So I think he has touched on something that is fundamentally a wedge issue between us.

Mr. Reid: I do not disagree with that last part of your statement with respect to philosophical differences. I am sure we are all in this room, because we want to do, hopefully, the right and appropriate thing to try to build our province and make it the place that we all want to live in, and we want our children to stay here and live and to work and to build our province as well. I am trying to get an understanding here of your philosophy and ask the question: how does this help build Manitoba, if we have labour coming to the province of Manitoba to work on a project solely within the borders of our province, to have people who are unemployed not working in the very field of expertise required to do that type of work, to do that construction work, and to have the tax dollars that would normally be generated as a result of the employment on those projects leave our province to go to another jurisdiction to help them build their province? How does that help the individual jurisdictions? How do we build our province when those tax dollars leave here and when the people are unemployed and seeking work?

Mr. Radcliffe: First of all, I guess, I would remind my honourable colleague, and I am sure he is very aware of it, that 5.1 percent of Manitobans are currently unemployed right now. We are enjoying one of the busiest periods of our collective experience in our history.

An Honourable Member: . . . First Nations, again.

Mr. Radcliffe: Well, excluding First Nations, of course. This high level of activity has come into being not because we just rolled off the last load of kumquats. It was done as a result of deliberate, concise, thoughtful policy, and part of that policy is that we want to encourage people to move to Manitoba to do business, but that we are members of a nation. There is something larger than Manitoba. I would remind my honourable colleague that, when we were involved in the debate over the Headingley water issue, which is a contentious issue, and sewage in Headingley, I was astounded at people who said that residents of Headingley ought not to have clean water or residents of Headingley ought not to have sanitary sewers.

To me, that is incomprehensible. Likewise, I think if somebody can perform a function and is prepared to follow a job, we allow them in this country to go from province to province to follow their employment. If we had stockbrokers, who were limited to the Winnipeg Stock Exchange, because they would not be allowed to do trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange or the Montreal Stock Exchange or the Calgary Stock Exchange, what would that do to the investment industry here in Manitoba? What would it do to say that you ought not to write an insurance policy unless an insurance company was founded and wholly contained within the province of Manitoba?

You can extrapolate that simile right on to the horizon, and I am sure my honourable colleague would say, well, that is ridiculous. You cannot do that, that the source of capital in this country for the large part is founded in Toronto. A lot of our economic exchange happens in Montreal or Calgary or Vancouver, and, in order to enjoy the benefits of finance, the opportunity for employment, we have to look beyond our own borders. If we restrict people coming in, then we, too, will be restricted going out, and then, as I say, we condemn ourselves to an insular group of people who have nothing to feed on but our own despair. I do not think that is something my honourable colleague would want or advocate for a moment, because I truly do believe that my honourable colleague, like me, shares a vision that we want the best for the people of Manitoba, but our means of getting to that conclusion is where we radically differ. This is one of the touchstone points on which we radically differ.

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I believe that one of the major reasons why Manitoba today enjoys the prosperity it does, which is far and above even the levels of employment and productivity that are going on in other parts of the country, is as a result of the cosmopolitan employment issues, employment decisions which we have made here and the economic environment that we have created for people to do business here in Manitoba. This one issue is related to that whole fabric, so that we are saying we are open to do business here in Manitoba to all comers. Whether a corporation is headofficed in Chicago or Toronto or Bismarck or Winnipeg, we are happy if they are doing business here in Winnipeg or in Manitoba and bringing the spin-off prosperity.

Now, one of the things that I think that my honourable colleague is probably very aware, that the Manitoba government does have employment policies when we are dealing in government contracts, say, with Manitoba Hydro, when we are dealing in the North, and we want to introduce a level of employment in the North. So we will make it a government policy that hiring, if it exists, if it is possible, labour or skilled artisans or journeymen or tradespeople be employed given first opportunity out of the North when those are our tax dollars going out. I do not think my honourable colleague is referring to that issue, what they call legitimate objects. I think he is referring more to the Pan-Canadian corporations who are laying pipelines or doing business right across the country. That is what he is advocating, that they should dismiss all their employees or hold all their employees at the Saskatchewan border and hire only Manitobans, then when the Manitoba pool is exhausted, then maybe resort to other people. I would say that that is an artificial, an arcane and unreasonable way to take industry and economics in Manitoba.

Mr. Reid: There are several points, Mr. Chairperson. The minister referenced the Headingley sewer and water program. I disagree with his analysis of what the public was saying. I know I have talked to people in my community. In fact, I did a survey on it. They were not saying do not provide them sewer and water and that they are not entitled to that. I think what they were saying is if I have to pay for the rate that the residents do for sewer and water program, we want to make sure that there were others who are coming on stream with that who have decided they no longer want to be part of Winnipeg, why should they then be entitled to a service that is paid for by residents of the city of Winnipeg and was provided for that benefit for which those who chose in Headingley to withdraw made a conscious decision? I think that was what the public at least in my community was telling me. It was not that they do not deserve to have sewer and water programs, but it was the method in which they are no longer part of the larger well-being, in other words, the city of Winnipeg.

With respect to the employment, maybe I should ask this in the form of a question. No doubt this issue has been brought to the attention of the department dealing with outside firms coming into the province of Manitoba, in particular in this case pipeline employers or pipeline contractors. Are they 100 percent out-of-province employees on each of those firms?

Mr. Radcliffe: In response to my honourable colleague's question I can say, to our information, our best available information, it is not a hundred percent employment by firms out of province. If there are construction jobs, if there are jobs where there are individuals available in our community, there is a mix of employment, and we have been told that supervisory, high-level management jobs are coming in from out of province, in this particular case with the pipeline, Alberta. Often economics dictates that if there are individuals who are available here in Manitoba, it is cheaper and more efficient to hire an individual here to do some functions and some work rather than importing a worker from Alberta where one has to be responsible for housing and feeding and all the other attendant supports that would go with importing work gangs from out of province.

Another point that I think bears on the issue for discussion as well is that local Manitoba legislation applies to individuals working in Manitoba if they are covered by our legislation, and that is a bit of double-talk, but to say for example the construction wages industry, those individuals, if they are in the construction industry, fall under the aegis of our legislation. So it is a mixed bag. What are the percentages? I do not know. Do we have any way of knowing that? No. It is not a hundred percent appointment from out of province. There is some cross-pollination. To what levels or extent, I cannot say, and we have no way of knowing or discerning that.

I guess, my concern on this issue is that one cannot legislate and say specifically pipeline workers cannot be portable across the country, but if we were to generically say labour cannot be portable across the country, what about the running trades in railways? What about airline people who deal in transportation? There are a lot of jobs that are, by their very nature, Pan-Canadian.

An Honourable Member: Your change point is at the border.

Mr. Radcliffe: That is right. My honourable colleague says that we would have change points at the border. That would remind me of sort of those old grainy late movies of sort of prewar Europe where all the carriages were changed at the border as one was rushing from Poland to Russia and all those sort of things. I know my honourable colleague is not recommending that in any seriousness for a moment, but I think that today our vision is a bigger vision than just our provincial issue. That is why Canada is the second-best or the best place to live as voted by the United Nations. That is one of the reasons why people want to immigrate to Canada.

One of the points that I guess my honourable colleague was touching on earlier was the workforce in Manitoba and the cherishing and the encouragement of the workforce in Manitoba, and that is something I do believe in. I think that our government encourages immigration of workforce to Manitoba. If we were to restrict the purity of our workforce only to Manitobans, then it is a very slippery slope to saying, ah, well, then you must be people who were born in Manitoba or you were people who belong to an identifiable group in Manitoba. I do not think we want to go there, and that is not what we are saying. This interprovincial trade treaty speaks to a wider picture.

Mr. Reid: Mr. Chairperson, just picking up on what the minister says and following along his line of thinking with respect to his party and his philosophy on out-of-province labour coming in and occupying or filling the jobs inside of this province, he used the term looking "beyond our own borders" and having "a bigger vision." Does that bigger vision and looking beyond our own borders also include going beyond the borders of Canada and perhaps allowing labour from the United States to fill the jobs within our jurisdiction?

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Mr. Radcliffe: I do not think that, at this point in time, save migratory agriculture workers, who do, I know, come to Manitoba for specific purposes at specific times–again, there, you are looking at a very small window and a very specifically trained group of people who work very intensively for a short time, whether it is picking peas or beans, or some very particular issue.

An Honourable Member: Cabbage and rutabagas.

Mr. Radcliffe: Cabbage, rutabagas, yes. You know, that is a niche issue. I do not know, I guess in an ideal world, I would like to think that my children could get a job in America if there was an opportunity that opened itself.

I can tell my honourable colleague that, when I was born, my father was a British subject, so I am entitled to a British passport, which I took out so that my son, when he was living in England and he will be there in a couple of weeks to follow his studies, could have the opportunity to get a job as the son of a British passport holder so that there would be a wider opportunity for him.

I regret what we as mankind throw up as artificial boundaries between one another. I like to think that I am just as good as somebody from Borneo or from Indonesia or Japan or wherever, France, and that we are all human beings that should have equal opportunity. To restrict people from earning a living or living their fulfilment of their life span, I think, is regrettable. Now, is that possible within the confines of our national state today? Probably I am being idealistic, and probably it will be a long time before that happens, but on an ideal level, I guess I am saying I would like to see that in the ultimate, in the fullness of time.

Does that mean that I want Manitobans or Winnipeggers walking the unemployment lines? Absolutely not. I want everybody living to the fullness of their destiny.

Mr. Reid: Well, the minister referenced earlier artificial boundaries, and it does not support the concept. The 49th Parallel is an artificial boundary. So in the sense of using your philosophy about allowing for the migration of workers and having them come in and fill jobs, what is to prevent, outside of the existing perhaps restrictions on treaties which are also artificial and made between governments of both countries, in the future, following along your philosophy and line of thinking, American labour from coming into Canada and into our province in particular to do those jobs versus other Canadians from other provinces coming into Manitoba to do those works? Do you believe in the bigger picture of allowing for the migration of labour from any jurisdiction to come into Manitoba to do those jobs?

Mr. Radcliffe: Well, Mr. Chairman, I am the son of an immigrant. My dad walked into this country in about 1923 or '24. Actually he rode in on a train coming up from Minneapolis. He had $7 in his pocket and he was a British subject. He was a British sailor who got lost, who was a long way from his boat. He hit Winnipeg and he got himself a job in the Grain Exchange. He was good with mathematics and he was a trader. He came from the outside. He was a foreigner. He was not born in Manitoba. He remained a British subject because that was important to him. But he got a job here in Winnipeg; he settled here. He went home during the war to see his people as an artillery officer, but he died here.

An Honourable Member: He moved here.

Mr. Radcliffe: Yes, and my honourable colleague says and "he moved here." But, if we were to say we are going to object to people coming from the outside and working here, then we would cut off people like Leslie Radcliffe. We would say, I am sorry, you are not welcome, the borders are closed to people like you, and we are only going to look inwards. I am saying that is wrong. I am saying that I also have faith and I am confident in the ability of our workforce, the skill of our workforce, the aggressiveness of our workforce to flourish in any competitive community. I think we are showing that day after day, month after month, year after year in all the arenas in which Manitobans are functioning. I do not think that we need to take a backseat to anybody. We are educated here in Manitoba, we are skilled, we are motivated, we have a wonderful work ethic here, and we continue to show that.

To say if we opened our borders interprovincially, are people at risk, no, of course not, because our people are good, they are skilled, they are resourceful, and they are winners. So I have no fear but that they will prosper. What we were touching on a moment ago was a little philosophical reflection of an ideal world. As I said in part of my answer, I do not think in yours and my lifetime we will go there, but I think it is an ideal to look at.

Mr. Reid: Well, then I understand what the minister is saying with respect to the freedom or mobility of labour to go wherever and employers to take that labour wherever within our Canadian jurisdiction. I am not saying that I agree with what he is saying, but that is his position. That is why I asked the question about the bigger picture. If it is with respect to labour mobility and the rights of employers in that regard for Canada, would the same also apply to the ability of American employers bringing labour into this country to bid on contracts, to bring the labour here, or Canadian employers bringing in American labour to work on contracts here and employment projects here while we have Manitobans?

I know there are some on the list for the plumbers and pipefitters union that are skilled and can do that work and yet they are not being employed here in projects that are solely within the borders of Manitoba. So I raise that for you. I know that the issue has perhaps been dealt with by the department before. There has to be, I think, a better way devised to make sure that our Manitobans are in a position of being able to be fully utilized within our province.

I do not know if there is any room in the agreement. I think you said the AIT was the agreement that allows or the agreement between the provinces. I am not sure what the acronym stands for again, but perhaps you can explain that to me and also explain, if we have the ability to do preferential hiring for northern hiring, for example for the Hydro projects, for Conawapa, should that become a reality in the near future. Does this AIT preclude or prevent us from having northern hiring preferences, or hiring preferences for Manitobans versus contractors who may bid on that work, may be successful in achieving the contract and being able to bring in their own labour? Why are we able to do it for one component of our community's economy but we cannot do it for other components? I do not understand the distinction between the two.

Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, the AIT is in fact an agreement on interprovincial trade. That is the acronym. The agreement speaks to legitimate objectives, and states very specifically, I am told–I have not had the advantage of reading the agreement–that individuals who are disadvantaged on an employment basis by virtue of location can receive preferential first hiring, first opportunity for hiring. So that translates into first-level opportunity, I guess, an advantage for some of our First Nations people who are living in the North.

However, the agreement then goes on to speak specifically that we cannot discriminate against interprovincial workforce, that a Canadian is a Canadian, first and foremost, and that there are no boundaries on this basis, save and except as is specifically set out. So that, in response, this has been specifically designated for social purposes, for purposes of helping individuals who are functioning under a disadvantage, but that our general labour force is not disadvantaged, that our labour force in Manitoba in fact is highly employed, well employed. In fact, we are experiencing one of the best employment levels right now that we have ever had in our recent history.

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It would run counter, I would suggest, to the charter of human rights that we have signed, that we declared to be a rule of behaviour amongst all of us as Canadians. This agreement speaks to a freedom of trade between provinces, which I have touched on in the area of finance and transportation. There are a whole myriad of other issues where there ought not to be barriers or trade tariffs between provinces. That in fact was one of the fundamental reasons why Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes came together in the first place was to share and to become part of a larger whole, rather than to be isolated and independent British colonies. So that really is a philosophy that is rooted in our history, that goes right back to the beginning of the formation of our country in 1840 and then on into 1867.

Mr. Reid: I knew you should have paid more attention in those history classes.

Mr. Radcliffe: My history professor used to say if you do not understand history, you are cursed to repeat it.

Mr. Reid: For the minister's information, I did reasonably well in history. I will let my academic achievement stand for itself.

So if we proceed with Conawapa as an example, a project, what restrictions are there, or is there anything that prevents this government, any future successive governments, from having a Manitoba-first hiring preference, or are we restricted solely by nature of that agreement, the AIT, to employing First Nations people or underemployed communities or cultures as part of that agreement? In other words, does it preclude our Manitoba government from employing tradespeople who live in Brandon or in Dauphin, should we start a project like that?

I am trying to get an idea here, and I do not know if you have a briefing note or an executive summary on the agreement that can provide us with some guidance or some clarification or understanding about how this agreement functions. I am trying to educate myself in the process. The minister says he is not fully aware of it, so perhaps both of us can learn in the process.

Mr. Radcliffe: I believe that Chapter 7 of the AIT, or agreement on interprovincial trade, speaks to the mobility of workforce. More specifically, I had a vision flash into my mind right now. I have had the opportunity to go to Whistler a couple of times to go skiing, and there are a lot of young people there from Newfoundland. They have left Newfoundland because of a lack of opportunity because the fisheries have closed, and these are young, single people. They are making their way to a hot spot in the country which right now is Whistler and Blackcomb, and they are lifties and they are waiters and they are all sorts of individuals. There are probably many of them living on a hot bunk system, if one gets out of the bed as another gets in. Have they established families and built little houses in a row with picket fences? Absolutely not. Are they a migratory workforce? Probably. If you asked them to examine their souls, would they love to go home to The Rock ? Yes. Are they there for a short time? Probably. But should we restrict that? No, I do not think so.

With regard to the agreement on interprovincial trade, the agreement speaks to legitimate objectives, and in fact the Manitoba government has the opportunity on a project such as Conawapa, which we are talking about, to say to the employer we want X percentage of the workforce in a particular component to be given the first opportunity to hire locally, and with that there would be a training facility as well so that we could take folks who maybe have Grade 12, maybe do not have Grade 12, maybe are literate. I would presume they would have to have some competence, but there would be an opportunity for them to be trained so that they then could join the project and then have a wider opportunity.

This speaks, I guess, to one of our goals that we were discussing earlier of the advantages of education, so that it would bring education to these people as well who are territorially economically disadvantaged. Then the call would go out to all the trades right across the country. We would start probably here first in Winnipeg to the trade halls where there would be a call for plumbers or welders or pipefitters or whoever we needed, and it would be on a first-come, first-serve basis. Likely there would be uptake here pretty quickly before the message would get out to people across the country.

But I think that it is a very slippery slope to travel down, as I have admonished before, to say, well, it only has to be Manitobans and Manitobans who establish a home here or have roots here. Then you are really getting into some imponderables that work against being a Canadian.

Mr. Reid: I am not sure if you have a briefing note on this or you have an executive summary. Perhaps you can advise, and if you do, perhaps I can read up on it and educate myself to what is in the agreement. I am inquiring as whether or not that is available or not.

Mr. Radcliffe: I advise my honourable colleague that in fact we do not have at this time a briefing note or executive summary, but we can create one very quickly. We have copies of the agreement and I am sure it comes by the pound, but we can give my honourable colleague an overview. I would in fact enjoy an overview of the agreement as well, so we can produce that so we can each get a grip on it.

Mr. Reid: That would be fine. I know it will give the staff the chance to do something on the weekend when they prepare this and go through this extensive document, so I look forward to that.

Mr. Radcliffe: The assistant deputy minister has this document at this fingertips and can recite it from memory, so it will be no problem for him to engender such a document.

Mr. Reid: I will look forward to receiving that whenever it is available. I mean it is not a pressing issue at this time, but when we have the opportunity, sometime in the next couple of months perhaps will be more appropriate.

Questions regarding issues surrounding vacancies and secondments, and I know in past years I have asked for that by individual subdepartments, but perhaps if you have that information available for the overall department and a breakdown of that, I would appreciate receiving that information, and also if you have vacancies, if there is some information with respect to posting a bulletin for those for filling up those jobs, what your plans are, and also a question dealing with LMRC, Labour Management Review Committee and when that committee has met and recommendations perhaps that have come to the department and the minister, if he can share that information with us.

Mr. Chairperson: The honourable minister, very quickly.

Mr. Radcliffe: Very quickly. This will not be quick.

Mr. Reid: You can bring it back tomorrow.

Mr. Chairperson: Order, please. The hour being 5 p.m., time for private members' hour. Committee rise.