VOL. XLVI No. 21 - 1:30 p.m., MONDAY, APRIL 22, 1996

Monday, April 22, 1996

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF MANITOBA

Monday, April 22, 1996

The House met at 1:30 p.m.

PRAYERS

MATTER OF PRIVILEGE

Home Care Services

Mr. Dave Chomiak (Kildonan): Madam Speaker, I am rising this afternoon at the first opportunity that I have on a matter of privilege and this matter will be followed, according to the rules, by a substantive motion which I will introduce at the end of my comments.

Recently we have been given information with respect to the Connie Curran APM contract which states in Schedule A, page 93, quote, a final report of the analytical findings will be presented to the home care steering committee.

On May 27, 1994, in this Chamber, in response to a question from myself, the Minister of Health (Mr. McCrae) stated and I quote from Hansard again: “ . . . the work of APM with our department on the home care project last year arrived at certain recommendations.”

On April 15 of this year on CJOB radio, the minister changed his position and I quote: The work done by APM with my department with respect to home care was not something that resulted in any formal report.

On April 16 in the Winnipeg Free Press, the Minister of Health stated, “The Curran report, as I recall, may have made reference to contracting or allowing for some competition.” . . . “I made a decision that there was not much to be gained by releasing it.”

Again, Madam Speaker, on April 17 in this Chamber, the Minister of Health stated and I quote, “ . . . the APM work with respect to home care was not the subject of a formal report. What the process involved and the arrangement involved was a process to facilitate the people who work for Manitoba Health in the provision of home care services in trying to identify areas where improvements could be made. That is what was arrived at. There was no formal APM report.”

Madam Speaker, on April 18, the Minister of Health tabled the APM contract and tabled the, quote, final working group document presented to the steering committee.

This report was presented to the House and to the media and to the public of Manitoba as the final APM documents. This was later contradicted by the release of a report in Estimates on Friday--and this is my first opportunity to rise after having reviewed this document--by a document titled Home Care Demonstration Project: Advisory Committee Presentation, Manitoba Health, June 22, 1994.

Madam Speaker, the minister said there was no report, then the minister said there was a report, then there was not a report, then the minister released a so-called report, and then the minister released another report that was a so-called final report.

Madam Speaker, how can I, as a member of an elected constituency, do my job when the Minister of Health obstructs, when the Minister of Health does not tell the full story, when the Minister of Health says one thing in the Chamber, another thing outside of the Chamber, another thing in the Chamber, and then another thing outside of the Chamber?

Madam Speaker, this is not according to Beauchesne’s Rule No. 30, a dispute over the facts. This is a dispute over the integrity of not just the minister, but the very government which he represents with respect to these documents, with respect to the entire issue of home care and with respect to the Connie Curran report.

Madam Speaker, it would be one thing if the minister, in dealing with a question from an elected representative--my job and our job is to represent our constituents. We make inquiries of the government of public documents and of public information. The minister fails to release it or if he does release it, he releases parts of it. Ultimately, when he does release it, we find that they are different documents that have been released, and the minister purports to show one document represents a situation, when in fact there is another document that he is holding, and he did not release it until Friday.

* (1335)

Madam Speaker, this would be bad enough. This, in itself, in my opinion, would be a breach of privilege in my rights as a member and our rights on this side of the House to obtain information from the government. But what is worse, the final document that was released Friday, the final document that came to our hands Friday, appeared to have been altered. It appeared to have been doctored. There are major inconsistencies in this document, and that is an insult to the public of Manitoba and to the elected representatives whom we serve.

Madam Speaker, this document misses page 33, page 35, page 36. There are two pages 38, there are two pages 39, and two pages 39 that are different from each other. There are references in this document to studies and information that do not appear in this document. What is worse, there are no numbers on the first 17 pages, and yet, there are not even 17 pages that go between No. 1 and No. 17.

Madam Speaker, this is an affront to members on this side of the bench. This is an affront to democracy; this is an affront to the intelligence of the people of Manitoba. In some jurisdictions there would be public inquiries based on the way that this minister has handled this issue. Now, with respect to the Connie Curran contract, we have seen one contradiction after another. We have seen documents not released; we have seen the minister stating there are reports and then there were no reports, and then there were reports. Then he finally tabled the report.

Last week, on CBC television, he said there was a report, then the minister said there was not a report. He said the same thing in the House and then in the hallway. On Thursday, they tabled documents that were purportedly the Connie Curran documents and they were not the final documents. Then on Friday, the final insult, we get a so-called Connie Curran report and final documents. There are pages missing, there are pages not in order, there is information missing.

Madam Speaker, this is not a dispute over the facts. This is clearly an inability or incapacity on the part of this minister and this government to deal with the very fundamental issues we have been discussing in this Chamber for two weeks now--the lack of information on home care, the lack of studies, the lack of, frankly, competence.

Madam Speaker, I ask you to look at this situation and rule on it.

Madam Speaker, I move, seconded by the member for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale), that this house do censure the Minister of Health for a breach of the privileges of its members in the matter of information made available about the privatization of home care, a misrepresentation of reports and background documents on this issue, and that this matter be referred to the Standing Committee on Privileges and Elections.

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Inkster): It is supposed to be somewhat rare, as Beauchesne’s indicates, in terms of how often a matter of privilege does arise, and when it does arise, that this House take it in the most serious fashion in terms of the context in which it has been presented. Having said that, Madam Speaker, we have been in the Health Estimates for a number of days now and have attempted on numerous occasions to be able to get information from the Minister of Health (Mr. McCrae). The member for Kildonan raises an issue which, no doubt, does warrant the discussion of members of this Chamber and some sort of action needs to be taken.

I want to express to the House that over the last number of days we, representing the Liberal Party, have asked the Minister of Health to provide information to the members of this Chamber, and through us, to members of the public. We believe that the information is absolutely essential.

The Minister of Health responded to me once, saying that there are tons of information that are out there, a lot of it; all we have to do is go and look for it and we will find it. Madam Speaker, I do not question that fact that there are piles and piles of information, from one coast to the other coast, to the Americans, that deal with home care services. What we have been asking directly of the Minister of Health is to provide us information that specifically states to privatize home care services in the province of Manitoba is in the best interest of the client.

We have, day in and day out, Madam Speaker, put pressure on this government to materialize any sort of information that specifically points to how the client will benefit with the privatization of health care. They have failed to do that. The critic for the New Democrats has asked for information, specifically with respect to the APM report, believing that there is information that condemns the privatization of health care.

Madam Speaker, if that is the case, that we have had a report that has been manipulated that will demonstrate that privatization is the wrong direction to go--and we have to keep in mind that this is a report that was commissioned by this government--that in itself does warrant full and immediate attention by all members of this Chamber, if a document has intentionally been doctored in any fashion in order to manipulate an issue as important as home care services.

* (1340)

Having said that, Madam Speaker, I would suggest that this motion is in order and request, for the sake of the clients throughout the province, that we deal with this issue as soon as possible, and that we get whatever information that is there that is talking about the privatization of home care services, in its entirety, put onto the table.

You know, I had a constituent who had indicated to me, in the federal government they are doing a complete investigation with what has happened with the Somalia affair in terms of documents that are being hidden. Well, maybe what we need to do is to get the Ministry of Health to look for the documentation that might be there to indicate support for what this government is doing. We want to see the support the government is using or the information that it is specifically using to do what it is currently doing. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Hon. James McCrae (Minister of Health): Madam Speaker, the honourable member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak) has made some very serious allegations. I suggest, as I have suggested many times, that it is very irresponsible to make allegations without any basis in fact upon which to justify such allegations. Yet we seem to see the honourable member for Kildonan and his colleagues doing that on a daily basis in this House.

I dare say if every time honourable members opposite brought something specious or incorrect into this House, and if honourable members who were aggrieved by that raised questions of privilege every time they did it, that would be all we would ever do in this place, is raise questions of privilege about the way honourable members opposite conduct themselves.

Madam Speaker, the honourable member has made some very troubling allegations with respect to documents that I tabled in the committee on Friday. It may be the honourable member was not listening at the time, but it would be good for the honourable member to know what it is he is talking about before he opens his mouth to condemn somebody else.

I have tabled so many documents related to home care that the honourable member for Inkster (Mr. Lamoureux) has readily admitted he has not come close to examining most of them. But the honourable member for Inkster, of course, has all the expertise he needs; he has not read any of the stuff, but he sure knows what is the right thing to do. That is not a very good approach.

The honourable member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak), I believe, was referring to a document I tabled on Friday entitled Home Care Demonstration Project: Advisory Committee Presentation and made suggestions that I had somehow altered this document. He cites the fact that pages are missing.

On Friday, when I tabled the document, I went out of my way to tell the committee that the pages were misnumbered. I said that the pagination is incorrect, but that I was assured by the people in the department that all the pages that were part of this are in the document that I tabled. Yes, indeed, the pagination was wrong, but there are no pages missing. This is the kind of stuff the honourable member brings forward under the guise of a question of privilege. It might be appropriate that that behaviour itself be the subject of a question of privilege.

He also made a suggestion that there were alterations. Let him be specific about that, because I can tell you, without any hesitation or worry about contradiction, I made no alteration whatsoever to any of the documents I tabled in this House.

The honourable member, in his question of privilege, forgot to mention a rather important little item because he keeps talking about the Advisory Committee to the Continuing Care Program and its advice to the minister on the whole subject of contracting out as if I am somehow in disagreement with the committee. Once you correct the transcription error in the report of the Advisory Committee to the Continuing Care Program, it all becomes very clear that the case the honourable member is trying to make goes nowhere.

* (1345)

On page 25 of the report of the Advisory Committee to the Continuing Care Program, it says the following, and I will need to quote this so you will be able to have a context here: This fact is supported by the department’s own 1994 work-restructuring report--to which I referred a moment ago--in which the department, following a review of a number of other jurisdictions, asserted as follows--and then it quotes the report that the honourable member suggests has been altered and repaginated and so on--contracting out service delivery among multiple providers is not advisable due to difficulty ensuring quality of service and difficulty co-ordinating across multiple services.

Madam Speaker, let me go back to the advisory committee presentation and read to you what it really says as opposed to what is quoted in the report of the Advisory Committee to the Continuing Care Program. It is on page 16, and it says: Contracting all service delivery among multiple providers is not advisable due to difficulty ensuring quality of service and difficulty co-ordinating across multiple services.

The difference between the words “all” and “out” is extremely significant. Honourable members like to gloss over that little part. In addition, I tabled on Friday a letter from two members of the Advisory Committee on Continuing Care, Myrna Fitchett and Joyce Rose. One line in that letter is: It is our understanding this committee did not advise against contracting out a portion of present services.

The honourable member wants reports. He has been given all the reports, including being reminded of the NDP report which pushes user fees and cuts in services, which is not my report and a report to which I do not attach any--were not any support. But the NDP report suggests user fees and cuts. Maybe that is what was in the honourable member’s mind when he went out telling people in the public that what we were doing here in Manitoba was bringing in user fees and cutting services, neither of which is true, but that does not stop the honourable member. I think his philosophy is, if the facts do not work for you, make something up.

Madam Speaker, prima facie, the honourable member certainly has no question of privilege, but it is part of his ongoing battle to support his friends and colleagues at the leadership levels of the union movement.

Mr. Steve Ashton (Opposition House Leader): On the matter of privilege, I would first of all like to just deal with the technical questions because I believe that the matter of privilege is in order. Under Beauchesne’s Citations 114, 115, we should essentially now be dealing with whether you as Speaker, Madam Speaker, should determine that there is a prima facie case of breach of privilege.

I would like to stress what a matter of privilege really is because, as the member pointed out, we are not saying that this is in any way, shape or form merely a dispute over the facts. We believe that the minister’s conduct in regard to these reports goes far beyond any mere disagreement between us--and there are many in this government, on home care or the recommendations of the many reports we are dealing with, none of which, by the way, support the privatization of home care.

That is not the issue, Madam Speaker. If we are to conduct ourselves in this Legislature and to make important policy decisions on behalf of the people we represent, we expect one basic thing, that is, that we be provided with accurate information.

Madam Speaker, the member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak), our Health critic, probably I think established the matter of privilege most clearly in the words of the minister himself. Now the minister can try and explain the missing pages and the contradictory pages in the reports that he did finally table, but it was the minister who on May 27, 1994, said there was an APM report which made certain recommendations. It was the minister on April 15, 1996, who said there was no formal report. It was the minister on April 16, 1996, who referenced the Curran report, which is APM, having made reference to contracting or some form of competition. It was the minister on April 17, 1996, who said that the APM work with respect to home care was not the subject of the former report, and the minister on April 18, who tabled the APM contract and the final working group document presented to the steering committee.

* (1350)

Madam Speaker, you do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out there are some contradictions in the words that the minister himself has put on the public record. We are not just talking about statements that have been made to the media. We are talking about statements that have been made in this House, April 17, 1996--Connie Curran did not provide, did not make a report; it was never agreed that there would be a report--the words of the Minister of Health in Hansard in this session of the Legislature.

Madam Speaker, this is particularly important because we are seeing a situation where the government has made a major policy decision that is going to dislocate thousands of home care clients and dislocate thousands of home care workers.

Madam Speaker, if we are to have any proper debate on this issue, we have to find out the real reasons why the government is making these decisions. We have been trying since the beginning of this session to determine that. One of the key things we wanted was to find out if the government had any objective evidence to support the privatization of home care. We asked continuously in this Legislature, in Question Period, of this minister; we asked him to deal with the questions we had raised and we also asked him to table all the reports that he was dealing with.

Madam Speaker, how can you decide anything else other than the fact that in the desperation this government is facing now, to try and defend an indefensible position that the Minister of Health has made numerous statements on the public record and statements in this House which have misled the members of this Legislature and the general public. That is the issue. The minister has misled the public.

Madam Speaker, we are raising this today not out of any sense of bringing merely a technical matter. If this matter of privilege does nothing more than make the minister himself and the Premier (Mr. Filmon) and members of this government realize that they cannot keep on doing this--I think it is obvious to everyone else in this province right now that the government has made a serious mistake. They have no objective evidence. They are ripping apart a system that has served Manitobans well for more than two decades. When we get to receiving objective evidence, we find they have no evidence to support such a dramatic change. That is obvious to everyone in this province, and it should be obvious to the Minister of Health and the Premier, who is directing this in his role as Leader of this government.

We ask two things today: No. 1, we ask you to deal with this matter and clearly give us the opportunity as members of this Legislature to deal with what we believe is a clear case of a minister misleading this Legislature. We also ask, Madam Speaker, that in doing so, we have the opportunity to do what is probably the most important thing on the home care issue at all and that is have a real debate in this province that, hopefully, will make the government realize it has made a serious mistake in privatizing home care. Thank you.

* (1355)

Hon. Jim Ernst (Government House Leader): Madam Speaker, as the member for Inkster (Mr. Lamoureux) has said, a question of privilege ought seldom, if ever, to arise in a parliamentary process. To allege the things that the member for Kildonan (Mr. Chomiak) has alleged against the Minister of Health (Mr. McCrae) is a very, very serious matter and one that needs to be taken under great consideration.

Madam Speaker, if the member for Kildonan interprets certain documents provided by the Minister of Health in one way and the minister interprets those same documents in a different way--[interjection] And, in fact, the member for Thompson has just said, we have not provided any evidence at all. In his own words, he said, we have provided no evidence. Apart from that, if they interpret information contained in a document in one way and the minister interprets that in a different way, that is not a breach of privilege. Our own rules say, on page 76: “But a dispute arising between two members as to allegations of facts does not fulfill the conditions of parliamentary privilege.”

Madam Speaker, upon looking and reading in Hansard all of the comments that have been made here this afternoon, you will easily determine, I think, that it is a dispute over the facts. It is not a question of privilege at all, and so I commend this ruling to you and no doubt we will hear back from you in due course.

Madam Speaker: A matter of privilege is a serious concern. I am going to take this matter under advisement to consult the authorities and will return to the House with a ruling.