Hon. James McCrae (Government House Leader): Madam Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Minister of Culture, Heritage and Citizenship (Mrs. Vodrey), that Madam Speaker do now leave the Chair and the House resolve itself into a committee to consider of the Supply to be granted to Her Majesty.
Motion agreed to.
Madam Speaker: Due to the unavailability of the Deputy Speaker (Mr. Laurendeau), the honourable member for Sturgeon Creek (Mr. McAlpine) will Chair the Committee of Supply in the Chamber, and the honourable member for Pembina (Mr. Dyck) will Chair the Committee of Supply in Room 255.
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(Concurrent Sections)
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Dyck): Order, please. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This afternoon this section of the Committee of Supply meeting in Room 255 will resume consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. When the committee last sat, it had been considering item 5.3. Corporate Affairs (h) Companies Office on page 26 of the Estimates book. Shall the item pass?
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Mr. Jim Maloway (Elmwood): Perhaps before we begin today, I would like to ask the minister whether he was able to make arrangements for us to have the people from the Insurance branch attend--so he did receive that message then--and the Cooperative and Credit Union Regulation people--we want to ask questions about co-ops.
Hon. Mike Radcliffe (Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs): Yes, Mr. Chairman, I am told that both those individual directors will be scheduled and present in the committee room today. We at the present time have Mr. Rick Wilson, who is the senior officer from the Land Titles Office, here and is ready to assist with any questions that my honourable colleague may have. We have scheduled the other individuals for reasonable intervals throughout the afternoon.
Mr. Maloway: Well, I guess I would like to begin by asking virtually the same questions of this SOA as I have of the other SOAs, and that is for a list of the fees that they charged before it became an SOA and the current list of fees and any schedule of increases that have occurred between the time it became an SOA and the current fees?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to be able to tell my honourable friend that in fact the only increase in fees that has been occasioned at the Land Titles Office in Manitoba is a $10 rise for the registration of mortgages and transfers, and that is the only fee increase there has been since 1988.
As my honourable colleague no doubt is aware, there is a land transfer tax now on transfers of land which is on a graduated basis depending on the value of the real estate that is being transferred or the mortgage, the face value of the mortgage, that is being registered, and so therefore--[interjection] I stand corrected. I did recollect, but I was not sure of myself. The mortgage is a flat $60 charge right now. So this represents on an $80,000 house an increase of 2.8 percent, and on a $100,000, it would be a 2 percent increase.
The reason for this is in order to make the service a cost-recovery service in order that we are able to supply nothing but the best of service to Manitobans and to be able to employ high-quality employees and to support the work that is involved with the registrations of the documentation and to keep up with the technology in the Land Titles Office.
Mr. Maloway: Then could the minister tell us what the profitability of this SOA was for the last 12 months? Was it better or worse than projected?
Mr. Radcliffe: I am pleased to be able to tell my honourable colleague that, in fact, in the past year, LTO was running at a small deficit. It was not making money for the province of Manitoba. The $10 fee increase was an attempt by the administration to bring the Land Titles section of the registry office to a break-even position.
Mr. Maloway: That was the case this past year, but what is it projected to show for the next year and the year after? I am looking for the lead-up to the run up to the 1999 election, of course.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to be able to advise my honourable colleague that the Land Titles Office, the Personal Property Security Registry have been combined into a special operating agency to be known as the registry office for the province of Manitoba. Now, the Personal Property Security Registry has always run at a significant profit, and there the fees, as you are no doubt aware, are determined by the value of the security that is being registered. This coming year the registry will be paying a dividend under the business plan of $1.8 million to the Consolidated Revenue of the Province of Manitoba. That will be increased. The following year the registry office will pay a $2-million dividend for the year '99-2000.
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Mr. Maloway: The $2 million projected in 1998-99, now that money from the SOAs--I am trying to get at the financial arrangements that you have with the Consolidated Fund. If you produce a deficit in any given year, then how is the deficit offset? By money flowing from the Consolidated Fund? You know, you had a deficit some years. When you work on a profitability, you are turning your profits year by year to the Consolidated Fund. You are not allowed to keep them in your fund.
Mr. Radcliffe: I would challenge my honourable colleague on that. My understanding at least of an SOA is that the SOA files a business plan with government and there are all the attributes, of course, of an activity which has the ability to stand alone, is self-contained, et cetera. The SOA will be assigned and agrees to payment of a dividend to the Consolidated Revenue branch and then anything over, anything earned in addition to that dividend by way of revenue to that SOA remains at the SOA level to be used as the administration of that SOA sees fit. They cannot, obviously, take trips or go to consumer living or anything like that--it goes to proper administration of the department--but that is the incentive there so that it gives them the freedom to manage their affairs in such a fashion as they think fit and gives them a little more independence.
Mr. Maloway: Mr. Chairman, when the election time comes though, it is quite conceivable that a political decision can be made and the user fees can be lowered at that time. The minister cannot deny that.
Mr. Radcliffe: Well, I think that my honourable colleague's question is speculative at best. Anything is possible, Mr. Chair, but I would say with great sincerity that I would have a great difficulty with that sort of governance at this point in time unless, of course, there was a vast reduction in staff or a significant diminution in the collective agreement or wage rates of the civil servants of the province of Manitoba. But from what I know of the MGEU, I do not know that that is a realistic possibility.
Mr. Maloway: Mr. Chairman, has the minister or anybody in his department been approached regarding privatization of this SOA or has interest been shown in the privatization in any quarter at this point?
Mr. Radcliffe: Absolutely not.
Mr. Maloway: Mr. Chairman, I wanted to deal with the computer situation with regard to this SOA. Could the minister give us an update as to what sort of system is in place right now, and what sorts of functions this computer system is currently performing and supposed to perform for the department?
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Dyck): Before the minister gives his answer, just a question regarding the Insurance branch as to when they would be here. Could the minister advise us of that approximate time?
Mr. Radcliffe: Yes, I think 3:30.
My honourable colleague asked me the status of the computer system in the registry office of the Personal Property Security Registry and the Land Titles. I can tell him that at the present time Winnipeg, Portage and Brandon Land Titles Offices are all fully computerized. They are on a provincial mainframe and this enables individual law firms or people who are hooked up to Manitoba Online to access preliminary searches through their own computer network. It is proposed that ultimately all the remaining rural Land Titles Offices, namely Dauphin, Neepawa and Morden, will be fully automated within the next number of years. These are some of the smaller offices in the province of Manitoba.
The Manitoba Land Titles Office does not have a year 2000 compliant problem. That is not, in fact, a feature with their land title registry system and with their environment.
The Personal Property Security Registry will be moving to a client-server system with a PC-based, personal computer-based, environment. It has a year 2000 problem, compliance problem, and the Better Systems Initiative is at this point in time looking at the PSR computer system with a view to getting this updated and on line and corrected, so that we have software that will adapt to the year 2000.
Mr. Maloway: What is involved and what is it going to cost to get this compliant?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, the cost for the PSR to become 2000 compliant apparently is inextricably tied up in the whole system of BSI, and those are not figures to which we are privy. In fact, I think probably the most appropriate place to ask that question would be in Finance.
Mr. Maloway: Mr. Chairman, in one of the other SOAs that we discussed earlier this week, we were told that once the computer system was in place that the profitability of the SOA would be further enhanced by virtue of the fact that six staff members would not be required anymore and would be phased out over time. What is the projection regarding this SOA on that score?
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Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chair, I believe in the previous SO we were talking about the remark that was made, and the emphasis that was put upon this was that there would be six staff individuals who would no longer be performing the present function that they are under the current paper system or the current technology system that the SOA was functioning under, and in fact there would be an introduction of vacancy management, there would be skill enhancement and there might be sidetracking of these individuals into other functions within that SOA.
Likewise in Land Titles, we do not anticipate at this point in time that there will be any diminution in staff in Land Titles Office. The change in the computerese may have some impact in PSR, but we do not have any read on that at this point in time.
Mr. Maloway: Mr. Chairman, my colleague the member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) I believe has several questions on this topic, so I will turn it over to her.
Mr. Radcliffe: Fine. I would welcome the honourable member for Wolseley with her questions.
Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): I am interested in the Land Titles documents which have been framed and put on the walls of the Land Titles Office in Winnipeg, I gather. We have raised some questions about this in Question Period, and I want to take this a little further. First of all, I wonder if the minister could tell me on what basis the documents were selected. There is a specific list of documents. They were chosen as documents important in the history of Manitoba, and I wonder if the minister has a full list of the documents that are available for this particular kind of treatment.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, in response to my honourable colleague's question, apparently all the documents, individual documents in the Land Titles Office now, with the aging of the paper, are being committed to microfilm and being preserved on microfilm. The process that the management of Land Titles noted was that these documents were then sent to the Archives of the Province of Manitoba either for retention or destruction and largely for destruction. Land Titles felt that there would be a significant loss to the ongoing chronicle or history of the province of Manitoba if in fact a number of documents that were currently in the possession of Land Titles were actually physically destroyed.
Therefore, there was a staff at Land Titles themselves, through their own appreciation of history, either the history of the chronicle of the people of Manitoba generally or of the Land Titles system--those were the two perspectives that were applied to the inspection of the documents. A list of documents was culled and sent to the Archivist for the express purpose of preserving them in perpetuity and to solicit funds from the law firms to have them mounted in an appropriate fashion so that they could be preserved and appreciated in the future.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, does the minister have the list of the documents that were so dealt with?
Mr. Radcliffe: Yes, we have the list. We do not have it here today, but we certainly would be more than willing to provide it to my honourable colleague.
Ms. Friesen: How many documents are on that list?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am told that apparently there are 24 documents that have received this sort of treatment. The period of time covers from 1870 to the present. I am told that in the normal course of handling documents that a great number of documents have gone to the Archives and have been destroyed, the actual physical paper, and that this list of 24, in fact, was chosen to be representative of the types of documentation that would have been handled by the Manitoba Land Titles system through the course of its history. I would add for the benefit of my honourable colleague, that in the LT locations outside the city of Winnipeg, a great number of the actual physical documents are still on deposit in the Land Titles offices in either the other cities in Manitoba or the smaller towns.
As my honourable colleague is no doubt aware, these documents are deteriorating quickly and every time they are handled they become more and more fragile. I have had occasion to see some of the early titles and the early documentation and work with them, even some of the early registries. When we were on a registry system of land, the abstract of title book for titles, which has the original spidery handwriting of the original registrar's is becoming more and more fragile. However, these still do exist. Many of them exist in the Land Titles offices outside the city of Winnipeg, and these abstracts covered the land-holding system before the imposition of the Torrens title system which we now currently enjoy in Manitoba.
Ms. Friesen: I wondered if the minister could tell me whether these documents which are, as I understand it now, not necessarily significant historical documents in themselves but representative of types of documents, representation of a type of collection. When you selected those 24, could the minister tell me whether this was done in conjunction with the Archives? The sense I am getting--and it may not be the one that you want to leave on the record--is that these documents were selected in order to preserve them from the destruction of the Archives. That does not make sense to me. If they are significant documents, the Archives would preserve them. If they are not, then they would be subject to the normal procedures. So I am not sure what the minister wants to leave on the record there.
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Mr. Radcliffe: I will try to be a little more specific for my honourable colleague, and I am learning more myself as we go along on this. There are two streams or channels of land title documents. Documents under The Real Property Act, which is the present Torrens system, are currently and have been for a number of years in the Winnipeg Land Titles Office committed to microfilm, and then those documents have been sent to the Archivist and indicated to be destroyed in the normal course of business by the Archivists themselves.
Then there is a second category of documents, and this is the grouping from which these 24 representative documents have been culled. These refer to the registry system and the deed system of our history of land title holding, and those were for inspection and perusal by the Archivist to select. The Land Titles people would have made their nomination or selection, and then that would be submitted to the Archivist. The balance of the documents in that category would be subject to the legislation under which the Archivist functions, which our understanding is generally these documents are committed for destruction.
Ms. Friesen: I think the minister might want to say that they are committed for selection rather than destruction. That is not automatic and there are certain principles which any archivist would follow. My guess is that is what is meant and that is the ultimate disposition that the Archivist makes.
My concern for the ones that have been selected is their preservation, not just as a representative collection, but in the case, for example, and I am only picking one because I only know the names of four of them, the one which is the transfer of the St. Peters Reserve in 1906. This is a significant document in itself, I think, probably nationally as well as in terms of Manitoba history. So its selection for matting, framing and display in an area outside of a gallery, outside of the normal conditions of humidity and protection from, well, the public in many cases is unusual. So I am concerned about the survival of these documents.
When an Archives puts documents on display or when a museum puts documents on display, there are very strict international standards, in fact, which are followed. When Canada sends documents to other jurisdictions for display, as it has done recently, for example, in a big international exhibition on Captain Cook, they must follow the international standards for the circulation and display and preservation of those documents.
In many cases, the older documents, say even the 18th Century ones, are actually better able to stand up to modern conditions than those of the early 20th Century, so it is not necessarily age which determines the future preservation, but it is the composition of the paper and the conditions under which they are displayed. So the matting and display and the conditions of that are important, and I wondered how that has been handled. Has it been handled by the Archives according to Archive standards? Has it been handled by the Land Titles Office according to perhaps more domestic standards of display?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chair, I am told that the Land Titles Office does work with the Archivist at the present time. I am told that there were six documents, out of this list of 24, that have been framed. They were framed by the Birchwood Gallery, which was at the choice and on the behest of the Land Titles Office. This is not the regular matter and framer that the Archivist chooses and works with, and types of documents that have been mounted in this fashion by this particular gallery are a number of blank titles, forms of certificates of title, and notices of sale.
In addition to those, the second transfer of land in the province of Manitoba has been treated in this fashion as well, and the Land Titles is considering, at this point in time, taking this particular document out of circulation, submitting it to the framer that is the framer of choice by the Archivist in order that it can be inspected and, if necessary, rematted and reframed. I concur with my honourable colleague with the aspect of the deterioration of the documents of which she speaks. In fact, I had the occasion to sit on the board at the Museum of Man and Nature when the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company were turned over to the museum, and a great number of those early documents were still in incredibly good shape. Even though they had been sitting up in the Lower Fort for the last number of years, there had been some archival activity on them.
In any event, to go back to Land Titles, Land Titles does circulate and proposes to, in the future, circulate these documents and only leaving them out for stated periods of time because the light will cause deterioration as well. So this is another issue that Land Titles is sensitive to. There are approximately, I guess, 18 documents that are yet to be treated in this fashion, and these documents are on deposit still in the Land Titles Office where they had remained up until this point in time. They are earmarked for future care in the fashion which we have outlined.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I think that would give much greater comfort if we could be assured that the documents which are framed are kept in places where they can be protected, where the light conditions and the matting conditions are of archival standards and, first of all, the archival standards of the province of Manitoba, which I assume are certainly moving towards international standards. So I would leave that with the minister. I think he may be on the right track. It sounds as though a mistake was made, and I certainly hope that can be rectified.
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The second issue I have again relates to the documents, and my understanding is that they are being offered essentially, like, for sponsorship just as one can sponsor an animal at the zoo or one can sponsor a variety of things. Am I right in my understanding of that, and could you tell me the kinds of conditions of sponsorship which you are offering? Is it, you know, X number of dollars for so many years? Are there only one-year terms? Do they turn over every five years? What are the conditions of sponsorship?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am advised that the sponsorship is to cover the cost of framing. The solicitation was done to the law firms in the city of Winnipeg, those whom I presume, and this is just my wording at this point, that Land Titles probably thought would be appropriate, who would be interested in such a sponsorship. The length of time of the sponsorship is in fact, in essence, determined by the Archivist, because there is a little acknowledgement plaque that would be on the face of the document or on the face of the framing, and so the Archivist would determine how long that document can be left out in the light, and then once that period of time has transpired, the document is removed and secured so that publicity or sponsorship would then be removed from the eyes of the public until it could be recirculated again.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, so that company or corporation which wanted continuing sponsorship would presumably sponsor three or four so that one would be out of circulation while the other one or two were left. So the price of framing, my guess, is probably in the region of $300 to $500. Is that the price that the--
Mr. Radcliffe: Yes, my honourable colleague is correct that it is in the $300 to $500 range.
Ms. Friesen: I just wanted to make sure also that the documents remain on display in the Land Titles Office not in lawyers' offices.
Mr. Radcliffe: Absolutely correct. I made this quite abundantly clear on the floor of the House one day, and that in fact Mr. Brown, who is a practicing solicitor in town, had made a misstatement in Headnotes and Footnotes. There was a subsequent retraction published, and I did spot it and I forwarded that to Ms. McGifford for her knowledge and edification as well. But my honourable colleague is absolutely correct, these documents are displayed in the environs of the Land Titles Office.
Ms. Friesen: Is it the intention of the minister to limit sponsorship to legal firms? How else has it been advertised? I guess that is one aspect that certainly concerned me and other members of our caucus. The sponsorship that was offered appeared to be only offered to legal firms for the document, for example, of the 1906 transfer of St. Peters Reserve.
Mr. Chairman, can I add another question at the same time, and that is if the minister can advise me whether or not such sponsorship and the listing of legal firms constitutes advertising within the Land Titles Office.
Mr. Radcliffe: As a point of clarification, does my honourable colleague mean advertising as regulated by The Law Society Act, or is there some other parameter that my honourable colleague is referring to? I am not sure I understand the ambit of her question.
Ms. Friesen: It probably should have been a separate question. Yes, there are two subaspects of that. One is advertising within the constraints of legal discipline, and, secondly, of course, the issue of general advertising within a government services office.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, in response to my honourable colleague's question, Land Titles does not intend to limit the solicitation to the law firms in the city of Winnipeg at all, and, in fact, the process that was followed was that there was an approach to the Manitoba Bar Real Property Subsection. They were consulted. They canvassed their membership, and they were in charge of the solicitation of the different law firms involved. Issues such as privacy and the whole issue of the archival input was also considered, because the preservation issue is obviously a matter of some sensitivity as well.
My department is not really in a position to say whether this is or is not advertising per se pursuant to The Law Society Act. I would perhaps refer my honourable colleague to Ms. McCawley at the Law Society for determination of that issue.
I guess, further along that line, that there has been no determination by Land Titles either whether this is, in fact, commercial advertising within a government building. This is perhaps more of an acknowledgment that an individual entity has covered the costs for the particular mounting and preservation of a document. I would be loath to condone banner headlines in the Land Titles Office saying shop at Aikins MacAulay for your legal needs, in glowing lights in the basement of the Woodsworth Building.
I do not think that is appropriate, and I do not think that is the way we are going. I think it is a very significant question, and acknowledgments have been restricted to the form of acknowledgment only in order to not get involved in that sort of disputation or consideration of advertising in government buildings.
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Ms. Friesen: It may well be more properly a question for the Minister of Government Services (Mr. Pitura). The principle that the minister suggested there of an acknowledgment of the covering of the cost, I mean, looking around here at a certain number of premiers, one wonders if the cost of reframing or the cost of painting, for example, might well be acknowledged. As I look around, I can suggest some interesting sponsors for some of these portraits, but I will refrain from doing so.
That principle I think is an interesting one, and, of course, it is not the issue of having neon lights in the Land Titles building. It is an issue of clients, customers, the general public in the land titles business for the purpose of a certain type of business and their eye happening to catch upon the name of a particular type of lawyer or particular legal firm.
So I think it is one that I will pose to Government Services to see what kind of policy directives they and other governments have on this, and I take the minister's response on the issue of the Law Society being the appropriate person for the other aspect of my question.
I would like to ask the minister how he proposes to broaden the offer of sponsorship. Who else has he spoken to? Who else has it been advertised to? What plans does he have for that kind of broadening? How many of these documents of the original list of 24 have already been taken up in sponsorship?
Mr. Radcliffe: I can tell my honourable colleague that, in fact, there has been a canvass of the law firms as I had indicated previously. There has been some interest in the law firms, but I am told that there has been no uptake at this point in time. There has been some interest shown by a number of law firms in town.
The Land Titles administration is considering next moving, once the whole milieu of the law firms has been researched, to the large client groups that deal with Land Titles. This would include mortgage lenders, credit unions. Members of the general public would not be excluded.
In fact, I may hear and I would pass on to Land Titles my honourable colleague's name as, in fact, somebody who may be interested in promoting and sponsoring such an activity.
I would also note, as I think my honourable colleague is aware, that this practice has been publicized in Headnotes and Footnotes. So any of the recipients of Headnotes and Footnotes, which is a legal journal which I believe is where our honourable colleague Ms. McGifford picked up the information initially, anyone who reads that is aware of what is going on in Land Titles Office. So if they have any interest, Land Titles would obviously be open to being approached if there were general interest in the general public.
Ms. Friesen: Well, I thank the honourable minister for his offer to me of sponsorship. It is not one I think I will take up at this point, but we were discussing on this side of the table that perhaps the former Premier Sterling Lyon--there might be a number of people interested in sponsoring that portrait. I wonder if the minister sees this as an expanding element of government fundraising.
Mr. Radcliffe: Well, I am sure that the creative juices of the party brass are always at work to look for more innovative ways to create fundraising schemes for support of good government in Manitoba and to perpetuate the ongoing existence of the Filmon government in perpetuity to the horizon, but short of that I would take my honourable colleague's suggestion and place it in the appropriate receptacle and consider it passed on.
Mr. Daryl Reid (Transcona): I would like to ask the minister--
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Dyck): Excuse me. Could you pull your mike in, please.
Mr. Reid: Could the minister tell me: Is the Land Titles department responsible for the survey monuments throughout the province?
Mr. Radcliffe: My honourable colleague has raised a very interesting problem with regard to Land Titles. Initially, when the whole province was surveyed, there were monuments placed across the province of Manitoba. This was done as the basic support system for our current Torrens Land Titles system. I believe that in each section of land across the country there are three monuments or wooden stakes that were placed in each section. I disremember specifically where they are. I know there are three stakes, wooden stakes, yes, that is right, that were placed by the original surveyors when they went across the countryside in 1870 and shortly thereafter, and I am sure my honourable colleague is aware of all the rebellion and angst that was raised with that initial survey.
As you can appreciate, over the passage of time a number of these monuments have deteriorated and also with the passage of time, with farmers farming fields, where there has been tillage of the land right up to the access roads or sometimes the road allowance where the access roads do not exist, or where there is plowing of the roads and grading by the local municipalities, a number of these monuments have been displaced.
So I have become aware of the fact that there is an ongoing concern by the rural municipalities right now as to promoting a scheme for replacement of the monuments in Manitoba. If we were to embark at this point in time and this is sort of the worst possible case scenario, if we were to resurvey the province of Manitoba with the current technology that we have right now to replace all the wooden monuments and in many cases to try to relocate the monuments that have deteriorated and disappeared, we are looking at a cost of somewhere in excess of $750 million. So at this point in time this is something which I would respectfully submit is probably out of the reach of the Land Titles system as we are practicing it in Manitoba.
However, the only legislation which touches on responsibility for displacement of the survey monument rests in The Surveys Act, which I think is Section 4 of The Surveys Act, which states that if a rural municipality has displaced or destroyed a monument, then the responsibility and the cost of replacement rests with the rural municipality--which is not rocket scientist. It seems appropriate that the responsibility would be there if they were, in fact, in charge of grading the roads or moving it.
(Mr. Mervin Tweed, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
I have taken some advice on this, as well, from a number of surveyors in the system, and I am told, and I think this is a matter of opinion and may yet be speculative, that a surveyor is able to discern--if the monument has not been disturbed, a surveyor is able to discern from perhaps almost some research, dusting the land and digging and trowelling, et cetera, where the monument did exist even if it has disappeared. This is a matter of opinion and there is perhaps some controversy amongst surveyors at this point in time.
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The next thing I can tell my honourable colleague is that the major areas of concern right now for this issue of monumenting the survey system in Manitoba is restricted largely to the south end of the province where the majority of people are found and where there is more intensive use of the land. The rural municipalities are estimating--and all the figures that I am giving, I want to caution my honourable colleague, are only guesstimates at this point in time, and therefore they do tend to perhaps be exaggerated, and we could be open to comment and criticism that they may be too high or too low. But the best available knowledge we have right now is that it is approximately a $35,000-a-year problem to the existing municipalities. I have been approached by my colleagues in Rural Development with a number of ideas as to how to finance a replacing of the monuments, and I am personally of a mind that it is desirable to replace the monuments, especially in rural Manitoba. It should be done sooner than later because, of course, the system that we have is a failing system.
The issue then remains as to how it is going to be paid for, and I do not believe that the Province of Manitoba is in a position to write a cheque to have this all done at once with a ticket for $750 million, if, in fact, that should be the case. That figure, I must tell my honourable friend, is an extrapolation forward from the minutiae, from the micro to the macrocosm.
There have been a number of suggestions that have been brought forward, one of which was to add on an additional levy for all registration of all documents in the Land Titles Office, and I personally did not favour that scheme because, in fact, I felt that there were a number of individuals who would benefit from the remonumentation who, in fact, would not be paying for it because they are not necessarily transferring land. They would be the passive recipients.
If you hold a particular title for 60-70 years, being your active lifespan perhaps of owning land, and never sell it, never mortgage it, never have any transactions on it, but your monuments have disappeared, you then would be receiving a benefit from a selected group of the public who had been mortgaging or who had been trading in land, transferring land, so, therefore, you are selecting an exclusive grouping of our citizens to pay for a benefit to all of Manitobans, not necessarily who are supporting it themselves. So from a philosophical point of view, I had problems with that sort of approach and concept.
The other approach which I advanced was that the municipalities raise the local levies to pay for this. I am told that this has not met with general accord in the municipalities. So we are very much in the negotiating period, at this point in time, between the Land Titles people and Rural Development, the municipality people, to find some way to pay for this renovation which must be done.
I personally acknowledge, and I think that all my staff and the Land Titles people acknowledge, that it must be done, and it must be done soon. It is a deteriorating system, because, of course, the original surveyors who put this system in place did not address their minds, I guess, at that point in time, to the fact that wooden stakes buried in the land will rot and disappear over a very short length of time, plus these monuments do form the very basis for our Land Titles system because there is no point in having a theoretical Torrens system, a paper system or a computerized electronic system if you do not know where you are out on the actual land.
So these are some of the ramifications that we have been working with, debating. I am pleased to be able to share this with my honourable colleague, and this brings you more or less up to date as to where we are at this point in the whole search for an answer. Perhaps, it was more than he wanted to know and was afraid to ask but--
Mr. Reid: No, Mr. Chairperson, the minister gave a fairly detailed explanation there, and I appreciate that. There has been some concern that we are lagging behind in the province and our monuments and markers are disappearing through various activities in the province, including nature, and that if we do not take steps now to correct the problem and have some type of a plan in place to restore those markers, of course, your cost is going to only increase in the future.
Can the minister tell me, because he says he does not agree with the levying of a fee for those that register land transfers through the Land Titles branch, what other proposals that he has in place, you know, to address it outside of the one that the municipalities themselves are now balking at? Are there other options that you have available that you are considering at this point in time? Perhaps some of the ones that maybe some of your colleagues may have raised as well.
Mr. Radcliffe: Well, I believe this has been an issue of some debate amongst a number of my colleagues. I would suggest to my honourable colleague that we are open to suggestions on this. One possibility may be to create a fund within the Land Titles system which could be devoted periodically to this renovation. I think that the answer is probably to approach it on an incremental basis, and to go to the areas where there is a dearth of monuments and then fan out from there across the province.
I concur with my honourable colleague in his remarks that, in fact, this is something that needs to be addressed, and needs to be addressed, as I had said, sooner than later. We are very concerned about it. The issue, as I have touched on, of just writing a cheque out of consolidated revenue, I do not think is on. I think that raising fees in the Land Titles Office is something which we are sensitive to at this point in time, not only from a philosophical basis that I had just pointed out, but as well there has just been, as you have heard, a rise in fees, effective May 1, of $10 on the registrations for mortgages. So I do not think that the timing is appropriate, at this point in time, to layer another rise in fees on the consuming public, as well, so that goes against that argument.
We propose, in the very near future, to be sitting down with a number of the reeves and councillors from the municipalities in Manitoba to canvass in a workshop or a more extended discussion group some of the potential solutions that there may well be out there for this issue.
Mr. Reid: So when the minister says he is sitting down with the reeves of the various municipalities, are these negotiations being undertaken in conjunction with UMM representatives? Is that who the negotiating body is going to be for the various municipalities throughout the province?
Mr. Radcliffe: I do not want to raise a false apprehension of activity here with my honourable colleague. I had an appointment scheduled with the UMM people, and it had to be cancelled partially I think because of the floods. These people were unable to come into the city of Winnipeg and also because of the onset of Estimates. But I can say that I have met several times with the Minister of Rural Development (Mr. Derkach) on this issue, and we look forward in the immediate future to meeting with the representatives from UMM.
Mr. Reid: The minister talked about a $750-million worst-case scenario to put in place all the survey markers throughout the province. That is an extensive amount of money. What type of a time frame do you have in mind that you would like to see this process start to restore the markers in the province? Are we going to let negotiations drag on for years and years, or do you have a time frame in mind that you would like to see some step developed, the first step of the process to putting in place the necessary funds?
Also, where do you anticipate starting this type of work? Are you going to have a plan in place where you are going to have several survey crews in the province start to do that surveying work, that remonumentation work throughout the province, taking into mind the importance of where the bulk of the population is but not to ignore other areas, you know, central and northern Manitoba where we also have a significant number of Manitobans who would also need to have that accuracy of title of property as well with respect to the survey monuments?
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Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I concur with my honourable colleague's remarks that in fact there is a need for this monumentation to be addressed in central Manitoba, in northern Manitoba, in fact any places where there are concentrations of population and landholdings of Manitobans. I would also want to advise my honourable colleague that in fact 30 percent of the problem rests within the boundaries of the city of Winnipeg as well. There has got to be a remonumentation in the city of Winnipeg because of the same reasons, that these monuments have deteriorated. I did not want to leave the impression with him that this was uniquely or peculiarly a rural problem. I chose to talk about a rural problem for point of illustration of destruction and removal of the monuments, but in fact it also exists as an urban problem as well.
One of the proposals that has been suggested, to readdress another issue that my honourable colleague had raised, was a sharing of the expense for this remonumentation with the municipalities, be they rural or urban municipalities, across the province.
The Land Titles is anticipating that this process will be engaged and underway within the next year, so we are looking at a reasonably quick uptake on it. We would do it on a priority basis. For example, if a landowner or a surveyor were to come to Land Titles and say, basically on a complaint-driven process, I cannot give an adequate survey to a particular township or a particular quarter section because I cannot find a monument; I have to go 10 miles down the road, or if there were a particular subdivision being conducted within an urban environment and there were difficulties there, that would be where the surveying teams would first address their attention.
Then again, it would be on an incremental basis, slowly, year by year. One of the areas, where there possibly, and this again is blue-skying, is that the Personal Property Security Registry might be an appropriate area where funds could be collected and held. The Personal Property Security Registry is an area that shows a profit from year to year in the exercise of its activity, so if there were funds that were to be--excuse me, I stand corrected, because one of my initial suggestions on this to address this was that we anticipate or hope that there will be excess funds generated over the next year to two to three to four and into the future on the whole Property Registry system, be it personal property or real property registry, that are not required by the Consolidated Fund for government purposes.
I had indicated to my honourable colleague before, I think it was $2 million, $1.8 million this year and then $2 million thereafter that could be devoted to building up this fund to cover the costs in the future, and that would be, perhaps, the Land Titles component for raising this money.
Now this again is a suggestion that has been voiced about within the confines of Land Titles staff at this point and our colleagues within this room, and I do not think it has gone much further than that. It is something that we think may be feasible, and I see my honourable colleague, the Minister of Agriculture (Mr. Enns) raising his eyebrows at this. This is coming as news to him. This is one other idea of where funds could be raised and a repository formed in order to expend to try and cure this issue.
Hon. Harry Enns (Minister of Agriculture): I am delighted to join my colleague's Estimates at this particular time on this particular issue. Regrettably, it is one of those issues that does not have a great deal of profile, it is not politically sexy, but it is an extremely important one, and I acknowledge I think that governments have to take, past governments, governments that I have been a part of, considerable responsibility, and not in a measured way, trying to restore the survey monuments in the province.
It really acts very inequitably. I am not that familiar with how it works in an urban setting where you have, as a rule, land divisions, land lots, you know, acquired if they are new through development agencies, and the established ones, of course, are there. In rural Manitoba, and within one municipality, because the difference can be for somebody like myself if I want to subdivide a bit of land for my son or daughter, I can face a nominal $500, $600, $700 surveyor's fee or a $10,000 surveyor's fee within the same municipality, depending entirely on if he has to trace, as you said, he has to go back eight or nine miles to find markers, the clock is ticking on the surveyor's clock. So it is a real issue in rural Manitoba. I would encourage you, Mr. Minister, to resist the temptation of putting costs on a small grouping which might be convenient for people who are attaching it to Land Titles for instances, people in a land titles draw transfer.
That is, as you said earlier, just transferring it to a relatively small, select group of people, that in my opinion would not be fair. Quite frankly, I believe this is a government responsibility. I think initially it was a federal government responsibility. Were they not federal surveyors that marched across this landscape and met one Louis Riel in Fort Garry? This an appropriate time to raise it. But, no, I am not making jest of this. I just think that this ought to be able to--I really encourage you to use all the new vigour that you bring to this department, your influence that you have on Treasury Board. Look at Jules Benson squarely in the eye and Eric Stefanson in the eye and demand a fair appropriation for this amount. You would have the Ministry of Agriculture's support for this.
Mr. Radcliffe: I would thank the honourable Minister of Agriculture for those well-seasoned remarks. I would only take issue with one aspect of his address to the assembly here today when he says that this does not have a high profile. I want to assure the Minister of Agriculture that in the environs of the Land Titles Office and the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, which of course is responsible for Land Titles, as I indicated earlier, the issue of restoration of monumentation in Manitoba forms the very basis for our land titles holding system, our real property holding system. Therefore, this assumes a very high proportion of consequence and need. I want to reassure the honourable Minister of Agriculture that this will not go unmentioned in the halls of government. I thank him for his support, and I will look forward to calling on that support from time to time as may be required for this issue.
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Mr. Reid: The Minister of Agriculture did raise a good point with respect to problems in the rural area. I can say that there is definitely a need from what I can see, an imbalance or an inequity that is in the system currently.
The minister mentioned in his comments--and reflecting on them--I believe that some 30 percent of the work that is needed to be done with respect to remonumentation is within the confines of the city of Winnipeg. What negotiations have you undertaken with the City of Winnipeg, which is obviously the largest municipality in the province, to work towards--are you looking at establishing a partnership arrangement to undertake that type of work? What steps have been taken to commence those negotiations with the City of Winnipeg?
Mr. Radcliffe: I can advise my honourable colleague that, in fact, there has been no discussion with the City of Winnipeg to date with regard to asking them to participate on a partnership basis to support funding of this issue yet, but I can tell him that is something that we will anticipate very shortly. There has been discussion with the City of Winnipeg through Land Titles Office to define and describe the extent of the problem within the city of Winnipeg. The municipality of the City of Winnipeg is aware that it exists; they have addressed it with their survey department. The discussions had centred around establishing a committee to address the prioritization of the remonumentation in the city of Winnipeg and the implementation of the restoration itself.
The other side of the ledger sheet, the debit side, has not been addressed with the city fathers or the city mothers at this point, but that is something that I will look forward to with anticipation.
Mr. Reid: I may have missed this, and I apologize if I did not catch the minister's comments. I am not sure if he reflected or responded to my question earlier with respect to whether or not he is going to have, once the agreement is reached, hopefully soon with the reeves of the various municipalities or the mayors of the municipalities, teams of surveyors go throughout the province working in several areas to undertake the type of work so that we are not just concentrating the efforts on one particular small section of the province. Are we going to have teams of people go out and do the restoration of those survey monuments?
Mr. Radcliffe: I did address that question, albeit maybe perhaps somewhat obliquely, in one of my previous answers, and the response and intention of Land Titles, to keep this within a manageable ambit at this point in time, is to respond basically on a complaint-driven process. So, for example, if the Honourable Mr. Enns were to do a yardsite subdivide and were to notify Land Titles that he had to run a line some 10 miles or five miles before he could get a monument and the survey bill was going to be significant, we would immediately respond into that area of Lakeside. If it were something within the city of Winnipeg--
An Honourable Member: No, that would not work. They would nail me for political favouritism.
Mr. Radcliffe: Well, I only use the honourable Minister of Agriculture (Mr. Enns), you know, as representational of an individual who might be in a rural setting, or if the honourable colleague for Elmwood (Mr. Maloway)--[interjection]
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Tweed): The honourable minister, to complete his comments.
Mr. Radcliffe: So basically it would be complaint driven, it would be intermittent ad hoc, yes, at this point in time so that the worst areas, the areas of greatest need would be addressed first.
I believe that after that had been addressed, there would be some sort of consistency where Land Titles would identify, they would have to survey the need itself and describe the need and then address that on a consistent basis after the initial ad hoc requirements were satisfied.
Mr. Reid: I guess my concern here is that the ad hoc issues will never fade away until the whole province has been resurveyed. So essentially what you are going to be doing is going along, from what I understand the minister's comments to be, putting out fires in different areas of the province, and it is going to take years. It does not seem to me that you are going to have an orderly plan in place to try to re-establish.
So if you go into the Lakeside area and you address the concerns of the Minister of Agriculture's neighbours, not necessarily his own holdings out there, but his neighbour's, for example, and then you may not go back into that area for some period of time, maybe years, to address problems in there, then you are going to be doing it in such an ad hoc fashion you are not going to have a uniform plan to address the problems in those areas.
But if you have got teams of people that can go into a region and address the problems of those regions, and eventually over that period of time you can solve those problems, I think, by having those teams in place. So if you got a team into the Interlake area and it addresses the problems immediately that they need, it can continue to work within that area. If it is somebody in southern Manitoba, you can have another team down there and another team in northern Manitoba or several teams in each of those zones, if you want to call it that. Then you would have the opportunity to have an orderly remonumentation of the surveys within the province. So I throw that out as a suggestion.
Another question I have to ask the minister here: Is there not a process that we have in place? It is my understanding that Linnet was doing, through its land-based information systems I think is the appropriate term, aerial surveying of the province. Now I am not sure. Do we have a process in place where they would have a particular type of a detectable item in the ground for surveying that you may have already done that could be detected from the air so you can have the appropriate surveying done, whether it be some metal rod that would give off a certain signal or something that can be done to assist in the process and continuation of determination of the accurate boundaries? Is there a process that you have in place that may involve Linnet when they were still partner with the province?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I smiled when my honourable colleague was asking this question because I, too, asked that same identical question. The general response that I was given, as I give now, is that our technology is not yet precise enough with the Linnet aerial imaging to be able to delineate boundaries with the specificity that we require for survey. In fact, in addition, there is a real need for landowners to be able to have something tangible on the ground. So, for example, you know, to put it on a very pedestrian basis, if you are building a fence, running a line, you need to know specifically where that line goes, what is yours, what is mine. The Linnet technology that we have right now lends itself, and I have actually used this in some cases for crop spray damage cases--it can give you the imaging of a particular crop in a field or images of a general nature, but it does not yet possess the specificity required for Land Titles needs, for the monumentation needs.
Mr. Reid: Can the minister explain then what role Linnet played in their activities in the contract they had with the province? Were they not involved in a contract that would involve recording all the land-based information that would be required doing aerial photography, surveys, mapping, et cetera, for the province? Is that not the role that they played and maybe perhaps other activities involved with the minister's department?
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Mr. Radcliffe: Yes, in fact, I think there are many, many purposes for which you do aerial cartography. You do it not only to look at the terrain, but the course of rivers, swamps, the elevation, these sorts of things. I believe a lot of their work went to this particular function. But the actual location of a monument is something very precise and mathematical. I am told it is beyond their technical expertise. It was not used for the location of boundaries. It would show perhaps the site of buildings, but in fact I would not want to determine a boundary based on a general snap from the air--
An Honourable Member: If you can have smart card, why can you not have a smart monument?
Mr. Radcliffe: That is right--of a Linnet photograph.
Mr. Reid: I am not an engineer, so I am going to give you my thoughts here with respect to the flood, and I do not know if there is an opportunity here for you to share resources or whether or not this type of work has already been done, but if you are going to be doing survey work throughout the province and perhaps some of it may be also in the Red River Valley, because my understanding is that part of the survey work also deals with elevations, is it possible, if we do not already have the information relating to the various elevations that would lead the Water Resources branch to be able to determine water flow patterns, that some of that work could be done in conjunction with the Water Resources department--
An Honourable Member: Do it under the emergency program. You get the feds to pay 90 percent.
Mr. Reid: It is possible perhaps to get federal participation through this process to look at doing the elevation work for the land in the Red River Valley. If we can have the federal government play a role in that as a preventative measure at the same time, we would have future mapping showing elevations and we could do our monumentation at the same time, and it would perhaps solve several problems at the same time.
So I throw that out for the minister. I do not know if he has any comment that he wants to place on that.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I would thank my honourable colleague for that. I have made a note of that, and that is a potential for research which we will follow up.
Mr. Reid: Can the minister tell me, is the Land Titles or is anywhere in his department still involved with Linnet? Is Linnet finished in its contract with the provincial government?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am told by my director that, in fact, there was never any relationship between Land Titles or the Property Registry office and the Linnet corporation. In fact, the nexus, we believe, was through Natural Resources. There was a sharing of information and a sharing of data upon request from Land Titles Office to the Linnet people. They were compiling records for the Natural Resources people as to land use. There is nothing current going on between Land Titles and Linnet by way of a sharing of any information at this point in time.
Mr. Maloway: Mr. Chairman, the minister made reference earlier that this problem could be solved with approximately $700 million, I believe he said, and I just wondered how he determined that. What went into determining the cost of $700 million, and how long a period would that be over?
Mr. Radcliffe: Well, as I indicated to the honourable member for Transcona, this was an extrapolation, moving from the amount of service that would be required, assessing the cost, the hourly rates of surveyors' fees and forecasting and broadcasting that across the province of Manitoba. I cautioned and I caution my honourable colleague again that this was, in fact, at best only a forecast of the nature and extent of the problem. So what we have done is, for example, take the need in one particular township and assess the nature of the number of missing monuments in that particular area, then extrapolate that across the province.
So I caution that these are not hard figures by any means. These are only to give an idea that, in fact, it is a very, very large ticket item. That is all we can say.
Mr. Maloway: Well, would the minister table for us today any documentation he has to prove that figure of $700 million?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I believe that what was done was the sampling was taken of a particular area of the province, as I have indicated, and then that was applied across the province. That is what I meant, for the edification of the honourable colleague at the table, to extrapolate or extend, move from microcosm to macrocosm.
We do not have that document with us, and I undertake that if it is within our possession and we are free and at liberty to disclose it, I will share that with my honourable colleague.
Mr. Maloway: I thank the minister for that promise that he will provide us with that documentation. I would like to ask him whether he has approached the federal government for contributions.
Mr. Radcliffe: Not yet.
Mr. Maloway: Well, Mr. Chairman, we are in the middle of a federal election. I do not think that there is any better time than a federal election to find more co-operative and pliable, receptive federal politicians with chequebooks. They are very close. They are not hard to find at this particular period. The minister has known about this problem for a long, long time, and he is telling me that he has not at this point made any overtures to the federal government for support on this.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I would like to advise my honourable colleague that I do sit here corrected, that, in fact, there was an application made by the department for an infrastructure grant and it was turned down. It was declined by those nefarious federal individuals.
However, that is not to say that assiduity will not reap its own reward, and I wanted to advise my honourable colleague that, in fact, I would concur with the proximity of our federal politicians at this point in time because I had the pleasure to be approached by the Honourable Mr. Axworthy very, very recently to attend at a local community informational evening in our community of River Heights which is a community which we both share, and I was able to bring to that meeting of citizens some of the particulars of our flood control and the information skills which our people were exercising in the province of Manitoba at that point in time.
So I think that those remarks are very appropriate at this point, and perhaps with the spreading of largess which our federal associates seem to be bent upon at this point which we read about in the media, that this could be something in which we could inveigle their attention.
Mr. Maloway: Well, when did the minister make this request for an infrastructure grant from the federal government, and when was it declined, and how much was the request for?
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Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to advise my honourable colleague that it was approximately two to three years ago this request was made. The present staff who are with me today do not have a recollection of the amount that was requested, however I am advised that these records do exist, and we will undertake to search for them. If we are capable of recovering that figure, we will certainly share that with my honourable colleague.
Mr. Maloway: Will the minister then make a commitment to reapply to the federal government as quickly as possible and use the opportunities provided by the federal election to try to get money from them for this project?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chair, immediately upon our exiting from the Estimates process, I will address my mind to this and will set in motion a process which will result in the appropriate approach to Mr. Axworthy for consideration of this problem, being that he is the senior minister for the province of Manitoba. So that process would be determinative by our exiting from Estimates.
Mr. Maloway: I accept that the minister will do what he says, and I am hoping that he will keep us informed on the progress of such overtures to the federal minister.
Mr. Chairman, before we move into the Insurance Branch for questioning, I wanted to ask the minister a few more questions on the SOAs just to round out the SOAs. On the previous SOAs, the Companies Office, I did ask questions about the computerization and the fee structure, but I neglected to ask about its projected revenues up to the year 1999, and perhaps the minister could answer those questions now.
Mr. Radcliffe: I am sorry, Mr. Chair, I want to readdress that question. My honourable colleague is asking for projections for income from the Corporations Branch?
Mr. Maloway: For the minister, the Companies Office which we dealt with, with Myron Pawlowsky in attendance last evening.
Mr. Radcliffe: We have limited documentation here at the table at this point in time, but I can certainly undertake to give that information to my honourable colleague.
Mr. Maloway: I appreciate that commitment from the minister. I would like to ask the minister about the criteria that goes into the selection of an area of the government for an SOA. The minister has three such SOAs. I would like to know what was the master plan here. What was the blueprint? Who selected these areas for SOAs? Who selected these particular areas over others?
I asked the other day whether the minister planned on spinning out any more SOAs in this particular department. He was unable to tell me whether or not there were any more prospects. Well, I invite the minister to re-respond then.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I am advised that government has sent out an invitation to different branches and areas of government and that the branches themselves have responded to the call to present a feasibility proposal. The feasibility proposal is presented to the Department of Finance. The process there is that it is studied in Finance. It is reviewed rigorously, I might add, by the Treasury Board to see that the proposal for financial or fiscal stability an area of commonality of interest or function would exist. Then if it clears that threshold, then the business plan is put in place such as has just been done.
I would for the record repeat for my honourable colleague's edification that there is no intention for any further SOA activity within the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs at this point in time. There are no proposals that we are aware of coming from the branch, any of the departments.
I would point out for my honourable colleague that Vital Statistics which is one of the SOAs was formerly attached to Child and Family Services. Land Titles and PSR were attached to Justice. They were then determined to be fulfilling a registry function, which is what those offices, in fact, essentially do, so they were included into the Consumer and Corporate Affairs department which is the essential function, I guess, of being a regulatory and registry department.
Mr. Maloway: Would the minister provide us a copy then of the application for SOAs and a list of the criteria that accompanies such application?
Mr. Radcliffe: I do not know that there is a list of criteria per se. I think this is something that probably is handled, well I know is handled through Finance. So perhaps that is something that probably rests more properly in the purview of Finance, that they would have an overview of what the requirements are for SOAs.
Mr. Maloway: Seeing that Finance Estimates are now concluded for this year, would the minister on our behalf endeavour to get this information from Finance and forward it on?
Mr. Radcliffe: I certainly have no problem approaching the honourable Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson) and requesting an overview of that, to set out the parameters of what is an SOA and why and how they are formed. I certainly would be pleased to make that request.
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Mr. Maloway: Yes, we want some specificity in that because it seems to me there has to be some sort of guidelines and rules for this because one could see little departments within departments asking for SOA status if guidelines were not established. So my assumption is, and I think the minister has already agreed, there is some amalgamating going on within these SOAs. We have one or two previous sections of a department currently being amalgamated together into an SOA so clearly there is some sort of criteria here at work that I am certainly not familiar with, and it obviously makes sense to the people setting up the SOA.
I guess what I would like to know is: Who has the master plan? You know, is there some sort of a neocon bible out there somewhere that the Minister of Finance (Mr. Stefanson) has or Jules Benson has, or somebody?
Somebody has got to have the game plan here, you know. Clearly, I have not seen it. I do not know where it is. No one on this side of the House has seen it, but we see pieces of the quilt. You know, every once in a while, we see a little piece here hanging out and a little piece over there. Then when we show some attention to it, they kind of pull in the edges and hide it a little bit from us. But there is an overall plan here.
The Crown Corporations Council has the master plan for the Crowns and their future. For example, Crown Corporations Council, as the minister probably knows, has a criteria in which they assess each of the Crown corporations as to their current viability, long-term viability and any sort of volatility, and that is part of the rationale that they use, for example, in privatization of the telephone system, that its long-term viability and volatility was such that they felt it was ready for privatization. So we know that these decisions are not being made by individuals. They are being made by somebody with this central blueprint here, this central plan, and who is controlling this. So we would like to find out who is in charge of this thing and who has a copy of the plan.
Now having said that, and the minister has indicated that he will endeavour to get us these criteria, in order to implement the plan, there has to be a two-way street and there has to be some sort of co-operation on the part of the departments to show some initiative and to offer themselves up for this exercise. So in keeping with some of the plans, I think, of the federal government over the past few years about offering incentives and so on, is there any sort of financial or other kind of incentive program that this government has developed or offers to people who come up with these sorts of money-saving ideas?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, there is no monetary advantage that is awarded. There is no actual reward by an increase in monthly salary or dividend paid or anything like that falls--[interjection] No, there is nothing like that. What it does do is, and why branches are being responsive to this call is that it gives the branch a certain degree of autonomy, a certain degree of independence. They can measure their activities and see the actual benefit, I guess, of their labours by the reward within their own department.
So that is the advantage of autonomy, flexibility of local management, and yet there is also a business plan which sets out goals and objectives by which they measure the service that they provide to the public of Manitoba, and so this gives greater incentive to the individual employees, the managers and the superintendents in different areas of government to achieve these levels.
So there is nothing tangible in the way of actual money but rather better service, a better way of doing business, a better way of fulfilling the government needs to the people of Manitoba.
Mr. Maloway: Has there been any representations or efforts made by individuals or groups of individuals to the minister or other members of the government or department regarding the privatization of this SOA or the Companies Office SOA? For example, when I asked the question regarding Vital Statistics, there were good reasons why that could never become a privatized function or should never become a privatized function.
Clearly, in some of the other instances where there are no confidentiality problems, the guidelines are less obvious, and so it seems to me that it is only a matter of time, when there is profitability being shown with these SOAs, until private interests will start putting pressure on the government to privatize and divest themselves of this particular or that particular SOA.
If the minister has not had representations, I mean, I can tell him it is only a matter of time before he will, because that is what happened in England and other areas where privatization has occurred on any sort of mass scale. So I will let the minister answer that question, I guess.
Mr. Radcliffe: I can tell my honourable colleague categorically, unequivocally, that there has been no such solicitation of this minister, and, in fact, I think what my honourable colleague must be confusing is his familiarity with a number of the American institutions which he has often cited with favour during the course of these Estimates, that he is probably looking to the escrow houses that exist in the United States, but I would suggest that that is a wholly different system of land registry based on a completely different theoretical base.
If my honourable colleague has some experience or some knowledge of Torrens systems which have been privatized in Australia from whence this process originated, then I would appreciate his information on that. I can tell him that, in fact, the Torrens system originated by virtue, originally, of ships' registry which came out of Australia in about the 1860s, I think. This was then modified to replace the deed system which was, in fact, a very cumbersome and ponderous system of holding land whereby if you did not have the deed to the property, you, in fact, could have title defeated.
In fact, one of the prime elements of our land title system is the guarantee that the Crown puts behind the indefeasibility of the title. So, therefore, when Land Titles speaks and says that the meets and bounds of a particular holding are vested in one particular individual, that is, in fact, the Majesty of the Crown speaking, the voice of the state.
So it is not an insurance policy. It is not an estimation of actuarial losses, and, in fact, our Land Titles Office backs up the indefeasibility of title, so that one can look at the face of a certificate of title or the priority of registrations which do appear by way of documentation of mortgages, or caveats, or interests expressed in land--[interjection] I just did not want to miss it. The whole essence of the land titles system is based on the fact that it is backed by the Consolidated Fund of the Province of Manitoba and perhaps even the violence of the Crown.
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I think we had touched upon earlier that in other jurisdictions, namely, I had cited India, where you have different concepts or philosophy of landholding, where you can have individuals living on the land who have no right to alienate the land, but they have the right to reap the benefit of the land. The local landowner has not the right to sell that land but must take those individual residents who live on the land who have a sharing of the bundle of rights which I had touched upon earlier. These tillers of the soil go with the land, almost like an indentured serfdom. This is something that we do not have in this country. We, in fact, have a fee simple which is an indefeasible title. Therefore, I would suggest with the greatest of respect that the land titles system as we know it here in Manitoba, and in fact across western Canada, lends itself particularly to operating under the auspices of the Crown.
I do invite my honourable colleague, if he has any particular knowledge as to a privatization of a particular land titles system, and peculiarly a Torrens land title system, that he would share that with me, because I am not aware of any such progress, or developed progress, meaning movement.
An Honourable Member: Not Whiggish progress.
Mr. Radcliffe: Not Whiggish progress, not at all. No, there are no Whigs allowed in this.
Mr. Maloway: I will take that as a no, that the minister is not planning to privatize this SOA at this time. However, the second SOA that we dealt with was the Companies Office. Now I could be wrong, but something tells me that in Alberta there is something--that the companies branch there is privatized, but perhaps I am wrong about that.
Nevertheless, I am looking for the assurance from the minister that there are no plans to privatize the Companies Office, and that there have been no representations made by individuals or groups of individuals to the minister, the government or members of his department regarding privatization.
Mr. Radcliffe: I am told that in Alberta the corporations branch still performed the registry function. In fact, what has developed in the Alberta jurisdiction is that there have sprung up a number of search agents. I would point my honourable colleague to--in fact, if one wants to do a search of a corporation in Washington, D.C., of a federal corporation, or if in fact one wants to do some registrations of a federal nature in Ottawa, one contacts an agent. In some cases they may be solicitors, they may be individuals who specialize in registry work. In fact, the elemental function of creating and maintaining a registry is a Crown function, and in Alberta, as it will in Manitoba, it will remain with the Crown, and we have no plans to privatize nor derogate from the function of the Crown in this function.
Mr. Maloway: My colleague the member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) has been quite anxious to ask some questions of the Insurance branch, and I know they have been waiting patiently for some time now so perhaps we could begin questioning them.
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Tweed): Would it be the will of the committee to sign off on these?
Mr. Maloway: We should do that when we finish.
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Tweed): You are going to do that today?
Mr. Radcliffe: Alright, and is it appropriate then to excuse the director of Land Titles who is here at the table with us? Thank you very much, Mr. Wilson, for being here and providing assistance to answer the questions.
I would invite Ms. Couture to the table. Mr. Chairman, I would like to take this opportunity to present Ms. Lucy Couture, who is the Deputy Superintendent of Insurance in the Province of Manitoba.
(Mr. Peter Dyck, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
Mr. Chairman, I would invite you to invite the honourable member for Elmwood to commence the questioning. I believe he had indicated that the honourable member for Wolseley, who is at the table, may have a few questions and so we are prepared to proceed.
Mr. Maloway: I indeed did suggest that we call the Insurance branch and that the member for Wolseley was anxious to ask some questions.
Ms. Friesen: Yes, I do want to ask some questions about a practice that is known popularly as redlining, and the minister and his staff, I am sure, are aware of a number of articles that have appeared in the Free Press and other newspapers from time to time over the past number of years, but certainly within the past year, on the issue of redlining in the residential areas of the inner city, part of which I represent.
The concerns of the residents of those areas, whether it is Wolseley or whether it is west Broadway or whether it is the area north of Portage, all of them have faced an increase in insurance costs in the last year, as they have in the past number of years. Many of them, particularly businesses, are finding it increasingly difficult to get any insurance at all and that is a serious concern.
The issues that we face as communities and as neighbourhoods is of course the inability for businesses to get insurance and the inability for both present homeowners and absentee landlords to get the kind of insurance that is necessary. It means that the neighbourhoods increasingly begin to deteriorate and that the real estate values, and I would say this is particularly true in the areas north of Portage of my riding, which are the areas from the University of Winnipeg to about Toronto Street, that the real estate values in that area have seen some deterioration and, I think, neighbours and the people in the community are very concerned about it.
Much of this is attributed to the inability to get insurance. We hear about insurance companies who simply do drive-bys. We hear about insurance companies who never inspect a property. We hear about people who have never had a single claim in their life, finding that their insurance is increasing by two and three times over a very short period of time.
Many of the people in that community north of Portage that I am talking about are long-term residents who are now senior citizens and on fixed incomes, very concerned about maintaining their homes. Through no fault of their own, they see that their neighbourhood becomes increasingly transient and that businesses cannot be maintained. Articles in the Free Press may or may not carry all of the material required, and the issue of redlining is often, in fact frequently, denied by the insurance industry as a whole.
I have written to the minister, not this minister but the previous minister, about this and really have not had a very satisfactory reply. The sense I get from the ministry is it is not their problem. The sense I get when I have called agents of the industry myself, and I have called meetings of them to meet with constituents who have brought this to my attention, is that it does not exist. It is not done. People are not redlined by their location rather than by their claims' history. I am hearing, for example, of people in apartments, and this is in apartments that are well kept up, where there is security, but students moving into those apartments, for example, are having to pay a thousand dollars a year for insurance for the contents of a student apartment. That simply really makes it very difficult for students to play a part in the community, to continue to be part of that community. You know the University of Winnipeg is in this area. They are an important part of the neighbourhood.
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So I would like, first of all, to ask the minister to respond on what he sees as the role of his ministry in this, and what steps have been taken in the past to deal with this issue. I know that it has been brought to the minister's attention in Question Period, not this minister, I believe, but the previous minister, and so there will be departmental policies on this and departmental responses. So I wonder if we could begin there.
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, the member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) does raise some very real issues of what is going on in our financial world at this point in time. I think she is very much aware of how an insurance company works, that, in fact, the risk is actuarially based and that the issue of insurance coverage is a private contract. Basically, it is a gamble where the homeowner is betting the insurer that a loss is going to occur and the insurance company is betting the resident that the loss will not occur, and the homeowner pays the insurance company a premium dollar based upon the exigencies of that risk. So it is, in fact, truly a measurement of risk.
I am very sympathetic to individuals who find themselves residing in deteriorating neighbourhoods. I, too, live in an older section of the city, and in my area of Winnipeg, at different points in time, the nature and characteristic of the neighbourhood has ebbed and flowed with the growth of young families and then the passage of families and the growth of senior citizens. The maintenance and nature and quality, the safety of the neighbourhood, the element of vandalism plays a very real role. Those are some of the elements that contribute to insurance rates. As well, as I am sure my honourable colleague is aware, the age of buildings, the components, the materials that go into the construction of buildings, the updating of electrical systems, the availability of fire halls, first-alert systems, all of these components are, in fact, attributes which can participate in the assessment and measurement of risk.
I can tell my honourable colleague that about approximately a year ago, when these articles were in the newspaper, I had occasion, with another one of my colleagues from our party, to call upon Mr. Hanson, who is the president of the Wawanesa Insurance Company. We posed to him and asked him the question very specifically: Is there redlining going on in the city of Winnipeg? By way of explaining redlining, are there areas of the city that are designated as uninsurable or as highly undesirable business? The answer that we got from the head of the Wawanesa Insurance Company, which is a very credible and well-run insurance company in Winnipeg and Manitoba, was that there are areas of the city where risk is assessed and at different levels, and based on the components that I had indicated to my honourable colleague a moment ago--
An Honourable Member: It should not be based on . . . it should be based on claims.
Mr. Radcliffe: My honourable colleague from Elmwood is saying that it should be based on claims history. I am told that that is, in fact, the basis upon which the insurance companies do ultimately base their actuarial statistics, and the whole issue is funded and fuelled and driven by actuarial data.
There is no magic to insurance. Insurance companies take our premium dollars, they pool them, and they then gamble basically that they are not going to have to pay out on the risks which they have committed to.
That is all it is, really. When you strip away all the surface material, documentation, that is the fundamental issue that has been going on. In fact, I can tell my honourable colleague that I used to act as the solicitor for a group of people that started up a reinsurance company in Manitoba, a mutual insurance--[interjection] This was the Hutterian Brethren Mutual Insurance Corporation.
What they did was they gathered together as a co-operative movement all the Hutterite colonies in Manitoba. At that point, there were approximately 80 of them that were in concert with one another. They decided that they would insure the first $50,000 of loss. They all contributed a pool of funds which ultimately built up to a fund of approximately $3 million of reserves which were held and invested against that loss. Then, any loss over that initial $50,000 threshold was contracted out to other underwriters, principally Lloyd's of London, I believe, although I stand to be corrected on that.
Basically, again, when you get into Lloyd's--I have a cousin who is an underwriter in Lloyd's and I have walked about Lloyd's--all that is is an aggregation of individuals who privately contract blocks of risk. They have to post large amounts of capital, and I am sure my honourable colleague is aware that this was an outgrowth originally of a coffee shop environment, where insurance underwriters would gather to have coffee and discuss the commerce of the British Empire.
An Honourable Member: It is called Lloyd's now, not Lloyd's of London anymore.
Mr. Radcliffe: Is it just Lloyd's?
An Honourable Member: As of a couple weeks ago.
Mr. Radcliffe: Ah, well, that is good to know. Again, it is all statistically driven. I am told that, yes, there is some element of truth to the complaint that my honourable colleague brings to the table, that there are areas of the city where there is more violence on the street, there is more vandalism, there are aging buildings and there is a higher rate of loss. Therefore, in order to show a profit, the insurance companies are raising premiums.
I am aware, Mr. Chair, that when I look back, because I chart my insurance premiums every year and have done so over the course of the number of years that I have owned a home, I can see a steady increase in the insurance premiums with regard to what I pay for home insurance myself.
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I take into account the fact that I have fire alarms built into the house. I have a security system in the house. I am a nonsmoker. We do not have any tobacco products in the house. We have an up-to-date furnace system. These are all issues that tend to diminish the amount of premium, but with the rise in the cost of materials for replacement, the cost of labour in the community, these are all countervailing issues that tend to raise the cost of insurance premiums.
So it is not a simple answer. Now, my honourable colleague had asked what is the role of the department in discussing this and in ensuring that there is reasonable equity between the insurance industry in Manitoba and the citizens who have a need. Well, first of all, as to the role of the department, I am advised that my superintendent has arranged a meeting for me to meet with a number of the managers of some of the leading insurers in Manitoba over the course of the next several weeks, within two weeks, I am told, as soon as I get out of Estimates. [interjection]
At the rate we are going, this may be a long-time experience, but nonetheless to discuss the whole issue of insurability, because I have demonstrated some concern about that, they want to share with me their concerns so that we can reach some consensus. We have looked at the issue of imposing regulation, and we feel as a department that if we were to do that we would hear nothing but the slamming of trunks and the slamming of doors and people would leave the province because they are unwilling to assume the risks if we were to enter into the environment with a heavy-handed regulation. So therefore we feel that consensus building is in fact a superior form of process to undergo.
I would further add for my honourable colleague that there was a specialty market for high-risk insurance that was introduced to the province of Manitoba, and I think a number of insurance agents were made aware of this recently. It is about a year old this process, this market, and I am told by the superintendent there has not been one person do any uptake on this. So that is an interesting attribute. Now that may be a function of lack of publicity or it may be a function of the cost of this insurance. I do not know. One of my concerns, I must advise my honourable colleague, is the issue of uninsurability, and so I want to satisfy myself that the department goes to reasonable ends to make sure that contractual facility is extended to all members of the community. As to whether we impose mathematical limits and skew the actuarial returns I think is something that I am very reticent to become involved with, because I think that once government enters into that fray you get very unexpected and unpleasant returns from that.
The other thing of which I think that there is perhaps a potential for expansion or investigation is the whole reinsurance market, which I touched on earlier, which my clients, the Hutterian Brethren had looked upon much to their benefit. They found because they had very expensive wooden structures with a lot of heavy equipment in them, electrical equipment, livestock, and they were found in remote rural locations that they were unable to get insurance in some cases if they were poor risks or running their operations poorly or that the premiums were very high. Once they set up this mutual insurance corporation with a reinsurance component where the higher risk for total loss was laid off to other insurers that the rates came down, that there was in fact a universal application. Now I do not want to make too glowing a picture of this, because I am told that a recent devolution of this industry is that there has been some reticence in the insurance market in Canada to continue being involved with this type of farm insurance. When I last was involved with it, it was in fact a highly successful endeavour. So I think that extending that type of application to the private insurance world, in an urban setting, that there may be a market for that as well. So there are other alternatives, I think, creative alternatives which can be--
An Honourable Member: Self-insurance.
Mr. Radcliffe: The honourable colleague from Elmwood has raised the issue of self-insurance, and I believe the federal government is a self-insurer. [interjection] No, I am not proposing that the core of Winnipeg become self-insurers. But, in fact, I think that is what my honourable colleague has raised that if you are unable to get commercial insurance you do by virtue of that fact become self-insured. I do not suppose for a moment that these individuals to whom my honourable colleague is making reference actually set aside an amount comparable to premium dollars to create a fund to insulate them against potential loss. But that is the function of self-insurance.
Another possible area of activity for exploration may be--another area which may lend itself to some potential research is communities of interest getting together and establishing reciprocal insurance, where a group of individuals each basically bet one another that there will not be a loss and that if there is a loss occasioned that a group of citizens would then share in the particular loss. So this points to creation of establishments of communities of interest.
Now to go back for a moment to what Mr. Hanson explained to us from the Wawanesa, he said that if communities were prepared to get together to minimize particular conditions which insurance companies find offensive, such as vandalism, by virtue of Neighbourhood Watch or community activities to employ the children or the young people who might be the authors of some of this damage, property damage, that that would tend to ameliorate some of the impact of the premium rise. So I think what my honourable colleague is referring to--and I think is very real and I do not deprecate that for a moment--of rising insurance rates and deteriorating neighbourhoods and aging neighbourhoods, I think one is the function of the other.
As the neighbourhood ages and as the quality of life deteriorates by virtue of the social conditions arising out of poverty or marginalization and many other issues that I know my honourable colleague has touched upon and I have listened to in the Chamber, that rising insurance rates are a result of these social conditions and not in fact essentially a cause of those conditions, albeit I do not think it is a pleasant result. T and there may be some things that we can do on a creative basis, either she as a leader in her community, to learn about different alternatives of insurance and not just to fight the traditional battle of saying, oh, those evil insurance companies, the big business ogre, et cetera, but rather that there are other creative alternatives which people themselves, if they address their mind to, can come up with solutions on a community basis because, in fact, when you analyze what the real function of an insurance company is, it is a number of investors who get together, create a pool of cash which then forms a reserve in order to fulfill the insurance function. So this can be done on many alternatives. It is a matter I think that would form the source of many future interesting discussions and arrangements and schemes, perhaps, in our communities.
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Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, well, I wanted to point out to the minister a number of issues that arise from what he said, and one of the most important things I think is that he should understand--and I want to use this opportunity to express to him the extreme frustration of people who live in my community, that no matter what they do, no matter the fire alarms that they put in, no matter the fact that they have a guard dog, no matter the fact that they have an alert system, no matter the fact that they have had no record of robberies, no matter how their property is kept up, it does not make a difference because redlining does not apply to the individual. It applies to a postal code and it applies to very large postal codes. R3G is a big postal code. It includes areas where there has been an enormous amount of upgrading. Most of that area is in fact covered by Neighbourhood Watch. Most of that area has programs for young children, as the minister mentioned, to keep them employed. We have a number of those in west Broadway and in the Ellice area. We have community policemen on the beat, but we do have, also, a deteriorating infrastructure in parts of that area as well.
So the first thing I want to have the minister understand is the frustration of people who have done everything they absolutely can and yet still their rates go up and up. Because the rates are going up, they find it very difficult to sell their property so that they are caught, and this seems to be the unfairest trap of all. So it is not the fact that the individuals have done nothing or are unable to do anything because of income. They have, and that is their frustration, and I find that in all parts of the community.
I think a second thing I would like the minister to understand is that it is not--he suggested it is an effect rather than a cause, but in fact it is not that simple. The inability of a business to have access to insurance that it can afford, the inability of people in the community who are prepared to create Neighbourhood Watches, who are prepared to develop these community programs and to keep their property in a secure manner, their inability to have access to insurance is also a cause. It is a cause of the continuing deterioration of parts of the inner city. It is not just simply an effect. It is a circular event I think, and I think the government and the minister should understand that as well.
Thirdly, I think the minister has expressed very clearly the market-based philosophy of this government. Insurance is, he says, an actuarially based private contract which is a gamble and is an issue of risk, and it is a private contract between individuals and the insurance companies and, yes, that is true. But there is also, it seems to me, a community responsibility and an aspect of government which is being abandoned by this government.
When we had, for example--and I will just suggest the most recent memory is the Core Area Agreement--those teams of people who were going door to door, who were taking the social worker and the carpenter and the building evaluator and the health inspector and the public health nurse in parts of the community, we saw improvement. We did not see these rising interest rates. We saw, in fact, communities where we had no boarded-up houses. You go down a number of the streets in my community, and I am told most recently of one particular street where there are 19 houses boarded up. Well, the very rapid deterioration that occurs in those conditions is considerable, and it is very difficult to stop that kind of deterioration as much as people are trying to, as much as I would say the City of Winnipeg is doing a good job with its community policing and with the social worker extensions that they have in parts of the community, who are finding the employment, who are creating different kinds of community centres, both at Magnus Eliason and at Broadway Community Club that are very much involved in things which go beyond the normal elements of community club activities.
Yet, what has happened is the federal government, I would say to some extent but increasingly the provincial government, has abandoned the inner city, and we see one element of that is the issue of insurance. It is a much broader problem, I would say, than simply insurance, but that cause and effect is very much a part of it. There is a role for government, not just for this ministry, but for the Department of Urban Affairs and for the Department of Family Services, as well as for the Department of Education. You simply cannot continue to abandon the inner city of Winnipeg in the way that you are doing.
It is an issue which will have an impact upon every aspect of Manitoba's industry and Manitoba's sense of community, Manitoba's ability to present itself to the outside world as a place of investment. The rapid deterioration and the exodus from the city generally is something which I think is just beginning to spiral. Our attention has perhaps been taken away from it for the moment by the flood, but it is certainly continuing, and we see no attempt by this government in any of the areas where they could act to begin to stem that change.
When I say spiral, I probably should almost say ripple because it is not-- you know, today it is the boundaries of parts of my constituency, but it is also moving into St. James, it is moving into parts of St. Boniface. It is expanding. The minister has heard, I am sure, of the doughnut effect, and I want to use this opportunity, again, to impress upon the government the importance of maintaining conditions of life in the inner city which are tolerable, which are hopeful in all aspects of people's lives, because some of the conditions are increasingly becoming absolutely intolerant. It is not just the inner city of Winnipeg which suffers in this case, it is everybody.
What people do not see from this government is, first of all, a recognition of that. They do not see any attempt to halt it, and they do not see any hope that this government is going to put any money into any aspect of the inner city, whether it is in education or whether it is in material conditions of living or whether it is in programs for youth. I do not need to go into the, I suppose, extreme disappointment, despair that many people are feeling about the Youth Secretariat, something which offered some hope, which has produced studies which clearly understand the problems that are being faced by people in the inner city but which simply result in announcement after announcement of nonexistent government programs. Again, the cynicism and the despair that comes out of that kind of, what is it now, three-year process of the Youth Secretariat without any kind of measurable result is--adds to the problem. It adds to the psychological despair that people are feeling in the inner city.
I cannot stress enough for this government which does not have representation in the inner city--it is very much of a suburban and rural government--that you have to come to grips with that. Nothing is more significant, it seems to me, than that. It is a problem that the government has allowed to deteriorate over the last 10 years, and I think any government is going to find it extremely difficult, very, very difficult to reverse what is happening.
We use now the occasion of redlining to draw the attention of the government to that issue. It seems to me that a government which has a concern for Manitoba, for Winnipeg, for our presence in that global economy, has to come to grips with that. One of the ways in which you can do it is to begin to rebuild physically the inner city. You can begin to rebuild some of the hope for the young families who are there. Redlining is one aspect of it. It is both cause and effect. I am glad to hear that the minister is meeting with insurance agents. I am glad to see that he is prepared to discuss this with them. I know that other ministers have tried this.
I am not, frankly, convinced that a government which is philosophically based upon the supremacy of the market is actually prepared to do anything, and the minister himself alluded to the fact that one option is self-insurance. I mean, somebody on $12,000 a year, and, you know, children to feed and a life to try and hold together in some communities which are increasingly physically violent, simply is not able to begin to conceive of that in the same way that he mentioned that the Crown is able to self-insure.
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The issue of co-op reinsurance that the minister mentioned, again, it seems to me that the kind of capital which the Hutterite communities can bring together for these kinds of self-insurances, good for them. That is a very good use of the co-operative power that is there in those kinds of community-based rural societies, but I just simply do not think that is feasible in the way that the minister described for people in the inner city where there is a high level of migration, partly because of the conditions of urban life and partly because of the intense poverty and increasing poverty.
Do not forget that many of the people in parts of the community I am representing here are people who live for the most part on versions of transfer payments, whether it is on pensions, whether it is on welfare, whether it is on disability, and most of those have been cut. We are seeing people now who are living on 20 percent less, as a result of this government's actions, than they were last year.
One of the increasingly most difficult conversations I have with my constituents is to explain to them that, yes, this is not a mistake, the government actually did intend to make you poorer. It actually did intend to cut not your landlord's income, but to cut you, not just by 20 percent, as the government said, but by 40 percent, not just in the way that Harris did it in Ontario where he allowed the cut to welfare to be passed through to the landlords, but in Manitoba that cut was not passed through to the landlords, it came off the table. It came from food, it came from clothing, and it came from an inability for families to manage the many, many crises that they face everyday.
When you only have $200 a month to deal with your daily living and a family to feed, you simply face a crisis every day. Getting to the doctor becomes a crisis. Going for a test when the doctor orders a test becomes a crisis. When your telephone is cut off, that is a crisis because you cannot reach the doctor anymore. So the manner of daily living becomes a crisis and to suggest that there is the possibility for reciprocal insurance there or co-op reinsurance, I think the minister is well aware that that is not a possibility.
The minister also talked about reciprocal insurance. That is a community getting together and reinsuring itself against risk which sounded an awful lot to me like what government insurance used to do. The government of Manitoba used to be, as a community, involved in reinsuring or insuring each other. That is what we do with hail insurance. That is what we do with crop insurance. It is what we used to do before this government abandoned general insurance. It was a form of that kind of reciprocal insurance that the minister talked about.
So I offer my support to the minister in meeting with the insurance agents. I also want to ensure that he carries forward with him that sense of desperation, that sense of the significance of this issue not just for the inner city of Winnipeg, but for all Manitoba as well, and the extreme sense of frustration that many of my constituents have, that no matter what they do, their insurance goes up. No matter what they do as a community, no matter what they do as an individual, those rates continue to increase, and they are simply by virtue of the postal code where they live colloquially redlined.
Mr. Radcliffe: I would like to thank my honourable colleague for that overview of certainly a very real aspect of our community. I think that in analyzing the remarks of my honourable colleague and in analyzing the problems that we face with this issue, there are two components to the question. The first component is availability of insurance. The second component is the price or the cost of doing business, and I think I have outlined the cost of doing business already.
I think that one of the roles of government is to make sure that should people be so inclined, that there is the availability of this service to the community. I would suggest, as well, to my honourable colleague--and I do not for a minute want to diminish the advocacy that my honourable colleague brings to the table. I am well aware of the sense of frustration, despair of many of our marginalized citizens.
As my honourable colleague knows, I had occasion to chair a committee on Child and Family Services on a revision of the legislation over the course of the last year. I travelled to many different communities in the province of Manitoba, not just the west end of Broadway or north Portage. I talked to individuals in the bush. I talked to individuals in mining towns. I talked to individuals in small rural towns and many, many people in the city of Winnipeg. I saw on a very real basis some of the elements with which they must live and face and contend on a daily basis. I do not mean to detract from that for a moment, and none of my remarks should be interpreted as such.
One of the issues that I think plays a real part in the price of insurance is the cost of reproducing the property which is at stake. Therefore, if we are taking a typical house on Simcoe Street which may be a two-and-a-half storey, 1,200- or 1,500-square-foot home on a 50-foot lot, if that were to burn, today the costs of reproducing that dwelling are very, very significant and probably worth more than what you could fetch for that property where it sits today.
I think that this is a product of an aging infrastructure. I do not know what the price of real estate is on Simcoe Street today, but I would hazard a guess that it is probably $50,000, $60,000 for such a home that I have described. To reproduce that on a running board foot basis--and I believe the costs of reproduction is close to $95 a square foot plus finishing--you are looking at a significant problem there that the insurance company is facing as well. I am not an apologist, I am just explaining some of the realities with which the insurance companies have to deal today, and depending upon the finishing that you put in, you are facing a significantly costly experience on a mathematical basis.
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Whether government foots that or whether it is commercially driven, if it is not economically feasible, then some other alternative must be addressed.
My honourable colleague has suggested, Mr. Chairman, that the panacea of all is that, oh, well, government will ride to the rescue on a white horse and dispense largess. Well, I think that all that would do would be to enhance the cynicism of our citizens. In fact, I think that has been described quite adequately in our Chamber of recent date with some of our Liberal colleagues of the federal persuasion right now, and I know it is being voiced about in the community.
I think that what we have got to do on a philosophical basis--and I am not diminishing for a moment the real need. I know it exists; I know that it is a very complex issue, and I invite my colleague to be aware, and I respond to her in that vein, that it is not just a simple fix of commanding or legislating or a provident government riding to the rescue of improvident or bereft citizens and saying, oh, well, let us give you something.
I think it must go a step further because, quite honestly, we tried that. We had a government insurance company. We had a lot of very expensive social programs. You know what, Mr. Chair, we were unable to change the reality of poverty. All we did was band-aid it. In fact, I would suggest to my honourable colleagues at the table that what we should be doing is truly going a step further. I believe in putting money into education, and I think that is probably one of the priorities that our government will be addressing even further.
I know my honourable colleague would be very responsive as to the dearth of funds that she sees have gone into education from her perspective right now, but I would say that as my honourable colleague the Minister of Child and Family Services (Mrs. Mitchelson) has so often said, the best form of support is a job. So, therefore, if we can help these individuals change how they perceive themselves, so that they are no longer perceiving themselves as the despairing, as the people who are left out, the people who are bereft, then I think that we will have formed a far greater social service than just a handout.
I can recite--and this not to trivialize the whole experience, but my wife was a member of a women's group at one point in time in her career, and there was a group of individuals who came to town from Boston, known as the Boston Trainers. They had these individuals perform a game, an interactive game. Very quickly, all the women in the room realized that if you were a green circle, you were programmed for failure. If you were a red square, you were programmed by virtue of the counting to where they succeeded. If you were a green triangle, you could not break out of a particular strata in the counting and assessment of reward in this particular game.
Then all of a sudden, the convener, the facilitator, said, whoops, I fooled you. All the rules are changed, and, in fact, the initial group that were the losers now become the winners, and the people who thought they were winning are now losing. The relationships between those individual women at that particular meeting became so intense and so acrimonious that a number of them had to go back to their colleagues a day or two later and apologize because of the emotions that this evoked.
So it analogizes, I guess, the feelings which I know are very real. I think that government is not unmindful of those feelings and the skill sets that are required to bring people out of this morass of poverty, of ill health, of marginalization and of real despair.
I know that we have an element in our city right now of 60,000 to 70,000 aboriginal people, and that in many, many cases these people are refugees from a repressive system that they lived amongst in their own home communities, and they have fled to the city of Winnipeg. They have been subject to poverty, violence and lack of opportunity.
They are in a process of evolving, and, in fact, I think rather than just giving them a blind, patronizing, hierarchial handout is to create an opportunity so that those people can succeed. This will take time. This is an incremental issue and it will not be something that will happen overnight, but I think that the real assistance we can give to many, many of these people is to assess their real needs and to create the opportunity so that they can help themselves.
I think that is probably--we have come a long way from redlining, but I think that from the philosophical aspect that is the real issue that is at stake. I think I had mentioned before the Andrews Street station, which is a particular community organization that I have had occasion to attend and admire significantly. This is where a group of citizens got together, established what their real needs were in a particular community, which was firstly a safe and hygienic place to do their laundry and that grew then to a community kitchen and that grew then to communal enterprises in the city.
The issue that I touched upon previously, Mr. Chairman, of the example of our Hutterian Brethren, I think should give us great pause for thought because here is an aggregation of individuals that if you divvied up the communal holdings that these people have on a particular parcel of land, their net income which actually has to be notionally done from year to year, is probably $16,000, $17,000. That is all they earn, at least that was where they were at when I left the practice of law about two or three years ago. You pool those assets and you create an economic engine. You create a community force which is far, far, more effective than the sum of all the component parts.
These people have the ability, the motivation, the theological underlay which enables them to work together, and I had seen over 20 years of practising law in serving these communities how they can move onto a piece of bare land, and this was to me astounding, and within the course of three to four years they could transform that piece of property by the stint of hard work and not just tons of cash. I mean they would start out very humbly with a rented trailer for a dining room. They would live in very humble dwellings; they would bunk together and over the course of three to four years they could transform that piece of property into a show place.
I could take my honourable colleagues out to, for example, just north of Starbuck to a particular colony which today is something that agriculturists come from near and far to admire, to look at, to study, and again it is not just because they had a wealthy mother colony that dumped a plethora of cash onto them. It was more a thought pattern, a thought process which enabled these people to succeed. I think that we as government, we as community leaders, we as educators, we as people in our communities have got to try and share and transmit that sense of ability to succeed, that ability to solve problems, that ability to act as community and when we are able to do that, we then will be able to say we have succeeded.
It is an ability to cause people to think differently about themselves, and I am sure that every one of us in this room today think that we are winners, that we are leaders, that we have succeeded in a number of great endeavours, as has my honourable colleague who is well educated and a successful educator herself. She thinks well of herself. I was a practicing lawyer. I attained validation in my community by achieving areas of course of study and received the appropriate acknowledgment from that. That went to a perception of self, and if we are able to somehow reach out to aboriginals who come from our reserves, people who, through lack of opportunity have not been able to achieve education levels, people who come from Third World nations and give them the opportunity and the ability and the motivation to think well of themselves, then we will have succeeded.
We look at our Chinese community in Manitoba, and this is a burgeoning entrepreneurial group of people. They have a pride and a sense of being, because they come of a 4,000-year-old history. I had the opportunity to do a minimal bit of travelling in China, and it was explained to me that the most humble and lowly of Chinese think themselves more superior to what they called gwai-lo [phonetic] or westerner essentially because they are Chinese. The word "China," when translated from their script, means "centre of the universe." So that bespeaks a sense of perception of self, and I think that is truly what this Filmon government is trying to do for the people of Manitoba. I get a note of derisive evocation from my honourable colleague from Wolseley, but, in fact and in truth, if you think well of yourself, if you think that you have the ability to succeed, then you become self-fulfilling.
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An Honourable Member: What does that have to do with postal codes?
Mr. Radcliffe: Well, this was a springboard from redlining and postal coding to a broader philosophical base, which I am being responsive to my honourable colleague, and I am well aware of the awful results of ill health and of lack of education and lack of opportunity and general frustration and real despair. So, Mr. Chair, I could perhaps talk, you know, for hours on this topic.
An Honourable Member: Thirty minutes.
Mr. Radcliffe: Thirty minutes. Yes, I can count, but I do not want to monopolize the Estimate time, and I would bow to my honourable colleague for a further question.
Ms. Friesen: Well, it was an interesting circuit from the virtues of individualism to the virtues of collectivism to the intentions of the Filmon government and, without accepting what the minister said of his and my self-evaluation, I would point out to him that both of us were educated considerably at the public expense, something which and opportunities which are now considerably diminished for the people whom we both represent. It is worth, I think, remembering that the kind of community action that we are talking about here is something that cannot be achieved by individuals. I mean, what education does, what our health system does, is enable us to do together what none of us can do individually, and that is certainly the kind of thing that I am looking for from this government and from the minister.
I do not believe I did talk about white horses or black dogs or whatever. What I was suggesting to the minister is that there is much that cannot be done by individuals within these communities, that there is a great deal that can be done with the collective power of both community and government. I made reference to the core area program which did stem some of the deterioration in Winnipeg. Other ones that the minister, I am sure, is well aware of are community credit institutions, the lending circles, that are more prevalent in other countries but certainly have been tried in Canada, and which are collective ways of meeting some of the needs of communities. Other ways that he mentioned are, of course, the Andrews Street Family Centre, and similar kinds of community-based organizations. But many of those also need a collective, and you can call it government, government in some cases but not necessarily government, but certainly collective ways of organization and expression.
The Hutterite community that he made reference to, of course, has the advantage, not necessarily of extreme wealth of mother colonies, but it has the advantage of a community of language and of religion as well as of kinship networks, and those are not necessarily there in the inner city of Winnipeg. In fact, I would say that in many cases they are not. There are certainly small communities that are linked by family. There are small communities which are linked by a common language. But one of the major ways in which Hutterites have been able to accomplish what they have been able to accomplish is, first of all, their co-operative ethos and, secondly, their commonality of language, religion and kinship, so that the conditions that the member suggested perhaps ought to be not necessarily--he should not necessarily think that those are transferable to the inner city of Winnipeg.
Interestingly, if we were to comment in a philosophical way--well, perhaps I will not get into that. I was going to go into his version of the Chinese sense of confidence.
If the minister were to read, and I will give him some of the examples, the early European explorers in Manitoba in the 18th Century, La Vérendrye, Alexander Henry, Alexander Henry's associates, one of the common messages that they came back with was, never believe that an aboriginal person whom you meet thinks you superior to him. You are but slaves to him--the same sense of self-confidence, of knowledge, of superiority of knowledge, of superiority of adaptability to the land, superiority in the fur trade. In fact it was the consumer and the labourer that aboriginal people represented in the fur trade that gave them, until 1821, a tremendous sense of self-confidence and superiority, much the same as the minister expresses about the Chinese that he was told about.
Mr. Radcliffe: And witnessed.
Ms. Friesen: And witnessed, he says. From the 18th Century to the 20th Century that has changed. The self-confidence, the sense of superiority, the sense of ability to control their own future has changed dramatically, and that is what communities in Winnipeg are coping with.
It has changed partly as a result of government policy. One of the arguments that is often used is that aboriginal people are culturally not adapted to farming, but that is a complete and erroneous misunderstanding of what happened in Canada, and particularly in Manitoba. In the early years of the treaty system and the reserve system in the 1870s and 1880s, the most advanced farmers, for example, in the Virden area, were the aboriginal people, the Oak River Dakota. They had the largest crops. They were the ones who supported the elevators in that area. They did so because they had experience as farmers. Many of them had worked in the 1860s as farmers, and therefore nonaboriginal farmers in the Portage region, and when they took their own reserve, small as it was, they adapted very quickly to the incoming commercial agriculture of Manitoba.
When the government found this out in the 1880s, when they began to send Indian agents to the Oak River Dakota, they were appalled. They were horrified. They said this is not what we meant by Indian improvement. What we meant, in fact, was that Indians should become peasant farmers, and they instituted a policy of essentially taking away from the Oak River Dakota their ability to sell their crop. They had to move to a permit system which meant that the Indian agent was the only one who could sell their crop for them, whereas they had for 10 years been selling their crops widely and successfully in Manitoba because they were essentially in advance of the European civilization or, quotes, civilization.
At the same time, they said that Indians should not be allowed to own machinery. They must be farming the land of Manitoba only with the tools which they can make with their own hands, only with the wooden plow, only with the scythe that they can make with their own hands, and only with the wooden implements, stone implements and metal implements, indeed by the 1880s, that they can make by themselves.
Why was this? It was because the Government of Canada was on a moral crusade to change the very nature of aboriginal society. They were not to be commercial farmers. They were to be limited in what they could sell and limited in what they produce, and it was because the government required, not commercially successful Indian farmers, but they required a moral change amongst Indians. What they argued for was that the Indian must, first of all, become a peasant before he can become a commercial farmer. No matter that the evidence was very clear that the Oak River Dakota had done much more. Indeed, the European people within the Virden area were some of the greatest supporters of the aboriginal farmers. They were the ones who were filling the elevator. They were the ones who were, in fact, providing the early cash in that area, and they went to Ottawa with the Oak River Dakota to protest this policy.
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So, as the minister looks at the aboriginal people in Manitoba and their increasing migration to parts of the city of Winnipeg, that policy of less than a hundred years ago--and, in fact, which remained as an aspect of federal government policy until the 1930s--is one I think that should be borne in mind, that government policy has changed those people of 150 years ago from ones who were confident, secure in their sense of their ability to determine their own futures, to ones who have lost that ability. It is often laid, I think, by many Canadians--I will not just say Manitobans--at the door of aboriginal people themselves, because they are unaware of the nature of government policy and the details of government policy as it has affected people. It is a difficult one to explain today with people who believe in sort of the inevitability of progress, but it is one that is very, very clearly there, and if only this government were not about to drop Canadian history from the requirements for graduation of students in Manitoba, we might have the opportunity to explain such elements of government policy and such social issues in Manitoba today to our young people.
So perhaps I am becoming a little more successful in ensuring that the government does maintain Canadian history as a requirement for graduation in Manitoba. I certainly hope so, and I know that the minister has yet again delayed that change in curriculum. I have applauded her for that and look forward, in fact, to a complete rethinking of that on the part of the government, and I welcome the support from the member for River Heights (Mr. Radcliffe) since I know he does have an interest in history and in the philosophical bases of it.
But this has taken us a long way from redlining, and may I come back to my question, which is--and it is both a question and an urging of the minister. The issue is the very broad regions that are defined by the insurance companies and which, to my knowledge, they continue to deny. Yet, to every citizen who has faced this, the evidence seems very clear. It is not the individual, it is the region, and it is the community which is suffering as well as individuals. So I want to ask the minister, when he goes to meet with those insurance agents, will he take that concern, will he take that question, and will he come back with an answer from them, either in the House or in writing, as to their response to that?
Mr. Radcliffe: Mr. Chairman, I would advise the honourable member for Wolseley that I have her argument and I thank her for it. I do undertake to share with her the results of my discussions with the members of the insurance industry with whom I will be meeting. I would just reflect and extend a little further and make common cause with the honourable member for Wolseley of government policy, because one of the things that I had been aware of as a young person in Canada growing up, because I used to summer on Lake of the Woods and had an opportunity to attend at a residential Indian school and then subsequently on my reading and then on my perambulations about the province of Manitoba with regard to this small committee that I was on, I had explained to me the devastating influence of the whole residential school policy of our federal government and of our churches. This was a group of people who thought at the time that they were trying to do good to what they considered a savage element of our society. I am told that what would happen is that the Mounted Police would actually go into aboriginal communities, apprehend young children. These children would be taken some two to three days often, travel away from their families, away from their environment. They would be placed in residential schools at the hands of clergy, well-meaning clergy, but people who would then refuse to permit these young people to communicate in their own language.
They were prevented from associating with siblings in these schools. They were indoctrinated with a classical European education. I can remember attending religious services at some of these residential schools and in the spring of the year listening to the local priest starting to prepare these children for their return to the reserves and explaining some of the social conditions they were meeting and reflecting, at that time, what was the relevance of educating these people to a basically European or urban environment with all the skills of an urban education, and then expecting these people to go back to living on the rim of what was our society in the bush, trapping or gathering or living in a very fundamentally different environment and expect that those skills that we had imparted to them would be relevant to their subsequent existence. I remember reflecting even at the ages of 12 and 13 that this did not seem to be a fit.
What has been explained to me as well by a number of elders and aboriginal community leaders is the disassociative influence that being almost confined to a residential school has on people, that you forget or you lose the opportunity for the transmission of passed-down culture. Much of our learning, as I am sure my honourable colleague will acknowledge, is the sharing of communal lore, of the knowledge of who you are, which is done at your parent's knee or around the dining room table or when you are doing familial tasks together. If you are in fact institutionalized at a young age, then there is a gap in your experience and in your knowledge base.
I am told that that is what a lot of our aboriginal people today suffer from. We have compounded that by virtue of again a well-meaning policy which was of adopting out a number of children who were in care, in foster care in the '70s. They were apprehended by Child and Family Services and adopted out to urban families, the families in the northern United States. These were young people who were apprehended from their parents, from their communities, from everything that they related to and put into a totally foreign environment. I am told that many, many of these people became disassociated from the environment in which they found themselves. Despite the fact the best of intentions of the individuals who placed them, the best of intentions and the real love that was showered upon them, they did not become successful because they were out of pace with the environment in which they found themselves.
Again, this was a colonization or an assimilation that the aboriginal people felt was being imposed upon them by our European or Caucasian society. Again, another communal force that I think we must be very mindful of is the whole apprehension of children today and putting them into group and foster homes which are--there is not the adoption process which is a European legal fiction--nonetheless an alternative care giving and imposing standards of behaviour and standards of community on these people which are not normally or necessarily ones to which they adhere. So there is still, I would suggest, today, even in our society, based on the most altruistic of motives, of an intention, a still continuing suppression and alienation of these people from their roots.
I think that one of the things--and I touch on my previous remarks of saying that I think that we should be focusing on and I have advocated, and I think that my honourable colleagues will see some manifestation of this--is to empower some of the aboriginal leaders themselves to take responsibility for their children and to try to undo what is a generational problem.
I have become quite an ardent advocate for some of these aboriginal issues, and I would welcome the opportunity of sharing my views with the honourable colleague for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) at a future time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity.
The Acting Chairperson (Mr. Dyck): Order, please. The hour being 6 p.m., committee rise.